FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Vince Guaraldi Trio - A Charlie Brown Christmas

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Vince Guaraldi Trio - A Charlie Brown Christmas

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MAYBE Jazz…

is this genre where snobbishness still exists. Not necessarily the only genre, it is still synonymous with a certain attitude I feel. A lot of modern Jazz is more experimental than traditional Jazz. It is such a wide-ranging and evolving genre. Some are happy about this, whereas ‘purists’ feel Jazz should sound a particular way. This takes me to an album that did divide Jazz fans upon its release in December 1965, Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. I am marking sixty years of the album. As Christmas is next month, you might hear songs from this album. Since 1965, there has been a split opinion whether the album is pure or actual Jazz of something less authentic and lighter. Inarguably a classic and such a beautiful album, I will come to some features and reviews around this festive classic. You can buy a vinyl copy of Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas here. The first piece I want to bring in is this. In terms of how the Jazz community views A Charlie Brown Christmas, maybe modern fans are more kind and can see its strengths. That has not always been the case:

“By the end of the 1950s Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip “Peanuts” had become a nationwide sensation with syndications in seven national US newspapers including the creator’s hometown Minneapolis Star, The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.

With the everyday trials and tribulations of the “loveable loser” Charlie Brown, his iconic dog Snoopy and their ragtag bunch of friends becoming a global hit, TV producer Lee Mendelson hatched an idea for a documentary. While “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” never happened, it set in process one of the most viewed Christmas TV specials and successful yuletide soundtracks ever made.

For the score Mendelson had turned to pianist Vince Guaraldi. Raised in the North Beach area of San Francisco, Guaraldi was the nephew of Joe and Maurice “Muzzy” Marcellino, two prominent bandleaders in the Bay Area. It was through his mom’s two brothers that Vince got the music bug, starting on the piano when he was just seven. He got his break in 1953 when he appeared on The Cal Tjader Trio’s self titled 1953 album for Fantasy that helped introduce Mambo to mainstream America.

By the mid-1950s while still a member of Cal Tjader’s various ensembles, Guaraldi was leading groups of his own, recording albums for Fantasy like “The Modern Music of San Francisco” with his quartet as well his the debut as ”Vince Guaraldi Trio”. When he was invited to write a number for Antonio Carlos Jobim/Luiz Bonfá 1962 album, “Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus” the wind was firmly in his sails.

After the success of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” Fantasy released the live album “In Person” followed by a series of Bossa Nova influenced albums with Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete. An unexpected turn came when Reverend Charles Gompertz invited Guaraldi to compose a jazz mass for the choir of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, with a subsequent album on Fantasy in September 1965. Both projects would prove pivotal in the story of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.

Two years earlier Lee Mendelson was driving over Golden Gate Bridge when he heard “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” on the KSFO radio show hosted by Al “Jazzbo” Collins. The mood of the piece (awarded a Grammy Award Best Original Jazz Composition in 1963) immediately connected with Mendelson who had his ears tuned to possible music for his forthcoming documentary. “It was melodic and open, and came in like a breeze off the bay. And it struck me that this might be the kind of music I was looking for,” he recalled in the book “A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition.”

Introductions were made by music critic Ralph J. Gleason, and Guaraldi penned the first track of a then untitled number. That track would become “Linus And Lucy” from the album “Jazz Impressions Of A Boy Named Charlie Brown” released in 1964 despite the documentary for which it was composed never being made.

While the project was shelved because of lack of sponsorship, Guaraldi had so impressed Mendelson that he would turn to him again when he and Schulz were commissioned by Coca Cola to create the Peanuts animation “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.

Recorded by the Vince Guaraldi Trio (with drummer Jerry Granelli and bassist Fred Marshall) “A Charlie Brown Christmas” opened with a version of “O Tannenbaum” chosen as the show was based around Charlie’s search for the perfect Christmas tree.

Elsewhere on “Great Pumpkin Waltz” Guaraldi created one of his many lilting 3/4 time numbers, while “My Little Drum” updated “Menino Pequeno da Bateria” from Vince Guaraldi and Bola Sete’s 1964 album “From All Sides”.

Then there was “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing” and “Christmas Time Is Here” where the pianist invited back the children from the Eucharist Chorus of San Francisco, for the two beautiful choral numbers that opened and closed the 30 minute animation that first aired on CBS on December 9, 1965.

Of the best known original composition “Linus And Lucy”, revisited for this Peanuts special, Mendelson captured the magic in the music when he recalled in “Vince Guaraldi at the Piano” a book by Derrick Bang from 2012. “It just blew me away. It was so right, and so perfect, for Charlie Brown and the other characters…There was a sense, even before it was put to animation, that there was something very, very special about that music”.

It is worth highlighting the merits and strengths of Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. I was always aware of the music from it, and the Charles M. Schulz T.V. special. Maybe I saw that in the 1990s. However, I can happily listen to the album in isolation, as the music alone is captivating. This is what Rolling Stone noted a decade ago when they celebrated fifty years of a classic soundtrack:

“The legend goes like this: In 1963, producer Lee Mendelson made a documentary about Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, for which he needed music. One night, Mendelson was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, tuned into a San Francisco jazz station. “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” came on the air, a drifting cut where melodies appear and then disappear, and bouncing elation is matched by tiny moments of despair. The track was pianist Vince Guaraldi’s mini-hit that year, and Mendelson was struck by how it sounded simultaneously adult and childlike. The next day, he called up the San Francisco Chronicle‘s jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason. “Do you have any idea in the world who Vince Guaraldi is?” Mendelson asked. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I’m having lunch with him tomorrow,” Gleason said. Mendelson met Guaraldi a few days later, and they agreed to work together.

The documentary ultimately didn’t sell. But two years later, Coca-Cola, who had seen the doc, called up Mendelson, and asked if he’d ever thought of making a Christmas special. Mendelson said, “Absolutely!” and hung up the phone, then called Mr. Schulz. As Mendelson remembers it: “I said, ‘I think I just sold A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ And Schulz said, ‘What in the world is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s something you’re going to write tomorrow.’ There was a long pause, and he said, ‘Alright. Come on up.'”

The rest, of course, is history. A Charlie Brown Christmas aired 50 years ago, on December 9th, 1965. Over the years, the special has become a perennial classic: the 25-minute story of wistful Charlie Brown and his struggle to find the true meaning of Christmas in the face of holiday-season commercialism. “I almost wish there weren’t a holiday season,” he sighs, at the story’s beginning. “I know nobody likes me. Why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?” The genius of A Charlie Brown Christmas was the way it channeled the looming sadness and anxiety that come with the holidays — and the way its timeless, best-selling soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio tapped into that narrative seamlessly, with muted, melancholic jazz.

Indeed, to create such an unabashedly anti-consumerist story with the backing of both Coca-Cola and CBS was a subtly radical accomplishment in 1965, as it would be now.  The executives at CBS were displeased with the finished product: its slow-moving animation, its religious undertone, its jazz soundtrack. They had no choice but to air it, though — they had already advertised it in TV Guide.

“They wanted something corporate, something rousing,” says drummer Jerry Granelli, the lone surviving member of the Guaraldi combo. “They thought the animation was too slow. They really didn’t like that a little kid was going to come out and say what Christmas was all about, which wasn’t about shopping. And then the jazz music, which was improvised — you know, the melodies only take up maybe 30 seconds.” Yet A Charlie Brown Christmas was an immediate, massive success”.

The penultimate feature I want to bring in is actually a review of the 2006 reissue of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Pitchfork were in praise of a truly timeless soundtrack. I think this is one that you can introduce to someone very young and they would not need context. It is a record that continue to amaze and delight six decades after its release. I have been playing it again and marvelling in its beauty and emotion-provoking magic:

“Playing a smooth brand of West Coast jazz comparable to Dave Brubeck or a very snappy Bill Evans, and having scored a modest pop hit with “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” Guaraldi made an easy choice in 1963 for television producer Lee Mendelson as composer for a documentary on Schulz and Peanuts. The doc was made, but never aired; apparently, the networks didn’t want kids hearing any unnecessary “adult” thoughts about Peanuts. So when plans for A Charlie Brown Christmas came to fruition in 1965, Guaraldi’s music—including the classic “Linus and Lucy” theme—got its chance. The rest is history: The special has been rebroadcast every year since its premiere and, though Guaraldi’s death of a heart attack in 1976 (in between sets at a club no less) prevented him from seeing the full extent of his influence on popular culture, it would be hard to name a more recognizable cartoon theme, give or take a Danny Elfman piece.

But then the reissue of Guaraldi’s soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas has a lot more going for it than “Linus and Lucy.” Melancholy covers of “O Tannenbaum,” “What Child Is This?,” “The Christmas Song,” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”—and yes, it has the Peanuts kids singing “loo-loo-loo, l-loo-loo-loo-loo”—make for the perfect dysfunctional holiday music. Certainly, I will make a point this year to get too drunk, thereby spending the week after Christmas listening to this record and regretting telling off my grandma. However, it doesn’t have to be so bad; Guaraldi’s rolling, snow-mystic touches on “What Child Is This?” or his reconstruction of “Little Drummer Boy” as the minimalist bossa “My Little Drum” are hypnotic, faithful mappings of the rhythm of snow falling, or the reflections of people walking by store windows.

And “Linus and Lucy” is here in all its deceptively simple glory. In fact, the motive bass line and a perfect realization of the melody are patterns that should be taught to all beginning piano students as models of efficient finger technique. The closest parallel to this music is Philip Glass, and really, “Linus and Lucy” is a lot more interesting than anything Glass has done in years. Guaraldi’s “Christmas Is Coming” is similarly kinetic, shining with the kind of understated elation you’d expect for any music soundtracking the misadventures of kids always ready to celebrate while perpetually shown the downside of Christmas. If there’s a muted quality to a lot of this music, it’s smiling nonetheless.

The reissue includes alternate takes of several tracks, and great liner notes detailing the history of the project. Even the cover is cool, with an animation still and foldout, faux LP-style jacket. If all of this screams “stocking stuffer,” please don’t let me stop you. Nostalgic though it may be, anything that’s as full of introspection, empathy, disappointment, loneliness, and the perpetual hope of better things around the corner can’t be all bad. Like the strip, Guaraldi’s songs here are small, observant miracles”.

I am going to wrap things up with this feature from 2022. Turning sixty in December, I do hope to see new features written about A Charlie Brown Christmas. A masterpiece from the Vince Guaraldi Trio – you can read about Guaraldi’s other albums here -,  this is one that is going to be passed through the generations. The Christmas special that it scored is also this perennial favourite:

“Apparently, not all jazz aficionados share my exalted opinion of the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), which may or may not be the greatest jazz album of all time but is certainly the Sgt. Pepper’s, maybe even the Saint Matthew Passion, of televised cartoon soundtracks. In their Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, Richard Cook and Brian Morton dismiss Guaraldi as “a harmless pop-jazz pianist,” “the lightest of the lightweights.” A few more phrases might suggest their tone: “about as hot-blooded as a game of dominos,” “relentless triviality of the material,” “mild unambitious variations,” and, most damning of all, “If this kind of music appeals…” Well, this kind of music does appeal, and if it makes you (or me) feel any better, Wynton Marsalis and some other heavyweights greatly admire Guaraldi too. I probably wouldn’t understand what Marsalis likes about A Charlie Brown Christmas, but I like the relaxed brushing of the snare drum, the creaking of the fretboard on the upright bass, the ripple-in-water effect of the spreading piano chords, all those things I never hear in rock ‘n roll. Despite the shocking absence of electric guitar solos, the music feels embracing, partly because the songs remain songs, not intimations of A Love Supreme and other things that I will never understand. “O Tannenbaum,” for instance, which leads off the album, is still “O Tannenbaum” even when Guaraldi breaks into a “mild unambitious variation” after a mock solemn introduction.

Whether in the final analysis A Charlie Brown Christmas is anywhere near as good as I think it is hardly matters. There are lots of important and influential jazz records out there; maybe this isn’t one of them. I still don’t like a lot of things about jazz, especially the endless saxophone solos, frequently as pointless and indulgent as their rock and roll equivalents on guitar. Most of all I dislike the priestly solemnity of some of its gatekeepers. But at least A Charlie Brown Christmas gives me a sense of what all the fuss is about. My God, maybe the jazz snobs are right! It is a highly evolved musical form which we owe it to ourselves to experience, even in the unlikely form of a soundtrack album for a children’s cartoon show whose songs are played at Christmastime in every shopping mall and food court in America. Maybe not the least of Guaraldi’s achievements is that he composed a soundtrack almost as memorable as the disturbing story of the depressive ten-year-old with the round head and ethical aspirations too large for the world he so uncomfortably inhabits”.

Maybe it is a little premature to play a Christmas album at this moment, though this is one that is suitable all year round, I feel. It has that sense of wonder about it that I don’t feel it can strictly be reserved to Christmas. Go and investigate this phenomenal album. A Charlie Brown Christmas, sixty years after it came out…

STILL leaves an impression.

FEATURE: Alright, Still? Exploring Lily Allen’s Remarkable and Moving West End Girl

FEATURE:

 

 

Alright, Still?

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Denis

Exploring Lily Allen’s Remarkable and Moving West End Girl

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SOME might see the title…

IN THIS IMAGE: The cover of Lily Allen’s West End Girl/ART CREDIT: Nieves González

of Lily Allen’s fifth studio album and think of the Classic Pet Shop Boys song, West End Girls, of 1986. However, when listening to Allen’s fifth studio album, you realise that this is perhaps her most powerful, personal and remarkable release. Arriving after 2018’s No Shame, I am going to end with a couple of reviews for West End Girl. It was a bit of a surprise. Without the build-up and endless promotion that artists do for albums, this came pretty quickly and without ceremony. West End Girl is going to win awards and go down as one of the best albums of the year. I think that many have that perception of Lily Allen as being exactly like she was when she on 2006’s Alright, Still. Even though that album deals with relationships in a raw way and has some darker lyrics, the music is lighter and more Ska-influenced. It has this more uplifted, sunny and playful edge. I think many people always have that view of her. However, listen to No Shame and especially West End Girl, and it is clear that Allen is a different artist. The assumption that her new album is all personal and about the breakdown of her marriage (due to the infidelity of David Harbour). That is not explicitly the case. As Stylus explain, it does not matter if each line is gospel truth or there is some fiction. It is this soul and teeth-baring album that should be cherished and heralded:

“The assumption is that the album references Allen’s ex-husband, actor David Harbour, from whom she split in December 2024 after four years of marriage. The musician has been clear that she has taken creative liberties, describing West End Girl as a “mixture of fact and fiction”. But while not every lyric may have been drawn directly from Allen’s real life, what’s refreshing about the record are its straight-talking lyrics and refusal to hide behind metaphor. There are no Easter eggs or guessing games about how Allen feels or what she thinks. The word vulnerability has been so overused in recent years to become almost meaningless, but Allen is genuinely vulnerable in songs such as Ruminating, in which she sings of obsessing over a partner’s other loves: “I can’t shake the image of her naked on top of you and I’m dissociated… I’m not hateful but you make me hate her.”

Too often, women are told to conform, to be stoic, to shrink. From an early age, we’re taught to stay polite, agreeable, contained. All of these pressures are magnified for women in the public eye. And when women express anger or sadness after a breakup, we’re called bitter, unladylike, washed-up. Not only that, women are often made to feel as though it’s undignified to air the truth about how or why a relationship ended. Angelina Jolie and Amber Heard have both been cast as hysterical or vindictive for speaking out about alleged mistreatment and abuse (claims their ex-husbands have denied). Even Princess Diana, the so-called people’s princess, was sometimes painted as vengeful or unstable for daring to speak candidly about her marriage to the then-Prince Charles. 

Men don’t face the same treatment. It might be seen as unmasculine to be cheated on, but generally, when a man speaks about suffering due to infidelity, he is cast as a sympathetic figure. Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me A River video, which suggested Britney Spears had cheated on him, is perhaps the all-time example of this (despite Spears later stating that, actually, Timberlake had been unfaithful to her). The dynamic can be seen in cases of general heartbreak, too. Think of the kneejerk response to Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s divorce, which framed him as the wounded, responsible dad while she was criticised for having too much fun. Or Ben Affleck’s misery in paparazzi shots, and how it became seen as endearing. When men hurt publicly, we reward them for vulnerability; when women do, we call it oversharing. Yet despite knowing the risk of being shamed for her candour, Allen has gone full-throttle in West End Girl.

But it doesn’t matter whether each line in West End Girl is the gospel truth (again, Allen has said this isn’t the case). Her private life is hers to share or fictionalise as she sees fit – although I’m sure many lawyers were involved before the record was released. Instead, what is interesting about the album is its emotional honesty. Allen has always written clearly about her feelings and experiences: satirising them but never sanitising them to fit neatly into a more-marketable box. In a world where too many women still hold back from saying how they really feel, that’s something to be inspired by”.

Before I get to a couple of reviews for West End Girl, there are some new interviews that I want to cover. Allen discussing her album. One, as I say, that will sit alongside the very finest of 2025. I am going to start with a brilliant and in-depth interview from Perfect. For anyone who has not followed Lily Allen and is not perhaps aware of what she has been though in regards to her marriage breakdown and addiction struggles, it is discussed in this interview. West End Girl is this album that talks about her experiences and marriage breakup in a very potent way, though this being Lily Allen, there is still humour and wit running through it:

“West End Girl, the new album from Lily Allen, is a coruscating account of a broken marriage in 14 startling pop songs, alternately angry, despairing and defiant. Each track opens a new chapter in a sad and sometimes sordid story, and each is delivered with Allen’s bravura combination of angelic voice, acid tongue.

A hardcore revenge drama, a pitch-black anti-romcom, a work of bracing autofiction written from the point of view of a woman scorned, betrayed, provoked, Allen’s fifth album is that rare thing in the age of Spotify: a collection of songs conceived as a single work, to be consumed whole, in sequence.

The title nods to the Pet Shop Boys classic (“Too many shadows, whispering voices / Faces on posters, too many choices”) as well as to the singer’s recent successes as an actress on the London stage.

It opens with a title track that functions almost as if it were the opening scene in a stage musical, words spoken as much as sung, snatches of dialogue, crestfallen phone calls. Then it’s away: panicky spiralling (‘Ruminating’), unanswered pleas for honesty (‘Sleepwalking’) and the one-two gut-punch of ‘Tennis’ and ‘Madeline’, an imagined conversation between a wronged wife and the other woman in her husband’s life: ‘I can’t trust anything that comes out of your mouth / I’m not convinced that he didn’t fuck you in our house.’

The lurid, uncompromising ‘Pussy Palace’ will perhaps receive the most feverish attention from amateur online sleuths: ‘Duane Reade bag with the handles tied / Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside / Hundreds of Trojans you’re so fucking broken / How did I get caught up in your double life?’

On ‘4Chan Stan’ the cheating husband is dismissed with a sharp barb: ‘You’re not even cute.’ Later songs ‘Nonmonogamummy’; the forlorn ‘Dallas Major’ – explore the disappointments of a 40-year-old woman seeking validation on dating apps. And the drama reaches a vituperative pitch with the heartbroken ‘Beg For Me’.

West End Girl moves through suspicion, paranoia, shock, recrimination and, ultimately, some kind of catharsis: closing number ‘Fruityloop’, in which tentative accommodation is made with what has gone before, in a phrase that calls back to the title of her most successful album, from 2009: ‘And finally I see / It’s not me, it’s you.’

PHOTO CREDIT: Morgan Maher

It is, as they say, a lot. But then much has happened – clearly! – in the seven years since Allen’s last album, 2018’s No Shame.

First, she got sober. Then she met and married the actor David Harbour and moved to a townhouse in Brooklyn. She embarked on a successful new career as a stage actor, starred in a TV sitcom, marketed her own sex toy. She launched a hit podcast with her friend Miquita Oliver. She opened an OnlyFans account to sell images of her feet. To much acclaim she returned to singing live, as a guest of the American pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury and then at the O2 in London on Rodrigo’s Guts tour.

Everything seemed to be going splendidly, even if there were those, like me, who occasionally wished she’d get back in the studio and make some new music – because for all her many talents, being a pop star is still what she does best.

Then the relationship with Harbour broke down, and they separated.

AB: You haven’t released any new music in seven years. Was there a period where you thought you might permanently retire from pop stardom?

LA: Yeah, there was a lot of time where I felt like that. I was writing pretty consistently throughout the last four years, but I just didn’t think it was any good.

AB: Why not?

LA: I don’t know. I can’t really explain it. To me the value in it is meaningless until it feels like it’s something that you want to release into the world. And I hadn’t gotten to that point until I wrote this collection of songs.

AB: You were blocked?

LA: I was. I hated everything. I guess I have a barometer, which is that if I don’t leave the studio with a bounce of the song to listen to in the car or to send to friends, then I know I’m not emotionally attached to it, I know I don’t really care about it.

AB: What were you writing about at that time?

LA: Observational stuff about the internet and the world. It just all seemed really obvious and crap.

AB: No Shame was made after a turbulent period in your life. Among other things, you’d got divorced from Sam [Cooper, her first husband and father of her daughters]. Do you find it easier to write, and that the work is better, if you have had some personal difficulty that you can channel into the songs?

LA: Yes, but I don’t think that that’s unique in any way. I think everyone does. Even people on the Daily Mail comment section. It’s easier to write funny things that are rooted in darkness or anger or... terminal hatred.

AB: Let’s talk about West End Girl. You’ve been saying to me over the years that you were struggling to come up with songs you liked. And then not so long ago you said you’re going to LA to make a record and it felt like two days later you got back and it was done.

LA: It was 10 days.

AB: Ten days is still astonishingly quick to write and record an album. Tell me how it happened. What was it that provoked this sudden outpouring of really good material?

LA: I wish I could tell you. If I knew the answer to that then I would make it happen all the time. I think with all my records – bar [her third album] Sheezus, which felt a little bit misguided – all of them have felt like… not hard. I mean, it was hard to make this record. It was incredibly manic, and it was emotionally traumatic. But nothing felt forced. It just sort of fell out of me. And I think that’s what happens when you’re writing from a place of truth, and without an agenda. I think when I struggle with writing it’s because I’m worried about how things are going to be perceived or how things are going to be consumed, or where I exist in the market, or whatever. This record was purely for me, and it was a way of processing things that I was going through in my private life.

AB: You made it in LA.

LA: I made it with a friend of mine who was also the musical director on my last tour, Blue May. And he put together a really strong team of different people – writers, producers, players – that would come and go from his studio in LA. There were a few days that we went and worked in this guy called Chrome Sparks’s house, but apart from that it was all done in the same room.

AB: It is a very dark record. It’s the sound of someone in pain. Forgive me for telling you what your own record’s about, but it is the story of a broken marriage and a series of betrayals that has caused the singer to feel really devastated. Is that an accurate description of West End Girl?

LA: Yes. That is an accurate description.

AB: The album paints a very unflattering portrait of the idea of open marriage. People have had open marriages for centuries, of course. But it does seem to have become somehow part of the culture lately, the idea of polyamorous relationships, multiple partners. And it strikes me that women are made to feel sort of uncool or uptight if they don’t go along with it, because it’s the modern way of being.

LA: Do I think that that’s true? Yeah, I do. And it seems to me that younger people find it easier to embrace as a concept. Maybe the 2.4-children-nuclear-family thing has not been rammed down their throats quite as much, so it’s not so much in their wiring. But it’s not something I ever thought about when I was younger or going into either one of my marriages.

AB: Do you find the idea of an open marriage appealing?

LA: No.

AB: Some people would be like, ‘Oh, amazing idea!’ You get to have all the comfort and reassurance of a relationship but you also get to fuck other people.

LA: I guess it’s just my attachment style. I grew up in a really unstable household. Neither of my parents was particularly present. And so what I craved in adulthood from my relationships was to be centred. And I’m not particularly interested in anything else. Right?

AB: Totally. I also would not find the idea of an open marriage appealing. I mean, I’m older than you. When I was younger this was not presented as a serious option. But everything’s changed. I think porn is responsible for a load of this.

LA: I think porn is responsible for a load of it, and I think that Instagram is responsible for a load of it. If you are a 60-year-old man and you’re on social media you’re not being served pictures of women in their forties. You’re being served pictures of women in their mid-twenties. The algorithm is showing you what is desirable”.

I am going to come to an interview with British Vogue. Though they say this is Lily Allen making her musical comeback – a word I hate, as I have said, as Allen went nowhere and it is not a return or comeback! -, West End Girl is “is putting the tumult of her life into her music once more”. It is one of the most remarkable albums of the year. One that many people were not expecting:

“The album certainly appears to tell a story of a marriage coming spectacularly undone; of the all-consuming pain and confusion of betrayal. The upbeat opening track, “West End Girl”, acts as a sunny musical prelude of sorts, setting the scene of a newlywed couple embarking on married life in a Brooklyn brownstone (sounds awfully like the home she and Harbour showed Architectural Digest around in 2023, to internet-breaking effect). Already, though, there are warning signs (“You were pushing this forward / made me feel a bit awkward,” she sings). From there, the album unfolds like a tragic novel, each subsequent song a different chapter charting a relationship’s demise.

Take one of the album’s standout tracks, “Sleepwalking”: “You let me think it was me in my head / and nothing to do with them girls in your bed”. Or “Dallas Major”: “You know I used to be quite famous that was way back in the day / I probably should explain how my marriage has been open since my husband went astray”. Allen’s deadpan, “fuck you” humour is alive and well: “What a sad, sad man, it’s giving 4chan stan” she sings on “4chan”. Running through it all is a narrator desperately trying to understand what the hell happened to the life she thought she had. So here’s the question then: is it her?

Allen sucks on her vape. “There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel,” she says, in the manner of someone who has recently spent an inordinate amount of money on lawyers’ fees. “It is inspired by what went on in the relationship.” What did she feel as she was making it? Cue more displacement activity as she applies a coat of lip balm and replies: “Confusion, sorrow, grief, helplessness.”

Between the end of last year and speaking to her now, Allen has been to “some very, very bleak places” emotionally. It wasn’t always thus: though she has long since scrubbed her Instagram clean of any Harbour-related content, scroll back far enough on his and you can find the blissful photos from their wedding day: her, beaming, in a 1960s-style Dior minidress, being held aloft outside the Graceland Wedding Chapel; the newly marrieds with her children having a celebratory In-N-Out burger.

PHOTO CREDIT: Francesca Allen

Thinking about it, all of her albums “have been informed by big traumatic experiences”, she says. “My first album really was the break-up of my first love. And my second one was – this is going to sound so stupid – but the ‘Trauma of Fame’.” Her third, Sheezus, “was a mess, because I was a pop star who suddenly had two children and didn’t fit into this world. So actually it’s kind of exactly what it should have been,” she says, laughing. “Then my last album was emerging from the detritus of my first marriage.” A beat. “And we’ll see what happens with these songs!” Cue wide eyes and rictus grin.

I wonder if being a mother to now-teenage daughters has altered her outlook at all. Does she worry about them out there in the world?

“I try not to smother them,” she says. “I feel like I can try and shield them and protect them from things, but I don’t think that really works. A big part of what I’m doing at the moment creatively is for them. I need to show them that, yeah, we’ve been through something fucking devastating – twice now – and that I can get us through.” They’ve seen me in the depths of despair this last year and they have listened to my music and they are proud, I think.” (They don’t really understand the lyrical content, she says, “But their TikTok dance is ready!”)

“I feel like I often talk on the podcast about how fucking hard it is to be a mum,” she continues. “And people come to me and say, [she puts on a grouchy voice] ‘Imagine your children reading this.’ And it’s like, yes, I want them to know that so that they don’t do the same thing! You know? I felt totally gaslit by my mum about motherhood.” How so? “Well, she was like, ‘Oh, it’s easy, just throw it over your shoulder and everything’s fine.’”

And what about her personal life now? “Are you on the apps or are you in a relationship?” she fires back to me. “Because when you get to 40, you go into a different category and your selection is suddenly very different,” she says, her voice becoming a squeak.

PHOTO CREDIT: Francesca Allen

But this is moot: dating is not a priority until she has worked some things out. “Listen, I am in a period of self-discovery at the moment and I’m really trying to explore how I’ve got myself into certain situations in the past,” she says. “I need to unpack some things and break some patterns and probably talk to my therapist about my relationship with my dad.” You haven’t done that yet? I baulk. “I think we have some more work to do.”

By all accounts, it is hell out there in the world of modern love and dating. What exactly, in her opinion, has happened to men? “I think the internet happened. And I think the abundance of opportunity that the internet has created and the ease with which things and people are available is what happened.”

With a bit of distance, some rage has subsided. Looking back on her second marriage, she is able to say that “there were lots of good things” about it. “My kids had an amazing experience living in America for five years, and I have a lot of compassion for my ex-husband. I think we all suffer.”

And with that, it is almost time for Allen to get to the theatre, to transform into her role as a “convincingly brittle newlywed” as The Guardian will praise her performance come opening night.

But she is more excited to step back into the role she was born to play: musician. “When I feel like I’ve captured something well and it does something for me, but can also do something for others, I want to play it to people straight away,” she says. “It’s all I want to listen to.”

However difficult the road to making this record has been, she is thankful this is what has come out of it. Finally, she has something that is truly, authentically, her. “It feels like me, unquestionably,” she says, proudly. “It feels like my voice. I listen to it and I go, ‘Yeah, that’s me”.

There are a couple of reviews that I want to get to. The Guardian provided their take on West End Girl. Noting how it contains “these stylistically varied songs have melodies that sparkle”, anyone who has not heard it yet really needs to! This is a year when incredible women in music are releasing these very open, frank and personal records – Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream (out on 31st October) is another -, I think West End Girl will compel other artists to bare their scars, soul and experiences in music in a similar way:

“So West End Girl arrives in a very different and more welcoming climate to its predecessor. But although you can hear a Charli xcx influence on the fizzing, trebly synths and Auto-Tune overdose of Ruminating, and a whisper of PinkPantheress about the two-step garage-fuelled Relapse, West End Girl really doesn’t seem like an album made for opportune reasons. It feels more like an act of unstoppable personal exorcism. It appears to pick through the collapse of Allen’s second marriage so unsparingly, with such attention to vivid, grubby detail, that you have to assume the lyrics were reviewed by a lawyer. (She told British Vogue that the album references things “I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel.”)

While you can’t tell where poetic licence has been applied, its narrative arc traces accepting an open marriage along certain guidelines (“He had an arrangement, be discreet and don’t be blatant,” Allen sings on Madeline, “there had to be payment, it had to be with strangers”) only for the relationship to explode when it transpires that the husband isn’t abiding by the rules. There are confrontations with other women, a visit to an apartment where Allen (or her character) believes her husband is practising martial arts but where she finds “sex toys, butt plugs, lube” and “a shoebox full of handwritten letters from brokenhearted women”. There is a brief, unhappy attempt to beat him at his own game – on Dallas Major, she joins a dating app under an assumed name, but keeps repeating the phrase “I hate it”. It reaches a bitterly unhappy denouement: “It is what it is – you’re a mess, I’m a bitch … all your shit’s yours to fix.” It’s simultaneously gripping and shocking. There are moments when you find yourself wondering if airing this much dirty laundry can possibly be a good idea, impeccably written and laced with mordant wit though the lyrics are.

Obviously said lyrics will attract the lion’s share of attention. In an era where every pop song is combed through for inferences about the artist’s private life, Allen has dramatically upped the ante: certainly, Taylor Swift complaining that another star once called her “boring Barbie” seems pretty small beer by comparison. But there’s far more to West End Girl than just cathartic disclosure. The songs skip through a variety of styles: the title track’s orchestrated Latin pop; Beg for Me borrows from Lumidee’s 2003 R&B hit Never Leave You; Nonmonogamummy blends electronics and dancehall-influenced guest vocals by London MC Specialist Moss.

What ties the songs together beyond the story they tell is the striking prettiness of the tunes, which seem, jarringly, more evocative of a romantic fairytale ending than the anger and unhappiness the lyrics convey. And West End Girl seems to reserve its sweetest melodies for its bleakest moments. 4chan Stan is possessed of a wistful loveliness at odds with its internet basement dweller-referencing title; Pussy Palace – the one with the lyric about butt plugs etc – may well be the most musically addictive, hook-laden track here: it’s as if Allen is defying you not to hit rewind even if you don’t want to hear its squalid story more than once.

It’s hard not to wonder whether West End Girl is going to get the reception it deserves for its boldness and the quality of its songwriting: it would be a great pop album regardless of the subject matter. Perhaps some listeners will view it as too personal to countenance. Or perhaps fans who have grown up alongside Allen, now 40, will find something profoundly relatable in the story it has to tell about modern relationships. Underneath all the gory details, it seems to tacitly suggest that open arrangements are easily abused, usually by men, and that believing you’re above outmoded concepts of fidelity – “a modern wife”, as Allen puts it at one point – is no guarantee you won’t get your heart broken. We shall see. What’s for certain is West End Girl is a divorce album like no other”.

It is interesting what The Independent say in their review. How there must have been lawyers, friends and family wondering whether Lily Allen should release this album. West End Girl is not a confessional album at all. Instead, “it’s obliterative; an emotional post-mortem carried out in public, a death-by-a-million-cuts account of a thoroughly modern marriage breakdown”:

“Songs about cheating (“I can’t shake the image of her naked/ On top of you and I’m dissociated”), open relationships (“I don’t wanna f*** with anyone else/ Now that’s all you wanna do”) and sex addiction (“hundreds of Trojans, you’re so f***ing broken”) are best experienced raw, on their own terms. Inevitable comparisons to classic heartbreak pop albums written by thirtysomethings will seem wrong. Beyoncé’s Lemonade, after all, is mediated by marital reconciliation; Kacey Musgraves’s Star-Crossed made measured by the lack of betrayal; Adele’s 30 tempered by a few years of reflection. But the bewildered and wounded Allen wrote West End Girl in 10 days. It shows, in the best way.

This musical of deceit and suffering puts her in the starring role, seizing control of her narrative and holding little back. Those distinctive, creamy vocals sound sad and deflated, as if she’s processing in real time. Seven years since her last album, this intense story-driven format lets her sound sharper, smarter, and more clear-eyed than before.

The show opens with the jaunty title track – an unnervingly sunny bit of scene-setting. Allen’s narrator got her happy ever after, moved to New York for him, hesitated, then conceded when he talked her into a house that was too expensive. But all is not well. In real life, Allen starred in 2:22: A Ghost Story, playing a woman who suspects her new home, bought with her husband, is haunted. The irony is acute: art imitating life, or perhaps life catching up with art. Allen misses nothing, which is part of the problem for her narrator’s marriage.

Allen has said she drew from personal experience to write songs that feel universal, though that relatability only really lands in the final two tracks – and they’re two of her best. On the quietly triumphant“Let You W-in,” she lays out the album’s aim: “I can walk out with my dignity if I lay my truth out on the table.” What’s eerily universal is how easy it is, in love, to drown in someone else’s shame and mistake it for your own. On the bittersweet closing ballad “Fruityloop”, she serves herself a slice of responsibility: “I’m just a little girl/ Looking for her daddy.”

After two albums that defined mid-2000s British pop, Allen lost her grip on the pop star version of herself that once felt effortless. Sheezus and No Shame had the same attitude but lacked focus. The pain of this real-life breakup has given her something solid to attack with all her might, and West End Girl feels like the clarity she’s been writing toward for years. In 2025, Allen sounds newly alive in the contradictions we loved her for: acid-tongued and soft-hearted, ironic and sincere, broken again but alright, still”.

You wonder where Lily Allen will go next in terms of her music. Maybe the next album will see her in a relationship and in a very happy place. Perhaps something different altogether. It is clear how important it was for her to get West End Girl out. Recorded in ten days, this is such an urgent album. One that has received rave reviews and really stunned critics and listeners. I have been a Lily Allen fan for twenty years now. I think that West End Girl is her greatest work. It is clear that West End Girl is going to create ripples and conversation…

FOR a long time to come.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Amy Allen

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Ethan Benavidez for The Times

Amy Allen

__________

THIS feature…

PHOTO CREDIT: Joelle Grace Taylor

puts a spotlight on one of the most reputable and greatest living songwriter. Certainly when it comes to Pop music. Amy Allen might not be known to everyone, but I can guarantee you have listened to some of her work! You can follow her on Instagram. I am going to bring in some interviews with her. Among modern-day Pop hits she has had a hand in are Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso and Tate McRae’s greedy. You can find a comprehensive list of her songwriting credits here (I am including a playlist at the bottom of this feature that includes her incredible list of songwriting credits). I am going to start with this feature and introduction from last year courtesy of GRAMMY. This is one of the most influential and prolific modern-day songwriters. We often talk about these major mainstream artists, though songwriters who collaborate with them are not often discussed:

“Some artists are lucky enough to have a moment: a song of the summer, a radio hit, or a point at which their song dominates the pop conversation. Before even launching her own singing career, Amy Allen has done just that — multiple times.

In 2022, the Maine native contributed to hit songs from Harry Styles, Lizzo, Charli XCX, and King Princess; at the 2023 GRAMMYs, she was one of the inaugural nominees for Songwriter Of The Year, Non-Classical, and celebrated an Album Of The Year win alongside Styles thanks to her work on Harry's House. And as of press time, two songs she co-wrote with Sabrina Carpenter are in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: "Espresso" and "Please Please Please," the latter of which hit No. 1.

When you have a resume and catalog as impressive as Allen's, it's hard not to get stuck in a run of highlights — but Allen's writing style is so full of remarkable emotional depth and inevitable hooks that her life and career deserves further exploration. After binging on classic rock and performing in rock and bluegrass bands in her youth, Allen began writing songs for others in the mid 2010s and has only continued to expand her impact on audiences and collaborators alike.

"Amy is a once-in-a-lifetime writer and friend — it all comes to her very naturally and effortlessly," Carpenter recently told Variety. "She's super versatile: She can wear any hat and yet it still feels authentic. I've learned a lot from her and admire what an incredible collaborator she is."

Along the way, Allen has continued honing her skills as an artist in her own right, releasing a handful of EPs and singles since 2015, initially under the name Amy and the Engine. But on Sept. 6, she's ready to fully introduce herself with her debut album — fittingly titled Amy Allen.

Just after Allen celebrated her latest No. 1 and released her newest single, "even forever," GRAMMY.com rounded up the key details you need to know about the singer/songwriter's diverse musical background, from her advocacy for female creators to seeing Harry Styles sing a song she co-wrote to a massive audience.

Her Origin Story Features A Lot Of Car Talk

Allen's early musical growth relied on four-wheeled vehicles to drive the plot forward — in many different forms. Growing up in rural Maine meant long car rides to for school and family outings, which in turn meant a lot of time with the radio.

"My dad is the biggest classic rock fan, so since I was little, I spent hours every day listening to music in the car with him and my sisters," she told Variety earlier this year.

When it came time for one of her sisters to start a band, the elder Allen named it No U-Turn, setting the theme. When the band needed a new bassist, Amy took up the low end at just 8 years old, learning classic songs from the likes of Tom Petty and Rolling Stones. The band started collecting opening spots at a bar in Portland, Maine, and lasted until Allen was in high school and her sisters had left for college. In addition, she started playing in a bluegrass band called Jerks of Grass alongside her high school guitar teacher.

Eventually, Allen thought about moving on and changing course. "I went to nursing school at Boston College for two years, and within a month of getting there I was like, 'I made a big mistake,'" she continued. After moving over to the prestigious Berklee School of Music, Allen started a new project, yet again turning to vehicular terminology: Amy and the Engine, who would go on to open for the likes of Vance Joy and Kacey Musgraves. The project's timeless indie pop charm shone brightly on singles like "Last Forever" and the 2017 EP Get Me Outta Here!, fusing references ranging from the Cranberries to the Cure.

She's A Major Champion For Women In Music

Back in 2021, Allen pondered whether it was time to carve up one of America's most prominent monuments. "Can you imagine tits on Mount Rushmore/ And Ruth Bader Ginsburg from dynamite sticks?" she sang on "A Woman's World," a highlight from her 2021 solo EP AWW!. The song backs off from that explicit ask, but the low-slung waltz of ghostly piano and gentle acoustic guitar still subversively slices at traditional gender roles and power dynamics.

And while the track may focus its first verse on the Notorious RBG, Allen designed it as a more approachable anthem. "I felt very proud of that song. And it's something that I love to play live, because I think that it's nice as a woman to give that moment to other women in the audience where I see them," she told The Line of Best Fit upon the EP's release.

Her solo work sits in a long line of female pop and rock stars looking to lift others up — with Allen's list of influences including everyone from the Carpenters and Pat Benatar to No Doubt, Hole, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. But she's also aware of the shortcomings in the industry when it comes to behind-the-scenes matters, with female songwriters representing a disproportionately small percentage of the industry and often at lower revenue than their male counterparts.

"It's important to have more women writing and performing so that younger girls can be hearing that and really connecting with that and resonating with that, and then being inspired to do that themselves," she continued. "I'm really excited to hear what the next generation of singer songwriters creates, and I want to do my part in making sure that they're able to”.

In February, Amy Allen became the first woman to be named Songwriter of the Year. In fact, she won in the category, Songwriter of the Year, Non-Classical. You can see her listed as the winner on GRAMMY’s website. Among the songs listed is Leon Bridges’s Chrome Cowgirl. The Maine-born songwriter (Amy Allen) was nominated for the inaugural Songwriter of the Year award at the 65th GRAMMYs for her work on releases by King Princess, Alexander 23, Lizzo, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Harry Styles. At the same ceremony, she won Album of the Year for her contribution to Harry Styles’s Harry's House (2022). There is a new book out about her that talks about her rise from living in this small town in Maine and becoming this huge songwriter talent. I do wonder if Allen will write a book herself. She is this incredible talent, so it would be interesting to hear her story. I am going to move to an interview from Billboard. For their On the Record podcast, Amy Allen “talks pitch records, songwriting trends and locking in with Carpenter for Man's Best Friend”. I will embed the full interview, through below are some highlights:

“Over the last few years, I’ve been hearing songwriters and publishers complain that pitch records [songs written when the artist isn’t in the room] are becoming increasingly less popular. You’ve said that your first hit, “Back To You” by Selena Gomez, started off as a pitch, so I’m wondering — how could this trend away from pitch songs impact up-and-coming songwriters?

It feels like it will be harder for songwriters to get into the door, because my first two songs that changed my trajectory of my career were pitch records — that Selena Gomez song and a Halsey song called “Without Me” and that changed everything for me. I wouldn’t have gotten to go into the room with those artists at that time in my career, because I didn’t have any track record of writing songs. So, it feels like two arms are being tied behind your back as a new songwriter, where, you know, the pitch game is not as strong as it used to be, and artists are wanting to be in the room and writing with songwriters.

But this trend also leads to really exciting songs now where the artists are using every part of their life in these songs, and that’s really exciting.

I think the other thing that could be seen as a positive is that now big songs are coming from everywhere. Like, when I was coming up in songwriting seven or eight years ago, TikTok wasn’t a thing. People weren’t exploding off of TikTok. Now, there are a lot more ways for songwriters to get into the door of people at early phases in their career. Sometimes artists might find a songwriter on TikTok now. There’s pros and cons.

So TikTok can be a discovery platform for songwriters as well as artists?

Yeah, and I think it just goes to show that amazing songs come from anywhere. It’s not like we’re just being told by the radio programmers who the big artists are today.

What are some career highlights for you?

Writing “Matilda” with Harry [Styles]. I really will always love that song. It means so much to me and getting to make that with him was one of the highlights of my entire career. I also love “Please Please Please” because I love how many boundaries that pushes as a big pop song. When we were writing it, I don’t think anybody in a million years would have been like ‘this is going to be a hit.’ It felt like we were just following some emotion that we all loved, and we were all on the same train, writing it together and not knowing exactly where it was going. And when it was done, we came out with something that felt so new and exciting. To see the public react in the way that they did and make it a pop hit is so cool”.

I am going to move to a recent interview from PAPER. It is interesting what PAPER write in the introduction to the interview, where they say Amy Allen’s love of classic songs and artist melds into modern sensibilities and sounds. It makes for a fascinating blend that is not that common in modern-day Pop: “Timelessness could be the word, an essence that derives from Allen’s ongoing commitment to the fundamentals of songwriting. Or maybe another word is “rooted,” an adjective she frequently invokes in our conversation. Calling in from her sunny home in Venice, she describes her writerly sensibilities as being grounded in the Tom Petty, Dolly Parton and John Prine she’d listen to in long car rides in rural Maine, where she grew up. While her brain has surely been filled with the fizz of contemporary pop since then, it’s those classics that lend her songs a fundamental clarity that is relatively rare in the 2025 pop machine, where art is so often made via committee and informed by algorithms”:

“We talked a lot about being from Maine and how that shaped his artistry, how the transition to LA was a particular culture shock for him, because it’s so opposite in so many ways. Was that your experience as well?

It was for sure. I didn't have a ton of friends out [in Los Angeles] when I first moved here, and the few friends I did make worked in music. It just felt like everything you talked about was music, everything social gathering you went to revolved around music. I first moved to West Hollywood, which is like, so, so industry-centric. Two and a half years in, I moved to Venice, where I live now, and everything changed for me because none of my friends in Venice work in music, and I'm right by the beach, which is how I grew up in Maine. I can walk to everything. I kind of forget that I live in such a major city. I go in every day for sessions to different places, but I feel like I've found my area here, so it's much more doable for me.

I'm from LA for context and a lot of my friends work in music. Part of why I wanted to get away was because everything can feel so industry there. Your writing feels very timeless and removed from that. I'm curious about how you created that space or stay on your own frequency.

I grew up in rural Maine in Wyndham, which is on Tobago Lake. When I was in high school, my parents moved to the ocean, close to the same town where Tucker is from.I had to do such long drives when I was younger. My dad would always play a lot of timeless music that I really associated with being outdoors, like Tom Petty, Dolly Parton, John Prine, and Fleetwood Mac. It was Americana country and folk. It just felt very grounded and earthy to me, and I think especially when I moved to LA, it felt like the opposite of that and the opposite of me in a lot of ways. What's always drawn me to music is this feeling that I'm grounded and rooted in an emotion, or close to home and the people that I love.

Going back to those records has helped me immensely through significant life changes, such as attending college for music or moving to the West and signing a publishing deal. It's helped me keep my world feeling a lot smaller than this big, scary, massive music world that I could easily get lost in. I just continue to come back to the core of what I loved about music and the artists that I loved. That informed a lot of my writing instincts as well.

Pop songwriting is an art and a science. I'm curious how much you think about the math of a pop hit?

Not at all. I don't know much theory at all. In terms of math, I can tell there are certain tricks that songwriters pick up along the way. When you listen to a Max Martin song, there are a lot of strategic moves that are happening so that the chorus feels massive. Every part to it feels like a building block that's moving up the ladder to the big climax. I’m not really a music-mathy gal, but I do know that when I'm writing a pre-chorus or verse, I don't want the notes that I'm hitting in the pre-chorus or the verses to be walking all over the note that the chorus is going to hit. Then the chorus just doesn't feel as euphoric. Or if there's a certain line in the chorus that I really want to stand out … maybe don't want to be reiterating that same thought throughout the verse. You don't want to give too much away.

PHOTO CREDIT: Caity Krone

There are definitely bits that I am very conscious of, but I'm not technically mathy, and it's actually really fun because there's a lot of accounts now that are pretty mathy that will be like, "Oh my God, ‘Without Me’ or ‘Please Please Please,' or 'Espresso,'" did all these things that weren’t necessarily super thought about in the process. A lot of my favorite songwriters just go off of emotion. My favorite artists are the exact same way. They're really governed by how it feels in their body. I've always been that way, so that's where I stand on that. But I'm always in awe of people that are very mathy about music and can make a song that’s technically perfect.

So with something like “Espresso,” which people would say is the perfect, earworm pop, that arrived intuitively in the same way that something longer like “Please Please Please” came about?

It's only the same process in the sense of I trust Sabrina [Carpenter] with my whole heart, soul and guts. She is such a phenomenal songwriter and artist, and I know she trusts me as well as a collaborator. When something feels good, we allow that to take the reins and we can run with it. There are very few people in the world who I'm like, “Let's go,” and we just start moving, and it snowballs into something that we're all really excited about in the room. That takes a lot of trust and rapport to have with somebody to get to that point where you can allow something to come so naturally and it doesn't have to be this robotic thing. It feels very natural.

“Espresso” and “Please Please Please” came together in very different ways, but both were so exciting. They're such different songs, and to get to work with an artist that can put out “Espresso” and live in that world and then do the same with another song like “Please Please Please,” which is very different … I don't know any artist that could live under both of those umbrellas and sell them both so seamlessly and phenomenally. I feel blessed to be able to work with somebody that can do that.

One of the most remarkable things about Sabrina is the sense of humor that comes out on these two records that you worked on. Is that your sense of humor as well, or are you tapping into Sabrina's?

One of the most exciting things for me as a songwriter is getting to learn more about myself with every single artist that I work with — whether it's Sabrina or somebody else. Sabrina is so funny, witty, quick, smart, and so musical, just being within her orbit brings out parts of me that I didn't even know existed or wasn't necessarily brave enough to follow. She is this amazing artist that can encompass light and funny moments, and also immensely vulnerable, serious and heartbreaking moments, and have them all wrapped up in one. Of course, it's a collaboration. She is fully the engine and I just feel grateful to be around it for sure”.

I am going to end with an interview from Music Week. They talked to Amy Allen about the fun and laughter in the studio, her remarkable collaborations and hot streak, and advocating for women “leading the charge” in songwriting. Allen was also asked about the realities of songwriting and how it pays. Artists we know are paid very little and have to tour and rely on merchandise sales and record sales. However, songwriters have different challenges and obstacles:

“This year’s evidence of Allen’s hot streak includes Sabrina Carpenter’s seventh album Man’s Best Friend (on which she wrote on every track, as she did on Short N’ Sweet), which sold 85,305 copies on debut in the UK, at the time the biggest opening week for an album by an international artist in 2025. Man’s Best Friend has 163,316 sales to date, according to the Official Charts Company, while Short N’ Sweet has 816,453. Also in 2025, Allen wrote on Ed Sheeran’s No.1 Play and Olivia Dean’s The Art Of Loving, one of the most eagerly anticipated albums by a new UK act in recent memory. Meanwhile, Apt by Rosé and Bruno Mars – another recent Allen co-write – has a monstrous 1,519,027 sales.

Yet even the winner of the 2025 Grammy for Songwriter Of The Year, Non-Classical – who has written with a glut of stars also including Harry Styles, Charli XCX, Dua Lipa, Tate McRae, Selena Gomez and many more – still has pinch-me moments.

“I met Paul McCartney for the first time the other day,” Allen, who hails from Windham, Maine, begins. “He was at the Oasis concert and I was in the same box as him. I introduced myself and it felt like a full out-of-body experience, I didn’t know what to say, I really went into shell shock.”

You might think the former Beatle would have had some words of hitmaking wisdom, only, they didn’t quite get that far.

“I don’t even think I told him I worked in music,” she reveals, breaking into laughter. “There aren’t that many artists where I really am at a loss for words.”

Ed Sheeran’s album hit No.1 here shortly after Man’s Best Friend. What was it like to work with him for the first time?

“It was so amazing because I’ve been a fan of his for so long. I remember going to an Ed Sheeran show when I was a teenager. I don’t even know if I’ve told him this, I might have, but it was in Boston. I’d never even seen somebody use a loop pedal before. Some of his songs are some of the best written pop songs ever, so getting to be a collaborator was incredible. He’s in a place in his life that is really different to a lot of artists that I work with. He has a beautiful family, he’s a father and a husband. I’m not in that stage of my life. I’m not married and I don’t have children, so that was really nice. He can write big up-tempo bangers like Shape Of You, but he also is a really honest, vulnerable man and songwriter. He was ready to have a song [For Always] on the record that felt really heartfelt and was an ode to his loved ones. I had done some harmonies on it in the UK, then when Ed asked me if I wanted to add some more, I was over the moon because to get to do any background vocal with Ed Sheeran is amazing, let alone on a song that I really love.”

You’ve also co-written for Olivia Dean and Inhaler. Are more acts coming to you from the UK and Ireland?

“For sure. I also had a song come out this year with Dua Lipa [Handlebars with Jennie Kim], who I’ve been a fan of for a long time. In terms of Olivia, she is great, 10 out of 10, I absolutely love her. She’s a phenomenally talented artist and songwriter; so genuine, intimate and real and I loved getting to write with her. I’ve also worked with Charli XCX, Niall Horan, one of my dearest friends, and Sam Smith, who I’ve been close with for ages and worked with many times. Even a lot of American artists that I work with have been wanting to write in the UK, so I’ve really got to spend a lot of time here.”

Are you concerned about how AI might impact the craft of songwriting?

“There’s this video of a female news broadcaster, I think it was when the internet was first becoming a thing, and she was like, ‘I don’t think it’s going to catch on…’ I’ve been like that about AI for years now. And I’m like, ‘I can’t be that woman, I have to embrace this new wave that is coming.’ Somebody just told me a stat the other day that 28% of all songs uploaded to Deezer are AI-generated now, which is really wild. However, I have so much faith in the artists, songwriters and producers of this generation and the next. I will always stand by the idea that humans can offer something that computers can’t. And even if things turn into a big AI world for a bit of time, people are going to crave watching somebody play a live guitar solo, or listening to an artist that is saying a lyric that is so personal and undeniably unique to them as a human, that a computer could not have come up with it. But that’s just me.”

Earlier this year, UK major labels committed to a per diem allowance and expenses for songwriters at their sessions. What is your position on songwriters making a sustainable living?

“Per diems sound great, as long as it’s in addition to what the writer will be getting anyway, in terms of publishing and things like that. When I graduated from college, I worked at Lululemon for a year-and-a-half to save up money to move to New York. I also saved throughout college from playing with my band, I was playing so many shows. I had enough to live in a really tiny apartment in New York for a year and within that time I wrote my first song and ended up signing my first publishing deal, which then gave me a lot more runway in terms of finances and being able to move to LA and become a full-time songwriter, as opposed to working numerous jobs, which I know so many people have to do. That’s why everything with how songwriters are compensated with streaming platforms and so on is heartbreaking because there are so many phenomenally talented songwriters out there that can’t really ever fully get both feet in the door because they are financially struggling. They could be doing six sessions a week, but they’re doing one a month because they have to be working multiple jobs.”

Finally, do you have any dream collaborators?

“For sure. I mean, I’m the biggest fan of Rosalía and I’m a huge fan of SZA. Stevie Nicks would just break my brain if that ever happened. Carole King… I mean, so many!”.

Wrapping up there, for anyone who has not checked out the songwriting and incredible work of Amy Allen, check out her eponymous debut album from last year. Also, listen to artists she has written for and incredible songs that she has helped create. It would be amazing if Amy Allen got to work with artists like Stevie Nicks and ROSALÍA! One of the greatest songwriters we have ever seen, even though you may not have seen Amy Allen put in the spotlight and heralded as a modern-day songwriting genius, then that definitely needs to change! There is no doubting her…

INCREDIBLE talent and pedigree.

FEATURE: Black History Month 2025: The Remarkable and Vital Black Music Coalition

FEATURE:

 

 

Black History Month 2025

 IMAGE CREDIT: Black Music Coalition

The Remarkable and Vital Black Music Coalition

__________

I realise I have not posted…

as much as I should for Black History Month. As October is about celebrating and spotlighting Black heritage and culture, it is perfect to focus that to music. I wanted to use this feature to react to interviews and articles Music Week recently shared regarding the Black Music Coalition. Now in its fourth year, the Black Music Coalition’s Excellence Honourees initiative recognises emerging talent changing the industry. I am going to get to what Music Week published, as on this Black History Month, it is important to spotlight the brilliant work that the Black Music Coalition do. I am going to share a bit of background about them before moving on:

“The Black Music Coalition (BMC) is a Black led organisation created in June 2020, in the wake of #TheShowMustBePaused and the parallel movement in the UK, #TheShowMustBePausedUK, at a time when a spotlight had been cast on anti-Black systemic racism in the world causing Black executives in the UK music industry to look inwards at the industry and to reflect upon their shared experiences of racism and discrimination as Black execs. The commonalities of those experiences informed the creation of our organisation and its goals.

The BMC is dedicated to eradicating racial inequality and establishing equality and equity for Black executives, artists and their communities within the UK Music Industry. The organisation currently consists of an executive committee formed of Black professionals either working in or affiliated to the UK music industry, as well as a wider committee also formed of Black music industry professionals.

On Monday 8th June 2020 an open letter was sent out by the BMC to the music industry community setting out our stance, that “for far too long, the global Black community have faced racial injustice, inequality and disenfranchisement across all aspects of society and [that] here in the UK, [it was] no different”. In that letter we set out our calls to action and made it clear that, we wanted actualise to the shows of support we’d seen from #BlackOutTuesday and to drive forward tangible changes in the industry. We then set about formulating the long-term objectives of the organisation which we set out in our manifesto which released to the industry and all interested parties in September 2020”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Sheryl Nwosu

In the first feature, Black Music Coalition’s Chair, Sheryl Nwosu, introduces this year’s awesome Honourees and reflects on the impact and importance of the project. I am quite new to the work they do and what they are about. That is on me, and I should have discovered them and shared everything I could. Having read about them in the newest edition of Music Week, it has been eye-opening and rewarding learning more about them and their Honourees list:

“As the BMC started looking towards the fourth year of our Excellence Honourees awards, the team and I sat down and reflected that we were also coming up to our fifth birthday as an organisation. It was an opportune pit-stop to take stock of not just who would make the longlist of potential Honourees, but also what we wanted to celebrate by continuing these awards, which have now become a staple in our year.

When we created the BMC, we didn’t know the road that lay ahead. In 2020, at the flashpoint of Blackout Tuesday, we, along with many others, were all resolutely passionate about what would become our overarching cause, namely the eradication of anti-Black racism in the music industry. But for the BMC specifically, it was also about creating a space where Black music executives – and supporting, celebrating and recognising their experiences – would be the primary focus. Through each year since, we’ve remained steadfast in ensuring that Black music, Black creatives and execs remain at the centre of what we do.

This five-year point was also a moment to look at the industry and all the names put forward to us with a bit of a retrospective lens on. Through the nominations, our observations and discussions, the word ‘despite’ continuously came up. As we talked and counted votes, we realised that these execs were excelling despite the difficulties facing various areas of the industry. Their passion remained and, through their work, it shone through.

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And so it was with this in mind that this year’s Honourees were selected: these execs were lauded for pressing forward despite obstacles, creating their own spaces and in turn their own successes despite notable downturns, and it is fair to say that our final picks really stood out in this respect.

This year’s Honourees embody excellence, resilience, creativity and transformation, and so it’s with a real sense of pride that we honour them. In my view, they represent the very best of the talent the UK music industry has in its ranks: diverse, dynamic, innovative, sharp and community minded – and those are just a few of their combined qualities. Between them, they are claiming their own professional space while also making ways for diasporic connections, building and adding to the music industry by cultivating and guiding rising music stars or navigating and solidifying the paths of more seasoned artists. They are creating organisations which are unapologetic in their aim to highlight and importantly respect the culture whilst dealing with the commerce, and moving upwards in the corporate space maintaining integrity and authenticity.

Announcing this year’s Honourees during the UK’s Black History Month is a serendipitous happenstance brought largely about by schedule and capacity, but I am personally delighted about it. Despite promises of change it is now undeniably clear that the issues of diversity, equity and inclusion have slipped to all but a footnote on many an agenda. Black History Month therefore provides a moment to reflect loudly on the stories and successes of Black professionals across all industries.

This is why we are passionate about our Honourees, because shining a spotlight on Black executives’ stories is important in building what will be not only their individual legacies, but also the shared legacy of the UK music industry. I’m so pleased to announce this year’s Excellence Honourees as:

Alex Omisesan (founder, Late Bloomer & artist manager, Nemzzz)
Chris Chance (CEO & director, Single Channel Films)
Janay Marie (founder & managing director, Tallawah Agency)
Kara Harris (senior promoter, Live Nation)
Keecia Ellis (founder/director, Rekodi Music)
Nasra Artan (head of international A&R, Sony Music Publishing)
Neicee Oakley (tour manager & co-founder, Blk Kactus)
Nnamdi Okafor (senior manager, global commercial partnerships, AWAL)
Terry Appiasei (CEO, Golden Boy Entertainment/co-founder, Black Pearl Music Group)
Uchenna Ubawuchi (Twnty Four Music)”.

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There are a few interviews from Honourees that I want to share. This one is with the brilliant Chris Chance, CEO & Director of Single Channel Films. I am not going to quote and source the whole interview, though I am including most of it. It is laudable and commendable that Chance’s key ambition is to affect the career trajectory of creatives early in their careers. Making a real difference. That is to be applauded:

“How did you first break into the music industry?

“My cousin Aaron Attille was a mentor to me when I first started out and barely knew how a camera worked. My entry point into the music industry was during my time studying post production at Ravensbourne University. I knew local musicians and started to shoot and edit music videos for them to gain experience and improve my knowledge of the craft. After leaving university, I had a respectable portfolio of work on YouTube and a growing profile in the industry as a visual creative. I spent the next few years as a producer and director within corporate spaces working at MTV and Sony Music, during which time I worked alongside creatives such as Neron Power, Mark Tintner and Laurence Warder.”

You launched your own production company after working in-house at bigger companies – what made you take the plunge?

“The experience and industry knowledge I gained from working for those companies is invaluable. I moved on to figure out what I wanted for my own career and, after deep introspection, I decided that I wanted to build my own brand.”

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far and how did you overcome it?

“Finding a core team of professionals who trust and support my vision for Single Channel Films was something that didn’t come instantly, but having a track record of successful collaborations and leaning into the network that I’d built from previous projects was something that proved useful. Maintaining patience and trusting the process is another key one; I’m Christian so prayer and my faith definitely helps.”

How do you hope the industry changes in the coming years?

“I hope to see more Black and brown change-making personnel in leading positions. As for the individuals who are already in those groundbreaking positions, I’d like to see them continue to pay it forward to the next generation, helping to expand our presence and diversify the ways in which we as innovators and entrepreneurs are able to contribute and benefit from our commitment to the industry.”

What’s your ultimate ambition for your own career?

“To be able to positively affect the career trajectories of creatives at early stages in their professional journeys. I want to do this by maintaining a position where I’m able to build partnerships across the media industry, create opportunities and inspire others”.

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I will move to a great interview with Janay Marie, Founder and Managing Director of TALLAWAH Agency. This is an amazing woman. “TALLAWAH Agency is an agency with the commitment to bridging the gap between the amplification of the global majority and the rich cultural tapestry of the Caribbean Diaspora via experimental events, consultancy + community-led initiatives”:

“What does it mean to be named as one of the BMC’s Excellence Honourees for 2025?

“Honestly, it came as such a huge surprise. When I first received the email, I thought it was someone trolling me. This year has been incredibly challenging for so many reasons, so to be recognised as one of the Excellence Honourees was such a lovely and humbling surprise. Tallawah Agency was created out of frustration at seeing how little cultural investment there was within the industries I work in, especially across music and the influencer ecosystem. I really wanted to change that. From the start, our goal has been to show brands what authentic investment in culture looks like and the kind of long-term impact it can have. It’s not just about shaping the industry, it’s about creating lasting change in the lives of the people and communities we serve.”

Is the wider industry doing enough to uplift and platform Black executives?

“I definitely think it’s getting better. I’ve seen a shift within the last few years, and it’s super-refreshing to see collectives such as BMC, Women Connect UK and the like amplify people behind the scenes, and it is not getting quieter either. There are more employee resource groups in companies that work overtime in ensuring that Black executives are thriving and are celebrated, which is so wonderful to see.” 

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about how to make it in music so far?

“The importance of staying grounded and not getting swept up in everything. This industry can sometimes make you feel like you have to prove yourself or fit a certain mould, but I’ve realised that carving your own path is a strength, not a threat. Music is beautiful and rewarding, but life is so much bigger than work. My deepest joy comes from my sisterhood, my pets, my family, my friends, and the moments I treasure outside of it all. Protecting that balance is what keeps me centred and allows me to show up fully when I step into work.”

And what’s the biggest myth about working in the music industry?

“The biggest myth about working in the industry is that it’s easy to break into. I remember being 17, fresh out of the BRIT School, applying for over 100 roles and hearing ‘no’ every single time. It would have been so easy to give up, but I wanted it badly enough to keep going. I enrolled in media programmes, took on weeks of work experience and kept pushing until I finally got my first ‘yes’. It wasn’t overnight, but that persistence paid off, and it taught me that relentless dedication opens doors you might not even see yet”. 

IN THIS PHOTO: Terry Appiasei/PHOTO CREDIT: Calvin Ceile

I am going to end with an interview with Terry Appiasei, CEO of Golden Boy Entertainment/Co-Founder of Black Pearl Music Group. I would suggest people to go and buy Music Week, where you can read more about the Black Music Coalition and their incredible legacy and role. More about this year’s impressive and diverse Honourees. Each of them doing incredible things in their field. A big reason why I wanted to spotlight them for this Black History Month. Celebrating the cultural impact of Black Music Coalition:

“You’re alongside lots of talented people on the Honourees list – how do you feel about the new wave of talent coming through?

“It’s definitely a privilege to be part of such a talented list. There’s loads of great Black talent coming through in the industry, all from different walks of life and with different goals. I think that the key to continued growth is to keep pushing forward and setting amazing examples, which the BMC allows to happen.”

Is the industry doing enough to ensure there is a diverse pool of new acts?

“In the current climate, I do not feel like there is a diverse pool of talent coming through. The Black music scene is not where it was a few years ago. However, there are loads of great artists that are yet to get their chance, and also loads of great artists flying the flag here and internationally. I think the industry could do more to nurture talent. This is definitely a cut-throat industry and sometimes people forget that there are real people from all walks of life behind the artists. Ensuring that artists are exposed to therapists, mental health professionals and even media and social media training could go a long way.”

What is the industry not focusing on enough?

“Mental health is an important one. The industry has so many ups and downs and not everyone can deal with the roller coaster, which in many unfortunate cases can lead to downward spirals.”

You have the keys to the industry for a day – what would you do?

“This seems like a lot of pressure for just one person, but I would put on a global music festival and every country in the world would be able to select an artist to represent them”.

Go and follow Black Music Coalition on Instagram. You can read more about the other amazing Honourees and why they were awarded and included. A body driven to combat systemic racism through the music industry and create equality to provide opportunities and voice for Black executives within in the U.K. music industry. As I say, I am fairly new to them, but it has been enriching and moving learning about their vital role in the music industry. For this Black History Month in the U.K., I wanted to dedicate some time…

 

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TO the remarkable Black Music Coalition.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

__________

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”.

View this post on Instagram

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

FEATURE:

 

 

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.

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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

__________

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 years 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.