FEATURE: Behind That Locked Door: George Harrison's All Things Must Pass at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Behind That Locked Door

George Harrison's All Things Must Pass at Fifty-Five

__________

I have been writing a lot…

IN THIS PHOTO: George Harrison in 1970/PHOTO CREDIT: GAB Archive/Redferns via Guitar.com

about The Beatles this year and I am going to be again at least a couple of times. However, because George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass turns fifty-five at 27th November, I needed to spotlight this album. One of the finest Beatles solo albums. A lot of these songs were in his head and available during his Beatles career. I can imagine how keen he was to release these songs free from a band that was centred around on John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Released in the U.S. on 27th November, 1970, this was a huge album from Harrison. I am going to bring in some features about All Things Must Pass. However, I want to drop in some background information from Beatles Bible that caught my eye:

“George Harrison’s third solo album was his crowning glory. All Things Must Pass was a triple album, and his first release after the break-up of The Beatles.

The album contained the hit singles ‘My Sweet Lord’ and ‘What Is Life’, the Dylan collaboration ‘I’d Have You Anytime’, and a third disc of jam sessions titled Apple Jam.

All Things Must Pass saw Harrison transcend his Beatles status and established him briefly as the most successful former Beatle, with sales outstripping the likes of John Lennon’s Imagine, and Paul and Linda McCartney’s Ram. Harrison topped the US Billboard single and album charts simultaneously, a feat not equalled by his former bandmates until McCartney and Wings did so in June 1973.

Cast and crew

All Things Must Pass featured an extensive list of collaborators, including Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Badfinger, Klaus Voormann, saxophonist Bobby Keys, and drummers/percussionists Alan White, Jim Gordon, Ginger Baker, and Phil Collins.

It was produced by Phil Spector, the maverick American then most famous for his Wall of Sound technique. Spector’s tendency to mass-record instruments and smother them in echo was his trademark, but several of the All Things Must Pass songs were overproduced. Remastered versions were released in 2001, 2010, and 2014, but a remixed version is yet to be issued.

On 27 January 1970 Spector had produced Plastic Ono Band’s single ‘Instant Karma!’, which featured Harrison on acoustic guitar. The producer was brought in again to remix The Beatles’ Let It Be recordings in March and April 1970, which helped convince both Harrison and Lennon to sign him up to produce their respective next solo albums.

Harrison was finding his own feet as a producer. From April to July 1969 he co-produced Billy Preston’s fourth studio album That’s The Way God Planned It, a mix of gospel, soul and rock. Harrison also co-produced the following year’s Encouraging Words. Released in September 1970, two months before All Things Must Pass, Encouraging Words contained versions of the songs ‘All Things Must Pass’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’. In addition to bolstering his skills as a producer, working on Preston’s albums helped Harrison understand the structure and composition of gospel music, and its expression of spiritual love and devotion.

Harrison and Preston had also worked together on soul singer Doris Troy’s eponymous album, released by Apple Records in 1970, for which Harrison co-wrote many of the songs.

I think he had been involved in soul music for years – he listened to it, he loved it, and that’s what made him want to do it. I wasn’t actually introducing him to the stuff, he already knew it. The Beatles as a whole listened to black music, a lot of their soul and feelings came from American music.

Doris Troy
While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Simon Leng

In April 1970 Harrison was in New York City, where he visited Bob Dylan, then recording New Morning at Columbia Studio B. Harrison performed uncredited on ‘Went To See The Gypsy’, ‘Day Of The Locusts’, and ‘If Not For You’, and jammed with the studio musicians on a number of songs including The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’”.

I will end with a review from Pitchfork. This is an album that arrived at a strange time. In 1970, The Beatles were broken up and the members were releasing their own albums. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band came out in December 1970. Paul McCartney’s McCartney came out in April of that year. He was attacked and criticised for releasing a solo album and was blamed for breaking up the band. With all of this tension, it must have been a combination of tense and freeing for George Harrison. Able to release a new album without being in the band and negotiating that. Ringo Starr released Sentimental Journey in 1970. Each member releasing an album that year. George Harrison made the biggest statement. Ultimate Classic Rock looked at All Things Must Pass in 2023:

“George Harrison Was Stifled in the Beatles' Later Years

It's no secret that Harrison's later years in the Beatles was frustrating for him as an artist. As the youngest member of the band, he started songwriting later than Lennon and McCartney. Then, eager to expand his contributions to the group's albums, he would write and submit songs to his bandmates for consideration. But by the time Beatlemania had peaked, Lennon and McCartney pretty much controlled the band's records, duly allotting a song each to Harrison and Starr to sing on the albums.

But unlike the drummer (who was never comfortable in the spotlight, and, until the end, often just sang a cover or a number given to him by Lennon and McCartney as an obligation), Harrison was writing more and more songs. By the time the members basically split into four solo artists with the other members of the group as backing bands on the White Album, the Quiet Beatle was no longer keeping quiet.

One of his songs, "Not Guilty," was pulled from the record at the last minute, and his contributions to Abbey Road – "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" – were among the best on the Beatles' final recording together. But he was still treated as a second-tier member. 

Who Did George Harrison Recruit for 'All Things Must Pass'?

When Harrison started putting together All Things Must Pass in May 1970 – gathering songs originally written for the Beatles – he was ready to unload years' worth of frustration. He poured almost everything he had into the album, turning his first real solo work into a sprawling, triple-record set that included jams, sketches, fragments and a long list of friends like Starr, Eric Clapton, Bobby Keys, Dave Mason and Ginger Baker.

Working with producer Phil Spector (who helped assemble the Beatles' disastrous sessions that ended up on Let It Be), Harrison reworked many of the best songs his old group had rejected, including "My Sweet Lord," "What Is Life," "Isn't It a Pity" and the title track, and wrote some new ones for the project. And he hosted a jam session with his famous friends that filled the entire third record of the set.

It was and remains an astonishing album, the first truly great one by a former Beatle. Harrison was also the first to reach No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart as a solo artist with "My Sweet Lord," which later was the center of a lawsuit involving the Chiffons' 1962 girl-group chart-topper "He's So Fine" and charges of plagiarism. (Harrison lost the case, but that takes nothing away from the song's greatness.)

And if it occasionally seems like Harrison gets a little lost along the way, or loses a grip on some of the unstructured jam tracks, it's all part of All Things Must Pass' lasting appeal. It's a self-indulgent work at times, certainly, but it's also a shot at Lennon and McCartney, who routinely passed on his songs for their own on Beatles albums. It's certainly a better record than McCartney, and it nearly tops the cathartic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

It was a bigger album than both of them too, staying at No. 1 for seven weeks, which had to feel like some sort of vindication for the neglected Beatle.

But most of all, the album served as Harrison's separation from the Beatles and their legend. All of their early solo albums, in some way, were about breaking with the past, but All Things Must Pass was more so, establishing Harrison as the thoughtful, spiritual and inquisitive one. He finally got his chance to speak here, and he did so loud and clear. All these years later, that voice still resonates”.

I want to move to this feature from 2022. Even though this was not George Harrison’s first album, it was his first after The Beatles broke up. It is remarkable how ambitious and brave the album is. Harrison not holding anything back at all. No wonder that it is seen as one of the greatest albums ever. Fifty-five years after its release and it still sounds exceptional. All Things Must Pass is a wide-ranging and hugely impressive masterpiece that everyone needs to hear. I hope there are new anniversary feature written about it:

“The sound of All Things Must Pass is so huge that at times it is hard to be precise as to who appears on which track. Aside from the musicians already mentioned there’s Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, an uncredited Peter Frampton, and German bassist Klaus Voormann, who also did the artwork for the cover of The Beatles’ Revolver album. Members of Apple band, Badfinger, on acoustic guitars, also helped to create the wall of sound effect. On keyboards, there’s Bobby Whitlock, and Gary Wright, who had been a member of Spooky Tooth and later in the 1970s had considerable solo success in America. Other keyboard players included Tony Ashton and John Barham, who both played on Wonderwall Music.

The drummers are future Yes man, and member of the Plastic Ono Band, Alan White; Phil Collins, in his young, pre-Genesis days plays congas; and Ginger Baker plays on the jam, “I Remember Jeep.” Other musicians included Nashville pedal steel player Pete Drake and Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker.

Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Jim Gordon, and Carl Radle played London’s Lyceum in the Strand on Sunday June 14, 1970 and decided, shortly before going on stage, to call themselves Derek and The Dominos. Earlier in the day, they were at Abbey Road for an All Things Must Pass session when they cut “Tell The Truth,” which became Derek and The Dominos’ first single release in September 1970. The B-side was “Roll It Over,” recorded at another All Things Must Pass session on June 25, and this included George, along with Dave Mason on guitar and vocals.

Originally, Harrison had thought it would take just two months to record the album, but in the end, sessions lasted for five months, and were not finished until late October. George’s mother was ill with cancer during the recording and this necessitated his frequent trips to Liverpool to see her; she passed away in July 1970.

As a producer, Phil Spector proved somewhat unreliable, which led to George doing much of the production work himself. Final mixing of the record started at the very end of October in New York City with Spector. George was not entirely happy with what the famed producer did, yet nothing can take away from the brilliance of this record. Tom Wilkes designed the box to hold the three LPs and Barry Feinstein took the iconic photos of George and the four garden gnomes on the lawns in front of Friar Park.

Captivated audiences everywhere

When recording began it was scheduled for release in October, but the delays meant it came out in America on November 27 1970, and three days later in the UK. It was the first triple album by a single artist and captivated audiences everywhere, entering the Billboard album chart on December 19, going on to spend seven weeks at No.1 in America, from the first chart of 1971. It entered the UK on the Boxing Day chart, making No.4 on the official listings, though it topped the NME’s chart for seven weeks. As the lead single from the album, “My Sweet Lord” topped the bestsellers list on both sides of the Atlantic.

As time passes, admirers have come to love this amazing record even more. It is the kind of album that says so much about what made music so vital as the 1960s became the 1970s. It’s full of great songs with lyrics that not only meant something then, but still resonate today. As decades arrive and pass, and new generations of music lovers look back, this is the kind of work that will take on almost mythical status. It’s one thing being able to read about its making, it’s quite another thing to allow it to envelop you, to caress you and to make you feel the world is a better place in which to live”.

I will end with a review from Pitchfork. In 2016, they took us deep inside such an important album. George Harrison reinventing and reshaping what an album could be. It goes to show what could have been if his songwriting was perhaps taken more seriously and got more love when he was in the Beatles. Anyone who has never heard All Things Must Pass should listen to it now:

“Given his own studio, his own canvas, and his own space, Harrison did what no other solo Beatle did: He changed the terms of what an album could be. Rock historians mark All Things Must Pass as the first “true” triple album in rock history, meaning three LPs of original, unreleased material; the Woodstock concert LP, released six months before, is its only only spoiler antecedent. But in the cultural imagination, it is the first triple album, the first one released as a pointed statement. With its grave, formidable spine, it’s symbolically freighted photo of Harrison in the country, pointedly surrounded by three toppled garden gnomes, it still sits like a leather-bound book, a pop-music King James Bible on any shelf of records it occupies. It is one of the first such objects in pop music history, the unwieldy triple album that spilled out oceans of black vinyl, printed thousands of sheets of lyrics, traversed multiple sides and made you get up and sit back down again five times, walking half a mile between your couch and your stereo to experience it all. It was the heaviest and the most consequential Beatles solo album, the first object from the Beatles fallout to plummet from the sky and land with a clunk in a generation of living rooms. It is a paean to having too much ambition, too much to say, to fit into a confined space, and for this reason alone it remains one of the most important capital-A Albums of all time.

It was also massively popular, despite its hefty retail tag; All Things Must Pass spent seven weeks at No. 1, and its’ lead single, “My Sweet Lord,” occupied the same slot on the singles chart, marking the first time a solo Beatle had occupied both spots. The success was sweet vindication for Harrison; his triumph was so resounding that his former partners could not pretend to ignore it. “Every time I turn on the radio, it’s ‘Oh my lord,’” John Lennon joked dryly to Rolling Stone. Rumors have it that John and Paul reacted with chagrin at hearing the bounty of material spilling forth on the album, finally grasping the depth of talent they had been slow to recognize. Their solo albums would be considered successes to various degrees, in their own ways, but only George had the wind of true surprise at his back.

All Things Must Pass had the quality of a broken-off conversation picked up years later; there were gorgeous songs here that Harrison had brought to the group, only to be met with to varying degrees of indifference. “Isn’t It a Pity” had been rejected from Revolver, while “All Things Must Pass” was passed over for Abbey Road. In hindsight, it is impossible to imagine these songs having half the impact if they had appeared sandwiched between, say, “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.” Taken together, they have their own cumulative weight and depth; you can even imagine their demos perhaps sounding too patient or too plodding to the other three. Reviewing it in Rolling Stone at the time, Ben Gerson compared it to the Germanic Romanticism of Bruckner or Wagner, composers who were unafraid of risking a little ponderousness to reach grandiose heights. Harrison might have been nursing resentments, but his former bandmates did him a perverse favor by leaving him with this material: This is music of contented solitude, and it only makes sense by itself.

Besides John, George was the only Beatle unafraid of writing from anger or negativity—his early Beatles tunes, like “Think For Yourself” and “Taxman” are almost startling in their bile. But where John thrashed and sometimes wallowed, George gently explored; when John Lennon pounded his fist, hollering that he was “sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites,” George simply noted it was a “pity” that “not too many people/ Can see we’re all the same.” The biting “Wah-Wah,” produced by Phil Spector and layered with so many different guitar tracks it feels like three guitar rock songs fighting each other, is possibly Harrison’s most pointed missive as a solo artist, addressed to his increasingly alienated former bandmates. But even here he seems more bemused than pissed-off; the swoop and dip of the melodies and antic main riff resemble chuckling rather than shouting, and the most resonant lyric (“And I know how sweet life can be/ If I keep myself free”) is the sound of a tentative soul allowing himself a measured yawp of freedom, however provisional and careful.

Sometimes, it seems as if the Beatles invented everything worth knowing about pop recordings. The process of making them, the process of venerating them, the idea that albums could be Ahab-like pursuits swallowing their creators nearly whole: We carry these notions in our heads because the Beatles put them there. With its sheer size and heft and gravitational pull, All Things Must Pass reinforced that the album could be an epic novel for a different sort of age. Today, “albums” exist largely as ideas rather than objects, shadow puppets we throw up against the wall to remind ourselves of the forms they represent. The language of physical media still haunts our vocabulary. Streaming services debut playlists that get dubbed “mixtapes”; we pull music from the available air and pipe them through our phones like water from a tap, and we still call use quaint words like “LP” and “EP” to describe them. For that legacy, we have artifacts like All Things Must Pass to thank. Today, albums like this are a bit like old ruins: They are important to keep around, even if they mostly remind us of what has changed. This dichotomy is the kind of thing that Harrison, who exited the earth in 2001, would probably have appreciated. All Things Must Pass is a monument to impermanence that has never once, even for a moment, left us”.

On 27th November, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass turns fifty-five. Hugely acclaimed and a number one success around the world, including the U.S. and U.K., I want to finish off discussing the legacy of All Things Must Pass. How influential and important it is. Wikipedia’s useful article gives us a glimpse into the stature and legacy of All Things Must Pass:

“Among Harrison's biographers, Simon Leng views All Things Must Pass as a "paradox of an album": as eager as Harrison was to break free from his identity as a Beatle, Leng suggests, many of the songs document the "Kafkaesque chain of events" of life within the band and so added to the "mythologized history" he was looking to escape. Ian Inglis notes 1970's place in an era marking "the new supremacy of the singer-songwriter", through such memorable albums as Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water, Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, Van Morrison's Moondance and Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon, but that none of these "possessed the startling impact" of All Things Must Pass. Harrison's triple album, Inglis writes, "[would] elevate 'the third Beatle' into a position that, for a time at least, comfortably eclipsed that of his former bandmates".

Writing for Spectrum Culture, Kevin Korber describes the album as a celebration of "the power that music and art can have if we are free to create it and experience it on our own terms", and therefore "perhaps the greatest thing to come out of the breakup of the Beatles". Jim Irvin considers it to be "a sharper clutch of songs than Imagine, more individual than Band on the Run" and concludes, "It's hard to think of many bigger-hearted, more human and more welcoming records than this”.

Such a perfect album from one of the all-time great songwriters, I know there will be new celebration and inspection of All Things Must Pass on 27th November. Such incredible songwriting throughout, few could release a triple album and make it as consistent as George Harrison. No real filler at all! That is a huge and rare achievement. All Things Must Pass is an album…

WITHOUT fault.

FEATURE: The Word: The Beatles’ Rubber Soul at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Word

The Beatles’ Rubber Soul at Sixty

__________

ONE of The Beatles’…

greatest albums turns sixty on 3rd December. It is my favourite from the band. That is Rubber Soul. Even though it is not a perfect album – the closing track, Run for Your Life, is misogynistic and a bad song -, it is a very special album to me. One I heard as a child and love to this day. You can read about when the tracks were recorded and who played on what. In the first of two anniversary features, I am going to explore its background and why it was a step forward for the band. Arriving a few months after Help!, it was a step forward for the band. That album is tremendous, though Rubber Soul is perhaps their most fascinating and different album. In the sense that it was not a selection of short and shep Pop songs. More acoustic elements. Indian influences and a broader range of sounds. I am going to start with a feature from The Beatles Bible and how this was a more mature step from the band. Still fresh in their careers, their work rate and sense of progression was peerless and stunning:

“The Beatles’ sixth UK album and 11th US long-player, Rubber Soul showed the group maturing from their earlier pop performances, exploring different styles of songwriting and instrumentation, and pushing boundaries inside the studio.

In October 1965, we started to record the album. Things were changing. The direction was moving away from the poppy stuff like ‘Thank You Girl’, ‘From Me To You’ and ‘She Loves You’. The early material was directly relating to our fans, saying, ‘Please buy this record,’ but now we’d come to a point where we thought, ‘We’ve done that. Now we can branch out into songs that are more surreal, a little more entertaining.’ And other people were starting to arrive on the scene who were influential. Dylan was influencing us quite heavily at that point.

Paul McCartney
Anthology

Rubber Soul furthered the group from the straightforward love songs that had characterised their early recordings, and continued the exploration of wider themes that had begun in songs such as ‘Help!’ and ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’.

John Lennon, in particular, was enjoying a songwriting peak, creating some of his best work such as ‘Girl’, ‘In My Life’, and ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’.

In ‘Nowhere Man’, Lennon detailed his lack of confidence and feelings of insecurity, and ‘Norwegian Wood’ dealt obliquely with an affair he was having, yet didn’t want his wife to discover.

‘In My Life’, meanwhile, began as a nostalgic set of memories of Liverpool. In 1980 Lennon described it as “my first real major piece of work”,

I think ‘In My Life’ was the first song that I wrote that was really, consciously about my life, and it was sparked by a remark a journalist and writer in England made after In His Own Write came out. I think ‘In My Life’ was after In His Own Write… But he said to me, ‘Why don’t you put some of the way you write in the book, as it were, in the songs? Or why don’t you put something about your childhood into the songs?’ Which came out later as ‘Penny Lane’ from Paul – although it was actually me who lived in Penny Lane – and ‘Strawberry Fields’.

John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

I am going to move to an article from The Guardian from 2015. Marking fifty years of Rubber Soul, the 1965-released work of genius was so ahead of its time. No matter how many times you play the album through, it loses none of its brilliance. If I was introducing someone to The Beatles, then I would play them Rubber Soul. It boasts some of the best songwriting from the band – especially Paul McCartney and John Lennon:

“Interviewed in Melody Maker in late 1965, the Beatles revealed that “comedy songs” were their new direction. As there had always been a streak of humour running through their songs, this isn’t immediately apparent, but the biggest clue is on the opening Drive My Car, which even has a punchline. Michelle is frankly hilarious, a baguette-and-beret pastiche which McCartney had written years earlier without any actual French words, just French noises. I especially like the droll “I want you, I want you, I wa-a-ant you … I think you know by now.” Another song with a mock continental sound was the Weimar-esque Girl, a downer take on the Third Man theme, though lyrically it wasn’t very funny at all. Girl is a rich girl put-down, similar to Mike D’Abo’s Handbags and Gladrags but, instead of finger wagging, it opts for an entirely exhausted approach. Lennon sounds desperate, caught in a game with an unfamiliar set of rules. Clearly, they weren’t hanging out with the girls from the Cavern or Iron Door any more. You’re minded of the likes of Maureen Cleave, Edie Sedgwick or Pauline Boty on songs like Girl, George Harrison’s cool but fierce Think for Yourself, and Norwegian Wood; on the latter the group find Scandinavian furniture frightfully exotic, and this is reflected by a wry vocal delivery and Harrison’s quite foreign sitar line. The exoticism of Rubber Soul is subtle, still grounded by Merseyside.

The Beatles were, by 1965, regulars at the soirees of pre-rock singer Alma Cogan’s home on Kensington High Street. Lennon nicknamed Cogan “Sara Sequin” and, according to her sister, had a fling with her; McCartney wrote the beginnings of Yesterday on her piano. It was quite the salon; the Beatles could have been rubbing shoulders with Cary Grant, Princess Margaret, Audrey Hepburn, Sammy Davis and Noël Coward. This was a new world for the moptops (which were by now a little shaggier, creeping over the tops of their black roll-neck jumpers, over the collars of their suede jackets – did they ever look better?) and on Rubber Soul they mirrored it with cheek and a little distance, but never with cynicism.

The Beatles were young adults. The lyrics are now more about sex than hand-holding – Drive My Car is a single entendre, and there are lines like “it’s time for bed”. Rubber Soul also contains the first elements of true darkness in the Beatle sound. I know Lennon’s cry for Help! had been real enough, but it’s still quite a shock to find death crops up on three of his Rubber Soul songs – Girl, Run For Your Life and In My Life. Alma Cogan would die in 1966, and Brian Epstein a year later; there’s an odd feeling of foreshadowing.

It has faults, of course – a few of the songs are a verse and bridge too long (noticeably Nowhere Man), and most of them audibly slow down, which may have been something to do with the smoky studio atmosphere. The humour borders on the puerile (“tit tit tit”), on the otherwise affecting Girl. And what’s with the gargled backing vocals on You Won’t See Me?”.

Before getting to a review of the album, this feature from Ultimate Classic Rock outlined how Rubber Soul was a departure for The Beatles. Even though their sixth album is perhaps less energised and exuberant than their previous work, I think it is a deeper and more interesting album. One that inspired their ambitions for 1966’s Revolver. The band becoming more curious about the studio. Maybe recording music that they could not tour. Tiring of the excess and demands, their music was not aimed at fans’ adulation and creating songs like they used to. Maybe that alienated and annoyed some fans. However, if The Beatles continued as they did, then I feel like they would have regretted it:

“The exuberance found on the Beatles' first three albums had been gradually disappearing. Beatles for Sale suggested the whirlwind pace of the previous two years was getting the best of them, and Help! showed the influence of Bob Dylan. The group's willingness to experiment with musical ideas outside of rock 'n’ roll, which began with “Yesterday,” continued with a song recorded at the album's first session.

“I went and bought a sitar from a little shop at the top of Oxford Street called Indiacraft,” George Harrison recalled. “It was a real crummy-quality one, actually, but I bought it and mucked about with it a bit. Anyway, we were at the point where we’d recorded the ‘Norwegian Wood’ backing track and it needed something. … I picked the sitar up — it was just lying around. I hadn’t really figured out what to do with it. It was quite spontaneous. I found the notes that played the lick. It fitted and it worked.”

“We were all open to anything,” Ringo Starr continued. “You could walk in with an elephant, as long as it was going to make a musical note. Anything was viable. Our whole attitude was changing. We’d grown up a little, I think.”

This was also reflected in the lyrics. Gone were the expressions of puppy love found in their earlier work, replaced by more adult ideas, particularly in John Lennon’s songs. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” was his admission that he’d had an affair, “Nowhere Man” continued the introspection of Help! and the last verse of “Girl” was a comment on Christianity.

But the biggest leap of all took place in a song that ranks among Lennon’s best. “‘In My Life’ was, I think, my first real, major piece of work,” Lennon said. “Up until then, it had all been glib and throwaway. … It was the first song that I wrote that was really, consciously, about my life. … It started out as a bus journey from my house on 251 Menlove Avenue to town. I had a complete set of lyrics, naming every site. It became ‘In My Life,’ a remembrance of friends and lovers of the past.”

After setting it to the music, Lennon felt "In My Life" needed something beyond the group’s musical limitations. So, he asked Martin to play a Baroque-style piano solo. The part Martin wrote was a bit too complex for his own skill, however, and the solution was to slow down the tape and play the solo at half-speed. The Beatles were so intrigued by the harpsichord-like sound the piano took on that they began experimenting with tape speeds regularly to change the texture of instruments and voices.

Lennon wasn’t the only Beatle who was changing. Paul McCartney was quickly expanding his musical horizons, too, adding jazzy chords to “Michelle” and fuzz bass to Harrison’s “Think for Yourself.” And despite its sweet melody, “I’m Looking Through You” includes the most deliciously nasty lyric he’s ever written.

The willingness to take chances even extended to the way they played around with Robert Freeman’s cover photo, which McCartney called “one of those little exciting random things that happen.”

As he explained, they were looking through the results of a photo shoot with Freeman. “He had a piece of cardboard that was the album-cover size and he was projecting the photographs exactly onto it so we could see how it would look as an album cover," McCartney recalled. "We had just chosen the photograph when the card that the picture was projected onto fell backwards a little, elongating the photograph. It was stretched and we went, ‘That’s it, Rubber So-o-oul, hey hey! Can you do it like that?”

And the title? Apparently it was derived from “plastic soul,” which McCartney had heard was a term blues musicians had coined to refer to Mick Jagger”.

In 2009, Pitchfork awarded Rubber Soul a perfect ten. They observed how it was their most Folk-influenced and quiet album. One where you can hear the influence of peers like The Byrds and Bob Dylan. These artists in turn influenced by The Beatles. I think that Rubber Soul is the band’s first masterpiece. A sentiment that is echoed by Pitchfork:

“To modern ears, Rubber Soul and its pre-psychedelic era mix of 1960s pop, soul, and folk could seem tame, even quaint on a cursory listen. But it's arguably the most important artistic leap in the Beatles' career-- the signpost that signaled a shift away from Beatlemania and the heavy demands of teen pop, toward more introspective, adult subject matter. It's also the record that started them on their path toward the valuation of creating studio records over live performance. If nothing else, it's the record on which their desire for artistic rather than commercial ambition took center stage-- a radical idea at a time when the success of popular music was measured in sales and quantity rather than quality.

Indeed, at the time the Beatles did need a new direction: Odd as it seems today, the lifespan of a pop band's career in the early 60s could often be measured in months, sometimes in years, rarely in three-year increments. And by 1965, the Beatles were in danger of seeming lightweight compared to their new peers: The Who's sloganeering, confrontational singles were far more ferocious; the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was a much more raucous, anti-ennui cry than the Beatles' "Help!"; and the Kinks beat the Beatles to both satirical, character songs and the influence of Indian music. By comparison, most of the Beatles music to date was either rock'n'roll covers or originals offering a (mostly) wholesome, positive take on boy-girl relationships.

Above all, Bob Dylan's lyrical acumen and the Byrds' confident, jangly guitar were primary influences on John Lennon and George Harrison, respectively (and the Byrds had been influenced by the Beatles, too-- Roger McGuinn first picked up a Rickenbacker 12-string after seeing A Hard Day's Night). Dylan and the Byrds' fingerprints had been left on Help!-- Lennon, the group's biggest Dylan acolyte, played an acoustic rather than electric guitar throughout most of that record. Even Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" found him strumming an acoustic. (All this at a time when Dylan was beginning to move in the other direction and fully enter his electric period.) Harrison was growing more serious on the political "Think for Yourself", while "If I Needed Someone"-- his other contribution to Rubber Soul-- is practically a Byrds pastiche and his chiming, sure-footed solo on "Nowhere Man" also displays a debt to that band. His deft touch is all over the record in subtle ways-- appropriate for an album full of finesse and small wonders (the ping at the end of the "Nowhere Man" solo, Lennon's exhalation in the chorus of "Girl", the "tit-tit-tit" of the backing vocalists in the same song, the burbling guitar in "Michelle").

The most lasting influences of Dylan and the Byrds on the Beatles, however, were likely their roles in introducing the group to recreational drugs: Dylan shepherded the quartet through their first experience with pot, while the Byrds were with three-fourths of the Beatles when they first purposefully took LSD. (McCartney sat that one out, avoiding the drug for another year, while Harrison and Lennon had each had a previous accidental dosage.)

Marijuana's effect on the group is most heavily audible on Rubber Soul. (By the time of their next album, Revolver, three-fourths of the group had been turned on to LSD, and their music was headed somewhere else entirely.) With its patient pace and languid tones, Rubber Soul is an altogether much more mellow record than anything the Beatles had done before, or would do again. It's a fitting product from a quartet just beginning to explore their inner selves on record.

Lennon, in particular, continued his more introspective and often critical songwriting, penning songs of romance gone wrong or personal doubt and taking a major step forward as a lyricist. Besting his self-critical "I'm a Loser" with "Nowhere Man" was an accomplishment, and the faraway, dreamy "Girl" was arguably his most musically mature song to date. Lennon's strides were most evident, however, on "Norwegian Wood", an economical and ambiguous story-song highlighted by Harrison's first dabbling with the Indian sitar, and the mature, almost fatalistic heart-tug of "In My Life", which displayed a remarkably calm and peaceful attitude toward not only one's past and present, but their future and the inevitability of death.

Considering Harrison's contributions and Lennon's sharp growth, McCartney-- fresh from the success of "Yesterday"-- oddly comes off third-string on Rubber Soul. His most lasting contributions-- the Gallic "Michelle" (which began life as a piss-take, and went on to inspire the Teutonic swing and sway of Lennon's "Girl"), the gentle rocker "I'm Looking Through You", and the grinning "Drive My Car" are relatively minor compared to Lennon's masterstrokes. McCartney did join his bandmate in embracing relationship songs about miscommunication, not seeing eye-to-eye, and heartbreak, but it wouldn't be until 1966 that he took his next great artistic leap, doing so as both a storyteller and, even more so, a composer”.

On 3rd December, Rubber Soul turns sixty. Among my favourite albums ever, I am interested to see how journalists approach The Beatles’ masterpiece on its anniversary. It is such a stunning work that has so much richness. In terms of the compositional textures. The band taking a different direction and thinking more about the studio than the stage. It was revolutionary! Sixty years after its release and Rubber Soul inspires artists. It is an album whose influence will…

LIVE forever.

FEATURE: I Knew You Were Trouble… A Further Call to Those Who Have Not Yet Embraced the Wonderful Club

FEATURE:

 

 

I Knew You Were Trouble…

IN THIS PHOTO: Dr. Julia Shaw will be hosted by The Trouble Club on 29th October at Ladbroke Hall

A Further Call to Those Who Have Not Yet Embraced the Wonderful Club

__________

THIS is the penultimate feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Trouble Club’s CEO and Owner, Ellie Newton/PHOTO CREDIT: Ioana Marinca

of the year relating to The Trouble Club. As I say in every feature, there is some housekeeping to get done. You can check out The Trouble Club here. They have just launched a beautiful and amazing new website! You can also follow them here. Check out their TikTok page too. In this feature, I am going to mention future events. I recently interviewed The Trouble Club’s CEO and Owner, Ellie Newton. I am always in awe of her drive and passion! How she has built The Trouble Club up and up and is hosting some incredible women. With a brilliant team around her (Zea Stuttaford is their Event Manager; Jen Needham their Head of Marketing), membership is growing and widening. Hosting events at these incredible venues and locations across London (events are also held in Manchester), they just hosted Emily Maitlis (on Tuesday) at St Marylebone Parish Church. It was one of their all-time best events at a gorgeous and sold-out venue. A brilliant interview from Ellie Newton! I will highlight some upcoming events that you will want to attend. For anyone who is not a member but has perhaps been to one event or heard about The Trouble Club, then I hope that this provides some push and interest. An event I cannot attend – because of other commitments -, I still really want to recommend Dr Julia Shaw: Exposing Earth-Killers. Taking place on 29th October at Ladbroke Hall, I have been following Shaw on social media for a while. I have read her brilliant 2023 book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality. She is currently coming to the end of a book tour discussing Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet, and How to Stop Them:

“Traffickers. Hit men. Outlaws. Thieves . . .

Our planet is a crime scene - but we can catch the killers?

Enter a world where people are murdered, ecosystems are destroyed, organised criminals terrorise communities and corporate gangsters operate outside the law. And, closely following their every move, are teams of secret agents, vigilantes and scientists who are fighting for our planet's future.

Using insider sources and her expertise as a criminal psychologist, Dr Julia Shaw takes us deep into some of the worst environmental crimes of our time. She reconstructs the minds of the perpetrators in cases like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Dieselgate emissions scandal, and the Shuidong wildlife crime syndicate. From the Amazon forest to South African gold mines she follows the impact of green crimes right to our doorsteps, and meticulously profiles the work of the heroes bringing these criminals to justice.

Dr Shaw asks: how do the Earth's killers think? What makes their crimes so deadly? And how can we stop them from stealing our future?”.

There are six more events that I want to include and highlight. Some may be sold out, whilst others have tickets free. So apologies for anyone who will miss out! The point of this feature is to highlight the range of events held and why it is so rewarding becoming a member. It is not only talks that The Trouble Club hosts. They have some amazing social events and dinners. Their Christmas event in December is going to be a classic example. One that is going to be very busy! Sadly another event I will have to miss – as I am co-hosting an event of my own somewhere else – is Elizabeth Day: Too Big To Fail?. Another event at the beautiful St Marylebone Parish Church (which, like Ladbroke Hall, is becoming a regular venue for The Trouble Club, and is absolutely beautiful!), this is going to be one of the most popular events of thew year. I have started listening to her podcast, How to Fail with Elizabeth Day and her book, One of Us, came out last month. I want to include part of an interview that might be mentioned and discussed when Day joins The Trouble Club on 6th November. Speaking with The Guardian last month, she spoke about how she struggled with infertility and loss for years…until a call with a psychic changed her life:

“I’d spent the previous 12 years failing to have babies. During my first marriage, I’d had two unsuccessful rounds of IVF followed by a “natural” pregnancy, which I lost at three months. I was in hospital for that miscarriage and can still recall seeing the blotted, bloodied remains of my much-longed-for child in a kidney-shaped cardboard tray the nurses had given me.

Some months later, that marriage ended in the throes of a peculiar sadness: simultaneous grief for what was, for what might have been, and for what had never existed. I thought I was dealing with it but, in truth, I was numb. There seemed to be no way of communicating the magnitude of the loss. Not back then, anyway, when miscarriage and infertility were still barely talked about. A loved one advised me to treat it like a heavy period. Another questioned why I’d told anyone I was pregnant before the three-month mark, as if not speaking about it would have made it less real.

And so, like many women who experience misplaced shame, I readily set about internalising the failure as my own. The doctors told me my infertility was “unexplained” – a diagnosis so blank that I could quite easily shade it with my own self-loathing. It was, I determined, all my fault.

PHOTO CREDIT: Alice Zoo/The Guardian

In my late 30s, I did a cycle of egg freezing at a different clinic. Once again, I was told my results were disappointing: two eggs, where most women my age could have expected about 15. By the time I met Justin, I was 39 and he was 43, with three children from a previous relationship. I decided I would try to be happy without a baby of my own. But then we got pregnant naturally just after my 41st birthday. That ended in miscarriage at seven weeks. We were both so devastated we realised we wanted to try again. We travelled to Athens, to a new clinic and a new set of protocols, and I had an operation to remove a uterine septum. Within a month, I was pregnant again. At seven weeks, we had a scan and saw and heard a heartbeat. At eight weeks, the heartbeat had gone. By now, the UK was in the grip of its first national Covid lockdown. I took pills to trigger a miscarriage at home. The pain was horrendous. Of my three miscarriages, this was the worst to get through.

‘The doctor made it seem straightforward. All we had to do was find a suitable donor, for which he recommended hiring a “fertility consultant”’

I took a few months off the ceaseless trying in order to feel my way back into my own body, to reconnect with who I was when I wasn’t riding a wave of pregnancy hormones, or having my insides prodded and scanned and examined by unfamiliar hands. When Covid restrictions started to lift, I was allowed to book a sports massage at home via an app. The masseur was Polish and when he began working on the left-hand side of my lower stomach, I gasped. He had pressed the exact point where I felt the aching, yawning tenderness of pregnancy loss. It was a very specific sensation, starting in the womb, then spreading through my synapses. I thought I might faint.

“You have a lot of sadness here,” the masseur said.

“Yes,” I replied, eyes closed, trying not to cry.

Lockdowns lifted, vaccinations rolled out, and fertility clinics resumed their normal business. We had been recommended a place in LA by friends. This clinic, we were told, was at the forefront of fertility medicine (“Because lots of Hollywood stars get to their late 40s and the acting parts dry up and then they decide they want a child,” said one of my more cynical acquaintances).

The clinic’s website looked impressive and claimed to offer several cutting-edge procedures that weren’t available anywhere else. In October 2021, Justin and I joined a Zoom call with one of the leading consultants, who apparently had a legion of celebrity children to his name. He was robotic in manner, listing all the ways in which he could ensure higher than average success rates. He advised egg donation”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Elif Shafak

An event I definitely will be attending – and have booked a half-day at work so I can get there – is Margaret Atwood & Elif Shafak: Words Like Fire. At Fairfield Concert Hall, it is going to be an amazing afternoon and evening. The main guests have not been united before at Trouble Club. Both have spoken with them – Atwood before I became a member in 2024, and Shafak has appeared a couple of times I think, as I have seen her twice – and there is also Fantastic Women & Fantastic Stories preceding the  Margaret Atwood & Elif Shafak that welcomes incredible panellists, Bolu Babalola, Lucy Foley and Emilia Hart:

“This conversation will never happen again. Margaret Atwood and Elif Shafak have never sat across from each other, live on stage and discussed their collective body of exceptional work.

Neither author requires an introduction, but for the record: Margaret Atwood is the Booker Prize-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, Alias Grace, and dozens more works that have defined and defied the boundaries of literature for over half a century.

Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, and The Island of Missing Trees. She is a fearless writer and public thinker who has even faced trial in Turkey for the words of her fictional characters.

This will be an unscripted exchange between two of the most vital literary voices of our time. Together, they have written across continents, invented new forms of fiction, and spoken boldly on the world’s most urgent issues: authoritarianism, gender, freedom, silence, climate, and the power of the story.

One night. Two legends. No repeats.

IN THIS PHOTO: Bolu Babalola

Fantastic Women & Fantastic Stories

Our evening will begin with a panel including some of the finest authors in Britain today. We will discuss the phenomenal worlds they have created and the female characters that glue us to the page.

Our Panellists:

Bolu Babalola writes stories of dynamic women with distinct voices who love and are loved audaciously. Her short story collection, Love In Colour, was published in 2020, became a Times bestseller and was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year. Her debut novel, Honey and Spice, was published in July 2022, was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick and won the inaugural TikTok Award for Book of the Year. The sequel, Sweet Heat, is publishing in Summer 2025.

Lucy Foley is a No.1 Sunday Times, New York Times and Irish Times bestselling author. Her novels, including contemporary murder mystery thrillers, The Hunting Party, The Guest List and The Paris Apartment have sold over 5 million copies worldwide. The Guest List was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month, a Reese’s Book Club pick, one of The Times and Sunday Times Crime Books of the Year, and it won the Goodreads Choice Award for best mystery/thriller. It was announced in March 2025 that Lucy will be penning the first-ever new Miss Marple mystery, due to be published by HarperCollins in autumn 2026.

Emilia Hart’s first novel, Weyward, was an instant New York Times bestseller, the winner of two Goodreads Choice Awards, and has sold over 700,000 copies worldwide. Her latest novel, The Sirens, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, an instant New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America book club pick. Emilia lives in London with her partner, a black cat called Luna and far too many books.

Event Schedule

5:00pm: Doors Open

5:30pm: Fantastic Women & Fantastic Stories

6:30pm: Break

7:00pm: Margaret Atwood & Elif Shafak: Words Like Fire

8:30pm: Book signing for those with tickets.

TICKETS:

Members: Live Ticket £35, Live Ticket & Book Signing £50, Virtual £0

Non-members: Live Ticket £85, Live Ticket & Book Signing £110, Virtual £20”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kristina O’Neill and Laura Brown/PHOTO CREDIT: Cass Bird

An event I am really excited about is Cool Girls Get Fired! Laura Brown & Kristina O'Neill. Taking place on 17th November at The Ministry Borough, this is one you will want to get to! As they explained to Grazia, in their new book, All the Cool Girls Get Fired, getting canned (their word) was the best thing that could have happened. It will be amazing to hear them talk about the book when they are hosted by The Trouble Club:

“Kristina O’Neill’s first and last meeting with her new boss was the moment she was told her role would no longer be filled by her. The former editor of the Wall Street Journal magazine soon found herself navigating the uncertainty of unemployment—a challenge shared by Laura Brown, who 14 months earlier had been told via Zoom that InStyle magazine’s US print edition (where Brown was editor-in-chief) would cease publication, ending her entire team’s tenure.

Both O’Neill and Brown were casualties of a turbulent media landscape marked by constant change in ownership and leadership. Instead of quietly moving on as many in their glamorous, high-status industry might, they decided to tell the truth. After meeting up for drinks post-firing, the two friends—who first met at a Marc Jacobs show in 2001—posted a selfie captioned, “All the cool girls get fired.”

“For me, it was ownership, and for Kristina, shock ownership,” says Brown. “We had no desire to spin it. We knew we were really good at our jobs.”

The response was overwhelming. Their very public dismissals prompted an avalanche of supportive messages from other women sharing their own experiences—including Monica Lewinsky, who commented, “I got fired. And transferred to the Pentagon, where I became friends with Linda Tripp.”

Recognizing the power in what they’d started, O’Neill called Brown the next day and said, “This is a book.” That idea led to All The Cool Girls Get Fired: How To Let Go Of Being Let Go And Come Back On Top, a part-memoir, part-practical guide. The book covers everything from whether you need a lawyer, to managing your finances, safeguarding your mental health, and how to update LinkedIn—along with inspirational contributions from high-profile achievers like Oprah and Jamie Lee Curtis.

“Getting fired is part of a lot of successful men’s lore and legends,” says Brown, pointing to Steve Jobs and Mike Bloomberg. “For a lot of people, getting fired was the moment that unlocked Apple or Bloomberg. We want more women to be part of that type of storytelling. It was really important for us to put a few women up on that Mount Rushmore of getting fired too.”

When you're pushed off that rung yo worked so hard to climb, it hits you harder.

Why are women perhaps more susceptible to the feelings of shame and inadequacy that job loss can bring? “It took us so much longer to get here, because men have run everything for so long,” Brown explains. “When you’re pushed off that rung you worked so hard to climb, it hits you harder.”

One of their key messages: “The sooner you own what’s happening to you, the sooner you can move on.” Brown calls it the “kettlebell of shame and spin that no one asked you to carry—and no one really cares.” They encourage readers to tell their friends and family, as new opportunities often come from unexpected places.

Their advice for anyone recently unemployed? Don’t hide it—let people help. Use the opportunity to reflect: What made you happy in your career? What didn’t? Give yourself the space to explore, and you may find a new—and possibly better—path forward”.

At the beautiful The Hearth over in Queen’s Park, Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin: The Girl from Montego Bay will be held on 24th November. Showing the sheer range of women that are invited to cause trouble, this is going to be special: “From a childhood in Jamaica to the heart of the British establishment, The Rt Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, CD, MBE, has lived a life defined by courage, conviction and change. Britain's first black woman bishop, the first woman to serve as Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons and now Bishop of Dover, Bishop Rose has spent over three decades tackling racism and sexism in the Church and reimagining faith as a force for justice in modern society”. I want to source from an interview that Keep the Faith recently published with The Rt Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin:

“Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin is a woman, whose ministry as a Christian leader has been both impactful and historical.

Her landmark appointments include being appointed as Chaplain to the late Queen Elizabeth II in 2007; becoming the first woman to be appointed as Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons in 2010; and being the first Black woman to be appointed as a Bishop in the Church of England – and first woman as Bishop of Dover in 2019.

Her ministry continues to make waves. Earlier this year, her book The Girl from Montego Bay: The Autobiography of Britain’s First Black Woman Bishop was published. Bishop Rose says the response to it has been “overwhelmingly positive” – so much so, that the book won the award for Autobiography of the Year at the Christian Resources Together (CRT) Awards 2025. “I went to America this August, travelling to different cities in both Florida and in New York, and the number of people who would come up to me after book signing or during the book signing to tell me that my story resonated with them was moving.”

She continued:

I think people have resonated with my upbringing. Although it happened in Jamaica, it’s the story, it’s the life experiences, the things that you did as children, and sadly also, some of the abuse.

The book also chronicles her life in Britain, her ministerial appointments, and her role in some of the pivotal spiritual moments in the history of the nation.

Born in Jamaica and raised in Montego Bay, Bishop Rose was called to ministry at a young age. She recalled: “I just knew I was being called to serve the Church, but, at the time, women were not allowed to be priests in church. I remember one of my bishops in Jamaica saying: “Rose, we’re Anglicans. We don’t do that.” In my heart, I thought: ‘You may not do that, and the Church might not do that, but I know that God does that.’ So, for me, it was making a promise to God that I would remain faithful until the Church heard the Spirit and moved with the Spirit. It took a long time. I was 33 when I was ordained as a priest.”

Since answering the call, Bishop Rose has slowly risen up the ranks. She came to the UK as a young woman to do her ministerial training. Ordained as a deacon in 1991, and as a priest in 1994, serving at St Matthew’s Church, she was later ordained as an associate priest at the Church of the Good Shepherd in the Diocese of Lichfield. She then became the vicar of two churches in the London Borough of Hackney (Holy Trinity with St Philip’s Dalston and All Saints Haggerston) for 16 years. It was during this time that she was appointed as a Chaplain to Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth ll, before her major appointment as Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. 

Bishop Rose’s early years growing up in Jamaica have deeply influenced her approach to her faith and ministry. She explained: “The motto of Jamaica is ‘Out of many one people’, so I had the sense that, although we might be different, have different upbringings, cultures or ethnicities, as I was accustomed to seeing in Jamaica, we are all one people, made in God’s image. I also saw trust and dependence on God, particularly in the older generation. God was not some faraway being; He was right there in their midst, and I saw that being lived. It definitely made an impression on me and is something that I have patterned.”

As a trailblazer, Bishop Rose fully recognises that she is a role model to many. “There is a weight of responsibility that comes with being the first. You can’t let the side down and you’ve got to do 100% your best all the time. There’s no resting on the job, because others must come after me.

“I feel quite honoured by the number of people who have said to me: ‘Because you are there, we know that we could do that.’ I hear that repeatedly. That gives me joy, because that is precisely what I want people to be able to say: ‘If she can do it, I can do it too.’”

The Church of England (CofE) is currently discerning a new Archbishop of Canterbury, following Justin Welby’s resignation last year amidst an outcry about his failure – and those of other church leaders – to report a prolific child abuser to the police. Bishop Rose admits leading the CoE is a tough position. “I think it was Rowan Williams, a previous Archbishop, who is quoted as having said: ‘You need the skin of a rhinoceros to be in this role.’ It is a challenging role in many ways. You’re trying to hold together people who don’t always want to be held together.

“People say the good thing about the Church of England is that we’re a broad church. We have people whose actions reflect that of the Pentecostals, and then right at the other end there are those who try to pattern Roman Catholicism, and then there’s much more diversity in the middle. The person appointed to the role of Archbishop of Canterbury has to hold together a church that has all these various views and practices, and it has become more difficult now, because I think, sadly, we have spent so much time nurturing labels, and being identified with certain camps and groups within the Church, and that’s been a disadvantage”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Julia Ioffe

I am going to wrap up and mention the Trouble Christmas party. However, I will get to one more event. Julia Ioffe: The Motherland That Ate Its Daughters takes place on 4th December at The Hearth. I love events at larger venues like St Marylebone Parish Church, though equally great are more intimate spaces like The Hearth. This event will be fascinating: “In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up: doctors, engineers, scientists - had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values?”. It will definitely stir debate. Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy is a brilliant book:

“Award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy.

In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values?

In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin.

Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women”.

There will be further events added to the Trouble Club calendar before the end of the year. However, the ones I have written about are so varied and exciting. If you can get a ticket to them (or one or two), then I can guarantee it will be well worth it! Such a great community of brilliant women (and men), one of the big rewards is great social events. At Dear Grace on 13th December, A Troublesome Christmas Party!!! will be awesome. I am looking forward to eating, drinking and speaking with existing and new Trouble Club members. Go and book your ticket. I know it sounds premature to talk about Christmas, but it will come around quick enough! Led by the brilliant Ellie Newton and her fabulous team, The Trouble Club is going from strength to strength! I write about them because I have loved being a member for over two years now. I am excited to see what 2026 holds in store. Newton, in her interview, said there are plans and there will be changes. A hugely hard-working woman in her twenties, there will be times when she wants to step back or focus on her personal life. However, she is CEO of something more than a club. It is a community and sense of friendship and connection for its thousands of members! If you are not a member already, then I think Trouble Club membership would be…

A perfect early Christmas present!

FEATURE: Inside the Brilliant Riot Women: Why the New BBC Series Strikes a Chord in Relation to Ongoing Ageism and Sexism in Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Inside the Brilliant Riot Women

IMAGE CREDIT: BBC

Why the New BBC Series Strikes a Chord in Relation to Ongoing Ageism and Sexism in Music

__________

I am going to bring in a review…

IN THIS PHOTO: (Back) Lorraine Ashbourne, Amelia Bullmore (front), Rosalie Craig, Joanna Scanlan and Tamsin Greig/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

for Sally Wainwright’s brilliant Riot Women. You can watch the series here. The plot revolves around five women (Lorraine Ashbourne as Jess Burchill, Joanna Scanlan as Beth Thornton, Tamsin Greig as Holly Gaskell, Rosalie Craig as Kitty Eckersley and Amelia Bullmore as Yvonne Vau) coming together in Hebden Bridge to create a makeshift Punk-Rock band in order to enter a local talent contest but, in writing their first original song, soon discover that they have a lot to say. The title refers to Riot Grrrl, which was an underground feminist Punk movement that began during the early-1990s. Raging against the patriarchy and their dictate, it made feminism more accessible and enthralling to younger generations. I guess, rather than Riot Women being an inversion of a way of introducing feminism to slightly older generations, it is this spin. A movement that, in fact, could and should exist today. For anyone who says that the music industry is not ageist, then you really do need to talk to women! Listen to the most popular radio stations and look at festival line-ups. How many women over the age of forty are being played or headlining festivals? It is very much a double standard. Men over thirty or forty have more opportunities and platforms than women of that age. Think about women who have children and the fact that it is so hard to juggle motherhood with performing. Maternity leave means that their careers are threatened. Also, I think there is still an emphasis on younger women. If a new band came through like we see in Sally Wainwright’s series, would they be covered and given a spotlight? There is still ageism in music. As I have written in previous features, artists such as Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga have shared their experiences of ageism. Also, as noted, albums released this year from legends like Sophie Ellis-Bextor contain such incredible and interesting Pop. Perimenopop is one of the best of the year and can contend with albums from her younger peers. And yet, there is still more stock in artists under thirty/forty than over, regardless of quality and worth.

If Riot Women is not specifically a commentary on modern music and the sexism and ageism that persists, you can read the title as this wake-up call. The synopsis is “As they juggle demanding jobs, grown-up children, complicated parents, absent husbands, and disastrous dates and relationships, the band becomes a catalyst for change in their lives, and makes them question everything. The themes of the series include the power of friendship, music, and the resilience of women who refuse to be silenced by age or expectation”. I think age is still a barrier for women. I know artists who are in their mid-thirties and forties and say how hard it is to get gigs and spots on radio playlists. Think about a festival like Glastonbury and its main stage headliners. Only once in their history have they had a woman over the age of forty headline (that would be Marcella Detroit of Shakespears Sister. In 1992, they became the first female-fronted band to ever headline the Pyramid Stage). Even if stations other than BBC Radio 2 play women over forty, the reality is that most major stations have an age barrier. Or they are aimed at a younger demographic. For women juggling careers, childcare or who are coming into music at a slightly later time in life, the reality is that the door is very heavy and hard to get through. Though they have a lot to say and deserve as much opportunity as anyone. Riot Women, in addition to be an amazing, funny, warm and thought-provoking series, should ask questions of the music industry. Sexism and misogyny has not exactly gone away. Among artists this year who have talked about ageism include Nicole Scherzinger, who told how she faced ageism early in her career.

In this interview from Rolling Stone UK, we learn more about a series that “reignites the feminist fury of the iot grrrl movement, while also setting the stage for new contemporary voices, as alt-rock duo ARXX provide the original music”. ARXX (Hanni Pidduck and Clara Townsend) and Riot Women’s Joanna Scanlon (Beth) and Rosalie Craig (Kitty) discuss the importance of the series and how older artists, especially women, should be celebrated more. Some of the earliest words in Riot Women are from one of its leads, Beth: “Do you think women of a certain age can become invisible”. This is a question many women in the music industry ask. It is a reason that compelled me to explore the series and ongoing barriers that women in music face:

“Woven into the very fabric of what the Riot Women band learn and practise is the ethos of riot grrrl, the original early-90s underground feminist punk movement spearheaded by Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and represented by bands like Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear and Bratmobile.

The movement was born out of a desire to challenge society attitudes that conflated being a girl with being ‘dumb’, ‘bad’, or ‘weak’, but also to highlight the importance of show-ing up for one another, irrespective of lived experiences. When performing, Hanna, then 23, would make the rallying cry of “Girls to the front!” demanding that space be taken up by those who would traditionally be pushed to the back.

One of the riot grrrl manifesto points feels especially relevant to Riot Women: “non-hierarchical ways of being and making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorisations”. It’s a point Scanlan touches on when discussing anger and punk, and what seems to be the biggest teaching of Riot Women, that “musical skill was secondary to expression”.

Her character’s early scene in the music shop delivers another punk reference. “You thought The Clash were angry,” says Beth. The action then cuts to Kitty, a woman Beth is yet to meet, who will become the band’s lead singer. Pent-up and intoxicated, Kitty jumps atop a former lover’s car and smashes it with a stolen sledgehammer. As she does so, she casts a strikingly similar silhouette to Paul Simonon on The Clash’s infamous London Calling album cover, an image that became immortalised as an iconic symbol of the rebellious punk rock spirit.

Continuing with the theme of rage, Scanlan tells me, “The idea of being feminine does not usually embrace the idea of anger. I think that’s really a central tenet of the drama.” The actor, who remembers punk from the first time around, recalls it as a pure force of working-class anger at what the world meant and the limitations there were for everyone. “I think what Sally’s trying to talk about is there’s got to be an outlet for the resentment and the feelings of fury and rage about what modern society does to all of us. But the accumulation of it when you get older is quite strong. And I think these women are all at the point of just having had enough.”

From the off, it’s clear that Wainwright doesn’t intend to rely solely on the nostalgia of punk and riot grrrl sonics to ensure the success of the new series, which she has described as being scarily exciting. “Anything with Sally at the helm of it is always going to be a cultural moment,” says Craig.

Aside from early references to Hole, Bikini Kill, Skunk Anansie and Garbage, Riot Women gives flowers to new, strong female voices in music, including those of Billie Ei-lish and The Last Dinner Party, not to mention the involvement of Brighton two-piece ARXX, who have written the show’s original music.

The Riot Women soon discover that music is a way to reclaim their autonomy. “They’re the wife, they’re the mother, and actually having something just for you or having some-thing that you’re not defined by… [They’re] trying to create a new shape, really,” says Craig. She references the sneering reactions these women face from their immediate families as they discuss their intentions to join a band at their age, yet it’s noted early on in the series that they would have been afforded the luxury to start much sooner had they been male. What they discover is how much fun it is to play music with other people.

Scanlan elaborates, highlighting the ultimate “pinch point” between conforming to mounting standards for women, who are expected to look after everybody else but are also thinking, ‘Hang on, how long have I got left and what else do I want to do with my limited time?’

What DIY teaches on a broader level beyond the physical act of making music is a means of regaining control and architecting an environment in your own vision. It’s all the more necessary for underrepresented groups, with ARXX describing the DIY space as pivotal to giving voice to those that aren’t usually allowed to be heard, even more so at a time when Government policy is coming into place to “squash” minority voices.

“You need these spaces to realise that you can say what you need to say,” Pidduck elaborates. “You can feel what you need to feel, and you can have that community and you can just make it happen.” Riot grrrl used these DIY ethics to bypass traditional, mainstream media and cultural gatekeepers in order to generate art, music and literature that spoke to them, that they felt represented by, and to make it easier to see, hear and share each other’s work.

As far as ARXX’s involvement is concerned, the duo have certainly won fans in both leads, with Craig praising what they’re saying as young people in the world as “amazing”, and Scanlan likening picking her favourite ARXX original in the show to the idea of “choosing between her children”. For the band, their love of the show is in the enriching message it sends, and how it tells a story which can be accessed by everyone because you don’t realise how political it is.

“Riot grrrl has not disappeared, it’s just evolved,” says Pidduck. “But for people thinking that that was something that happened and doesn’t happen anymore, go to a gig, hun.” With that in mind, can we expect to see Riot Women live in the future? Craig is keen, and her eight-year-old daughter even more so. “I’ve still got the guitar that Kitty has in the show, and she’s having a go,” Craig recalls with a grin. “I just thought, ‘Well, that’s great if you’ve come to see me at work and it’s inspired you to pick up an electric guitar.’”

And the incentive for older women, trans and non-binary people? “We have many more stories to tell. If anything, older artists should be celebrated more,” ARXX conclude. “I hope the show gives a little bit of that energy”.

You only need to look at recent releases from music icons like Kylie Minogue to realise some of the richest and best work comes later in their career! How they have the same verve, energy, worth and skill as younger contemporaries. Their greater experience and longer careers should be seen as a positive and not a drawback. I do think that sixth-wave feminism will formulate soon and, among its objectives, will be positivity, kindness, greater rights for women; tackling sexual assault and misogyny and also highlighting the voices and stories of older women. I am going to wrap things up soon. I do want to bring in this glowing review from The Guardian regarding the extraordinary Riot Women:

“First, we meet Beth (Joanna Scanlan), who has decided that the only answer to this question is to take her own life. A note is written to her beloved but thoughtless son, Tom (Jonny Green), and propped on the piano and she is getting prepared – when the phone rings. It’s her brother, Martin, selfish to the point of viciousness, calling to berate her for putting their mother in a home that will eat up the inheritance he was looking forward to instead of continuing to care for her by herself. Beth roars back at him, but not cathartically enough to turn her from her chosen path. She only stops trying to see her plan through when her friend Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne) rings. “D’you want to be in a rock band?”

And we’re off. The call has gone out to their friend Holly (Tamsin Greig) too. She has just ended 30 years in the police force by arresting a drunk and disorderly woman – further disoriented by a hot flush – in a supermarket and giving her a bed for the night as she has no home to go to. The next morning, Holly recognises the magnificently obstreperous felon as Kitty (Rosalie Craig), daughter of local gangster Keith. She will be even less delighted in episode two when Beth discovers Kitty doing karaoke in a bar and brings her along to the first band rehearsal as their new and soon indispensable singer. Though Holly has also invited her joyless sister, Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore), to play guitar so they are roughly equal on the potentially bad decision-makinge.

Add in a thick sprinkling of unrewarding children, parents at various stages of dementia, weak men, bad men, bosses who cannot or will not address the suffering of employees whose problems run deeper than hurt feelings, mounting physical problems in the face of medical indifference, a baby given up for adoption in the 90s and now looking for his birth mother and you have a rich and moreish stew that is offered up in generous portions. And it is, of course, in Wainwright’s customary manner, perfectly seasoned with humour, from the lightest (“Rocco was a tree in assembly. Before and after an explosion. It was heartbreaking”) to the darkest. Kitty was expelled from the posh school she was sent away to at 13 after her mother died and her father couldn’t stand the sight of her. “It was an education in all sorts of way. Apart from … education.”

Like all Wainwright’s best work (and work by the likes of Debbie Horsfield and Kay Mellor before her), Riot Women covers a lot of ground without getting bogged down or leaving the viewer feeling shortchanged. As the band fights to get into a fit state to play at the local fundraiser in six weeks’ time, Beth learns to stand her ground and fight against the invisibility that did so much to make her miserable. She bonds with Kitty partly through admiration of her talent and their shared interest in writing original material for the Riot Women (“Old Bags’ Department” was considered as a band name but ultimately vetoed) but also because she needs to mother, and Kitty, whatever she thinks, needs mothering.

It is a drama that, like Happy Valley, looks at the multitudinous roles women manage, the caring responsibilities that accumulate and how they evolve over a lifetime. Children leave home but never stop taking. Mothers become children and take some more. What do you do if you are caught between the two, alone, and no one is around to give you anything? You turn to your equally depleted friends, dig deeper and give what you can to each other. You become a self-supporting circle, which itself becomes a link in the chain that can keep an entire society going. There will be merry hell to pay when that breaks, of course, but TV with this sort of pedigree and cast will buy us a little more time”.

I do think that the brilliant writing and performances through Riot Women will extend beyond the screen. As The Stylist write about Sally Wainwright’s series: “Wainwright has created a call to arms for women of all ages to make sure they prioritise themselves – and not in a woo-woo, have a bath kind of way – but by making space in their lives for the things they love. And if that’s screaming about hot flushes with more anger than The Clash with your best mates, then we’re all for it”. I hope that there is a movement in music that addresses issues that have remained for decades. How women especially not only are held back and face discrimination and sexism constantly. How, so much of the time, they are the ones fighting for equality and raising issues. The combination of anger, friendship and humour through Riot Women, I feel, could lead to something in the music industry. If women over, say, forty are seen as invisible to many, the truth is that they are not. The industry needs to realise this! Not only by accepting ageism is rife and tackling it. Also, to value their stories and experiences. How some of the best music is being made by women over forty – though, to be fair, many women over thirty face ageism! – and this needs to be valued and rewarded. The brilliant Riot Women has and will create tremors and conversation points that the music industry needs to take note of. Testament to Sally Wainwright’s vision and incredible writing. Given all of that, perhaps the greatest and most pressing question is…

WHERE do we go from here?

FEATURE: That Ain't Workin' Is the Closure of MTV’s U.K. Music Channels the Death of the Music Video?

FEATURE:

 

 

That Ain't Workin'

IN THIS PHOTO: A still from Peter Gabriel’s classic music video, Sledgehammer (1986)

Is the Closure of MTV’s U.K. Music Channels the Death of the Music Video?

__________

I don’t feel…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jace One/Pexels

we will ever see the end of music videos as we know them. However, as it has been announced that MTV will close the last of its U.K. music video channels at the end of the year. I have written about that before. However, it is clear that there is still a place for music T.V. I guess many people associate MTV with music videos. My memories of MTV are of classic and memorable music videos. In the 1990s, there was this golden period when you would see these amazing and innovative videos. Ones that endure to this day. I really love music video and think that, if done right, can elevate a song. The connection between song and video. It is so amazing that we had this long period where we got these great videos. Now, with so many artists out there and music videos not really played on T.V., it does call into question its future. Whether music videos are viable. I think that artists need to put videos out. There is no way they can ever end. However, I think there is a shift more to Spotify and physical media. Maybe people not going to YouTube and watching videos. Unless you are a massive artist, are you seeking out the video for an artist? There are not that many features that discuss the best music videos of the year. I guess the issues with music videos is that directors and artists not making money from them. Put that together with the cost of making them in the first place, and are they too much of a risk? In a new feature, The Guardian reacted to the moves at MTV and whether a shrinking of their music T.V. output puts the music video under threat:

“For some, it represents the end of an era. Others, such as the musician Hannah Diamond, suggest that era may have been over some time ago. “The last few years, MTV has sort of transformed [into] more of a nostalgic memory,” she says. “It hasn’t been part of the conversation for such a long time that it really doesn’t surprise me that they’re ending it.” As an independent artist, she says, YouTube has always been the primary platform for music video releases.

The specific shuttering of the brand’s music platforms does call into question the position of the music video in today’s industry, and whether the form still provides a viable outlet for expression and promotion. Jennifer Byrne, head of development at Academy Films – the famed production company that launched the careers of film-makers such as Jonathan Glazer through their music video work – says that “labels aren’t as willing” to invest heavily in videos as they once were. “They’re trying to spend that money on so many more deliverables than there used to be,” she says, referring to the multiplicity of online video and social media platforms. “It used to just be one three-minute video. Now it’s: how do you reach all these different audiences and can you cut it in 10 different ways?”

Iris Luz, a London-based director who has made videos for British pop singers PinkPantheress and George Riley, says that budgets for videos are shrinking rapidly, even for seemingly simple clips. “The number of times I’ll come up with an idea that, to me, seems easy, and people are like: ‘No, that’s gonna be 50 billion pounds,’” she says. “I’m like, that’s funny, because it’s in one house with four people. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Neither Luz nor Byrne believes that the end of MTV will significantly impact music videos overall. In Luz’s mind, videos now are less promotional tools than “vehicles for relatability and branding that makes [a viewer] want to buy into the artist,” she says. “They’re just a facet in the ecosystem of a musician. Because of TikTok and the rise of independent artists, people put out music as soon as they’re done with it. So a video is designed to convey that immediacy – where they’re at in one moment – rather than make a big splash like 15 years ago.”

There are also still barriers to entry for smaller artists, says Diamond. “The music videos I have made have been made through sheer luck, grafting or multiple years of work put into one thing,” she says. “I’ve become a musician in an era where artists don’t get the budget to make a music video unless they are a really big artist with a big label behind them that thinks it’s going to be a worthwhile investment”.

It is sad how things have shifted. I guess money is such an issue for so many artists. They need to put music out regularly to stay relevant and make a career. That means touring extensively and making sure any money they do make is put into the music. Not to say videos are under-ambitious, though there is perhaps not the budget to do something high-concept and luxurious. Think about some of the all-time classic videos from the past. Maybe time-intensive or expensive, you have Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Of course, videos do not have to be expensive or complex to be memorable. Think of OK Go’s Here It Goes Again and how amazing that is. If cost is not the biggest barrier, maybe grabbing attention is. If you put out a terrific music video that is intelligent and original, what is the best-case scenario? You might get quite a few videos, but in terms of that adding any value and earning money, is that possible? Perhaps it can lead to more albums sales, but will it be that noticeable? It is harder than ever to make money and the golden age of the music video has passed. If we have seen the last of that MTV age where videos were very much this important stock, I do feel like the music video remains important. At a time when so many people are preferring short-form videos and perhaps have less focus and attention, the music video provides this middle ground. They are typically pretty short and not too demanding. However, one of the reasons why we need to keep music videos going is because it does give that platform for directors. It is also good acting exposure for artists. Directors that go on to make films. A chance for artists to be on camera and pick up this discipline. Whilst they can gain some of that experience from the stage, I do think that the music video performance is something different. Also, I think there is something about the pairing of video and music that makes a song more powerful and enduring. I can remember songs from decades back because of the video. Not because the videos were especially brilliant but because the visualisation of the song was more attention-grabbing and potent.

What Hannah Diamond said about artists and budgets. Maybe there is not a great deal of money available to make videos. I do contend that, rather than there being music video channels, that there are alternatives to the limited music shows we have on U.K. screens. That music videos could form part of one that also incorporated live performances. If some no longer watch music videos, for so many people, they were our path into music. I love the work of directors such as Michel Gondry and have forged aspirations myself of directing because of him. It does come down to profitability and whether there is any financial sense in making them. I do feel like they hold a place, though they are not as prevalent or important as they once were. Only major artists have the budget to make bigger videos and the audience to make them worthwhile. Maybe this will change. Physical music is not rising and has seen a revival, so will music videos be next? I genuinely feel there should be this central fund or organisation that can provide money to artists for music videos. We cannot let such a beautiful and limitless artform dwindle and die. The possibilities and long-term potential. When was the last time you say a genuine standout video that stayed in your mind?! I don’t think it is due to a lack of talent but directors and artists maybe feeling people will not watch videos. Or there is not enough money to make them. To ignore the music video and completely write them off is wrong. If we lost them altogether, or there was this feeling they are not worth investing in, then that…

WOULD be a tragedy.

FEATURE: Trynna Finda Way: Nelly Furtado’s Woah, Nelly! at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Trynna Finda Way

Nelly Furtado’s Woah, Nelly! at Twenty-Five

__________

MY association with…

IN THIS PHOTO: Nelly Furtado wears hoop earrings and a tank top backstage at a recording of a CD:UK at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London in 2001/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Tonge/Getty Images

and memories of this album are so vivid. Released on 24th October, 2000, we celebrate twenty-five years of Nelly Furtado’s Whoa, Nelly! When the album came out, I was seventeen and in sixth-form college. I remember taking a trip to Amsterdam in 2001 with a couple of friends. This album, strangely, soundtracked that trip. I remember hearing songs like I’m Like a Bird and Turn Off the Light and really bonding with them. The whole album is brilliant. In terms of an introduction, the sequencing is perfect. The first six songs give us multiple sides to Furtado and her songwriting. Rare for an artist on their debut to have such a hand in the songwriting and put their stamp on an album. That sounds insulting, though so many artists today collaborate with others. Woah, Nelly! Is very much the artist putting her ideas and personality into the music. The Canadian legend released her seventh studio album, 7, last year. It is one of her most acclaimed. Whilst fans might think 2006’s Loose is her best album and one where she is at her most confident, expressive and physical, I love the sound of Woah, Nelly! It is such a beautifully eclectic and personal album for me. I know some of the criticism around her debut concerned the vocals and how Furtado had this unique style. In terms of stretching words and intonations. Tics and mannerisms that they were perhaps not attuned to. The way Nelly Furtado projects and delivers her lines if one of the standout aspects of Woah, Nelly! I am going to get some words about the album. However, as it is twenty-five on 24th October, I wanted to share my feelings about the album. I think it is one of the most underrated debuts ever. Hey, Man!, Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days), Baby Girl, Legend, I’m Like a Bird and Turn Off the Light is this perfect run! Opening the album and taking us to the halfway point without losing a step. So many different sounds and layers but this singular identity.

A number two success in Canada and the U.K., the strength of I’m Like a Bird (released on 25th September) no doubt helped sales. Perhaps its standout song, that track was played on the radio so much. It is still a favourite today. I heard the song today, in fact! Before getting to some reviews of the album, there is an interview from 2001 that I wanted to start with. There are not that many print interviews available from the debut album time. Whoa, Nelly! perhaps took a lot of people by surprise. Not used to a talent like Nelly Furtado. The Guardian spoke with Nelly Furtado and we find out so much about her background and path into music. This was an artist inspiring, passionate and committed from the start:

“To her manager, Nelly Furtado is "the new Madonna", to her record label "the female Beck", while her languid singing style has been likened to to that of fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, and her Latino looks (inherited from Portuguese parents) to Jennifer Lopez. So much hype, so little time - it has been less than a year since 22-year-old Furtado came out of Toronto with the hippy-dippy hit I'm Like a Bird, quickly attracting praise that would embarrass a less confident soul. Just how confident is she?

When she signed her record deal, aged 20, she mused that she aspired to be Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Mona Lisa "all at the same time, to inspire people, but not in a cheap way".

Even allowing for the fact that Next Big Things often turn out not to be, the music business has reason to welcome Furtado. A year of diminishing returns has seen the industry fall out of love with Britney Spears and her many clones. Furtado (who shares her birthday, December 2, with Spears, though she pretends to be unaware of it) represents a fresh start, a female pop singer who is not just photogenic but who - crucially - writes, performs and produces her own material. This is so unusual in 2001 that it deserves to be repeated: Furtado does it herself. Her Toronto friends Gerald Eaton and Brian West co-produced and co-wrote part of her debut album, Whoa, Nelly! But in American biz-speak, Furtado is the very much the "vision".

Fifteen years ago, it wouldn't have been so remarkable for a chart artist to have artistic control, but the making of pop records has become a division of labour, with the components (the song, producer and "talent") purchased separately and brought together in a studio. To find it all in one package, especially a female one (more kudos for the label in question) is rare enough for veteran executive David Geffen, president of DreamWorks records, to have personally pursued her signature.

"One magazine said he let me stay in his mansion," she says with amusement. "Nooo. I just went over there one day. Well, you want to see what it's like." Evidently, the pad passed muster - she signed with DreamWorks after turning down a £3m offer elsewhere.

Following the lead of her friend Missy Elliott, with whom she rapped on a remix of Elliott's big hit Get Ur Freak On, Furtado has mastered the post-Britney recipe for chart success. What one needs to do, it seems, is to whisk up three-minute tunes from a variety of cross-cultural influences (Furtado uses African, Brazilian and Asian sounds as easily as she does the more familiar ones), then go out and sell them with north American can-do initiative. Given the right breaks, such as MTV and key radio support, can-do becomes has-done.

Today, she has already appeared on GMTV, and faces an afternoon of hobnobbing with the suits at her UK company, Polydor, where she must cut an idiosyncratic figure alongside the likes of Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Hear'Say. Our interview cuts into her lunch break, but she behaves as if nothing would give her more pleasure than to spend the next hour sharing her thoughts in a Kensington hotel room.

She begins chirpily and stays that way, answering even facetious questions with a desire to provide whatever's required. "So you're like a bird? What kind?" I inquire. "A seagull," she says seriously. "I was really inspired by a great book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull [the drippy new age classic by Richard Bach]."

When Furtado talks, it's not a case of gradually drawing her out until she hits her stride. She seems to have hit it as a teenage over-achiever in Victoria, British Columbia ("I joined lots of clubs and was always winning leadership awards"), and hasn't looked back. Her positivity is correlated by a sense of entitlement one frequently encounters in north Americans - she expected success, it duly came and she hasn't wasted energy agonising over whether she "deserves" it. Not that she has been indulging herself in the fruits of her labour, though. In the middle of an earnest rap about the need for women to defer gratification until they break through the glass ceiling, she laces her fingers together and says: "I'll quote Einstein here. 'Intelligence is sacrificing immediate pleasure for long-term gain.' That's the story of my life."

Furtado - whose immigrant parents named her Nelly Kim because "they didn't want to give me a Portuguese name in case I got made fun of at school" - astutely remarks that it has become commonplace. When America's urban radio stations heard her rapping on Get Ur Freak On (which she will perform with Elliott at a Michael Jackson tribute concert in New York next month), some assumed she was Jamaican. She was delighted.

"I want to empower people who don't know much about their culture. I've grown up not seeing my ethnicity reflected in Hollywood, so I was glad when Jennifer Lopez came out. I'm a flag-waver and I don't care because it's so much of what I am. I went to Portuguese language school from the age of four and I'm passionate about my heritage."

Her parents, Maria and Antonio, emigrated from the Azores, a chain of Portuguese islands that accounts for around 80% of Canada's 400,000-strong Portuguese population. Her closest friends at school were children of African, Indian and Latin American immigrants. She did well academically, receiving straight As and handing in 50-page extra projects for fun. "Over-achiever is the word," she says cheerfully. "I've always been the conscientious one in my family. I was the one who'd remember birthdays and would buy cards. My older sister was a rebel and I'd worry if she went out at night. But I was almost like an only child. I worked with my mom as a housekeeper in the motel where she worked, but I loved being by myself and spent hours alone in the park listening to music."

Her form of rebellion was, briefly, a girl gang called the Portuguese Mafia (which disbanded because Nelly couldn't throw rocks at school buses with enough petulance) and music. Through her parents she had a grounding in Latin sounds, which she adores enough to have plans for an eventual Brazilian CD. Her friends introduced her to Asian and dance music, and her brother to Oasis. She admits sending a fan letter to Liam Gallagher under the misapprehension that it was he rather than Noel who wrote the songs. By 18, she had moved to Toronto, formed a trip-hop band called Nelstar and begun making contacts on the music scene. It all happened quickly after that, just as she undoubtedly expected it to.

Whoa, Nelly! sold 300,000 copies in the UK, and the salsa-tinged Turn Off the Light has just become her second British top five single. She even has a coterie of male devotees, known as "Fur-verts". Things have fallen into place so neatly that her intention of being the Gandhi of the MTV generation must seem to her quite reasonable. "Oh, no, the Gandhi quote! I was 19 when I said that! I was just saying I like aspects of their characters. From individuality come great and wonderful things”.

I am not sure if Nelly Furtado will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of her debut or has anything to say about it. I hope that she shares a post, as it is one of the most extraordinary debut albums of the 2000s. In the first year of this century, we got an album of pure joy, invention and class. SLANT provided their verdict on Woah, Nelly! The sheer range and breadth of the material is one of the reasons why the album is so engaging. At a time when Pop music was perhaps more commercial and samey, Furtado delivered a debut album that was so much more fascinating and distinct than what her peers were offering:

“Flash forward a year or so later and Furtado’s sugar-pop “I’m Like a Bird” is in heavy rotation on College Television. MTV hadn’t quite latched onto the video yet, but I quickly realized that the fresh-faced Portuguese-Canadian singing was the same young woman who delivered the darker, edgier “Party.” Surely some major label suit had gotten a hold of Furtado and coaxed a Top 40 hit out of her.

A few weeks later a promotional copy of Furtado’s debut Whoa, Nelly! floated around the office of the record label where I worked at the time. I quickly discovered that, while “I’m Like a Bird” was the poppiest thing on the entire album, it was anything but a fluke. She directly confronts the issue on “Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days)” via a friend or lover who thinks she’s sold out: “It’s so much easier to stay down there guaranteeing you’re cool/Than to sit up here exposing myself trying to break through.”

 

Chockfull of instantly memorable hooks and lyrics beyond Furtado’s 20 years, Whoa, Nelly! was a delightful and refreshing antidote to the army of pop princesses and rap-metal bands that had taken over popular music at the turn of the millennium. Two years later, the album still sounds as fresh, opening with the sampled Kronos Quartet loop of “Hey, Man!” and cascading track by track into the trip-hop of “My Love Grows Deeper Part 1,” the trip-pop of the hit single “Turn Off the Light,” and the torchy swing of “Scared of You,” while maintaining a rare consistency.

“I’m changing my inflection and how I say the words/Maybe it will sound like something they’ve never heard,” she declares on “Party.” Furtado’s free-verse poetry flows meticulously over a Prince-esque riff on “Trynna Finda Way,” flawlessly summing up her post-rave generation ambivalence (“To see past my lethargy is hard I feign/The beauty of my youth is gone but the chemicals remain”), and her observations are like nothing you’ll hear from her pop-tart contemporaries (“Looks like I only love God when the sun shines my way,” she admits on the cartoonish “Well, Well”).

Furtado’s voice is certainly an acquired taste, but there’s no shortchanging her ability to ad lib along to a trumpet solo (“Baby Girl”) or spit rhymes like a caffeinated MC (“Legend,” “I Will Make U Cry,” in which she snidely taunts an unresponsive love interest by mawkishly weeping, “I will make you cry…boo-hoo!”). The impeccable pop-crackle production—clattering electronic percussion, turntable scratches, hip-hop beats, acoustic guitars, and string arrangements courtesy of Track & Field—never diminishes the resonance of Furtado’s voice, but you may need to read the lyric book to fully appreciate the breadth of her world”.

I am going to end with a feature that argues why Woah, Nelly! is more radical than you might think. Woah, Nelly! is a feminist and empowering status, as Furtado’s fame was so low-key. She did not follow the Pop crowd and redefined what the genre could be. Subversive and inspiring, it is not as celebrated as it should be. In 2018, FLOOD MAGAZINE heralded an album that was ahead of its time. It definitely signalled a change. I hope there is new evaluation on its twenty-fifth anniversary on 24th October:

“Contrastingly, the love for Whoa, Nelly!, recorded when Furtado was only twenty-one years old, is hard to come across on its eighteenth anniversary, even with our pervasive cultural nostalgia. That lack of admiration can’t be divorced from the fact that the Furtado we first met was hard to label. She was a pop star, but not a Christina or Britney analogue. Her debut was eclectic, drawing on her roots—her quavering, emotive voice evoking the pathos of traditional Portuguese fado music—among other pop, rock, and hip-hop influences collected from studying music and growing up in Victoria, British Columbia.

But Furtado wasn’t in the same sultry, exotic world Shakira exemplified with her 2001 English-language breakthrough single “Whenever, Wherever.” Furtado was too pop to be an indie music darling (she didn’t play guitar on stage), too eclectic and intriguing to be a pop starlet (she didn’t dance), both talented and unique, but not enough so to be remembered alongside ingenues like M.I.A. or Amy Winehouse. She’s not a Personality, having never been one for tabloids or reality shows, boasting an Instagram account with 126,000 followers and 0 pictures, whereas Shakira is a Guiness record-holder for her massive Facebook following. Her low-key style of fame is, by design, a feminist statement that can be traced directly back to the self she exposed on Whoa, Nelly!: an artist who stands firm in the belief that no person should be reduced to a one-dimensional front.

Listening to the album when I was still in grade school, its view of love, relationships, and individuality seemed to come from another world I was only just beginning to understand, far beyond the simplified schoolyard version of romance that flowed from the mouths of other Top 40 artists. “I’m Like a Bird” is a certified bop about fear of commitment and the threat of losing one’s self to loving another person. “Shit on the Radio” tells of dealing with a partner or friend too insecure to handle Furtado’s career success. “Turn Off the Light” covers the fallout after a breakup, the kind of self-questioning that happens after you lose someone you never even fully opened up to.

The album is a takeoff of the girl-power ethos that started with riot grrl and was co-opted by another group of idols from my youth—the Spice Girls. As Furtado explored specific interpersonal intricacies, she also marked a new era of empowering music by women that was as emotionally unguarded as it was danceable. There was something inherently political in the narratives Furtado weaved across the album, too. The line “I don’t want to be your baby girl” on the track “Baby Girl” was as much a statement to the music promotion machine as it was, within the song, directed at a patriarchal lover.

Eighteen years later, Whoa, Nelly!’s subversiveness is easier to parse. Its influence has come into clearer focus, as female artists, queer artists, and genre-defying iconoclasts pummel expectations of how a popular artist should look and sound. Unlike Furtado, they have a safety net in the Wild West of the Internet that did not exist back when labels still dictated who became famous or didn’t. With her 2017 independent album The Ride, Furtado continues to be every bit as ungraspable as she was in 2000, veering away from the artist we knew on Loose, and embracing sounds as disparate as stripped-down indie rock and industrial-tinged dance music. Critics praised the effort, with Billboard going so far as to call it “the most slept-on release of 2017.” But that ability to experiment was truly honed at the turn of the century with her debut. Whoa, Nelly! may never be celebrated as the work of feminist rebellion that it is—but as Furtado expresses on the album, she wasn’t vying for our approval anyway”.

I think a lot of people who have written about Woah, Nelly! are my sort of age. In college/university when it came out, we were at that stage of life when we were looking to discover something different. A new century, this was a time of personal transformation and growth for me. Woah, Nelly! was this bolt from the blue. An exceptional debut album from such a wonderful artist! Whilst some artists feel honed in or directed by a label and commercial expectations on their debut album, Woah, Nelly! sees the incredible Ms. Furtado…

FREE as a bird.

FEATURE: Sad Café: The Importance of ‘Appropriate’ Music in Coffee Shops

FEATURE:

Sad Café

PHOTO CREDIT: mh cheraghi/Pexels

The Importance of ‘Appropriate’ Music in Coffee Shops

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I am not sure what the vibe is…

PHOTO CREDIT: Afta Putta Gunawan/Pexels

when you go to a city like Barcelona or New York. Step into a coffee shop, a chain or an independent shop, and listen to what they are playing. I think that the music in a coffee shop sets the tone and can do a lot. People might think that it is merely background. However, whether you are there alone or meeting someone, the music can inspire conversation and dictate how long you stay at the place. To play copyrighted music in a coffee shop, you must get a music license from the relevant licensing body, such as PPL PRS in the U.K. This is because playing music in a public commercial space is a public performance, and you need permission to do so legally to avoid fines. You can get a single, joint license that covers both recorded and live music, and you cannot use personal streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music for a business. You can find out more here. Whereas a film or T.V. production would need clearance from an artist to play their music and need to pay for that use, things are different for hospitality. As long as you have a license and are permitted to play music, then you can pretty much make your own rules in terms of the mood and sound. I think that each coffee chain or shop has an idea of their demographic and what type of music would suite them. The thing is, with a few rare exceptions, the music is awful! That is not me being a snob at all. I am one of the most open-minded and broad music lovers around. I tend to find that the music in coffee shops is either too unstimulating or heavy-going. I will name the chains. Take Caffè Nero and the music they typically play. Maybe seeing themselves as a more classic or sophisticated option, the music they play tends to be smooth Jazz. Not anything as interesting as John Coltrane or Miles Davis. Instead, it is generic and bland Jazz. They might play more acoustic songs too, but the takeaway is a real lack of energy or variation.

Maybe the objective is to calm people and create this relaxing mood. The thing is, you can do that with better music. Stuff that has personality! Take Pret a Manger. One of the reasons I go there less than I used – aside from the fact it is wildly over-priced – is the music. Maybe different depending on the branch, but their music is more Pop-based. This is not the sort of Pop from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s that is popular and catchy. It seems like a bunch of A.I.-generated artists who are beyond boring. It is all fake energy without any melody, hook or quality! A chain that sees themselves as more youthful, upbeat or even family-orientated, you occasionally get some popular Pop and R&B but, for the most part, it is pretty awful stuff. I have been into Starbucks and other chains and there is either silence or the sort of background and airport music that is a cross between muzak or music devoid of any purpose or place. As I say, the choice of music is important. It can influence how long you remain in the establishment. Bad music, objectively, can ruin the mood and conversation. Other people can do that, too. From inconsiderate families with noisy children to the infuriating anuses who play music and phone calls on their phones without putting them through headphones, that is a big issue. I tend to carry headphones around when I have a coffee, because I really get annoyed by their choice of music. It is a shame. When I meet someone for coffee, I am always conscious of the music. Too loud and annoying and it can be as bad as music that is as bland and ‘easy going’ as the sort of awful Jazz you can hear. Even if it is largely acoustic music, is that what you want to hear when you have a coffee?!

I know people have a choice and you can listen to your own stuff, though it would be nice to walk into a coffee shop and have some decent music. I think independent shops are a lot better and can be a lot cooler. However, many of the massive chains really do get the tone wrong when it comes to music! One exception is Black Sheep Coffee. I have been going there more and more, not only because of the aesthetic of their shops and the friendly staff. The music is a lot better. That may seem like a subjective statement. However, their soundtrack is broad and interesting. I have heard some classic Beatles, brilliant Miles Davis and some 1990s Pop missed with some chilled Club sounds and some banging dance. The volume is not too high and the emphasis seems to be on ensuring the music matches the décor. More diverse and cooler than some of the more white-walled and bland options, I know that many people will go to Black Sheep Coffee because of the music. In a society where people will choose their own music and listen through headphones, I have found myself taking mine off because a song being played in the shop is better than what I am listening to!

Some might say the music in coffee shops is no big deal. I think it is. It is about the mood and atmosphere. If you get it wrong then it can ruin the experience. I have stopped going to certain chains because their choice of music is either coma-inducing or obnoxiously irritating and A.I.-sounding. Getting that brew just so – in terms of genres, dynamics and moods – and the effect can be transformative. There are other great coffee shops with terrific music, but I have named one that has struck me. I live near Camden (London) and I visit that branch a lot. I was in Manchester recently and found the shops there played incredible music. Patrons may not want to listen to music in coffees shops, so many of them are silent. This might be okay with bustle and a busy day. However, if there are a few people there then it can be embarrassingly awkward and deafening. Also, so long as the volume is not blaring and you have this considered variation of engaging and interesting music, then it can have a big impact. This needs to be realised more. The importance of music. It extends to retail too. Good music can directly impact sales and how many people come through your doors. When lingering for a coffee, music is pivotal. This particular coffee chain, rather than being a black sheep when it comes to their music, instead is very much a…

GOLDEN calf.

FEATURE: Unglamorous Profession: Steely Dan's Gaucho at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Unglamorous Profession

Steely Dan's Gaucho at Forty-Five

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GAUCHO is an album that was…

IN THIS PHOTO: Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen/PHOTO CREDIT: Corbis via Getty Images

a bit of a crucial moment for Steely Dan. It would be their final album together until 2000’s Two Against Nature. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had spent a lot of time in studios recording albums since they released their 1972 debut, Can’t Buy a Thrill. Their recording was always intense. So many musicians and takes. They might not necessarily call themselves perfectionists, though it is clear that there was this sense of expectation and standard. Aja, released in 1977, is their best album. In terms of everything coming together, Becker and Fagen were at their peak. Things changed by the time Gaucho was released on 21st November, 1980. I wanted to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of this album. It was pretty much Donald Fagen recording without Waler Becker for quite a bit of the album. Gaucho was not as critically acclaimed as Aja. Strains and problems within the group meant that they would not continue as a unit. Donald Fagen embarked on a solo career after and released The Nightfly in 1982. Becker would produce Fagen’s second solo album, Kamakiriad. However, I think that Gaucho is one of Steely Dan’s best albums. It contains Babylon Sisters, Hey Nineteen and Time Out of Mind – three of their finest works. Before getting to some features about Gaucho, I want to first bring in an interview from Musician Magazine that was published in 1981:

“Three years, two hundred outtakes, a few mistakenly erased tracks, and one shattered shank after Aja, Steely Dan has come sauntering out of hibernation with a ravishing new record, Gaucho. It’s elegant, it’s extravagant; it shows again why Walter Becker and Donald, the masters of Ellingtonian Backbeat, Coolpop-Jazzrock, are the closest thing this generation has to pre-war sophistication of Porter and Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Weill and Waller. If Aja convinced Woody Herman to let his big band loose on Steely Dan materiaf (Chick, Donald, Walter and Woodrow, 1978), prompted a Berklee College of Music songwriting analysis course featuring their work, and elevated the taste of the frat-dance college crowd, one wonders what kind of a dent Gaucho might make. One thing it won’t do is send Steely Dan back on the road, not even after Becker’s carcrunched leg heals completely. Nor will they perform in their native New York. So we are left solely — and quite happily — with the music at hand.

Which is, as may be expected by now, sublime and fragrant and audaciously smooth. Steely Dan Inc.’s revolving door of studio sidemen hasn’t stopped swinging yet — some 36 grace Gaucho — and I mean this in the musical sense as well: rarely have so many done so little spontaneous blowing for so much music that sounds so fresh. But it probably won’t sound that way upon first or second listen; chances are it will sound soft and round, blandly pleasant, almost superficial. With further listening, each of the record’s seven tunes opens and deepens, revealing the harmonic jewels and subtle understated solos. At first obscured by the dominant colors of the surface, background colors become apparent, much as they will in fine oil paintings as your eye moves closer and closer to them; rhythmic nuances make themselves felt; each piece eventually jumps out of bed with the others and goes its own way: the patina, a rather mundane orgy of highgloss sensuality, gives way to the substance — seven different compositions in profound intercourse with their own partners, their indigenous lyrics.

As for the lyrics’ subject matter, rest assured Steely Dan enters the ’80s with some timely tales of tawdry high- life and desultory desperation. Gaucho overflows with mystics, coke dealers, sexual rivals, gosling girls ignorant of ‘Retha Franklin, concupiscent Charlies out for “that cotton candy,’ playground hoopers, Third World schemers mobilized on First World lawns, surprisingly gay friends and bodacious cowboys. The stories are rich, richer than Aja‘s, the metaphors subversive and witty. For instance, the rival lover is introduced with the couplet, “The milk truck eased into my space/Somebody screamed somewhere.” All in all, we may say this about Steely Dan: the more things strange, the more they stay the same. I recently spoke with Messrs Becker and Fagen at an MCA rented suite of the Park Lane hotel on Central Park South in New York. As I entered the room, the two jokingly whined about the day’s previous interviewers; every one, it seems, had grazed over the parched grass of basic bio material, asking, “So did you two really meet at Bard College?” With furious swipes of my pen, I mimed scratching that one off the top of my list of questions and mumbled something about my masterplan being destroyed.

MUSICIAN: It has been a considerable time since Steely Dan first started: how do you feel you’ve grown as artists, as musicians and lyricists, since that time?

FAGEN: [Long pause] It’s a matter of maturing. Becoming more selective with material, knowing what to write about, being able to pick and choose — showing more discretion than in the earlier days. Musically, our harmonic vocabulary and so on has expanded a great deal. so I feel we’ve progressed a lot since our first records. They are plain embarrassing, if you listen to them.

MUSICIAN: When you look back at your older work — as all artists, regrettably or enthusiastically, must do — do you think, “Oh God, that just wasn’t it at all”?

FAGEN: [ Laughs] Well, yeah, you know I don’t listen to our old records, but if I happen to hear one on the radio, my general feeling is humiliation. I don’t really understand some of our earlier stuff.

BECKER: [Limping slowly back into the room] You mean: why would we do a thing like this or that?

FAGEN: In terms of why we would do certain things musically and also lyrically.

BECKER: Like, say ” My Old School”? Gimme a for instance…

FAGEN: Not that one so much. That one has taken on a certain, well, it’s improved with age. I’m trying to think of a really embarrassing one, but I can’t off-hand.

MUSICIAN: At what point can you begin to stand yourself, listening back? 1974? 1975?

FAGEN: The next album I like pretty well. The one we haven’t done yet. The rest of them are fairly humiliating.

MUSICIAN: You don’t feel Gaucho is what you want to sound like?

FAGEN: Well, on the humiliation scale each album gets lower and lower. I think starting with Pretzel Logic, I began to like a few cuts here and there as things I can really listen to.

MUSICIAN: How do you feel, Walter?

BECKER: Differently. But I don’t listen to them either. I mean there were a lot of things that were very shoddily done, and a lot of things that were just bad, but probably different things for me than for Donald. We were doing the best we could, but fuck it, it wasn’t very good. It’s like looking at yourself in a mirror: it’s not how you really look. Left-handed people look weird. I don’t know whether it’s ultimately good or not, I really don’t.

MUSICIAN: Which brings me to another question. I know you agonize over your lyrics. Does it ever frustrate you that with many or most of the people listening, they may being going in one ear — and with little in between to stop them — right out the other? That all they may want is a beat and a hummable melody?

BECKER: I assume that’s the case for most of the audience, or at least a big part of it, and that’s why we try to always make the lyrics not grab your attention. We want them to sound good with the music, even if you’re not an English-speaking person.

MUSICIAN: But for those that are listening, atlas and dictionary in hand, you don’t want the lyrics to be one-shot deals, like a comedy record that you put on once and it gets tired pretty quickly after that.

BECKER: That’s definitely a problem. We have to be clever, but not funny.

FAGEN: We have a problem, trying not to cross the comedy threshold.

BECKER: Every time someone’s in the next room when we’re writing a song they’ll say, ” Don’t tell me you’re fucking writing songs in there, you’re not working, ‘ cause you’re fucking screaming and laughing in there. You’re not writing, you’re making up Pope jokes.”

FAGEN: Sometimes Walter comes up with a line, and it’s just too fuckin’…

BECKER: Funny. The whole thing would just stop; it would be like making Spike Jones records.

FAGEN: Suspension of disbelief would stop; there’d be laughter. You have to keep the equilibrium, have to maintain the irony, without getting into yuk-yuk territory”.

There are some interesting features that take us inside Gaucho. How it was a difficult and challenging time for Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. How it really shouldn’t have sounded as good as it does given the fracturing and turbulence within the ranks. In 2020 for its fortieth anniversary, Albumism highlighted this. Even so, I feel that Gaucho is one of their finest works. A wonderful Steely Dan album that I have always loved. It was a hard task following up Aja:

“Gaucho is nothing shy of a miracle in its creation, which was plagued with problems so deep that a superstitious man might call it cursed. So, it’s right, somehow, that the curse should finally break, exactly 40 years later, as we are collectively miring through the worst year most of us can remember.

In late December 1979, the two were working on “The Second Arrangement,” which Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, as well as Nichols and producer Gary Katz, agreed was their favorite song on the album. But a careless studio tech erased all but 19 seconds of it, and though attempts were made to re-record, it was never up to Fagen and Becker’s standards, and the song was abandoned, “Third World Man” substituted in its place.

Demos have floated around the internet for years; there are groups dedicated to cleaning up the demos to as close to studio perfection as one might have. The band has only performed the song live once, at the “Rarities Night” show at the Beacon Theatre on September 17, 2011. I was there in the balcony, the first of many, many Steely Dan shows. It’s a story I tell anyone who will listen, a date I remember as closely as my wedding anniversary.

But the plagues didn’t stop there. Becker was not only struggling with his own drug addiction—sometimes not even showing up for sessions. Fagen himself was depressed and tired. In January 1980, Karen Stanley, Becker’s girlfriend, died of a drug overdose in their home. He was sued by her family for introducing her to drugs, a case settled out of court in Becker’s favor. Four months later, he was hit by a car, breaking his leg in multiple places, leading to a six-month recovery that kept him out of the studio. He listened to the tapes at home, working out parts with Fagen over the phone.

As such, “Time Out of Mind,” a poppy, pleasurable, Michael McDonald-aided confection that makes doing heroin sound like the most fun thing ever, feels like a weird inclusion, practically a mockery of Becker and Stanley’s struggles with addiction.

Even “Glamour Profession,” with its shadows and midnight dumplings, recognizes the seedy underworld beneath the slick coo of Fagen’s electric piano.  Like “Babylon Sisters,” the narrator —or rather, the backup singers, including Valerie Simpson, who act as his conscience—know that he is only a momentary pleasure, a kept man for the Showbiz Kids—in this instance, a Lakers player—who would dispose of him as soon as it comes time for him to undertake the rehab-and-redemption part of the Hollywood fairytale”.

It was unfortunate that this incredible perfectionism and the issues with the group coincided. Layering tracks to the maximum, some would say that Gaucho required stronger editing. Maybe stripping it back a bit. Some of the critical reviews in 1980 and 1981 compared it unfavourably to albums from Steely Dan they felt were superior. In years since, Gaucho has been re-evaluated. Acknowledged as one of the greatest albums. This feature explores an album that, through its recording sessions, employed forty-two different musicians:

“When Gaucho finally surfaced in 1980, any fears that Steely Dan might relax their exacting standards were silenced with the first needle drop. Perfectionist obsessions that had driven songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen remained audible in the sheen of the set’s seven songs. If anything, the arrangements were even more meticulously groomed, their sonic finish smoother yet than on Aja, the acknowledged masterpiece that preceded it three years earlier.

Before Aja elevated them to multi-platinum stature, Becker and Fagen had pushed each new LP further toward ambitious musical and technical goals. Since downsizing from working band to floating studio workshop, they cast an ever-widening net to recruit heavyweight musicians, earning a reputation as demanding taskmasters willing to burn through miles of multitrack tape in pursuit of the perfect take. From the outset they aspired to the state of the recording art, long before Aja became ubiquitous as a demo disc for high-end stereo salons.

Gaucho continued the mission that Becker, Fagen, producer Gary Katz and engineer Roger Nichols began with Steely Dan’s 1972 debut album, but completion required navigating a maze of technical, legal and personal obstacles after the songwriters moved back to New York following six years in Los Angeles. Lawsuits, false starts, lost master tapes, a debilitating injury and an overdose death stretched the interval between Aja and Gaucho to three years.

In all, they recorded a dozen songs during sessions at studios in New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, comparable to prior albums, drawing from a pool of 42 musicians. On the eve of its release, Becker and Fagen noted a greater reliance on layering tracks. One casualty of the overdubbing process resulted from an assistant engineer’s accidental erasure of nearly three weeks’ work on “The Second Arrangement,” an early contender for one of their most promising tracks.

Other technical hurdles included tests of the Soundstream system, one of the first digital audio recorders. Ultimately, they chose to stick with analog tape after deeming the sound “different but not necessarily better,” in Becker’s estimation.

Then there was Wendel, a costly adventure to mate the complexity and nuanced touch of world-class drummers with the mechanical precision of disco. Roger Nichols volunteered to tackle the challenge, drawing from his earlier career as a nuclear engineer. Six weeks and $150,000 later, Nichols delivered a 12-bit digital editor enabling them to manipulate and tame dozens of takes into a final rhythm track.

That quest for the perfect groove proved a key denominator across the album, which retreats from bolder shifts in meter to tilt toward steady R&B, Latin and, yes, even muted disco pulses.

The finished album dovetails seamlessly with Aja’s bespoke arrangements. That album had proven a tipping point in Becker and Fagen’s overall ensemble design, stepping further away from rock instrumentation to sculpt the material with keyboards, percussion and horns. Gaucho upholds that elegant restraint with “Babylon Sisters,” a laid-back ode to Cali decadence that kicks off the set with studied nonchalance.

“Drive west on Sunset to the sea,” Fagen directs his companions in anticipation of a three-way tryst set to a faintly anesthetized reggae pulse, undercutting the singer’s salacious come-on to the “sisters.” “This is no one-night stand, it’s a real occasion,” he insists, only to compare their rendezvous to “a weekend in TJ…it’s cheap but it’s not free” before female vocalists offer a soothing refrain that’s a thinly disguised warning: “Here come those Santa Ana winds again,” they coo, alluding to “devil winds” that blow west from the California deserts that Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion notoriously invoked as harbingers of chaos”.

I am going to finish with a review from Pitchfork. Alex Pappademus wrote a book with artist Joan LeMay in 2023. Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan explored the characters in Steely Dan’s work. Gaucho has a fair few, including the Babylon Sisters, The Gaucho, the Third World Man, the Dread Moray Eel (Glamour Profession) and The Dandy of Gamma Chi (Hey Nineteen). Pappademas holds a lot of love for Gaucho:

“It’s their most obviously L.A. record, so of course they made it in New York, after spending years out West making music so steeped in New York iconography it practically sweated hot-dog-cart water. And it’s also the most end-of-the-’70s record ever made, 38 minutes of immaculately conceived malaise-age bachelor-pad music by which to greet the cold dawn of the Reagan era. The characters in these songs have taken an era of self-expression and self-indulgence as far as they can. They’re free to do and be whatever and whoever they want, but all that severance of obligation has done is isolate them from other people.

The only character who’s having any kind of communal fun is the coke dealer on “Glamour Profession,” who makes calls from a basketball star’s car phone and takes meetings over Mr. Chow dumplings with “Jive Miguel…from Bogotá.” Everyone else is lost out there in the haze, having mutually demeaning sex or reaching for human connection in angry, possessive, usually futile ways. “Gaucho” and “My Rival” are both about relationships into which some threatening/alluring interloper has driven a wedge; both “Hey Nineteen” and “Babylon Sisters” are about older guys who chase younger women and wind up feeling older than ever. Things fall apart, the center does not hold, there’s a gaucho in the living room and he won’t leave, and it’s getting hard to act like everything’s mellow.

There’s a precisely calibrated mix of empathy and irony in the way the Dan observe these poor devils, these sinners in the grip of a checked-out God— Becker, perfectly, called it “a sneer and a tear.” This is, at points, a very funny record—particularly the title track, whose unfolding absurdity builds to the moment where the narrator, having caught his lover holding hands with a bodacious cowboy in a spangled leather poncho, cries out, “Would you care to explain?” in high dudgeon worthy of Frasier Crane.

When Becker and Fagen started making this music, it was 1978, and they were coming off the platinum-selling Aja, the biggest hit they’d ever had. They briefly toyed with the idea of putting together a band and touring—a form of strenuous exercise they’d given up years earlier—but instead they went back to work on new music, and didn’t emerge from the studio until late 1980. One of the first tracks they finished was “The Second Arrangement,” a blithe kiss-off from an unapologetic Jaguar-driving lothario whose faithlessness is suddenly fashionable. You can find the song on YouTube in various states of completion—a piano demo with Fagen trying a shaky falsetto on the chorus, a polished instrumental, a bootlegged-sounding full-band version whose discoid thwack evokes a waterlogged “Get Lucky”—but you won’t find it on Gaucho. After an assistant engineer accidentally erased a large chunk of the master tape, Becker and Fagen tried for a while to recreate the track, then gave up on it entirely. It wasn’t the only good song they discarded during the sessions—even with all the king’s sidemen at their disposal, they couldn’t capture “The Bear” or the surreal colonialist fever-dream “Kulee Baba” either—but it might have been the best song on the album if it had survived. They replaced it with the merely-very-good “Third World Man,” a retooled track left over from the Aja sessions, featuring a downhearted soliloquy of a guitar solo by Larry Carlton, who was reportedly surprised to discover he’d played on Gaucho.

In January 1980, Becker’s girlfriend Karen Stanley, who Becker later said had struggled with depression, died of what may have been an intentional overdose in Becker’s apartment. Then, in April of that year, while walking on a New York street, Becker was hit by a taxi cab. He spent seven months in a cast with a fractured tibia and was effectively sidelined from the studio for most of the three laborious months it took to mix Gaucho. Mixing was Becker’s forte; Fagen was left to muddle through. During a visit to the studio in summer 1980, Palmer watched him sit with Katz and Nichols, “inhaling a cigarette in spasmodic gulps” while endlessly retooling the fade-out at the end of “Babylon Sisters,” eventually spending four hours fiddling with fifty seconds of music.

Of the nearly 40 consummate studio pros whose work at the Gaucho sessions made the final cut, the player with the heaviest footprint belongs to “Wendel,” a Paleolithic 12-bit sampling unit designed and built by Nichols, deployed by Becker and Fagen to impose a drum-machine-like consistency on the work of live drummers like Steve Gadd and Rick Marotta. “In the ’80s,” Becker told Mojo years later, “hand-crafted, hand-played music was being overtaken by this increasingly mechanical, perfectionist machine music, and we were just trying to get there first. They had all these disco records that were just whack-whack, so perfect, the beat never fluctuated, and we didn’t see why we couldn’t have that too, except playing this incredibly complicated music…It seemed like a good idea.”

Of course, the computerized micro-tweaking of live instrumentation is now as commonplace a part of pop-music production as reverb, but back then the option to program with real drum hits was tantamount to magic, especially for two guys who’d spent much of their professional lives being just a tiny bit disappointed by some of the finest session musicians on the planet. But Wendel was also a bit of a prickly collaborator. “[E]ven the most minute event,” the band wrote in the liner notes to a 2000 reissue of Gaucho, “had to be programmed in the gnarly and unforgiving 8085 Assembly Language, in which all relevant parameters needed to be described in its baffling hexagesimal-base numerical system, which ultimately became the only language Roger Nichols spoke or understood, at least for a time”.

On 21st November, we mark forty-five years of Gaucho. Although we sadly lost Walter Becker in 2017 and he will not get to see this album being celebrated and discussed on the day, I do wonder how he viewed that period. Especially tough for him, I am glad that he and Donald Fagen got together for two more Steely Dan albums and toured together until Becker’s death. I think that Gaucho is an incredible album with some of Steely Dan’s best songs. If you have not heard this album in a long time (or ever), then seek Gaucho out and…

PLAY it in full.

FEATURE: So Real: Remembering the Great Jeff Buckley at Fifty-Nine

FEATURE:

 

 

So Real

IN THIS PHOTO: Jeff Buckley in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Willshire

Remembering the Great Jeff Buckley at Fifty-Nine

__________

ON 17th November…

IN THIS PHOTO: Jeff Buckley at Tower Records, N.Y.C. on 16th December, 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Merri Cyr

we remember Jeff Buckley on what would have been his fifty-ninth birthday. We sadly lost this iconic musician in 1997 at the age of just thirty. I have been a fan of his for decades and feel his loss is one of the most tragic in all of music. In terms of how far he could have gone and what could have been. Rather than pointlessly speculate, we have to look at what he left behind in his brief yet brilliant career. A sole studio album, Grace (1994), that ranks alongside the best of all time and is one of the most influential albums in history. We can also here him in live albums, a posthumous album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk (1998), in addition to recorded and filmed interviews and live performances. We have books like Jeff Buckley: His Own Voice and Jeff Buckley: From Hallelujah to the Last Goodbye. There is also a documentary, It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley, that can be streamed on services like Apple TV+. The question around a biopic keeps surfacing. Fortunately, a proposed biopic starring Brad Pitt was nixed by Jeff Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert. Since then, I think there has been talk and rumours, but nothing is confirmed. You feel, with the success of music biopics involving Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, that Jeff Buckley’s name must be constantly pitched and various actors of today attached. I think that his mother and estate would be very reluctant to see one come to light unless it was at the right time and with the right actor.

You could imagine Jeff Buckley hating the idea of a biopic if he was alive! Sine his death in 1997, Buckley’s music has touched so many other musicians. Radiohead, Muse, Coldplay, Adele, Lana Del Rey, Bon Iver, Bat for Lashes  and Massive Attack are among those who have cited Buckley as an influence. Looking ahead to 17th November and what would have been his fifty-ninth birthday, I want to update something I have done before. That relates to a comprehensive playlist. A mixtape here of his best songs. Through live albums, Grace and his posthumous work, this is a look inside the genius of Jeff Buckley. It will be especially sad next year when we mark his sixtieth birthday. However, his legacy is being kept alive. You can hear his influence across modern music. Grace frequently talked about alongside the best albums ever. With a voice like no other, I can see his music enduring for generations. His amazing guitar playing and songwriting is not discussed enough. I know that fans around the world will pay tribute to Buckley on his birthday. I am curious what the next step is in terms of books, documentaries or anything relating to Jeff Buckley. Rather than milk things or go overboard, I do feel like there is something big to come. In the meantime, go and listen to the stunning music of a once-in-a-lifetime artist whose brilliance shines bright twenty-eight years after his death. This celebratory mixtape is a selection of wonderful musical moments from an artist that we…

MISS so much.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty: Looking Ahead to a Special Night at Avalon Cafe

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty

 IMAGE CREDIT: Avalon Cafe

Looking Ahead to a Special Night at Avalon Cafe

__________

I am going to end with a couple of reviews…

for Kate Bush’s 2005 masterpiece, Aerial. I don’t think that word is ill-placed and hyperbole. Even though many would argue it would come say, fourth or five in her ‘best albums’ list – behind Hounds of Love (1985), The Dreaming (1982) and maybe even The Sensual World (1989) -, I do think that Aerial is one of her finest works. In terms of production, it may be her very best example. That genius at work! I have written about Hounds of Love a lot lately, as it turned forty in September. I am also comparing Aerial and Hounds of Love a bit in this series of anniversary features. How family is very much at the heart of both albums. How nature and the natural world enforces their conceptual suites. On Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave it is water. On Aerial’s second disc – as it is a double album -, there is water involved. I would say the sky is more prominent. The expanse and beauty of what is above, rather than the terror and unknown of what is beneath the sea. Also, both albums were regarded during high points. Very happy times. Hounds of Love was a period where Bush changed her lifestyle and built a home studio at East Wickham Farm. She followed up one of her most challenging albums (1982’s The Dreaming) with her most acclaimed work. Aerial was released seven years after she gave birth to her son, Bertie (Albert McIntosh). As a new mother, you can feel her contentment and sheer joy come through. Especially on the first disc of the album. I feel the decision to have A Sky of Honey be about a summer’s day from its start to its end was also reflective of her new life. Perhaps based around her own English garden with new family, Bush took us much further and wider – to the Balearic-infused final stages of the suite, complete with a beach fantasy and as close as she has come to full-on Rave and Dance!

I cannot do full justice to Aerial in this feature! I am going to explore and dissect it more as I run through the series. The main reason for this feature is that I will be co-hosting an event on 6th November (a day before Aerial’s twentieth anniversary) in London. Here are more details:

“Kate Bush’s “Aerial” is turning 20. On the eve of the album’s 20th anniversary, join us at Avalon Cafe for a celebration of Aerial and all things Kate Bush 💃🏻
We’ll not only be listening to the album’s second disc, A Sky of Honey - a 40 minute experimental suite and ode to the rapture of summer - but will also be pausing midway for a discussion and Q&A with @leah.kardos and @liddicottsam. Kate tunes to be played throughout.
Released after a 12-year hiatus, traversing a multitude of themes and sounds, Aerial is the work not only of Kate Bush, the artist, who fashioned a truly experimental sound into something universal and refined, but also that of Kate Bush: mother, daughter, lover.
Over 16 tracks and two discs, Bush declares that she has not only made peace with life’s grief and loss, found untold love in motherhood, and ascended to certain domestic bliss - but that she remains, as ever, capable of teasing out the sensuality, sublimity and weirdness that exists in everyday life.
Join us Thursday 6th November at Avalon Cafe as we celebrate this incredible album”.

It is exciting that A Sky of Honey will get a full airing. Even though the first disc will not get a spin, we can discuss that at the event. I especially want to dive into my favourite Aerial song, Mrs. Bartolozzi! Even so, I don’t think Aerial will get the same press and attention as Hounds of Love when it turned forty on 16th September.

Even though I feel both are comparable masterpieces, Hounds of Love is more known and played. Its first side especially gets regular radio airplay. Aerial in contrast maybe has King of the Mountain (its sole single) played and, perhaps, one or two other tracks now and then. It is definitely not as written about and covered as Hounds of Love. The fact Hounds of Love is twice as old as Aerial is not the reason. I do feel like some see Aerial as having a few weaker moments – Bertie, Pi and Joanni are brought up in reviews as being ‘lesser’ tracks -, though I don’t feel there are any weak moments. I love the maternal bliss of Bertie and perhaps the most Kate Bush song ever, Pi. I would say Mrs. Bartolozzi is the most Kate Bush track ever, though a song where she recites Pi (incorrectly at one point) is so her! Also, Joanni is this fascinating and beautiful song that I feel is more about Kate Bush and motherhood. In fact, I feel like motherhood and mothers weave into so many songs on the album, including A Coral Room and How to Be Invisible. Even King of the Mountain, I feel, is about Kate Bush seen as a recluse and mystical figure when, in fact, she was starting a family! I want to try and help dispel some myths around Aerial and so-called weaker or less essential songs. That the album is up there with her very best and warrants more love and inspection. Also, that the production throughout proves that Kate Bush is a genius and one of the finest producers of her generation. It is good that I get to speak with Leah Kardos. I would consider her to be one of the great Kate Bush authorities. If I were to set up a dinner party of Kate Bush experts and superfans, I would have her there. The fine folk of Kate Bush News, Graeme Thomson, Tom Doyle, Laura Shenton, the brilliant and dedicated minds behind Gaffaweb, together with some high-profile Kate Bush fans (maybe Guy Pierce would be in there!). I heard Kardos speak about Hounds of Love at London’s The Horse Hospital on its anniversary. It was powerful and insightful. Hearing the album in full and her speak about the album. She wrote a book for 33 1/3 series. I think this is the only time a Kate Bush album had been included in the series.

I have a dim memory of The Dreaming being written about, though I am not sure it is available. As The Kick Inside is fifty in 2028, I would be tempted to throw my hat in the ring for that pitch! It is amazing that Kate Bush was so underrepresented. Leah Kardos’s insights, analyses, expertise and writing is brilliant. I know she loved Aerial so much and I do think this is an album that should also be included in the series. As I write in another feature, maybe she will take on the task or someone else will. Aerial is so fascinating and has so much history. The twelve-year gap from The Red Shoes and everything leading up to 2005. The impact of the album and how it took six years for Bush to release another album (2011’s Director’s Cut). Also, as we have waited almost fourteen years for another Kate Bush album – since 2011’s 50 Words for Snow -, there is a modern relevance to Aerial. I will be hot-footing it from my job in Covent Garden on 6th November to Avalon Café in Bermondsey to be part of a very, very special night. Go and get your ticket here. I think Leah Kardos will have more insight into the musical and production detail and its brilliance. I think we are of a similar age, so we have that generational perspective. Also, I have said how Aerial’s A Sky of Honey should have a cinematic release. Something built around it. Whilst Kate Bush mounted it for 2014’s Before the Dawn residency in Hammersmith – Leah Kardos caught one of the dates; I did not get a ticket -, there is an argument to revisiting it. So why get excited about coming to a night where we discuss Aerial and play A Sky of Honey?! Well, on its twentieth anniversary on 7th November, fans will share their memories. I know Kate Bush will remember the album fondly. Critics were definitely awe-struck and affected in 2005 when Aerial arrived. I am going to wrap up soon, but not before dropping in a couple of ecstatic reviews for arguably Kate Bush’s finest (double) album.

I am going to move to a review from The Guardian. Even though critics felt this was a Kate Bush return, the actual truth is that she never went away. Instead, she was busy making music and enjoy new responsibility as a mother. Anyone expecting something like an updated The Red Shoes were in for a shock! This was a sublime, expansive and beautifully realised album of ambition and incredible beauty:

“Why do so many pop performers produce their best work when they are in their early-to-mid twenties? A simple answer is that pop is essentially a juvenile form, the expression of a certain youthful worldview and rebellious sensibility, and the more the musician matures and learns about music, the greater can be the desire to complicate and to experiment with what once felt so natural and spontaneous.

Few artists experiment more than Kate Bush - often to thrilling effect. Her first single, 'Wuthering Heights', was a huge number one hit in 1978, when she was just 19. After that surprise, EMI allowed her near-absolute artistic control. Since 1980 she has produced and written all her own material and, as the wait for each new album has grown longer and longer, she has become the musical equivalent of a celebrated novelist who refuses to be edited: she has the freedom to do whatever she wants and at whichever speed she desires. If she wants to combine the orchestral string arrangements of Michael Kamen with uninhibited rock guitar, as she does here, she can. If she refuses to play live, as she has done for more than 20 years, no one will try to force her to change her mind.

Twelve years is a long time to wait for a new record from any artist, even from one as consistently inventive as Kate Bush, but at least Aerial offers value. It's a 14-track double album, and the more experimental of the two records is 'A Sky of Honey'. It begins not with music but with the sound of birdsong, the wind in the trees and the voice of a child calling for her parents. What follows is a suite of seven unashamedly romantic and interconnected songs taking us on a long day's journey into night and then on through to the next morning when birdsong is heard once more and the whole cycle starts all over again. There are similarities here with the second side of the remarkable Hounds of Love (1985) and to the song sequence 'The Ninth Wave' that took us into the consciousness of a drowning woman (the sea, in her work, has long been a source of inspiration and of threat). That album, memorable for its daring, its imaginative use of sampling, and its erotic intensity, was, like much of Bush's work, preoccupied with memory - and with how we are never entirely free from the voices and sounds of childhood. It remains her best album.

'A Sky of Honey' is music of pagan rapture - songs about acts of creation, natural or otherwise; about the wind, rain, sunlight and the sea. Sometimes it is just Kate alone at her piano, her voice restrained. Sometimes, as on the outstanding 'Sunset', she begins alone and softly, but soon the tempo quickens and the song becomes an experiment in forms: jazz, progressive rock, flamenco.

There are weaknesses. At times, Bush can be too fey and whimsical, especially on 'Bertie', which is about the joy of motherhood, or on 'Mrs Bartolozzi', a rhapsody to nothing less than a washing machine: 'My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers... slooshy sloshy/ slooshy sloshy.' And the bold, musically adventurous second album is a little too insistent in its 'hey, man' hippyish sensibility, with Kate running freely through the fields or climbing high in the mountains. She did, after all, once dress up as a kind of white witch for the cover of Never For Ever (1980), on which she is portrayed flying through the air, like a giant bat.

'What kind of language is this?' Kate Bush sings, self-interrogatively, on the title track, the last of the album. It's a good question, to which she offers a partial answer on 'Somewhere in Between', which in ambition and content is where most of the songs on this album are suspended - somewhere in between the tighter, more conventional structures of pop and the looser, less accessible arrangements of contemporary classical and the avant-garde; somewhere, in mood and atmosphere, between the lucidity of wakefulness and the ambiguity of dream; between the presumed innocence of childhood and the desire for escape offered by the adult imagination; between abstraction and the real. Even when she escapes her wonderland to write songs about actual figures in the known world, she remains attracted to those figures such as Elvis ('King of the Mountain', the album's first single) or Joan of Arc ('Joanna') that, in death as indeed in life, have a mythic unreality.

So, again, what kind of language is this? It is ultimately that of an artist superbly articulate in the language of experimental pop music. But it is also the language of an artist who doesn't seem to want to grow up. Or, more accurately, who has never lost her child-like capacity for wonder and for pagan celebration and who, because she is sincere and can communicate her odd and unpredictable vision in both words and through sumptuous music, occupies a cherished and indulged position in the culture. There is no one quite like her, which is why, in the end, we must forgive her excesses and eccentricities. We are lucky to have her back”.

Among the highlights of Aerial is Kate Bush singing along with a blackbird (Aerial Tal most explicitly) and her putting on an Elvis Presley drawl (King of the Mountain). A Sky of Honey is especially detailed and arresting. So many highlights. Aside from the black mark that is Rolf Harris featuring (his vocal parts were replaced on a later release, where Bush’s son took his parts), Aerial is this near-perfect album. AllMusic provided their take on the sublime and truly captivating Aerial:

“Fierce Kate Bush fans who are expecting revelation in Aerial, her first new work since The Red Shoes in 1993, will no doubt scour lyrics, instrumental trills, and interludes until they find them. For everyone else, those who purchased much of Bush's earlier catalog because of its depth, quality, and vision, Aerial will sound exactly like what it is, a new Kate Bush record: full of her obsessions, lushly romantic paeans to things mundane and cosmic, and her ability to add dimension and transfer emotion though song. The set is spread over two discs. The first, A Sea of Honey, is a collection of songs, arranged for everything from full-on rock band to solo piano. The second, A Sky of Honey, is a conceptual suite. It was produced by Bush with engineering and mixing by longtime collaborator Del Palmer.

A Sea of Honey is a deeply interior look at domesticity, with the exception of its opening track, "King of the Mountain," the first single and video. Bush does an acceptable impersonation of Elvis Presley in which she examines his past life on earth and present incarnation as spectral enigma. Juxtaposing the Elvis myth, Wagnerian mystery, and the image of Rosebud, the sled from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Bush's synthesizer, sequencer, and voice weigh in ethereally from the margins before a full-on rock band playing edgy and funky reggae enters on the second verse. Wind whispers and then howls across the cut's backdrop as she searches for the rainbow body of the disappeared one through his clothes and the tabloid tales of his apocryphal sightings, looking for a certain resurrection of his physical body. The rest of the disc focuses on more interior and domestic matters, but it's no less startling. A tune called "Pi" looks at a mathematician's poetic and romantic love of numbers. "Bertie" is a hymn to her son orchestrated by piano, Renaissance guitar, percussion, and viols.

But disc one's strangest and most lovely moment is in "Mrs. Bartolozzi," scored for piano and voice. It revives Bush's obsessive eroticism through an ordinary woman's ecstatic experience of cleaning after a rainstorm, and placing the clothing of her beloved and her own into the washing machine and observing in rapt sexual attention. She sings "My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers/Oh the waves are going out/My skirt floating up around your waist...Washing machine/Washing machine." Then there's "How to Be Invisible," and the mysticism of domestic life as the interior reaches out into the universe and touches its magic: "Hem of anorak/Stem of a wall flower/Hair of doormat?/Is that autumn leaf falling?/Or is that you walking home?/Is that a storm in the swimming pool?"

A Sky of Honey is 42 minutes in length. It's lushly romantic as it meditates on the passing of 24 hours. Its prelude is a short deeply atmospheric piece with the sounds of birds singing, and her son (who is "the Sun" according to the credits) intones, "Mummy...Daddy/The day is full of birds/Sounds like they're saying words." And "Prologue" begins with her piano, a chanted viol, and Bush crooning to romantic love, the joy of marriage and nature communing, and the deep romance of everyday life. There's drama, stillness, joy, and quiet as its goes on, but it's all held within, as in "An Architect's Dream," where the protagonist encounters a working street painter going about his work in changing light: "The flick of a wrist/Twisting down to the hips/So the lovers begin with a kiss...." Loops, Eberhard Weber's fretless bass, drifting keyboards, and a relaxed delivery create an erotic tension, in beauty and in casual voyeurism.

"Sunset" has Bush approaching jazz, but it doesn't swing so much as it engages the form. Her voice digging into her piano alternates between lower-register enunciation and a near falsetto in the choruses. There is a sense of utter fascination with the world as it moves toward darkness, and the singer is enthralled as the sun climbs into bed, before it streams into "Sunset," a gorgeous flamenco guitar and percussion-driven call-and-response choral piece -- it's literally enthralling. It is followed by a piece of evening called "Somewhere Between," in which lovers take in the beginning of night. As "Nocturne" commences, shadows, stars, the beach, and the ocean accompany two lovers who dive down deep into one another and the surf. Rhythms assert themselves as the divers go deeper and the band kicks up: funky electric guitars pulse along with the layers of keyboards, journeying until just before sunup. But it is on the title track that Bush gives listeners her greatest surprise. Dawn is breaking and she greets the day with a vengeance. Manic, crunchy guitars play power chords as sequencers and synths make the dynamics shift and swirl. In her higher register, Bush shouts, croons, and trills against and above the band's force.

Nothing much happens on Aerial except the passing of a day, as noted by the one who engages it in the process of being witnessed, yet it reveals much about the interior and natural worlds and expresses spiritual gratitude for everyday life. Musically, this is what listeners have come to expect from Bush at her best -- a finely constructed set of songs that engage without regard for anything else happening in the world of pop music. There's no pushing of the envelope because there doesn't need to be. Aerial is rooted in Kate Bush's oeuvre, with grace, flair, elegance, and an obsessive, stubborn attention to detail. What gets created for the listener is an ordinary world, full of magic; it lies inside one's dwelling in overlooked and inhabited spaces, and outside, from the backyard and out through the gate into wonder”.

I am looking forward to being at Avalon Café on 6th November. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Aerial, I will be joining Leah Kardos – and hopefully a full and willing audience – to discuss Aerial and have a chat. Listening to A Sky of Honey will be a highlight, as Kate Bush always intended it to be heard in a single go, rather than handpicking tracks. As a suite, it is one of her greatest achievements. Nearly twenty years after it was released, Aerial is a staggering…

WORK of brilliance.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: The Infant Kiss (Never for Ever)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Lichfield

The Infant Kiss (Never for Ever)

__________

I have not discussed this song…

for a while, and it is one I am keen to now. I think its title alone would mean it would not get played on the radio. People instantly misunderstanding the meaning or feeling people would complain if they heard the song. This idea of Bush singing as a woman and suggesting she is kissing this young boy. The complexities, implications and connotations. Maybe it would be too controversial and create a backlash. However, this track from 1980’s Never for Ever is one of her best. Certainly one of her most underrated tracks. Not released as a single and never performed live, I am also not sure whether it has been played on the radio. I think the last time I approached this track was back in 2022. I am going to bring in sections of an article I used back then. However, for people who do not know the backstory of this song, it might all seem a bit confusing. In fact, and as was quite common with Kate Bush, this is a song inspired by film. There are a couple of 1980 interviews, where Kate Bush discussed the song. In the first, she explains how The Innocents was influential when it came to the creation of this song. The Infant Kiss could have easily been misconstrued. In the second interview, Bush was keen to dispel any misreading of the title and the lyrics:

“It was based on the film, The Innocents. I saw it years ago, when I was very young, and it scared me, and when films scare you as a kid, I think they really hang there. It’s a beautiful film, quite extraordinary. This governess is supposed to look after these children, a little boy and a girl, and they are actually possessed by the spirits of the people who were in the house before. And they keep appearing to the children. It’s really scary – as scary on some levels as the idea of The Exorcist, and that terrified me. The idea of this young girl, speaking and behaving like she did was very disturbing, very distorted. But I quite like that song.

Radio Programme, Paul Gambaccini, 30 December 1980

The thing that worries me is the way people have started interpreting that song. They love the long word–paedophilia. It’s not about that at all. It’s not the woman actually fancying the young kid. It’s the woman being attracted by a man inside the child. It just worries me that there were some people catching on to the idea of there being paedophilia, rather than just a distortion of a situation where there’s a perfectly normal, innocent boy with the spirit of a man inside, who’s extremely experienced and lusty. The woman can’t cope with the distortion. She can see that there’s some energy in the child that is not normal, but she can’t place it. Yet she has a very pure maternal love for the child, and it’s only little things like when she goes to give him a kiss at night, that she realizes there is a distortion, and it’s really freaking her out. She doesn’t fancy little boys, she’s got a normal, straight sexual life, yet this thing is happening to her. I really like the distortedness of the situation.

Kris Needs, ‘Fire In The Bush’. Zigzag (UK), 1980”.

There is that feeling of taboo around a track like this. People jumping to wrong conclusions. However, The Infant Kiss is one of Kate Bush’s most beautiful and interesting tracks. I love her vocal performance on it. A mix of confusion, fear, desire and caution. She produced Never for Ever with Jon Kelly, so Bush would have had a lot of say in regards to how The Infant Kiss sounded. What I love about The Infant Kiss is the musicians she played with. Unlike many other song where there is a familiar crew, this was a bit less familiar. Well, Alan Murphy on electric guitar is no shock! However, Adam Sceaping played the viol and Jo Sceaping. They arranged strings. The lyrics, “There’s a man behind those eyes/I catch him when I’m bending/Ooh, how he frightens me/When they whisper privately/(“Don’t Let Go!”)/Windy-wailey blows me/Words of caress on their lips/That speak of adult love” put you inside the mind and psyche of the heroine. The fact Kate Bush watched The Innocents and then connected it with a song that breed up. Only an artist like her could do that! Although there was no official music video, Chris Williams, an American fan of Kate Bush, made one. She saw the video and told him that the scenes from The Innocents that he included were the exact ones in her head when she was creating the song! I will include it in here, but a French version of the song, Un Baiser d’Enfant, was released. Un Baiser d’Enfant has French lyrics by François Cahan. Recorded in one day by Kate Bush, Del Palmer and Paul Hardiman on 16th October, 1982, it was released as the B-side of Ne T’enfuis Pas and on the Canadian/U.S. mini-L.P., Kate Bush.

I will round up soon. However, I want to come to an article from Dreams of Orgonon from 2020. It is clear that, whilst The Infant Kiss is extraordinary and one of the most original tracks produced at that time, it will always be the victim of misinterpretation. A shame that such a beautiful song that provokes genuine discussion will never be played:

“The inaugural track of the album’s rear-guard, “The Infant Kiss,” is in some ways its most conventional, as it fits squarely into the “Wuthering Heights” and ”Hammer Horror” mold of baroque piano songs with intricate relationships to texts featuring psychologically unstable protagonists (once again, Bush’s source material is cinematic — the BBC’s 1967 Wuthering Heights serial is a greater influence on Bush’s song than Brontë’s novel). Yet “The Infant Kiss” drifts more than the rock inclinations of those two tracks would allow them to go, with its apprehensive minor-key piano machinations providing the song’s musical backbone (“The Infant Kiss” is only tenuously in D# minor — it starts with the III chord [F#] and often returns to the VII chord [C#], but inverts the key by playing the VI as B minor, and even forces in F# minor). pensively underlined by stalwart Alan Murphy’s electric guitar and the string accompaniment (viol and lirone) of brothers Adam and Jo Sceaping, sounding rather like a 1950s’ horror film’s soundtrack. Bush’s vocal is a triumph of her singing career, as she lifts her voice to a pointed F#5 (“noo-OO con-TROL,” a character description and virtually a self-assessment). Bush’s vocal shifts from eerie to spectral; as her songwriting slowly removes the lines between internal processing and external reality, Bush pushes her voice towards pitches of fear and nausea. Utilizing the higher end of her range, Bush’s vocal for “The Infant Kiss” is throaty, and she sounds like she’s choking her cries of “I cannot sit and let/something happen I’ll regret” and “I only want to touch.”

This source material is enough to make “The Infant Kiss” one of Bush’s most difficult songs. It’s by no means an endorsement of pedophilia (nor specifically about it — Bush’s comments about wanting to strike the child or being terrified of the child suggest more pathologizing and narcissistic manipulation than sexual attraction), but it fundamentally centers an adult woman’s obsession with a prepubescent boy. “What is this?/an infant kiss/that sends my body tingling” has clear implications. Instead of a man with a child in his eyes, this boy has “a man behind those eyes.” The song doesn’t treat this as a positive point — it views it as a source of disorienting horror (albeit more for the voyeur than the child, whose perspective is absent). In interviews, Bush expounded on the way in which “the whole idea of looking at a little innocent boy and that distortion” was “absolutely terrifying.” Her fixation on the disunity between mind and external situation has gone beyond herself – it now applies to other people. The song lacks any element of sexual abuse (although not physical abuse, i.e. “I want to smack but I hold back”), but its narrative of an incipient narcissist’s fixation on adolescence and obsession with a child is as unsettling as Bush gets. Never for Ever contains sundry portraits of failed motherhood, of which “The Infant Kiss” is the most spectral. Of course the boy is a ghost. So is every child who gets raised by a narcissist.

Even the healthiest relationships are complicated in many ways, and relationships’ healthier aspects often illuminate points of stress. Even wanting to help someone can be fundamentally harmful if one’s intentions are in the wrong place. Bush sees that with perfect clarity: a child possessed by a ghost is far less frightening than the mind of a person who perceives that”.

One of the best and also most complicated songs in Kate Bush’s cannon, I wonder if the English original of the song can ever be played or discussed. If Bush re-recorded it in French perhaps to reapproach the song that plagued her to a degree, there is no denying the intent behind the song. That film connection to The Innocents. I did feel that the haunting The Infant Kiss…

DESERVED discussion and investigation.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie at Eighty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie at Eighty

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I don’t think…

IN THIS PHOTO: John McVie (back centre) with Fleetwood Mac in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Polaris

I have ever spotlighted John McVie before. I have written about Fleetwood Mac quite a lot. Whether that is around one of their albums or a fellow members, such as Stevie Nicks, I have not focused on their incredible bass player. Whilst the band might be retired and I don’t think we will see them play together again, there is no denying the impact McVie made on the band and their sound. Playing with Fleetwood Mac since 1967, the band is named after their drummer, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie – with ‘Mc’ being extended to ‘Mac’. Even though McVie played with other artists, people know him best for his work with Fleetwood Mac. On 26th November, he turns eighty. I hope there will be celebration aplenty! He is an amazing bass player and has provided some of Fleetwood Mac’s best lines. Maybe his bass work on The Chain (from 1977’s Rumours) is his most-famed performance. I am going to end with a mixtape showcasing his bass work with Fleetwood Mac. Before then, here is a fulsome biography from AllMusic:

"As the bassist for Fleetwood Mac -- and, indeed, providing the "Mac" in that group name -- John McVie may be the most circumspect, self-effacing rock musician ever to achieve anything like superstar status. This fact could be explained when one recognizes that he never set out to be a rock musician, or a superstar. Among bassists whose names are (or have been) household words, he's positively a shrinking violet next to figures such as John Entwistle, Paul McCartney, Jack Bruce, John Paul Jones, Sting, et al., all the while appearing on just about as many records as any of them (save McCartney) that are in people's collections.

John Graham McVie was born in Ealing, West London, in 1945, and expressed an interest in music from childhood, when he took up the trumpet. He reached his teens amid the British skiffle boom and the first serious rumblings of home-grown rock & roll, and decided to switch to the guitar. But he saw that everyone was taking up the guitar, seeking to emulate either Lonnie Donegan or Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch of the Shadows; he also was inclined to play along to their work on the Shadows' records. And so, in a profoundly important moment, he chose to learn the bass instead, and to use the Shadows' original four-string player, Jet Harris, as his model. His father contributed to the choice by buying him a Fender bass, then a very expensive purchase in England. His listening included the work of Willie Dixon and Charles Mingus, though upright bass doesn't ever seem to have figured large in McVie's own career. Jazz and blues loomed large in his thinking, though he did find one rock player after Harris whose work intrigued him, Paul McCartney.

McVie's first band was the Krewsaders, comprised of friends he knew from Ealing, playing local dances and weddings. He was struggling along, paying his dues at local gigs, and planning to join the civil service as a tax inspector, when lightning of a kind struck. McVie had a friend, Cliff Barton, who was playing with the Cyril Davies All-Stars, one of the top British blues bands working in London at the time, and who was offered the chance to join a fledgling band called the Bluesbreakers, organized and led by John Mayall. Barton wasn't interested, but he told Mayall that he should look up the then 17-year-old McVie, who joined the Bluesbreakers in January of 1963. From that modest beginning (a ten-shilling payday for his first gig, at a pub, according to one interview), he stayed with the band for years, and was there when Mayall and company became important enough to rate a recording contract with Decca -- while McVie was working as a tax inspector during the daytime.

McVie was good enough to last, despite a propensity for drinking that grew more severe as time went on, and resulted in periodic dismissals and rehirings. He was there for the tenure of Eric Clapton on lead guitar, and for his successor, Peter Green. And he found a new partner in the rhythm section in 1967 with the addition of drummer Mick Fleetwood, a veteran of bands such as Peter B's Looners, and to a lot of connoisseurs, that band -- Mayall, Green, McVie, and Fleetwood -- was the best lineup the Bluesbreakers ever fielded. Green's tenure with the band was difficult, owing in part to his own aspirations and also to the dominant personality of Mayall, who exerted his authority as leader without compunction. Green decided to strike out on his own after work on the album A Hard Road, and wanted to take Fleetwood and McVie with him. Fleetwood went along, but McVie, who had been with Mayall far longer than the others, didn't want to betray his mentor/benefactor and also saw the new band as a risk; blues bands were springing up all over London, while the audience seemed to be splintering amid the burgeoning psychedelic movement, and there was this outfit called Cream that seemed to be getting most of the press and sales -- even the decision to call the proposed band Fleetwood Mac (or Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac), thus giving each member a stake in the name, couldn't get McVie dislodged from the Bluesbreakers.

In one of the luckiest gestures of friendship and good will that one is likely to find in music of that era, Green and Fleetwood agreed to "hold" the bassist slot open for McVie, and engaged Bob Brunning as their temporary bassist. Finally, in the early fall of 1967, McVie jumped ship -- Mayall had been changing the band amid the shifting personnel, and came out with something that was more jazz than blues, in McVie's view, and jazzier than he wanted to be. McVie's arrival enabled Fleetwood Mac to become everything that Green saw in its potential and more -- they went on, even in the blues years, to regularly reach the uppermost levels of the charts in England, and were getting reviews second only to Cream (and sometimes not second) among blues outfits. A recording contract with Blue Horizon made that company's fortune and yielded sales high enough to get the group signed to Reprise Records (part of Warner Bros. Records) following its second album.

That record included some piano played by Christine Perfect -- the lead singer of a Blue Horizon act called Chicken Shack -- who McVie first met at the Windsor Jazz Festival, where both groups were performing, and they were married less than six months later in August of 1968. Fleetwood Mac added guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan to their lineup and eventually Christine McVie would formally join as well, and take over a lot of the lead vocals. Green, Spencer, and Kirwan all eventually departed under the weight of various personal and psychological stresses, and Bob Welch passed through as well, and all the while Fleetwood and the McVies soldiered on, releasing albums that sold in the hundreds of thousands over time, and building a substantial (if not huge) audience in America. McVie's playing on those albums was exceptionally fine -- anyone who wants to hear some of the most beautifully melodic pop/rock bass work ever should give a fresh listen to Penguin (1973), one of the classics of what proved to be the "bubbling under" years for the band. They were successful enough, and sufficiently well known as a top-flight blues band in England, to yield a string of notorious impersonator bands, which resulted in lawsuits and Fleetwood and McVie eventually getting legal possession of the Fleetwood Mac name.

Amid all of this activity, McVie still struggled with his chronic alcoholism, which rose and fell but never quite disappeared. Eventually, it led to the breakup of the McVies' marriage, but not before the group added another couple -- Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks -- to its lineup and ascended to a level of mega-pop stardom rivaled only by the likes of the Beatles. The self-titled Fleetwood Mac album turned McVie into a superstar, along with the rest of the band, while its follow-up, Rumours, recorded as his marriage was disintegrating, only solidified the group's newfound status, exceeding the earlier album's sales. By the time sales began to die down from that album, McVie was married a second time. His career has continued apace since then, he and Fleetwood regarded as one of the best rhythm sections in the history of rock music, and essentially writing their own ticket in terms of recordings. He has reportedly cleaned himself up of drug and alcohol dependencies, and found time to cut his first-ever solo project, John McVie's Gotta Band with Lola Thomas, on which he even made a rare appearance on backing vocals.

Despite the band's inevitable celebrity status and the resulting press coverage, McVie has managed to keep a lot of his private life relatively private. McVie's best spokesman, apart from himself in the occasional interviews he gives, is his music, which now comprises a 44-year legacy and counting. In addition to his work with the band that carries his name, he has never been averse to working with former associates including his ex-wife Christine, former mentor Mayall, and longtime friends such as the late Warren Zevon, and he and Fleetwood have also lent their talents and celebrity to figures who they respect and admire, such as Grass Roots bassist/lead singer Rob Grill”.

I think John McVie is one of the most important artists alive, yet does not get talked about as much as other legends. His eightieth birthday on 26th November, should, I hope, shine a light on the role he played in Fleetwood Mac! Occasionally as a songwriter but predominantly and prominently as their incredible bass player, we may see him portrayed some day on the screen. I have always said how we need a Fleetwood Mac biopic or film that looks at them around the Rumours era. I guess the stage play, Stereophonic, is loosely based around Fleetwood Mac, though it would be nice to see an authorised and official biopic. For now, I shall end with a playlist containing some amazing John McVie bass work. As you will hear, he really is…

A truly awesome talent.

FEATURE: A Brilliant and Much Needed Collaboration with Saffron: Why FKA twigs’ Initiative Is a Hugely Important Step Forward

FEATURE:

 

 

A Brilliant and Much Needed Collaboration with Saffron

IN THIS PHOTO: FKA twigs is launching a new educational grant to get more women into music tech roles, in partnership with non-profit organisation, Saffron/PHOTO CREDIT: Jordan Hemingway

Why FKA twigs’ Initiative Is a Hugely Important Step Forward

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ONE of the most egregious…

IN THIS PHOTO: Catherine Marks in an award-winning producer and engineer who has worked with the likes of boygenius. However, she is one of very few women working in professional studios

aspects of the music industry is how it is left to women in music to make life better for themselves. Creating their own opportunities and tackling a lack of progression. From fighting to be heard on festival line-ups to changing the way modern studios are dominated by men, there is little support from men. Very few men in the industry speaking out and showing their allyship. It would have been nice to have seen more of this before. Men in the industry pledging to affect change. However, the brilliant FKA twigs has announced she is working with a non-profit organisation to address the imbalance when it comes to tech jobs and roles. How young women are very much in the minority. I have some thoughts on it. However, The Forty-Five shared this:

“FKA twigs has announced a new educational grant to get more women into music tech roles, in partnership with non-profit organisation Saffron. The news came as the artist collected her Inspirational Artist award at the Music Week Women In Music Awards in London on Friday – and used her speech to deliver a fierce critique of the industry’s gender imbalance.

Alongside being a creative polymath, Twigs has long been an advocate for change. She hopes the new grant will help support women who are interested in “working at the backbone of the industry – techs, engineers, all of the roles I hope to see more women earning and being successful at in the future”.

Saffron provides hands-on opportunities for women and non-binary people to access music production and sound engineering development through short courses, workshops, mentoring and industry connections. Their vision is a creative landscape where all underrepresented artists can harness technology for full self-expression, disrupting power structures and shaping culture.

Twigs’ speech didn’t shy away from calling out the sexism she’s faced throughout her career.

“When I was a little girl, I would daydream about one day being a music artist, and I would doubt myself,” she said. “I’ve been releasing music now for over 10 years, and to my surprise, those things are actually the easy part. The hard part of being a female singer and producer artist – the part I have found the most challenging – is dealing with men.”

She spoke candidly about navigating “a male-dominated industry rife with unwanted sexual advances and fragile egos,” recalling times she’s had to fight to retrieve her own stems from male producers whose “pride had been bruised.”

“These experiences seeded doubt in me,” she said. “When I’ve told males who are being paid off the back of my talent that I feel unsafe, and I’m told to ‘take the situation with a pinch of salt’, that I ‘need these people for my career’, so I should just ‘play the game back’… No doubt many women in music have had to navigate these situations and obstacles before they even get to lay a finger on a keyboard or touch a computer mouse.”

“If we don’t use our voices collectively to raise these concerns,” she continued, “how do we expect the circumstances to be any different for the next generation of women?”

Her message was backed by stark statistics.

“In the two decades I’ve been in the studio, aside from the sessions where it’s been at my request, I’ve only worked with one female engineer. I’ve met one female head of a label, and no female producers have ever accidentally joined any of my studio sessions. That’s despicable — but not surprising — considering fewer than 5% of professionals in music production are women, and less than 1% of those are women of colour.”

“I wish when I started out, I could have had more women around me — engineers, techs, managers, executives — more support, more advice, more people to hold those accountable who made me feel uncomfortable. Then maybe I wouldn’t have had to navigate so much unnecessary noise.”

Still, she made a point of gratitude too.

“There have been so many incredible men who have supported me with my art behind the scenes, and I’m so grateful to you. I just want more diversity and equal opportunity so that young females can be making it in the music industry across all roles and concentrating on what we’re supposed to be doing — which is making art.”

Next month, Twigs releases ‘Eusexua: Afterglow’, a new body of work that continues the visceral, dance-driven world she began with the Mercury-prize nominated ‘Eusexua’ earlier this year. A reminder, if one were needed, that her power extends far beyond performance – to changing the structures behind it”.

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A post shared by Saffron (@saffronrecords)

FKA twigs’ words are not unique to her. In terms of women who have faced sexism and having doors closed in their faces. Being in studios and surrounded by men and not seeing many women in tech roles. It is industry bias and a lack of incentive from men to balance things. How, if they feel things are not broken, then they will not be fixed. I am interested to see how her work with Saffron develops and what form it takes. Saffron shared their support and appreciation. They are a record label but also provide tech courses and artist development. A growing community that provides these essential workshops, check out the brilliant work they do. Even though we are seeing tiny steps forward when it comes to tackling inequality and sexism in various corners in the industry, there are others where little or no movement has happened. I have saluted and discussed brilliant women in studios such as producer and engineer, Catherine Marks. There are brilliant women in studios that are still in the minority. It extends beyond that to all tech roles. I still think that women in music are reserved to music itself. When we think of the very best D.J.s, managers, P.R. representatives, executives, tech, engineers and beyond, it is very much men that are mentioned. Even though many women-self produce albums, think of the professional studios and production credits. Most producers men. Even more so when it comes to engineers. FKA twigs is one of many artists whose experiences have led her to fight and call for change. Even if many men are supportive, women coming into music need to see more women around them.

That sense of familiarity and inspiration. If studios, tech roles, boardrooms and all corners of music are male-dominated, then it does not seem like an industry that reflects them and it made for them. The sexism and misogyny that still runs rife through music. Going ahead, I would love to see more men in the industry using their time and name to call for equality and more opportunities for women. Making it easier for women to be more visible and active in roles geared for men. The culture needs to change. FKA twigs’ grant initiative and her work with Saffron will definitely affect movement and change. There needs to be more action and cooperation. It is so angering and disheartening to see these stats when it comes to tech roles and production. I know for a fact how man incredible women work as tour crew and lighting engineers. These incredible women who manage artists and work in P.R. Terrific producers and engineers. The truth is that their voices are not as amplified as their male colleagues. Things have to change. The Women in Music Awards 2025 showcased some incredible talent and truly inspiring women. It should give a kick to the industry. That these brilliant women, whilst in the minority, are being celebrated for a reason. That artists like FKA twigs do not want to see an industry that is so imbalanced and male-heavy when it comes to technical roles. With women dominating music in terms of the best albums released, we need to see more women in these roles where they are still underrepresented. Whilst FKA twigs ended her Women In Music Awards 2025 speech with some gratitude to men who helped her, these words stuck out, with regards to seeing so few women in tech roles and around her when she was coming through: “Then maybe I wouldn’t have had to navigate so much unnecessary noise”. That struggle and experience that she and so many of her peers have faced. It makes her upcoming work with Saffron…

SO important.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Leigh-Anne

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Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Derek Bremner for NME

Leigh-Anne

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THE Pop scene right now…

is so exceptional and varied. In terms of the absolute best out there, Leigh-Anne is near the top of the pack. The past couple of years have seen her put out some incredible singles. Her debut album, My Ego Told Me To, will be released on 20th February. That is going to be among the most anticipated albums of 2026. Her Little Mix bandmate JADE released her debut album, THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY, in September. Also in September, Perrie Edwards, as Perrie, released her eponymous debut album. I know there will be a lot of analysis of the three members’ albums. It is not competition at all. Instead, it is three members of a hugely successful girl group presenting their solo debut albums. I know that Little Mix will come together for something in the future but, for now, we are seeing three amazing artists deliver remarkable albums. Leigh-Anne’s is going to be one to get. Prior to that, I did want to highlight this amazing artist. Someone who is among the true heavyweights of modern-day Pop. I am sharing this after 23rd October, but there was this pre-release option where you could get various bundles and options for My Ego Told Me To. Including a cassette on its own and a vinyl, cassette and C.D. bundle, there was this choice for fans. Great value too. Actually, the options are still available, though that date cut-off gave pre-sale access to Leigh-Anne's upcoming tour. I am keen to get to some fairly recent interviews with Leigh-Anne. One of the most remarkable artists we have in our midst, this is someone who is already influencing other artists coming through. Before getting to an interview from last year, I want to start with a recent article from NME, who gave details about Leigh-Anne’s debut album and upcoming tour:

“Former Little Mix member Leigh-Anne announced her debut album ‘My Ego Told Me To’ and a UK and Europe tour. Find all the details below.

The album, which will be her first outside of Little Mix, will be released on February 20, and is available to pre-order here.

A new single, ‘Dead And Gone,’ will come out this Friday (October 17), following on from ‘Been A Minute‘ and ‘Burning Up’, the latter of which came out back in August and drew inspiration from her Caribbean heritage.

Speaking about the album, Leigh-Anne said: “This album is the truest representation of me as an artist. Versatile, rooted in reggae and my heritage, but stamped with pop. It’s personal and impossible to box in.

“I wanted it to feel authentic, blending the genres I love with a sound that’s distinctly mine. It’s also a statement: standing by my art and doing it my way,” she continued. “These are songs I’ll be proud of in five, ten years, because they reflect exactly where I was.

“You’ll hear my world in it, my daughters, my marriage, my fight for power, and the moment I embraced my fire side and said: no more. This is my show now.”

Alongside news of her album, Leigh-Anne has also announced the ‘My Ego Told Me To Tour’, which will include dates in the UK, Ireland and Europe.

The shows kick off in Dublin on April 6, before she makes stops in Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol, London, Paris and Amsterdam. She’ll then wrap things up in Berlin later that month.

Tickets go on sale on October 24, and will be available here. Ahead of that, an artist presale will kick off on October 23, which you can gain access to by pre-ordering the album here”.

There was a lot of excitement and a bit of shock when Leigh-Anne announced her solo career. In the sense many felt this signalled the end of Little Mix. That she was leaving for good. Speaking with DORK in June of last year, we discover how Leigh-Anne was stepping out on her own for this solo venture of self-discovery. Stripping layers away to reveal the truest form of herself. Although quite scary to go out solo, it is clear that Leigh-Anne had a lot to say as an independent artist. She could be more authentic as a sole artist rather than being part of a group:

“Thanks to the success of Little Mix and the devotion they inspired from fans worldwide, Leigh-Anne knows she’s not exactly starting her solo career from scratch, “but I am essentially a new artist who is at the start of building something,” she offers. “I’m still growing, I’m still finding my feet, and I’m still experimenting, all of which is normal for a new project.” She goes on to say she’s still working on her debut album. “I definitely feel like it’s there, and I’m excited for it to finally come out. The pressure has been taken off a little bit now, though, and I feel a lot more comfortable about it.”

Part of that comfort has come from blocking out social media noise. “It’s easy to get sucked into worrying about what other people think I should be doing or achieving, especially because Little Mix were so huge. There are obviously going to be expectations, but I’m just really focused on doing my own thing, which is putting out music that I think is brilliant,”

“I absolutely loved what we did in the group, but what I’m doing right now is completely different,” she says. If it wasn’t different, what would be the point of leaving the safety of the group in the first place?

After big, pop-infused songs like ‘Don’t Say Love’ and ‘My Love’, that upcoming body of work sees Leigh-Anne shimmy away from polished spectacle and lean into creating something more intimate. “It’s definitely the most raw I’ve been,” she explains. “Those early singles and the massive videos were such amazing moments, but this record is me stripping some of those layers away and just being open about my story. It’s scary, but I hope it allows people to come into my world more.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Lou Jasmine, Adama Jalloh

When she first started writing music for her solo career, Leigh-Anne wanted to explore all the different things she was experiencing – being a new mother, leaving the band, stepping into her power – but she kept coming back to her relationship with her husband, Andre Gray.

“I really do lead with love,” she says. “If I’m hurt in love, or if I’m happy in love, that really does affect me. And at the beginning of my relationship with Andre, he put me through some crap where I was left hurt and didn’t know if we were going to make it. At the same time, I had to pretend everything was ok,” she continues. She didn’t feel like she could talk about it with the rest of Little Mix despite their tight bond, and those feelings were left unexplored. “I just never really healed from it,” says Leigh-Anne. “When I went into the studio, I felt like I needed to get it off my chest, and it’s been a healing process.”

The entirety of Leigh-Anne’s upcoming record is about her relationship with her husband. “There have been sad times, sexy times and happy times, so it’s definitely a journey of emotions,” she explains.

The first chapter of the currently-unannounced #NHF story is ‘Stealing Love’, a beautiful, tightly-wound track about not receiving the love you deserve in a relationship, while the second is ‘Forbidden Fruit’. “I never really wanted to talk about how I met my husband because it was forbidden fruit,” says Leigh-Anne. “We were both in situations, but we genuinely couldn’t deny the love that we had for each other.” As she sings in the song, “Broke a couple hearts just to be forever”.

“I don’t really want to get too into it because it still feels wrong. When I talk about it, I still feel icky,” she continues. “But at the same time, love had to come first.”

“The way that I’m attacking this solo era is by wanting to be as honest as I can,” says Leigh-Anne. But that’s also a daunting prospect, considering how many people are listening. “Obviously, people don’t know this stuff,” she explains. “People assume things are always great, especially because you only post the good bits on social media. But let’s face it, nothing is ever perfect. It’s been really freeing to embrace that.”

She hopes people can find hope in her raw, vulnerable storytelling. “There are so many songs about heartbreak and breakups, but this story is about finding a way through. It’s about making things work. It would have been really easy for me to walk away from that relationship, but now we’re married, and we have our twins. All of that came from fighting for each other.” It’s a far cry from the colourful, bright and happy world of Little Mix, but it’s not a complete departure. “We always wanted to inspire people, and I’ve definitely taken that with me into my solo music,” Leigh-Anne adds. “It’s so important to spread a joyful message”.

In July, Rolling Stone spent time with Leigh-Anne. The start of a bold and thrilling new era, Been a Minute was released into the world. She was asked about its incredible music video. Leigh-Anne also shared some behind-the-scenes images from the music video. Since then, we have had a further few singles from Leigh-Anne, including one of the year’s best in Burning Up:

“This is your first release as an independent artist – what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far?

To always trust my gut, I don’t think it’s failed me once. Always stay true to myself and what’s authentic to me. And just enjoy and savour every moment and every win no matter big or small.

You’ve overseen the whole creative direction for this music video. Tell us about the concept and what’s it been like fine tuning and creating your own vision?

It’s been the most freeing experience watching my vision come to life. For the ‘Been a Minute’ music video I wanted to create a space where everyone feels like they can be themselves unapologetically. It’s giving afterparty carnival vibes, everyone’s sweaty, there’s zero fucks given and we’re all living life. I wanted to capture the essence of the song, and to me that’s all about freedom and fun. I have an amazing team around me who just get it. Feeling grateful to have found my tribe.

How was it working with director Femi Lade?

I think it was one of the easiest shoots I’ve ever done, it was such a smooth process. Femi absolutely smashed it, we really clicked and brought our vision to life.

PHOTO CREDIT: Lucy and Lydia

There’s a lot of strong choreography throughout the video – how did you decide on this movement?

I love a bit of choreo so had to give a little taste of what’s to come! I love how this movement feels a bit more loose and free. Literally like you and your girls have taken over the dance floor and living your best life!

The music video captures the essence of carnival and has a very warm palette. How important was that to portray?

The warm palette and energy of the video were really intentional. I wanted it to feel rich, vibrant, and alive. It was about paying homage to heritage, not just in a visual sense but in spirit too. My culture is colourful, it’s expressive, it’s bold and I wanted all of that to bleed through. Now that I’m in control of my artistry, I can really bring those influences to the forefront unapologetically. This era is about embracing all parts of me, and I can’t wait to show more of what I’ve been working on.

The video takes a turn towards the end as we see a doppelgänger dressed in red take your place. Who are they and what do they represent?

There’s a shift happening, and that moment at the end is a small glimpse into something bigger. I don’t want to say too much yet, but everything you’re seeing has a purpose. The story has only just started…you’ll have to wait and see how it all unfolds.

Are there any details in the video that only you would notice?

I had a day to learn the choreo! But I’m really hoping the fans don’t notice that!

What can fans expect in this new era of control and independence from you?

Everything done on my terms, taking more risks, worrying less about what people think and other people’s expectations of me. We’re coming to disrupt. No more miss nice girl…”.

Leigh-Anne played at Reading Festival in August. Backstage, NME chatted with this wonderful artist. Someone who is a natural festival act. Someone who could well headline soon enough. Leigh-Anne spoke about this new period of music for her and what the future of Little Mix is. It is clear that, alongside her esteemed sisters in Little Mix, Leigh-Anne is forging this wonderful Pop sound and legacy. She will continue to build and grow as an artist. However, the music she is releasing now is tremendous:

“You’ve recently released two new singles ‘Burning Up’ and ‘Been A Minute’. Is this the start of a new era?

“It is 100 per cent the start of a new era. I had to take a bit of time to step back – and I’m newly independent now as well – so I was going through that process. I needed to find my tribe. People say ‘Have a tribe around you that sees your vision, otherwise how can you really get to where you wanna go?’ I finally get that, and I’m trusting myself and leading everything myself. I feel great.”

We’ve seen you grow as an artist from your beginnings in Little Mix. How has your sound evolved over that time?

“At the beginning of my solo career, I felt like I knew what I wanted, but there was too much noise around it. There was too much politics, like ‘It has to sound a bit more like this’, and I couldn’t have the real creative control to do what I wanted. So I think it’s evolved by literally just taking the reins myself and saying, ‘No, I’m doing it my way’ and taking the jump to go independent.

Is there anything that you’ve taken from your time starting out in the girl group that you’re still implementing now, or is it two separate worlds for you?

“I definitely feel like I learned everything in Little Mix, so everything I do now [stems] from that. Probably, the fact that I always want to put on a show. In Little Mix, we turned it out every time. I’ve still got that in me – always wanting to give everything I can to have the best show possible. That’s the main thing, the performance level and striving to be even better.”

You’ve said that this isn’t the end for the group, it’s just a hiatus. Do you think all of your respective solo projects and individual sounds could shape the way that we see Little Mix when it makes a comeback?

“I’ve been thinking about this, because we have all gone off and done our own things, found our own sounds, and we are in completely different lanes — which is amazing. I have been wondering though, when we eventually come back, what will that sound like? That’s going to be an exciting thing… but at the same time, Little Mix is Little Mix, and part of that is wanting to deliver what people love. I have to wait and see”.

I am ending with DORK again. Another interview around her Reading performance, Leigh-Anne slayed when she played. However, very few Pop acts are invited to play at Reading & Leeds. It is still very much reserved for ‘heavier’ acts. A degree of elitism, rigidity and misogyny, certainly when it comes to its headliners. I hope that powerful and phalangeal artists like Leigh-Anne can bring about a change. It is high time that major festivals work up and released how important women in Pop are. I know many festivals book Pop artists, though I feel other ignore them out of principle:

“The first taste of the new chapter was the smirking comeback track ‘Been A Minute’, which was released in July. “It’s such a summer banger, I had to release it,” explains Leigh-Anne. “It really is just the beginning, though. I have so much to say and want to take the fans on a journey.”

She doesn’t want to give too much away (“I’m excited to keep unveiling”) but does say the next project is all about “the journey of discovering my power, owning it and standing up for myself.” She’s also excited to challenge expectations. “People think Leigh-Anne is the emotional, sensitive mum… and I am, but there’s a different side to me as well.”

A lot of this next project is inspired by playing live. “With ‘No Hard Feelings’, I wanted to explore deep things like my relationship with my husband and heartache. The headline tour for that record was amazing, but doing these festivals with ‘Been A Minute’ and ‘Burning Up’, the energy has just been electric. It’s been such a party, it’s reminded me what I enjoy – I love to dance, I love to put on a show. There’s space for those ballads, but I want to make sure people have a great time.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Frances Beach

During her feel-good set at Reading Festival, Leigh-Anne took a moment to encourage the crowd to “to sing for love, to stand for love and to spread the love, in a world that needs it so bad right now,” before a glorious cover of Bob Marley’s ‘You Could Be Love’. “How could you ignore what’s going on right now because the world is a fucking scary place,” she says of her decision to promote love during a time when hate is on the rise. “The injustices, oppression and everything else that’s happening right now is fucked, quite frankly. I just wanted to talk about the importance of spreading love, and Bob Marley’s ‘You Could Be Loved’ is one of those beautiful songs that just brings people together.”

She also performed a trio of Little Mix songs – ‘Touch’, ‘Power’ and ‘Sweet Melody’. “All those songs are important to me, but they’re also bangers, so they slotted into the set nicely.” As much as Leigh-Anne is starting a new solo chapter, she’s got no intention of leaving her past behind. “I wouldn’t be where I am without Little Mix. Everything I’ve ever learned and everything that I am is because of the group. What we’ve done is unbelievable, and I’m only really just processing that now. There’s just this pride, and I think that’ll be something I always bring to my shows.”

Despite the shadow cast by being a member of one of the world’s most successful girl groups, Leigh-Anne says she doesn’t care about the expectations around her solo project. “It took a while to retrain my brain, but I now know I don’t have to prove anything to anyone,” she grins. “I’m done with thinking like I do. I’ve been doing this for more than 12 years. Now, I just want to do it with no inhibitions”.

I am going to wrap up. Leigh-Anne is about to embark on the busiest time in her solo career. With a debut album out in February and a tour coming, she will make this major step. One where she is independent of Little Mix. Not that she wants to cut free from them, though you can hear the realest and most potent form of Leigh-Anne in her solo material. A queen of modern music, I wanted to salute…

THE awe-inspiring Leigh-Anne.

___________

Follow Leigh-Anne

Official:

https://www.leigh-anneofficial.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/leighannepinnock/

TikTok:

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

Twitter:

https://x.com/LeighAnneMusic

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/79QUtAVxGAAoiWNlqBz9iy?si=asYeqzRFScCECU0oKZjSXA

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt3aMDPD6lSUFcLgvg7Zcig

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Tracks from the Best Albums of 2025 So Far

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: The Last Dinner Party/PHOTO CREDIT: Rachell Smith

Tracks from the Best Albums of 2025 So Far

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I wanted…

IN THIS PHOTO: The cover of Perfume Genius’s Glory

to look back on the very best albums of this year so far. I know that we are almost through 2025, and I will name my favourite albums in December. However, there have been some remarkable albums released so far and I am keen to combine songs from them. You would have heard most of the albums in the mixtape at the end of this feature. However, there might be some that you have not discovered. I am including a few of the albums that were shortlisted for the Mercury Prize this year. I think that 2025 has been one of the strongest years for music in a very long time. So many albums that will endure and be talked about a long time from now. I hope that you enjoy the mix of songs from the…

IN THIS PHOTO: The cover of Oklou’s choke enough

BEST albums of the year.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott – Get Ur Freak On

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott – Get Ur Freak On

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LAST month…

PHOTO CREDIT: The Gap via Getty Images/Getty Images

Rolling Stone published their list of the two-hundred-and-fifty best songs of this century so far. It is an interesting list, but I wanted to spend time with the song that topped that feature. It is Missy “Misdemeanour” Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On. You can see what they had to say about the song here:

“Missy Elliott dropped “Get Ur Freak On” just in time to rule the radio in the long, hot summer of 2001 — and nothing was ever the same. It was more than just the latest mind-bending Missy smash — it was a challenge, a dare, the sound of Miss E and Timbaland defying everyone else to keep up with the future or get left behind. The dynamic duo from Portsmouth, Virginia, were music’s most radically innovative team, ever since they flipped hip-hop upside down with their 1997 debut hit, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).”

But “Get Ur Freak On” was one step beyond, riding a crazed space-bhangra beat. Timbaland warps a tabla hook into head-spinning Dirty South avant-funk, playing the six-note motif on the tumbi, a one-string Punjabi guitar, while the party people go off in Japanese and Hindi. Missy yells her epic “Hollaaaaa!,” commands all freaks to the dance floor, hocks a loogie, and boasts, “I know you dig the way I sw-sw-switch my style!” It was a nonstop freak manifesto that made the musical future sound limitless. And after more than two decades, “Get Ur Freak On” still sounds like the future — everything vibrant and inventive and cool about 21st-century pop is in here somewhere. Holla, forever. —R.S.”.

Released on 13th March, 2001, this classic was written and produced by Elliott and Timbaland for her acclaimed third studio album, Miss E... So Addictive (2001). What makes Get Ur Freak On so different and timeless is that the song utilises Bhangra elements. This is a music and dance form from the region of Punjab, India. Get Ur Freak On is this mix of Hip-Hop and Bhangra. Something that was not common at the time, it was a bit of  revolution. Last year, the BBC published an article that looked inside the making of a game-changing song. It definitely changed the career of Missy "Misdemeanour" Elliott:

“Switching things up had definitely been Elliott's intention. By then in her late 20s, she was already a savvy businesswoman, had founded her own offshoot (The Goldmind) from major label Elektra, and was conscious of the industry pressure surrounding her next move. There was also a sense that while Timbaland's distinctive productions were proving widely influential, they weren't yet getting their mainstream due.

In a 2001 Vibe feature (written by Marc Weingarten), Elliott explained that: "I wanted to do what everybody else is scared to do." She and Timbaland had actually created Get Ur Freak On as an impromptu late addition for what would be her third album Miss E… So Addictive; first, though, she intended to let the track "marinate in the clubs for a while, get a street buzz going". This buzz would blossom into a crossover storm; Get Ur Freak On channelled serious hip-hop caché, worldly flavours, and an instant, all-encompassing pop appeal, as Elliott insisted: "It could be about dancing, the bedroom, whatever. You're cleaning your house? Get your freak on!"

It's also impossible to separate the vivid music from its eye-popping visuals. Elliott had already established a reputation for outlandish videos directed by Hype Williams; the '90s had proved a creatively febrile, increasingly big-budget period for US hip-hop and R&B, but Elliott presented alternative, fuller-figured and fearlessly surreal statements. For Get Ur Freak On, she turned to a new collaborator, video director Dave Meyers, and together they conjured a murky-glamorous world that projected the avant-garde into the prime-time. Meyers told Fortune in 2019 about his initial connection with Elliott: "She reached out to take me to dinner and then took me to see Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. We just vibed about perspectives of the world and weird stuff and developed a trust… There are no limits with Missy. The crazier, the better. She tends to respond to interesting movement."

Reaching the mainstream

Get Ur Freak On's urgent dance moves were created by another of Elliott's regular collaborators, visionary choreographer Nadine "Hi-Hat" Ruffin. Elliott's dancers throw shapes in some kind of industrial underworld – crouched on concrete blocks, hanging upside down like bats. The video also spotlights an array of Elliott's established and emerging peers: Timbaland, Busta Rhymes, Eve, LL Cool J, Jah Rule, Nicole Wray. Elliott herself is both queenly and cartoonish: craning her head from her body; swinging from a chandelier; and in one memorably trippy, Matrix-like effect, spitting long-distance into a male dancer's mouth.

The track received international airplay, scoring Platinum success on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, Elliott was emerging as a cover star across publications that had rarely afforded such attention to hip-hop – although she had already been a mainstay in acclaimed street culture and music magazine Touch. "Get Ur Freak On was the song that really took Missy to the mainstream, although R&B fans already knew her from her earlier band Sista, and had the two albums prior to this," says Lawrence Lartey, former contributing editor of Touch, now creative director at Ravensbourne University. "I liked the track, though I did think that everyone was playing catch-up; they'd finally seen how good she is. And it immediately sounded and looked different in the national charts; this wasn't Oasis or S Club 7! It was the age of bling, but also a time where the mainstream was opening up to the offbeat in other acts like Outkast. It was also a precursor to the UK really projecting its own identity in hip-hop and R&B”.

Music Radar published a detailed feature about Get Ur Freak On. It is a song that almost didn’t happen. However, twenty-four years after it was released, it is has gone down as this groundbreaking work of genius. The Bhangra-sampling song is an enduring moment in music history. Small wonder that it was crowned the best song of this century by Rolling Stone. You can feel its influence in music that followed.

“Though instruments like these may not be unfamiliar to today’s listeners, when Timbaland dropped these into a mainstream, major-label hit, it was a groundbreaking decision, opening up the charts to a kaleidoscope of international sounds. “It felt like a watershed moment where, sonically, you feel like the world would never be the same again," DJ and broadcaster Nihal Arthanayake told the BBC last year.

"Certain sections of the press had leaned towards an esoteric orientalism when it came to Asian music," Arthanayake continues. "Then this guy [Timbaland] was African-American, and one of the biggest producers in the world, along with one of the most exciting rappers on the planet, and they incorporated the beats in a way that was commercially viable, not just exotic. It kind of gave Asian producers, and people who used Asian beats, a validation.”

Though the tumbi and tabla hail from Northern India, that’s not where Timbaland discovered Get Ur Freak On’s boundary-pushing sounds. According to WhoSampled, these were lifted from a slightly more pedestrian source: Spices of India, a sample pack from British company Zero-G.

Released in 1995, the library features a “selection of Bhangra rhythms, instruments and vocals”, among them Classic Tumbi Loop 03 and Tomi Tablas 07, two samples that Timbo chopped up, rearranged and pitch-shifted in Get Ur Freak On’s pioneering production.

It wasn’t only Get Ur Freak On’s instrumentation that pushed the envelope, but its melody, too. The song makes use of the Phrygian scale, a musical mode with roots in Ancient Greek music. Though it’s central to Middle Eastern, Indian classical and even flamenco music, the Phrygian mode doesn’t make frequent appearances in Western pop. (When it does, its colourful intervals are often employed to convey a vague sense of darkness or mystery.)

While Get Ur Freak On ultimately became by far the most popular cut from Miss E… So Addictive, the song very nearly didn’t happen. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Elliott revealed that the track arrived at the very end of the recording sessions for the project, when Timbaland believed they already had everything they needed. “I had completed my album, but I kept saying I didn’t feel like it was all the way complete. I felt like a song was missing,” Elliott recalled. “But Timbaland, he kept saying: ‘no, your album is dope. We’re done!’”

Visibly tired and ready to head home at the tail end of a studio session, Timbaland started “bamming” the keyboard, just “hitting anything”, Elliott says. “He was ready to go, and he felt like the album was done, but he hit something and I was like: ‘that’s it, right there.’ He was like, ‘what? What you talking ‘bout?’ I was like, ‘whatever that sound is that you just played’. He just went down the keyboard again and then he finally hit it. I was like: ‘that! That right there!”

Timbaland continued to protest, Elliott says, but eventually she persuaded him to pursue the idea. “He was like: ‘I don’t know why you’re saying this, because your album is done. Your album is hot.’ But I was like, ‘no, let’s work on that’,” she says.

Timbaland eventually relented, looping the tumbi melody with a basic kick pattern for Elliott to record some scratch vocals over. “He just put a kick and the sound in there, and I just went in the booth and did the record," she recalls. "Then he added all the other stuff later when the song was done.”

While we might have Timbaland to thank for Get Ur Freak On’s forward-looking production, it was Elliott’s ear for a hook – and her dogged determination – that brought the song into being. And whether or not you agree with Rolling Stone that Get Ur Freak On is the best piece of music that the past 25 years has produced, there’s no doubt that it’s a landmark release”.

Written and produced with Timbaland, Get Ur Freak On is the standout from the phenomenal Miss E... So Addictive. A chart success around the world, in the year s since it was released, it has been named as one of the best songs ever. Multiple publications have hailed this song as the work of greatness that it is. I hope that this feature gives you more of an insight into Get Ur Freak On. A genius cut from Missy “Misdemeanour” Elliott. I remember when it came out in 2001. It was like nothing I had heard to that point. In the years since, I have lost none of my affection for the song. Rolling Stone naming it the century’s best song is…

FULLY deserved.

FEATURE: Spotlight: ALT BLK ERA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

ALT BLK ERA

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IF you do get the chance to…

PHOTO CREDIT: Dean Chalkley

see the Nottingham duo of Nyrobi Beckett-Messam and Chaya Beckett-Messam, then I would thoroughly recommend it. They are known as ALT BLK ERA. One of the most exciting acts and sensational live propositions around, you can check live dates here. There are a lot of great interviews from this year. I am going to end with one from Music Week, where the duo won the New Artist prize at Music Week’s Women in Music Awards 2025. They have already been recognised by the MOBOs. Rave Immortal was released earlier in the year. I am surprised that the album did not get a Mercury Prise nomination. It has won a score of positive reviews. I shall end with one of them. I am going to start out with Kerrang! from February. They highlighted how the duo won awards and have taken to big stages before their debut album arrived. Also, they discussed “Nyrobi’s experiences of chronic illness, and why their sisterhood is stronger than ever”:

“Since that initial performance in skyscraping footwear, ALT BLK ERA have been on an upward trajectory. Aged just 17 and 20, they’ve already dominated stages at Glastonbury, Download and beyond, and have just dropped their debut album Rave Immortal, which hit Number One on the UK Rock & Metal chart. Rather than being riddled with adolescent angst, however, Nyrobi reveals the record “is about the journey of my disability and coming to terms with it.”

Opening track Straight To Heart deals with “the feelings of isolation that I felt when I first became disabled and noticed that my friends had moved on and left me”, the singer explains, adding that the song, “is about being abandoned”.

Usually songwriting late into the night (as that’s when Nyrobi is most active), putting pen to paper proved to be quite the cathartic experience with lines like, ‘Save me, they left me in the dark / Wasting away under the stars.’

But putting the song out into the world was an even more powerful experience. Despite the older sister initially being in tears when the single was released, she was soon inundated with messages from from fans offering support or telling her how they resonated with the message.

“The release, emotionally, was a little bit daunting, but the support was overwhelming in a positive way,” Nyrobi reflects. “It was worthwhile.”

Symptoms like exhaustion don’t always show up in a way that can be seen, so it can be hard for people who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome to get the support they need from the people around them.

“I still feel like people don't view me as disabled, because it's not a visible disability, which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes not a good thing,” Nyrobi explains, acknowledging that it can be difficult for those with symptoms like exhaustion to get the support they need. “It's a good thing when they treat me just like a human being and not a different entity, but it's a bad thing when they don't acknowledge that I do have needs and I do need help.”

The second track on the album, Come On Outside, is a brighter follow-up to Straight To Heart – a sister song in both senses – that recounts how Nyrobi’s health improved with Chaya’s support. She says the song is, “about my journey to health and how Chaya helped me through that. So I say Come On Outside is really about our bond as sisters. [We] have a really good relationship, and I'm not sure how rare that is, but it seems to be pretty rare.”

Bandmates are there to share work and ideas, but for Nyrobi, it’s all the more important that she has someone to rely on.

“I think I've been really fortunate in the way that I have my sister… She does a lot of the admin or the day-to-day work. For instance, yesterday, I was just out of it. I was so terribly ill, I didn't get any work done. I just slept the whole day. And it's really unpredictable like that,” she explains”.

There are a few more interviews I want to bring in. Nyrobi Beckett-Messam and Chaya Beckett-Messam spoke with PRS for Music in the summer about bonding with their fans, playing the illustrious and prestigious SXSW, and the importance of funding. They are an inspiring and stunningly talented duo (they play live with a drummer) who are going to go from strength to strength and will have a massive year next year:

“Behind the scenes, the pair have become masters at transforming harrowing personal memories and moments of self-doubt into shimmering spectacle. Nyrobi lives with chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition that means pushing herself to be physically or even mentally active can lead to a crash. While touring, she and her sister make adjustments — such as carving out time for Nyrobi to catch up on sleep, staying in 24/7 contact with their team and arriving at venues with ample time to spare — to ensure they can give their all on stage.

Rave Immortal is the result of intense introspection and healing; the record highlights how Nyrobi has spent a long time sitting with her pain and worked to feel peace with herself. The band have performed to rapt festival audiences at the likes of Download, Reading & Leeds and Glastonbury, as well as being selected to represent the UK for the British Music Embassy at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

With a stacked season of summer festivals on the horizon — and an illustrated book project in the pipeline — M caught up with Nyrobi and Chaya for the latest edition of our On The Road series to discuss, in their own words, what it takes to thrive as a live act in 2025.

Nyrobi: ‘At the start of our tour, it was a little overwhelming having a room full of fans singing our words back to us night after night. It's such an odd feeling, especially when you consider how much some of the songs mean to those people in the crowd. The music doesn’t just belong to me and Chaya any more. On the album, we speak about everything from my struggles with my hidden disability to changing friendships, and wanting to go crazy in a rave but not being able to. It just feels surreal seeing how these stories have resonated.

‘The one moment that really stuck out for me, however, was when I spoke with someone who was in a wheelchair, and they just broke down. I was trying not to cry while she was talking about what the album meant to her. Even though it was emotional, I felt really at peace knowing that our music was getting to those that need to hear it. Knowing that our album has potentially changed other people's lives — as well as ours — is amazing.

‘In a way, we learned that we actually need to carve out more time after shows to chat with fans. Connecting with the people who make up the ALT BLK ERA community has become such a big thing for us. Most people can do this while touring day after day, playing back-to-back shows, but there is no chance I would be able to tour if we didn't have days off in between.

‘The funding that we got from PRS Foundation allowed us to do two days of shows and then have a two-day break, so I could actually reset my body and get on with my therapies. It was a privilege to be able to tour knowing that this was an option.’

Chaya: ‘During this downtime, we had to make more [friendship] bracelets because the fans loved them! They sold out by our second show, so we spent hours [in our hotel rooms] making more of them. We even had our band members and their partners getting involved. Otherwise, we spent time on vocal rest and ensuring that Nyrobi got lots of sleep to help combat her chronic fatigue.’

Nyrobi: ‘We mean it when we say that PRS have supported us at every stage in our career, from our first EP [2023’s Freak Show] through to the album, SXSW and even our first ever book. Without the funding we get from PRS Foundation, there would be no tour. They have helped us lay the foundations for our big moments, all of which would probably look a bit shaky without them. If you were to go back in time and we didn't have PRS, ALT BLK ERA would not be the same band we are today.’

Chaya: ‘I remember being shocked when we had the call from PRS Foundation asking us if we wanted to go out to SXSW. That was really big for us, to be able to showcase ALT BLK ERA on an international stage — especially in America! It was amazing to see the fans that had travelled to see us, as well as enjoy shows from artists that we wouldn’t be able to catch otherwise.’

Nyrobi: ‘Crucially, we learned so much at SXSW beyond enjoying the music. We wanted to go there not just to perform, but to really engage in the community and culture of the festival. Part of that meant attending seminars, particularly as we got to Austin ahead of time in order for me to adjust with my chronic fatigue. We learned so much about marketing and different industries that we never thought we could be a part of but aligned perfectly with us”.

I want to head back to January and an interview from Left Lion. They spoke with ALT BLK ERA about Rave Immortal. How this incredible debut has launched into the world and it has been taken to heart by so many. I love how they end the interview by looking ahead to the rest of this year. Could they have imagined they would achieve so much in 2025?! The sky is the limit for them! Make sure they are on your radar:

“I want to talk about Straight To Heart, which is of course a very personal track for you Nyrobi, bravely sharing your battles with chronic illness in recent years. Was writing that song a cathartic process for you?

Nyrobi: I think when we were writing the song, it felt really healing, just to acknowledge this is how I felt and that my feelings were valid… because you can start blaming yourself for things. And we’re not ‘outside people’, so not many people knew in the outside world - it was just me, my sister and my mum in the build-up to the release.

I think on release day, it really hit me that the song was out. It was one thing to put it on Spotify and work on it within the comfort of my own home, but when it released, my heart kind of dropped. I was like, “Oh my gosh, it’s actually out and people are actually going to see a side of me that I’ve been hiding for so many years.”

But I think now it's healing knowing that other people can connect with the song as well. Even now, fans will come up and speak to me like, “Oh I heard about your chronic illnesses, I also suffer with them.” So, I was shocked and in bits on release day, but I am glad it’s out now looking back.

I feel you’re one of the bands right at the forefront of this wave of great Nottingham artists getting national exposure at the moment. What would you say it is about the Nottingham music scene that has made it such a successful breeding ground for musicians in recent years?

Nyrobi: I guess I would say it’s the genuine love and support. I never grew up anywhere else so I can’t speak for other places, but there’s just something about Nottingham that feels genuine. Like people speaking to you after the show – it’s just so real.

Chaya: There’s a lot of festivals like Dot to Dot, Hockley Hustle, where you can catch new artists too

Nyrobi: Yeah, I think it’s that exposure as well. Nottingham allows new artists to start out, grow and be seen regularly. You know with all the venues that we have here at different levels, you can always find someone, which I think is really important. I also just think the people here are nice!
Chaya: They genuinely are!

So you have the album release and the launch show at Saltbox – but what else is on the horizon for 2025?

Chaya: Well, we have a record store signing / acoustic set-up that we’re going to be doing across the UK. Then around April time we have a UK tour that I’m very excited about, which will be our first UK tour!

Nyrobi: A lot of collaborations coming up for 2025 – a lot of big ones as well, like huge! So loads more new music in 2025 – we’re not stopping. We’re not disappearing for three years, we’ll still be here dropping new music throughout 2025, mixed in with festivals. Then we’ll probably be getting ready for album two… but that’s another story!”.

Game-changing women who are making a real impact in the music industry, ALT BLK ERA were richly deserving of the New Artist award. Music Week spoke with them to get their reaction and look back at their path so far. With some new music perhaps arriving very soon, it is an exciting time. Make sure that you get involved with this amazing duo. It does seem a bit baffling that there was no Mercury nod. Maybe their album was not submitted. Anyway, I am sure they will be scooping plenty of awards very soon. Nyrobi Beckett-Messam and Chaya Beckett-Messam are phenomenal musicians and role models:

“Congratulations! How does it feel to win?

Nyrobi Beckett-Messam: “Really, really honoured. We know that Music Week and the Women In Music Awards are so respected in the industry, so it feels like a win, not just for us, but for everyone else who's been supporting us on this journey. So it's massive.”

It's tough out there for new artists at the moment – what has your experience been like in terms of trying to break through and make your way?

NBM: “It's been really mixed. We've always been the type of people who march to the beat of our own drum. Coming into the industry, we didn’t know if we would be allowed to continue to do that.”

You won Best Alternative Act at the MOBOs back in February. It’s only the second year that category has existed. How important was it to you to be recognised and that the music you make is represented at events such as the MOBOs? What do you think it says to the industry?

NBM: “First of all, it means so much to already be winning awards [at events] as prestigious as the MOBOs and Music Week's Women In Music. That kind of recognition, so early on in our careers and while we’re still quite young, is not lost on us at all. We really respect that our peers, fans and industry professionals are seeing us and rooting for us, and it makes us even more determined to work hard and show that people were right to back us.

PHOTO CREDIT: Panni Renner

“With respect to alternative and rock music, people often forget that these genres have deep Black roots. Recognition from the MOBOs is powerful because it pushes back against that historical erasure, it reclaims the space, and it broadens what Black music representation can look like. It’s the same way artists like Beyoncé are reminding the world that Black people were always part of country music and culture. It feels like we’re in the middle of historical shifts, and the MOBOs are leading the way in the UK. To be a small part of that through our win in the Alternative category feels incredible!

“For the industry, we think it’s such an exciting moment. Because of the MOBOs’ Alternative category, we’re going to see more artists feeling confident about experimenting with genres that sit outside of the usual musical pathways. So, industry-wise, it’s a time for celebration and it’s a call to action for more work to be done.”

WIM is all about celebration – who are the women in music you'd most like to celebrate and why?

CBM: “I would say our mum. She’s been with us for our whole lives and she was the one who pushed us towards the music industry. It was 2020, we were writing loads of songs and doing covers on YouTube. And then our mother was like, ‘Why don’t you actually try and release a song?’”

NBM: “First she said, ‘Learn about the industry.’ And then it snowballed into this huge career! I’d also say Kanya King, CEO of the MOBOS, is a massive, massive inspiration for everything that she’s done over the years. Also, Alyx Holcombe – we got our first ever Radio 1 play from her and our first year of music was massive.”

What are Alt Blk Era’s biggest ambitions?

CBM: “I would love to collaborate with all my favourite artists. That would be a bucket-list thing. I listen to such a wide range of artists – Stromae, Billie Eilish, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga – I don’t know what that would sound like! But it would mean so much to have the opportunity.”

NBM: “Legacy is a big one. Just being able to say, at the end of our career, we’ve changed lives. I want small artists to listen to us and think, ‘Oh, they’re cool. I didn’t realise you could mix all these genres, I didn’t realise you could do this and this.’ We want to bring a new perspective to the industry”.

I am going to end with a review for Rave Immortal. I am going to come back to Kerrang!. If some critics felt Rave Immortal was more powerful Bubblegum Pop than something more Rave-indebted and fierce, there is no denying the potency and sense of power from the album. A declaration that ALT BLK ERA are here and are going to make a big splash! Maybe album number two is already being worked on. They will grow in strength and ability the more music they put out. As it stands, they are very much set for greatness and longevity:

“ALT BLK ERA exploded onto the scene as a fascinating prospect – two sisters with yin and yang personalities taking a hammer to genre boundaries and flying the flag for misfits and weird kids everywhere. Last summer, however, Nyrobi and Chaya Beckett-Messam got a little more personal. Onstage at 2000trees, Nyrobi revealed she’s been living with a chronic illness since the middle of the pandemic, which has left her bed-bound, fatigued and in pain. This is the nexus of the Nottingham duo’s debut album, but beyond this showing of vulnerability, the sisters prove that they’re still determined to live loudly.

At first, things look a little darker. Opener Straight To Heart vibrates with a subdued pulse as the sisters recount how Nyrobi’s friends 'Left me in the dark / Wasting away under the stars,' while she was most ill, before the surging alt.rock of Come Out Outside beautifully captures the support Chaya offered her.

From there, the clouds dissolve into a lurid rainbow of sound, but their willingness to delve into sometimes untouched topics remains, and it’s one of their biggest strengths. The fizzing My Drummer’s Girlfriend delves into complicated friendship dynamics, while Hunt You Down’s eerie synth-pop (almost reminiscent of Fame-era Lady Gaga) lends a thrumming edge to an exploration of unhealthy obsession.

ALT BLK ERA’s sound has often remained quite fluid, but as the title of Rave Immortal suggests, they’re committing to the unbridled energy of the illicit warehouse party here. The jittering sounds of drum ‘n’ bass power much of the record and at its best – the fierce Crashing Parties and tongue-in-cheek Upstairs Neighbours – listening while sitting still does not feel like an option. Even with a couple of slightly samey tracks in the second half, the spooky Catch Me If You Can opens a portal to Halloween for three minutes in a clever late album twist.

The exciting part is that this is just the first chapter. They’ve got a foundation for greatness, not to mention a knack for sticky hooks and a giddy playfulness to the way they seem to make whatever the hell they want. It won’t be long before they find a way to outdo themselves”.

I shall end it here. Undoubtably one of the most important new (or emerging) acts around, the fact that ALT BLK ERA have won awards and plaudits so early on is only the start of things! They will continue to grow and dominate. Their music, whilst perhaps not at their absolute peak, is phenomenal and instantly engrossing! I am excited to see where they go and how far they go. Nottingham’s Nyrobi Beckett-Messam and Chaya Beckett-Messam truly deserve…

THE world.

____________

Follow ALT BLK ERA

PHOTO CREDIT: Esmé Bones for Kerrang!

Official:

https://www.altblkera.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/altblkera

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4FNR2qdCVKGAep4alfgt25?si=85TTn7k1Sf-WlBofuHArHQ

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Isabel Garvey

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

IN THIS PHOTO: Isabel Garvey, Chief Operating Officer at Warner Music UK (a role which she steps down from at the end of this year), was the winner of Outstanding Contribution at the Women In Music Awards 2025 on 10th October, 2025 at JW Marriott Grosvenor House London/PHOTO CREDIT: Music Week

Isabel Garvey

__________

ONE of the most important events…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sarah Louise Bennett

in the music calendar occurred on 10th October. It took place at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House London. I think that more focus needs to be put on the event. Not only because women in music are not celebrated as much as they should be. We do not spend enough time spotlighting and commending the incredible work that women do throughout the industry. At a time when there is still huge imbalance and misogyny. Technical roles and studio jobs. Still dominated by men. Not as many opportunities for girls and women as there should be. In another feature, I will reflect on a scheme FKA twigs is launching. Someone who recognises that women are underrepresented, Saffron is designed to challenge that. You can read more here. The New Artist award winners are Alt Blk Era. I am going to shine a light on them in another feature. For this Modern-Day Queens, rather than highlight an artist, I instead want to talk about Isabel Garvey. It has been announced that she is stepping down from her role as Chief Operating Officer at Warner Music UK. Prior to her work with Warner, Garvey was the managing director of Universal Music's Abbey Road Studios. There is no denying the huge contribution that she has made to music. I am going to come to the Music Week interview with Isabel Garvey. I will come to a couple of other interviews before that. I want to start out with an interview from Music Ally. Isabel Garvey discussed what success means now for artists. Whereas a chart-topping album was a real peak, now things are different. It is more complex and multifaceted. I am really interested in what Garvey says and I wanted to bring in the first parts of the interview:

“Isabel Garvey has been COO of Warner Music UK since May 2023, having previously been MD of Abbey Road Studios (owned by Universal Music Group). Going from where records are crafted to where hits and success have to be minted marks a creative shift, a business shift and a cultural shift.

What shape that success takes, however, depends on your expectations, your scale of investment and what angle you are looking at it all from.

“Success is very different in the world we live in today – or the metrics of success are different,” says Garvey. “An artist’s definition of what success looks like can vary as well.”

Under the ownership of Edgar Bronfman Jr (from 2004 to early 2012), the focus at Warner Music was around multiple-rights deals (or, ideally, 360-degree deals), in a large part a spread bet response to cratering CD sales. That era, says Garvey, is firmly in the past for Warner, outside of a handful of smaller markets. “There is no prerequisite that you must sign up to these things,” she says of current artist contracts. The focus is on recorded music revenues, although that can include partnering on D2C.

“The reality is we probably pick up artists at a lot of different phases,” says Garvey of how acts are signed at Warner. “I can think of a couple of signings we did this year that are super early stage and there are no followers of social media. They are very music-driven signings. Then there are artists where you can see the bubblings of social media picking up on a song or on the artists themselves. And then there’s the signing frenzy around these artists.”

She says that acts must be backed in the long term as the build is longer and harder. Charli XCX, with Brat, is a solid example of that, taking six albums before hitting the mainstream (or what we understand as the mainstream now).

“We’re investing [in acts] at the same rate, if not more, because the media environment and the media landscape is so changed,” she says, arguing the acts can run at a loss for longer than in more impatient times in the past – all in the hope or belief that success is coming. “I think we tolerate the red for a long time.”

She points to Fred Again.. as an act that might not have one of the key success metrics of the past (major chart hits). “But he is streaming incredibly well, building a hugely engaged listener base and selling out stadiums around the world.”

She adds, “We’re investing for the longer term, so we will stick with things. Charli is on album six now. We’re really sticking with artists. It’s not: ‘That didn’t work – goodbye.’ The whole point of A&R is to pivot. We saw some shoots of success here, so let’s pivot towards that and let’s grow that audience”.

Back in May, Music Business Worldwide spoke with Isabel Garvey and asked her to name the songs that define her life. Those that are most important. The Music Week interview I will come to explains why Garvey is so important and influential. Why she richly deserved the Outstanding Contribution award at the Women in Music Awards 2025:

“1) Dave Brubek, Take 5 (1959)

I’m one of four girls, and when I was growing up my dad used to take himself off on a Sunday to listen to jazz on vinyl, it was quite religious for him. Jazz was very much part of the soundtrack to my very earliest days, hearing trumpets and piano coming out of his room while he escaped for a couple of hours!

It brought a kind of calm to the house – which wasn’t always there thanks to there being four girls. I associate it with the smell of print from the Sunday papers, and it’s just a very warm memory for me.

“I still love jazz to this day, to the extent that I’m currently trying desperately to force my eight-year-old to learn the trumpet.”

It also clearly seeped in, because I still love jazz to this day, to the extent that I’m currently trying desperately to force my eight-year-old to learn the trumpet.

There was a lot of music in the house generally. My mum actually grew up in a very classical music environment. And, like I say, my dad was really into his jazz. But then whenever we’d go on car journeys we’d force him to put musical soundtracks on while all four of us sang our heads off.

I think that’s why he needed his Sundays.

3) Corona, Rhythm of the Night (1993)

This takes me back to night clubs, growing up in Dublin and being with all my childhood friends.

This was our song, it was the one where you put your bag down and you went onto the dance floor.

I struggled to pick just one track from that era of dance music, because there was so much of it that we loved.

There was Haddaway, there was Daft Punk, there was Darude… they’re all tracks that take me back to a real time and place and bring me such a lot of joy, still to this day.

“I was at a birthday party recently, this came on and I couldn’t have been happier! It’s amazing the impact one track can have.”

In fact, I was at a birthday party recently and this came on and I couldn’t have been happier! It’s amazing the impact one track can have.

It was a great time to be going out in Dublin, whether to bars that hosted live gigs with DJs coming on after. or the clubs on Leeson Street.

7) The Beatles, Come Together (1969)

Obviously I had to have at least one track with an Abbey Road connection, and this one just seemed perfect.

Running Abbey Road for eight years has been one of the absolute privileges of my life. It’s just a phenomenal place, steeped in history. You still get the goosebumps going up the steps.

Of course its story is so interwoven with the Beatles, and this particular song is from Abbey Road, which is the album that named the studio. Until then, it had always been known as EMI Studios.

The connection between the two is magical, and when you bring people to the studio, the first thing they want to see is Studio Two, the Lady Madonna piano, etc.

These are the fables that the studio is built on, but they’re not fables; they are part of the reality of that building, they’re the result of how the Fab Four – along with Sir George Martin – worked with that studio.

We did a lot of playbacks of Beatles songs, and this is one that we used quite a lot, so it’s ingrained in me as a track that represents my time there.

My time at Abbey Road was full of very surreal moments: I’m in Abbey Road, which is mad enough, I’m running Abbey Road, which is crazy – and now I’m just casually saying hello to Paul McCartney in the corridor!

8) Dua Lipa, Levitating (2020)

I actually feel like I owe a lot to Dua Lipa, for this song and this album. It came out in lockdown when we were all in the depths of depression, a lot of us struggling quite a bit with this unprecedented situation, and then there’s this irresistibly joyful and uplifting album reminding us that we will be back out there at some time in the future.

One thing I did to preserve my sanity in lockdown was go for a run along the Thames, and I would make sure I planted this song halfway through my playlists to lift me and keep me going.

It was the album we all needed. It was kind of a throw back to the eighties, and to the days of disco, so it was both familiar and new – all made even better by a phenomenal voice. It was my salvation”.

I will end with the main interview. When Music Week spoke with its main award winner recently. Someone who has made a huge impact on he music industry, it is fascinating reading her words. What she has accomplished. Also, the question regarding what comes next, as she is leaving her role as Chief Operating Officer at Warner Music UK in December:

“Isabel Garvey has always been someone who is willing to embrace change, who will invest in new technologies, adjust business structures or look for patterns in consumer behaviour. And, days before being presented with the Music Week Women In Music Award for Outstanding Contribution, she turned towards another huge change and announced she would be stepping down from her role as chief operating officer at Warner Music UK in December. 

Garvey informed colleagues that her decision was made following the reorganisation at the major last month when Tony Harlow stepped down as CEO. Under the new framework, Atlantic and Warner Records presidents report to US management, while Warner Music UK’s other teams will be overseen directly by Simon Robson, president, EMEA, Recorded Music. 

“The structure of our UK business has changed quite fundamentally,” Garvey tells Music Week. “I've worked with leadership here to figure out if there's a path for me going forward. But, I think, the structure has changed so much that there isn't much of a COO role anymore. So it felt incredibly logical to step down and think about the next thing. I do wish everyone at Warner, and the new structure, well. I am sure it will be a raving success.”

Garvey’s time at Warner has been full of highs. Since joining in 2023, she has overseen the commercial, legal, business affairs and artist relations teams, as well as Rhino Records UK and The Firepit Studios. This has included restructuring the commercial team and establishing a data and insight team.

“There was always a brilliant data team here at Warner, so it was just about creating easy reference tools,” she says. “It’s almost like a new language of how we communicate with the artists and with the labels, to make sure that the data is actually changing behaviour and really accelerating artists profiles… We have a lot of data scientists who've done really smart work around the correlation between social media discovery and streaming. It has been a really exciting area to be in, it felt very cutting edge.”

Prior to her work as COO of Warner, Garvey was the managing director of Universal Music’s Abbey Road Studios, where, amongst many other things, she launched the legendary venue’s digital production services and Europe's first incubator for music tech innovation. She has also held various other senior roles, including SVP of commercial channels and consumer marketing at Warner Music International and VP of digital at EMI.

So, what’s next?

“I'm very excited about the future,” she says. “I think there's plenty I can still contribute and do and I'd like to be somewhere where I can be the mastermind of that.”

And so as Garvey ponders her next outstanding contribution, we reflect on her story so far...

Firstly, what are your initial reflections on winning the Outstanding Contribution honour?

“It was a huge honour to be in that room and amongst so many incredibly talented women, and to be singled out feels really special. It's brilliant. I love this industry, so to be honoured by the industry is a real, real joy.”

With this award and your impending departure from Warner, is this a time for reflection on your years in the industry?

“Yes, the beauty of this award is it really forces you to reflect on the journey. I mean, my entry into the company was particularly interesting. One of the first things I did was stand in front of a government inquiry on misogyny. That's very apt to bring up for this interview, but that was a baptism of fire. But we liaised with the government and the BPI and did a lot of work on that. We’ve worked with the government on AI challenges and looked at what we need to do to lean into a new government and make sure this industry was set up for growth. I've also done a lot of work with a team here and internally on how we kind of become a lot more strategic, a lot more data-led in terms of our decision making.”

With the likes of Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, PinkPantheress, Rachel Chinouriri and more, Warner acts have been at the heart of a period of female acts dominating the charts and the live circuit. Why do you think these acts are doing so well at this time?

“Personally, I think it's long overdue. Previously we were all terribly concerned that the representation in the charts still wasn’t female enough. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, where we have almost a dominance of female artists who are real lyricists and storytellers. It’s not throwaway pop, it’s relatable and thoughtful artistry.”

In terms of female talent on the executive side, are you seeing enough coming through? Is this something that you've been involved in nurturing?

“Yes, yes, yes.  I personally grew up in an industry where I never had female leadership above me and anyone to model myself against. I've always taken my role very seriously in terms of being hopefully inspirational and definitely a mentor to people coming through. But Tony [Harlow] and I have very purposefully thought about diversity, particularly gender diversity, in the UK team. We have an incredible generation of women that are coming through in numbers. It's not just identifying talent, it is also having the right parental leave in place and nurturing a culture that supports women through all their various life stages. I feel like there's excellent groundwork in place and a generation that's ready to push through.”

How would you describe your own journey through the music business?

“I've been in this industry now for over 20 years, and I have just loved it. I joined it when Napster was stealing the world's music. The parallels with today are quite ironic, it’s strange that we're on the next iteration of that [technological shift with AI]. I've always been at the intersection of creativity and commerce, and the changes that are forcing the business to innovate.”

You started out at EMI, how do you reflect on that time now?

“I joined as the chief of staff at EMI Music. I was working for Alan Levy and David Munns. It was a great introduction, because they were chairman and vice chairman of the recorded music side and they taught me the industry top to bottom. So I got the best schooling you could get. And then I moved into business development. That was the era of ringtones and going over to the West Coast of the US to do ringtone deals with Microsoft. It was a really exciting time, it was that cusp of change again, because at that point only 2% of revenue was digital. Just imagine how far we’ve come.”

And from there you took a job at Warner Music International…

“I ran the European digital business there. That was an era where we talked about 360 degree deals a lot, so it was about expanded rights. But rather than grabbing rights from artists, it was about building capabilities, buying merch companies and live companies, many of whom are still in the portfolio today throughout Europe. I’ve always been very digital and technology leaning in what I’ve been doing. But then I got the call to go and run Abbey Road…”

How exactly did that come about?

“Universal had just acquired EMI and with it Abbey Road. They had really exciting entrepreneurial plans about what you could do with a brand and a place as magical as Abbey Road. I spent seven years there reimagining this place that’s an incredible cultural icon, but working on how to take it outside just being a physical studio in north west London. So we built tech incubators and schools and retail stores, and it became a business with multiple strands, but always with creativity and music production at its core.”

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What do you think the future of the industry looks like?

“I wish I had that crystal ball. It feels daunting, but I have no doubt that if the government puts the right legislation in place, if we're smart about how we licence and how we represent artists in this new AI world, then I think there's plenty of opportunity. I think the challenge for all of us is we can see how powerful the technology is, but we don't see what the consumer proposition is just yet. There are so many articles out there at the moment about how disruptive AI can be. But in terms of actual industry uptake, how we use it day-to-day, or how we use it facing our audiences… we’re not there yet. It's kind of like Skype. We all know Skype and video calling now, but it took 10 years for that technology to make sense. So I think it's going to be a journey. Change has just been such a constant in our industry, I have no doubt that we will be able to hold hands with all of the various stakeholders and actually find something that kind of comes through.”

And, speaking personally, what would you like to do next?

“I don’t know… I am definitely the person who is the commercial brain, and I love this beautifully creative business that we work in. I love the clash. It can be really frustrating, but it’s also really rewarding, that clash of creativity and commerce. I'd love to stay in that intersection and find a growth business, a business that has a real energy about doing something different. We're about to hit another phase of serious disruption, so being able to plot something disruptive, disrupting with the disruptors, feels really compelling. It can feel quite daunting, reading the headlines and trying to get our heads around AI in the first instance. How do we market effectively? How can we be really good champions of artists in this world and this landscape? But it brings huge opportunities and new ways of working. Who knows where the next opportunity is?”.

A hugely important figure in the music industry, I wanted to shine a light on the award-winning Isabel Garvey. It will be exciting to see what her next step is and what opportunities lie ahead. The Women in Music Awards 2025 celebrated everyone from Chantal Epp, Semera Khan and Amy Wheatley. I will be spending time with some of these amazing women for future features. However, I did want to spend some time with Isabel Garvey. A modern-day queen and incredible influence and force for good in music, small wonder that she received such a high accolade from Music Week. The amazing and inspiring Isabel Garvey is such…

AN incredible human.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Shivani Day

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Shivani Day

__________

I will start out…

with a couple of interviews from last year before getting to one from this year. They relate to Shivani Day. The Leicester-born, London-based artist released her debut E.P., That Which Is Not, last year. It is a remarkable E.P. and I would urge anyone who has not heard it to check it out. Day has put out a couple of brilliant singles this year. Too Well came out in April. I am new to her music and have only recently discovered her. However, I feel next year will be one where we will see Shivani Day blow up. Loads more interviews and perhaps another E.P. Her music fuses Electronic, Trip-Hop, and alternative R&B music. It is a sonic cocktail that takes from her South Asian heritage. I am going to start out with Wonderland and their interview from last July. Shivani Day talked about the creation of her debut E.P. and what drew her to music:

“Talk us through your musical origins? 

My musical origins start from my father, who played so much different music for me and my sister growing up. One of my earliest memories of music was him pausing songs and asking if we knew what the lyrics meant and then he would proceed to tell us the meaning and often the songs would have social and political meanings. This was quite a big part of my knowledge of music being a tool to get a message across and be used as a way to inform. Music has always been a safe space for me and meant a lot to me and that continued to the point of expression. In 2019 I taught myself how to DJ and was building on that for a few years, then in 2021 I decided to start making my own music and see what I could do. Since then it’s been my life haha.

Who and what inspired you to pursue artistry?

I mean to be honest I’ve always wanted to be this I just never really knew how I would get there and didn’t think someone like me would be able to. I’m just an Indian girl from Leicester, it was not the norm to see someone like me doing this or even attempting it. I think as I started working in the industry as a DJ and then started making more connections I gained a bit of inspiration and thought well if it doesn’t work at least I can say I tried. My good friend Erin said to me before I took the plunge that I could sing and I said I know shyly and it was her reassurance that pushed me to take the plunge back in 2021.

How does your cultural background influence your musical and personal outlook? 

Growing up I would watch and listen to Bollywood movies and South Asian sounds all the time, I used to dance Kathak and Bollywood so it was a big part of my childhood. In terms of my own music I pull from it when it feels right, I normally like to weave certain aspects into all of my music sometimes more overtly and sometimes covertly. It has to feel right for me I don’t force it and definitely don’t do it for the sake of it, my ear is naturally drawn to those sounds due to my upbringing and so it weaves itself in naturally. Also the complexity of the music is something that I really emulate in my own music. I took some open classes for Hindustani and Carnatic vocal last year and it’s something I want to explore deeper.

Congratulations on your new EP! Talk us through the creative process?

Thank you! I’ve essentially been working the EP since I began my musical journey in 2021. A few of the first songs I ever wrote are on it (“Rhetoric”, “Autoflight” & “Sucks to be There”). This EP is me for the last few years figuring things out, my experiences, my observations etc. Ive worked a lot with my 2 close collaborators Sonny (23Sunz) and Minas, I met them both in 2021 and I was very blessed things just clicked and they were very open to letting me steer and my crazy ideas haha. They are both lovely and have been a big part of me growing into the artist I am. I also worked with Earbuds on a track on the EP which was really cool as I had been a fan of his other work for years. I’ve been blessed to be with FAMM and be able to put things out the way I want and to my creative vision, the creative team and my sister who is also my creative director have really been such a wonderful support system in doing so. Shoutout Erea and Jay working with them on my videos for this EP, honestly I do feel blessed to work with so many great and talented people who enjoy my music.

What’s to come from you, this year and beyond?  

Hopefully some live shows, I’m keen to start performing and bringing my EP to life. More music and delving deeper into my artistry and self. I really love the process of making music and figuring out the next parts of the song so right now Im just in the studio putting the next pieces together. I also look forward to DJing again and doing it in a way that’s Shivani Day”.

Before coming to an interview from very recently, I am going to move to one from NOTION from last year. They asked Shivani Day about her music firsts. Within the interview, we hear about her love for Sade and her father’s musical influences. If you have not listened to Shivani Day, then make sure that you connect with her music. She is this astonishing talent that is going to have a very long and interesting career in music. I am excited to see what next year holds in store:

“No one has a sound quite like Shivani Day. Though a fresh face to the scene, she has nailed her artistry down to a ‘T’, blending a bold electronic palette and a sultry R&B smoothness that takes genre-bending to greater heights. Her sound feels modern, suave and an authentic tribute to her South Asian heritage, finely tuned in every note she configures and lyric that she sings.

Despite her newcomer status, Shivani’s voice resonates with an old-school charm that belies her youth. Raised on a diverse musical diet curated by her father—comprising reggae, Chicago house, Latin and jazz—her eclectic tastes swiftly saw her stand out amongst her peers. While pursing International Relations at university, it was there where her passion for music truly blossomed. Teaching herself the ins-and-outs behind the decks, Shivani swiftly became a name in the game, travelling across the UK for sets that included a coveted Boiler Room gig.

Whilst she has moved on from her DJ roots, Shivani still brings her love for electronica into her sound today. In her debut single, ‘Rhetoric’, released this spring, she seamlessly fuses electronica with R&B, incorporating traditional South Asian motifs into the fabric of the genres, whilst infusing the track with hints of sounds that pay homage to her heritage.

First time you fell in love with music?

I think I fell in love with music from inside the womb. I have a few strong early memories of music which really shaped my ear. From the beginning of my life music was always played and my dad would pause songs and explain their meaning. Learning that music can be a tool to help state an opinion or be a means to inform was something that stuck with me.

First song you were infatuated with?

I have two! One is ‘Jealous Guy’ by John Lennon, or as I used to call it, “dreaming of the past”, which my dad used to sing to me every night to put me to sleep. The other is ‘No Ordinary Love’ by Sade, which I’ve heard countless times; the progression and emotion get me every listen.

First time you felt starstruck?

I haven’t, maybe it’s yet to come.

First thing on your rider?

I have never had a rider but it would be tea for sure, english breakfast or a good chai. I need my daily cup of tea around 2/3pm.

First track you play when handed the aux?

It depends on the environment! I’m a particular person, so I always need context. I can never answer these types of questions”.

I am going to wrap things up with CLASH and a new interview from them. We learn that Shivani Day is working on her new project. I am interested to hear what form that takes. I do love how websites like CLASH are spotlighting Shivani Day and introducing her music to new fans. I do think that she is going to be making waves and inspiring people for years to come. Someone that we really need to embrace and celebrate. Her music is among the most distinct and brilliant you will hear:

“Shivani Day might be relatively new to the scene, but her artistic intention already shines in its ambition and creative possibility. Just coming off the success of her singles ‘Too Well’ and ‘Know When You Call’, her music embodies multitudes of being: a melange of cultural identities, a comment on human behaviours, and a duality of past and present.

Day isn’t precious about this, and she empowers her listeners to believe that they can exist in multitudes too. Leading with independence and introspection, these are two words Day has self-subscribed to in her craft. She is most creative in her solitude, and attributes her uniquely independent vision to her space of quiet.

Even more so, independence and introspection stand all the more powerful as a female artist fronting her culture. When I cited the importance of distinctive identity against this backdrop, she reassured me that this was a conversation she would always want to have. As someone who inherently cares about these conversations, she says it’s hard not to implement these thoughts into her music.

“So tell me about the new project you have coming out next!

I’m so excited to talk about this new project. It builds on this idea of dystopia—which I think is quite real. We’re living in a state of dystopia, whether we want to admit it or not. This project is about fusing the ancient with the futuristic. ‘Ancient-futurism’ is a keyword I’m holding throughout this project, and I think it will be a theme in my work moving forward, at least for now. It’s always been part of me, this blend of old and futuristic. I’ve always loved it, especially in the films and sci-fi I watch. Films like Tron really laid the groundwork for me, fusing those two worlds together. But, of course, I’m coming at it with elements of my Indian heritage and more Eastern influences. Some of that is obvious, some more subtle.

My influences and inspirations also come from people like Sade, Grace Jones, Aaliyah. They had such elegance and a strong sense of self. They never compromised on who they were, and that’s something I channel in my work and visuals. One thing I don’t love about things now is how people need to be spoon-fed everything. Art is so subjective and open to interpretation. I want people to think about it and connect with it in their own way. If you attach your own meaning to it, that’s just as valid. For the next project, I want people to pick up on the main themes I’m putting out there, but also really think critically about it. Everything I do is intentional. Even with the sonic elements, everything is thought out. For example, one of the songs we worked on—I had Minas [my producer] add a conch sound, which is something used in Hindu temples. It’s used to call people in and set the tone for prayer. I’m going to put it in an electronic song, with glitches and everything, to bring those worlds together. It’s intentional, again, fusing the ancient with the modern world.

PHOTO CREDIT: Aanaya Ferreiro + Anaya Dayaram

I think being a creative and a woman of colour sometimes means we’re justifying a lot of our identity to other people, but we shouldn’t have to do that. Your music really breaks that mould, and that’s why I love what you’re doing. It’s not on the nose, but it brings out your culture and your interests and you’re just saying, “this is me”.

I’m so happy you get it. I really hope people do too. It’s true that I’m speaking about those things, but like I said, it’s not overly obvious—it’s deeper, and I think that’s something I’ve always loved in music. I’ve always enjoyed songs with hidden meanings, things you have to read between the lines to understand..

Not everything needs to be obvious, and critical thinking is key. I studied International Relations at university, and that was kind of a mix of politics and human behaviour—how humans interact with each other and the world. That definitely influenced my music and the things I wanted to address. Music can be an escape, but it’s also such a powerful tool for saying something real, and I think it’s important to speak about things that matter.

Do you feel like implementing these influences comes quite naturally to you? Or are you quite intentional with it?

I think it comes quite naturally, to be fair. Of course, there are certain points where I put more thought into it, but for the most part, it just flows. With this project, I’m always thinking about how to weave these deeper themes into the music and give it those double meanings and subtle messages. I can’t wait to reflect that in the visuals as well. I’ve been making mood boards and putting together a big project book, like a scrapbook, with printouts and notes. As I move forward with the real-life aspects, like live performances, I’m really keen on immersing myself in that experience. I want people to feel like when they hear my music or see me perform, they’re not just listening to a song or watching a show—they’re learning something about themselves. I want them to question things, maybe discover something new, or at least think critically. I also want to transport them into this world, this blend of ancient and futuristic, a place where even in the dystopia, there’s still hope.

How do you hope to grow as an artist in the next few years?

I really hope to connect with more people who resonate with my music and understand the world I’m trying to create. Building a community is at the core of what I want to do, and I think that’s been the biggest challenge for me so far. I’ve been craving real connections, you know, with like-minded people, and I feel like I’m slowly getting there—especially this year, as I’ve been more consistent with what I’m putting out.

But beyond that, I want to do more live shows, have genuine, real conversations with my audience. I encourage anyone to reach out. I think it’s so important to bring that sense of community and connection back into the conversation, especially when so much of social media feels so disconnected. I’m also excited to work with more producers, particularly female producers, and just keep exploring new creative spaces”.

I will wrap there. The wonderful Shivani Day has had a pretty good year. I think that we will see even more from her next year. Working on a new project – whether that is an E.P., mixtape or album -, maybe that will come out early next year. She is no doubt going to be playing some big stages. I think that everyone needs to listen to Shivani Day. This phenomenal musical talent is…

SOMEONE to be truly proud of.

_________

Follow Shivani Day

Official:

https://shivaniday.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/shivaniday/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@shivani.day

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5mnwQTXBL1eoE4Fj9v9Awn?si=-YpLz4gXQimj2lGKUNMCXA 

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/shivaniday

FEATURE: Kim Wilde at Sixty-Five: Inside Her Classic, Kids in America

FEATURE:

 

 

Kim Wilde at Sixty-Five

Inside Her Classic, Kids in America

__________

I am sort of…

tying two things together. First, the amazing Kim Wilde turns sixty-five on 18th November. I am going inside Kids in America, as this was Wilde’s debut single. I love how Kim Wilde’s eponymous debut album, where Kids in America features, had all the songs written by Kim Wilde, her younger brother Ricky, and her father, Marty Wilde. In fact, it was mostly father-daughter writing the songs. That is the case for Kids in America. Released as a single on 26th January, 1981, it reached number two in the U.K. One of the most successful and remarkable debut singles in music history, Kids in America sold so well in its first week, many suspected foul play because it was not included in that week's chart. A scam. Kids in America, In its first eight weeks of release, sold more than half a million copies in the U.K. alone. It is easy to see why. The song is so infectious that you cannot help but to listen to it again and again! I am going to get to an interview with Kim Wilde, where she said she felt caged in by Kids in America. Artists who are defined by one song or expected to repeat it, it did take on a life of its own. I am starting out with some features about the classic song and how it was made. In 2018, LOUDER published their feature. Speaking with Kim Wilde about the making of Kids in America, it is a fascinating piece. I have included the earliest parts of the interview. An idea of how the seeds were planted:

“Kim Wilde remembers exactly where she was when she stumbled upon the song that would change her life forever. “I’d just left art college in St Albans, and I was half thinking about going on to do a degree, only because I hadn’t found a band,” she tells TeamRock from her home in Hertfordshire. “Actually, one of my main motivations for going to college was to try and start a band, because I heard that could be a good place to start them.”

Having grown up under the watchful eye of British rock’n’roll singer and MBE-awarded songwriter Marty Wilde, Kim’s career in music was as good as set, as was that of her older brother, Ricky. “Ricky had left school at 16 and had been on the road with my dad Marty when he started writing songs. My dad had some studio time he couldn’t make because he’d double booked himself, so he gave the studio time to Ricky.”

That simple administrative mistake ended up sewing the seeds for what would become one of the biggest-selling songs of the 80s. “Ricky went in demoed some songs he’d been writing and ended up taking them to London to meet with several record companies,” recalls Kim. “One of them happened to be Mickie Most’s RAK Records. Mickie recognised very quickly that he had a great talent on his hands with Ricky’s production, songwriting skills, energy and passion for pop music – they were all the things he recognised in himself.”

With Ricky firmly ensconced in Mickie’s favour, Kim sensed an opportunity. “I asked Ricky to ask Mickie if it was okay if I went and did some backing vocals on these tracks that Ricky had done,” she says. “I was trying to row myself in as a backing singer really, which is where my head was at the time. I had a lot of experience with my father in studios and live and I knew how to work with harmonies; it came as second nature to me. So I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to get myself in as a session singer, and then I’m going to get on the circuit’.”

“So obviously I arrived looking as natty as I could,” says Kim. “I remember I had a pair of black red striped pants and an old dinner jacket of my dad’s. At that point I’d already started dyeing my hair, so I basically turned up looking like Kim Wilde, but not realising that at the time.”

As it turned out, Kim wasn’t the only one sensing an opportunity. “Mickie asked Ricky who I was and mentioned something about getting me in with his producers, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, who were writing all the hits for Suzi Quatro and numerous others at RAK Records at the time,” says Kim. “They were sort of like the Stock Aitken Waterman team, but it was Mickie Most, Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. So Ricky thought, ‘Sod that’. He was determined to impress upon Mickie that he didn’t need other producers, that he was a one-man show.”

So Ricky set about writing the song that would transform both of their careers – but not without inspiring some good, old-fashioned sibling bickering in the process. “He went home that weekend – we were all living in Hertfordshire at this point – and he wrote Kids In America,” recalls Kim. “I remember that happening, because his bedroom was next to mine and he’d got himself a Wasp keyboard –­ the little yellow and black thing – and I was really annoyed by all the noises coming out of his room. It had a sort of pulsing beat which ended up being the intro to Kids In America. That was particularly annoying coming through into my room while I was trying to listen to Joni Mitchell,” she laughs”.

In 2023, Marty Wilde talked to Songwriting Magazine about how he and Kim Wilde wrote Kids in America. It is one of the most enduring hits of the 1980s. One that arrived right near the start of the decade, I still think it is amazing today! It still pops and has this incredible addictiveness. Not so dated and old that it does not fit into modern Pop:

“I’d seen a TV programme which was about a certain batch of young teenagers in America and they frightened the hell out of me, because their attitude was…quite interesting! They came across very single-minded and their attitude was was very hard, which of course, a lot of youngsters can have, at a certain age. But I thought, if the American youth are going to be like that, we’re going to have a third World War in a few months time! So with this song, I said to Rick, ‘That’s the title: Kids In America.’ Then, of course, I had a clear cut picture. I wanted this tough girl who was looking out of a window, looking at the nightlife and people, traffic rushing by and thinking, ‘What the damn hell am I doing sitting here? Let’s get down there, let’s follow the music! Once you are there, you’re in control, in that song. She is in control. It’s not the guy, it’s not the person she’s dancing with, she is in total control. And that’s what I got from watching those American teenagers, I thought that’s what they would be like.

“It came together fairly quickly, really. I mean, Rick is very productive, he’s a very talented writer and he’s full of ideas – we both were – and, of course, Kim’s input was important. We worked in a studio in Hartford with a group called The Enid – I think they’re still in operation. They were a wonderful group of musicians. So whenever we were in their studio, [they would create] whatever sound that we wanted. So if we wanted a French horn, or a bit more synth on this, or a more powerful sound there… They knew they could twiddle the knobs and get it up, so suddenly we had a French horn at the end of Kids In America and we had sirens and a great pulse… They were a very experienced band so we were helped, we were fortunate to have them, so there’s no question that The Enid must take some credit. All the tracks that we did there, which were n Kim’s first album, came very quickly.

“It was one of those those times when I hadn’t really written anything of value and hadn’t been writing at all for some time – I’d probably not written for about five or six years when I started to write this song – so that layoff did me good. Because with lyrics, if you’re talking about love and after you’ve written [so many] songs on love, you start desperately looking around for a fresh angle. So I had the angles, I had fresh ideas and I felt like I was about 20 years old again! And with Rick being a young guy, the whole thing really went through like a dream. As we were finishing one song, he would get a melody line or I would get an idea and we’d be moving on to the next one.

“[With the iconic ‘woa-a-oh’ backing vocal] there was always a gap there but we all thought it should be a vocal ‘answer’ and also something you which you can get a crowd to join in with. It was just a natural chant that came in and it was needed. It comes down to the arrangement, you couldn’t leave [it out] so that tiny little line really fills it up. And when Kim does a concert you can here them all going, ‘Woa-a-ohh!’

“It was like every song that I’ve ever been a part of, when I’m actually writing it, I’m 100 percent up for it. Sometimes you can be very wrong. I’ve been there many times, you can be part of a song that you think, ‘Oh, this is a smash!’ But whatever happens, you go in with that kind of enthusiasm when you’re writing because you need to keep your energy flowing. If you start to doubt yourself, your song will end up on a piece of paper in the corner of a room instead of being out on a record. So yeah, I still get a buzz. Sometimes you write a song you think: why in God’s name wasn’t that a hit? It’s one of those things, there needs to be a gap for a song to be a hit. There has to be a market for it and a bit of luck. [We had] phenomenal luck!”.

There are a couple of other interviews I want to bring in. The Guardian chatted with Kim and Marty Wilde in 2017. A single that was controversial as it sold so fast. Seen as a scam because of its instant success, there is no denying how Kids in America was this titanic thing. It instantly connected with people. I want to include recollections from Kim Wilde:

“My brother Ricky hated school and left at the age of 17. He started writing songs and trying his luck with record companies. He was bowled over by the charismatic Mickie Most at RAK Records and took me along to meet him. I wore my best black-and-red punky trousers and had newly acquired blond hair which, according to one teacher, was the most creative thing I’d done at art school.

Mickie noticed me straight away. He asked Ricky: “Does your sister sing?” Suddenly, Ricky was being asked to write songs for me. He wrote the tune for Kids in America with my dad [the singer Marty Wilde] doing the lyrics. Ricky came up with the melody on a Wasp synth, a little black and yellow thing that made a bloody irritating noise if you were an older sister in the bedroom next door.

We recorded it in a studio in Hertfordshire owned by prog rock band the Enid. It was full of reptiles and other slithery things. The finished song sounded really exciting, but took a year to get released, during which time I worked in a local pub, wondering what was going to happen. When Kids in America finally came out, it sold so fast the people who regulate the charts thought it was a scam. It sold 60,000 copies a day and was only kept off No 1 by Shakin’ Stevens.

As Hertfordshire kids who grew up with Saturday Night Fever, we always imagined American teenagers were having a much better time: going to drive-ins, eating hamburgers, wearing fabulous clothes, snogging really cool kids. The song worked because everyone had the same fantasy.

Four years ago, Ricky and I were coming back on the train after the Magic FM Christmas party. They had all these exotic cocktails, so we’d stayed much longer than we planned. I’d acquired a pair of antlers and, since Rick had his guitar, I said: “Come on, let’s have a sing-song.” A passenger filmed us so there’s this footage of me on YouTube, extremely squiffy, wearing antlers and singing Kids in America. To my amazement, it went viral”.

Kim Wilde has very little but respect and love for her best known song. In 2015, The Guardian spoke with her, and she did say this: “After the 1980s I felt very caged in by “Kids in America”. I put out a more R&B influenced album but the public just didn’t want that girl Kim Wilde doing that. So I got out of the music business. Now I realise what a piece of gold that song is; I feel extremely honoured it’s mine”. I can appreciate she did not want to feel defined by one song. However, it is a gift that keeps on giving. Widely played to this day, she is still out there releasing phenomenal music. Her fifteenth studio album, Closer, was released in January. Writing on the album with Ricky Wilde and his daughter, Scarlett, it is another case of family being at the heart of her music. The same with Kids in America and writing with her father. Even though Marty Wilde is not songwriting anymore, he can look back proudly at one of his greatest moments. As Kim Wilde turns sixty-five on 18th November, I wanted to show proper respect…

FOR Kids in America.