FEATURE: Spotlight: Daria Kolosova

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Daria Kolosova

__________

AS I have been including…

a lot of female D.J.s in my Spotlight feature, I wanted to keep that ball rolling. One of the reasons is because there seems to be steps back when it comes to gender equality for D.J.s. In terms of inclusion on bills and opportunities. I wanted to highlight as many great D.J. queens as possible. One that you should keep your eyes out for is the sensational Daria Kolosova. A world-respected, successful and captivating Ukrainian-born D.J., I feel like this year is going to be a gigantic one. I do wonder whether Kolosova will put out any tracks or mixtapes. A lot of D.J.s are also artists and have their own albums and E.P.s. It does seem like Kolosova could well follow that path. As she is playing at Fabric in London on 7th February, it is a good time to spotlight this astonishing D.J. I will come to some interviews with her, starting with one from a while back. However, before getting there, I want to bring in some biography:

“Daria Kolosova’s 14 years of experience as a DJ, combined with her deep passion for electronic music, have shaped her into a remarkably versatile and proficient artist. Daria was born in the small town of Lutugino in eastern Ukraine. Her love for music was instilled by her father and her devotion to electronic music began at the age of 9 when she first heard “Diesel Power” by The Prodigy. Her passion for music deepened when her mother sent her to music school, where she studied piano. Yet being drawn to DJing from an early age, Daria embraced her vocation which led to her first performance in February 2010. Following this debut, she continued to actively perform in clubs across Lugansk and other cities while also organizing her own parties. After being inspired by Kyiv electronic scene and absorbing the vastness of electronic music genres, Daria honed her taste and recolated to Kyiv.

There, she became a resident DJ at Keller, performing under the alias Dar:k and co-launched the party series Materia UA. After actively being involved in the electronic music scene for some time, Daria started to use her own name, leaving her Dar:k moniker aside as an experimental project. She began headlining most of Kyiv’s underground nightclubs like K41, Closer, Otel and began expanding her reach internationally, performing outside of Ukraine and securing her place on the global stage, with bookings at high-profile events and venues across Europe and beyond. Currently, Daria is one of the most actively growing names in the techno scene. She has played some of the world’s most renowned institutions, with frequent bookings at Berghain, Bassiani, Fabric, London’s Fold and festivals like Tomorrowland, Junction 2, Awakenings, Time Warp and played at Amnesia, Hi and DC10 in her first Ibiza season. As a DJ, Daria never aims to deliver what is expected of her, but rather tries to convey her personal narratives through music. Daria views music as the most genuine method of communication, empathy and unity - a tool that helps her transform her distinctive energy into a story that can be shared with people on the dance floor. She desires to not only provide a danceable and enjoyable set but inspire and introduce people to something fresh and daring. Daria’s style is rooted in hard and groovy techno, often infused with elements of breakbeat, electro, hardcore, or jungle, making her performances rich in variety and unpredictability”.

It is worth going back a bit, so that we can see this progress and evolution. There are not many recent interviews with Daria Kolosova, so I am heading back a bit further. System 108 spoke with Kolosova about her work and career. This is a Techno D.J. but not one that is one-dimensional or limited. You never know what to expect from her. Someone that I hope to see play soon. From everything I hear about her, and listening to mixes she has put together, this is someone who is among the greatest D.J.s in the world:

“Do you remember the first track that you listed to that made you think "Oh yeah, this is techno"? What did it make you feel.

It was Das boot by U96. Back then I didn't know it was techno, I thought it was just some type of electronic music. But that track was different in terms of thrust and crazy energy. I heard it when I was about seven years old. My Dad was a big fan of electronic music and I found it listening to one of his tapes. It was a real revelation.

Have you played it in your sets?

Actually no! Its pretty slow and I haven't tried speeding up the bpm. Maybe I should? Ive never thought about it. (laughs)

After watching a lot of your interviews and listening to a lot of your sets I feel like limiting you to techno alone would be wrong. Do you yourself identify as a techno DJ?

Its obvious that I define my main genre as techno, while it can be quite diverse - from melodic to rough and groovy. But it has always been important to me that im not associated with only techno music. Thats why I like experimenting in my sets, I can play brake-beat and electro, then try some jungle or ambient, downtempo or house in an atypical slot for myself. People know I'm a techno-DJ, but they never know what to expect from me.

You left the "Culture of sound" school because of your tight performance schedule?

I temporarily stopped teaching about six months ago. At some point, it became difficult to combine active touring with teaching at school. At first, the idea of teaching DJing came to me as a side effect of quarantine. There were few performances, I wanted to occupy myself with something, and then I got an offer from the school. Moreover, I git the offer from the guys at "Culture of Sound", at whose events I performed several times, and they themselves are very involved in what they're doing. I loved their approach. I taught at the school for about a year, I liked doing it. I can definitely say that the experience was very interesting. It turned out that I'm not a bad teacher. (laughs)

And you're not only good in practice, but also a great theorist?

Yes, it's one thing to be able to play, but another thing to be able to share your knowledge correctly and easily, to teach someone. When you start teaching, you overestimate your knowledge, you start looking at it from a different angle, wow, it turns out I know so much.

And your students? What kind of people were they? Those who are eager to conquer the industry, or those who are just looking for a hobby?

They were all very different. I probably had the most active flow of students out of all the teachers in the two schools (one in Kharkov, the other in Kiev). That's why I had the opportunity to choose my students. The first lesson at school is introductory. The student meets the teacher, tells him about himself and why he came to school, the teacher shares what will happen in the learning process, and eventually they decide whether they are suitable for each other or not. That was very important to me. I didn't want to waste my knowledge. I collected all my experience bit by bit, and wanted to share the information I got over the years with the most motivated people. Of course, there were some students that came to me and said, "I want to tear up dance floors , I want swarming crowds of fans." So what they needed first of all was fame and Instagram followers. I told them "I'm sorry, but we have different paths". That approach isn't really about culture and music. We are the "Culture of Sound", and thats exactly what we're about. But there were also some students who shared touching and motivating stories about how they got to know music, about their love for it. I was happy to take on training those people. There were also those who came and said directly: I don't understand DJing, I've only just started listening to electronic music, but I'd like to try and see if it will work or not. Thats also an honest position and I was also ready to work with such people.

Can you name two or three moments in your career that you consider crucial for yourself?

The first such moment occurred in 2014 or 2015, when I decided to quit commercial music, and I was invited to perform in Krasnodar for the first time under the new nickname Dar:k. Then I indicated to myself that I wanted to move in a different direction and play techno. The second gig was my cooperation with Nastya. She offered to perform back2back, and for the first time we played in that format at the Arma17 birthday party at the Funkhaus in Berlin. And the third turning point was my performance at the Berlin HOR. I don't understand how or why, but this video has gained 670,000 views. I just came there for fun and played music that I really liked.

Haven't you started writing music yet?

I have! Seryozha and I were listening to music at home, just fooling around, and he says, "Why don't we write music together? That would be fun!" Yes, l agree. But in this area I feel his advantage and so far I'm a bit shy. Therefore, I want to focus on production again, to tighten up my knowledge. Seryozha constantly works at home, for example, right now he is finishing work on remixes, and he inspires me very much. On the other hand, I have a very active touring activity right now, and it's extremely difficult to find time to write. I sincerely admire people who tour a lot and still have time to write music. I don't understand how they do it.

Who inspires you?

Seryozha is certainly one of my favourite producers and DJs. I also like the creativity of Blawan — he's very talented. Lately I've been digging more into techno from the 90s and 2000s and I'm more interested in artists whose names are unfamiliar to me. I discover new names, a new sounds. I am inspired by what comes to me at the moment”.

I would be interested in reading something new with Daria Kolosova and how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected her and her home nation. In terms of playing in Kyiv and whether that is possible. I am staying in 2023 when it comes to interviews, as there does not to have been much written since then. I will head to Resident Advisor. Kolosova was asked about the invasion of Ukraine and how that has impacted her. Or she shared her views on the invasion and why it has impacted her especially hard. I do think that this year is going to be one where she release music, plays some of the biggest venues and festivals of her career, and collaborates with fellow D.J.s. It is a really exciting point in her career:

“Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Daria Kolosova was one of the brightest stars of Kyiv's incredible techno scene, when the city was among the best places for the genre anywhere in the world (and remains so, even under duress). Now living in Berlin, Kolosova's style and sound feel both timeless and progressive. She's been DJing since she was a teenager—after falling in love with dance music via her dad's collection—and has built up a style that has taken her to the world's most renowned techno clubs and festivals. In spite of her popularity, Kolosova does things differently to many of her peers. She's spoken about her respect for and recognition of techno's origins, and her DJing style pays homage to the genre's history. Her sets span eras and continents, with a '90s bent that encompasses not just hard, rolling techno but breakbeats, electro, IDM and prog. Her RA Podcast is a brilliant collection of old and new, from Goa trance to Julia Govor, expertly mixed with a storyteller's hand.

What have you been up to recently?

Lately I've been quite busy with touring around the world, besides my gigs in Europe for the last three months I did tours in Australia, US, South America. On the one hand I'm grateful to be able to travel again and do what I love after two years of the pandemic, but at the same time I've started to feel the need to find a healthy balance between my tours and personal life because it can be super exhausting at times. So I'm learning how to take care of myself, doing yoga, cold exposure and trying to dedicate more time to new projects and studio in the future.

What's one club or party that had a major impact on you as an artist? Playing at Berghain was a dream come true. It made a huge impact on me because I used to travel a lot from Kyiv to Berlin to go there to experience it and learn from bigger DJs. Lately I've enjoyed playing at BASEMENT in New York so much that I literally didn’t want to finish my set. I'm eagerly looking forward to being back. What's one social or political cause you want the world to pay more attention to? There are many things going on in the world, but the war in Ukraine is the most painful topic for me. Unfortunately there's not much news and updates about Ukraine anymore, and the lack of information makes people believe that the war is almost over or the situation has become better. It has also become more complicated to share information about the war on social media as it could be deleted or statistics of views would be significantly low. I just want to remind everyone that the war in Ukraine is going on and we need your support”.

This is a rare case of including older interviews for someone I am spotlighting. I do hope there are 2026 chats with Daria Kolosova. I feel this is a crucial point in her career and we will see big things from her. I do want to finish with another 2023 interview from Fabric London. In it “Nastia and Daria Kolosova give an insight into Kiev’s burgeoning electronic music scene”. This was published nearly a few years ago, so I am aware they are referring to Kyiv as ‘Kiev’:

“Something special is happening in eastern Europe. While artists like [a:rpia:r] have been the key proponents for a stripped-back style of house in Bucharest since the mid-2000s, in recent years there’s been a new electronic music scene developing in Kiev. The city’s favoured style is house and techno, a sound that’s frequently championed at parties like CXEMA and Ukraine’s premier nightclub, Closer. Few artists have done more to put the city on the electronic music map than Nastia. As well as being Ukraine’s biggest techno DJ, she helps run Strichka, the beloved annual festival from the Closer team that brings together a killer cast of local talents and international guests. Recently she’s found a sparring partner in Daria Kolosova, another Kiev selector who’s frequently found spinning colourful techno and electro alongside Nastia. Ahead of the pair’s upcoming head-to-head in Room One, they told us more about their musical backgrounds, how they first met, and why electronic music is thriving in their hometown right now. What styles of music were you exposed to through childhood? Nastia: I was born in 1987. My sisters were listening to pop music at the time, but from what they had I liked Enigma. Then The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim came out. I used to collect movie soundtracks too – that was my passion. Daria Kolosova: My passion for music came from my father. He was a bassist in a rock band, and used to be a DJ. He took me to rehearsals when I was only 3. I grew up on my dad’s records – stuff like Pantera and Metallica, or electronic music such as The Prodigy, Groove Armada and Crystal Method. I went to musical school for piano classes, and DJing became the next natural step in my relationship with music. How did you first discover electronic music in Kiev? Nastia: For me, it happened in around 2005 or 2006. I started to travel from Donetsk to Kiev to party. There were several clubs, which I would now consider places playing mainstream music. There was also an underground scene, but I was removed from that. I was living in Donetsk, and started DJing in February 2005. Before that I was a dancer, and met all the local DJs who showed me this wonderful lifestyle. 

 

Daria Kolosova: In 2010 I came to Kiev from my hometown Lugansk. I visited Cinema Club with my friends. It was a huge underground club playing big techno, hard techno and drum & bass. This was a super new experience because there’s nothing like this in my hometown. My second time was a Sunday daytime party at Closer. I’d just moved to Kiev, and this was a revelation for me. Beautiful people, amazing vibe and music. One of the residents dropped Call That Love (Rob Rives remix) by X-press 2, which I’ll associate with Closer forever. How did you obtain records when you first started collecting? Nastia: I started to collect records quite late, in 2010. I was travelling a lot and mostly going to record shops. I also used to order from online shops, but it would take three weeks to receive them. Nowadays it’s easy – I adore Discogs for that. At the moment there’s also Closer Record Store, which is run by serious diggers. Daria Kolosova: I started to buy records when I was travelling – from small no-name music stores to big ones like Spacehall Berlin. There are a few vinyl shops in Kiev. My favourites are Closer Record Store and Diskultura. Closer is a super cosy place with new releases and rare items, perfect for “diggers”. Diskultura is the oldest multi-genre store in the city with a big collection of old-school techno, electro and more. It seems like electronic music is going through a golden period in Kiev at the moment. How would you describe the scene right now? Daria Kolosova: It’s a really historical moment happening in Ukraine now. The post-Maidan financial crisis helped the discovery of a generation of local talents, because organisers didn’t have the money for big names. That’s why we have such a strong local scene. For example, at the recent CXEMA x Boiler Room rave, 4,000 people came for a local line-up. Young ravers are open-minded and educated, they don’t want to hear something expected. This builds to a raw phenomenon in Ukraine, and we are very lucky to be part of it. Nastia: Golden period – it’s true. Ukraine finally got on the map of the worldwide electronic music scene. It’s been a fast rise: in 2013 Closer club opened its doors, and by 2014 we had Strichka Festival, CXEMA, Rhythm Bureau and a few more local promoters. Now it’s huge, fresh and amazing. People here really dance, I don’t see people express themselves like this anywhere else. The club community is educated, curious, united and cultural. Strict face control at Closer helps keep the vibe on a high level. CXEMA keeps it raw with local artists. Brave! Factory and Strichka are the best festivals right now. I must admit we have very good residents: most of the time they are better than the international guests. People’s tastes and those who run the scene are always stepping forward. For me, Ukraine is the most interesting clubbing spot at the moment. We’ve travelled to the city a few times specifically to spend the weekend at Closer. What do you think makes this club so special? Nastia: The team behind it. You can feel they do it for themselves – not for people or business, but for themselves to be able to live the life they want, and do something for the history and culture. They were the ones who built the scene in 2013. The team used to do parties before, but everything started seriously with the club. I don’t know any stronger family-style relations than them. In five years, I’ve never seen any conflict in their group. They are just perfect”.

Most of my Spotlight features have new interviews and we can give a sense of where an artist is heading. However, with D.J.s, there is perhaps less in the way of continual interviews, unless they put music out, though Daria Kolosova is one of the world’s most important D.J.s, so I wanted to spotlight her. Given the continuing violence in Ukraine and Russia’s invasion, I thought it especially important to discuss a Ukrainian D.J. Go and follow her on Instagram and keep up with her mixes on Soundcloud. I really do feel this year will see Daria Kolosova creating some of the best memories and experiences of her life. If you do get a chance to see her play then please do. Among the queens of the decks, the fabulous Daria Kolosova is…

ONE of the absolute best.

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Follow Daria Kolosova

FEATURE: Spotlight: Clara Kimera

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Clara Kimera

__________

PERHAPS not known…

PHOTO CREDIT: Louise Sauvard

by everyone, Clara Kimera is someone you will want to follow as we go through this year. The French musician is the co-founder of the duo, Agar Agar. As a solo artist, she is inspired by the chimera, reflecting the dreamlike nature of her music. At the start of last year, Kimera released her debut solo E.P., Dial 8. There have been a couple of collaborative E.P.s. Working with notinbed, unknown reasons came out in August. I Pray 42 with helen island arrived last month. I am going to start with an interview from Glamcult from early last year. They spoke with an artist making her first big move as a solo artist. Talking about Dial 8, Clara Kimera said “I refuse to be in the madhouse of the inhuman. I refuse to live with the wolves of the market place”. Even though she is a music veteran and has been around for a while, her solo work is a new venture and chapter. Glamcult was ready to introduce “her soul and subconscious to a synesthetic world”:

“Please tell us about Dial 8!

Dial 8 is my first solo EP. I spent a few years working on it, trying to be as sincere as possible and to find my true musical identity. It’s not like I found it, but it was my first try ! I love experimenting and I loved working on music on my own. The subject is therefore more personal, it deals with my most profound fears, OCD and gentle creepy pasta creatures.

“I can be whoever I want to be,” you powerfully enunciate in the album’s opening track. Is the jester, also seen on the cover art, an archetype you resonate with?

I love the history of the jester. I am intrigued by the paradoxical and ironic image of what he stands for. He’s fooling around and joking, but deep down, he is full of sin and sorrow. This cynical aspect of him is very modern in our society. It really talks to me. I also love the Middle Age imagery.

You commission a lot of your cover art from artists, tattoo artists, graphic designers, and digital artists – what is your vision for the visual representations of your music? Where and what mediums do you get inspired by?

I love collaborating with different artists because it brings a visual dimension to the table that is so attached to the music. I am very passionate about image and art, and that’s why I always want my musical projects to have a very strong identity. I love to control everything in terms of image because I usually know what I want pretty easily. I get inspired by old manuscripts from the Middle Ages (seeing one irl is so crazy), manga drawers such as Asumiko Nakamura and Kazuo Umezu, painters like James Ensor, and movies by Gus Van Sant.

Distortion and grain tint the album with an element of haunting, a hypnotic eeriness lingers in the hard-hitting bass line – even on the last track, “Drive Safe,” which is initially linguistically more about an element of care. How does the tension of the familiar and the unfamiliar, creepy or eerie, inform this project or your music generally?

I love to have a tense instrumental with a very soft subject, or the contrary. I love how words can melt into something different than expected. To sing words that reassure with a distorted guitar

Turning back to the first track, who do you want to be? How have you constructed your identity as a musician and an individual?
I want to be as sincere as possible. I think that’s the main thing I want to convey. Sometimes musical projects are so built and flawless I can’t seem to relate with them. I like dusty shelves and imperfections. I like when it’s palpable. I want to be relatable.

I can’t not mention Agar Agar – I actually got to see you guys perform in Istanbul in 2023, and it was amazing – how do you sonically separate Agar Agar from your solo identity as Clara Kimera?

I think it’s pretty simple for me to separate both as Agar Agar’s set up is analogic and electronic and I come from a more acoustic background. Grew up with lots of shoegaze, cold wave, and folk artists like Slowdive, Joy Division, Sybille Baier… Going solo made me go back to a more organic approach, hugging the guitar and putting a lot more of my influences in it. It felt really natural”.

I am going to move to COEVAL and their interview with Clara Kimera and notinbed around their collaborative E.P., unknown reasons. It is amazing how Kimera can collaborate with others and produce this variety of music so seamlessly. However, I think her most important moments through this year will come when she is working solo. I just feel she is at her strongest when her voice and vision is at the front:

“How do you find the music scene in Paris?

Notinbed: Cool. The last few years it’s been growing. It’s the first time in a while that it’s been a cool scene in France.

Clara: I think there are some cool people to make music with, but not enough independent labels in my opinion! The scene is fun though.

What do you feel like caused the shift in the French music scene?

Notinbed: There’s a new rap scene that’s developed in France. In France, rap, two and a half years ago became way more open and open to new types of beats. It became more open with club and experimental stuff so that opened people up, like producers, to different types of music, and gave different people a place to shine. The club scene has gotten cooler; there are more cool events - the scene isn’t just rap anymore. It’s transitioned from rap to more of a club scene. Most people coming up have the same objectives and are a similar age, so it feels like a team. It didn’t feel like that before.

How do you find the French music scene compared to those other cities?

Notinbed: The French scene is very precise, kind of intellectual - it can be less fun than English music, and a bit more serious.

Clara: I feel like it’s still very traditional, meaning it’s still pretty hard to make it there if you don’t sing in French.
How did you initially meet and start to collaborate?

Notinbed: Clara contacted me because she liked one of my songs, so she wanted to work together. I knew her from her band and she messaged me about a new project and then it really just flowed from there. For example, normally with an artist you throw away most of what you do to keep the best tracks for release, but with Clara, they didn’t have to throw away anything.

What message do you want to relay with your sound?

Notinbed: For me, it’s just about trying to give emotion. Music is the best way to make anybody feel better, so the more people that my music touches, the more people that I hope to make feel better. It’s like a plaster for the brain.

Clara: I don’t think it’s a message that can be translated with words. I think it’s just sharing some things that we put all of our heart into with the hope that it can be understood”.

Prior to getting to an interview from November, I want to get to The Line of Best Fit and their spotlight of Clara Kimera’s eye 2 eye single. If anyone reading his has not heard the music of Kimera and what she has put out as part of a duo, solo, or with other artists, then do go and explore her work. She is this fantastic visionary and creative who we will hear a lot more from soon:

“Kimera draws on a constellation of influences, including Hans Bellmer’s uncanny doll photography. She’s also deeply shaped by manga and anime, particularly Soul Eater, Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!, and the dreamlike spirituality of Mamoru Oshii’s film Angel’s Egg, where emotion takes physical form. “I love how Atsushi Okubo illustrates emotional spaces [in Soul Eater] like fear, anxiety, pain in vivid landscapes,” she says.

“There’s invisible places in our heads that can make us evil: a long infinite hallway of stairs, two people slowly dancing to a weird jazz tune.” She likens the song’s themes to Twin Peaks’ extradimensional realm The Black Lodge, “it’s like the thin world between life and death…[in the Lodge] there is a person talking to you backwards and you’re just casually sitting on a chair. I like the fact that we can make images out of these spiritual projections.”

The song inhabits a liminal plane, while its video – directed entirely inside The Sims by Kimera – builds a world to match. Kimera has been modding the game since childhood, once running a Sims blog that recreated MTV shows like Room Raiders and Pimp My Ride. “The visual possibilities are endless, I’ve always felt like the director of my own film.” As she grew older, her builds became more elaborate; discovering the global modding community unlocked a new realm of collaboration. “It’s one of my favourite things about the internet. Meeting people that truly get your POV and artistic references,” she explains.

Kimera’s own universe continued to expand to the electronic community. Recently featured on Canadian trance auteur TDJ’s debut album, with single “On and On (You Lie)”, it placed her alongside genre heavyweights like Hannah Diamond, Danny L Harle, and 8485 – a significant arrival into the orbit of hyperpop and dance music.

For “eye 2 eye”, she stages scenes of horror, sorrow, and longing inside the simulation. The video oscillates between eerie and playful with uncanny digital choreography mirroring the track’s tension. Still, the single feels like a distillation of her own evolving identity that is darkly whimsical yet entirely her own. “I never really know where I’m headed,” she admits. “But this feels like the natural evolution of finding more and more of myself and what I want to share”.

I am going to end with Church Electronic and their interview from November. Talking about her upcoming projects, Clara Kimera did mention I Pray 42 with helen island and working with him. That has come out. She also said this: “And my next EP is almost ready. I just have to finish one song. It's like seven songs, and it's really inspired by Japanese Shoegaze, LA, and horror movies”:

“Some fruit trees take four years to bear their first fruit—whether it’s due to insufficient sunlight, incorrect watering, root constraint, a tree takes time to mature. One could liken Clara Kimera’s trajectory to a tree that has been steadily rooting. Earlier this year, the artist debuted her first project outside of the Parisian electronic duo Agar Agar. With a decade in the music industry under her belt, she’s exploded back on the scene with two EPs and a handful of singles in a new, raw direction. Drawing inspiration from early internet culture, tarot, creepypasta stories and the sincerity of the jester, enter Clara’s world of mischief where anything goes.

The first song, “King Jester,” off of Clara Kimera’s solo EP, Dial 8,  closes with a sample from an early 1996 Youtube documentary Dirty Girls:

It’s a sample from a documentary that appears through Clara Kimera’s EP Dial 8, released earlier this year. This interpolated sampling lends a voice of sincerity that only adolescence can replicate: of blindly trying to find oneself in a world fraught with those who seem to already carry an opinion. The documentary, an early Youtube cult classic, centers on a group of 13-year-old Los Angeles-native riot grrrls—part of the 1990s underground feminist punk movement, inspired sonically by Joan Jett and Siouxsie Sioux and politically by anti-establishment ideals and challenging the then-male-dominated punk scene. A purveyor of early internet archival works, Clara Kimera’s tongue in cheek choice of sampling paired with downbeat and post-apocalyptic chords create an atmosphere that’s not unlike the feeling of pirouetting at the edge of a very, very steep cliff. These early ideas from riot grrrl permeate the EP: of plainly being true to oneself despite the world telling you that you should act and be a certain way.

Her new EPs this year are the maxim of Clara’s artistic transformation in a new direction. Where Agar Agar was polished and almost glossy in production, Clara Kimera’s latest works are raw and driven by acoustic elements. It’s one that is characterized by sweet-but-threatening complex rhythmic structures and angular phrasing, drawing on her ability to create haunting layered melodies on “aside” and her latest single “eye2eye.”

This latest release, co-produced with 888rks, is centered on two beings in the mise en abyme of life and death, as they are listening to the track that killed them. With eye2eye’s music video accompaniment being visualized completely within the Sims, it draws on the artist's love for the video game, apparent from her middle school blog dedicated to recreating early 2000s MTV shows like Room Raiders, Made, and Pimp my Ride in the aforementioned meta-human simulation.

You produced a few things with notinbed this year. How did that collaboration come around?

I was just randomly digging music two years ago, and I ended up just really, really digging that song where he sampled this really famous old French video about this little kid that just lost his goldfish, and the goldfish name is Mustache, and the kid is so sad and it’s devastating.  He's filming the aquarium, and he's like, ‘Mustache is dead. He's going to Goldfish Paradise.’ And this video is soul crushing, but so funny, but really, really devastating, and I love this video so much. It's really, it's just so sad. This little kid is realizing what death is.

And so he sampled this video, so I was just randomly listening to music and it struck me, and it was like, who sampled this? Who sampled Mustache? It was with ambient songs. It was so sad. And I was like, this is genius. This is so good. So I think I just messaged him on Insta and I was like, ‘Hey, I love Mustache.’ I was like, this is so out there. And so we just collaborated really quickly. It was just very intuitive, the two of us working on songs together.

Where did you record your latest project?

I mostly did everything in Paris, and in LA actually. But, I've been going to LA every year since I was 18. I met these girls back then. They were my besties and I was living at their place. They had an art gallery in Highland Park, but it was my first time there. I was so fascinated by LA. I loved it so much. And then my best friend, who's French, got married there and is living there. So I go once a year at least for a couple of months, and I love it there. It's kind of my second house. I don't have my license though, so I'm being passively driven by people.

It's definitely special. If I stay there for too long, my brain kind of explodes, but at the same time,. It's just so different from everything I've ever seen or grew up with. It is just very touching to me. Probably the fact that it's just so spacious and European cities tend to be so tiny, so restrictive, so narrow, and this space, this amount of landscape, and it makes me want to breathe really fresh air. Just the whole aesthetic, I guess it really influenced my music and just me as a whole.

On the songs that you've released this year, the vocals have almost become the beat on, no one belongs here, or aside, that acapella keeps developing.

No one belongs… it’s kind of crazy. I think I was feeling really tired that day, and it was nighttime, and I like night sessions. But not too late, I’m kind of a grandma. I like to wake up really early and read some stuff in my bed. I am really an early person. I want my day to be very, very long, I guess. So I was really tired and I didn't really want to be there. And I don't know what came out of me, but I started screaming my lungs out because the instrumental was so good, and something happened that day.

I don't know, I kind of went out of my body. I recorded one time, so there's no lyrics. It doesn't mean anything. It's just like this scream of the heart and that's it and we never ever touched it again afterwards. So it's really a one shot thing where I just scream so hard, but I don't even think I can do that again. I think it's really a one time experience type shit.

You have a really distinct sound and intentional aesthetic going into this new era. Do you know what kind of world you're looking to build or any key visual or musical inspirations?

What I’ve been listening to right now, definitely what influenced me recently is I love Shoegaze Japanese music these days. I've been really, really listening to Plastic Tree a lot. Worldpeace DMT, bod and this guy Neo Lapse. my dead girlfriend, all of these dudes, I've been obsessed. Obsessed. Yeah, these three bands I've been really listening to. My next project is really influenced by that, for sure”.

Such a remarkable artist, you feel influences from cinema and art in Clara Kimera’s music. I guess working with different artist brings all these new elements and influences into her own work. I am interested to hear her new E.P. and what she has in store this year. A distinct talent who we all should be aware of, go and listen to her stuff. It is incredible, and I guarantee that you…

WILL be hooked.

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FEATURE: Spotlight: Prewn

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Silas Ray Burns

Prewn

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ONE thing I would say…

PHOTO CREDIT: Harry Wohl

about Prewn prior to highlighting her as an artist to watch this year, is I hope she gets her own dedicated YouTube channel. As I type (1st January), there is on the explodingunderground channel and there is not a lot in the way of independence on that front. She does have a YouTube channel, technically, though her music videos are not on there. Just the basic tracks.  I know artists who do have videos on a label’s site or someone else’s but, as an artist being tipped for major success, there will be that desire for a dedicated Prewn YouTube channel where everything is pulled onto it. In any case, she is on the bill for Dot to Dot 2026. A chance for U.K. festival-goers to see this amazing American artist in the flesh. At the end of last year, there was a lot of excitement around Prewn. Many tipping her as someone who is going to be hard to ignore. Prewn is Massachusetts-based Izzy Hagerup. Her new album, System, came out in October. Even though this is her sophomore album, many people are just discovering her now. I want to start out with an October interview from Post Thrash. As they say near the top of their interview: “She’s reaching for a sensation, a thing that she can’t shake out of her head, an obsession with the shape of music, of her music, of just the right note that clicks the right emotion or feel in her body and soul”:

“Izzy Hagerup, who makes music under the name Prewn, released a new album earlier this month on Exploding In Sound Records. A Hampshire College graduate originally from Glen Ellyn, IL, she spent years in the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts, before recently relocating to Los Angeles. The ebb and flow of bands in the Pioneer Valley has given the area a reputation for musical fecundity. When I lived there I learned that Dinosaur Jr. is from the area, even once spotting them casually playing on the lawn of the Amherst Common. They just set up with no stage, kind of under a tree, and in the grass. They just felt like playing. It wasn’t a crazy crowd, and I don’t even know if they promoted it. I feel like in that moment, they reflected a large part of the attitude of artists in the Valley; they wanted to just play, and fueling that obsession was an essential proclivity to exist. That’s what Prewn’s sophomore album System feels like to me.

JE: Can you tell me a little bit about the place or places you grew up and how you grew into your relationship with music?

IH: Yeah. I grew up in suburbia in Chicago. It's called Glen Ellyn. It's a fine town, it's suburbia. I started playing cello when I was in second grade, and my mom was kinda like, you gotta play until like eighth grade. I was like, whatever, this is stupid, I don't wanna lug this big cello everywhere. I was late to orchestra every morning. I didn't really feel like I fit into the classical world, and wasn't good at practicing, but I stuck with it till eighth grade, and then I was like, okay, I'm gonna play guitar now.

I had a pretty rough period, I don't really know why, in my freshman year of high school, and I  stopped going to school. It was a whole thing. That's when I got into playing guitar just for fun. My dad was a musician my whole life, growing up, just more on his own. So that was around me, but I abandoned the cello. Got into guitar and then I moved to Northern California because I got shipped out there 'cause my mom was like, I don't know what to do with you.

JE: You were causing havoc or something?

IH: I think I was just like so depressed and not getting better, and I think I was probably causing some havoc. I was always the easy child, but something picked in at that time. It's a blur, just being a bad girl, and I think, yeah, I moved in with my aunt in Northern California for a couple of years.

I was playing guitar more, and I took some guitar lessons. I wrote one song in high school, but I was definitely not taking music seriously, like something I would ever do.  I'm getting used to that idea now, but it was a surprise. Then I moved to Western Mass for school. I went to Hampshire College. I worked on it more, and then I was in my first band called Blood Mobile with my friend Tuna, and that was my first experience tapping into a DIY scene.

It was more like silly, I wanna die rock, some type of music, but yeah. Then over time I got more familiar and close to the people in the music scene, and realized I could make my own band. It's been like a very slow burn of hesitantly, starting to take music more seriously and face all the things that are scary about it like being seen in that way.

JE: So you solely wrote and recorded System, the album during stretches of bedroom sessions. When did you know you were recording an album, and how did you commit to the idea of creating an album?

IH: Yeah. It actually was after the fact that I decided that this was gonna be an album. I was just looking through [the songs], and I was like, that's so many pieces in the air. What do I have now? I do want let things go, so I can have more emotional mental space for the new. I was looking through all my songs that I hadn't really taken seriously as stuff that could go out. Then I made a collection that got narrower and narrower of these songs, and I'm like, it'd be cool to redo these in some way, but I don't think there's a way that I could do them like this again. I like them like this. They just became this bundle of songs. I kind of make sense of most things and my songs after the fact. When I'm writing, I'm often like, “I don't know.” Then afterwards I'm like, “Ohhh, I see, I can connect these dots and I'm gonna run with it.” So I see now after making what the album is I see the connection and that came from different sides and faces of the same experience I was having, which I think is just a reflection of being in my mid-twenties and fucking making mistakes and learning from them and being childish and being wise and getting wiser and making mistakes again and struggling and feeling lost. I think it's a reflection of my experience. Becoming an adult or something [laughs].

JE: How important is it, was it for you to record mostly alone? Though you've said that you might wanna go into a studio in the future. But for this record, you pretty much recorded all by yourself.

IH: Yeah. One of the most rewarding times when I get into the zone and I’m creating a song or writing something like that is simply the highest high for me. It just feels so good. I think I'm just at a point in my life where accessing that place and that level of freedom and creativity is just something I can only really do alone. It's something I'm working on, and I think it's the same way I operate, just in general.

I'm gonna close up a little bit with other people. I think with my first album, I also did that all alone. I think I had more of a pride of I did this album myself! Now this album I'm at a point where I see so much value in being able to collaborate and work with people and give up a little bit of control. That now is a scary challenge I would like to take on. I get very attached to demos and I just do feel like there's an energy in them that I often find really difficult to recreate. 'Cause when you're recording something, there's just the magic to it that when you're trying to recreate, it always loses something for me, but I really wanna get to the point where I can recreate something and feel like it's gaining something. That also takes practice and getting comfortable with giving up control and working with other people creatively.

But I now see how that's such a beautiful way to let something blossom, even more. I'm just also very attached to how good it feels to be completely alone and like time disappears and everything's happening just very intuitively, and it just feels like one of my favorite things ever to do”.

Perhaps one of the most difficult things with Prewn is whether they are a solo artist or band. 2023’s Through the Windows was a full band effort. However, System is Izzy Hagerup on her own. The Big Takeover ran an interview with Prewn at the end of December. I am new to her work, so I am trying to piece everything together. This amazing sound and a brilliant album with System, I am looking forward to seeing what this year holds in store:

“So, in 2025 is Prewn you, or is Prewn a band?

IZZY: The first album, I started Prewn and it was a band. It was with my ex-boyfriend and Mia. I had already made and recorded Through the Window. All the songs existed before I made the band. The band kind of fell apart for various reasons. We all love each other, it’s all good, but I think Prewn essentially is my baby. It’s my one main outlet. At this point, it’s a band, but it’s a shifting band. I’m the one that stays. I’ve been stretching my muscles a lot and learning a lot in the process of making new bands. Now I moved across the country, of course, and I’m just kind of trying to keep it a little bit open. I’m gonna make a band in Berlin for the Europe tour. At its core, making the music that is part of the Prewn project is the process that I’m addicted to and, on a soul level, need to do: make these songs and record them all in isolation on some level. I wanna be part of other projects more, I wanna collaborate as Prewn more, but it is the one thing that is deeply personal to me. Maybe I have some commitment issues, too. Being in a band with people, shit happens, and I’m like, this needs to forever be a thing, and I know that I can count on myself.

You did an album release show recently. Are the people that played with you at that show who you consider to be the touring band or were those just people who were available to play the release show with you?

IZZY: The band in Western Mass has been as it is for a year, give or take. I love everyone in the band so much; they’re so sweet and so good. They did both the shows on the East Coast. I’ve been putting myself in this situation of having to figure it out, and I’m figuring it out as I go, but I’m actually gonna fly them out to do this West Coast tour because it’s just feeling so good. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time, but I am excited. Seeing different people’s interpretation of the music is so cool and exciting. There’s just so much to learn from people, and being in a band is like being in a relationship on some level. There’s just this intimacy.

Are you the type of person to continuously write? The songs on System have been around for a little while, do you have another record already in mind or even started?

IZZY: Kinda. I have so many songs that haven’t been recorded yet. When I’ve tried to record, there’s just such a nuance; I’ve recorded a lot of songs, but I’m still just like, “That’s not it.” The thing with this album that does feel so special is a lot of the songs were made in the moment. The recording is from the night they were created. I feel like there’s this energy that I can’t replicate. I’m starting to look through my stuff and it’s growing, but I definitely want to approach the next album in a different way and push myself. I guess I have this idea that bands go to a studio and it’s a really thought-out thing, but there’s a magic to spontaneity. I don’t really know how to do it otherwise. Maybe I need to start leaning into what does work for me instead of trying to do what I think I should do. I’m always feeling like I’m doing something wrong, but what if I stop doubting everything all the time?

Is there a particular time of the day that you like to record?

IZZY: Definitely. I always want to get right into it, and I think that mentality isn’t helpful sometimes. No matter what time I get there, it’s really not until 10 or 11 PM that anything’s happening. Sometimes I need to be there for 8 hours to feel aimless and stuck, but there’s a magic in the night. I wish it worked otherwise. Maybe I just need to leave the mornings for practicing or learning some new solo, but the creativity seems to come when everyone’s asleep and I’m as isolated as I can possibly be.

As the year winds to end, what are some of the highlights of 2025 for you?

IZZY: I want 2026 to be more “tapped in.” 2025 was so absorbed in my own changes and the move. But the Burlington scene is amazing—*Greg Freeman*, Robber Robber, and Dari Bay all put out music. Something magical is happening up there”.

In highlighting Prewn as an artist to watch this year, is how there is no real certainty regarding her future output. I shall not put this interview in this feature, but I would recommend everyone check out Stereogum and their interview, where Prewn tells the story behind every track on System. These words stood out: “The 28-year-old musician talks about her work with equal frustration and awe. "It's been a slow burn," she says of her music-making journey. In second grade, she started taking cello lessons and as a teenager moved to the guitar. She wrote her first song when she was 15 and didn’t return to songwriting until college. She studied psychology and writing, but never expected to be a musician. Even now, as she’s in the thick of it, it all seems like a mystery to her. "I don't know how I'll ever write a song again," she says, revealing she currently has no writing process. "I really feel writer's block all the time, especially right now. But, I know I'll get through it,” she says. She speaks about her artistic tension as something both inevitable and insatiable. It's the same hunger that fuels her songs”. Born in Chicago, this is an artist very much in demand in the wider world. With a European and U.K. tour scheduled for later in the year, I may see if I can catch her in London in May. The Guardian highlighted Prewn as one of their artist to watch for this year. Laura Snapes interviewed Izzy Hagerup/Prewn about her “bitterly optimistic indie-rock of Prewn”:

“Hagerup is self-deprecating and wildly expressive – her first espresso has just kicked in – and occasionally talks in circles around her latest album, System. To write, she says, she has to not necessarily know what she’s writing about: from opening song Easy, “I was sniffing a flower but I snorted a bug” is the kind of emotional trap door she sketches so well. Looking back on what the album might mean now, she sees “moments of struggle” as well as bird’s-eye views of the challenges of living in intentionally oppressive systems.

“In the moment, I didn’t realise I was depressed – it’s like watching your hair grow, you don’t realise you’ve gotten to a place that isn’t how you like to feel,” she says. “I would have a lot of shame about feeling so depressed when there’s so much beauty in the world. But then that’s just another way to judge yourself when you’re already low.”

The making of System sounded pretty painful: Hagerup staying up all night, forcing herself to write until some scrap of muse appeared to her. Looking back, she thinks it’s a result of the “immense pressure” people put themselves under in their mid-20s as they figure life out. “Hopefully as I’m getting older and more comfortable, I can approach music from less of a desperate … ” she mimes wrenching something out of the ground. “A lot of fear got wrapped up in it, but now it feels back to how it used to, like music is for the joy of the moment.”

Hagerup came of age musically in the famed western Massachusetts scene, where she stuck around after college far longer than she had planned. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore used to live there; J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr was a regular sight on the bike paths near where Hagerup lived.

“He wears his helmet!” she says. “I love this area so much. It’s beautiful but it doesn’t have enough going on to be distracting. I hadn’t been in a DIY scene before I moved here. I was like, what, we just get together and make this happen on our own?! Seeing all the work that went into the community was so beautiful. It totally changed the course of my life, and it gave me a lot of courage to do music on a more serious level.” Nevertheless, she moved to Los Angeles in the summer: “I was like, what if I went somewhere that I could never imagine myself?”

Since releasing her debut, Through the Window, in 2023, Hagerup has become used to her growing fandom seeming shocked by the darkness of her music. “I think the most powerful music is the most honest music,” she shrugs. “If it’s getting a little dark in here: well, chase that.” But as much as she sings about giving in, System is full of reminders not to fear “the sound of your broken, beating, dripping, heaving heart”, as she sings on Don’t Be Scared.

“That’s another thing I really value about music,” she says. “If you’re not going deep into the dark side, I don’t know how you can go deep into the light side”.

I think that this year is going to be a very busy one for Prewn. Even if Izzy Hagerup is never 100% sure how much new music will come and what is next, I do feel we will get another album and there will be a lot of activity from her. System is a brilliant album that has picked up some positive reviews. Go and check out this amazing artist. You will be hearing a lot more from Prewn as we…

MOVE through 2026.

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Follow Prewn

FEATURE: Spotlight: False Reality

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

False Reality

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IT is interesting seeing…

PHOTO CREDIT: Rachell Smith

the dates False Reality have coming up. The London Hardcore band formed in 2023, and I must admit, they are new on my radar. I am instantly struck by them, and I know many others are tipping the band for great success this year. Consisting of Rachel Rigby (vocals), Dave Connolly (guitar), Joe Cornwell (bass) and Louis Dale, I think a lot of the artists recommend for this year are Pop are genres around that. Hardcore bands that mix in Metal and Thrash are seen as niche or not mainstream (translation: palatable). I do think that False Reality are such a refreshing and interesting band. Last year was a big one for False Reality. Releasing their debut studio album, FADED INTENTIONS, in November, I shall end with a review of it. Rather than put out a string of singles and some E.P.s, the band are putting out complete works. Their debut E.P., Path of Self Destruct, came out in 2024. Honing their craft on the road and then bringing that into the studio then back to the road, I do feel like this year is going to be one of their busiest. In terms of festival dates and music sites that spotlight them. There are four or so interviews I want to come to. Last year was such a successful one for False Reality, where so many people were picking up on their music. With an incredible debut album out in the world, it was a big statement from one of the best Hardcore bands in the country. Kerrang! spoke with False Reality “about the importance of community, getting the nod from Speed, and ’80s metal tour bus sing-alongs”. They listed ten reasons why you need to follow the band. I am going to narrow it to five:

“They’ve been into hardcore since they were kids

Discovering the London hardcore scene at a young age was a formative experience for the members of False Reality

Rachel Rigby (vocals): “When I was literally a toddler I was loving ZZ Top! As I grew older, heavier gigs started happening in Colchester, and through YouTube I found TRC and started going to a lot of London hardcore shows from a young age. When I was 19, I started putting them on myself, and that was so fun.”

Dave Connolly (guitar): “The first hardcore band I ever saw was Strife, opening for Sepultura at Brixton Academy in ’96, which was Sepultura’s last-ever show with Max Cavalera. I was very young – 13 or 14 – and that was a gateway for me. I started checking out all the bands on Victory Records at the time, and all the bands on their ‘thanks’ lists, and eventually someone said, ‘You do know there’s a scene going on in London, don’t ya?’ And then that was that – it just ruined my life!”

They’ve got a real melting pot of influences

There are several album tunes that draw from ’90s grunge and post-hardcore to give an extra flavour to their sound

Rachel: “When we’re driving in the tour bus, Alice In Chains will come on and we’ll all be loving it. That’s a part of our personality that we want to use in our music. It’s the same with Deftones. We’ve got so many influences from different veins of alternative music, not just hardcore, that there’s a little bit of something for everyone in our songs.”

Joe Cornwell (bass): “When I was living in Liverpool I was producing electronic music and doing a lot of DJ residencies, supporting some quite cool leftfield, ambient housey acts. I used the moniker GhostChant, from the Poison The Well song – that was a little nod to hardcore. There’s a couple of the riffs I wrote on this album where there’s a little subtle ambience there, and I think there’s always going to be some element of that aesthetic to False Reality.”

They’re finally done with walking on eggshells

The frustrations of other people’s expectations and prejudices fuel Rachel’s fire

Rachel: “COST OF SPITE is about trying to appease other people, and trying to live quietly and tread on eggshells, rather than living to your actual true potential, and finally just thinking, ‘Do you know what? I’ve had enough of this, I need to be myself.’ I’d rather ruffle some feathers doing what I need to do than go through life not being true to myself. We’ve also got a song, EVERY GAZE, that’s about having your hard work pulled back due to your gender, your sexuality, your skin colour…”

PHOTO CREDIT: Jon Sugden

They’re all about community

Hardcore unity is a guiding principle

Rachel: “The hardcore community is such a small space. Everyone knows everyone, everyone meets everyone at some point. We’re all doing it for the same reasons, we’re all here to shout the same message, we’re all here because of the passion and the love for it. We’ve all grown up in it, and we love seeing new people come in and experience it for the first time. We all remember our first show and that feeling that it gave us, just the dream and the love of that moment and that memory, and the beauty of hardcore. One of the best things about going out and playing live is getting to meet people, and having that interaction.”

They’re seriously proud of what they’ve done on FADED INTENTIONS

False Reality can’t wait for you to hear their all-killer, no-filler new album

Louis: “Nothing’s written to be an album track. But that makes choosing singles difficult!”
Rachel: “Like Louis said, everything that we’ve written for this new album is intended to be played live and with high energy: lots of two-steps, lots of guitar solos, lots of sing-along bits. We love it, it’s our baby and there’s been a lot of blood, sweat and tears put into the new album, quite literally!”.

Actually, I might come to two interviews and then wrap up with a review of one of the most explosive and important debut albums of last year. I think people associate Hardcore with being aggressive with no depth or musicality. That it is all about rage and violence. Instead, the scene is so diverse and you cannot pigeonhole or easily define bands. At the end of December, The Guardian included False Reality in their New Music for 2026 section:

“As a DIY sound that thrives off hungry newcomers, hardcore, in principle, doesn’t tend to over-prioritise legacy. But the cumulative effect of False Reality’s previous bands and their years being steeped in the sound gives Faded Intentions a real edge. After playing and moshing at thousands of shows between them, the four of them have an ear for what makes a track rip through a room with maximum impact, and a learned musicality that goes beyond the classic three-chords and beatdown formula of some of the tougher music they grew up on.

Faded Intentions is full of playful, dynamic shifts. For metalheads, there are thrash guitar solos reminiscent of early Metallica, Slayer and Arcangel, and for hardcore lifers, there are plenty of two-step parts. The music’s toughness is charged by Rigby’s ferocity. On Cost of Spite, her lyrics tear through the noise: “Suffer, set it off, trapped in unequal life.” She says it’s about “feeling anger when your hard work and passions are boiled down to your gender, skin colour or sexuality, but then breaking from that, not diluting yourself to make others comfortable.”

The most distinctive, surprising element of their music is how they bring shoegaze into the mix. Shoegaze can be crushingly loud, of course, but it’s not necessarily heavy. On tracks such as Sonder, they flood the beatdowns with distortion and melodic vocal chains. “We love that Deftones sound and worked it into our world,” says Dale. “Having an interlude is one thing, but turning shoegaze into a False Reality song is another. We want to subvert expectations of what a hardcore band should be doing. We wanted to come out with something unexpected on our debut album – and we’re proud of it”.

Out of Rage crowned False Reality their Artist of 2025 and spoke with them. There are parts of the interviews that I want to come to. Even though False Reality have this incredible energy and are such a punchy and powerful band, there is also this cool and groove to them. A swagger almost that fits alongside this teeth-baring and muscular sound:

“With the band citing bands like NINEBAR and COLD HARD TRUTH as some of the best UKHC right now, there is no doubt that the scene is in capable hands. However, amongst it all, there is an emphasis on how much this translates to the entirety of hardcore. Perhaps it’s too early to see the full extent of the recent revitalisation of the genre in the mainstream yet, but the band emphasises the need for more people to attend hardcore shows to start a resurgence. Here, an influx of new blood may seem daunting, but as Dave states, “a good crowd is all you need to make one of the best shows of all time. If the music and the people are bumping, you have all the ingredients.” It seemed only fitting to catch the band at one of their album release shows, including at the newly refurbished Boom, where OOR took the photos for this cover.

Regardless, the band are aware that the next step is to take their sound further afield, as Joe says, “I mean, as it stands, the goal is still just to play as many shows as we can and get new ears on our stuff.” In France and Germany this summer, alongside MPF, No Play and Burn It Down in the UK, FALSE REALITY came into its own during festival season. No doubt this paved the way for their debut slot at HellFest next summer.

However, the biggest wildcard booking came from the call from Pennsylvania rockers CKY, who were on the lookout for the best heavy live bands to tour with them across the country. Dave mentions the influence of the band growing up, “Like through the culture of skateboarding and Jackass, it’s a really exciting opportunity.” Again, the conversation turned to the influence of punk and hardcore on modern culture, with bands like DRAIN, END IT, and SCOWL finding their place on the soundtracks of the new Tony Hawk Pro Skater and Skate games.  What is evident here is that both hardcore and FALSE REALITY are measured in mentality rather than sound. Whilst some conventions shape the genre, opening up to experimentation is a key part of its tenacity and malleability.

So much of Faded Intentions is disordered by confrontational lyrics, divebombs and thrashing, the ferocity of the record is tamed by the impressive Sonder. Dead-set in the middle of the record, it unexpectedly throws elements of a shoegaze sound into a calming lull. Rachel says, “Sonder is a kind of love letter to the other adjacent genres of hardcore. Post hardcore, shoegaze, alt rock kinda vibe. We don’t necessarily wanna be pigeon-holed as one kind of sound, and it could definitely be a place that we visit again in future”.

Working with Stephen Sears Jr., producer for the sound behind GALLOWS and TRC, the band entrenched their identity in the raw energy of the UK underground. Louis comments, “He’s one of those people who just gets what we’re about and the kind of sound we’re trying to go for. There were a couple of times through recording where he’ll bring an idea for us, and it made the final cut”.

Even if you are not a Hardcore fan or feel you cannot bond with False Reality, I would encourage you to take a listen to FADED INTENTIONS. It is a terrific album with many highlights. I really like MIRROR and CRANIUM. Going back to Kerrang! and their positive review of an album from a band that they are throwing their weight behind. One that are going to be making some interesting and important moves through 2026:

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. That’s how False Reality get you. Diversification in hardcore has seen the genre expand in bold and unexpected directions over the last half decade, so much so that the London gang’s unapologetically old-school fistful of steel catches listeners off guard to leave teeth scattered over the floor.

Picking up where they left off on last year’s Path Of Self Destruct EP, debut album FADED INTENTIONS is an exercise in wall-to-wall ass-kicking – to the extent that even the 133-second INTRO packs enough riffs for a substantial ruckus. FROZEN immediately calls to mind the grandiose brutality of Trapped Under Ice, but you can hear a love for metal legends like Metallica and Sepultura in the high atmospherics and weave of guitar solos around sledgehammer riffs. MIRROR bends from 100-mph mosh mayhem into a distended prog-metallic squeal, before SNAKE EYES wipes out with a viciously simplistic beatdown.

Vocalist and lyricist Rachel Rigby grew up amongst the spin kicks and circle-pits of the capital’s HC community, and a learned love of the music can be felt in both organic meld of mood and sound here, and the refusal to chase trends. REALITY SLIPS is a headspinning slide along the downward spiral that still maintains momentum. SONDER dips right into shimmering alt.metal without compromising on heft. OUT OF TIME offers a shreddy mid-album adrenaline rush, then WORTH IT injects affirmation Hatebreed would be proud of.

Packing each of these 12 songs with gut-churning mosh fuel and unselfconsciously straight-faced explorations of betrayal, empowerment and revenge, FADED INTENTIONS could be a lot to stomach for the uninitiated. But as the THE FURTHER unleashes a full force artillery barrage to blow listeners into thrillingly cathartic closer EVERY GAZE, anyone with a taste for carnage will be licking their lips at the vibrant violence False Reality are ready to unleash.

Verdict: 4/5”.

I will finish things there. I would recommend everyone keep an eye out for False Reality. A tremendous London Hardcore band whose members have been in music for a while, yet as a force, they are still considered quite new and ‘rising’. However, with an acclaimed debut under their belt and critical kudos behind them, they are going to grow bigger and bigger. The tremendous False Reality…

DESERVE massive success.

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Follow False Reality

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Never Be Mine (The Sensual World)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

 

Never Be Mine (The Sensual World)

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THERE are not too many songs…

I can include in this feature without repeating myself. The thing is that a lot of Kate Bush songs have little written about them. However, I have been fascinated by her deeper cuts. Those songs that are not exactly obscure, yet they do not get talked about a lot and people are not going to highlight them much. One is Never Be Mine from 1989’s The Sensual World. Its title might suggest a basic love song. I think some people (Graeme Thomson for one) criticised The Sensual World for burning at a lower heat than Hounds of Love. How it is less extraordinary than that 1985 album, and there are songs that are inessential and Kate Bush is not at her (expected) best. I have seen Never Be Mine highlighted as one such song that falls short of expectation and previous standards. I know that Never Be Mine was a possibility for Bush’s 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. A recording of the song, supposedly from initial rehearsals, is included on the C.D. and L.P. versions of Before the Dawn. On the physical versions of the album, you hear Never Be Mine after Top of the City in Act I. It is an extraordinary and powerful vocal from Kate Bush that should put some eyes back on the original. Although it is one of the most-streamed songs from The Sensual World on Spotify, it is still just over three million. It is quite low. I feel Never Be Mine could have been a single from the album. Love and Anger is great but, if we think of strong songs that were not brought out as singles, Never Be Mine and Deeper Understanding spring to mind. In terms of articles written about Never Be Mine, there is not a whole lot. However, it is a fascinating song. Its positioning on The Sensual World is interesting. On the second side after Between a Man and a Woman – one of the lesser cuts from the album – and before the extraordinary penultimate number, Rocket’s Tail – which I have explored for a future feature, and is a natural highlight from The Sensual World -, Never Be Mine was perhaps a song Bush felt less sure about. Wanting to positioning it lower in the album.

That being said, Kate Bush did re-record Never Be Mine for 2011’s Director’s Cut. That would indicate she was not happy about the production sound or feel of the original, but that she did like the song enough to take the effort to do that. I think the Director’s Cut version is fine, though the superb version on The Sensual World is the best. I think it is absolutely wonderful, so maybe Bush re-recorded it to give it some attention or a new focus. In terms of the lyrics and its story, it would make sense she would re-approach it as an older woman. Just in her thirties when it was released on The Sensual World, Bush was fifty-two when the Director’s Cut version was released. Even though it not a massive streaming success, Never Be Mine has a rare distinction of being included on a studio album, Director’s Cut and Before the Dawn. Few other songs can claim that honour (pub trivia territory if you can name any other songs!). Bush did her best with the original, but she wanted to come back to it for Director’s Cut. Keen to bring it to the stage, I am curious about the decision not to include it in the set. However, it does make me think that this is a track more people should know about. I am going to discuss it further. However, I want to come to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia article about Never Be Mine and some interview archive, where Kate Bush talked about the song’s background:

“It’s that whole thing of how, in some situations, it’s the dream you want, not the real thing. It was pursuing a conscious realisation that a person is really enjoying the fantasy and aware it won’t become reality. So often you think it’s the end you want, but this is actually looking at the process that will never get you there. Bit of a heart-game you play with yourself.

Len Brown, ‘In The Realm Of The Senses’. NME (UK), 7 October 1989

I wanted a sort of eastern sounding rhythm. I wrote it first on the piano, though the words were completely different, except for the choruses. I did it on the piano to a Fairlight rhythm that Del programmed – I think that maybe because of the quality of the sounds, it was harder for Del to come up with the patterns. And I was more strict – he found it much harder. I think the pattern in ‘Heads We’re Dancing’ is really good – really unusual, the best he came up with. But ‘Never Be Mine’ was kind of tabla based. We got Eberhard (Weber) over to play bass and he played on the whole song. When we were trying to piece it together later we kept saying it just doesn’t feel right, so we just took the bass out and had it in these two sections.

Tony Horkins, ‘What Katie Did Next’. International Musician, December 1989”.

There is so much to unpack when it comes to the lyrics. These lines are especially intriguing and stirring: “I want you as the dream/Not the reality/That clumsy goodbye-kiss could fool me/But I’m looking back over my shoulder/At you, happy without me”. I am not sure if they were written about Del Palmer – who Bush was in a relationship with at this point, though I suspect it was breaking down (I am never 100% sure if they broke up around 1993 or at the end of the 1980s), or if it was not based on anyone. Singing it in 2014, it would have taken on new meaning. Memories and reminiscence rather than something that held as much meaning and emotion than back in 1989. What makes Never Be Mine so enduring and compelling is its richness and simplicity. In terms of musicians, it is not packed to the rafters with bodies. You have Davy Spillane on Uilleann pipes that adds this Celtic/Irish beauty and yearning. Wonderful bass from Eberhard Weber. The Trio Bulgarka providing vocals. That clash of countries, cultures and sounds. It is a mix that works wonderfully! That idea of wanting someone in a dream but not a reality. We can all relate to that. “The thrill and the hurting/I know that this will never be mine”. You can hear genuine hurt in Bush’s voice…making me wonder whether it was based on her relationship at the time. Although she had revealed her hurt and opened her heart on previous albums, The Sensual World has a few songs where she does this. As potently as on Hounds of Love or any of her other albums. I have seen a review that called Never Be Mine a “haunting exploration of desire, fantasy, and the emotional complexity of unattainable love”. Is it unobtainable love or something that seems ideal in your head, but the reality is not as desirable as hoped?! That first verse where she sings “My life that might have been/Your face just ghostly in the smoke/They’re setting fire to the cornfields”. Poetic, stark and devastating, I see those lines as the embers of a long-term relationship where maybe Bush foresaw a different ending or future. However, there is tension and division, so the person that she thought she might spend her life was is not that person anymore.

Just prior to getting to a feature about the song, I want to move to some critical snapshots and opinions of Never Be Mine (the version on The Sensual World). In an extremely generous and adoring review from Pitchfork - who still don’t give many albums high kudos; this 2019 review seemed like someone had spiked the water supply! -, this was observed: “To hear someone recall formative childhood truths (the lush grandeur of “Reaching Out”) and lingering romantic pipedreams (the longing of “Never Be Mine”) is like being given a reel of their memory tapes and discovering what makes them tick”. The Quietus marked thirty years of The Sensual World in 2019 and put this in their sub-headline/by-line: “Burning fields, black November nights, the swirling beauty of the Uilleann pipes…”. That could apply to the title track, though it ticks all the boxes for Never Be Mine. They add that “Kate Bush made the perfect soundtrack to autumn”. Never Be Mine seems very autumnal. The leaves have fallen and the nights are drawing in. That sense of loss or impending separation in the chill. Such an evocative song! Their opening section of the review spotlights Never Be Mine:

“They’re setting fire to the cornfields/ as you’re taking me home" So sang Kate Bush thirty years ago on the majestic ‘Never Be Mine’, a forlorn ballad of yearning that radiates from its parent album, The Sensual World with understated autumnal grace. It is a song that still conjures the same images for me every time I hear it – an early evening sunset in October, birds departing a harvested field, the sunlight low and fading on the horizon. Eberhard Weber’s bass has a throbbing beauty that weaves around Kate’s piano like a cloak, while the strident vocals of the Trio Bulgarka merge with the melancholic Uilleann pipes to evoke all sorts of emotions – sadness, hope, reflection, loss, longing. Beginnings. Endings. It doesn’t matter when I hear it, what time of year, or in what context – it is immediately transportive…

The smell of burning fields / will now mean you and here," she sings. Well, quite. Autumn, for me anyway, encapsulates all of these things. It’s both a beginning and an ending, a time of reflection and anticipation; it bridges the warmth and joy of summer and the barren starkness of winter. Music is an art that can suggest a sense of time and place like no other – and has there ever been an artist who so emotively captures the mood and texture of the seasons as Kate Bush?”.

Five years before that mention of Never Be Mine, The Quietus looked at Kate Bush’s best and most revealing songs beyond the hits. Tying it to Before the Dawn in 2014, Lisa Jenkins observed the following: “Never Be Mine’ is a thing of beauty which showcases Bush’s amazing vocal range in its entirety, and has the ability to make the hairs at the nape of your neck stand up. The lyrics are heart wrenching, full of unrequited love and yearning, suited to my angst ridden fifteen-year-old self at the time, the song itself like a fire coloured painting with nature, love and lust intermingling. The album in general is one of her strongest, and bought teenage girls and boys of the 90s screaming into their own, individual, sexual awakenings”. Pop Dose spent some time with a Kate Bush work of brilliance in 2008:

“Never Be Mine” is just what the title suggests: the story of a woman who still pines for a lover who’s moved on. The chorus is the song’s biggest hook, where Kate lays it all on the table by admitting, “This is where I want to be, this is what I need / But I know that this will never be mine.” However, she does something even more clever in the first verse:

I look at you and see, my life that might have been
Your face just ghostly in the smoke
They’re setting fire to the cornfields, as you’re taking me home
The smell of burning fields, will now mean you and here

By associating a sensory perception with a memory, she has guaranteed that people will do the exact same thing with this song. Music of all kinds always reminds people of a time and a place, and Kate is basically doubling down that you will do the same. And she’s dead right. I, for one, cannot hear this song without thinking of a specific time — and person — every time I hear it, regardless of how much time has passed since the year and girl in question. That’s powerful stuff, kids, and it doesn’t hurt to have the fabulous Trio Bulgarka doing the heavy lifting with the backing vocals.

The opening lines to the second verse have a certain brazen honesty to them as well: “I want you as the dream, not the reality.” Is she saying that she understands why she and her beloved are not together but still pines for the pipe dream anyway? Wow. Show me a pop song today with that much self-awareness and maturity. Okay, I’m kidding, stop looking. It doesn’t exist”.

Even if Pop music has matured since 2008, and modern-day artists might be able to match Never Be Mine, it is amazing that some critics in 1989 and since overlook or look down their noses at The Sensual World when one of its deep cuts is Never Be Mine! Alongside the best-known songs – The Sensual World and This Woman’s Work -, there are some phenomenal gems that do not get exposed enough. Both heartbreaking but relatable, Never Be Mine is this song that started out in 1989, was reworked in 2011, then almost made its way into the set list for 2014’s Before the Dawn. It did get onto the 2016 live album, so has enjoyed this span of twenty-seven years. I’d like to think that this song will feature in a future chapter of Kate Bush’s career, as it really is…

ONE of her best.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: SOFIA ISELLA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

 

SOFIA ISELLA

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SOMEONE who I…

spotlighted in 2024, I wanted to reproach SOFIA ISELLA (she styles her name in all capitals, so that is what I shall do throughout), as she did a lot last year. An incredible Mexican-American singer, songwriter, and violinist defined by  her unique sound, blending Pop with deeper themes, gaining traction for her music and opening for major acts like Taylor Swift. Last year, ISELLA put out the I’m camera. E.P. and some brilliant singles, so there has been some movement and evolution regarding her sound since I spotlighted her. ISELLA has some tour dates booked for this year, including some U.S. dates with Florence + The Machine. This amazing artist will be in the U.K. in May, so that will be exciting. One thing you do get with SOFIA ISELLA is amazing value. In terms of the spread of photos on her social media, there is so much to choose from. She is so prolific and releases loads of music. There are regular and great interviews, and a wide range of social media accounts. This is an artist who ticks all the boxes, so I will revisit her and bring in some 2025 interviews. I am going to lead with an intervbiew with The Independent from last August. Ahead of her U.K. headline tour, Hannah Ewens spoke with SOFIA ISELLA. “The alternative musician spent last year riding high after supporting Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour. But the 20-year-old poet is no pop princess”. It is a fascinating conversation:

“I got called demonic by someone online for the first time the other day,” says the alt musician Sofia Isella, who is not annoyed but in a blissful reverie. “There were other compliments within her message: I have ‘the most ominous aura she’s ever seen in her life’.”

I wouldn’t say these things about the 20-year-old LA native goth at all but I might say she’s mysterious. Across the cafe table from me, she’s completely obscured by a big hood and steampunk glasses. I’m trying to interview her but every question I ask is countered with a softly spoken question. ‘Do you remember what you learned in math class?’ ‘What is your least favourite modern word?’ ‘But what do you think about that?’ As she calmly knits herself a fingerless glove – while wearing it – all I can think is that I’m not surprised that this curious person is a curiosity to 1.7 million people on Instagram. She likes to learn about other people, she says, although this sometimes comes across as passionate debate. “I’m going easy on you…” she adds.

In person, Isella is gentle and thoughtful, but that spikier side exists in her music: acerbic whispered poetry set to Nine Inch Nails-style beats. On the distinctive piano-led track “The Doll People”, she is a dark Regina Spektor, explaining in ironic ASMR tones why women are best enjoyed beautiful and mute: “Art does not interpret itself / There are men with a day to save / We are paintings with legs”.

Isella thinks it might have been her elegant rant “Everybody Supports Women”, about how women inevitably get torn down from every angle, that got the attention of Taylor Swift, who chose her to play at Wembley Stadium on her Eras Tour. Or at least, it was that song that was mentioned in a handwritten letter Swift gave to the singer. “It’s easier to play Wembley than it is to play a bar with two people,” Isella says, shaking off any idea that she might’ve needed some extra nerves to scale up her intimate live sets so dramatically.

Her most recent (very unsettling) EP I’m camera – all confrontational images against industrial soundscapes – feels like a musical museum of taxidermied oddities. “Crowd Caffeine” is a creepy track about how we sanitise the human experience with overuse of technology and has Grimes (another notable Sofia Isella fan and follower) listed as a songwriter. She technically didn’t have a hand in writing it but Isella was heavily inspired by something the electronic musician posted online in 2024: “The machines want to be like humans / humans r trying be like machines / I’m sure we can work smthn out”.

While she’s mostly interested in writing about the experience of women, one song, “Man Made”, is for her male counterparts. “It’s an empathetic approach to them shooting themselves in the foot with masculinity demands,” she explains. When she was 15, she asked lots of her friends the question, “What is the biggest pressure that society puts on you?” The girls said beauty standards. “The men – kind men – all said they felt pressured by other men to talk s*** about women, to be mean to them, to not be a ‘simp’ or whatever that word is… to not love women.” This surprised her, but then human beings are constantly surprising her.

Around the time we speak, she’s preparing to return to the UK to play Reading and Leeds Festival – which took place this weekend – and a short headlining tour. “I’ve always known that this is definitely the world that I sacrifice myself to,” she says of pop music, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. “Because every world is a sacrifice. You gain something but everything you say yes to, you are sacrificing something else.” Take a Taylor Swift, for example. “Somebody at those big levels, we see their highlight reel, but they’re always sacrificing something.” At present, Isella can walk out into her crowds and hold hands with fans, have meaningful conversations with them even. “I’m small enough now that people still see me somewhat as human.” But it may not be long before she’s seen as less human, more icon, more machine”.

IN THIS PHOTO: SOFIA ISELLA performs at the House of Blues in Orlando on 2nd November, 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Nicolita Bradley

Though I am not fan of when artists put titles all in lower case or upper case and do that sort of mix, you cannot deny the quality and genius of SOFIA ISELLA. Look at her social media accounts and where she played last year. Such incredible live photos, you can feel the electricity and love from the crowd. So captivating and this physical experience, she is one of the greatest performers in modern music. A sensational live act that everyone needs to see. I will head to a November interview from Los Angeles Times, as we get some background on this incredible artist. If you have not heard her before, you really need to connect with this superstar-in-waiting. Someone who will be as big as artists like Taylor Swift:

“Isella grew up in Los Angeles in a family with enough entertainment-biz acclaim to make being an artist feel like a viable career. Yet they still let her be feral and freewheeling in developing her craft. Her father, the Chilean-Danish American cinematographer Claudio Miranda, won an Oscar for 2012’s “Life of Pi” and shot “Top Gun: Maverick” and the recent racing hit “F1” (Her mom is the author Kelli Bean-Miranda). Looking back on her bucolic childhood in L.A., Isella recalled it as being filled with music and boundless encouragement, worlds away from her social media-addled peers.

“I’d been homeschooled my whole life,” Isella said. “My mom would leave little trails of poetry books for me to find, and my dad would set up GarageBand and leave me for hours with all the instruments and nothing but free time. I didn’t even have a phone until I was 16. When I first was on TikTok, I saw everyone had the same personality, because they had been watching each other for so long. Being around kids my age was so strange, because I’d grown up around adults — like, ‘Oh, these kids are so sweet and kind and adorable, but they think I’m one of them.’”

After her family temporarily moved to Australia during the pandemic and Isella began self-releasing music, it became clear that her talents set her very far apart. Drawing on her early background in classical music and a fascination with scabrous rock and electronic music, she found a sound that melded the Velvet Underground and Nico’s elegant miserablism, Chelsea Wolfe and Lingua Ignota’s doom-laden art metal and the close-miked , creepy goth-pop of Billie Eilish’s first LP.

Her early music showed a withering humor and skepticism of the culture around her (“All of Human Knowledge Made Us Dumb,” “Everybody Supports Women”), but singles came at a rapid clip and translated surprisingly well on the social media platforms she loathed (she has 1.3 million followers on TikTok). It all got her onto stages with Melanie Martinez and Glass Animals and, eventually, Swift. (A Florence + the Machine arena tour opening slot is up next.)

Her newest material (and her subversively eerie, Francesca Woodman-evoking music videos like “Muse”) feel perfectly timed to the apocalyptic mood in L.A. and the U.S. now, where an inexorable slide to ruin feels biblical. “Out in the Garden,” from September, hits some of the Southern gothic moods of Ethel Cain, but with a sense of acidic pity that’s all her own. “That there’s a small part of me that’s envious / That you fullheartedly believe someone is always there,” she sings. “That will always love you, and there’s a plan for you out there.”

Even at her bleakest, there’s a curdled humor underneath (her current tour is subtitled “You’ll Understand More, Dick”). But if this little sliver of young fame has taught Isella anything, it’s that even when everyone wants a piece of you, no one is actually coming to save any of us.

“There’s nothing with weight, nothing that’s meaningful, to blind faith,” Isella said. “On this next record, I’m about to go really angry because religion really pisses me off, it inflames me. But it’s the most beautiful placebo to imagine that there’s a father that loves you no matter what you do. I’m a really lucky person in that I’ve always been safe and protected, but if you’ve had a rough life, that is insanely powerful to imagine that and believe that”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nicolita Bradley

Even though this interview is mostly photos and that takes up more space than the words, there are some interesting takeaways and responses from SOFIA ISELLA in this FADER interview. Spotlighting this “20-year-old inspired by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and who has already opened for Taylor Swift”, I do think that this year is going to be another massive one. I am going to end with a review of I’m camera, as it was one of the best E.P.s of last year. I do think, if there is a debut album soon, it will be one of the most anticipated of that year:

“Describe the best show you’ve played this year so far.

Montréal was such an incredible crowd that for the first time, I felt like it was hard to keep up with their energy . They really pushed me . I love that .

What’s your favorite song to play live right now and why?

Above the Neck . Because I take my pants off . That song is out now .

What’s a motto that you think everyone should live by?

Be bored . Boredom has given me creativity and it’s a fight to be bored in this world .

What’s the worst advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t be political . I was told early on to not divide my audience .

What’s the best thing you’ve bought yourself recently and why?

Books . I was in the bookstore and I overheard someone behind me saying very loudly “Is that Sofia ? Isella ? Could be . Maybe not .” I’m not sure if they wanted me to confirm . I’m currently reading The Martian .

I will finish off with this review from Hive Magazine and a simply stunning E.P. Though the tone of the E.P. is darker and moodier than you’d get from most Pop artists in the mainstream, SOFIA ISELLA is not trying to follow them. She is as compelling as the best Pop artists, though I think she offers something deeper and more interesting. Perhaps more in common with Billie Eilish or Florence + The Machine. However, it is hard to directly compare her to another artist. ISELLA is unique. I am excited to see what this year holds in store:

“Moody and atmospheric are words that get thrown around a lot to describe indie music that spares a second to think about itself — SOFIA ISELLA’s second EP, I’m camera. is an example of a record that really fits that bill, and it does so beautifully. Opening track ‘Muse’ is a meditation on the violence of being possessed by inspiration. Backed by an ominous plucked guitar, building into a choral descent into madness, Isella discusses the horror of being a female artist in a deft and stylish authorial voice. She discusses how her work feels like an imitation of her personhood — “a shadow mimicking [her] slightly wrong.” The muse is transmuted from an inert force to a “gun,” holding her hostage but simultaneously making her “scared to die.” Isella captures the intensity and enormity of this dilemma, and manages to pull gold out of what I’d argue is tired material: the stress of stardom, the glare of the spotlight, the challenges of being creative in front of other people.

‘Josephine’ is a low-pitched, rumbling nightmare that climbs, crests, and fans out into a. Isella’s voice is delightfully intense, soaring to gorgeous falsetto and falling to a growl. She puts a clever twist on the “I’m a star and you, someone who doubted me, are not” revenge song by illustrating the darkness hiding in the cracks of that comparative, competitive mentality. As always, Isella takes well trodden ground and treads it in a new way.

‘Dog’s Dinner’ is one of my favourite types of songs: it’s about having bad sex that makes you feel awful. It’s a song about receiving overly enthusiastic cunnilingus from someone you’re slowly coming to be disgusted by. It’s a bitter, cruel little track, and I enjoyed every seething, sardonic second of it. If I’m recommending one track from I’m camera., it’s this one.

While most of Isella’s music wraps a blunt message in poetic, avant garde style, ‘Crowd Caffeine’ has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It’s a track about phones, technological dependency, and dopamine addiction. It doesn’t quite thread the needle on combining this subject matter in a way that doesn’t sound like evangelism. My reservations aside, the squeal of the guitar before the final bridge made my hair stand on end — like the rest of the EP, it’s sonically sumptuous, something to sink your teeth into. It’s just a bit naff when you compare it to everything it’s surrounded by.

‘Man Made’ is Isella’s most impressive vocal showcase; she sounds better on this song than anything else she’s ever released, and my God, Isella can sing. There’s a cowboy jangling spurs-ism to ‘Man Made’ that works beautifully. It’s an anti-masculine, anti-gender anthem that fits into Isella’s artistic oeuvre, and cements her place (at least in my mind) as the indie music scene’s feminist poet laureate.

‘Orchestrated, Wet, Verboten’ begins with ambient sound that blends into a more striking guitar line than anything else on I’m camera., There’s actual energy here; ‘OWV’ grabs an uncomfortable set of feelings and pulls them until they unravel. It’s about wanting to be wanted in a way that destroys you and the person wanting you. “I want you to take my breath and merge your own” is one of the most achingly horrible bits of verse I’ve heard in a while, and it captures exactly what makes Isella a stand-out musician.

I’m camera. is a brilliant EP. It’s clever and angry and bitter and ironic, and considering how meteoric Isella’s rise has been so far, I hope it's another boost upward. While I have my issues with some of the writing, I think it’s a great record on the whole, and I’d highly recommend it”.

Coming back to an artist I was excited to spotlight in 2024, last year was such a huge one for SOFIA ISELLA, I had to come back. She is being tipped by people for success this year. Still a rising artist, she has this incredible live experience that you can feel in her music. Brilliant photos, wonderful music and these stunning live performances, SOFIA ISELLA is in her own league. Look around music and there are…

FEW are as good as her!

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Follow SOFIA ISELLA

FEATURE: Spotlight: BIIANCO

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

BIIANCO

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ANOTHER incredible D.J. that…

I feel people should know about and is going to have a phenomenal 2026, BIIANCO is someone whose work I have known about for a while. I am going to come to a couple of 2025 interviews with her. However, I will head further back to start out. They are an amazing D.J. that I do think is going to have a very busy year. Before getting to this must-know artist and D.J. who has overcome challenges to become one of the most respected and influential modern-day D.J.s, I want to bring in an interview from 2024. The partially blind, proudly queer and inclusive BIIANCO spoke with Broke Magazine about their new music and why it is important for them to represent diversity and queer identity through their work:

“BIIANCO is an artist who recently skyrocketed into viral attention last December with the hit track ‘Against The Wall, gathering an impressive 10 million views, over 500,000 shares, and gaining 150,000+ new followers across socials. These crazy numbers very soon led to international chart inclusions on platforms like Apple Music, iTunes, and Beatport as well as earning coveted spots like a Danny Howard Mini Mix and Jack Saunders’ Next Wave pick.

This dynamic talent—partially blind, proudly queer, and identifying as femme (they/them)—is back with a new dance-floor summer hit titled ‘Got Me Like’. The track has wasted no time leaving its mark, with the Instagram teaser raking in a staggering 1 million views and 40,000 likes in just five days.

But even before the viral explosion, BIIANCO had been carving out a niche in the industry with their high-energy trance sound and musical prowess. Their live performances, often featuring multiple instruments and vocals showcased to their dedicated fanbase through Insta and TikTok, have allowed them to champion inclusivity within the music scene.

Tell us about your upbringing and journey into music…

Honestly, music has been the most constant thing in my life.  I grew up outside of NYC and was a classically trained pianist since age 5.  Learned guitar, bass, and voice lessons and started producing music on a very old Mac by age 15.  I ended up going to UCLA for music and then was in a band for many many years after graduating.  I don’t think there’s ever been in a time in my life when I haven’t been making music.

Who do you draw the most influence from?

I have two pillars of inspiration for BIIANCO music — the first is emotional intensity.  Whether it’s euphoria, rage, dejection, or limerence, I am a person who naturally feels things on 10 and I’ve always wanted my music to reflect that.  A lot of dance music can be very surface-level emotionally, which is wild to me because people experiencing it in these spaces usually feel so much emotion!  So, I’ve always wanted to stay true to that.  The second inspiration is the 90s / Y2K trance culture.  I love the combination of speed, melody, high-octave energy and emotion in that music.  I think that’s always going to be my biggest sonic inspiration.

You’re known for your mad scientist tech skills in music production. Can you share a bit about your creative process when you’re in the studio?

I try to write at least 3 songs a week.  I’m at a place now where I feel like I really know my sound so my palate of tones and musical elements to choose from is super specific.  But honestly, what’s been happening lately is I’ll be out watching people perform or I’m going for long runs listening to people’s mixes and inspiration strikes and I go in the studio with a very very specific idea and execute it.  This happened to me the other day when I was listening to a FJAAK set.  I was like I need a song that dynamically moves its energy like that — that’s what’s missing from my set.  And I went home and made it.

It’s amazing how you’ve overcome challenges like losing sight in one eye and continued to pursue your passion. What keeps you motivated during tough times?

Well, I feel like I was just on the brink of discovering my sound and was just starting to gain traction.  So, when the accident happened I was like absolutely not this is a VERY inconvenient time to be interrupted and have this fire lit to move forward as quickly as I could.  It meant very very long hours of relearning to play drums and instruments that really do require full eyesight.  Only years later now, does the grief of losing my sight and learning to live with a disability fully hit me.  I’ll find myself crying sometimes and be like oh what a delayed impact.

As a champion of inclusion in the industry, how important is it for you to represent diversity and queer identity through your music and platform?

To be honest, I’ve been queer my whole life so it’s really all I know.  I think it comes naturally because if I’m being true to myself that’s just what I’ll choose.  However, if I’m thinking with intention, I think it’s so important to represent diversity and queer community very fluidly.  I think we’re all a bit exhausted of only being included when there’s a “diversity”, “queer” or “femme” title attached.  True inclusion is seamless.  I feel very passionately and intentionally about breaking down the performance of inclusion and helping build a music community where it just simply is”.

The first of two interviews from last year I am including is from DJ Mag. Taking us into BIIANCO’s studio, they guided Mick Wilson and “talked through their setup, creative process, and approaches to sound design, as well as transferring this into a live setting”. It is a fascinating interview with one of the most distinct and awe-inspiring D.J.s in the world:

“BIIANCO is a London-based, LA-trained producer, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist. Known for their high-energy releases, live sets and studio skills, their sound pulls from high-octane acid, trance and techno as confidently as it does from house and luminous pop.

A champion of inclusion in the music industry, BIIANCO also proudly shares their experiences of navigating clubland as a queer, neurodivergent and disabled artist, helping to blaze a trail for others to embrace their authentic, creative selves in the process. It’s a theme the self-proclaimed synth head regularly explores within their releases, including unleashing body positive club bangers with Marlon Hoffstadt, and October’s techno-leaning single, ‘Get You Out’ on Ultra Records, which wrestles with questions of identity amidst a whirlwind romance.

While touring the globe with their thrilling live and hybrid DJ sets, BIIANCO took us through their innovative approach to on-stage performance during an IRL edition of DJ Mag’s How I Play Live series at ADE last October — diving into sequencing, building energy, DAW-based and DAW-less options, and the art of balancing live and DJ elements. Below, they invite us into their studio as part of our new series, taking us through their setup, creative process, and approaches to sound design, as well as transferring this into a live setting.

Your music has a distinct sonic identity. How do you approach sound design in the studio? What tools or techniques are essential in shaping your sound?

“I think the most important thing you can do for building a distinct sonic identity is to know what you want to sound like and then to understand the history and musicology of that sound and what tones, synths, characteristics make that sub-genre. I really try to abide by this. I spend a lot of time studying the original authentic trance, acid, rave and hard house synths of the ’90s and early 2000s so I can incorporate those elements into my music.

“I also try to use real 303 acid synths to make my acid layers, to enhance that authentic sound. Most importantly, over the past year-and- a-half, I’ve been extremely particular about the BPMs I’m making my music at 140-150bpm, always. As a percussionist, I know this means the drums — especially the kick and bass patterns — must stay within some constraints to avoid them sounding chaotic. I think all these intentional decisions are the building blocks to the BIIANCO sonic identity.”

How do you channel personal experiences into your studio work? Is there a specific process you use to translate feelings into sound?

“As a neurodivergent person, I feel emotions very strongly and always have — therefore, music became a utility for me to process them at a young age. So, music has never existed for me without emotion. I have classical training, and that comes in handy when trying to translate my emotions into musical elements. For example, in a song conveying heartbreak, I’ll lean heavily into certain minor key progressions or timbres that can evoke that psychological response. I try to marry the emotion to the musical theory. This is a technique we studied heavily at university in our film scoring and composition-focused classes.”

How do you translate your studio work into a live setting, especially with a hybrid live set? What elements do you keep from the studio, and what changes to adapt to the energy of a live audience?

“I try to preserve the sounds I spend so much time crafting in the studio when going into a live environment, so I love tools that allow me to bring in my sounds. That’s why the Roland TR-8S sequencer is so clutch for performing drums and bass, as I load and sequence all those patterns with my original studio elements.

“For acid, I play the 303 live and in the studio specifically, so the tone is consistent no matter the environment. A lot of the acid people hear on tracks is super hard to recreate with real hardware, so I try to stay away from falling into that trap so I can give audiences authentic experiences.

“I tend to very slightly adjust my song formats to give myself padding in live settings that may not exist in the original song structure. For example, if I need to bring up the fader on the bass, hit the synth at the top of the phrase and start singing all at the same time in the original form, that would be super unrealistic in a live setting. So, I might adjust the structure to stagger the start. I basically finesse the structure so I can deliver a precise and powerful performance where I’m not overthinking what I need to do, and can get lost in the moment.”

hat are the biggest challenges you face when performing a hybrid set compared to a traditional DJ set or a full band performance? How do you overcome these challenges?

“Introducing any live elements means introducing risk into the performance, so an assessment of risk vs reward is the most important first step. For every risky live decision you make, there is extra hardware you need to bring, maintain and set up. Live also requires exponentially more rehearsal. I always tell people, ‘You want to use live elements, then be prepared to practice, practice, practice’. You need to be prepared for every single problem to occur at least once, and you can only do that when you know what could potentially occur. If I am doing live sampling in a performance, I will practice those live movements hundreds of times until it is muscle memory I can do with my eyes closed. That is the only way everything is as clean and smooth as loading up a CDJ with a pre-recorded track.

“A good example of a live challenge occurred when me and Marlon Hoffstadt recently performed our song, ‘Touch My Body’, at Amsterdam Dance Event. I was sampling the vocals while he DJed the instrumental track, and there’s a really cool part in the track where everything drops out but the vocals for a few bars. In a studio setting, this sounds awesome, but it poses a challenge in a live setting without a click track, because you want to drop back in perfectly in time with the track but have no way to know when that is. We could have added some hi-hats to the silence in the track to keep time, but honestly that sounded so blah, and we preferred to find a cooler solution. So after rehearsing it a few times, we figured out I could lean into a repeat roll effect using an RMX-1000 if we matched the tempo of the CDJ with the tempo of the roll. It worked perfectly to help us preserve the timing and even elevated the dynamics in the live performance. It just required us to decide ahead of time what BPM we would play the track at during the set and stick to that decision”.

How do you utilise sampling and looping in both your studio work and live performances? Are there any differences in how you approach this technique in each context?

“Studio performances are actually really different to live setting performances. For example, a lot of my TikTok loops are done with an entirely different method than what I would do on a real stage. Studio looping leans more heavily into controlling Ableton than my live stage elements. With my social media loops, I’ll set up an Ableton session and automate exactly how many bars I’ll be recording the MIDI before it starts looping. I can also set up the session to immediately quantise the loop after it records. So most of what I’m doing in studio loops is arming a track, performing the audio or MIDI live, then I’ll loop it based on my Ableton session, and I’ll also write in automation like fader cuts.

“Sometimes with studio loops based around the Maschine+, there is no prep work that goes into Ableton and I’m really just using the Maschine+ as the performance brain for tempo and recording its master out into Ableton. In a stage setting with both decks and live elements, I try to keep it completely DAW-less and lean into the Maschine+ and hardware only to create the performances. I usually just beat-match the loops into the mix like you would a vinyl or CDJ element”.

I am going to finish with Magnetic Mag and their interview with BIIANCO. I am going to recommend people check out sites like this, where you can hear episodes featuring their music and mixes. Back in June, they published an interview with an artist and D.J. who was coming off the back of some high-octane sets. Their newest single, Bassline Vandal (released via Ultra Records), is absolutely fantastic and demands to be heard. As Magnetic Mag say, “It is the kind of track that makes you move first and think later”. BIIANCO’s work is tied to movement and their body – as is also noted -, so this aspect was spotlighted. The physicality and mobility of their sets and work is vitally important:

“Do you move around a lot during sessions, or are you more locked into your chair once you’re in it?

I have my hardware located around the studio so there’s some natural movement when I’m working out of my personal studio. But lately, I’ve been doing a lot more sessions while on tour, and with those I tend to sit stationary for far too long. I do like to stand in the best spots in the studio sonically so I can hear the mix once it’s ready, and during that I’m always dancing.

Have you found that certain gear setups encourage more physical interaction or flow?

I think the best setups are ones that are in a U shape with the DAW and computer at the center because the movement becomes very circular – allowing you to move fluidly from synth to synth. I am a huge fan of hardware and synths in my production, so I nearly always make my music in my studio with my hardware.

When you’re physically tired, do you notice your music sounding different?

When I’m physically tired I’m more indecisive about creative choices in producing. It creates a brain fog, and I tend not to finish those songs in one sitting. If I’m rested and thinking clearly, I can finish a working mix of a song in one session.

Do you think movement helps you make decisions faster—or slow things down to be more intentional?

This is an interesting question. When writing, I think at first being too intentional works against the writing process and impedes the stream of consciousness flow. I try not to have too much intention in the beginning of the songwriting process. That comes out later when I am cleaning everything up and mixing things down.

So most likely, I am not moving a lot at first but towards the time I start getting more intentional with the mixing, I start stepping back and moving more”.

As we are into a new year, there is going to be a lot of emphasis on artists and their promise. Those who are D.J.s and artists are perhaps not given as much oxygen. BIIANCO is a tremendous and inspiring D.J. I am actually writing this on 29th December. As I write, BIIANCO actually has a New Year’s Eve set in Utah. They play in the U.K. later this month (as in January). A combination of British and European dates, it is a busy start to 2026. I am excited to see what the summer holds for BIIANCO. It is going to be thrilling to see…

HOW far they will go.

____________

Follow BIIANCO

FEATURE: The Streams Keeps Flowing: Kate Bush: The First and Foremost

FEATURE:

 

 

The Streams Keeps Flowing

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush singing copies of her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside

 

Kate Bush: The First and Foremost

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I have written some features…

around the modern influence of Kate Bush. How so many of the best albums of last year were very much influenced by her. Maybe not one or two specific albums. However, the artists who were releasing the finest of last year were largely Kate Bush fans. And I could see her very much in the blend. I am going to move away from the artists who are influenced by her and return to a subject I touched on last year. How Kate Bush has been setting records through her career. Literally from her debut single, Wuthering Heights, in 1978 to today. As I write this (29th December), Kate Bush is in the top five of the Worldwide iTunes Song Chart. It is a huge achievement. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) could well soon be the most-streamed and purchased song on iTunes. It has over a billion and a half streams on Spotify. Even though its video does not to be in HD, it has been seen over 367 million times. After being featured in the fifth season of Stranger Things, there is this second wave of attention for this song following the initial 2022 appearance and subsequent chart success. The fact that this all-conquering song from 1985 from an artist who is sixty-seven riding high in the charts even today is no doubt a record! The same song breaking records in different years. Although I do not want a single Kate Bush song to dominate as the expense of her others, it is still positive that she is being discussed and posting updates to her websites. I am not sure of any other female artists who have set so many records across such a wide time period. Madonna maybe? I am trying to think about her records, as she started later than Kate Bush – 1982 was when her debut single came out – and she has a new album out this year. Maybe in terms of number one singles and that side of things, perhaps Madonna has set quite a few. However, I think Kate Bush’s record-setting and the variety of them is more important and notable.

I am referencing Leah Kardos’s 2024 book about Hounds of Love for 33 1/3. There is a section of the book I have referenced before, where she talks about Kate Bush as ‘the first’. A female artist who set a record that none of her peers have. As I am going to publish a couple of features around the forty-eighth anniversary of The Kick Inside on 17th February, this ties into that. The first records she set were in 1978. I do wonder what official records Bush will set with Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) and its success on the iTunes chart. No other artist of her age and longevity can claim this sort of feat I do not think. I am considering the likes of Paul McCartney, but as a solo artist, has there been a song of his that has done as well on the Worldwide iTunes Song Chart?! Nearly forty-eight years since Wuthering Heights reached the top of the U.K. chart, Kate Bush is setting records and is this pioneering artist. Perhaps there was not the expectation that she would break records with her debut single.

EMI did not want Wuthering Heights to be the first single. Not a single at all. It was only because Bush fought so hard that it got to be released. It reached number one in the U.K. and, in the process, Bush was the first woman with a self-written song to reach number one. Even now, female artists are not featured on the singles chart as much as they should. There was a period when male artists were dominating the top spot. That has shifted, though think about the composition and writing credits. Many women who have topped the charts since Kate Bush have co-written their songs. It is not as common as you may think. In terms of those who have solely self-written number one singles, there have been incredibly few. Maybe only a small selection since 1978. That is amazing in itself. However, the fact no other female artist had achieved the distinction prior to 1978 shocked me! Kate Bush no doubt inspiring women who followed when it came to writing their own material. Not to judge artists in general, but so many artists, especially major Pop artists, have teams behind them. Or they write with one or two others. Although there are incredible female artists who do write their own material alone, relatively few get to number one on the U.K. singles chart.

Some might say chart success is irrelevant in a streaming age. I would disagree. Even if they are less important and desirable as they used to be, artists still want to get a number one single. For Kate Bush, reaching number one in 1978 was a massive success. Not only a self-written song, but her debut single to boot. Out of the gates with this song purely of her own, she got to number one. It is a remarkable achievement! The Kick Inside went to sell over a million copies in the U.K., making Bush the first woman in history to write a million-selling debut album. I still think that this record has not been equalled much since then. So, in 1978 (perhaps The Kick Inside did not hit a million copies until 1979), Kate Bush set two records. And she was a teenager until 30th July, 1978. So, in terms of age, she was also the youngest female artist to achieve these feats. And I am pretty sure very very few female artists aged nineteen or twenty have released a chart-topping U.K. single that they wrote solo. Same with a million-selling album. I think these records are less about number and chart positions and more about Bush having this writing autonomy and showing that a female artist who writes her own albums could get chart success. This was definitely uncommon in 1978. However, in years since, we can see artists who are following her example. Every major female artist that does this can be drawn back to Kate Bush. Not a record in terms of sales and chart positions, one of the best can also be applied to modern Pop. The wireless head mic is ubiquitous. Every major artist uses it at some point. Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa. I am naming three major Pop artists, but throw in Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx and women I mention a lot.

As I mentioned in December 2024, it was Gordon 'Gunji' Patterson was the sound engineer on The Tour of Life and fashioned a wireless mic out of a wire clothes hanger. I think Madonna is often credited with popularising that. Perhaps in terms of global concerts and this iconic vision. The Tour of Life less known and famous as Madonna’s Blond Ambition World Tour. However, it is surprising that artists did not fashion a wireless mic previous to 1979. David Bowie and other major artists were still using a hand-held microphone. Looking back, it seems like such a wrench having to be tethered and not having both hands free whilst singing! I know someone else would have designed a wireless microphone at some point, but Kate Bush opened the door. The Tour of Life not only introduced the wireless microphone. It also was revolutionary for female artists in terms of the spectacle and ambition of a Pop concert. Again, think about Madonna. The biggest Pop artist ever, I do feel like she was influenced by Kate Bush. You can draw a line between Bush and Madonna. Kate Bush definitely revolutionised the live experience in terms of how flexible artists could be. Not having to sing with a microphone and moving slightly. Now, Pop concerts could incorporate more dance and artist could leave the floor whilst singing. Even though Madonna and Bush rarely left the floor, they could bring dance more into their sets and not be worried about being on this static microphone. If 1978 saw Bush set a record with an album relating to its sales, she set a chart record with her third album. 1980’s Never for Ever debuted at number one in the U.K. Bush, again, the first woman to do this. This record has been equalled a lot since then, but no other female artists accomplished this by 1980. Kate Bush was only twenty-two. It is incredible thinking everything she had done in terms of breaking ground, innovating and being written into the history books. At a time when the industry was pretty sexist and misogynistic, it was a major step forward that Bush set these records! That the record-buying public also helped her do this.

I think back to today and Kate Bush continuing to set records. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Not to repeat too much what I write at the end of 2024. When The Whole Story was released in 1986, it was noted how Kate Bush had self-written all fifteen of her hit singles. That was a first for any woman. I am thinking of male artists who might have achieved this. Even major artists like The Beatles and David Bowie had co-writers. I am wracking my brains to think of any artist before Kate Bush who wrote fifteen hit singles on their own. Again, when it came to the future for female artists, this idea that you could achieve chart success writing solo. I think it was more suggested that female artists co-write. Or it was seen as more normal. However, that record Bush set by 1986 is one that has not been equalled a lot since then. I do really love that Bush was paving the way and breaking barriers just by being true to herself. It was not a big deal to her as she could only write solo. She was such a distinct artist that she would not think of collaborating. I have covered this for another feature, but it is conceivable to call 1993’s The Line, the Cross and the Curve a visual album. In the sense that it was visualisations of songs from The Red Shoes (1993). Not the whole album, but there were quite a few. This was not common for artists even in the 1990s. Look now at heavyweight queens like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and so many major acts. They have either released visual albums or they have released short films with songs strung together. A way of getting an album and music out to people in a more cinematic and filmic way. Kate Bush also set the record regarding the longest gap between number one singles for a female artist. Wuthering Heights in 1978 and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) in 2022.

It always amazes me that Kate Bush only had the one U.K. number one until 202!. You would have thought that singles from Hounds of Love like the title track would have reached number one. The music industry is still quite ageist, so the fact Bush was sixty-three when Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) reached number is a step forward. I know Kylie Minogue was Christmas number one in 2025, but she is fifty-seven. This is still a major achievement, as he industry still very much prioritises younger female artists and it is always important when someone like Kate Bush or Kylie Minogue gets to number one. It would be nice to normalise this more but, as the major radio stations in this country do not include many older female artists on their A-list or regular rotation, it takes viral moments and an original Christmas track from a legend to buck this trend. Kate Bush, again, breaking ground and changing things. Or at least showing that a female artist in her sixties can get to number one. Though I feel this will not be a common thing going forward. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) continues to break records. It surpassed a billion streams on Spotify in 2023. Bush was sixty-four. Not even 1980s queen Madonna, who is the same age as Bush, has achieved this! I don’t think that this will also become a norm, as streaming dominance is still very much coming from younger and newer artists. It is still inspiring that Kate Bush set this record. I think that Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) set more than one record in 2025. If it reaches the top of any iTunes chart, then it will set one in 2026. If Bush releases a new album, and it goes straight to number one, that could be a record. All of her studio albums – and greatest hits album and the Before the Dawn live album – have reached the top ten in the U.K. My point is that Kate Bush continues to amaze and innovate! By breaking records and being discussed now (aged sixty-seven), it does give encouragement. I think back to 1978 and Wuthering Heights setting a record. Right now, in 2026 (when you are reading this; not when I am writing this), you feel like Kate Bush will break new records and be the first ‘woman’. No wonder her influence is so huge and widespread today! The stunning and decades-enduring Kate Bush is undoubtedly…

A genius and vital influencer.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Madison Beer

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Hearst

 

Madison Beer

__________

I spotlighted…

the wonderful Madison Beer back in 2021. She is such an important artist, and one that people need to know about. Born in Jericho, NY, Beer was discovered on YouTube by Justin Bieber, which then led to her stunning 2013 debut single, Melodies. The E.P., As She Pleases, was released in 2018. I discovered her when she released the superb debut album, Life Support, in 2021. I was struck by the raw emotions and honesty in her music. Soul-baring but also connective, in the sense that her music touched people and they could relate to her experience. Although there are quite a few collaborators on 2023’s Silence Between Songs, you can hear Madison Beer’s heart and soul come through. It is her album and voice. What I love is she is someone who could collaborate and put a load of other artists on her albums, though she prefers to keep things personal and solo. I guess she will collaborate more in the future, but I tend to find it takes away from the directness and personal nature of the music. In the sense these songs are meaningful to her, so having other artists on the top of them takes something away. The extraordinary The Half of It: A Memoir was released in 2023. I would advise people to buy it. I know there are a lot of Madison Beer fans around the world and they will have read her memoir. It will give them a lot of strength. It is an emotional read at times but it does give us an insight into Beer, her music and personal life. I am writing about her now as her third studio album, locket, comes out on 16th January. A matter of days away, I think that this will be one of the most powerful and best albums of the year.

Make you mine, the first single from the album, came out in 2024. It has been a while since the first taste but, rather than release all the singles very shortly before the album coming out and then everything being wrapped up too soon, instead we have this slow release schedule in terms of gaps between singles. Yes Baby and Bittersweet came out in the autumn. They are phenomenal examples of a modern music queen at her best. I am excited to see how the album is received. Because locket is about to come out, I want to drop in some interviews with Madison Beer. Someone who discusses mental health issues, personal struggles with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), anxiety, and self-harm, Beer also promotes therapy and authenticity. She is someone who supports and promotes body positivity and advocates for L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ rights. In terms of chronology, I am not going to start with the oldest interview and work to the newest. I really want to start out with Rolling Stone and their interview from November. Madison Beer, as they say in their headline, is ready to get back to Pop. I do think that locket is going to be among the most talked-about albums of this year:

“Madison Beer knew her third album would be called Locket long before she even really dug into making it. After wrapping her most recent tour last fall, she was ready to dive into a new project, and this time around, the title felt important to her. She wanted it to feel authentic to who she is as an artist, perhaps an item or a word that felt tangible.

“I was in my Notes app for weeks on end just writing words I related to,” she says over the phone in early October. “I just kept on gravitating towards [Locket] every single time I would read the list.”

The word became a north star for Beer and her collaborators before they even got back into the studio. They would listen to songs or exchange ideas and say things like “This is so Locket” or “Locket-core.”

As she describes it, both the album and the accessory it’s named after feel like a vessel for her memories. Locket holds all the experiences she’s had that make the project what it is now.

“Each song contains things that are in my locket that I carry around with me,” she says.

Nostalgia runs deep in Beer’s new music. She wanted to return to the pop sound of her early releases and looked toward early favorites including Ariana Grande, SZA, and Gwen Stefani for inspiration. But Locket’s pop return comes with a growing confidence in her talent, thanks to successful experimentations with her sound and lyricism on recent releases like 2023’s more introspective Silence Between Songs.

“[Silence] really was a definitive moment for me because I was nervous about releasing an album that was extremely personal and very lyrically driven with more acoustic, slower stuff,” she says. “It really wasn’t a pop album at all. I was scared because I was like, ‘Is this not what people want from me?’ And then I was like, ‘This is what I want, and this feels really good to me. So why don’t I just do it?’”

Fans were more than accepting of her new direction. At the shows, they sang back every word, even for deeper album cuts like “Nothing Matters But You.” Before going on tour, however, she wanted to make a big dance-pop moment to keep the energy high at the shows. So she took another detour, crafting the delicious EDM-pop moment “Make You Mine” as a one-off single. It was so well-received that it was nominated for Best Dance Pop Recording at the 2025 Grammy Awards.

“It truly was made just for the tour,” she says. “I didn’t have any expectations for that song other than for my fans who are already attending my tour.” After the song’s success, she crafted two more big dance-pop moments in the vein of “Make You Mine,” including “15 Minutes” and Locket lead single “Yes Baby.”

“‘Yes Baby’ is kind of the finale of that,” Beer says. “Not the finale in the sense of me never going to make another dance song again, but I close that [chapter] for now. I’m returning a little more to my roots.”

The songs from Locket don’t lose the energy of her dance-pop period, even if they don’t go as maximalist as those tracks. Beer returned to the studio with some of her frequent collaborators, including Tim “One Love” Sommers, who worked on her debut EP As She Pleases when Beer was 18 and just getting started.

“I’ve been working with these people for so long, so it’s been really cool for us all to really grow together,” she adds”.

There are a couple of other interviews to cross off before wrapping up. Cosmopolitan published a really detailed and long interview with Madison Beer from August. At a time when locket was still being recorded and there was still some uncertainty about exactly when it was coming out, Madison Beer discussed working on the album and, among other things, her relationship with social media and the press. I cannot imagine how tough it is at time being this high-profile artist on social media. A lot of expectations and criticisms. How the press actually seemed to want to drive her out of music or were putting this pressure on her. How they bullied her. It is another revealing and really honest interview:

“We’re speaking right in the middle of your creative process. How’s it been going?

There’s no clocking in and out of the job. The other day, I broke down out of nowhere. I was working with this songwriter I’ve always wanted to work with and my entire arm started going numb, the side of my head started going numb. I just lost a friend to a brain aneurysm. So I’m thinking I’m having one, straight-up, and I’m freaking out internally. She asked me, “Are you okay?” I burst into tears. I had just met her an hour before. I ended up taking the weekend to do nothing. I was like, I want to sit in my room, watch stupid movies, play Fortnite, go in my Jacuzzi, drink a beer. Everyone can fuck off, leave me alone.

Your body was telling you something.

I’m not doing anyone a favour by burning myself out. Why does it have to get to the point of me having a panic attack? It shouldn’t, but I’m trying to snap out of it.

What’s your main goal with this new music?

I have the highest goals. This is hopefully what solidifies everything for me, whatever that means. That’s why it’s been hard to make — there’s a lot of pressure I’m putting on myself. So it’s taking me a second, but it feels exciting. I don’t want to succeed if it means not being who I am. I don’t need people to love me. And I don’t want people to listen to my music if it’s not real.

And then I’m simultaneously trying not to have a panic attack thinking about if everything goes super well, what my life will look like. Because that scares me, which is something I’m trying to be honest with myself about. When you work your whole life toward something and then it’s right there, it’s like, “Do I want it though?”

PHOTO CREDIT: Hearst

Something that really stands out to me is how you have a lot of compassion toward your younger self and also a genuine understanding that the adults in your life could have done better. And how you’re willing to speak publicly on all of this. Has this prompted any confrontations?

The boy who the whole nude situation happened with,3 he reached out to me and was like, “I had no idea that I hurt you like this. I’m so sorry.” I don’t know how it feels to be a 14-year-old boy receiving photos of a girl. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I don’t think he was being malicious showing them to his friends. He was a kid.

I’ve had to sit people down and be like, “Hey, you owe me an apology for what you did to me when I was a kid.” And a lot of the other people from that time in my life — I just have completely severed my relationships with. I don’t care to make up with you or be cool with you.

What about your relationship with the press?

I’ve been bullied a lot. They sometimes do interviews with me just to make fun of me. People around me used to tell me “Shhh, don’t speak back, don’t stand up for yourself.” But I’m at this place now where I will happily be like, “What the fuck are you saying?” if that’s how I feel. And who I am is someone who does stand up for themselves — someone who can be a bitch, if that’s what you deem it as.

And what about social media? Your digital footprint across platforms is huge.

If I could have a perfect world, I would not be on social media at all. I don’t think there’s any way to accurately depict yourself online. I’m so conditioned to everything I say and do on the internet being twisted. Though I do, unfortunately, scroll TikTok for hours on end. I want to delete it but I’d lose all my drafts. I don’t have Twitter on my phone anymore. I’m not going to die on this hill begging all of you to see me when you are clearly committed to misunderstanding me. I do miss my fans who are on there though —I used to talk to them on Twitter all the time.

Where does your self-worth come from?

To be so honest with you, a lot of my self-worth is based on the way I look. I’m trying to change that, but it’s so deep-rooted. It’s been ingrained in me since I was young because of people focusing on superficial bullshit. Unfortunately, that’s manifested itself into a place where if I’m breaking out or I’ve gained five pounds or I don’t feel pretty, I don’t feel like I’m worth anything.

Do you think he’s ready for whatever this next career moment could hold for you?

No, neither of us are equipped for whatever the fuck might come. But it’s kind of exciting to be like, “We’re going to figure all this out, hopefully together.” Yes, I know he’s going to support me, but do I think that he knows or I know or my parents know or my brother knows how we’re going to feel or go through it if and when that does happen? No.

But in terms of certain other people, don’t think that if and hopefully when this album goes crazy, I’m not going to be like, “You didn’t give me the time of fucking day and now you want to be my best friend. Goodbye. Get out of my face, genuinely”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Morgan Maher

I am going to end up with PAPER and a great discussion with Madison Beer. This was published in September and was released to coincide with  the release of yes baby. One of Beer’s best tracks, I wanted to include parts of the interview here, as it is a song that struck me when I first heard it. I am excited to hear the rest of locket. She is such a strong and amazing person. Her music, interviews and writing has helped so many people. The fact she is so real with her fans is refreshing and important. However, you do hope there is a time she can detach from social media and live a less visible life:

“Last time I talked to you was last year when you released "15 Minutes." Take me through the timeline of what you've been up to since then, and what led to this new song coming up?

Obviously there's a lot that I would love to talk about regarding the album, because it is all tethered to the project. I know I haven't announced it yet, but my fans know that this is part of an album, and this is the first song kicking it off. From touring, I've learned a lot about which songs feel good to perform, what I like, what I don't like. "yes Baby" felt like the right way to start this all. In my head, it looked like closing out a little bit of the EDM dance stuff — not that I'll never do more, maybe even on the deluxe — but I wanted there to be a new dance song people could connect to. It's not a representation of the whole project, but I felt like it tied in with "Make You Mine" and "15 Minutes" before moving into album world.

I love that idea of a trio: "Make You Mine," "15 Minutes," and now "Yes Baby." What's your relationship with your fans nowadays?

I got off Twitter a couple months ago, which I'd never done since I started. It was negatively impacting my ability to see my artistic direction clearly. I really value their opinions, but when there are too many cooks in the kitchen, I get overwhelmed. I was second-guessing myself constantly. Deleting Twitter has actually helped me feel more connected, not less. I do IG Lives on my mbhq account and it feels like the same old — we just talk, and it feels like family. Honestly, I feel closest to them on tour, but not reading the constant discourse has made my decisions for this project really my own.

Tell me about the making of "yes baby." I feel like I'm in Ibiza listening to it. Where did you pull inspo from?

We made it right after I got off tour. I was so geeked up on performing "Make You Mine." Every night when that intro came on, people would lose their minds. It tapped into a different part of my performing brain. I'm a singer first, but with songs like "Make You Mine" or "Yes Baby," it's more about performing, jumping, running around. On tour, those moments felt like the club. With "Yes Baby," obviously the phrase is sexual, but I also picture people snapping for their friends and going, "Yes, baby!" I imagine my fans doing that back at me. It's just a fun, affirmational song inspired by the tour energy.

Do you ever feel like people disregard how good a singer you are?

I'm at a really good place with that now. I don't feel the need to prove myself to people who aren't paying attention. I know that when people come to my shows, they leave knowing I'm a singer. I used to get upset about it, but it's a personal opinion. People can think I'm a bad singer all they want — I'd rather that than them not think I'm a singer at all. I know I'm a singer, my fans know it. If you don't, come to a show. The mic will be on.

A lot of pop girls are coming back with dance and club vibes. Were you conscious of that when releasing this song?

Not really. With "Make You Mine," it was completely organic. With "Yes Baby," it wasn't about following a trend. My album isn't really a dance album — it's a straightforward pop record. If I were chasing the trend, I'd make a full dance album, but that would feel alienating. I like too many different genres. I just love making fun songs you can play while getting ready, feeling sexy, and having fun”.

I have so much respect and love for Madison Beer. I have been following her for a while, and I know how much locket means to her and how much of herself she has put into it. In terms oft tour dates for locket, I do hope that she comes to the U.K. I will try and see her if she plays in London, as there will be so many people who are keen to see her on the stage and talk to her. For anyone who is new to Madison Beer, go back and listen to her previous albums and listen to interviews with her, as she is authentic, compelling, hugely intelligent…and someone whose honesty and bravery is quite rare when major Pop artists are expected to be guarded or filter themselves carefully. I hope that this year offers personal happiness, positivity and success for Madison Beer. There are few artists who deserve it…

MORE than her.

______________

Follow Madison Beer

FEATURE: I Got Sunshine in a Bag: Gorillaz’s Clint Eastwood at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

I Got Sunshine in a Bag

 

Gorillaz’s Clint Eastwood at Twenty-Five

__________

WHILST I am prioritising…

big album anniversaries this year, I also want to recognise singles that are celebrating significant anniversaries. The debut single from Gorillaz turns twenty-five on 5th March. Clint Eastwood was one hell of an introduction to the virtual band. Peaking at number four in the U.K., Clint Eastwood was written by Damon Albarn and Teren Jones and received large positive feedback. In terms of the fanbase in 2001, I guess a lot of Blur fans would have followed Damon Albarn. However, Gorillaz were a bit of an unknown quantity. A virtual band that Damon Albarn and the artist Jamie Hewlett created in 1998, Gorillaz consists of four fictional members: 2-D (vocals, keyboards, melodica), Murdoc Niccals (bass guitar), Noodle (guitar, keyboards, backup vocals) and Russel Hobbs (drums). A sense of anonymity perhaps meant that Damon Albarn could write in a different and les inhibited way. This wholly new project, Blur were still active. They would release Think Tank in 2003. However, Gorillaz was this fresh character. Albarn proving he is one of the most enduring, innovative and talented songwriters of his generation. Clint Eastwood is proof of his brilliance. I remember when the Gorillaz album came out on 26th March, 2001. I was in college and was already aware of Clint Eastwood. I bought the album and was not sure what to expect. 19-2000, the next single from Gorillaz, is a highlight. It would be four years until Gorillaz released their second studio album, Demon Days. I think it is a more consistent and better album, though I do love the debut. And Clint Eastwood is fantastic! There is an interesting 2001 feature from Sound and Sound I will come to relating to the recording of Clint Eastwood. Rolling Stone ranked his gem at thirty-eight on their 100 best songs of the 2000s. In October 2011, NME placed it at number 141 on its list of the 150 Best Tracks of the Past 15 Years. With a basic explanation behind the song’s title – named after Clint Eastwood, its similarity to the theme music of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is obvious -, there is more curiosity to be found in the background and recording of Clint Eastwood.

I do want to come to Sound on Sound and their fascinating chat with Tom Girling and Jason Cox. They engineered Clint Eastwood. They also acted as producers alongside Gorillaz and Dan the Automator. One of the best debut singles in my opinion, there is something dark, cool and unusual about Clint Eastwood. I had not really heard anything like this in 2001. It was a bit of a revelation and shockwave that I felt affect people I knew. Excited by this new virtual band:

“Two years ago, when Sound On Sound last visited resident engineers Tom Girling and Jason Cox at Damon Albarn's West London studio, Albarn's band Blur had recently finished working with producer William Orbit on their album 13, a recording which involved bizarre instruments, experimental recording techniques and endless Pro Tools editing. The studio had also been used to record Albarn's equally experimental collaboration with composer Michael Nyman, the soundtrack to the film Ravenous. Since then, however, Blur have only entered the studio to record one more single, so Girling and Cox have been able to put their feet up and take it easy...

Er, no. Although the only Blur activity in the meantime has been a Greatest Hits album, Albarn had set up the studio (also named 13) mainly to handle his own side projects — and these have proliferated during the band's time off. There has been two more film soundtracks, Ordinary Decent Criminal and 101 Reykjavik, and a lengthy trip to Mali to record material for an Oxfam‑sponsored project drawing together musicians from every nation on the Greenwich Meridian. The studio has been extended to incorporate what was the adjoining unit, with the control room completely rebuilt around a new desk — a task which inevitably fell mainly to Girling and Cox. And on top of all that, there's been Gorillaz, a project which has yielded a top 10 album and a massive hit single in the shape of 'Clint Eastwood'.

The final version of 'Clint Eastwood' in Logic Audio. The track labelled 'rough blues' is Damon Albarn's original 'gibberish' vocal; 'V Comp' is the final vocal as recorded and edited in Jamaica. Kid Koala's scratching, on track 5, has been heavily edited...

The brainchild of Damon Albarn and former flatmate Jamie Hewlett, who was the artist responsible for the cult Tank Girl cartoon strip, Gorillaz have been described as the world's first 'virtual band'. The idea was that while Albarn came up with a suitable selection of songs, Hewlett would devise cartoon characters to front the band and stories for them to act out in their videos. "Once we'd started doing the tunes, Jamie got an idea of what the characters should be like, and once we'd fine‑tuned the characters, people started to think about the whole story around those characters, and it just started evolving like that," explains Jason. "So the music started first, I think. It was Damon, Tom and myself doing the music, and Jamie used to come down and see what was going on and what style of music we were heading towards. He was doing his sketching and demoing his characters while we were demoing the songs — the same sort of thing but on the drawing front."

With initial demos done at 13, the 'virtual band' managed to attract record‑company backing, and recording commenced on an album proper. Unlike the majority of Albarn's previous projects, the Gorillaz album was largely written in the studio. "The comparison would be that Blur would go into the rehearsal studio and rehearse the songs that were written, and then sometimes even go on tour with those songs before they were even recorded, and then go into a studio," says Jason. "The changing point was working with William Orbit, because he'd work in a different sort of way where he'd get the band to do jamming and then make up tunes like that, and then bring them back the next day and do some more on it. So we were slowly getting towards this way of working. It's a lazier way of working!"

"It's not a conscious effort to work in a different way," continues Tom. "I think the reason why we worked in a different way is because we've got this whole Logic thing going on, so instead of working in a linear world where you're using tape, you've got a hell of a lot more flexibility. I think it gears itself more towards this kind of thing, where you haven't necessarily got a specific goal you're after. It just gives you a chance to experiment, basically chuck a whole load of paint at the canvas and see what sticks, and weed out all the drips of paint that you don't want! I know that Damon loves working in this way now, compared to the way Blur would put a track together."

'Clint Eastwood' was in some ways an exception to the free‑form, cut‑and‑paste compositional method employed on the album as a whole. Damon Albarn's initial four‑track efforts with a drum machine and guitar were recreated in Logic at 13, before the other basic instrumental elements and guide vocals were added. Althought the structure of the song was changed, it neither lost any sections to other songs nor gained any. "In terms of sound, the way the song is and the format hasn't been changed much from day one, even though we've had different vocals on it," explains Tom. "Essentially, it's made up of stuff we put together in more or less a day, except the vocals, and then just tweaked. There were a couple of instruments in early versions of the song that were taken out later, but the final version is basically pretty much the same as the first set of arrangements, except for the structure of the song. The actual track's pretty much the same bar a couple of extra drums and the rap, and one keyboard part that's not in the final mix.

IN THIS PHOTO: Tom Girling (left) and Jason Cox in the new control room at 13

“There's no real drums on here. One's off a drum machine, and there's a sample I got from somewhere. Apart from that there's some live percussion on there. You know on a bass drum you've got the lug nuts that hold the skin on? It's actually a load of those in a carrier bag being shaken. It sounds like it's pitched down, too, but it's just EQ'd. The bass is a keyboard bass, which is the Moog Rogue, and on the big fills it's got a low sub‑note which is off a Roland JV. There's a piano in there, which is our little cheesy upright in the other room. The strings came from one of our string machines, the Solina String Ensemble."

"That should have been burned years ago," laughs Jason. "Damon gave us the OK to set fire to it on stage, but we said 'No, you can't set fire to that! It's a classic!' And it's ended up being used on two or three tunes."

'Clint Eastwood' included a rap section from its early days, but the original rap recorded by Girling and Cox at 13 ended up being replaced. "There was a rap on there before done by some English guys called Phi‑life and Cypher, which was used for a B‑side in the end," says Tom.

"That's the version that we do live, as well," adds Jason. "It's a little bit more hardcore, in that English style."

One of the most prominent instruments on 'Clint Eastwood' is the melodica. This cheap wind instrument, with its plastic keyboard, has traditionally been used mainly as a teaching aid, but has become a firm favourite with Damon Albarn for its sound, usefulness as a compositional aid, and capacity to irritate engineers...

"It's one of those school teaching instruments that needs to be brought back," says Jason.

"No, it doesn't need to be brought back, it needs to be binned!" insists Tom”.

There is an article I will finish off with. However, I want to quote from a March 2001. Lobotomy Pop sat down with Gorillaz – if you can physically sit down with a virtual band?! – and asked them about their music and fanbase. It must have been strange talking to actual people but writing them as virtual figures and not photographing them:

“The members of your band have different backgrounds. How do you manage these differences

Russel: We formed as a band in April 1998. It then took some time for our individual characters to gel together. It’s only after many punch-ups, screaming matches, and late-night colouring-in sessions that we have reached a point where we can get on stage, pull our pants up high under our armpits and shout “Hello Mr. President...”

Do you feel related to a musical scene (or a cartoon scene)?

Russel: We live in an animated alter-world where Augustus Pablo can walk into Electric Lady Studios, pick up a Gibson, and play a fuzz lead over a Cachao bassline while Dr. Dre plays the tin flute to Rag Time beatz.

How did you collaborate with such strong personalities as Damon Albarn, Dan The Automator, etc

Murdoc: It was an easy vibe with everyone, you know? We had already been working on the tunes for about a year before we started getting anyone else in, so we had such a strong vision of who we were and what we were about that anybody who came along had to acclimatise to us. Like Russel said, we’re in some animated-alter-bollocks or whatever!

Do you plan gigs? And how will it happen?

Russel: That’s the ace up our sleeves!

2D: Yeah! The world is having a hard enough time wondering how and where we exist and what happens in the studio. People go into melt down when they try and imagine us playing live.

Murdoc: People will bloody melt down when they get an ear-load of what we’ve got to give them.

Is Jamie Hewlett an important part of the group? Do you actually work with him?

Murdoc: He’s as important as any designer or director is to any band. You really put your life in these people's hands when you hand over any amount of control of your visual style to them. He’s cool, as long as you steer him off of his obsession with nudity and military headwear. It gets on my bloody wick when he sticks his ore in on interviews though. He and Albarn are the same, you do them a favour with their tired old careers and they take it as a carte blanche to start gobbing off”.

I am going to hop to this article from Music Radar. It is revealed how that incredible and loved beat on Clint Eastwood was not in fact composed by Damon Albarn. It was an Omnichord loop preset. It takes nothing away from the song, as it is still Albarn bringing that sound into the song. Even if it was not an original sound or composition. I think that Clint Eastwood sounds incredible twenty-five years later:

“Sometimes, finding inspiration can be a hard-won battle. On other occasions, it’s right there waiting for you as soon as you turn on your synth.

Case in point: Gorillaz’ Clint Eastwood. The familiar lolloping piano and drum beat from the band’s 2001 single wasn’t, it turns out, composed by Damon Albarn, but is simply a preset from the good old Suzuki Omnichord - the Rock 1 preset, to be precise.

Albarn made the revelation during an interview with Zane Lowe at the Blur frontman’s Studio 13 facility in London. There’s an impressive level of organisation going on here: each synth has its own spot on a labelled shelf.

And there are a lot of shelves. Albarn casually confirms that he has a whole roomful of drum machines, before showing off his BOSS VT-1 voice transformer and Yamaha QY10, which he used back in the day to create the bass synth line on Elastica’s 1994 single, Connection.

It’s when he turns on that Omnichord, though, that Albarn gets the biggest reaction out of Lowe, with the Apple Music One presenter seemingly amazed that Clint Eastwood’s groove was so easily come by.

“It just came like that?” he asks. “That’s it. That’s the preset. It’s the Rock 1 preset,” replies Albarn, before spicing it up with the Omnichord’s fill button.

Originally released in 1981, with the final model arriving in 1999, the Omnichord was a preset-filled groove machine that could play rhythms, chords and basslines, and had buttons that enabled you to switch between major, minor and 7th chords. The ‘Sonic Strings’, meanwhile, could be swiped to (sort of) replicate the sound of a stringed instrument.

This isn’t the only time a pre-rolled beat has been used in a hit record, of course. The drum loop for Rihanna’s 2007 smash Umbrella comes straight out of GarageBand (Vintage Funk Kit 03 is what you’re looking for) and Usher’s 2008 chart-topper Love In This Club also features Apple Loops.

While some will be disappointed to learn that Albarn and other producers have had hits off the back of what are effectively stock sounds, it just goes to show that you don’t necessarily need to sweat over every element of a song to make a great record. In all of the aforementioned cases, the skill came in recognising a loop’s potential when no one else had”.

In 2001, Jamie Hewlett and Albarn said that they had not received any feedback from Clint Eastwood himself over the song. I wonder if that has changed since. A lot of songs are named after actors (Fall Out Boy’s Uma Thurman among them), but I guess it is optimistic to expect any response from the actor in question. However, it would be nice to think Clint Eastwood has heard the song named after him. A sensational debut single from the Gorillaz album, we mark twenty-five years of Clint Eastwood on 5th March. I think 2001 was a fantastic year for music but bad one for politics and world events, so the way you felt about a song or album then has changed given events that followed. I still have a lot of love for Gorillaz. Their debut album and what they were doing in 2001. Clint Eastwood is one of their best song. A perfect opening salvo from…

A genius virtual band.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Jaguar

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Jaguar

 

Jaguar

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WHEREAS most of…

PHOTO CREDIT: Lucas Alexander Wilson

my Spotlight features are around musicians, I am keen to highlight some incredible D.J.s. Female D.J.s specifically. For Modern-Day Queens, I am spending some time with one of the most influential and respected talents in the world. Jaguar is this incredible D.J. and broadcaster who I know will have a very busy and joy-filled 2026. I normally like to bring in recent interviews with anyone I recommend. However, it does not seem like there has been anything from last year, so I am going to go back a bit further. I hope people do interview Jaguar this year, as she has done a lot since 2024, and people will want to know more. Go and follow Jaguar on TikTok and Instagram.  I will come to some interviews with the D.J. and BBC Radio 1 host. I am starting out with some comprehensive biography from Resident Advisor:

“Jaguar Bingham is every bit as memorable as her name. Hailing from Alderney in the Channel Islands, but based in East London, the 27-year-old broadcaster, DJ and journalist, known mononymously as Jaguar, is among the new guard of multi-hyphenate talents steering UK dance music towards brighter waters. She’s a next-gen tastemaker instigating change through projects such as UTOPIA and The Jaguar Foundation. Jaguar’s work to date, spanning from her radio internship at BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra in 2014 to more recent endeavours such as her landmark BBC Introducing on Radio 1 Dance show, has been anchored by a desire to spotlight new artists and minority voices within electronic music. It’s what drew her to BBC Introducing – a platform devoted to unsigned and emerging musicians – in the first place. In 2016, Jaguar joined the crew as Team Assistant at the station’s Sheffield HQ. At the time, she was studying English Literature at Leeds University. (A move, says Jaguar, spurred on by the city’s reputation for vibrant nightlife.) Each week, she would rifle through tunes submitted to the BBC Uploader by new artists. “I was listening to all the dance tracks and sending them to Danny and Monki, and Annie's shows and Pete's shows,” says Jaguar, who later worked for BBC Introducing’s Central Team in London, “so I was ready, even then, for my own show.” That moment came in 2020, when Jaguar launched the BBC Introducing Dance show on Radio 1. A defining moment in Jaguar’s career to date, the show has been met with critical acclaim. In 2021, Mixmag named her Broadcaster of the Year – a poignant accolade, given it was there that Jaguar’s voice and face became synonymous with its weekly office party, the LAB LDN. “I fell in love with dance music at the LAB LDN,” says Jaguar on her time at Mixmag, where she also worked as Weekend Editor for a time. “It was really special.” Elsewhere, she was awarded Best Radio Show for BBC Introducing Dance through a public vote at last year’s DJ Mag Best of British Awards.

The magazine had previously dubbed her “UK radio’s next gen champion”. More recently, Jaguar was tapped to co-present this year’s IMS alongside summit co-founder Pete Tong MBE. Keen to diversify her work, Jaguar has also produced and voiced documentaries for radio on topics such as LGBTQIA+ safe space clubbing and written articles spotlighting unsung Black women pioneers in house music. She was also Beatportal’s Guest Editor in August 2021, and previously helmed a show on South London community station Reprezent Radio, which she dedicated to new music and guests such as HAAi, Anja Schneider and Dance System. In September 2020, Jaguar turned her attention to parties. She launched an event, UTOPIA, with the brand later branching out into a UTOPIA Talks conference and podcast. The latter welcomed SHERELLE, Mary-Anne Hobbs, Sama’ and many more in its first season. “I describe UTOPIA as my vision of the world,” says Jaguar, reflecting on the brand at large and the very first UTOPIA club night: a sold-out celebration at London’s Night Tales. “It’s a world I'm trying to get to through all of the work I do: radio, DJing and so on. It's a community.” Speaking of communities, Jaguar was inspired by some of the queer parties and venues she’d encountered previously as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. Dalston Superstore, say, or Leeds’ Wharf Chambers. Elsewhere, she’s thrilled to be sharing her latest project, The Jaguar Foundation, with the world. A partnership with Ministry of Sound and Sony Music UK Social Justice Fund, Jaguar described the foundation as a “home for my long-term commitment to [equalising] music through more forward-thinking initiatives and partnerships” in an op-ed she penned for the Independent. The Jaguar Foundation released its first report on the state of gender equality in UK dance music at last month’s IMS. Furthermore, the foundation’s first initiative, Future1000, saw Jaguar collaborating with in-school music education platform Virtuoso (fka FutureDJs) on a free, UK-wide DJ, production and leadership programme which introduced 1000 female, trans and non-binary students aged 12-18 to the music industry. A major move for the industry and Jaguar alike. Tackling issues such as gender imbalance, representation and accessibility within the industry at a foundational level, the initiative provided curious minds with artist-led sessions with the likes of Jyoty, Jayda G and Bklava and course modules curated by the London College of Music Education.

“I wanted the students to feel represented, supported, and comfortable,” explains Jaguar. “It can be scary learning to DJ. I wanted them to feel they were in an environment where they feel safe to explore their interests.” Future1000 was brought to life during the pandemic. It was then that Jaguar, amid the chaos of the time, recognised what her purpose was – and had been for some time, subconsciously – within the industry: amplifying marginalised and undiscovered artists and DJs. “It made me look inward,” says Jaguar on lockdown. “I realised I’m never going to be the loudest person. My way of expressing myself comes through my work and making it clear that I’m going to spotlight not just great music, but great music from women, and Black, brown, trans and non-binary people.” Born to a Ghanaian mother and English father, Jaguar cites the “lineage of Ghanaian women” on her mother’s side, along with her girlfriend, as continued inspirations. Though it was her father who taught her to always go the extra mile and dream big. (She reckons she’s also inherited his work ethic.) She looks up to fellow tastemakers such as Annie Mac and The Blessed Madonna, as well as Clara Amfo and Honey Dijon. This admiration is entirely reciprocated. Jaguar is a regular at the Annie Mac-curated Lost and Found Festival in Malta, for instance, where she treats sun-kissed ravers to her signature cocktail of genre-hopping, feel-good bubblers. She has previously supported Annie at venues across the UK, including Warehouse Project and the Pickle Factory. In 2018, Jaguar was mentored by The Blessed Madonna for the Smirnoff Equalising Music campaign. It was a spectacular ‘pinch-me’ moment that solidified her incredible career trajectory up until then. Let’s rewind though, for a second. Growing up on Alderney, it was the video games that initially piqued Jaguar’s interest in immersive electronic music and world-building through sound design. “I’d play Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts,” she recalls. “I loved fantasy games, they’ve got such incredible soundtracks.

I’ve actually started gaming again, since lockdown. Seven-year-old me would be excited to see it.” Her older brother exposed her to much of the music that eventually shaped her personal taste. (Her brother’s collection, that is, along with teenage summers spent raving in WWII bunkers on the island). Back when they were kids, he would transfer tunes from his Limewire-acquired collection to her iPod. “I'd listen to Kanye West and the Chemical Brothers,” she says with a grin so infectious you can’t help but smile too. “I remember hearing Timbaland's Shock Value for the first time, as well as Gorillaz's Demon Days.” A love for pop music soon blossomed, with Beyoncé, Black-Eyed Peas and emo/pop-punk outfit Evanescence, along with Aussie sisterly duo the Veronicas, among her favourites back then. Her affinity for electronic music and genres such as house, techno and disco, along with jungle, drum’n’bass and stacks more floor-filling styles, merged with an interest in student radio while in Leeds. “I loved the way talking about music, discovering music and presenting it to an audience made me feel,” she says of the days spent presenting and producing her own student radio show, Dangerous Jag.

In 2016, Jaguar won two coveted Studio Radio Awards. “It was like winning an Oscar at the time!” she laughs. Since her first stint on the airwaves, it’s been clear Jaguar possesses a natural talent for bonding with listeners via a shared love for great music. Not only that, but a determination to uplift those around her. See, Jaguar isn’t content with making a name for herself alone. Instead, she strives to rise through the ranks side by side with her peers. Take her recent run of headline UK shows with UTOPIA, which saw her inviting Future1000 alumni Badly Drawn Banana aboard the HMS UTOPIA for an intimate party on the Thames. Looking ahead, Jaguar is a resident at iconic hotspot Pikes Ibiza this season, with shows also confirmed at storied venues such as DC10 and Amnesia. Elsewhere, she’ll set out on a must-see European tour of her own, hitting up events such as Glastonbury, Circoloco and Radio 1’s Big Weekend this spring and summer. Jaguar will also fly UTOPIA out to Ibiza for a pair of unmissable White Isle shows, and make her US debut this October at CRSSD Festival. She’s also ideating on future film and documentary projects. She’d like to write some books down the line, and live out her childhood dreams by dabbling in TV presenting. She also plans to grow UTOPIA into a festival one day and aspires to host the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury. We can expect future club sets to include specially-produced edits of tracks made by Jaguar’s friends, too. A neat touch, one that’s very much in keeping with the spirit of togetherness that permeates through all that Jaguar does. Togetherness, authenticity and the delightful purveyance of effervescent dance music: these are the calling cards of Jaguar”.

Let’s go back to 2023 for the first interview. It is from DAZED. I have seen so many other D.J.s shout out and salute Jaguar. She is someone who is loved and respected! I tell a lie. There is a 2025 interview I have found. That is important, as last year is when Jaguar released her debut E.P., flowers. Four amazing tracks from this incredible and adored D.J. It is a wonderful E.P. I wonder if she has plans for more this year:

“What drew you to dance music?

Jaguar: Growing up, I predominately listened to noughties pop and anything my older brother had on his iPod – so, that would’ve been Timberland, Kanye, or Eminem. And, I guess, the early dance stuff I would’ve listened to would’ve been some Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Groove Armada, Fatboy Slim, and then all the 00s trance classics. But, as a teenager, a gateway [dance music] artist for me would have been someone like Grimes and hearing [her 2012 single] ‘Genesis’ for the first time. And, then, [going to] uni: that’s when I started going to clubs for the music and being like, ‘wait, what’s this song?’ or ‘I want to play this [song] on my student radio show that four people listen to, if I’m lucky’. So, the deep love of all music was always there and, then, it refined into dance music as a teenager onwards.

What’s the difference in your approach to building a playlist for and playing a set on your radio show in comparison to DJing at club nights and parties, like False Idols?

Jaguar: I approach DJing and radio differently, but there is a lot of overlap just by default. For my radio show, we probably get sent about 500 tracks a week [via the BBC Introducing uploader] so I’m downloading maybe 60 tracks a week, maybe more. And, naturally, the stuff I’m really into I’ll put in my playlists for my DJ sets. But then, my DJ sets are also dependent on the crowd, the vibe, what mood I’m in that day – so, in the end, they’ll be more of a melting pot of my overall influences. Whereas the radio show has a [defined] brief, which is: new and emerging, UK dance music. Some records work better on the radio, too: I’ll play more chilled stuff, or ambient, or neo-classical, or super heavy stuff [on there]. And that might not be my taste for DJ set but, as a tastemaker, I’ll reflect that on the radio.

If you were queen for the day, what would be your first royal decree?

Jaguar: Equality for all.

What’s one thing you could definitely live without?

Jaguar: The patriarchy.

Describe your vision of utopia in three words.

Jaguar: Colourful, togetherness, free”.

FOUR FOUR spoke with Jaguar in 2024. The statistics when it comes to Dance and Electronic music are shocking. In terms of gender imbalance and the lack of women and non-binary people represented. You can’t be what you can’t see. If women and non-binary people are not being given opportunities, having their music played and are almost invisible, it creates a very bleak future. The Jaguar Foundation has this ethos and ambition: “Our mission is to make electronic music a more equal place for the next generation of creatives and emerging artists. Through forward-thinking initiatives, we want to create a freeing, inclusive platform that inspires people from minority backgrounds to gain greater opportunities and feel represented throughout the music industry”:

“My role evolved as I told them that I loved electronic music and wanted to do more with dance music. I essentially became the dance editor. I listened to every dance track. I would send them to Pete Tong, Annie Mac, Danny Howard, and Monki. Then, in 2020, were getting so much dance music that Radio One said, “Oh, maybe we should do a show.” And I was in line to present Introducing Dance and I’ve been doing it for four years this month, which is pretty cool.”

The digital music renaissance has put pressure on radio, as listeners flock to streaming services and social media to discover new music. Algorithms have largely replaced tastemakers, placing individuals in a bizarre chokehold in which computers dictate our tastes. Previously, the radio and record stores were the only places to find new music, and DJs and broadcasters exposed listeners to new and avant-garde sounds.

Jaguar remains a passionate believer in the power of radio and tastemaking, infusing her programme with new sounds and breathing new life into BBC Introducing in an effortlessly personal way. “Obviously, I am biased. But I believe that having a tastemaker and a curator you trust to select the music is so important that it will never lose value.”

“I don’t think it’s ever going to die. I think the audience is shifting, and the way we consume is very different. But radio is always going to hold an important part and I still see that with my radio show. I have an important job, probably one of the most important jobs. I sift through 500 to 600 tracks a week on the Introducing Uploader. You have to have an ear that develops over time. I don’t think an algorithm can do that and that’s from 10 years of curating music on the radio.”

The concept of community is central to Jaguar’s work, whether it’s her BBC Introducing show, which provides a clear path for new artists to be discovered, her label and platform, UTOPIA, which serves as a voice for new ideas and artists, or her DJ sets, which capture her desire for the new, daring, and unheard.

“Community is an important word regarding my work. My show was built with a community around it. I think the kind of culture we’ve got around the show, which is mainly based around new artists is really special. And then what I do with my label, club night and podcast, UTOPIA, is a community platform, because it’s about bringing people together, it’s about representing an inclusive space on the dance floor with diverse sounds, styles, types of DJs and music lovers. I’ve also got a WhatsApp group, where the UTOPIA community is thriving full of creatives.”

“I’m obsessed with my artists, they’re genuinely my favourite artists in the world and it’s such a pleasure to work with them. I think unless you’re going to work with someone who’s as passionate as I am to put out your music, no one else is gonna be as passionate as you are. I take my job very, very seriously. I’m very, very empathetic with artists.”

The Jaguar Foundation may be one of her most important endeavours as she addresses gender imbalances in the business, going beyond raising awareness by collaborating with Sony to develop the first-of-its-kind study on documenting gender disparity in the music industry.

“The top line of it was that there is a lack of representation of women and non-binary people in dance music. It’s a systemic thing, we live in a patriarchy and there’s no denying that. There are multiple barriers, such as the gender pay gap, women being mothers and having to leave their careers, and whether they enter or not later on. A lot of women are being discouraged from pursuing a career in music and men are the gatekeepers. Ultimately, you can’t be what you can’t see”

“We discovered that only 5% of dance music in the charts was created by women and non-binary artists. Then, within radio, less than 1% of the top 200 tracks played were created entirely by women and non-binary artists. Only 24% of streaming places and streaming playlists were created by women and non-binary people.”

The first report is a stark and honest look at an unjust scene, that has barred so many people from entering and ostracised those who attempted to open the door. It has forced those in power to reflect on what has transpired and what should happen next. It serves as the industry’s starting point for learning.

“A lot of things came up, such as being subjected to the male gaze, feeling unsafe in the workplace or behind the decks, experiencing sexual assault while working, and navigating the club and booth safely.”

The Jaguar Foundation’s results serve as a baseline for the sector to grow and improve in terms of equity. It offered a voice to those who felt voiceless or alienated, reached out to the margins of society, and shed attention on the disparities that have plagued the scene for far too long.

“I’d love to update the statistics, as they were from 2022. So far, I’ve noticed some really positive changes. You know, just last summer, we had Peggy Gou, Jazzy, Raye, and Charlotte Plank all in the top ten of the UK charts, which was cool.”

In addition to statistics, Jaguar has advocated certain hands-on procedures to help carve out a more diverse and fair club and festival environment, one of which is rider requests, which artists may utilise to say that if they are going to play, the lineup must be balanced and fair.

“I have this clause in my contract. That simply means that whenever I am booked, there should be an effort to make the lineup as diverse as possible by including at least one other woman, transgender person, person of colour, or LGBT+ person.”

She goes on to say that it needs to start from the top. This situation cannot be resolved immediately, and while the industry is taking measures to make the environment more fair and open, true change will not occur unless people with actual weight and influence begin to show support and fight for those without a voice.

“I really just implore anyone with a bit of weight and power, which is mostly men, to include this in their contract. I believe it will make a difference because all we can do is put in more effort, work a little harder, and perform better. This is not me having a go. I never attack anyone. I never say, “This is your fault, or you are doing this incorrectly.” We are all responsible for global issues, whether they directly affect you or not. Often, the people who aren’t directly affected have the most power to change things.”

Jaguar’s success story thus far offers optimism for the future generation of dance music. Her influence in the business is undeniable, and her success can be attributed to her complete transparency about how she works, what she believes in, and who she supports. Her voice reflects the current sound and mentality of UK dance culture.

“I’m very passionate about the representation of people who don’t feel represented in the mainstream or in the world, music reflects the world and the world is by no means perfect. So one of my things is I want to help make the world a better place in that sense.”

I asked her to give some advice to those looking to break into the industry, “Be aware that it takes time to hone your sound and become truly good at what you do. If you’re making music, be as creative as possible while still having fun with it. Do not be afraid to experiment. If you’re releasing music, you should have a year’s worth of music planned out so that you can be consistent. If you can release a track every six weeks, or if you have four tracks, make sure you have a strategy for each moment. Know what you’re going to do for marketing and visuals; it doesn’t have to be an elaborate music video. You can do it for free”.

When I interviewed Carly Wilford last year she said, as a D.J., how she noticed the Electronic scene is male-heavy. In fact, whilst there were steps towards gender equality and balance, there has been a regression. This is something Jaguar discussed with FLO London last year around the release of the flowers E.P. Go and buy this glorious and stunning work. I do think that 2026 is a year when Jaguar will be discovering and spotlighting great artists. She will play amazing festivals and gigs and maybe there will be new music. An L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ heroine and icon and someone who is always striving towards inclusiveness and equality, one hope that The Jaguar Foundation and the essential report they published in 2022 goes some way towards fixing growing inequality. Maybe there needs to be more capital injected to lead to this regeneration of British nightlife. More clubs and spaces:

“BBC Radio 1 presenter, DJ, podcaster, and award-winning entrepreneur Jaguar is a trailblazer in the UK dance music scene. As a queer Black woman, she is fiercely committed to championing diversity, equality, and representation, using her platform to highlight emerging talent and push the culture forward. Her work spans broadcasting, DJing, producing, and advocacy, earning her accolades including DJ Mag’s Underground Hero and Mixmag’s Broadcaster of the Year.

flowers is your debut EP. What does this release represent for you at this point in your journey?

It’s about reconnecting with your inner child and recognising how far you have come through hardship. I struggled a lot during my late 20s, but picked myself up, found purpose again, and did a lot of therapy. The title track is a love letter of gratitude to my inner child who got me through this hard time.

The other tracks explore the different sides of my personality - from UK Cunty club bangers for queer clubs to peak-time rave weapons.

The EP explores your late-20s mental health struggles. How did you translate something so personal into music?

I made flowers with Jacana People, who are good friends of mine. I had the idea for writing a song to my inner child ahead of the session, and we worked on the instrumental first. They have a lot of pedals and hardware synths, which was so fun to play with.

I wanted to bring a tender energy reminiscent of being a child running around in nature to the track. We also used twinkling chords inspired by a track from my favourite Final Fantasy game. Then I started working on a poem addressing my inner child, and the spoken word vocal in the track is the initial take we recorded on the day. I felt very vulnerable but also free during this session. It was very healing, and I surprised myself by pushing myself a bit further. The Jacana People boys are amazing to work with and made me feel so comfortable, complementing my artistic vision so well.

In 2022 you published a groundbreaking report on gender representation in UK dance music. What progress have you seen since then?

The report is one of my greatest achievements to date. The impact it left was monumental - it made national news, I went on Women’s Hour, Sky News, the BBC; I saw really amazing conversations and change in dance music on line-ups and behind the scenes at labels, venues, events brands. The statistics in general showed that marginalised gendered are indeed misrepresented, but the stats showed that things were improving year on year. However, I’d say in the last 2 years that line-ups look less diverse again, and the dance space feels very male heavy again, almost like we have regressed. I believe that this is due to the nightlife industry which is currently in an economic crisis. It’s even harder than ever to sell tickets, clubs are closing and younger people are not going out as much due to change in habits and everything being so expensive. I fear the focus has shifted from pushing forward equality and more about trying to keep everything afloat. It’s a frustrating time, but I will never stop fighting for marginalised people. I hope to bring back a second edition of The Jaguar Foundation report in the next few years and reignite the movement. It feels like it is needed again.

A book or text you return to for inspiration?

Anything by Audre Lorde or Octavia Butler. Love Think Like A Monk by Jay Shetty too.

Can’t live without?

Music, a pen, and my diary.

Which artist, living or dead, would you most love to have a conversation with?

Lady Gaga or Honey Dijon.

What should the art world be more of and less of?

More support for artists! More investing in talent over followers. Less following trends and looking at metrics. Let the art speak for itself!”.

I really admire Jaguar! Her role as a broadcaster and championing new music. Her phenomenal D.J. sets and how passionate and inspiring she is. As an artist releasing music. A campaigner and advocate for equality and gender balance. Someone who also wants to unite people and make the world in general a better place, she is someone that we should put on a plinth. Jaguar was an easy choice for this Modern-Day queens, as she has achieved so much and is such a talent. I cannot wait to see where she heads and what she achieves this year. Someone who I am…

ALWAYS in awe of.

FEATURE: Fashionably on Time: Why the Rise of XO and Other Amazing Girl Groups Is Timely and Very Much Needed

FEATURE:

 

 

Fashionably on Time

PHOTO CREDIT: Alice Backham

 

Why the Rise of XO and Other Amazing Girl Groups Is Timely and Very Much Needed

__________

I guess there was a fashion…

IN THIS PHOTO: FLO/PHOTO CREDIT: Melanie Lehmann for NOTION

in the 1990s and 2000s for girl groups to perhaps copy those that were successful and came before. There were some attempts at Spice Girls or All Saints clones. The originals always endure. However, there is something about an amazing new girl group that reminds me of both, though they also have their own patented vocal and songwriting blend that mixes the modern with a glorious era for girl groups. They are called XO. I shall come to them and source some recent interview soon. I think that next year is going to be huge, as there are great British girl groups like Say Now and FLO who will be putting out new singles and touring. I think that the past few years, or maybe longer, has been dominated by female solo Pop artists. It is brilliant to see, though there is a sense of homogenisation. A lot of same-sounding artists and a few that are unique. On 8th July, it will be thirty years since Spice Girls’ globe-conquering debut single chart smash, Wannabe, was released. The album it is from, Spice, turns thirty on 19th September. I do hope that the group reunites for some gigs. There is something about Wannabe that heralded in a new sound in British Pop. At a moment when Britpop reigned and was starting to fade, I feel there was a need for girl groups. In the same way there was this slow build of girl groups in the 1990s that continued into the early-2000s (the likes of Little Mix picked up the baton later on), I do think we will see more come through. Not that the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Dua Lipa or Addison Rae are in danger of being replaced or overlooked. Instead, I think it will add more balance, diversity and different dynamics to the Pop scene. Mixing in R&B and other genres, I do think that a lot of ‘traditional’ bands are separate from the Pop scene.

Girl groups do offer that sense of nostalgia. However, the crop of great British girl groups coming through are distinct and their songs rich with personality and importance. At a time when many solo female artists are singing of female empowerment, tackling misogyny and abuse against women, in addition to send positive messages to their young fans, I feel that is something that would be at the core of a new girl group revolution. I do love FLO and Say Now. They are not the only ones. However, with XO, there is this holy trinity of girl group queens that will build through this year. Summer Askew, Shali Bordoni, Zoe Miller, Emmy Statham, and Reanna Sujeewon are primed for huge success. XO are signed to Polydor Records. Their Fashionably Late E.P. came out late last year. I do think there is a nod to girl groups and how they are coming through now and perhaps this is something the industry needed years ago. They have been lkened to groups like BLACKPINK because of their shared all-choreo. There is a bit of Gwen Stefani, some Sugababes too. However, now that XO are here, they are going to make an impact and turn heads. The group have influences but they are very distinct and themselves. I will end with Spice Girls and why next year will be a vital one in terms of remember their legacy and also welcoming in girl groups. I do think there is too much sameness in Pop. A lot of competition for sure, the sort of sounds and sensation you get with girl groups is much needed. Let’s start out with Rolling Stone UK and their interview with XO. Definitely on their ones to watch radar, they commended a girl group primed for the big leagues:

“Hello, XO! Excited to have the EP out there?

Emmy: Yes! It’s our little intro to this group. In the time we’ve been together we’ve had so many different eras of music and I think we’ve found a place in this EP where we’ve our little journey and every song has a piece of us all in there. So that’s special, but also seeing the reaction that has come from our headline tour and the fact that a lot of people had learnt the lyrics. We’re dying to get it out.

What’s the story behind your formation and how did you land on your sound?

Shali: Do you know what’s really weird, with the music, we never had a conversation about what it was exactly that we wanted. We all come from performing backgrounds and we’e all danced a lot, so whenever we heard a track it was case of wondering can we groove to it? That was a question before we even assessed genres.

Zoe: That’s it with the EP as a whole, it’s so important to us that the music is just fun and we’re trying our best not to overthink anything because we grew up with the 2000s era, people like Fergie. They just did what they wanted, they had a good time and it was all the vibes in the world. We want to bring that back and just have fun. Make people feel good, let loose and let your hair down.

The Fergie comparison is interesting. Was there any other girlbands you liked growing up?

Zoe: We’ve got to give a nod to the Spice Girls, because they’re iconic.

Shali: Girls Aloud, the Sugababes, Pussycat Dolls. like they’re so iconic.

What’s the things you’ve bonded over aside from music?

All: Food!

Zoe: Horrible taste in men!

Summer: It’s funny because we were lucky enough to go on a schools tour which we were quite sceptical of to begin with, because we had no fan base and we were starting from the ground up with no idea of how these songs were gonna sound. But that was so important, because we built our bonds that way and that was really important for us, going from London to Glasgow for 8 hours. You’ve got to get along and then on stage as well, it was such a great opportunity and something happened. The first time we got on stage was in a school in the middle of Birmingham and to see the journey from that first performance is mad. We’re interacting with each other, we’re a team on stage.

What’s the role of a girlband in 2025 when groups like Blackpink and Katseye have shown that the whole sound and image of such a thing has changed?

Shali: There’s space for everyone. We all bring something different to the table, whether that’s the size of the group or the genre of music. Because we can never do what they do like them, but we did see them in London and it gave us a little kick up the ass.

And finally, Zoe you’ve talked about world domination in 2026. Tell us more…

Zoe: We’ll have a cozy Christmas, go into hibernation and hit the ground. At New Year you’ll see the fireworks and then just start hearing our song ‘Ponytail’ everywhere. We’ve got more music, bigger tours and 2026 will be the year of XO!”.

As we close a great year for music, many are tipping which artists you need to watch. For the most part, solo artists are recommended. You might get a few bands in the mix. However, girl groups are not often highlighted or talked about. I did forget to mention the amazing K and J-Pop groups who are so important. I am not sure about contemporary U.S. girl groups. Back in the 1990s, we had TLC and En Vogue. Offering something alternative to what was at the forefront that decade, I personally leaned towards girl groups as I loved their chemistry and sisterhood. The beautiful harmonies and the power of blending four or five amazing voices together. How you could have girl groups that were more Pop-orientated. Destiny’s Child, my favourite, were late-1990s and they were an edgier and stronger core. What I see with established groups like FLO is a similar chemistry and power. I would expect FLO to release more singles or another album next year. 2024’s Access All Areas is remarkable and filled with incredible tracks. Walk Like This probably the best track, I feel. Say Now released incredible singles like Supermarket and Brick By Brick. I am not sure whether there is an E.P. coming form them, but there will be a lot of excitement around a potential debut album. There are a couple of other interview with XO that I want to include. They are an incredible group that you need to follow. Mixing choreography and sounds from girl groups like KATSEYE with legendary British acts like Sugababes and Spice Girls with one of their modern U.S. influences, Tate McRae, they are unique and have this heady and unforgettable blend.

I think it is the friendships you get in girl groups that makes the music and their bond so special and wonderful. XO spoke with The Gryphon earlier in the month and talked about their debut E.P. They were asked about songwriting and whether they had a hand in it. I think that is essential. Not to hark to bygone groups, but look at All Saints and Spice Girls for instance and they all collaborated. Maybe Shaznay Lewis was the lead of All Saints in terms of songwriting, but the more groups are involved with their songs, the more authentic and distinct they are. The quintet all adding their voices to the songs:

“Erin: I heard you’re all musical fans, I was wondering if you can think of one which you would cast yourselves in?

Shali: It would definitely need to be one with more POC characters, maybe Hairspray?

Emmy: Hairspray’s one of our favourite films, isn’t it.

Shali: Oh what about West Side Story, that’s a good one! Or In The Heights.

Erin: Stan culture is such a big thing for girlbands, are you guys, or have you guys been stans of any bands?

Reanna: Little Mix. I was a Little Mix STAN. Oh my god, I was literally obsessed with them

Shali: Definitely Destiny’s Child.

Summer: And the Pussycat Dolls.

Emmy: We were all such girlband fans.

Reanna: Girl’s Aloud

Summer: Sugarbabes as well!

Reanna: We saw the Sugarbabes!

Emmy: Spice Girls obviously

Shali: Even like the ones we see today, like Katseye. We saw them two days ago, they were INSANE

Erin: How do you guys feel about maybe being the idols of a standom in the future?

Reanna: It’s a weird concept really, like you can’t really visualise –  when you get streams of people looking at your stuff, it’s hard to visualise until you see, like today we’ll see 150 people. Even that’s crazy, like 100 people in a room all looking at us, so it’s hard to conceptualise people supporting you when you can’t see them. That’s definitely a weird thing about music, that you can never see it in person until you do gigs. But it’s definitely cool.

Shali: Yeah and it’s definitely scary because people looking up to you is always scary when you don’t necessarily feel like you should be looked up to… Do you get what I mean? However, I think that as a band we definitely want people to…

Erin: You touched on songwriting there, is that a creative process that you’d all like to have a hand in for the future of the band?

Shali: Yeah for sure! We all write in our free time. I mean we were even fixing one of the demos we’ve been given, today on the bus, we were all doing it together. But on the upcoming EP– which is coming out on the 14th of November, presave in our bio!

Emmy: Fashionably Late!

Shali: Yeah on the EP, obviously Zoe’s co-written on ‘Real Friends’ and then we’ve also written a song called ‘Silly Boy’. So we have two songs that we’ve definitely written on, coming up on the EP and then from this point forward it’s gonna be writing mania.

Erin: Are there any songs on the EP that you guys are especially excited for people to hear? I know there’s a lot of buzz around getting ‘Ponytail’ on streaming services.

Zoe: Yeah everyone’s wanting ‘Ponytail’. I think there’s quite a lot of people excited for ‘Candy’ as well.

Reanna: Yeah, I think that’s going to be the focus of the EP.

Zoe: Until something’s out you don’t know how people are going to react.

Reanna: But we love performing her! If you’re watching tonight, you’ll see. That one is so fun, she’s full-out and the kids loved that one on the schools tour”.

I love how XO call themselves chaotic and they are all about fun and spreading love.  Their live version of Real Friends is gorgeous. They have such beautiful, sultry and captivating voices. Beautifully harmonising and each member has such a strong solo voice, it gives them that versatility on an album. They can write these seductive or heartbreak anthems and match the tones of R&B and Popo legends who could buckle the knees. Alternately, they can bring fire and hypnotic punch with Candy. As profound and skilled as any of the U.S. iconic girl groups, they offer a distinct spice and grit that is swaggering, sexy and hugely confident. They are in control! XO are causing trouble and being true to themselves. They have the same energy and determination that we saw with a group whose debut single turns thirty next year. XO come from different parts of the U.K., but they have a shared musical and dance background, so they slot together. Building a fanbase by performing at schools, you know that they will be playing festival main stages very soon. You can check the dates they have for next year. I live near the O2 Academy Islington, so I will see if I can get a ticket (maybe write a gig review and wangle a guest list pass!). You can follow them on Instagram and check out their TikTok. In November, NME put XO on their radar. There is a lot of rightful excitement around them:

“They’re certainly hungry to deliver it.  XO’s five-member line-up was pieced together in a single day in September 2024 by Colin Barlow, a record exec who worked closely with Girls Aloud, and London-based Massive Management, whose roster includes All Saints singer Shaznay Lewis. Like hundreds of other hopefuls, the five talented young women talking to NME today answered a “very vague” ad in showbiz newspaper The Stage – “Can you sing and dance? Do you like the Pussycat Dolls?” – and turned up not knowing what to expect.

On the day, prospective band members were whittled down relentlessly as their auditions were filmed on Steadicam. “It was like, bang bang bang. Dance, cut! Sing, cut! Dance, cut!” Miller says. “And then it got to about 8pm,” Bordoni continues, “and [our managers] pulled up five chairs and were like: ‘Congratulations, you’re in the band!'”

The new members of XO were so in the zone that they didn’t realise until later that they already had connections: Askew and Statham used to compete against each other at talent shows. “Literally, as I was about to run off to get my train back to Liverpool, I was like, ‘Can you all just give me your name and number so I can make a group chat?'” Askew recalls.

Four members of XO grew up in different parts of the UK, while Bordoni spent her formative years in Hong Kong. A week after their audition, they reconvened in London for their first official band meeting, where their managers played them a selection of demos. “The very first song they played was ‘Ponytail’,” Sujeewon says, name-checking a rhythmic earworm from the EP, “and we loved it immediately. It’s become a real fan favourite.”

XO have just announced a second UK headline tour for May 2026, including a show at iconic Glasgow venue King Tut’s, and promise more new music “early next year”. They’re not touring schools anymore, but given that grounding, do they think of themselves as role models? “I’m not gonna act any certain type of way just for someone to look up to me,” Miller says. “But I’m not going to act like a dickhead either.” Bordoni chips in: “We’ll never act differently, we’ll always be ourselves. That’s our biggest thing as a band: we want everyone to feel confident in being themselves”.

You look at publicity photos of Summer Askew, Shali Bordoni, Zoe Miller, Emmy Statham, and Reanna Sujeewon, and you can tell they are happy to be here and getting hyped. They are making incredible music and this means everything to them! I feel 2026 will see our greatest girl groups join with J and K-Pop girl groups. Giving Pop this essential extra weight and variety. So much sound copy-and-paste. With girl groups, you have these different groups with their own sound and direction. XO would hate me keep comparing them to the likes of All Saints and Spice Girls. I mean it in the most flattering sense! What you get from the photos is the same sort of chemistry and distinction from those pics. How each member has their own look, voice and attributes that they bring to the fore and make XO what it is. Unlike manufactured groups that are thrust together and they seem interchangeable, XO cannot function without one of its members. They are so tight and interconnected that the full five-piece are at their best when all together (not saying a Geri Halliwell-like departure would damage them, but you don’t see that every happening!). Wannabe turns thirty in the summer. I see Spice Girls reforming for gigs and there will be things to mark that anniversary. The iconic one-take video and the chaos Spice Girls reek on a posh London hotel and its stuff guests! I see XO as a modern embodiment. Perhaps there would not be a 2026 Spicemania – XXXO? XOmania? -, but they have the passion, talent and underlooked qualities – the cover to their E.P. is fantastic, the tracklisting is perfect, and their interviews are real and open -, so they can join fellow Brit queens FLO and Say Now in kicking off a girl group summer of love. The first Summer of Love was in 1967 and was defined by free love, Psychedelic music and was U.S.-led. The next Summer of Love was in the late-1980s and was U.K.-led but was the opposite of 1967: this was hedonistic, Acid House and Rave music-heavy. A third can fit in 2026 in the middle. Pop’s girl group queens from the U.K. and beyond providing defiance, unity, liberation, incredibly powerful message but a Charl xcx-level of chaos, edge and genius that I think we all need. XO commonly means hugs and kisses. This is a group who are here to embrace and spread some modern-day good love and positive vibes, together with some kick, freedom, identity and chaos. Almost unifying two Summer of Loves in their own way, I feel they will help kickstart a girl group revolution…

IN 2026.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Experiment IV (The Whole Story)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

 

Experiment IV (The Whole Story)

__________

THIS is another song…

that I am compelled to write about after Kate Bush brought out Best of the Other Sides last year. There was fan demand to hear these rarer tracks. The Other Sides was released in 2019, though I think that this compilation was not being made anymore. Or you could not easily get a copy. Honing it down to the essential songs, Experiment IV is one of them. You can get Best of the Other Sides on C.D. and vinyl. I have written about Experiment IV before but, as it is in all its remastered glory and it is available on streaming, then I wanted to reapproach it. Also, this was a single specifically written for her 1986 greatest hits album, The Whole Story. That turns forty on 10th November. Experiment IV was released on 27th October, and that was the same day as her duet with Peter Gabriel – from his So album of 1986 -, Don’t Give Up, was released. It was an odd case of Bush being on two very different singles at the same time. Competing with herself! However, Experiment IV reached twenty-three in the U.K., whereas Don’t Give Up reached number nine. In any case, it did mean that, over a year after Hounds of Love came out, Bush was very much still at the forefront. Experiment IV would be her last single for a while. I do think that it is one that needs to be talked about, as you can stream it and it has been remastered. So it is more accessible and sounds better than perhaps it once did. The video is notable because Bush directed it, and it features comedy legends like Hugh Laurie and Dawn French. The late Del Palmer in quite a large role. Bush does appear in the video, but in different forms. As this ghostly figure that is summoned up after the scientists put this new machine into practice. Like something out of a Horror film, it is a startling moment. You can see that one image as Bush appearing as a ghost/demon and it inspiring shows like Stranger Things. We see her terrifying Del Palmer as he is stripped into a chair. She also appears as an army cadet or similar role and enters an office. There is a look to camera as we see that Bush in this form is the demon we saw earlier. The one that was terrifying everyone at this establishment, which we believe is an army base or testing facility. She has assumed this human form and has killed pretty much everyone there. Paddy Bush is seen in the video as a maddened patient in a psychiatric ward who presumingly has been tormented by this Experiment IV. This machine that could produce sound and music that kills. At the end, the action pans to the outside and this deserted area with a few shops and muddy fields. A sign gets put up saying ‘Prohibited’, and a van pulls up and collects Kate Bush, who opens the door, turns to the camera and puts her finer to lip as to shush us and keep the secret.

Before getting to some reviews and interpretation of the song, it is important to bring in Kate Bush Encyclopedia, as they collated some of the critical reviews for Experiment IV and what Bush posted to her website in 2019, when The Other Sides was out and there was this new interest in Experiment IV. I don’t think critics were expecting another single from Bush. She was still releasing material from Hounds of Love in 1986. The title track in February, and The Big Sky in April. As the Meteorological 12” Mix of The Big Sky is also on the Best of the Other Sides, I might spotlight that in another feature:

“The first lady of progressive rock warbles out another chilling fantasy. Kate crams more into seven inches of plastic than most science fiction writers could fit into a trilogy of novels. An epic to curl up with on some storm torn winters evening.

Edwin Pouncy, Sounds, 1 November 1986

Behind ethereal dreamy swirls of sound, a story line worthy of Stephen King.

Nancy Erlich, BillBoard (USA), 6 December 1986

This was written as an extra track for the compilation album The Whole Story and was released as the single. I was excited at the opportunity of directing the video and not having to appear in it other than in a minor role, especially as this song told a story that could be challenging to tell visually. I chose to film it in a very handsome old military hospital that was derelict at the time. It was a huge, labyrinthine hospital with incredibly long corridors, which was one reason for choosing it. Florence Nightingale had been involved in the design of the hospital. Not something she is well known for but she actually had a huge impact on hospital design that was pioneering and changed the way hospitals were designed from then on.
The video was an intense project and not a comfortable shoot, as you can imagine – a giant of a building, damp and full of shadows with no lighting or heating but it was like a dream to work with such a talented crew and cast with Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, Peter Vaughn and Richard Vernon in the starring roles. It was a strange and eerie feeling bringing parts of the hospital to life again. Not long after our work there it was converted into luxury apartments. I can imagine that some of those glamorous rooms have uninvited soldiers and nurses dropping by for a cup of tea and a Hobnob.
We had to create a recording studio for the video, so tape machines and outboard gear were recruited from my recording studio and the mixing console was very kindly lent to us by Abbey Road Studios. It was the desk the Beatles had used – me too, when we’d made the album Never For Ever in Studio Two. It was such a characterful desk that would’ve looked right at home in any vintage aircraft. Although it was a tough shoot it was a lot of fun and everyone worked so hard for such long hours. I was really pleased with the result.

KateBush.com, retrieved 28 February 2019"

Around the digital release of Best of the Other Sides, Kate Bush shared some memories of particular tracks. Updating what she said in 2019, she discussed Experiment IV and the fact the shoot was not comfortable. You can imagine, given where they were and shooting something quite complex, it threw up plenty of challenges. I do really love the song and think that it has elements of Pink Floyd and Peter Gabriel, but this is distinctly from the imagination of Kate Bush. Definitely the video! Cinematic and Horror-nodding, it follows from songs throughout her career where there are evil spirits, ghouls, ghosts and the dark lurking. This deadly experiment idea. I am not sure how she came up with it or whether it was a leftover idea from Hounds of Love that didn’t fit. A half-thought back then:

“This was written as an extra track for the compilation album The Whole Story and was released as the single. I was excited at the opportunity of directing the video and not having to appear in it other than in a minor role, especially as this song told a story that could be challenging to tell visually. I chose to film it in a very handsome old military hospital that was derelict at the time. It was a huge, labyrinthine hospital with incredibly long corridors, which was one reason for choosing it. Florence Nightingale had been involved in the design of the hospital. Not something she is well known for but she actually had a huge impact on hospital design that was pioneering and changed the way hospitals were designed from then on.
The video was an intense project and not a comfortable shoot, as you can imagine - a giant of a building, damp and full of shadows with no lighting or heating but it was like a dream to work with such a talented crew and cast with Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, Peter Vaughn and Richard Vernon in the starring roles. It was a strange and eerie feeling bringing parts of the hospital to life again. Not long after our work there it was converted into luxury apartments. I can imagine that some of those glamorous rooms have uninvited soldiers and nurses dropping by for a cup of tea and a Hobnob.
We had to create a recording studio for the video, so tape machines and outboard gear were recruited from my recording studio and the mixing console was very kindly lent to us by Abbey Rd Studios. It was the desk the Beatles had used - me too, when we’d made the album Never For Ever in Studio Two. It was such a characterful desk that would’ve looked right at home in any vintage aircraft.
Although it was a tough shoot it was a lot of fun and everyone worked so hard for such long hours. I was really pleased with the result”.

It would be great to see the video in HD, as it is cinematic and needs to be viewed in the best form. In a year where Hounds of Love was ramping down and Bush was looking to her next album. Experiment IV and The Whole Story was a nice bridge. A chance to collate her hits for fans and ensure that there was this continuing momentum. And new people would have discovered here music. I will end with some thoughts and bring in some lyrics. I want to source one of the few reviews for the epic and majestic Experiment IV:

“In 1986, after years of trying to break Kate Bush in the States with only the minor Top 40 hit “Running Up That Hill” to show for it, EMI decided to capitalize on Kate’s recent success with Hounds of Love in the UK by releasing a best-of, which could also serve as a catch-up primer for the US.Á‚  The Whole Story collected various tracks from Bush’s first five albums, along with a newly recorded version of her first single, “Wuthering Heights,” and one new track which was issued as a single to promote the disc.

“Experiment IV” (download) was a creepy tune that told the story of a top secret military operation where scientists were attempting to create a weapon using only sound. Unfortunately for them, they succeed. The single was accompanied by an equally spooky video that was banned from Top of the Pops, but got plenty of MTV play Stateside..  It also featured Dawn French of French & Saunders and a relative unknown by the name of Hugh Laurie:

While “Experiment IV” did not repeat Bush’s Top 40 success in the States, it did chart nicely in the UK and The Whole Story went on to become her biggest selling album. But can you believe The Whole Story is currently out of print? Neither can I, but that’s what Amazon tells us, although there are plenty of used copies to go around.‚ Highly recommended, even if it’s in serious need of a remastering”.

It is interesting how the B-side for the single release of Experiment IV is the re-recorded vocal for Wuthering Heights. Another ‘new’ inclusion on a greatest hits album, maybe Kate Bush feeling self-conscious about the vocal and how high-pitched it is. I prefer the original always, though I can appreciate she wanted to produce a more mature and deeper vocal for the track. The concept of Experiment IV and its video lends itself to something bigger. I wonder if there is a specific film or show that has done something like this. “They told us/All they wanted/Was a sound that could kill someone/From a distance”. I have had a search around and there is nothing involving a military operation and a machine that could kill by sound. Recent films where making a sound could get you killed, then we have A Quiet Place (2018), which features blind aliens hunting humans by noise. The Silence (2019), where deadly creatures hunt by sound, though it focuses on a hearing-impaired family's survival. Nothing really like Experiment IV. I love the violin from Nigel Kennedy. It is aching, romantic and eerie at the same time. Some brilliant and electrifying guitar from Alan Murphy. Rolling and punchy drums from Stuart Elliott. I am not sure if there is a Fairlight CMI in there, and whether that was used for sound effects and replicating certain instruments. Perhaps the best lines from the song are “It could feel like falling in love/It could feel so bad/But it could feel so good/It could sing you to sleep/But that dream is your enemy”. That idea that the sound being produced is seductive and could create all these different feelings. However, not to be lured by it at all, as it is designed to kill. It is a fascinating song from Kate Bush, and I am really glad Experiment IV is on Best of the Other Sides and that it is available to stream too. Anyone who is unaware of this brilliant Kate Bush song needs to…

LISTEN to it now.

FEATURE: True Gold: Madonna in 1986

FEATURE:

 

 

True Gold

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1986/PHOTO CREDIT: Herb Ritts

 

Madonna in 1986

__________

I think that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1986/PHOTO CREDIT: Herb Ritts

1986 is one of the most interesting years in Madonna’s career. There is a big anniversary when True Blue, her third studio album, turns forty on 30th June. I do want to spend time with its lead single, Live to Tell, as that is forty on 26th March. It is clear that, at the start of 1986, Madonna was already an established Pop queen. Some would argue her first creative peaks was maybe later: 1989’s Like a Prayer cemented her as a global icon and peerless Pop artist. However, I do think that at the start of 1986, Madonna was already there. Aged twenty-seven, she had released two studio albums that were incredible. The 1983 eponymous debut and 1984’s Like a Virgin. The last single from Like a Virgin was Dress You Up. Even thought the first single from True Blue is a ballad and stirring song, it held as much power and quality as Madonna’s singles up to that point. It would be Papa Don’t Preach, the second single from True Blue that arrived in June 1986, that would take her career to another level.

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in N.Y.C. in 1986/PHOTO CREDIT: Bruce Weber

That song about Madonna as a young woman getting pregnant, keeping the baby and asking her father not to preach and lecture, was a big moment in music history. Perhaps not something the 1980s scene was used to when it came to Pop artists, it is a remarkable and mature song that was a shift away from what people associated with Madonna. Maybe seeing her as playful and more conventional at that point. In the sense that the singles, whilst they were fantastic, were perhaps not as deep and sonically rich (or mature) as this. Like a Virgin’s title track is sexy and a bit provocative, but you could say that it is perhaps towards the end of a period where we would see Madonna’s music shift. True Blue is the Queen of Pop adopting a new look and direction. The cover of True Blue, and some of the videos from the album, see her dispense with the very long blonde hair to something shorter and more cropped. Some would say it made he look edgier and tougher. However, it is simply an artist staying fresh and being true to herself.

Look to 1989’s Like a Prayer and the brunette, longer hair we see in the video for the title track. I will cover True Blue in more depth before it turns forty on 30th June. Go into detail regarding Papa Don’t Preach. However, I wonder how Madonna is going to mark the fortieth anniversary of her third studio album. It is one of her best albums, and one that I feel remains underrated. We discuss Like a Prayer and 1998’s Ray of Light, though True Blue never gets quite that same level of kudos. It should. Alongside Live to Tell, which I shall come to, we have the exceptional True Blue, Open Your Heart and, perhaps the standout song from the album, La Isla Bonita. If Madonna’s first two albums were more traditional Pop/Disco and had a certain production sound, True Blue, I feel, is a deeper and richer album. More diverse musical influences and styles. The songwriting team of Patrick Leonard and Stephen Bray were instrumental. Madonna wrote Live to Tell with Leonard; True Blue written with Bray. La Isla Bonita was her writing with Leonard and Bruce Gaitch. Brian Elliot co-wrote Papa Don’t Preach with Madonna. Madonna producing True Blue with Patrick Leonard and Stephen Bray. In late-1985, Madonna and Leonard began working on her third studio album; she brought in her former boyfriend Stephen Bray, with whom she had worked with on Like a Virgin. True Blue is the record which found Madonna co-writing and co-producing for the first time in her career. It was a big step up. Like a Virgin had more people in the mix and Madonna didn’t have a writing credit on all the songs. On True Blue, things feel tighter and slimmed-down. Madonna co-writing everything on the album. A moment where she was growing as a songwriter and asserting more control on her direction. 1986 was the biggest year of her career to that point. Married to Sean Penn (which would not hold for too long) and gaining stratospheric success and acclaim from True Blue and its singles, I do think that this is one of her defining eras. That period between 1985 and 1987. You can get a sense of the big events in Madonna’s career in 1986 here. I shall throw ahead to Live to Tell. However, in January 1986, Borderline re-entered the charts. From her 1983 Madonna debut, it went back on the charts in the U.K. and the live video went to number one in the U.S. The start of this hugely busy – and largely happy – year presented Madonna as this icon. Played on MTV and talked about in the press, she was looking ahead to the launch of a new album, but also enjoying success from previous work. However, there was personal tragedy to handle at the start of 1986. She was caring for her close friend Martin Burgoyne, an artist who designed her Burning Up cover, as he battled an AIDS-related illness.

After a big end to 1985, Madonna was not resting as we entered 1986. In February, she would attend the At Close Range film festival with Sean Penn, and she filmed the Papa Don't Preach video in N.Y.C. I think that the promotional photography from 1986 is iconic. Herb Ritts collaborated with Madonna and took a lot of her publicity shots from ''86. The True Blue cover was his work. In terms of looks, I associate the short and cool blonde hair and red lipstick with Jean Harlow. A Hollywood star who died in the 1930s, she was shouted out – alongside other Hollywood legends - for 1990’s Vogue. There is also a Jean Harlow 12” mix of Vogue that is pretty banging! Stylistically, we associate 1983 with the bangles, beads, street chic and this more neon and stereotyped 1980s look. It was this accessible look that was much copied. For Like a Virgin and 1984, there was still some of this. Youthful and street chic still, we had the beads and necklaces. However, think about the Like a Virgin, Material Girl and Dress You Up videos. Long white dresses and this glamorous look. Cool, sophisticated, graceful but also tough and powerful, 1986 saw Madonna dispense with a lot of the accessories and aspects of her first three or so professional years. That was mirrored in the sound of her True Blue album. I have mentioned Madonna’s hair in 1986. It was actually between Live to Tell and Papa Don’t Preach when there was that notable change. Live to Tell, Madonna with longer blonde hair. It was more cropped for Papa Don’t Preach. Always evolving and changing, it is fascinating seeing Madonna’s career blossom through 1986! I will wrap up soon.

As mentioned, I will return to True Blue when it turns forty on 30th June. In December 2020, for their The Number Ones feature, Stereogum showed love for Live to Tell in their 9/10 assessment. Number one in the U.S. and two in the U.K., I think it is one of Madonna’s most important songs. In terms of elevating her career and developing her sound:

“Planetarium music" fits because the production of "Live To Tell" is pure head-blown '80s sci-fi awe -- the kind of wonderstruck synth music that Carl Sagan might've used to soundtrack Cosmos. The term also fits because the song sounds like Madonna staring out into the universe, contemplating her own place within it. Her lyrics are vague but portentous, and they hint at some kind of emotional apocalypse. Her voice is wounded but strong. She comes off as a person dealing with the kind of vast sadness that's hard to put into words, but she also comes off as someone determined to get through it: "The light that you could never see/ It shines inside, you can't take that from me."

In June of 1985, Madonna had just gotten done with the Virgin Tour, her first-ever arena trek. The tour, which featured the pre-Licensed To Ill Beastie Boys as openers, solidified Madonna as an A-list pop figure, and she apparently liked the experience enough that she wanted to keep working with her collaborators. The tour's musical director was Patrick Leonard, a fellow Michigan native who'd previously played keyboards in Frank Zappa's band and in the Allman Brothers Band. Before working with Madonna, Leonard had been the musical director for the Jacksons' Victory Tour. After the Virgin Tour ended, Madonna asked Leonard if he wanted to write some songs together. Leonard was into it.

At the time, Leonard was trying to get into the film-scoring world. Leonard had seen the script for Fire With Fire, a 1986 romance about a girl at a Catholic boarding school falling in love with a boy in a prison camp. He sent Paramount a song he'd written, telling the studio that he could get Madonna to write some lyrics for it. Paramount rejected Leonard's song, and they hired Howard Shore to score the movie instead. I'd never heard of Fire With Fire until I sat down to write this, but it exists. Looks pretty good, too!

At the time, Madonna was married to Sean Penn. They'd made it official on Madonna's birthday in 1985, just after she'd finished the Virgin Tour. When Madonna heard that Paramount wasn't interested in the song that Leonard had written, Madonna decided that it would be great for the movie Penn was making. Penn was starring in the drama At Close Range, playing a soulful and conflicted son in a family of criminals in rural Pennsylvania.

Madonna wrote some lyrics on the spot, coming up with a bridge and a few melodies of her own. She recorded a quick demo and then took it to Penn, who loved it. Madonna thought that she was writing the song from a male perspective and that they'd find a man to sing it. But Leonard loved the vulnerability of Madonna's version, and that demo that she recorded was the one that Madonna eventually released.

At Madonna's suggestion, At Close Range director James Foley hired Leonard to score the movie. Leonard only scored a few more films after that: The 1985 Tom Hanks mob comedy Nothing In Common, the 1991 Michael Biehn sci-fi Timebomb, the 1994 Joe Pesci/Brendan Fraser coming-of-age thing With Honors, the Sundancey 2014 drama Lullaby. Leonard's biggest film credit probably comes from a very different part of his career. Leonard was a writer and producer on Leonard Cohen's last three albums, and he co-wrote Cohen's "Nevermind," which became the theme song for the second season of True Detective. Anyway, Madonna loved working with Leonard, so he'll be in this column again as both a writer and producer.

James Foley directed Madonna's "Live To Tell," video, which is mostly just scenes from At Close Range. I'd have to check through her videography again to be sure about it, but "Live To Tell" is almost certainly the only Madonna video that gives as much screen time to a mustachioed Christopher Walken as it does to Madonna herself. But the video does highlight one of Madonna's many image reinventions. Where she'd previously styled herself as a new-wave New York club kid with a whole lot of jewelry, the Madonna who sings in front of a black void in the "Live To Tell" video is more of a retro Hollywood beauty -- a very conscious decision on her part. (At Close Range was only Foley's second movie, and he went on to have a weird and occasionally-great journeyman career: Glengarry Glen Ross, Fear, 12 episodes of House Of Cards, the second and third Fifty Shades movies.)

Despite generally good reviews, At Close Range was a box-office failure -- though not as big a failure as Shanghai Surprise, the notoriously awful movie that Madonna and Penn made together later in 1986. But "Live To Tell" took off anyway. When she released "Live To Tell" as a single, Madonna was still working on her third album True Blue, which wouldn't come out until a few weeks after the song hit #1. When "Live To Tell" was at its apex, then, it wasn't available on an album. You had to buy the single.

"Live To Tell" isn't necessarily about any particular situation. Madonna once told Rolling Stone that the song is "true, but it's not necessarily autobiographical." Her lyrics are light on specifics; we don't know what secret she wants to live to tell. Instead, it's the kind of song that you feel, not the kind that you parse.

Musically, "Live To Tell" takes the sound of big mid-'80s pop and somehow makes it intimate. Madonna and Leonard produced the song together, and Leonard played the keyboards and programmed the drum machines. All the sounds -- the glowing synths, the big drum thumps, the occasional guitar-growls -- are clean but immersive. "Live To Tell" hit #1 on the Adult Contemporary charts, but it doesn't sound canned and treacly like so many other '80s adult-contempo hits. Instead, it cuts a little deeper”.

I am interested to explore the summer of 1986 and how things changed once more for Madonna. The two success for Papa Don’t Preach earlier in June, and True Blue at the end of the month. It would be a further three years before Madonna released Like a Prayer, though she was incredibly busy and she was touring, appearing in films and would once more change her sound and look. Those who felt they could predict Madonna’s 1986 at the end of 1985 might have been in for a surprise! Not the artist we associate with her previous two albums, this was a pop queen (and soon-to-be icon) whose professional and personal life was changing. Maybe the latter affecting and influencing the former in many ways. The busy, eventful and world-conquering 1986 was…

A glorious year for Madonna.

FEATURE: But They Never Take the Country Out Me: Beyoncé’s Formation at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

But They Never Take the Country Out Me

 

Beyoncé’s Formation at Ten

__________

THE first single from…

Beyoncé’s sixth studio album, Lemonade, Formation was released on 6th February, 2016. To mark its upcoming tenth anniversary, I want to explore articles that discuss its themes and lyrics, in addition to its phenomenally powerful and memorable video. Though it did not reach the top of the singles charts in the U.S. and U.K., Formation garnered so many think-pieces and discussion. Huge praise and accolades. I will end with critical reviews and its legacy. I want to come to some articles and think-pieces before that. Formation is one of Beyoncé’s greatest songs. A perfect introduction to a masterpiece album, Formation is the final track on Lemonade. Unusual to release a closing track as the first single, as most artists release songs right near the top of the tracklisting. That is the thing with Lemonade: any of its twelve songs could have been singles, Written by Michael L. Williams II, Khalif Brown, Asheton Hogan and Beyoncé, this surprise-release genius song is Trap and Bounce. It scooped awards and is seen as one of this queen’s greatest achievements. Beyoncé celebrates her culture, identity, and success as a Black woman from the Southern United States. If there was this feature that suggested the video for Formation exploited New Orleans’ trauma following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the catastrophe and devastation that is caused, I would disagree. It is not appropriation, as SLATE write. I want to lead with an extraordinarily detailed and thought-provoking article written by Syreeta McFadden for The Guardian published on 8th February, 2016 (two days after the single was released). Reacting to its extraordinary video that is a “inherently political and a deeply personal look at the black and queer bodies who have most often borne the brunt of our politics”, I would urge people to read the entire piece:

“Formation is both provocation and pleasure; inherently political and a deeply personal look at the black and queer bodies who have most often borne the brunt of our politics. All shapes and shades of black bodies are signaled here and move – dare we say “forward”? – in formation. Even the song’s title is subversive, winking at how we have constructed our identities from that which we were even allowed to call our own.

Formation isn’t Beyoncé’s first foray into the political but, in her latest collaboration with director Melinda Matouskas (who has directed eight of Beyoncé’s videos since 2007), Beyonce’s narrative and aesthetic comes in sharp relief. The video articulates multiple identities of southern blackness, while social critiques of the nation’s crimes against its darker skinned citizens acts as ballast.

Bookended by the flooding of the city of New Orleans after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina – and by which the city’s black residents were disproportionately affected – and a black child in a hoodie dancing opposite a police line and a quick cut to graffiti words “stop shooting us”, Beyoncé morphs into several archetypical southern black women.

The potency of Formation doesn’t come from its overt politics: it comes from the juxtaposition of lyric with the images, which organically present black humanity in ways we’ve haven’t seen frequently represented in popular art or culture.

There is in it a litany of blackness, of what we love, of our diverse selves, of our intersections – class, sexuality and gender – woven so neatly in the visual that the lyrics and music seem secondary, but are intrinsic to communicating this celebration of southern fried blackness. Even Beyoncé retells her own history and by extension, marries the contradictions of black identity in her declaration: “My daddy Alabama, Mama Louisiana. You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas bama” – an insult that, perhaps, only Beyoncé was ever capable of reclaiming.

Beyoncé’s use of “slay” is an additional embrace of the language of the black queer community and, in its repetition, it’s an incantation that can slay haters, slay patriarchy, to slay white supremacy.

Formation is a protest and celebration, concerned with and in love with the very particular paradox of the black American identity and experience. The images, which are deeply layered and particular to a black Southern vernacular and aesthetic, beg to be catalogued: Creole and Black American, Mardi Gras Indian, crawfish, Black cowboys, wig shops, socks and slippers, corsets and parasols, parades, high school basketball, step team moves, bounce queens Big Freedia and Messy Mya, cotillions, “twirl on dem haters”, braids, “bama”, black spirituality (church and hoodoo, maybe even a nod to Mami Wata), black mama side eyes, drawls, Blue Ivy black girl magic fierceness”.

the date of the release of this work can’t be ignored, given that February is Black History Month in the US. Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans have already begun. More to the point, last Friday would have been the 21st birthday of Trayvon Martin, killed by George Zimmerman in 2012 in a shooting widely attributed to racism; Sunday would have been the 29th birthday of Sandra Bland, whose alleged suicide in prison in 2015 after a brutal and poorly justified arrest captured on camera led to unsuccessful calls for further investigation into her death.

Both were considered formative moments for the women and gay men who have been at the forefront of Black Lives Matter and, more broadly, the movement for black lives”.

There is argument to suggest the Formation video is history-making. It is celebratory, unifying, political, body-positive, political, and this reclamation of Blackness. So wonderful, engaging, educational, conversation-starting and eye-opening. Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff shared her thoughts and observations on the Formation video for DAZED. Again, I have highlighted sections of the piece, though I would encourage everyone to read the entire text:

“Crucially, “Formation” is a story of reappropriation – in parts of the video, Beyoncé is the mistress of her all-black household in a southern American plantation-style house. Black portraits adorn the walls – in one instance, showing a family dressed in peony-pink traditional African dress, while another depicts a dark-skinned woman almost blending into the backdrop of the painting. This feels like reclamation of the southern slave legacy, and Beyoncé is there, regally spinning her cream parasol, and dancing in defiance. This brazen nod to African history shows that the forcible shipping of African people from their motherland hasn’t been forgotten, especially in the south, where slavery clawed on for so long.

Interestingly, the only white people to feature in “Formation” are a militarised line of police, looking on at an unarmed black boy who dances freely, and beautifully, before them. In 2015, 1,134 young black men were killed by police officers, and were nine times more likely to get killed by police officers than any other Americans, despite only making up 2% of the population. The image of the young boy set against the police is poignant and powerful. It becomes even more so when it is the police who raise their hands in apparent defence at the little boy’s signal, rather than the other way around. “Stop shooting us” reads the graffiti on the wall – the message fearless and bold in its simplicity.

It should be noted that Beyoncé, who has supported the Black Lives Matter movement (she helped bail out Baltimore protestors last year) will also be donating over £1 million to the campaign in the coming months through Tidal, the music service which she co-owns with Jay-Z. Deray McKesson, a Black Lives Matter organiser, is one of the ten people she follows on Twitter.

Her video also marks an unapologetic celebration of black women. “Okay, okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, cause I slay,” she demands. This formation of ladies symbolises the collective power that black women have, and it’s always nice to see a diverse range of skin shades, tones and body shapes dancing rather than the flat, white norm we are used to in pop culture. As with Beyoncé’s nod to Blue Ivy’s hair, the natural curl patterns on display as the women dance in a basketball court help to emphasise the fact that Beyoncé is telling the world to accept black people’s beauty the way it is, in all of its natural and diverse glory. This is something that felt particularly potent at last night‘s Superbowl performance. While some might have expected her to dilute her political message for the American masses, there she was, dancing alongside a posse of beautiful black female dancers, who were all dressed like 1970s Black Panthers. Needless to say, her powerful celebration of blackness at such a widely-viewed event is not just iconic – it’s historical”.

I would advise people to read this interesting discussion feature from The New York Times, where “Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times, Wesley Morris, The Times’s critic at large, and Jenna Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, discussed the song’s sound, the video’s look and the way that Beyoncé increasingly blends the aesthetic and the political”. Before getting to the final feature prior to ending with critical snapshots and the awards and honours that Formations accrued, it is worth noting that Formation is not only memorable and discussed because of its video. The surprise-released single and video on the same day caught people by surprise and the video’s imagery and plotline/arc is so arresting and compelling. Like Childish Gambino’s This Is America video (2018), the video sort of steals a bit of focus from the song itself. Though the two things are intertwined and connected, a large part of Formation’s brilliance is in the lyrics and the vocal performance. I was interesting reading this NPR article, in which NPR's Mandalit del Barco highlights reactions to the video, including thoughts from filmmaker and writer dream hampton. (hampton has a long-standing professional relationship with Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z.). They dissect and discuss the New Orleans-set video (though it was primarily filmed in Pasadena, California). It is incredible that Formation was released the day before Beyoncé’s halftime Super Bowl performance. By all accounts, she saved a rather lightweight performance. The BBC wrote why it was such an important performance. A phenomenal two days for this music queen! Delivering a masterpiece song and genius video alongside one of the all-time great Superbowl performance:

“And what about the video itself? Can you talk about the images and the lyrics, both?

Well, the images are very much an homage to the black South, which is often forgotten, you know, in movements. And I don't know why, because we keep having to return to the black South, you know, as we should.

It's very important that this film is not only located –- well, I say "film," it feels like ... an Oscar-worthy feature — but it's very important that it's located visually and actually in Louisiana, which, of course ... is the site of this other trauma, and a kind of freedom and resistance also. It's longstanding trauma. Louisiana is this famous slave port, where so many cultures came together and mixed, but also she references the site of Katrina, where this horrible crime was committed against black people; where its nation didn't show up for us and where this generation is having to learn that its nation continues to not show up for us. And in that, she's both centering black women — her formation is one of black women, who are proudly wearing their natural hair, and she makes a circle amongst her daughter and three girls, which is a little bit of magic and conjuring. But there's also, you know, the centering of queer folks and trans folk, and both by the vocals that we hear and of what we visually see. And that has very much been an intentional thing that's been happening in this new Black Lives Matter movement. From the very outset, there was real messaging that talked about centering queer folks and black women in leadership. So it's really amazing to see all of that reflected back to us in a Beyonce video.

There was a big New York Times article about her being an activist. Is this something new for her? I know you talked about questions over centering her identity as a black woman, but in terms of being an activist — is this anything new, or is this a continuation?

I think it's a stretch to call Beyonce an activist. And I don't know that activist is such a compliment. What we need out here is organizers. No, what she is is a cultural force and artist and icon. She might be her own goddess, might have her own little Orisha power, but she's not an activist. I think that she's someone who is paying attention like anyone her age to what is going on. This is her generation's movement; she's absolutely a millennial, and she's tuned in to what's happening like we all are. So she doesn't live on some other planet, which I think we tend to think of pop stars, and Beyonce in particular. [Laughs.] She's very much in this world, paying attention to what's happening, and affected by it. You know, she's raising a daughter.

She showed up to the Trayvon Martin rally and met his parents, but that was disastrous for she and her husband. All of the eyes, which should have been on the dais, and they were all looking at Jay and Bey, who were kind of standing to the side of the stage. They understand what a distraction they can be. But this is all value add; this video "Formation" is not a distraction. It is a beautiful centering and a beautiful conjuring.

Do you think it's going to make a difference?

Well, what artists can do is provide narrative shifts. That is absolutely their responsibility, in fact. Nina Simone gave that charge decades ago, like, "What are you doing if you're not reflecting the times? How can you even call yourself an artist?" So in my mind, what's been happening is there's been this slumber — particularly unfortunately amongst black artists — for a long time, and now they're realizing that they can't not reflect back what their very audience is showing them.

Beyonce took that a step further; she really did. I mean, she created an anthem, a visual anthem in every way. And that's been beautiful to see. And it's been beautiful to see other artists kind of wake up around this and realize that this isn't going to cost them to put this kind of messaging forward; that it's actually going to benefit them”.

I want to collate some of the critical reactions to Formation. Wikipedia have a fascinating and really detailed page about Formation. There is a lot I have not include here, so go and check that out. It is interesting reading the critical observations. How essential and urgent the song and video is. How needed it was in 2016. A nation (the U.S.) that would see Donald Trump become President. Where Black lives were seen as unimportant (in his eyes). A time of huge division and inequality in the U.S. Lemonade came out in April 2016. Trump won the election on 9th November that year:

“Formation" was met with widespread critical acclaim upon release. Pitchfork named the song "Best New Track", with Britt Julious describing it as one of Beyoncé's "most instrumentally-dense and trend-forward productions" which is made specifically for black women, "an audience that might not receive the sort of mainstream, visually and sonically-enticing wisdom that Bey has perfected". In a review for the New Statesman, Anna Leszkiewicz praised the experimental nature of the track and wrote that Beyoncé presented "radical" sociopolitical concepts in a familial context, adding: "The more mainstream Beyoncé becomes, the more she functions as a marginal artist." Similarly, Q's Shad characterized the song's lyrics as "deeply personal and political", and praised Beyoncé for celebrating her black Southern roots on a global stage. Writing for The Guardian, Daphne A Brooks described the "brilliance of the single's sonic arc", with the tension from Beyoncé's "restrained, raspy" vocals exploding in a "euphoric release" as she expresses her pride in black identity and culture.

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, professor of African Studies at University of Texas at Austin, wrote for Time that "Formation" differs from contemporary political songs by celebrating the breadth and beauty of black women's lives, rather than focusing on black men's deaths. The New York Times' Jenna Wortham praised the song for its expression of black identity and wrote that it is "about the entirety of the black experience in America in 2016", encompassing topics such as beauty standards, police brutality, empowerment, and shared culture and history. In an article for The Washington Post, Regina N. Bradley wrote that the song sees Beyoncé forgoing a "more universally appealing trope of feminine blackness in favor of an experimental and boisterous black womanhood" that can voice critiques of social, political, and economic issues. A Rolling Stone journalist commented that the song "felt downright necessary" in the Black Lives Matter era, deeming it "a powerful statement of black Southern resilience".

Recorded at The Beehive (Los Angeles), and produced by Beyoncé and Mike Will Made It,  Formation received three nominations at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Music Video, of which it won the latter award. In 2021, Rolling Stone placed the song at number seventy-three on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Even though it reached ten on the US Billboard Hot 100 and thirty-one in the U.K., its relatively low chart position is irrelevant. Apart from Conservative commentators and politicians feeling the video and song was anti-police, anti-white and anti-American, decent, normal and soul-possessing humans correctly identified Formation as this positive, stirring, impassioned song about Black culture, resilience and empowerment! It directly addressed racial injustice, police brutality, and Black Lives Matter. It is this political anthem and phenomenal song that is still relevant ten years after its release. On 6th February, there will be new inspection and celebration of Formation and its video. New context and framing considering what Beyoncé has achieved since. Phenomenal albums like RENAISSANCE (2022), COWBOY CARTER (2024), and the astonishing COWBOY CARTER TOUR. I want to finish with Wikipedia again and their section on Formation’s legacy. They look at its legacy on popular culture, race and politics, academic studies and music. I want to focus on the latter:

“Critics and scholars considered "Formation" to have innovated popular music in the 21st century. The release of "Formation" was a defining moment of 2010s music, according to Billboard's Bianca Gracie, with Beyoncé setting the standard for what popular music can be. Glamour's Danielle Young wrote that the song revolutionized how music is consumed, with Beyoncé making listeners stop and experience the song together. Writing for Vice, University of Waterloo professor Naila Keleta-Mae commented that Beyoncé went from "manipulating the pop culture music industry machine to usurping it" with "Formation", setting the blueprint for how artists can explore political issues while holding mainstream attention. In his 2025 book Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, W. David Marx named "Formation" as "almost a perfect piece of pop culture", given that its creative innovation challenges the artistic and cultural decline that has defined the 21st century to date”.

This sense of surprise, shock, empowerment and joy met the Formation single and video release on 6th February, 2016. Considering how U.S. politics would change (for the worse) that year and what that did to the nation, I think that Beyoncé’s music and place in society was as essential and needed as ever. A decade on and Donald Trump is President. Someone who is racist and does not care about the Black population, the relevance and power of Formation is so huge and vital today. I think that Formation is one of the most important releases…

IN music history.

FEATURE: Feel the Drop! Highlighting Incredible D.J. Queens and Inequality in the Industry

FEATURE:

 

 

Feel the Drop!

IN THIS PHOTO: Charlotte de Witte is a hugely accomplished and respected D.J. and artist who runs her own label, KNTXT

 

Highlighting Incredible D.J. Queens and Inequality in the Industry

__________

I am going to start out…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue at the OVO Hydro, Glasgow in May 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Martin Grimes/Getty Images

with one of my favourite subjects to talk about in music. Not one I am happy to talk about. In the sense it is gender inequality, as it is unshifting and not tackled enough. Not by men in the industry or those in power anyway. In terms of the most pressing incident of sexism and gender inequality in the mainstream is festival line-ups. I will come to D.J.s and the world in which they operate and how things are unequal there. Festivals next year will see a split. Smaller or boutique festivals will have women headlining their main stages. Primavera Sound in Barcelona has women headlining in June, though it seems like a slight step back for them in terms of the percentage. Also, in the U.K., Reading & Leeds has taken a step forward. Though it has taken decades for them to actual get close to gender equality concerning their headline acts. And one feels 2027 will see them slip back to their male-heavy ways. Festivals like Isle of Wight always are hugely male-heavy and that will continue to be that way. So many festivals stuck in the tar of prehistoric times and unwilling to move or recognise the sexism. And how boring it having male-heavy headliners! Glastonbury are the leaders of the major U.K. festivals when it comes to their bill being gender-balanced. However, as I have said before, in their fifty-plus years I think there have only been thirteen (or so) headline acts featuring women. Either as a solo act/duo/band. Consider the number of headliners is well over a hundred, that is a massive issue! 2024 was the first year two female headline acts were booked. 2025 took it back to one out the three acts. I don’t think they will ever have an all-female Pyramid Stage. Unbelievable that it is so regressive in an age where women are dominating and there are so many ready to headline. I argued how Kylie Minogue should have been booked this year. I don’t think that she was even considered.

Only one female headliner was over the age of forty (Marcella Detroit of Shakespears Sister). Festivals also have an ageism issue when it comes to female headliners. Often only booked for certain festivals or a Legends slot, most major festivals still book younger women to headline - whereas men do not have those same barriers. The inequality, sexism, ageism and lack of progress is sadly not going to improve whilst the gatekeepers are around and calling the shots. Excuses are made when festivals are challenged on their inequality and sexism – pipeline issues, women ask for too much money, few are available women prefer to do their own tours and not play festivals etc. etc. – and it is all crap. Women are available and are not pricing themselves out or refusing to headline. They are simply not being asked. I shall park this subject until more festival line-ups are revealed for next year. My hope is that big players like Reading & Leeds continue to move in the right direction and Glastonbury books more female Pyramid Stage headliners and considers those over the age of forty too. Life for women in music is constantly challenging. Apart from sexism, misogyny, lower pay, less attention and this attitude they are inferior – whereas the quality of the music and critical reviews suggests they are owning music and putting male artists to shame! -, they face sexual assault, abuse and violence. Last year, I was lucky enough to interview some amazing D.J. queens. I approached a few, but two amazing women came through and provided fascinating insights. Rowena Alice. One of two incredible British D.J.s I interviewed, sections of her interview really took me aback. You can read the whole thing here. I asked about female D.J.s getting paid less, sharing credit with male producers, and facing harassment and abuse:

“I think most women in the industry will tell you they’ve faced some version of this - being underestimated, talked over, second-guessed, or flat-out offered less money for the same work. I’ve definitely felt it myself. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s painfully obvious. Even though things have improved as more women push through, the issues are still very much there.

What hits hardest for me is the male aggression and harassment I’ve had to deal with whilst literally just trying to do my job. I got punched in the face by a guy after a set who waited outside for me, but I still played another set the next day. There’s nothing more punk than being a girl and a DJ.

It’s become even clearer recently when I’ve been hanging out at my male partner’s DJ sets and seeing the difference in how people treat him when he DJs, compared to how they treat me when I play.

Another example: just last Saturday, I asked a man to step back slightly so he wouldn’t spill his drink over the club’s very expensive decks. He exploded at me, got right in my face, and had to be removed by security. He then waited outside, brought his mates back, started kicking off, and the venue ended up shutting the night down early for safety. Security rushed me out a back exit because he was outside threatening to “fuck me up.” Sadly, this isn’t a one-off. I’ve dealt with variations of this more times than I should have to. Some venues (like this one on Saturday) handle it brilliantly; some don’t. And, honestly, some will just avoid booking you again because it’s “easier” than dealing with the fact you’re a woman on the lineup and potential issues that may arise from that.

But here’s the thing: the more women, non-binary people and queer people you see behind the decks, the more the culture shifts. Representation changes everything - for audiences, promoters, bookers, and the whole scene. I don’t think the industry is doing enough yet, but I do see more people and venues trying and moving things forward. Slowly, but it’s happening.

What’s important is that the responsibility shouldn’t fall on underrepresented artists to fix the problems we didn’t create”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Rowena Alice

An amazing and prolific D.J., the fact Rowena Alice shared an experience so many women face was brave but also raised questions as to why they keep having to face this sort of thing. They are these amazing D.J.s who are highly skilled and have this deep passion for music. They travel all over the place, work insane hours and have to keep the energy sky-high for a set. On top of that, they look around and see male counterparts get paid more and appear more frequently and higher up on line-ups. Women facing threats and assault. Rather than celebrate these queens and their skill, commitment and the way they are fighting for equality, recognition and respect, instead, I do still think there is too much focus on men in the industry. Even though big publications feature more women on their covers and on their ‘ones to watch’ lists, I think there is imbalance when it comes to the value women bring and how awe-inspiring they are and how that translates into pay, opportunity, safety and greater rights. From festival inclusion, rights around maternity and protection at venues. New Year’s Eve is two days away, and consider the number of people who will see in2026 watching an amazing female D.J. play. A perfect way to party and dance your way into a new year, so many of them will face handsy punters and inhibition-lowered drunks who hurl abuse, sexual abuse and threats their way. However, the majority of club/gig-goers are respectful and want harmony. For both reasons, we need to give props to these amazing and hugely talented women. Carly Wilford is another stunning and super-skilled and passionate D.J. who kindly gave her time for an interview. Someone I have unending respect for and I feel, like Rowena Alice, is going to achieve some huge things. She is a wonderful presenter and has such a warm and amazing speaking voice, I can see her presenting in 2026, in addition to playing festivals, touring to new countries, dropping incredible new tunes, presenting on her must-hear One World Radio show, and building her reputation as one of the world’s best and brightest D.J.s. Like Rowena Alice, go and check Carly Wilford’s Instagram and her website, as she will have an epic 2026. I thought how it would be cool to have a filmed interview series, Twin Decks (or something better. The Drop?!), where you get female D.J.s in a room - or a cool bar with amazing lighting so it looks pretty classy and modern - and they discuss their careers, favourite songs and talk about issues around being a D.J., as we do not often here these amazing and diverse female D.J.s get together. They could bring vinyl, talk about certain festivals, boost a new artist but, above all, it is a unique opportunity to join together amazing women D.J.s from around the world for a YouTube series. It would, I think, help get equality for D.J. sisters and show why things need to change. The thing is, women should not have to solely fight for an issue that was created by men! Like with Rowena Alice, I asked Carly Wilford, I did pose that question about inequality and sexism. Whether the industry has made any progression:

“This is such a tricky conversation, because in all honesty, over the last year it seems to have taken a real step backwards. We had got to a place where line-ups were hugely diverse, but now I’ve noticed that sometimes I can be the only female on there again. The calibre of diverse talent globally is stronger than it has ever been, so really there are no excuses. The diversity conversation isn’t new. So many of us have been fighting for it for a long time, and we should never not appreciate the progress that has been made, especially when it comes to respect in the booth and on dance floors. Things were very, very different ten years ago and trust me, we have come a lot further than we realise. As an industry, I think it’s more about ongoing awareness and day to day decisions when it comes to programming line-ups and highlighting the next wave of talent. I still feel so proud of where the industry is at and how many powerhouse women are at the helm because, for that, it’s never been stronger”.

Shortly after that interview was published in November, Carly Wilford very kindly shared shots of the interview and highlighted the ongoing inequality and how passionate she is to shout about it and campaign. It received a lot of support and praise. I can see her making real changes in the industry. In a future Spotlight feature, I am including amazing D.J.s like BIIANCO (who Wilford shouted out) and Jaguar (who she mentioned to; Jaguar set up The Jaguar Foundation to create balance and equality in electronic music and published an illuminating 2022 report aimed at progressing gender representation in Dance music). I love Jaguar and her fellow female D.J. peers, as they are both playing these phenomenal sets around the world and bringing people together, in addition to making their own music and calling for change in an industry that would not be the same without them - yet one that overlooks and marginalises them. As Carly Wilford said in the interview, there has been a regression and step back in terms of gender representation and equality.

I also spotlighted D.J. queens Olive F (Firth), AZZECCA, Linska and KSMBA. I have previously written about the legendary DJ Paulette. MixMag’s list of ones to watch this year features a majority of female/non-binary D.J.s. In terms of those being highlighted and tipped for success, there is this shift in the media. One only needs to see the sets of my amazing two interviewees and the women they shouted – including Hang the DJs, Savannah, She They Press Play, DREYA V, HoneyLuv, SYREETA, Arielle Free, Hannah Laing, Tini Gessler – and those I have mentioned to realise that their sets are absolutely incredible. Uplifting, life-affirming, unifying, eclectic, fantastically inventive and always defined by drive, passion and stunning talent. It is only right that so many queens coming through are being heralded and spoken about highly. However, this is not being reflected quickly in an industry where so many female D.J.s face inequality, sexism and abuse. Features and pieces like this, this and this that tells of gender inequality facing D.J.s, those in Electronic music and beyond. Throw into the mix iconic queens like Peggy Gou, Charlotte De Witte, Honey Dijon, Amelie Lens, Deborah De Luca, Nora En Pure, Lilly Palmer and a growing number of wonderful and hugely inspiring women, and it bring hope that the sheer power and force of their combined talent will accelerate balance and change. Again, a male-created problem, why is it women who have to address and fix this?! In a more positive sense, I do think that there should be a book published highlighting the amazing D.J. queens from the past few years. I wonder if there has been a documentary where women talk about their experiences of inequality and discrimination (and assault) as a D.J. but also their highlights, when music entered their life, and their favourite venues and cities. There have been documentaries that investigate and spotlight misogyny and sexism across music, though I am not sure whether a new one has been produced where female D.J.s – and non-binary D.J.s – talk about their careers and experiences. Maybe something that icons like Jaguar and DJ Paulette can help bring to the screen.

As I often struggle to get to these amazing venues where these D.J.s play, and so many of them play abroad or in clubs that are pretty intense – and for someone who struggles with tightly-packed venues and that stress -, it would be wonderful to see established queens and the amazing new crop together on an epic bill. A lot of festivals where D.J.s appear tend to push them into smaller tents and they are lower on the bill. Specialist festivals still are not great when it comes to gender balance. Last year saw festivals like FEMMESTIVAL feature an all-female D.J. line-up. Among the sixteen women featured were Kayleigh Noble, Violet, Roma Radz and Billie-Angela. Miss Monique and DJ ReRe are two of my favourite D.J. queens. The thing is, it is great that there is a special festival. How there are shifts at others where more women are on the bill. It is important that all festivals that feature D.J.s give women more headline slots and include more on the bill. It would be great for this year to have a massive one-off event where pretty much every D.J. I have mentioned gets together. This amazing summer event where it would be in the open, but you would have female D.J.s collaborating and at the forefront. Some might say it is excluding men and sexist in itself. It is not. Instead, it gives access to people to see all these women in the same spot. Highlighting their incredible sets and talent, it would be a singular point of reference and awareness for industry bosses and gatekeepers who need to realise the depth, wealth and diversity of female talent. In terms of age too. I do think there is also an ageism when it comes to booking female D.J.s. It would be wonderful if someone curated this incredible line-up of these inspiring and phenomenal women. Changes will not occur overnight, and issues like abuse and pay inequality needs to be tackled urgently. However, a bill where women are at the front and the crowd feel protected, united and safe would be amazing to see this summer. Though I realise it is probably too late to execute something this big with only seven or eight months to go until the peak time to mount this. However, as would be proved, these women are among the best and most important D.J.s in the world. Salute these queens and…

FEEL the drop!

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs: The Bride/The Groom (Rudi) (The Wedding List)/Emily/The Actor (Wow)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the filming of The Wedding List for her 1979 Christmas T.V. show, Kate (in The Wedding List, she plays the part of a bride whose husband-to-be is killed at the altar and she seeks revenge against his assassin (played by her brother, Paddy)

 

The Bride/The Groom (Rudi) (The Wedding List)/Emily/The Actor (Wow)

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THIS edition of this series…

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

finds me focusing on characters from albums that followed one another. I am starting out with 1980’s Never for Ever and characters from perhaps one of the best and most underrated songs from the album. One that has some rare and amazing distinctions. I am then going to move to 1978’s Lionheart and the standout (or most acclaimed) song from that album. In both cases, I want to discuss characters that are not named. Well, there is one from the first and one second song, though there is more mystery as to the identity of The Bride in The Wedding List. In the second half, it gives me a chance to talk about acting and Bush’s stagecraft. Something that would be full developed and realised in 1979. I think there is a character from one Kate Bush song that could have possibly influenced Quentin Tarantino. Even though he is a bit of an asshole, there is no denying he is an exceptional filmmaker. I am referring to his Kill Bill films. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 came out in 2003 and stars Uma Thurman. She plays Beatrix ‘The Bride’ Kiddo (codename: Black Mamba). Of course, there had been vengeful brides portrayed in film before, though there is something about Uma Thurman’s portrayal that very much reminds one of Kate Bush for The Wedding List. Though the Bride in the song is not Kate Bush, she is portraying this character. Its inspiration is fascinating. If Tarantino took the idea of a bride seeking revenge after the groom is killed and took it in new directions for his two Kill Bill films, I do love how unconventional this song is. We get The Bride and The Groom (Rudi). Although The Groom is named and The Bride is not, we do not learn about their past and how they met. It is about a murder as they are about to be wed. It is possible that Tarantino might have been influenced by the same source as Kate Bush. As we will see in the second half, acting, theatre, film and T.V. is a constant source of inspiration.

For The Wedding List and its Bride and Groom pair, Bush was inspired by François Truffaut’s 1968 film, The Bride Wore Black (‘La Mariée était en noir’). It concerns a groom who is accidentally murdered on the day of his wedding by a group of five people who shoot at him from a window. The bride succeeds in tracking down each one of the five and kills them in a row, including the last one, who is in jail. It is a great storyline and film. Again, bringing it into song is a brave step. Bush always inspired by people, but not your everyday so much. Rather than her talking about her own relationships, heartache, stresses and desires, you can see her moving much more towards the fictional after 1978’s The Kick Inside. Though her debut is not completely filled with love songs and tales of lust and desire, there are more cases than the albums that would follow. It is much more interesting to hear a song about a bride who goes on revenge spree after her husband-to-be is gunned down. Before moving on, let’s get to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and their article on The Wedding List. We get some interview archive where Kate Bush discusses the influence behind The Wedding List:

“Revenge is so powerful and futile in the situation in the song. Instead of just one person being killed, it’s three: her husband, the guy who did it – who was right on top of the wedding list with the silver plates – and her, because when she’s done it, there’s nothing left. All her ambition and purpose has all gone into that one guy. She’s dead, there’s nothing there.

Kris Needs, ‘Fire in the Bush’. Zigzag, 1980

Revenge is a terrible power, and the idea is to show that it’s so strong that even at such a tragic time it’s all she can think about. I find the whole aggression of human beings fascinating – how we are suddenly whipped up to such an extent that we can’t see anything except that. Did you see the film Deathwish, and the way the audience reacted every time a mugger got shot? Terrible – though I cheered, myself.

Mike Nicholls, ‘Among The Bushes’. Record Mirror, 1980”.

I like how there is humour in all of it. The song being called The Wedding List. Rather than the traditional gifts for a happy couple, Bush’s vengeful heroine has a death list. We do not know who shoots down The Groom. In the lyrics, Bush sings that he is this “Mystery Man” - that is what the newspaper headlines say when reporting on the murder -, so I guess I should also include him as a character. In the Christmas Special video, it is Paddy Bush. However, on the Never for Ever version, we do not know who the mysterious killer is. I love The Bride. She is the most kick-ass Kate Bush character! I do think that it should have been a single from Never for Ever. We could have had this amazing video where we see the killer(s) and then The Bride hunts them down one by one. Luckily, and rather bizarrely, it was included in her 1979 Christmas Special, Kate. With very little Christmas vibes in it, it was more an opportunity for Kate Bush to do an extended televised live performance. The performance of The Wedding List is one of her most dazzling. 1979 was when she completed The Tour of Life. Performing songs from The Kick Inside and Lionheart, there were a couple of new songs. Egypt and Violin were featured on the setlist and would appear on Never for Ever. One of the biggest baller moves from Bush is to premier a song from Never for Ever on a Christmas show. Not only a new song. It is one where she wields a gun and goes on this rampage. I said when talking about James from James and the Cold Gun (The Kick Inside) how there is this association between Bush and guns. Not in a bad way. Instead, it is more about the filmic and theatrical. James and the Cold Gun’s spy hero was a bit of a washed-up agent who is definitely not the cool and suave James Bond-inspired figure you might assume: “You're a coward James/You're running away from humanity”. There are some publicity photos where Bush appeared with a gun. Again, it is more about concept and providing these different and interesting photos. She is not glamourising them. However, you could probably not have a modern-day version of The Wedding List on T.V. I don’t think.

Also, there are guns and loss in songs like Army Dreamers (Never for Ever) and Pull Out the Pin (The Dreaminmg). The latter is less overt (“With my silver Buddha/And my silver bullet”). The Christmas performance is phenomenal! Kate Bush plays The Bride and she is goes from this horrified and despairing woman to someone charged by revenge and the need to get justice. Choreographer Anthony Van Laast – who worked with Kate Bush and choreographed The Tour of Life – is The Groom. The unfortunate man that Bush shoots down is her brother, Paddy. Smoking a cigar and looking like something out of the Wild West. Rather than replicate French cinema and The Bride Wore Black, Bush goes for something close to a Western. In a third incarnation, we get Quentin Tarantino in 2003 fusing Japanese samurai/ninja films, Hong Kong martial arts movies, Spaghetti Westerns, and blaxploitation. In this article, we learn more about the films that influenced Tarantino for Kill Bill. Kate Bush would also perform The Wedding List for the Prince’s Trust Rock Gala on 21st July, 1982 (which was almost stopped, as Bush had a dress malfunction and had to use a hand to keep it in place whilst continuing to sing!), though it is not as stylish, theatrical and memorable as the 1979 version. For Kate – the Christmas Special –, The Wedding List was filmed Nunhead Cemetery in South London; a Gothic Victorian cemetery, blending this pre-recorded outdoor scene with in-studio performances at BBC's Pebble Mill Studios. I did forget to mention that Kate Bush’s The Bride kills herself at the end. Rather than being caught and imprisoned, she turns the gun on herself. It was an original and big move having a song about marriage that goes in this direction. Not wanting to live with this tragic loss and let the police do their investigation and the woman move on and lead a life solo, there is this feeling that maybe The Bride cannot live without someone else. Without a man. It is a very dark song, even for Kate Bush!

One additional element of tragedy is at the autopsy of The Bride – who, unlike The Groom, is not named –, who it seems was also pregnant: “They found a little one inside/I’m coming, coming, coming, honey!/“It must have been Rudi’s child”. I want to bring in part of an article from Dreams of Orgonon, and their dissection and analysis of this phenomenal song:

“In this way, Bush kills her positive vision of masculinity and replaces it with a bloodier one. She essentially takes the role of the vigilante usually played by men. When men stop playing a part in this story, women take their roles. It’s a kind of reverse fridging, the moment fridging stops being a misogynistic trope and becomes kind of good and queer. This is a traditionally male role being occupied by one of the most popular young singers in England. This break with gender norms is exemplified by Bush’s Christmas special performance of the song, where she dons a wedding dress while shooting her husband’s assassin to death. It’s terribly fun and extra, but it gets to a key truth about wedding stories: they usually don’t have a lot of women protagonists with guns.

The decisive way in which Bush differs from Truffaut, who ends his movie with Jeanne Moreau in prison but having killed all of her husband’s murderers, is that “The Wedding List” ends with… well… “after she shot the guy/she committed suicide.” “I’m coming, Rudy,” she howls desperately. It gets worse from there: her autopsy uncovers that she “had a little one inside/it must have been Rudy’s child.” This is a song where a pregnant woman commits suicide. And it’s not even the first time that’s happened in a Kate Bush song! If this was bleak for 1980, it is perhaps more so in our historical moment when shootings are a pestilence (and not just in America — the UK has seen the assassination of Jo Cox in the last three years). Violence wins in Never for Ever — the potentially happy wife and mother is never granted domestic happiness”.

The Bride and Rudi, The Groom, are the centrepiece of a smashed and poisoned wedding cake. The anti-romance ideal. The man is shot dead and The Bride gets vengeance but then kills herself and the unborn baby. Bush singing about this “eye for an eye” and “ashes to ashes” – I like to think this is a nod to one of her music heroes, David Bowie -, and creating this film of her own. One that is so evocative and filled with incredible visions. The newspaper headlines telling of a passion crime and this groom being shot down. Rudi being taken away but his wife-to-be not mourning, but avenging his death. Some beautiful wording and phrases from Bush include this: “He swooned in warm maroon/There’s gas in your barrel, and I’m flooded with Doom/You’ve made a wake of our honeymoon/And I’m coming for you!”.

To Side B as it were. Again, we have a more generic character and a named one. Whilst The Groom was given a name in The Wedding List, go back two years and Lionheart. The Wedding List was never issued as a single. Wow was. It was the second single from Lionheart and was released on 9th March, 1979. I want to look at the characters in the song. Specifically, one very briefly named right at the start. Emily. Who is she?! The Actor is less about a specific actor, and more about this representation of a certain type of person in showbusiness and music. The Wedding List was performed live twice but never got a wider release. It is quite underrated. Wow is very well know and was performed live several times (30th December, 1978: Rockpop (Germany); 14th January, 1979: San Remo (Italy); 22nd March, 1979: Top of the Pops; 16th April, 1979: ABBA Easter Special; 16th June, 1979: Numéro Un (France). The video is really interesting. The one for the single release features Bush performing in a darkened studio, backed by spotlights during the chorus. For the home video release of The Whole Story (I think that was actually released in 1987 and not 1986),  we got a montage of Bush performing at concerts/live performances. Both Wow and The Wedding List have controversial elements. The Wedding List more obvious and overt. In terms of the violence and the subject of guns and also the death of an unborn baby. The suicide of The Bride. The ‘controversy’ for Wow is a lot stuffier and silly. When Bush sings about The Actor never making T.V., stage or the screen as he is “too busy hitting the Vaseline”, Bush pats her bottom. That was seen as too sexual or controversial, as a reason why the video was changed for The Whole Story. So tame and insane, it does make you wonder about the standards of the time. Would a male artist have their video banned or condemned for something as minor? It is actually a funny little bit from Kate Bush!

At this stage in her career (1978/1979), Kate Bush was still subjected to the worst sexism and misogyny the music press had to offer up. This review from Sounds of March 1979 is an example of what she had to read and process: “I hear this mediocre chanteuse crooning her way through this silly song. (…) I realise that a lot of people would like to go to bed with her, but buying all her records seems a curious way of expressing such desires”. Before getting to the characters in Wow, I want to draw in an interview where Bush talked about the story behind one of her biggest songs:

“‘Wow’ is a song about the music business, not just rock music but show business in general, including acting and theatre. People say that the music business is about ripoffs, the rat race, competition, strain, people trying to cut you down, and so on, and though that’s all there, there’s also the magic. It was sparked off when I sat down to try and write a Pink Floyd song, something spacey; Though I’m not surprised no-one has picked that up, it’s not really recognisable as that, in the same way as people haven’t noticed that ‘Kite’ is a Bob Marley song, and ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’ is a Patti Smith song. When I wrote it I didn’t envisage performing it – the performance when it happened was an interpretation of the words I’d already written. I first made up the visuals in a hotel room in New Zealand, when I had half an hour to make up a routine and prepare for a TV show. I sat down and listened to the song through once, and the whirling seemed to fit the music. Those who were at the last concert of the tour at Hammersmith must have noticed a frogman appear through the dry ice it was one of the crew’s many last night ‘pranks’ and was really amazing. I’d have liked to have had it in every show.

Kate Bush Club newsletter, Summer 1979”.

If there was a sense of minor disappointment around Lionheart and the fact it was not as good and original as its predecessor, The Kick Inside – Bush being given an impossible task of releasing a second album in 1978 and only having time to write three new songs doesn’t help! -, many note how Wow is a definite highlight. I want to briefly return to the Dreams of Orgonon piece on Wow. How that idea of taking shots at those in the music industry or showbusiness perhaps came from her being luridly portrayed in the press. The constant sexism and inappropriateness. A veiled attack on journalists perhaps?! It is a fascinating song: “Being a fan of Bush’s music was a private exercise. Public speculation about her was done by voyeuristic journalists, who wrote such scintillating headlines and phrases as “Kate Bush Is A Sex Kitten,” “her flesh, her bones, her erogenous zones,” and this fucking travesty of the printed word (surely an article that begins by declaring that Kate Bush is a girl is going to be a Pulitzer Prize winner. Talk about her having “the breasts of a Victorian princess” and you have an all-time classic on your hands). It’s easy to why Bush would be resentful of this sort of treatment, especially when it manifested itself as a media furor over a photo of her wearing a pink top…The elation of the chorus is belied by the knowing facetiousness of the verses, with the shit-eating grin they flash at showbiz. Bush’s sweet-natured delivery of “we think you’re amazing!” efficiently hides the fact those lines are probably written with gritted teeth. It’s not that “Wow” is bitter, but it’s taking a few potshots as it falls through showbiz. The first verse is rife with tension, laden as it is with the song’s intro, acting as something of a rehearsal for the chorus”.

Rather than The Actor being this specific figure or actor, they are the washed-up and unprofessional. Someone who “always dives too soon, too fast to save himself”. Bush, as this constant professional and someone who was disciplined and amazing, looking at those in music or showbusiness who are hammy or a luvvie. There are lines that I think refer to Kate Bush in music. How good and original she is. How she got some high praise from certain quarters but is still not treated with respect and given the creative freedom by EMI that she deserves: “You say we’re fantastic/But still we don’t head the bill”. Maybe Bush wanting to produce her music but not being granted that responsibility. One thing that is ironic is how she sings about The Actor saying his lines “time and time again”. Wow was a song where Bush did the vocal over and over again. Perhaps exhausting producer Andrew Powell, almost like an actor trying to nail the perfect performance, Bush stepped inside the song and was almost like a director showing how it should be done. The antithesis to the lazy and ill-disciplined focus of her song, Bush said in the Lionheart promo cassette how “although it was all in tune and it was okay, there was just something missing. And we went back and did it again and it just happened”. I did not realise this is another Kate Bush song with reference/mention of a gun. In the sense that when she sings about The Actor and how “He’ll never make the screen/He’ll never make The Sweeney”, she mimes a gun being brandished. Lionheart was an album where there was conflict and compromise. Kate Bush wanted to her own band on the record after she performed with (excellent) experienced musicians for The Kick Inside. It started out with them before they were replaced by some returning players like Ian Bairnson. What is pleasing is how Wow does feature some of Bush’s choices. Including her brother Paddy on mandolin, her boyfriend Del Palmer on bass, and fellow KT Bush Band member Brian Bath on guitar. The Kick Inside player Ian Bairnson was on electric guitar, so it was a mix of the old and (slightly) new.

IN THIS IMAGE: Emily Brontë

Going in reverse order, we get Emily mentioned. I have written about this before, but I think that this is Emily Brontë. Bush immortalised her sole novel, Wuthering Heights, in her number one debut single of 1978. Bush was inspired to write Wuthering Heights after catching the end of a BBC adaptation of the novel. Feeling this connection to Brontë, the two shared the same birthday (30th July). Both faced criticism and sexism from critics. Bush felt this bond. I think that it is Brontë Bush is referring to, as when she whispers that word at the start of the video, we see Bush twirling around. This might be referencing the Wuthering Heights video and part of its choreography. Though Emily is not mentioned again in the song, the first words after that potential Brontë shout-out is “We’re all alone on the stage tonight/We’ve been told we’re not afraid of you”. I think this is a reference to Bush herself and Brontë. Rather it referring to the solitary practice of acting, how the audience are meant to behave in a theatre and the discipline required from them, I see it as women in the industry – and Brontë as a female author in the nineteenth century – being cast aside or on their own. The expectations of them. Maybe I am reaching. However, the feeling that the ‘Emily’ of Wow is a return to Wuthering Heights is reflected in another part of the Dreams of Orgonon article: “The similarities between “Wow” and “Wuthering Heights” are largely structural. Both songs have arpeggiated hooks (“Wow” opens with the notes of a C major chord), followed by tense, melodically wrought verses, before breaking into the song’s triumphant chorus. “Wow” is shorter, its album version capping off at four minutes, compared to the four-and-a-half minutes of “Wuthering Heights,” with its intro which is built into the verse, keeping the song moving after its chorus. The chorus and verse of “Wow” are repeated twice each, with the intro and outro essentially built into the verses, letting the song flow smoothly while also breaking it into distinguishable segments”.

I love how Emily Brontë is perhaps in Kate Bush’s heart for a song that may be about showbusiness and its phoniness. It may be about Bush’s experiences and how she has been treated. Casting herself as The Actor and playing the fool. Bush miming fingerguns to her head as she sings “We’d give you a part, my love/But you’d have to play the fool”. I feel this is more about Bush. Having to compromise somewhat or being told what to do. A reference to her not being given autonomy at this point? Maybe Bush being a fool or stooge in her own albums rather than the star and someone who has the spotlight. The criticism and mockery from some parts of the press. One thing that didn’t help when it came to parody and stereotyping Bush was the routine and theatrics of the Wow video. The Guardian expand on this for their 2012 article:

“In late 1978 the 20-year-old Bush still seemed an ingenue and it was always going to be tough following an album that contained Wuthering Heights and The Man With the Child in His Eyes. She later complained she felt under pressure from EMI to release Lionheart too early, a problem she made sure she never experienced again. But Wow was always a song that stood on its own merits. It contains many of her trademarks: enigmatic intertextual lyrics, unfeasibly high-pitched vocals that fall unexpectedly to an absurd low note (the last "wow" of each chorus is particularly amusing), tantalising verses followed by a cascading chorus. Musically, Wow is typical of her early work, with pretty woodwind, piano and strings complementing a lyrical bass line.

The song, as far an anyone other than its author knows for certain, appears to be about struggling actors and the disappointments of fame. In the video its most famous lines – "He'll never make the scene/ He'll never make the Sweeney/ Be that movie queen/ He's too busy hitting the vaseline" – were expressed through her much-parodied mime-the-lyrics dancing style. The word "Sweeney" was accompanied by her firing a gun and "hitting the vaseline" by her tapping her backside. Viewers were invited to draw their own conclusions.

 

Bush is such a singular talent it has become too easy to dismiss her as an eccentric, peripheral figure. It was around the time Wow was released that the pastiches began, most famously by Pamela Stephenson on Not the Nine O'Clock News. But those memories would not do justice to her achievements in carving out a career of complete artistic independence and integrity after starting out as a teenager in a male-dominated world, chaperoned by members of England's prog-rock elite. Her influence on so many female (and male) songwriters, musicians and performers since has been enormous, even if they don't know it themselves”.

I love the introduction and the strings. The Pink Floyd spaciness. Cosmic and grand, it like we wait for the curtains to open before the performance. I am endlessly fascinated by Bush and ‘Emily’. Maybe it is not explicitly about Emily Brontë, why mention her debut single muse for Wow? The unnamed actor and the potential Emily Brontë make Wow such a fascinating song. Is it autobiographical and a disguised attack on the press, record label and how Bush was feeling, or is it more about showbusiness in general? Like The Wedding List, acting is a common thread. One that is key and common in so many of her tracks. Whether a song inspired by a film or T.V. show or a song involving acting, actors or something theatrical, Kate Bush is always original and captivating. With the divine Wow being seen as one of her best by MOJO and The Guardian (whose words, “beautifully drawing the gulf between the gushing praise of his friends and the lonely reality of his life” make me think the song is about Bush’s career and reality) and so many others, it is clear that the song is a classic. When it comes to the divine Kate Bush, it is very clear that…

WE think you’re amazing!

FEATURE: Wired for Sounds: Why An Upswing in the Popularity of Wired Headphones Is Unexpectedly Positive

FEATURE:

 

 

Wired for Sounds

PHOTO CREDIT: Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels

 

Why An Upswing in the Popularity of Wired Headphones Is Unexpectedly Positive

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ONE might expect…

PHOTO CREDIT: Anastasiya Badun/Pexels

that, despite a rise in vinyl popularity, people would still fancy music on streaming and using wireless earphones and earbuds. I know that these wireless options provide comfort and ease, though I have always been a fan of wired headphones. I tend to prefer the chunky-eared headphones, as they seem more comfortable and noise cancelling when it comes to sounds around me. As I live in London, there is a tonne of noise everywhere! When it comes to music and how people experience it on the go, I advocate that it should be private and definitely not shared. I appreciate that some people might want to pass a phone to a friend to play them a video or message, but I find that incredible annoying and rude. If you are on public transport or a café, you do not want to hear other people’s phones. It is common in cities where you get people playing music out loud. Apart from a lack of manners and basic respect, I do think that there is something about the comfort of headphones that connects you more to music. I have dabbled with Airpods and earbuds but I find them to be a bit uncomfortable. Maybe I have odd-shaped earlobes, but they tend to come out and I am forever jiggling and repositioning them so they stay in. The price we pay for music portability! It was the same when I was growing up and listening through a Discman. It was not the smoothest of listens. There is also the issue of losing earbuds and the cost and inconvenience there. However, whilst there may be some sense of discomfort and obvious drawbacks to wired options – the eternal and agonising issue of wires being tangled and taking forever to untangle it! -, maybe it is to do with that security and connection. A literal and direct connection to the music. Also, as someone who uses headphones, I do also find they make the listening experience better. Maybe less sound leak or something a bit more panoramic, it does seem better than wireless options.

PHOTO CREDIT: Tony Schnagl/Pexels

Also, there is that thing of going back in time and experiencing music pre-streaming. Maybe a reason physical music is doing so well. I personally prefer to listen to music on a laptop through big headphones. That is optimal for me. Whilst the perfect listening experience is vinyl, if you are listening to albums and songs on streaming or on your phone/laptop, wired headphones and earphones do seem preferable. I was struck by a recent article to The Guardian where they spotlight the upswing and resurgence of wired headphones. Not to be pedantic, but headphones would go over your head and anything that goes into your ears would be earphones/earbuds. I think they are looking more generally at both options but are calling them ‘headphones’. Anyway, the fact that a lot of hugely influential people who you might expect to be wire-free and go with the herd are actually dispending with that in favour of quite basic wired options. It is pleasing to see this trend and change:

“I see more and more people, especially people around my age, rocking the classic white iPod-associated earbuds instead of the previously ubiquitous AirPods. Celebrities and politicians such as Bella Hadid, Zendaya, Dua Lipa and Kamala Harris use them, as do a lot of musicians I know. When New York magazine published its annual Reasons to Love New York issue last week, it featured stars such as Debbie Harry, Cameron Winter and Subway Takes host Kareem Rahma sharing wired earbuds on the cover, because photographer Hannah la Follette Ryan had noticed more and more people listening to music that way on the subway. You see the same casual intimacy on the tube in London and on buses. The other day I even saw a teenager recreating the ultimate symbol of cool of my youth: two white earbuds dangling from the inside of his collar.

IN THIS PHOTO: Zendaya/PHOTO CREDIT: Backgrid

Although there is undeniably some swaggy retro appeal in wearing wired headphones – especially dinky white ones, which allow Gorillaz-loving zoomers, of whom there are many, to relive the era of the Feel Good Inc-soundtracked iPod ad – I think the return to cords was likely born out of a desire for simplicity and economy. The facts of being young right now – just of being alive right now – are that wages have stagnated as prices have gotten higher and rent has become exorbitant. AirPods cost £99, wired Apple headphones are £17: the moment you lose an AirPod – or, as once happened to me, drop one as you leave a bus and look on in horror as the bus slowly rolls over it – you realise that they are emphatically a luxury product, not the everyday essential they may have seemed when you were using them to tune out a rowdy toddler on said bus. As with streaming, or TikTok, or next-day delivery, luxuries we’ve had access to for only a few years can seem indispensable when there’s actually evidence to suggest the world functioned a whole lot better before we had all these things.

That wired headphones are experiencing a resurgence is heartening – it may be a bellwether for a society ready and willing to slowly divest from all the crutches it uses every day. (I hope ChatGPT is next.) On the other hand, it could mean nothing except that 18-year-olds have just discovered the aura-increasing capabilities of white rubber-coated wire and PVC. Either way, I am ready for our corded future. When I go Christmas shopping this week, I certainly know what Shaad is getting”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Moose Photos/Pexels

Of course, let’s not romanticise wired headphones. There is the satanic ball-ache of having to lumber around headphones. Mine are a bit hefty and being wired in can make you feel a bit there and restricted. The cheaper earphones you used to pair with an iPod are more affordable and sleeker but they tangle easily and, like I said, they can be uncomfortable. I love the over-ear option and the comfort there rather than something more in-ear. I am not sure if there is a science behind the sound and experience you get with both options. However, one cannot deny that there are benefits to wired head and earphones. Less likely to lose them for a start. It may sound a weird flex, but how inconveniencing is it to lose expensive earbuds and then having to replace them. You also have to keep them charged and they are not perfect when it comes to reliability. Sometimes basic and older is better than something designed to be more convenient and invisible. I can admire people who want to keep music private and also want to keep things wireless, but there is a psychology behind the new appreciation for the wire. I do think that, as less and less use C.D. players and devices to play our music – other than smartphones -, we are starting to become adrift and lose the physicality of music. I long to see a raft of affordable and stylish portable players and carry around C.D.s and even cassettes. Sure, it means I am carrying this weight around and am almost like a D.J. carrying a stack on vinyl to a gig. However, that relationship to something physical and the process of plugging in some headphones and feeling the music go through the wire and into your ears is something you cannot get from wireless options. There have been quite a few think-pieces and articles around this subject.

PHOTO CREDIT: Olena Bohovyk/Pexels

Whilst there are practical and personal reasons why wired is a better option, I do have to say that there might be a danger than fad, trendiness and this being fashionable risks diluting the argument or making it about being cool and retro – rather than actually there being clear practical and sonic benefits to wired over wireless. With celebrities, supermodels and actors not only going to wired and also purchasing real camera and older technology, like so many things, it is all about TikTok and social media. Rather than it being able the music and opening up discussions about physical music and why wired headphones represent something positive, many are seeing this celebrity-led revival as being about clicks and image. The Times wrote about this back in 2024. Even though Hannah Skelley said she prefers to be wireless, she did note this about a growing trend: “Yes, wires are on the rise, with twentysomethings ditching untethered devices and reverting to digital audio habits last seen in the 2010s. Their interest in the impractical trend is purely aesthetic. They consider it bohemian: just scroll through the 174.8 million videos on TikTok in which users dance to viral songs, eat, or vlog their day and style outfits — all while plugged in”. Wired headphones being more of a fashion accessory than something deeper and more connected to music. However, plenty of ordinary and reality-based people have also fully embraced wired headphones. Something cheaper and a little less easy can sometimes be more advantageous than a more expensive, new and perhaps easy-to-use option.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Lily-Rose Depp/PHOTO CREDIT: Gotham/GC Images

Another article from The Guardian came out last month. Whether you are using Bluetooth wired headphones or some basic white ones that do the job just fine, I think this year will see that intensify. More and more people, especially those in their twenties, forgoing the high-tech and finding joy with physically connecting to music. The fact that cameras and once-obsolete and ‘bygone’ technologies and objects are now being picked up and used by a new generation is a positive thing:

“With white-wired headphones endorsed by celebrities including Lily-Rose Depp, Paul Mescal, Bella Hadid and Apple Martin, a growing number of people are breaking away from wireless listening.

For inspiration, there is the Instagram account @wireditgirls, or a Balenciaga campaign featuring the model Mona Tougaard reclining bed, wired headphones in place.

Daniel Rodgers, the fashion news editor at British Vogue, is familiar with the trend. “[It says] ‘I’m very effortless. I’m very nonchalant,” he says. “It’s become a real styleable accessory.”

But in a culture where the forward march of technology is often treated as compulsory, wired headphones represent more than aesthetics. “It’s an analogue way of opting out – of both tech but also life,” says Rodgers. “They’re visible in a way that AirPods aren’t. There is a sense of ‘do not disturb’.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Geese’s Cameron Winter/PHOTO CREDIT: New York Magazine

That symbolism is on full display on the cover of New York magazine’s latest issue, which features celebrities riding the subway: Debbie Harry with the Geese frontman Cameron Winter, Ben Stiller with the Knicks star Karl-Anthony Towns and Macaulay Culkin with the SubwayTakes presenter Kareem Rahma. The real story, however, is not the star power but the shared accessory in each image: wired headphones.

The pictures were taken by Hannah La Follette Ryan, the Brooklyn-based photographer behind the Instagram account @subwayhands, which documents New Yorkers on public transport. She says: “I see the revival as an extension of digital fatigue. Who wants another glitchy expensive gadget to charge?”

Price is clearly part of the appeal of wired headphones – Apple’s EarPods cost £17 compared with £99 for AirPods – but nostalgia is also a factor.

“We’re seeing retro tech come back,” says Tom Morgan-Freelander, the deputy editor of the technology magazine Stuff. “And as part of that, brands are starting to bring back wired headphones.”

He says some younger consumers are switching to wired for sound quality, which is typically better with cables. “Bluetooth became the norm, and there was an acceptance that, for wireless convenience, you’re going to lose a bit of quality,” he adds.

La Follette Ryan suggests this is part of the appeal. “The tangle is inevitable,” she says. “Think of a headphone knot as a more user-friendly Rubik’s Cube. Relish the opportunity to slow down and solve a little puzzle.”

If wired headphones have become the choice of the fashion-conscious despite these inconveniences, that could change soon. AirPods remain the bestseller at Currys but the retailer reports sales of Beats Solo 4 over-ear headphones have risen by 193% since last year.

Morgan-Freelander also points to the £20 FiiO Snowsky Wind, a design that looks like the earphones worn with a Sony Walkman in the 1980s.

Rodgers still believes wired headphones have the edge. “Even though we are constantly being [sold upgrades], there’s a sort of disengagement [with wired headphones], which is always really hot, right?” he says. “You never want to look like you’re too into anything”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Stefan/Pexels

I am going to end with another article from last year. Talking more about college experiences and students wearing wired headphones, there is this debate as to whether stuff like reverting to wired headphones is about nostalgia and the past than it is any natural evolution or sonic choice. People discovering wired headphones are actually fine without having to be upgraded. Or is it being escaping the horrors and increased uncertainty of the future by trying to escape back to a seemingly better (or simpler) time? There is a lot to chew on:

“I thought at first that it might be the beginning of a pretentious aesthetics movement. In the same way that there was likely a boy in your highschool who insisted that vinyl was the only correct way to listen to music only to later prowl the halls with a used SONY walkman playing a brand-new Smiths cassette tape. Or in the way that men who live in Bushwick choose to not own bed frames because they think the room looks better that way. I spoke with my friends later about this, and they basically all agreed that the decision to ditch wires is a ploy to stand out and cultivate an “indie” vibe. Perhaps the purpose of the lesser-quality wires was to blast Clairo loud enough that an indie girl could hear it playing in the next seat over.

I thought about this for the rest of the day though, and I came to an entirely different conclusion about the revival of this trend. It couldn’t just be that all of these people were sacrificing sound quality for an aesthetic. After all, it wouldn’t be long before even a novice audiophile became tired of the muffled quality that more rudimentary headphones produce. It took a bit more thinking to reach the following verdict: that perhaps the shift back to wired headphones is a nostalgia for a simpler time where people my age could leave the house without being concerned about the wellbeing of their technological ecosystem. The daily routine of charging bluetooth headphones and patting down your own pockets to make sure you haven’t lost them is admittedly tedious and inconvenient. Wired headphones are easily replaceable and are convenient — replacing them will run you about twenty bucks, they do not lose battery and they are virtually attached to your phone at all times.

It has been assumed that college-age Gen Z’ers are obsessed with the “next best thing.” The return to wired headphones proves that assumption to be incorrect. Young people on campuses now recognize that new is not always better. This revival of an old listening device is different from the aforementioned person who only listens to vinyl or cassette tapes because that choice is categorically inconvenient. This choice points to a larger desire to return to a simpler time when the priority was listening to as much music as possible, not the newest, flashy device that you could listen to music with”.

It may be a fad, though I don’t think it is. I do think that we need to take the narrative away from celebrities and say how brilliant it is they are wearing them because, as I saw, they are in a minority and there may be some cynicism and jumping on the bandwagon there. Walk around a town or city and take public transport and you will see the everyday person wearing these headphones. Me and my bigger, chunkier headphones perhaps looks a bit odd, though I find them cosy and I like the fact that I am plugged in. I always have them on when I am writing at the laptop – like, literally, right now – and I would never fully go to anything wireless – though I can see its appeal. Not just about being sentimental and any sort of new craze, it is part of a wider shift from the hyper-modern and very high-tech, digital, wireless and less human and tangible back to the warmth, physicality, tangibility and, yes, the slight inconvenience of the past. I am not expecting people to rock a Walkman, have disposable cameras and lug a boombox around like a 1980s/1990s teen, though it is encouraging that we are getting more of a blend between the easy and hi-tech and the more modest and ‘old-fashioned’, if you will! Whilst I have scoffed at trendy celebrities who are doing this almost to get focus and parade this new/old fashion accessory, they do love music too and their profile and example could lead their followers to do likewise. Not rely on what is seen as convenient and fashionable. Expensive and often quite stressful, I do feel wireless is not always best. Also, I do think you get another level and layer when it comes to the listening experience of being plugged in. Though I find in-ear headphones to be a little uncomfortable, I do admire those who use them and carry them around. I will stick with my headphones, but also keep an open mind about balancing the wireless and wired. For now, as a ‘trend’ seems to be more of a norm and common thing, the love and appreciation of the humble wired headphones…

PHOTO CREDIT: George Milton/Pexels

CAN only be a good thing!

FEATURE: Read It in the Papers: Supergrass’ Going Out at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Read It in the Papers

 

Supergrass’ Going Out at Thirty

__________

THE first single…

from Supergrass’ second studio album, In It for the Money, the supreme Going Out turns thirty on 26th February. Even though In It for the Money came out in 1997, the band released this amazing first single the summer before. Whilst not as massive as Alright from I Should Coco, Going Out was still a big success. It reached number five in the U.K. There was some tension within the band, as songwriter and lead Gaz Coombes was accused by Danny Goffey, the band’s drummer, of basing the lyrics around him and his girlfriend, Pearl Lowe. Their involvement with the tabloids and the attention they were courting. However, any spat or anger did not cause massive friction in the band and it is a song that they performed many times since 1996. I always thought that the tracklisting for In It for the Money needed a reshuffle. Richard III, the single that followed Going Out, should have been the opening track. It seems like the most natural set openers of all time, as it would whip the crowds into a frenzy! Going Out seems like a natural album closer, as it is epic and ends with those swelling and jubilant horns. Apart from the odd decision to put this whirring/machine-like sound at the end of the song – they should have just let the track fade -, it is a classic and one of my absolute favourite Supergrass songs. I love the single’s B-side, Melanie Davis, and the fact Supergrass recorded these amazing B-sides that deserve more attention. There is a lot to note about Going Out. Arriving in 1996, it announced perhaps a slightly darker, edgier and more mature – not in an insulting way – Supergrass. I see 1995’s I Should Coco as this carefree and brighter album that was released whilst Britpop was still raging. By 1996 even, the landscape of British Pop had changed. Going Out seemed to be the first sign of change and a new direction.

However, it is not to say that it is a angry or depressing song. Instead, I think it is more Supergrass reacting to things around them. Press intrusion, growing fame and that side of things. I think In It for the Money is a slightly stronger album and the shingles from it hit harder and remain in the head longer. Though this could be purely subjective. Going Out reminds me in a way of a Beatles track. Something that is a bit Psychedelic and raw at the same time, though it is has this incredible chorus. Danny Goffey reaching Ringo Starr reveals of genius with his drumming! Gaz Coombes in cool and swaggering from. Brilliant bass from Mick Quinn. Rob Coombes on piano and Hammond organ. Written by Supergrass and Rob Coombes and recorded at Sawmills Studio, Golant, Fowey, Cornwall. It was produced by Supergrass and Sam Williams. The Kick Horns provide those brilliant and rich horns. I want to delve more into this song ahead of its thirtieth anniversary. Even if Going Out could have been this Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles, 1967) cut, it is distinctly them. Differing from songs like Alright and that image of cheeky chaps, the song retains the fun and jollity you associate with Supergrass, though there is more bite and teeth for sure. Richard III heightened that! The way Supergrass kept the jollity and this incredible spirit but created something more sophisticated for In It for the Money. Going Out a perfect lead single. Critics commended the step forward from the band. Even if the lyrics to Going Out are quite simple, they do seem relevant for the time. About press, celebrity and how that affects things. The key changes, the circus-like droning organ, the horns and this bigger and deeper sound. Supergrass finding fresh energy, impetus and ambition after the success of their debut album.

I do feel Going Out deserves more written about it. I was looking around trying to drop a feature or two in but, alas, came up with nothing! However, it is a song that deserves a lot more than it has been provided. The video is quite joyous too. Directed by Dom & Nic, it was filmed in the bandstand in Battersea Park, London (the same one that features in the video for Late in the Day). Though it looked like it was a freezing shoot, the band are in good spirits and you feel this infectiousness and energy coming from the screen. I could not let the thirtieth anniversary of this single slide by without mentioning it. A lot of critics albums and tracks turn thirty this year, and I think it is an important milestone. It also makes me feel old realising I was around when Going Out came out – even though I was only twelve at the time! However, I look back fondly. Going Out still seems so fresh and alive. Maybe talking about the end of teenage freedom and the sort of lack of responsibility they may have had, Going Out does signify a change of sorts. I am not sure whether Gaz Coombes was basing the song around Danny Goffey. I think it is a more general commentary on tabloids and musicians who were featured a lot or are out on the town every night. Maybe that idea they were courting attention or they could stop all the intrusion with a call – but did not want to. A song that still is relevant to this day. There was a sense in press interviews around the release of Going Out that Supergrass had changed.

What happened to the cheeky and fun scamps of I Should Coco? Melody Maker said this in a February 1996 piece: “Almost exactly a year ago, when The Maker put them on the cover for the first time, SUPERGRASS were pop's likeliest lads, cheeky young upstarts who seemed to enjoy nothing more than getting totally off their faces. They were brash, rude, lovable rock 'n' roll clowns and their songs were the catchiest teenage anthems we'd heard in years. A lot's happened to them in the last 12 months — a Top Five single, a Number One album, debut tours of Europe, Japan, the US and South America. They've also — gulp! — Grown Up, Come Over All Serious and Gone All Thoughtful On Us. IAN WATSON met them last week, backstage at The White Room, where they were preparing to preview their new single, 'Going Out'”. I guess there was an expectation that Supergrass might repeat what they did on I Should Coco for In It for the Money. Going Out signalled a new direction for Supergrass. But they kept their core ingredients and that incredible sound. On 26th January, we mark thirty years of Going Out. The first taste of a remarkable second album from the band, I still get a rush of energy and pleasure listening to this song. I have not seen Supergrass live, so I am not sure if this is part of their sets still. I can imagine the sort of reaction this gets when it is played live! This stunning and phenomenal song from Supergrass remains…

ONE of their best singles.

FEATURE: While I Sing My Comeback Song: Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

While I Sing My Comeback Song

 

Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack at Thirty

__________

MANY people will debate…

IN THIS PHOTO: Mark Morrison in 1996/PHOTO CREDIT: Des Willie/Redferns/Getty Images

which songs and singles defined the 1990s. There are so many to choose from. Breakout hits, classic anthems or one-hit wonders, there are these tracks that just endure and seem to also perfectly sum up the period they were released. In terms of endurance, popularity and brilliance, few songs of the 1990s match Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mack. Released as a single on 18th March, 1996, it is the title track from his debut studio album. Return of the Mack was a major hit single for the German-born, British-based artist. It was a number one in the U.K. and multiple countries. It also reached two on the US Billboard Hot 100. To date, it has gone three-time platinum U.K. and five-times platinum in the U.S. It is a hugely recognisable songs that I recall vividly in 1996. At a time when things were shifting in British music, it is no wonder people responded to Return of the Mack. You could see Britpop ending or dying and there was this desire for something different. Return of the Mack puts one in mind of 1980s U.S. R&B. It was definitely not traditional Pop or anything that was being heralded and proffered a year previously. 1996 was a year of transition and evolution. It would be belittling and reductive to simply say Return of the Mack is one of the best songs of the 1990s. It is one of the best songs ever. Impossible to not sing along to, I know there will be celebration around the song’s thirtieth anniversary on 18th March. I wanted to look at the features that have been written about the track. Written by Mark Morrison and produced by Morrison, Phil Chill and Cutfather & Joe, The song's beat is sampled from the song Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club. It was also sampled by Mariah Carey for 1995’s Fantasy (and many other artists used the sample). Some dismiss Return of the Mack as a one-hit wonder or this overplayed song. One that is insubstantial and overrated. The fact is that this world-conquering and enormously successful song achieved so much because people responded to it. In 2025, I still hear the song played widely. Even though it is not the only hit from Mark Morrison, it is definitely the song people associate with him.

The first feature I want to drop in, unfortunately, does very much highlight Return of the Mack as a one-hit wonder. Rather than a brilliant single in its own right, it is often reduced almost to be a fantastic novelty. In any case, The Ringer told the story of Return of the Mack in a 2022 piece. I was not aware of his this song started life and how there was this quite basic and uncool original that then changed and was replaced by something awesome, layered and replete with these finely-selected samples:

“Mark Morrison started writing “Return of the Mack” in prison. In 2020 he told a Leicester newspaper, “I grew up on the St. Marks Estate. ‘Return of the Mack’ was written in Welford Road prison. I’m from here.” End quote. Mark also produced the original version of “Return of the Mack” along with a guy named Phil Legg, who’d most notably worked with Des’ree, the “You Gotta Be” lady. Love Des’ree. Two g’s in Phil Legg, just because.

That original version of “Return of the Mack” is not in the public domain. That’s the version of “Return of the Mack” that gets sent to our dear friend Cutfather and his own producing partner, Joe Belmaati. Cutfather, talking to Mel magazine, does not speak glowingly of the original “Return of the Mack.” He says, “It was very, very soft and sounded very slow. It was just very toothless. It wasn’t really catchy. The chorus was obviously catchy—the singing of it was catchy — but the chords around it actually made it less commercial. It was like pop R&B, but in a quite uncool way.” But he also says, “It was a really cool song.” Don’t you want to hear that version? The slow, soft, toothless, not-catchy, quite uncool version of “Return of the Mack”? That sounds awesome. Let’s pretend that the canonical, smash-hit Cutmaster and Joe remix of “Return of the Mack” is a song about Mark Morrison getting over the heartache of his original, quite uncool version of “Return of the Mack.”

Cutmaster and Joe got a few ideas for how to spice up “Return of the Mack.” First idea: The drums from “Genius of Love,” or drums very close to those drums. Second idea: Some new, way catchier chords from a 1992 song called “Games,” by an R&B singer named Chuckii Booker. That’s Chuckii, spelled Chuck with two i’s at the end, just because. Chuckii’s from L.A. I can confirm that this song “Games” has excellent chords.

Stupendous chords, truly. Tons of samples in this new, vastly improved, soon-to-be-colossal version of “Return of the Mack.” More drums from the French disco master Cerrone. Some noisy bits from the oft-sampled Bronx funk band ESG. Vocal fragments from the Treacherous Three, and Digital Underground, and Run-DMC. There’s a lot going on here. But there would be a lot going on here if Mark Morrison were the only thing going on here”.

Even though Return of the Mack was a number two in the U.S. in 1997, it was released in the U.K. the year before, so there was this delay. It might have been fortunate timing considering what was ruling the charts in June 1997. I think there is a little debate as to the exact U.K. date. I have seen 4th March, 1996 listed, in addition to 18th March. I am sticking with the latter. However, as Stereogum wrote in their feature, Return of the Mack is an epic bounce-back song: “But the narrative is great -- that whole idea of "fuck you, I'm doing great." That's the feeling embodied by Mark Morrison's "Return Of The Mack," one of the great bounce-back songs in pop music history. "Return Of The Mack" is an ideal dumped-guy anthem. It's breezy and fun and just ridiculously catchy, and its feeling isn't stuck in the sting of betrayal. Instead, Morrison sounds transformed, confident, ready to go. Most of the song's lyrics are about betrayal, about the ex who liiiied to him, but Morrison won't let that bring him down. Instead, he's focused on his come-up, on the return of the mack. When he wails out "oh my god!," it's like he can't believe how fly he's about to become. That's beautiful”. This is an endlessly fascinating song. In terms of male R&B artists of today, I don’t think they produce anything like Return of the Mack. Rather than the song being dated, I feel artists are sleeping on a sound and dynamic that we need to see today:

“On the "Return Of The Mack" bridge, we hear a bit about the relationship that brought Morrison down in the first place. A woman's voice gets impatient with Morrison: "Ahh, Mark, stop lying about your big break. For god's sake, I need a real man." (That voice belongs to Angie Brown, a veteran session singer and the featured guest on Bizarre Inc's 1992 single "I'm Gonna Get You," which peaked at #47 in the US.) That seems to be the source of the wound. Morrison talks a big game about becoming a superstar, but she's sick of waiting around for him. That hurts, but you can understand why she might be skeptical. Mark Morrison is, after all, a British R&B singer, and British R&B singers didn't often become international stars in the late '90s.

Mark Morrison was born in West Germany, and his parents came from the Bahamas. He also lived in Miami for a while as a kid. But Morrison mostly grew up in the English city of Leicester. (When Morrison was born, the #1 single in the US was Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.") He started making music in 1993, but his career really started later. In 1995, Morrison spent a few months in prison after a nightclub brawl, and the experience convinced him to devote himself to music full-time. Later that year, his single "Crazy" made the UK top 20. "Crazy," like "Return Of The Mack," is a hard-strutting club track that doesn't have anything to do with the different variations on techno and house that were dominating the UK charts at the time. Instead, "Crazy" gets its juice from dancehall and from new jack swing, the kinetic and rap-adjacent form of R&B that had come out of the US in the late '80s.

I was living in London when new jack swing first came along and made its presence known, and pretty much every kid I knew went nuts for that stuff, me included. At the time, Bobby Brown, an artist who will eventually appear in The Number Ones, felt like a legit contender to Michael Jackson's top-dog status. Bobby Brown's success faded, but I love the idea that the UK was still all-in on new jack swing more than a half-decade later.

Morrison followed up "Crazy" with "Return Of The Mack" in March of 1996. Morrison wrote the song, and he co-produced it with Phil Legg, a UK producer who'd done a lot of work with the London singer Des'ree. (Des'ree's highest-charting US single, 1994's "You Gotta Be," peaked at #5. It's a 4.) The "Return Of The Mack" beat is built almost entirely out of samples. The purring electric piano comes from "Games," a 1992 single from the R&B singer Chuckii Booker. ("Games" peaked at #68. Chuckii Booker's highest-charting single, 1989's "Turned Away," peaked at 42.) The needly guitar sounds and some of the drums come from "Genius Of Love," the 1981 dance classic from Talking Heads offshoot Tom Tom Club. ("Genius Of Love" peaked at #31. Another track with a "Genius Of Love" sample will eventually appear in The Number Ones.) Other drum sounds came from "Rocket In The Pocket," a 1978 live record from the Italo-disco producer Cerrone. (Cerrone's highest-charting single, 1977's "Supernature," peaked at #70.)

There were other samples, too, like the staccato siren sounds from ESG's culty 1981 club classic "UFO." There are echoing, buried-in-the-mix scratches: "Huh hah" grunts from Treacherous Three's "Feel The Heartbeat," "Good!" from Run-DMC's "Peter Piper," "straight gangsta mack" from Digital Underground's "The Humpty Dance." ("The Humpty Dance," from 1990, peaked at #11, which is the only thing stopping me from giving it a 10.) Effectively, Morrison and Legg were doing what good rap and R&B producers did in the '90s. They took sounds that were floating around in the ether -- often, sounds that had been sampled dozens of times -- and blended them into a seamless whole that felt new.

And "Return Of The Mack" really rides. The huge drums, the itchy little guitar stabs, the tremendous strut-roll of the bassline -- it all works together. Morrison sings over all of it with a breezy nasal intensity. You can't place his accent as British or as anything else. It's just a voice in love with itself, shaking off old betrayals. When Morrison sings that you lied to him, he doesn't even sound mad. He just sounds excited that his mack is returning. He's in full-on party mode even when he's talking about his lowest moments.

The dissonance between Morrison's heartbroken lyrics and the wild exuberance of the song itself is the secret weapon of "Return Of The Mack." Morrison says that he cried, but he doesn't sound like someone who's been crying. Instead, he drips triumphant swagger all over everything. Unlike many of the other R&B singers who scored hits in the '90s, Morrison never ever slows to show off his voice. Instead, he floats on top of the groove, radiating just-set-free relief. The video reinforces all that. Director Jake Nava, whose work will eventually appear in The Number Ones, films Morrison partying his way through London, his hair immaculately angular and his chunky chain enormous. (Morrison's whole style in the video is pure late-'80s, which fits the new jack swing feel of the song perfectly.)

"Return Of The Mack" went to #1 in the UK, and Morrison released his Return Of The Mack album a month after the single came out. In the UK, the album was big enough to send five singles into the top 10. "Return Of The Mack" also hit big throughout Europe. Finally, the song slowly caught on in the US, lingering in the Hot 100 for the better part of a year and finally peaking at #2 more than a year after it had topped the UK chart.

I am not going to include the entirety of this feature from Shortlist. But I did want put in quite a bit of it, as it delves into the hidden meanings within this timeless song. Thirty years after its release and Return of the Mack is being heard and appreciated by a new generation. Not alive when it was released in 1996, it is a song that transcends time. It stands up as a terrific song no matter how old you are and when you discover it:

“In the radio edit of the song, the words ‘return of the mack’ are sung no less than twenty-four times in three-and-a-half minutes. The effect is claustrophobic. It feels like he’s desperately trying to convince himself that he is who he once was - by God, he is The fucking Mack, man - and the chorus turns into a hypnotic mantra.

Despite being more than twice as long, the extended edit, the C&J Mix with all that piano, sees the title sung only seven extra times and yet it’s so much more effective and affecting. Again the song shifts from a meaty tale of persistent funkiness guiding a man’s way to personal redemption, and into an elegiac ballad of frail masculine ego.

Take the extended edit’s chorus backing vocal. Read alone they tell a tale of self-esteem finally being understood - ‘There it is! Come on! Oh my god’, he says, jubilant at realising his returned sense of being. “Once again! Top of the world! Watch my flow!” - but then…

“Mark…” whispers a woman’s voice at 2:25. “Stop lying about your big break… I need a real man… Stop bringing me down!” WHO SAYS THIS? It comes out of nowhere. Mark Morrison barely even references what just happened, merely internalising the slight, and the tone turns darker…

Return of the Mack (there it is)

Return of the Mack (hold on)

Return of the Mack (don't you know)

You know that I'll be back, here I go

Return of the Mack (oh, little girl)

Return of the Mack (once my pearl)

Return of the Mack (up and down)

You know that I'll be back (round and round)

While in the previous chorus he is triumphant, the pain in his wails and the backing vocal now tell another story. The Mack’s The Mackness is here for now, once again, but for how long? He cannot bring himself to move on, doomed to infatuate over his - presumably adult - former lover, doomed to constantly dredge up the past. He is doomed to go round and round. The question, eternally, remains: once damaged, can anyone - you, me, The Mack - ever be quite so strong?

You think back to the mysterious woman’s voice - “Mark… Stop lying about your big break…” - and another question emerges: What if the person Mark has been hurt by is… Bloody hell. Look at the video: The woman who enters the room to deliver these lines - tall, beautiful, dressed in a long blac… FUCKING HELL SHE’S DRESSED AS MARK MORRISON. It was Mark Morrison who hurt Mark Morrison all those years ago.

It’s little wonder that the song still resonates to this day. Even besides the song’s perfect tempo - quick enough to party to and slow enough to drunkenly sway through - have such deep, personal questions ever been more en vogue? And have they ever been more catchily sung? You already know the answer.

For this song to come in March 1996 - twenty years ago, almost to the month, at the peak of gangsta rap, of tough guy posturing - is nothing short of monumental. That it packs so much into a soundtrack so funky and so, at once, of-its-time and timeless, allowing you ingest its message without realising - like a sickly dog’s pill hidden inside a blob of delicious peanut butter - is a testament to the insurmountable courage of true art and to the indomitable spirit of a dancefloor classic”.

Return of the Mack turns thirty on 18th March. An incredible anthem from a wonderful decade of music, his 1996-released chart-topper never loses its brilliance. So catchy and brilliantly performed, you feel and believe every word. Even though there is a complex legacy regarding Mark Morrison’s time in prison and the circumstances behind that, there is no getting around the fact that Return of the Mack is a work of genius. Whether you see it as a one-hit wonder or give it more respect than that, you have to give respect and salute to this…

COMEBACK song.