FEATURE: Beatlemania Reaches Australia: The Legendary Band’s Incredible 1964 Tour

FEATURE:

 

 

Beatlemania Reaches Australia

IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles with drummer Jimmie Nicol in Adelaide, Australia on 12th June, 1964/PHOTO CREDIT: The Vincent Vigil Collection

The Legendary Band’s Incredible 1964 Tour

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1964 was…

IN THIS PHOTO: Crowds mob the car carrying the Beatles from Adelaide airport to the city centre/PHOTO CREDIT: Keystone/Getty Images

a huge year for The Beatles. It was the one when they truly exploded. Having only released their debut album the year before (Please Please Me), they were thrust into the limelight fully so soon! It must have been head-spinning! Like nothing the music world had ever seen or has seen since. We all know about Beatlemania reaching America in February 1964. One would not imagine that Australia would latch onto The Beatles so quickly. Even so, when the band – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimmie Nicol (Jimmie Nicol was a temporary member of The Beatles during their 1964 tour of Europe, Hong Kong and Australia) and George Harrison – reached the land down under in June 1964, they were met with hysteria and thousands of fans. As written here: “In June 1964, the world tour began. They went to Scandinavian, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Ringo missed part of the tour because he was in hospital with tonsillitis, but returned to play the gig in Melbourne, Australia, June 13, 1964”. It is clear that their music had truly reached the nation. Resonated and connected in a way possible no other artist had done in the country. I want to go into more detail about the dates they performed in Australia. First, in 2022, The Guardian wrote about The Beatles arriving in Adelaide for the Australian tour:

“When the Beatles arrived in Australia in 1964 for their first and only tour of the country, huge crowds greeted them everywhere they went. But one of the biggest turnouts was in Adelaide, where an estimated 350,000 people flocked to the city to catch a glimpse of them.

Adelaide wasn’t originally on the tour schedule, but local radio presenter Bob Francis petitioned to have it added, and 12,000 tickets were sold out in just over five hours for four shows, two each on 12 and 13 June.

The Beatles were the biggest band in the world and their songs were dominating the Australian charts with hits such as Can’t Buy Me Love (No 1 for six weeks in May and June 1964) and All My Loving, also previously a No 1.

It was one of the most intense outpourings of Beatlemania around the world, typified by the fans’ high-pitched screaming – although Ringo Starr was stuck in London with tonsillitis and was briefly replaced on drums by Jimmie Nicol until rejoining the band in Melbourne.

Thousands of people lined the Anzac highway from the airport to the town hall reception and then on to their hotel, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the band as they went past in convertibles.

Conservative Adelaide had never seen anything like it. In front of the town hall people swarmed around the cars, with the police having to lock arms to hold them back.

The Beatles went on to play Festival Hall in Melbourne and Sydney Stadium before flying to New Zealand to finish off the tour”.

The fact the band travelled all that way must have been strange in its own way. The boys from Liverpool in a country that was new to them. The Beatles' flight touched down at Sydney Airport just before 7:45am on Thursday, 11th June, 1964. The night after, they would perform in Adelaide. It was dizzying and a whirlwind for the band. Beatles Bible discusses that first date of the tour:

“An estimated 200,000 people lined the 10-mile route between Adelaide Airport and the city centre in the hope of seeing The Beatles’ motorcade. More than 30,000 surrounded the Town Hall, where they met the city’s mayor, James Campbell Irwin, along with council members and their families.

Nearly 250,000 people lined the Anzac Highway in Adelaide from the charming airport to the city centre. I told the writer Al Aronowitz all about it for the Saturday Evening Post a few weeks later. ‘It was like the Messiah come to Australia,’ I said, understating as best I could. ‘Cripples threw away their sticks and blind men leapt for joy,’ The only thing left for The Boys after this tour, I told him, would be a ‘healing tour’ of the world. It was like that. There were so many people of all ages and types reeling and a-rocking with joy that it felt as good as good can be. And if it felt good to the fans, it felt even better to us. I was called into The Beatles’ open car for the trip from the airport, and the journey was long and joyful and somehow humbling. You shoulda been there, John said on postcards later, and maybe some of you were. In the open car, George, now wide awake and full of delight, pointed in disbelief at the ribbons of people stretching as far behind and ahead as the eye could see. I had some difficulty in believing I was really here, a material witness to this unprecedented public love affair. How the hell, I wondered, do I come to be in Australia in a Victory Parade with the Most Famous People on Earth? Was this what I had always wanted?

Yes. Oh, yes. Definitely.

Derek Taylor

Fifty Years Adrift

We sat up on the back of our cars and all the people were out of their homes and hospitals, and then we went into the square. We got onto the Lord Mayor’s mantelpiece and waved at the whole crowd. It looked like something out of Dodge City, dirt roads and a Rock Ridge façade, or that’s what it seemed like to me. It was like ‘The Sheriff’s coming, ding, ding, ding.’ I’ve got photos, which I took from sitting up on the back of our car in the J. F. Kennedy position in the cavalcade.

George Harrison

Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor

The Beatles were given toy koala bears. John Lennon told the reception, “Wherever we go, anywhere in the world, this reception which Adelaide has given us will stick in our memories.”

The group was shadowed by local DJ Bob Francis from 5AD, who interviewed them in a range of locations including the Town Hall balcony. Francis also booked the suite next to theirs at the Hotel South Australia, from where he gave listeners hourly updates.

Three hundred thousand people welcomed us to Adelaide. It was like a heroes’ welcome. George waved too. That was the kind of place where we would go to the town hall and they would all be there in the centre of the city. If it had happened suddenly, overnight, it might have gone to our heads; but we had come up bit by bit, so it didn’t (not too much). We were just very pleased that everyone had turned out.

We were still close enough to our Liverpool roots to know how it would feel, and what it would mean, if we had showed up in the middle of town to see a group; so we could feel it in their spirit. I think we quite enjoyed it all. It can get a bit wearing, but it certainly wasn’t then.

We came in from the airport – it was the same in Liverpool for the première of a A Hard Day’s Night, with the whole city centre full of people – and the crowds were lining the route and we were giving them the thumbs up. And then we went to the Adelaide town hall with the Lord Mayor there, and gave the thumbs up again. In Liverpool it was OK, because everyone understands the thumbs up – but in Australia it’s a dirty sign.

Paul McCartney

Anthology

Meanwhile, Ringo Starr, who had missed the early part of the tour due to illness, flew to Australia via San Francisco, Honolulu and Fiji, accompanied by Brian Epstein. Starr left his passport in London, delaying the first flight of the journey, but was eventually allowed to board the aeroplane without it.

The passport was eventually found and sent to London Airport, from where it was sent to San Francisco and reunited with its owner during the drummer’s stopover on 13 June.

Over 50,000 applications had been made for tickets to see The Beatles in Adelaide’s Centennial Hall, which had just 3,000 seats. The group played two sets on this day, and two more on the following day.

The compère was Alan Field, and the support acts were Sounds Incorporated, Johnny Devlin, Johnny Chester and The Phantoms.

The Beatles performed the same 10 songs at all their Adelaide shows: ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘All My Loving’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Till There Was You’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘This Boy’, ‘Twist And Shout’, and ‘Long Tall Sally’.

I always remember the one gig in particular, I think it was in Melbourne [sic], doing the count-in to ‘She Loves You’, which was One, Two, dum be dum, ‘She Loves You’, with the down beat coming on ‘Loves’. I looked at Jimmie [Nicol] and said, ‘OK?’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ Right, then… ‘One, Two’ and he froze and sort of had a quick brain-fade. Panicky, he lashed out and went ‘crash’ – and somehow the song got going.

George Harrison

Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor

Brian Epstein sold the rights for one of the 12 June shows to be recorded for radio broadcast. It was titled Beatles Show and was transmitted on 15 June, with sponsorship from Surf detergent.

The Adelaide concerts were recorded for possible release as an album. I recall being driven to a studio to hear and approve the recording: to my uncritical ears, the tapes sounded all right and I gave them the provisional approval I’d been authorized to give. It was a weighty responsibility for someone so recently converted to popular music, and I was far too quickly and easily pleased. Whatever The Beatles sang was perfect to my ears. The Boys themselves later described the tapes as ‘crap’ (or one of its many synonyms) and they were never officially released, though no doubt they have turned up since as valued bootleg.

Derek Taylor

Fifty Years Adrift!”.

Even if the 1964 tour of Australia is notable for lacking Ringo Starr for the start of it, I wanted to mark sixty years of an important moment. The band has already cracked America and were beloved in their native U.K. It seemed perhaps inconceivable that they would be taken to heart so quickly in other nations. Especially in far-flung nations like Australia. You can read about The Beatles’ dates in Sydney. Noting how it was a connection to international culture and music for young listeners in 1964, it was also a moment of rebellion for Sydneysiders. This article from The Sydney Morning Herald in 2020 explained how The Beatles were a love language that bonded families. One that has truly stood the test of time. I would urge people to read the whole thing. However, I wanted to drop in the opening portions of the feature:

“By the time Paul McCartney sued his fellow Beatles, and their parent company Apple Corps, in London’s High Court of Justice on December 31, 1970 to dissolve the band, their relationship had taken on the emotional pallor of a family meal that’s gone south.

The insecurities, incandescent rage and jealousy that had crackled for years between the four men are well known: George Harrison and Ringo Starr felt stifled and unappreciated by McCartney and John Lennon, who allowed the first two only two or three songs of their own (sometimes less) on each album.

Lennon and McCartney, who had bonded over the early death of their mothers when each was a teenager, clashed over musical tastes: McCartney’s “granny” songs, Lennon’s primal screams. (McCartney dubbed The White Album “The Tension Album”.)

And let's not forget the big-ticket items: the stress of touring, so-called interfering girlfriends, drug addictions and violence. (Lennon once broke into McCartney’s house, after McCartney missed a recording session for Abbey Road, and damaged a painting.)

Far less known, though, is that in the 50 years since their official breakup – and the 40 since Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980 – the four lads from Liverpool have been the glue that has bonded many Australian families, for better and occasionally for worse.

“It was always on,” says Nicolas McKenzie of The Beatles’ music in his childhood Sydney home. “Always.”

And it was often the band’s music to which he’d turn in order to help his father - the late, renowned journalist Mark Colvin - cope with his debilitating pain.

“So Dad was always the model father, he was so generous, he was so loving … but he would have these moments where he’d be like ‘I’m watching TV’ and you knew he was in absolute agony,” says McKenzie, 37, a musician and music journalist.

Colvin contracted a rare auto-immune condition while on assignment in Rwanda which led to two hip replacements and ongoing dialysis. “I would just read between the lines … and would go [listen to music]. I’d be like ‘I’m not going to bother him'.”

Colvin taught McKenzie how to identify which Beatles songs were written by which musician – Colvin was partial to the Lennon/McCartney song A Day In The Life – and told his son about his connection to Lennon’s darkness.

“He knew that Lennon was super damaged, but also knew just how brilliant he was and how everyone kind of loved him, and there was a little bit of that element of fear, he was dangerous, and I think that he actually thought that Lennon was very similar to his father,” says McKenzie.

Mark Colvin's father John was a senior figure in MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service - “[he was] super sweet to us … he was super intelligent, but he could just kind of vanish".

In between vanishing acts, John Colvin had taken the young Mark to see The Beatles perform in London, where Mark grew up.

The Beatles toured Australia in 1964, enjoying their largest-ever fan gathering in Adelaide when around 300,000 people, nearly a third of the city’s population at the time, lined the 20-kilometre route between the town’s airport and the city centre to greet them. However the band abandoned live performance two years later.

Partly this was because wherever they went they could barely see anything outside of their hotel rooms; when they ventured out, they were stampeded. (“50 TEENAGERS HURT IN WILD CITY CRUSH” read the headline in The Age on June 15, 1964, about the 20,000 people who’d gathered outside the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne, some perched in trees.)

The Beatles 1964 Australia tour as remembered by those that were there. Video by Tom Compagnoni.

On the other side of the band’s hotel room walls, there was often a loneliness quite at odds with the teenage abandon Beatlemania had helped unleash.

“Bob, it’s John here, would you come have a drink with me?” Lennon said to Sydney disc jockey Bob Rogers one morning, who accompanied them on the 1964 tour for radio station 2SM.

“I went around to the room, he was there in bed with a bottle of red wine,” says Rogers, now 94. “So I had to sit in the bed with him, and drink the red wine, at seven o’clock in the morning.”

A year later, Lennon’s song Help! would be released. Years later Lennon would pick out the song as one of his favourites because it was “real”: “It was me singing ‘Help’, and I meant it.”

For Maree Trafford, thinking about the night she saw The Beatles at Sydney Stadium in Rushcutters Bay reminds her of that rare, shimmering moment in time when she was able to enjoy the comfort of a beloved cousin, not long before they were separated.

“I bawled all the way through, and Narelle screamed her lungs out and had a sore throat for a week,” says Trafford of her younger cousin, who was her “little sister, my best friend, everything, all in one”.

On 12th June, 1964, The Beatles performed their first date in Australia. It was a hugely important tour in a nation that was experiencing the first real taste of a Western musical juggernaut. I guess it was the same for the U.S. - even if Elvis Presley got their just before The Beatles. For Australia, it was a massive cultural moment! It is sad Ringo Starr did not get to experience all of it. In the year of Beatlemania around the world, their stop in Australia was pivotal. Throughout the tour, crowds sometimes topped six figures. The Beatles touching down in Australia in June 1964 was…

A huge moment for the country.

FEATURE: Call the Shots: Why the Pop World Needs the Return of Girls Aloud

FEATURE:

 

 

Call the Shots

IN THIS PHOTO: Girls Aloud’s Nadine Coyle, Cheryl Cole, Kimberley Walsh and Nicola Roberts/PHOTO CREDIT: Fascination Management

Why the Pop World Needs the Return of Girls Aloud

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I normally hate it when …

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC/PA

a journalist uses the word ‘return’ when talking about an artist releasing a single or album. Their first new material in a matter or weeks or months is not a ‘return’ – it is, in fact, them doing their job! It does seem very dramatic. The pressure artists have to constantly put out music leads to this rather strange use of the word ‘return’. That said, in the case of Girls Aloud, that might be appropriate. The fact is that their last album was released in 2008.Out of Control was a commercial success. A  great album from the quintet. In 2021, Sarah Harding died. It was a massive blow, not only for Girls Aloud but the entire music industry. Part of this incredible and hugely important group, it is understandable that there was doubts about them coming back and touring. I am going to come to a recent live review. There are hopes that there might be new material. I guess it is a conflict putting out new material without Sarah Harding. Even so, Cheryl Cole, Nadine Coyle, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh are on the road and are back together. There is another article from The Guardian that I want to get to. A reason why we need Girls Aloud back in a fuller capacity. However, prior to that, they were at a recent tour date in Dublin and shared their opinion:

“Eleven years have passed since Girls Aloud performed together as a five-piece for the final time, but adoration has endured in the interim – perhaps even intensified in the glow of 00s nostalgia. The group not only hauled themselves out of TV talent show Popstars: The Rivals, but then had 20 back-to-back UK Top 10 hits, four of them chart-toppers. As well as the strength of their voices, and their bubbly and even occasionally lairy personalities, their acclaim came from collaborations with Xenomania, the production team who took 60s girl group tropes and kitsch, and warped them through 21st-century sonics.

One of the quintet, the effervescent Sarah Harding, died of complications from breast cancer in September 2021, at the age of 39. Devastated by the death of their bandmate and friend, plans to mark Girls Aloud’s 20th anniversary were paused.

But hard-won celebration rather than sober mourning is the central mood of 30-date arena tour The Girls Aloud Show. The jubilant audience, a sea of twinkling sequined outfits and parents dancing with their Girls Aloud-inculcated children, eagerly anticipate the four-piece who are fashionably late. The curtain falls, revealing Nadine Coyle, Cheryl Tweedy, Kimberly Walsh and Nicola Roberts on tall podiums, as the latter takes the lead with Untouchable, taken from their fifth and final album, Out of Control (from 2008).

An unexpected opener – the only one of their singles not to go Top 10 in the UK – it quickly makes sense as visuals of Sarah Harding appear on enormous screens watching over the arena. In light of the group’s grief, several songs, including this one (“I need you here again to show me how”) feel all the more relevant to their story. Its roaring reception intensifies when the beat of The Show drops and the foursome are lowered to the stage, launching into a lively routine. It’s a strong first act – with the exception of some first-night vocal jitters from each member – featuring thrilling performances of Something New, Love Machine, Can’t Speak French and Biology.

Those early nerves soon dissipate, with Roberts’ solos proving to be the strongest and Coyle’s the most show-bizzy. Walsh and Tweedy also do well in their moments in the spotlight, but the group remain at their best when they come together to belt out irresistibly harmonised choruses. Along with playful banter from Tweedy (warning fans in the pit they might need to catch her if she falls off stage) and heartfelt appreciation from Walsh to the Irish crowd, the first show sets off firmly on the right foot.

Harding continues to be present via the screens that act as large-scale digital scrapbooks of their music videos. With Whole Lotta History, Roberts tells the crowd how they had “no idea how poignant this song would become in our journey,” when they recorded it back in 2005. In the song’s final moments, a montage of Harding plays with the four members facing her, embracing before exiting for the first of four costume changes. The tribute ends with the message: “The darkest nights produce the brightest stars”.

I do think that there is a void in music right now. Pop music is not in trouble, though there is this moment of transition. Huge artists like Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa are selling massive units and producing brilliant music. In terms of the new crop coming through, there is this mixture of TikTok artists and something quite modern. Very few stand out as competitors and future icons. I do love a lot of rising Pop artists. There is a feeling that something is missing. It might be that girl group connection. Spice Girls have toured since their split, yet you feel they will not return to the studio. That is a real shame. Same with Sugarbabes. You’d love to hear a new album from them, as they are one of Britain’s greatest groups. There is not a lot in the way of new girl groups that can compete with the legends. The chemistry between the Girls Aloud members and their incredible catalogue means that there will be a desire for them to return. The Guardian wrote last year about how Girls Aloud’s return was a beneficial thing for Pop:

“Along with the Shangri-Las and the Runaways, Girls Aloud are one of the greatest girl bands of all time. As someone born in 1989, it was probably the Spice Girls that I should have been obsessed with. Sure, I had the collectible photo album now doing a brisk trade on eBay. I could do the signature leg-kick of fellow scouser and ardent LFC supporter Mel C. But the Spice Girls never spoke to me.

That Girls Aloud did, a group born from a music talent show I did not watch, at a time when I was a moody mid-teen more accustomed to listening to Interpol’s Specialist for the 15th time in a row, is testament to a seductive combination of brilliant music and charismatic personality.

The band were never meant to be the breakout stars of Popstars: The Rivals, ITV and Simon Cowell’s twist on their previous show, Popstars (whose underdogs would also go on to enjoy surprise success in the form of Liberty X). The format reboot was simple: the show’s boyband and girl band would go head-to-head for the 2002 Christmas number one slot.

It initially looked as though the excruciatingly named One True Voice would win. But that seemed less likely when their insipid cover of a not-amazing-to-start-with late Bee Gees album track was chosen as the boys’ contender, while Girls Aloud came bursting out the gate with the surf riffs and drum’n’bass pulsating energy of Sound of the Underground (with a gritty video shot in a cavernous abandoned warehouse to boot). The latter song hit No 1, and would stay there for four weeks. Girls Arrived.

Much of the band’s phenomenal success and longevity – 21 Top 10 singles, four of them No 1s – was, undoubtedly, down to the genius production outfit Xenomania. Responsible for Sound of the Underground (apparently inspired by late-90s dance hit Addicted to Bass and nursery rhyme The Wheels on the Bus), Xenomania, founded by producer Brian Higgins, would go on to become permanent collaborators.

In Higgins’ hit factory (actually a Grade II manor house in rural Kent), he, the group and chief songwriter Miranda Cooper would squirrel away, recording songs as glorious and experimental as Biology (which kicks off with a sample of the Animals, eschews the usual linear verse-chorus structure, and changes direction three times); Love Machine (recorded in 18 parts, melding rockabilly and 80s synth sensibilities); and the frankly batshit Sexy! No No No (electro-punk with a Nazareth sample).

But it’s lesser-known album cuts that hold a special place in my heart. The barmy Miss You Bow Wow on their final album, Out of Control, or its stablemate Love Is The Key, which goes from creepy hymn intro to line-dancing country swagger to a harmonica solo played by Johnny Marr. Or Graffiti My Soul, which sounds like Run DMC and Aerosmith’s Walk This Way performed by Willie Nelson in the Hacienda, then remixed by the Prodigy.

Even the so-called flops, such as Long Hot Summer, which still reached No 7, were a cut above most chart fare, and the songs which weren’t as avant garde (the Spector-inflected The Promise, written in seven minutes; the ballad Life Got Cold) were nevertheless outstanding examples of their respective genres.

But the “girls” themselves were crucial. Though sometimes hesitant in the face of Xenomania’s more outre instincts (Nicola Roberts worried about Sound of the Underground because “we didn’t have drum and bass up north at the time”) they have multiple songwriting credits, including on four of the best tracks from Out of Control. As evidenced by their jump-through-hoops talent show origins, each could actually sing, possessing distinctive vocal styles that complemented Xenomania’s jigsaw-like process”.

It is not only about girl groups. There is some of that. They are practically non-existent now. I don’t think it is because there is not a call or space for them. It is maybe a lack of decent enough writers or sounds that catch public attention. Even if the members of Girls Aloud are in their late-thirties/forties, that is not to say that they would need to change their sound. The sort of ageism and misogyny that you get when women of that age release music. Perhaps not capturing the buzz that they had at their peak, they could still create some really wonderful albums. It might be that conflict of recording without Sarah Harding. The fact that their current tour is getting such positive reviews and ecstasy shows that there is this love and demand. This absence of anything like Girls Aloud is very telling. They are a legendary group that still has a lot in them. A clear reason they are touring together. Not only honouring Harding, there is love and affection between the members. I may have missed any announcement. I don’t think any firm plans have been made regarding a new album. The fact is that girl groups can reform and enjoy a really successful second stage of life. I don’t feel that Pop music is reserved for artists in their teens and twenties. The live performances Girls Aloud are embarking on proves they are still at their peak. Pop music does need them to come back. They have potential anthems left. Songs that can rival Sound of the Underground and The Promise. There is this aching and desire. Great to have them on stage and performing hits to the fans. What comes after that?! Maybe there are reservations and reasons. Perhaps there is music and plans in the back of their minds. If Girls Aloud released a new album and came fully back into music, they would be welcomed…

WITH opened arms.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) – Smooth

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Santana (ft. Rob Thomas) – Smooth

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THERE is a lot written…

IN THIS PHOTO: Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas/PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

about one of the biggest songs of the 1990s. In fact, a song that has gone on to become one of the most acclaimed ever. That said, there is a divisive element to it. Some people who have heard it a lot – when it originally came out in 1999 and since – feel that the earworm has lost any charm. Others outright dislike it. I would recommend that people who are not aware of Smooth by Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas check it out. The first single from Santana’s eighteenth studio album, Supernatural, this was a return to form and prominence of a legendary musician. Smooth was a song that become a colossus and, in the process, gave Santana a new lease of life. Cynics might say the collaborations through the album was an attempt for Carlos Santana to remain relevant by hooking up with more relevant and contemporary artists. I think it was a necessary exploration and diversity from a legendary artist. Someone who did not need to prove himself. Even so, Smooth was a remarkable introduction to Supernatural. A chart hit around the world – including getting to number one in the U.S. -, I am going to get to a couple of features about a huge song. A commercial blockbuster. Before getting to them, I want to bring in a bit of the Wikipedia article for Smooth (who incorrectly list the release date as 15th June, 1999):

“Smooth" is a song performed by American rock band Santana and Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty, who sings the lead vocals. It was released on June 15, 1999, as the lead single from Santana's 1999 studio album, Supernatural. It was written by Itaal Shur and Thomas, who re-wrote Shur's original melody and lyrics, and produced by Matt Serletic.

The song was an international success, reaching number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks. It was the final number-one hit of the 1990s and the first number-one hit of the 2000s, and the only song to appear on two decade-end Billboard charts. "Smooth" was ranked as the second-most-successful song ever on Billboard's Hot 100 60th Anniversary listing. In 2000, the song won a Grammy Award for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. "Smooth" also peaked at number one in Canada and charted within the top 10 in Australia, Austria, Ireland, and the United Kingdom”.

There is an oral history feature from Rolling Stone that was published in June 2019. That was to mark the twentieth anniversary of Smooth. As it turns twenty-five on 29th June, I wanted to go deep with the song. One that came out in my final months of high school. There was some great Pop released in 1999. Some terrific Dance music. Smooth sort of overtook everything. In a year when Britney Spears was coming through, you could not get away from the hegemony and simply unstoppable momentum of Smooth. I guess, because I heard it as a teenager and have grown accustomed to it, the song sounds natural and familiar. People who might have discovered it a few years ago might feel it is outdated. I think Smooth is a catchy and great track that has this swing and catchiness. A joy that does not ask for anything but the listener’s smile. In 2022, The Number Ones featured Smooth. Although they object to a certain commercial nature and a slight uncool nature of Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 and Carlos Santana joining forces, they could not avoid and deny its appeal and importance:

“The last #1 hit of the 20th century wasn’t just an unlikely smash. It was a blockbuster that defied all known laws of cultural consumption. Santana’s “Smooth” could’ve easily been a hackneyed, desperate grab for relevance from an artist who hadn’t had a radio hit in many years and who hadn’t been in the top 10 in decades. Instead, the song took advantage of a few different cultural headwinds and snowballed into its new role as a nearly Thriller-level cultural phenomenon. Nobody could replicate what Carlos Santana and his collaborators did with “Smooth” — not even Carlos Santana himself. The song was a one of one, a freak stars-aligning burst of consensus in an increasingly fracturing pop landscape.

In retrospect, “Smooth,” accidentally or not, rode a few different waves. The song came on the heels of the Latin pop explosion, the manufactured and hyped-up blast of excitement that still made full-on mainstream stars out of figures like Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez, and Enrique Iglesias. The song also took advantage of the burst in growly post-grunge soft rock that had put “Smooth” singer and co-writer Rob Thomas’ band Matchbox 20 on top. And “Smooth” could also be considered the final chart eruption from the baby boomer generation that had ruled the charts for decades. It seems entirely fair to say that Carlos Santana was the last boomer icon to top the Hot 100. (Someone like Madonna, who will appear in this column once more, is technically a baby boomer. But Madonna is an icon who happens to be a boomer, whereas Carlos Santana is a boomer icon.)

Those factors all played a role in the story, but I don’t think any of them led to “Smooth” becoming the pop bulldozer that it was. Instead, I attribute the song’s success to something else: It was just too fucking catchy to fail. “Smooth” stacks hooks on top of hooks, and those hooks are the diamond-sharp type that sink into your brain, that can never be extracted. “Smooth” isn’t just stuck in my head right now. It’s stuck in yours, too. If you’re old enough, “Smooth” has been playing on loop in your head for more than 20 years. Right now, this very second, “Smooth” is squirming its way through some part of your cerebellum, and it will remain there until the day you die. It’s eternal. It’s just like the ocean under the moon.

Nobody could’ve predicted that “Smooth” would hit the way that it did, but a whole lot of people had to work hard to put the song in position to succeed. “Smooth” wasn’t a random occurrence that took everyone by storm. Instead, it’s the best-case scenario for record-label meddling, the kind of thing that every A&R rep envisions when they give notes about how an album really needs a single. The people who made “Smooth” all deliberately set out to craft a hit, and they all succeeded to a degree that they couldn’t possibly have imagined.

One of those people was Carlos Santana. In 1999, Santana’s legend status was secure. He’d made hits. He’d sold millions of records. A year earlier, he’d joined the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and he’d convinced one of his heroes, the enigmatic ex-Fleetwood Mac axe-wizard recluse Peter Green, to play with him at the induction ceremony. But that wasn’t enough for Santana. He wanted to get back into the game. He wanted hits.

When he made “Smooth,” Carlos Santana wasn’t a contemporary hitmaker, but he was a familiar name. The man wasn’t starting from zero. He’d already done that. Carlos Augusto Santana Alves was born in the Mexican city of Autlán, and he eventually moved with his family, first to Tijuana and then to San Francisco. Santana’s father was a mariachi musician, and Santana and his brothers all learned guitar when they were young. Carlos Santana loved blues guitarists like BB King and John Lee Hooker, and he played in Tijuana clubs when he was still a little kid. In San Francisco, Santana got into jazz and folk and psychedelia. After high school, he worked as a dishwasher and saved up enough money to buy a Gibson SG. In 1966, when he was 19, he started the Santana Blues Band.

The people at Arista soon found that there were a great many artists who wanted to work with Carlos Santana. They lined up collaborations with Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Everlast, Dave Matthews, and even Santana’s guitar-hero peer Eric Clapton. Even with that lineup, plenty of the people at Arista weren’t convinced; Clive Davis said that the album was nicknamed “Davis’ Folly.” At a certain point, someone from the label told Davis that the label needed to stop spending money on this thing, to put the album out already. Davis refused. The album didn’t have a single yet.

One of the songwriters who pitched a track to Santana was Itaal Shur, the co-founder of the acid jazz group Groove Collective. Shur had one hit under his belt; he’d co-written the neo-soul star Maxwell’s 1996 single “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder),” which peaked at #36. Shur tried to write something that would have the same kind of groove as Santana classics like “Black Magic Woman,” and he came up with “Room 17,” a track about a couple getting together for an illicit tryst in a hotel. Shur recorded a demo for the track, arranging everything himself, and he was convinced that it was a hit. Pete Ganbarg loved the music, but he didn’t think the lyrics would work for Carlos Santana at all. Santana was a family man, and he wouldn’t want to get into anything sexual like that. So Ganbarg said that he could use the song’s groove but that another songwriter would have to come up with the lyrics and the vocal melody. A publishing exec suggested Rob Thomas.

Rob Thomas was (and is) 25 years younger than Carlos Santana. Thomas was born in Germany, where his father was stationed in the Army, six months after Santana released Santana III. (When Rob Thomas was born, the #1 song in America was Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.”) Thomas had a rough, chaotic upbringing in South Carolina and Florida. He dropped out of high school, spent a few months in jail for car theft, and went homeless for a while. Eventually, Thomas became the singer for an Orlando club band called Tabitha’s Secret. When that group broke up, Thomas and two other ex-members started a new band called Matchbox 20.

Matchbox 20 signed with Lava Records and released their debut album Yourself Or Someone Like You in 1996. At first, the record went nowhere, and the band almost lost their contract. But a radio station in Alabama started playing their song “Push,” so Lava made it a single. On the strength of “Push” and the similarly yarly “3AM,” Matchbox 20 took off nationwide, and Yourself Or Someone Like You eventually went platinum 12 times over. (Thanks to the goofy-ass chart rules of the ’90s, “Push” and “3AM” never made the Hot 100. But Matchbox 20 will eventually appear in this column, so we’ll get deeper into their story then.)

When Matchbox 20 got done with the years that they spent touring behind their debut album, Rob Thomas moved in with his girlfriend in New York. One of Pete Ganbarg’s publisher friends told him that Rob Thomas was a brilliant songwriter but that he was “doing nothing except smoking pot and playing PlayStation.” (That sounds amazing to me. My guy was living the dream.) Thomas spent an afternoon working on the song, and he eventually hit on the idea that he should write about his girlfriend, the half-Spanish and half-Puerto Rican model Marisol Maldonado. In that Rolling Stone oral history, Thomas said that he was kicking around a few ideas and that he “realized somewhere in the middle of it that I had this wealth of information because I had this smokin’ hot Latin girlfriend already.”

Thomas took a crack at the song, and then he honed it further with Itaal Shur, who lived a couple of blocks away from him. “Smooth” turned into an ode to a “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa,” even though Maldonado is from Queens. On the song, Thomas promises to “change my life to better suit your mood, ’cause you’re so smooth.” He liked the idea that he could be singing to a woman or that he could be describing the way that Carlos Santana plays. Thomas recorded the demo, thinking that another singer would be on the record. (Thomas had envisioned George Michael, who would’ve crushed it.) Carlos Santana didn’t like the “Smooth” demo at first because he thought it sounded too close to “Guajira,” a song that Santana had recorded in 1971. But when Clive Davis wrote to Santana and told him that “Smooth” was a hit, Santana agreed to record it.

Eventually, everyone decided that Rob Thomas should sing on “Smooth,” and they went through all the music-business headaches necessary to clear Thomas’ appearance. Since Matchbox 20 recorded for a competing label, these were considerable, but they got it done. Thomas finally met Carlos Santana for the first time when he joined Santana and Matchbox 20 producer Matt Serletic to record “Smooth.” In Leila Cobo’s book Decoding “Despacito”, Thomas remembers the first thing Santana ever said to him: “Hey, you must be married to a Latin woman; that’s the kind of thing a white guy married to a Latin woman would say.” I find that to be fucking hilarious. In that same book, Santana himself says that he did indeed tell Rob Thomas that: “He had a different type of sassiness about him.” That’s hilarious, too, not least because it’s true.

In general, I think of Rob Thomas as one of the most generic rock singers of an era that was absolutely infested with generic rock singers. But on “Smooth,” Thomas does manage to conjure a certain level of sassiness. (He says he was just imitating George Michael, the guy he’d imagined singing the song in the first place, which tracks.) There’s something vaguely uncomfortable about this chesty-bellow guy trying to get all soulful with it, but Thomas mostly succeeds. There’s a nice interplay between Thomas’ voice and Santana’s guitar solos. They know to stay out of each other’s way, to complement one another. Santana’s leads are big and clean and melodic, and they add drama to what Thomas does. For his part, Thomas does a nice job going from the sexy-crackle verses to the vein-throb chorus.

The whole thing is just catchy. It was always catchy, from the first time anyone heard it. The groove has a bright sparkle to it, all these horns and pianos and congas winding their way though the track. Thomas growls out stuff that will be stuck in our collective heads for all of eternity. You know all the lines already. “Man, it’s a hot one.” “My muñequita.” “Give me your heart, make it real, or else forget about it.” Those “Smooth” lines — the “it’s a hot one” bit in particular — become memes every few months because they’re just stuck in our shared brain-space”.

I am going to end with a feature from Esquire. Published on 29th, 2019, it was published to mark twenty years of a twentieth century classic. There is another feature I would advise people to check out. So much context and insight into a track that was a massive smash at the end of the decade. Smooth was a song that so many took to heart right away. I still thing it remains relevant and fresh twenty-five years later:

“It is easy—perhaps too easy—to dislike “Smooth,” the Grammy Award-winning 1999 hit by Carlos Santana featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty off the multi-platinum album Supernatural. The song's combination of tepidity and synthetic spice is like a dry English muffin misted with Tapatio. Its introductory drum fill, iconic to some, is gaudy and triggering to others. Even Santana himself wasn’t a fan when he first heard it.

Two years earlier, the 50-year-old guitarist was staring down a mid-career crisis. Despite years of steady output and critical acclaim, he felt out of touch with younger audiences and regretful that his teenage children no longer heard him on commercial radio. So, acting on the advice of his wife (and his longtime spirit guide, which he calls Metatron), Santana arranged to meet with the record producer Clive Davis at a lavish bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel. The two agreed that staging a proper comeback would require an arsenal of contemporary hits; and Davis, who signed artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Pink Floyd, believed he knew just how to get them.

“Give me half the album and trust that I will find material that is integral to your artistry,” Davis told Santana. “The other half of the album will be whatever you want it to be.”

The result was Supernatural, which featured a buffet of ‘90s hitmakers, including Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill, and Dave Matthews. “Smooth” was the very last single Davis and his team delivered to Santana, who at first thought it sounded too rough, “like a painting that needed to be completed,” he said. It also reminded him of “Guajira,” a slinking, piano-driven track with a similar intro, from his 1971 album Santana III. He wasn’t sure about the fit, or the vibe, or even Rob Thomas. It wasn’t the sort of song his band was in the habit of playing.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

In retrospect, that was precisely the point. From the instant it hit U.S. airwaves in June 1999, the track seemed destined to jackhammer its way into America’s consciousness. Thanks to its key personnel—an aging virtuoso and a rising pop rock star—the demographic potential was almost comically broad. And although haters deny it, the song’s musicianship is slick and impeccable.

It also didn’t hurt that 1999’s pop music environment was uniquely primed for a hit of this magnitude. Latin pop crossovers were ascendant, with Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” which debuted that March, as recent proof of concept. Meanwhile, U.S. album sales were soaring and Napster, the file-sharing service that would eventually firebomb much of the music industry’s critical infrastructure, was only a few weeks old.

Twenty years after its release, "Smooth" enjoys the gilded status of America’s second-most popular song of all time, right behind Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” and right above Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife,” according to Billboard. Its potency derives largely from the fact that it is impossible to not react to—whether with excitement, exasperation, derision, or muddled, semi-ironic affection. It was meme bait before memes even existed: the rare cultural product whose very existence morphed into a sort of provocation.

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

“This song belongs with something that people need every day in their lives: air, water and sex,” Santana says. “You can have food—granola, or whatever. But basically, air for your lungs, water for your body, and s-e-x for your psyche.”

Supernatural’s basic blueprint was cribbed from Deuces Wild, a 1997 album that paired B.B. King with a collection of established artists, including Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison, and D’Angelo. Although that effort didn’t impress reviewers (Rolling Stone concluded that its “juke joint authenticity” was smothered by a “Ritz Carlton budget”), Supernatural’s creators thought they might improve on the idea.

Just as Ganbarg was nearing a panic, he encountered the first of several lucky breaks that occurred during the creation of “Smooth”: Evan Lamberg, an industry friend, called out of the blue to ask if he still needed songs. Lamberg introduced Ganbarg to a young musician named Itaal Shur, who was developing a salsa track called “Room 17” about an illicit hotel rendezvous. Ganbarg loved the basic components, but he found Shur’s lyrics bizarre and kind of tactless.

“It was about a groupie meeting Santana after the concert in a hotel room,” Ganbarg recalls. “Which, if you know anything about Carlos Santana, is 180 degrees opposite of who he is.” (Shur, for his part, maintains the song was simply about two long-estranged lovers cheating on their significant others.) After some negotiations, Shur agreed to polish the track with Rob Thomas, who had just wrapped a tour with Matchbox Twenty and, in Ganbarg’s recollection, “was living in an apartment downtown in Manhattan with his girlfriend, and he was smoking pot and he was playing Playstation.” In other words: enjoying the trappings of a blossoming semi-stardom.

That Shur and Thomas worked so well together—and so quickly—turned out to be another happy accident. The two went from complete strangers to heads-down collaborators virtually overnight. Thomas changed the key of “Room 17” and added a chorus. He re-worked the lyrics to de-emphasize adultery and focus instead on a lusty yet G-rated commitment to his fiancée, the model Marisol Maldonado (eventually described as his “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa”). It all felt easy, casual.

“It was pretty much songwriting 101,” Thomas says. “At the time, I didn’t think there was any significant moment happening there. We were just kind of in [Shur’s] apartment studio chilling out.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Meanwhile, each tweak felt to Ganbarg like a form of pain relief, a chiropractic adjustment. He allowed himself to believe that maybe, possibly, “Smooth” could turn into the hit he so desperately needed—a song that could move both asses and records. When he played it for his boss Clive Davis, a notoriously tough critic, Davis agreed: They were onto something.

Just one problem: Santana wasn’t interested. He required reassurances from Davis, who had first signed him in the 1960s, whose opinion he deeply respected, and who he had been chanting about, in compulsive sets of 27, during meditation sessions.

“So I have to go in sheepishly to Clive Davis’s office with my tail between my legs and say, ‘Clive, I need your help,’” Ganbarg recalls. “‘You’ve got to tell Carlos that this song is a hit, or else he won't record it.’” Davis dictated a note to Santana, which Ganbarg hurried off to fax. A few days later, Santana relented. He would record the song—as long as Rob Thomas did it with him, live.

“It was pretty much songwriting 101. At the time, I didn’t think there was any significant moment happening there.”

“I believed him a little bit, but I didn’t believe completely,” Santana says of Thomas. “Something happens when Brother Rob Thomas sings at the same time with the Santana band and myself in the same room. All of a sudden, two and two become seven instead of two and two becomes four.”

If there’s one thing that’s remarkable about the recording of “Smooth,” it’s how plainly unremarkable it all felt in the moment. Yes, Santana himself now describes the experience as a “tsunami of positivity,” devoid of egos and full of “EN. ER. GEE;” and yes, he gifted Rob Thomas an elaborate tapestry as soon as they walked into the studio; and yes, he asserts that the forces of gravity and time may have dissipated momentarily. But for many of the musicians involved, it felt routine—an-easier-than average session in service of a simple tune. They recorded live, ran through the track a few times, liked what they heard. Then they went home.

“I listen to it, and it's like, ‘Oh! it's like a song!’” says bassist Benny Rietveld. “We were used to just recording jams.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

“The only thing that I remember is just trying to get it to feel right,” adds drummer Rodney Holmes. “Just doing your job: You show up at the studio, you've learned the music. So now, it’s ‘Let’s execute.’ And that was it.”

Simple in theory. Yet it’s worth pausing for a moment to point out that the musicians on “Smooth” are not exactly a gaggle of toothless vagabonds, busking for quarters. They are elite, hall-of-fame-level players with eye-popping resumés and decades of experience. This is perhaps an obvious point, but it’s also one of the most important—and overlooked—aspects of the song’s success.

“We play like there’s no tomorrow,” Santana says. “We play like if you’re gonna get a heart attack by getting to that note, then gosh darn it, get the heart attack. But get the note.”

Everyone agreed the song sounded like a hit. But executives at Arista were still worried about the mechanics of selling America on something new from Santana. So they made a shrewd choice: When distributing the single, they left off the guitarist’s name, marking the CDs simply as “Smooth” and “Mystery Artist.”

Soon, the song’s magnitude, its infectious omnipresence, began to dawn on the creators themselves. For some, the realization came through blunt repetition: hearing it in the grocery store, then in a nearby pharmacy shortly thereafter. Others flipped between radio stations that were playing it simultaneously, or heard it blasting from a beat-up Pontiac in Hawaii, or were simply told by their wives: This could actually be something.

Rob Thomas’ own “aha” moment was goofy and cinematic. “It was one of those weird things that never happens anymore,” he says. “I was just walking down West Broadway and I stopped at a crosswalk, and this car full of hot girls—a convertible—pulled up at the red light and they were blaring ‘Smooth.’ It took me a second to realize what I was listening to. So my first thought was, when I see a bunch of hot girls in a car listening to it, there’s something happening here.” Two days later, in Los Angeles, he was walking through a hotel lobby. “This big fucking guy, just fully tatted, this crazy dude, comes running over to me and he’s like, ‘That fucking Carlos track is on fire, man! Good job!’ I was just like, ‘Oh shit! All right. That’s something.’”

The song was released as a single on June 29, 1999. It was certified gold by September 13 and platinum by November 9. It was the first number one song of Santana’s career, and it stayed at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks (and in the top 10 for 30 weeks). Then it topped the charts in 10 other countries. At the following year’s Grammy Awards, it won Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Santana won Album of the Year for Supernatural, Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals (for “Maria Maria”), and Best Pop Instrumental Performance (for “El Farol”). Nine Grammies in total.

The awards provided a deluge of delayed recognition for Santana, a living legend who over his decades-long career had only won once, in 1988, in the Best Rock Instrumental Performance (Orchestra, Group or Soloist) category. In one photo from the evening, Thomas, Santana, and Clive Davis cradle their statues, each wearing a befuddled smile. Santana, in particular, looks ecstatic. The awards teeter cartoonishly in each man’s arms, as though the Recording Academy had backed up a dump truck and deposited them.

In the expansive canon of American popular music, there are various species of earworms. Some are harmless; some are venomous. Some wriggle in and out in mere minutes. The most powerful kind, though, are those that stick around despite a hapless listener’s best efforts at self-preservation. You really have to hand it to these fuckers: They enter the brain and immediately make themselves at home. They hang pictures, arrange furniture, sign a long-term lease. It goes without saying that they never, ever move out.

Like the cannonball gimmick, “Smooth,” as a cultural product, scrambles our receptors. Its omnipresence has created a nearly infinite spectrum of strong affinities and hostilities, some of which are difficult to parse. It remains fertile for parody—whether with memes that inquire whether today is, in fact, “a hot one,” or with T-shirts that proclaim: “I’d rather be listening to the Grammy Award-winning 1999 hit Smooth by Santana feat. Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 off the multi-platinum album Supernatural.” At its worst, it is a tongue-in-cheek weapon to be deployed at captive audiences (dinner parties, car passengers); at its best, a colossal hit, crafted with equal parts joy, virtuosity, and cold calculation. In the middle, where most of us reside, it is the largest and most inclusive in-joke of all time. In all cases, the best approach is to simply surrender.

“Here’s the key to miracles and blessings,” Santana says. “Do you have the willingness to allow the spirit to come in? And do you have the discipline to get out of the way?”

So yes, it is possible to hate “Smooth” for the cynical mechanics of its creation, for its permanent residence in our heads and homegoods stores, for the line about a “Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa.” Yet because the song’s success is self-inflicted through decades of our own weddings and parties and makeout sessions, any hatred is also, by definition, a form of self-hatred.

None of this, by the way, is lost on its authors, who like you and I cannot seem to escape it. They continue to hear it at Whole Foods, on their own device’s shuffle function, on commercial radio, and when they are traveling in other countries.

“Even today, in all honesty, I’m OK if I never hear that song,” Thomas says. “When I say that, I love playing it and I love performing it. And I would play it every night, and I have a great joy every time that I do it. But I’m OK if I don’t hear it again”.

On 29th June, it will be twenty-five years since Smooth was released. A song that spent three months atop the U.S. chart, you still hear it a lot today. I know its creators and writers might feel tired of hearing it, they know how important the song is. A single that introduced Santana’s Supernatural and very much put him back in the spotlight, I really like the song. I first heard it at high school and was instantly bonded to it. Regardless of any cynicism and accusations the song is cool or cloying, it is a belter that is guaranteed to…

GET you moving.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts: Strange Phenomena

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts

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

Strange Phenomena

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I have included a few songs…

from The Kick Inside for Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts. It is an album that is known for a couple of songs. Its U.K. singles. Like so many Kate Bush albums, people gravitate towards the singles and maybe do not investigate those deeper cuts. A song I have discussed many times in other contexts is Strange Phenomena. One of my favourite songs from The Kick Inside, it is a remarkable mature, unconventional and fascinating song from a teenage artist. Discussing, among other things, coincidences and menstruation, we get one of Bush’s most hypnotic vocal performances on her debut album. One of these songs that many non-Kate Bush fans are unaware of, I think it should be played more and better known. Another great example of the peerless songwriting talent of Kate Bush. For someone so young, she was writing about such unusual and interesting subjects. So different to anything that was released in 1978. More in common with classic literature and poetry, it must have been strange for some to hear an album like The Kick Inside. Before getting to a feature about Strange Phenomena, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia have an article that collects quotes where Bush discussed one of the standout tracks from her debut album:

“Kate about ‘Strange Phenomena’

[‘Strange Phenomena’ is] all about the coincidences that happen to all of us all of the time. Like maybe you’re listening to the radio and a certain thing will come up, you go outside and it will happen again. It’s just how similar things seem to attract together, like the saying “birds of a feather flock together” and how these things do happen to us all the time. Just strange coincidences that we’re only occasionally aware of. And maybe you’ll think how strange that is, but it happens all the time. (Self Portrait, 1978)

“Strange Phenomena” is about how coincidences cluster together. We can all recall instances when we have been thinking about a particular person and then have met a mutual friend who – totally unprompted – will begin talking about that person. That’s a very basic way of explaining what I mean, but these “clusters of coincidence” occur all the time. We are surrounded by strange phenomena, but very few people are aware of it. Most take it as being part of everyday life. (Music Talk, 1978)”.

There is so much to discuss and dissect regarding Strange Phenomena. It has an interesting placement on The Kick Inside. After Moving and The Saxophone Song, then comes this gem. It is then followed by the sharper and more Reggae-tinged Kite. The first four songs really set the mood of the album. If the final four or five songs are more about love, loss and the self, then the first four or five are a little less ‘conventional’. I do especially love Strange Phenomena. It was released as a single in Brazil on 1st June, 1979. As it is forty-five very soon, it is another reason to go deep. Before rounding up, I want to bring in an article from Dreams of Orgonon. Some very insightful details and observations about one of Kate Bush’s most underrated songs:

“Strange Phenomena” famously begins with an arpeggiating (A/F) ode to menstruation, “the phase of the moon when people tune in.” In her typical fashion, Kate Bush refers to menstruation as “the punctual blues,” suggesting both a musical quality and a natural rhythm to this particular bodily function (she also refers to it as something “every girl” knows about, but in her defense trans issues were not a topic of national conversation in 1978). Throughout The Kick Inside, Bush has made a case that all functions of the body are a thing of beauty, whether those be love-making or flying. With the opening of “Strange Phenomena,” Bush has extended her invitation of bodily functions into the fold beyond the pleasurable or fanciful and to parts of life women and other menstruating individuals aren’t encouraged to discuss in everyday life. Even more intriguing is how Bush frames menstruation as an almost musical act. In addition to her quasi-musical coinage of “the punctual blues,” she calls a period the phase “where people tune in.” To be sure, menstruating a subject people discuss in private, bringing discomfort to cisgender women and often triggering severe bouts of dysphoria in transgender men. It’s an aspect of life that unites lots of people in their unease by widespread patterns and, more importantly, rhythms of nature. Bush dignifies menstruating by making it a musical process. If there’s a central idea to The Kick Inside, it’s that everything is music.

This exercise of defining musicality as a unifying force isn’t confined to physical planes in “Strange Phenomena.” Bush described the song as being “about the coincidences that happen to all of us all of the time. We can all recall instances when we have been thinking about a particular person and then have met a friend who — totally unprompted — will begin talking about that person.” She more or less paraphrases this in the song, referring to “a day of coincidence with the radio.” Texts are a source of coincidence as well, such as when “you pick up a paper/you read a name/you go out/it turns up again and again.” There’s a sense Bush is being haunted by text, that the spoken word will accompany her wherever she goes. This is where Bush differs most radically from, say, Burroughs or Foucault, in that this constant presence of language and strangeness is a comfort to her, something to tip her hat to.

There’s a philosophical dimension to this as well: Bush once referred to Synchronicity while discussing “Strange Phenomena” in an interview. In short, Synchronicity is psychoanalyst Karl Jung’s concept of the interconnectivity of coincidences. Coincidences bearing similarity but no common cause are termed “meaningful.” This is a pretty easy way to argue for paranormality, and Jung did so (this is not the last time a psychoanalyst will influence Kate Bush. If you’ve read this blog’s title, you already know how). Bush picks up on this, heartily saluting the spectres and weirdness of everyday life.

“Strange Phenomena” is textured with little mysteries and details. Without the Internet at one’s disposal, listeners would go years not understanding some of the song’s allusions. There’s the obscure line “G arrives/funny, had a feeling he was on his way,” which seems inexplicable in context (apparently G was a person Bush knew, while my initial guesses were that G was the Almighty Herself, John Berger’s character G, or David Gilmour himself, most plausibly) yet brings a social instinct to the song, suggesting that people can be just as mysterious as events. The presence of people is mystical to Bush — the living can be ghosts as well. In many ways, “Strange Phenomena” is about clustering: when people gather and events happen close together, magic occurs. “We raise our hats to the hand a-moulding us,” sings Bush, nodding to spiritual forces beyond human understanding.

Sheer abstraction isn’t the only sort of mysticism that surfaces in “Strange Phenomena,” as Kate Bush will often decorate her lyrics with obscure cultural references. The chorus’ emphatic declaration of “soul birds of a feather flock together” is a sweet mystical touch. The most delightfully off-kilter part of the song is the end of the chorus, which has Bush repeatedly singing “om mani padme hum.” This is a Sanskrit mantra, hardly the sort of language you’d hear in a 1978 pop song. Apparently it means “the jewel in the lotus,” but Bush was unaware of this. When pressed on the meaning of the phrase, she admitted up front she had no idea what it meant (although she later published its definition when a fan sent it in). There’s a certain Caucasian ignorance to this, yet the charm of including Sanskrit on a popular album is nonetheless high.

Such is The Kick Inside as a whole. What it lacks in presentation, it more than amply makes up for it in ambition. If you have a song like “Strange Phenomena” on your album, you’re in good shape. If you have that, “Wuthering Heights,” “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” and “The Kick Inside,” you’re more than set for a career of strong music. The Kick Inside is one of the strongest debut albums of its era, and I’m looking forward to seeing where we go from here.

Recorded 1977 at London AIR Studios. Performed on the Tour of Life in 1979. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano. Stuart Elliott — drums. David Paton — bass. Ian Bairnson — guitars. Duncan Mackay — synthesizers. Morris Pert — percussion. Andrew Powell — electric piano, production”.

This is a song that I would love to have seen Kate Bush perform live in 1979. Maybe a hard song to appropriately or powerfully stage, it does seem like the Tour of Life version and mounting was pretty impressive. I hardly see this song played on the radio. It is a shame, as it is one of her minor masterpieces. On an album with so many sophisticated, bold, unconventional and unique songs, this is among the best. I would love to see more written about this song. Like other songs from The Kick Inside, it gives us an insight into Kate Bush in her earliest stages. This blossoming and hugely promising songwriter whose work would evolve and develop very quick. I really admire her debut album because it is so unlike anything the industry would have expected. As you can hear from the remarkable Strange Phenomena, Kate Bush could make any subject sound…

SIMPLY magical and essential.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: The Chillout Playlist

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Armin Rimoldi/Pexels

The Chillout Playlist

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I like to put together playlists…

PHOTO CREDIT: Todd Trapani/Pexels

now and then on a particular theme. This Digital Mixtape is all about chillout songs. Whether you see it as a genre or a looser word for music that has laidback vibes, I think we can all do with something a bit more soothing. Chillout does not necessarily have to mean completely relaxed. A song that makes you feel better or can calm you. It can have some energy to it. I hope that the songs below help to put you in a lighter mood. In future Digital Mixtape features, I am going to compile some more eclectic and energised songs. I felt there was place and purpose combining some chilled out cuts. Those that should get the nerves calmed and the body relaxed. If you do require songs to cool and soothe as well as raise a smile, then I hope that the mixtape does the job. Put it on and…

PHOTO CREDIT: Fabian Wiktor/Pexels

DRIFT away.

FEATURE: He’s So Aware of All My Situations: Kate Bush’s June 1975

FEATURE:

 

 

He’s So Aware of All My Situations

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in March 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Jill Furmanovsky

Kate Bush’s June 1975

_________

I have looked inside…

this important month in terms of Kate Bush’s career though, as it was forty-nine years ago, I am coming back to it. It was an interesting point in her career. Bush was a couple of years away from recording her debut album, The Kick Inside. I am not only going to focus on June 1975. It will be the centrepiece. I want to look at the couple of years before and after. In June 1975, Bush was a month shy of her seventeenth birthday. At a time when most people of her age would leave school and would either be pursuing further education or going into work. I have been spending a lot of time discussing Kate Bush’s early career. I will move on to her later work in future features. I think it is fascinating look at 1973 onwards. So young at the time, she would get a professional nod and interest from EMI in 1974. The deal was completed in 1976. She would record The Kick Inside in 1977. It was a few years of real acceleration and growth. The reason why I want to focus particularly on June 1975 is that is when Kate Bush stepped into a professional studio to record her first tracks. Two of the three she would record appeared on The Kick Inside. The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song were from the voice of someone who was sixteen. Bush sounds so mature and composed. It must have been a nerve-wracking experience! At this time, she was being mentored by David Gilmour. The Pink Floyd legend had seen her potential and paid for the professional recordings. Acting as an executive producer, he was very instrumental in getting Kate Bush signed and in front of EMI. Gilmour knew that Bush’s family might have preferred her to continue education and not go into music so soon.

EMI knew this too. They were not asking Bush to record an album straight away. In fact, they encouraged her to take some time to grow and develop her music before releasing the album. This early signature and meeting. I am not sure how many major labels would do that in today’s climate! Bush would go onto tour small pubs and clubs in and around London (mainly) with the KT Bush Band just before being called into the studio. Early live exposure that would provide some useful experience. In terms of recording, prior to 1975, there were demos recorded by Bush at her family home. Sitting in East Wickham Farm and putting down these modest but beautiful songs, it was a big leap in June 1975. She had not done anything as huge as that before! Regardless, what we hear on The Kick Inside is what was recording in June 1975. So amazingly professional and mesmeric. This wonderful website takes us through 1973 and 1974:

“1973

Kate records at Gilmour's home studio. The backing band is comprised of Gilmour himself on guitar, and Peter Perrier and Pat Martin of Unicorn on drums and bass, respectively. The songs recorded at this stage include Passing Through Air (later to surface on the b-side of the 1980 single Army Dreamers) and a song now known as Maybe.

[Again, a bit more detail would have been welcome here. There is no mention of how many songs were recorded during these recording sessions. Incidentally, an excerpt of this version of the so-called Maybe, which presumably first appeared on Kate's original demos, was played by Kate during a radio programme called Personal Call. It should not be confused with the presumably more professional version of the recording which was made the following year (see below) but which has never been heard by fans.]

The new demos are again circulated to record companies with no result.

1974

With no progress in her musical ambitions, Kate seriously considers a career in psychiatry.

Kate takes her "O Level" examination and obtains ten "Pass" grades, with best results in English, music and Latin.

1975

Gilmour decides that the only way to interest the record companies in Kate's talent is to make a short three-song demo to full professional standards. He puts up the money.

It is interesting that Bush recorded at Gilmour’s home studio. That must have been quite intense. Though, with a trusted friend encouraging her, it perhaps prepared for going into AIR Studios. That is where she recorded the rest of The Kick Inside. June and July 1975 provided some real contrast. A headiness and first professional recording in June. Some reality and education in July 1975.

June 1975

Kate goes into Air Studios in London’s West End, with Gilmour as producer, Andrew Powell as arranger, Geoff Emerick as engineer. The three songs recorded are Saxophone Song (also known at this stage as Berlin), The Man With the Child in His Eyes, and a song which fans refer to as Maybe.

July 1975

Kate takes her “mock A Level” examinations.

While Pink Floyd are at Abbey Road Studios recording Wish You Were Here, Gilmour plays the three-track demo to Bob Mercer, then General Manager of EMI’s pop division. Mercer is impressed and negotiations are opened.

The deal takes some time to conclude. It is much discussed at meetings between Kate, her family, Gilmour and EMI.

I love the fact that in July 1975 Bush was taking exams and, at the same time, there was this movement around her professional career and record deal. It must have been a strange tussle! Having recorded a few songs in the studio the month before, Bush would have wanted to do more and spend time writing. I guess she had to do exams and have a fallback. It would have been strange and exciting at the same time.

I am going to bring in what happened in 1976 before focusing back on June 1975. There is a bit of confusion as to what exactly happened that year. What we do know is that Bush would not continue in education. She was set to follow a career as a musician:

1976

Kate gets a small inheritance, and decides to leave school to concentrate on preparing herself for a career in music. She buys an old honky-tonk piano for 200 Pounds and begins screeching into existence her unmistakable voice.

[This statement implies that the twenty-two demo-recordings which are now circulating among fans date from no earlier than 1976. I do not know what the basis is for Peter's assumption, however.]

The EMI deal begins to take shape. A publishing contract is settled first”.

June 1975 is a pivotal moment in Kate Bush’s career. In a future feature, I will discuss the relationship between Kate Bush and David Gilmour. How they found one another and continued to be in each other’s lives.

Prior to closing up, it is worth looking closely at the two songs recorded at AIR in June 1975 that made their way onto The Kick Inside. The Saxophone Song is one of the more underrated songs from her debut album. Dreams of Orgonon looked inside a song that was recorded by a then-teenage Kate Bush. A remarkable sonic experience:

“I’ve tried to avoid being proleptic with this blog, so as to evaluate songs as they may have sounded to a listener upon their initial creation. Sometimes that’s impossible. Later developments will demand we recontextualize a song. The public first heard “Saxophone Song” after “Wuthering Heights” caught everyone’s attention. Behind the scenes, “Saxophone Song” is the earlier track—recorded almost three years prior to the release of The Kick Inside. The take recorded in the 1975 session is the one that shows up on the album. It’s not quite one-of-a-kind—only this and “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” made it from the ‘75 session to the album, and their anomalousness is noticeable when they’re separated from the LP’s other crisper tracks. “Saxophone Song” seems like a simple Cathy demo at first glimpse—it’s loaded with the same obscure attempts at poetic phrases abundant in the early songs (“a sturdy lady in tremor/the stars that climb from her bowels”). The singer is once again excited by a mysterious stranger in a magical place, in this case a warm tavern in Berlin (which, incidentally, was the song’s original title). That Elton Johnesque fascination with showbiz as foreign spectacle isn’t gone. For a professional (and “canonical”) song, it’s not too far removed from Cathy’s juvenilia.

Yet “Saxophone Song” is unmistakably a Kick Inside track, one that arguably signals the transition from the central character of our blog from being Cathy to becoming Kate Bush. That’s not just because it’s on the album—it clearly fits with the general style which permeates the record. In part, this has something to do with Andrew Powell, the producer/arranger/keyboard player who oversees this track and rest of Kate’s first two albums (the song also features the first appearance of guitarist Alan Parker,  previously of the band Blue Mink and a Kate Bush mainstay).

More broadly, the song’s themes gesture to both the past and future. Long-term concerns of Kate’s music such as spectatorship, place, and the tangible effects of music surface in “Saxophone Song”—the singer is captivated by this cool stranger in Berlin playing a saxophone. Yet it’s not simply a matter of watching a performer—the artist is interested in the relationship between audience and performer as a partnership, one in which the spectator participates as much as the player, as evidenced by the song’s framing of the listener’s experience (“there’s something very real in how I feel, honey”). The person playing the saxophone is fantastically talented, but they’re a vessel. What matters here is the magic their music awakes in the listener, and just as importantly, the source of the magic”.

I also want to stick with the same blog and their feature about The Man with the Child in His Eyes. One of the most beautiful and extraordinary songs Kate Bush ever laid down, many have interpreted the track as relating to David Gilmour. How important he was. Even though the truth is that the song relates to men in general who have a child-like quality, one cannot ignore potential links to Gilmour:

“So what we’re given with “Child” is that ever-so-rare thing in pop music: a young person’s vision of the world, undiluted by executive interference. In it Kate sings about a strange, wonderful man, older than herself but with an adolescent spirit that’s not unlike hers. The song is somewhat impenetrable, like any artistic work by a young person beginning to navigate the world, and it’s accessible and applicable and gorgeous. It’s rare for artists to pull this off successfully so early on, which may account for the limited amount of in-depth analysis on “Child”—Ron Moy finds little to say on the song in his book Kate Bush and Hounds of Love, and Deborah M. Withers’ classic Bushology text Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory skips the song altogether (frankly the best reading of the song hails from this Tumblr post). The most useful critical take comes from Graeme Thomson’s seminal biography Under the Ivy:

“[Kate] is surely unique among female songwriters in that her canon contains not a single song that puts down, castigates, or generally gives men the brush off. She has never been feminist in the bluntest sense — she wants to preserve and embrace the differences between the sexes and understand the male of the species. Many songs display a desire to experience fully what it is to be a man; she invests them with power,  beauty, and a kind of mystical attraction which is incredibly generous.”

Thomson is straightforwardly doing his “male writer gotta male writer” thing (one has to eye-roll at his audible sigh of relief when he talks about how nice Kate is to men), but there’s a key point in there. Kate’s music is very generous to men, perhaps overly so (perhaps best demonstrated by “Babooshka,” in which the main character’s husband gets off scot-free for an attempt at infidelity). In interviews, Kate has made it clear that the song talks about just that internal spark. “It’s something I feel about men generally… that a lot of men have got a child inside them, you know. I think they’re more or less grown-up kids,” she explained in a 1979 appearance on the BBC One children’s programme “Swap Shop,” to an amused Noel Edmonds (yes, *that* Noel Edmonds) and vocal studio crew. Kate grasps the fine line between being childlike and childish (the latter being perhaps a more common quality). What she’s talking about is a childlike sense of adventure, a desire and willingness to play games and believe in fantastic things. “Nobody knows about my man/they think he’s lost on some horizon.” Only she gets him; this is a part of the man’s internalism he only shares with her. Nobody gets this. He’s at an age where his fantasizing is considered adolescent enough to be an eccentricity.

And the singer is at that transition point where the storyteller becomes as much of a point of interest as the story. In part, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” is about someone learning what it’s like to have a person to themselves for the first time. They’re experiencing that magical feeling of being with someone who understands and who makes sense to them. It’s not clear what their relationship is—there’s an adolescent ambiguity to the song. “Maybe he doesn’t love me/I just took a trip on my love for him,” sings an almost-certainly-stoned 16-year-old in her award-winning lyric. But despite her lack of sure-footedness, there’s no danger here, no exploitative or sexual dimension to this relationship—it’s a mature but innocent dynamic, and a genuine, human, unmanufactured one”.

Forty-nine years ago, in June 1975, a young Kate Bush recorded three songs at AIR Studios. Two would appear on her debut album. At a moment when she was still at school and there was some doubts whether she would have a long-term career, these big steps were made. It would have been fascinating being in the studio and seeing Kate Bush recording. After that moment, it is was clear that…

NOTHING would be the same again.

FEATURE: Spotlight: J Noa

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

J Noa

_________

AN artist I am…

a little late to, the sensational and powerful J Noa (Nohelys Jiménez) is a teenage Rap prodigy that has been dubbed the ‘daughter of Rap’ The Dominican artist has incredible flows and is one of the sharpest and most original lyricists on the block. Last year, she released the seven-track E.P., Autodidacta. I shall come to some interviews from this year. First, from last year, J Noa spoke to Rolling Stone around the release of the stunning Autodidacta:

“J Noa comes from San Cristobal of Santo Domingo, a common playground for foreign creatives but a tough neighborhood for its residents, similar to the neighborhood of Capotillo. Growing up in San Cristobal inspired J Noa to start making music when she was just eight years old, as she told the famous radio host Brea Frank.

J Noa developed into a powerful performer and storyteller after achieving visibility through her impressive freestyle “Frente a Frente,” featured on the legendary DJ Scuff’s YouTube series. Feeling that the subject matter in rap culture at the moment is somewhat repetitive, J Noa had a particular goal for Autodidacta: “I feel like I came to revive rap,” she tells Rolling Stone. “To me, most rappers should be intentional about what they write, about what they recite. Otherwise, why would rap serve them, or why would they be considered rappers if they don’t live the reality of what they’re rapping about?”

A self-described fan of the genre and all that it offers, she’s eager to demonstrate the complexity of Dominican culture, identity, and challenging lived experience on this project. At the same time, she wants to show the nuances and dignity of her home.

Her lyricism highlights the tragedy of adolescents forced to “grow up too fast” and the vicious cycles that cause the same problems to repeat over again. Noting the difficulties that she witnessed firsthand alongside her young peers, J Noa pulls from an array of real-life topics, from teen pregnancy to gang violence to even drug addiction. On her Autodidacta’s emotional track “Betty,” she turns her lens on parents who are still maturing alongside their kids.

“Some parents are still adapting to technology and they themselves are growing up while they raise their children,” she says. “In ‘Betty,’ I speak to how adapting or not doesn’t necessarily make the difference in domestically violent situations in the households, and some need to realign their priorities”

In other songs on the EP, she boldly calls out the government’s inability to allocate funds for what Dominicans on the island need. “Que Fue” looks at the frustration over leadership’s negligence and lack of resources, like gas and electricity, that has become a growing problem across the Caribbean. The issue has been highlighted in the past, by Luis Ovalles in his classic Eighties merengue classic “Se Fue La Luz,” by Poeta Callejero in “16 de Mayo,” Guaynaa in his “Maria” freestyle, and Bad Bunny in “El Apagon.”

Her delivery is worth noting: J Noa raps at impressive speeds in a distinctively Dominican way. Through her lyricism and unique style, she wanted to combat the backwards idea of Dominican Spanish being “bad Spanish.” Instead, she shows its beauty and complexity.

Achieving such respect and critical acclaim as a young artist isn’t easy, especially in a culture whose art is constantly reduced to stereotypes. Genres like Dominican dembow are constantly diminished, and their depth is often ignored. Dominicans often face the racist burden of “proving themselves” to outsiders, despite all of their crucial contributions to music at large. And yet ironically enough, the country is constantly exploited for its cultural richness.

J NOA IS making it her mission to enter new spaces with her unique sound while holding onto every bit of the essence that makes her who she is. By pouring her all into the music, she shines a light on both the strength and vulnerability of the world she comes from while showing a brilliant sense of pride in herself.

“My self-esteem is never low,” she says. “If people say, ‘What a pretty girl who’s dark skinned.’ To them, I say I’ve always been too much to handle. When it comes to my skin color, my pride is as high as an 180 mile tall skyscraper. In other words, nobody is ever bringing me down.”

Currently, J Noa is finishing high school at an alternative school to ensure she can keep up with the creative demands of Sony, her label, who signed her in January 2023. On Autodidacta, she boldly decided not to include any features, adequately using every minute of each track to say what she had to and putting more weight on her courageous outspokenness.

The project also comes with bold visuals that show that J Noa has her eye on every detail of her project. She worked alongside her collaborators Lennyn Salinas and Daniel Bethencourt and made it a point to create videos that went beyond the obvious. “We created straight movies because that was what was needed to reinforce what you were hearing lyrically,” she says.

Autodidacta is a display of Dominican excellence. J Noa’s clear direction is a testament to her discipline and the care she puts into her work. “Autodidacta speaks to my intelligence and my strength as a young, Black female rapper. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to show, as well as the notion that in rap, it’s about obtaining the public’s confidence and their respect, too.” She’s working toward a better future, and instead of standing by and watching, she’s contributing to a reality she can be proud of”.

I will move on to We All Grow Latina and their chat with an artist that should be on everyone’s radar. Although she is known in the U.K., I don’t think the music of J Noa is played as much as it should be. A recent interview with NME could well see that change. Her music warrants a lot of airplay and love. She is s future legend that we are seeing blossom and bloom:

“Born Nohelys Jiménez, this Dominicana’s raps don’t stray too far from the realities of growing up in the neighborhood 5 de Abril in San Cristobal. Admittedly, her raps are pretty mature for what you can expect to hear from a 17-year-old, but J Noa raps about what she knows and has witnessed firsthand in the Dominican Republic. Her delivery mirrors that maturity and boldness.

“The boldness and maturity that I express in my songs and the delivery of my raps come from how I’ve grown up and what I have learned along the way.”

“The boldness and maturity that I express in my songs and the delivery of my raps come from how I’ve grown up and what I have learned along the way,” says J Noa.

As she speaks, she spares all humblebrag and any self-doubts; she’s very matter-of-fact about her intelligence and wit. It’s what has shaped her to be who she is today.

“Since I was little, I’ve been very smart. I’m the kind of person that will see something, and I will have an idea born out of it. I didn’t have a regular childhood like other kids who were playing in the park, so I grew up having to learn a lot about life.”

Fighting the Stereotypes Contra El Barrio, One Lyric at a Time

She has seen quite a lot growing up in San Cristobal and had to grow up fast. Her freestyles and raps are a vivid look into the socioeconomic state of her neighborhood and her country. Her listeners are the visitors, and she is your tour guide. As depicted in the music video for her latest single, ‘Betty, she shows us how in the barrios of the DR, one’s life can immediately change due to bad decisions, bad company, limited resources, and limited opportunities.

“If you look at the music video, the people that I’m taking in the golf cart with me are upper class. I’m showing them what it’s like to live inside the barrio, so my objective is to open consciousness,” says J Noa. “I’ve actually brought upper-class people to my neighborhood, and they were able to put themselves in the shoes of my community. They left and made sure to give back to the neighborhood. I know my neighborhood isn’t the most beautiful thing in the world, but it also isn’t the most terrible place either. I want to show the beauty of it as well, but the problem is that if I only talk about the good, then no one will pay attention. I need to shed light on the bad, so I can help improve it. Because if it’s all good, then no one is going to think that anything needs to be fixed.”

J Noa isn’t just trying to put her neighborhood on the map to the outside world – she’s also speaking directly to her community. In ‘Betty,’ she describes the cautionary tale of a 17-year-old girl swayed by bad company, teen pregnancy, and drugs. She wraps up the song saying, “lo que le paso a Betty te puede pasar a ti, solo espero que tus decisiones no sean igual.” (“What happened to Betty can happen to you too, I just hope that your decisions aren’t the same.”)

“It’s not just to show the upper-class how it’s like to live in the hood,” says J Noa, “but also open the minds of young girls who follow me and might be in the same situation as Betty. I understand with one positive message and piece of advice that I can give, I can inspire them as someone who is also their age, is working in music, and is also in school. I hope to show them that they can do it too.”

As I speak to J Noa, 17-year-old me is resonating with her message in trying to defy the stereotypes and statistics set for kids from the hood. Having been raised in Compton myself, I let her know that I, too, understood the damaging narrative attached to girls from the hood like me. However, she tells me that it wasn’t just the external world that expected her to fail as someone from el barrio; it was close family friends too.

J Noa Is Writing Her Own Lyrics and Her Own Narrative

“There was one time in our house I overheard them telling my mom that she needed to be careful with me growing up because my eyes were ‘muy vivos,'” she shares. Of course, anyone else would think that a description of having eyes that looked vivid would be a compliment, but this person was implying that J was too smart for her own good, and it was going to end her up in trouble.

“They told her ‘ella es demasiado inteligente, tú tienes que tener cuidado con ella,'” she shared with me. “They told my mom unpleasant things about me. They even told her she needed to be careful with my sexuality. It’s a pressure I’ve felt since a little girl.”

But she’s used that pressure to change the narrative others decided to write about her without her permission.

“When you have that type of pressure, you just want to grow up, shut those people up, and prove to them how wrong they were in making those assumptions about you.”

“When you have that type of pressure, you just want to grow up, shut those people up, and prove to them how wrong they were in making those assumptions about you.”

And she’s done just that. At just 17, she has signed with Sony Music Entertainment, has been covered on Billboard Latin, CNN en Español, Remezcla, People en Español, Univision, and Telemundo (to name a few), and has racked up over a million views on her YouTube channel. And as the self-proclaimed La Hija Del Rap, she is living up to her idols Melymel (La Mama del Rap) and Lápiz Conciente (El Papa del Rap) with a fire flow that keeps all those that cross her path bewildered by her prowess.

A Love Letter to Rap, Black Women, and Herself

However, in such a male-dominated field, I’m curious about how she’s been able to navigate her path as a rapper despite her gender and age.

“This industry is practically a boy’s club, but my age works in my favor. Since I’m young, people are like ‘wow, she’s 17, and she’s rapping with those rhymes and that maturity,'” she shares. “It’s like people forget that rap is for men when they hear me. Still, people make comments online saying that my rap style is just for men and that if I keep up with this style I’m going to change my personality and become a tomboy. What does that have to do with who I am?”

And that is one thing I learned about J Noa in this conversation: she doesn’t care an ounce about what you think or say about her. She is unfiltered and unapologetic in the way she carries herself and in her delivery because she does this for herself, for the girls that look up to her, and for the genre that raised her.

“I dedicate my rap style to Black women. I am a woman that loves my color, and I will defend my color. I was born with rap, and I will die with rap. And the legacy I want to leave is that I was always rap”.

Prior to ending up with the NME interview, there is a quick-fire interview I want to bring in. Earlier in the month, VIPER sat down with J Noa. An award-nominated talent, I know that we are going to see her grow and grow. One of the modern-day Rap talents that can sit alongside the icons and legends one day soon:

“Dominican rap prodigy, J Noa earned her first Latin Grammy nomination for Best Rap/Hip Hop Song. Get to know her better with this VIPER Presents interview…

What five words define your sound?

Authentic, versatile, story, real life, flow.

Tell me something unique about your creative process.

My ideas flow wherever they please. No matter where I am, if I have a new idea, I write it down. I stop whatever I’m doing because, to me these are opportunities I have to take advantage of.

Which song of yours would you like people to hear first?

‘Autodidacta’ because it’s a song where I openly express myself, my talent and who I am as a person. ‘Fronteo’ is about what I clearly have, which is my talent.

What inspired you to make that song?

I just wanted to create a relevant idea that stands out among the multitude of songs I have, one that represents me as a rapper in its fullest expression. And obviously, to surprise people with my skill in double tempo.

What’s the most vulnerable you’ve allowed yourself to be when writing/making music?

I really wouldn’t know what to say because I restrain myself a lot from vulnerability. I don’t like feeling weak, so I think it’s a topic that’s a bit taboo for me.

What’s the best/worst experience you’ve had on stage?

In all my time on stage, I haven’t had any bad experiences because I make sure to prepare very well before stepping onto a stage. Even with the audience, I haven’t encountered any situations that make me uncomfortable.

What is your favourite song to perform?

‘Autodidacta’ because I live in that moment like nothing else in the world. I think if it were a person, it would be my crush.

Which artist/song/album made you want to make music?

The guys in the neighbourhood doing freestyle in front of my house sparked my desire to become someone in life and progress to help my family. However, I wasn’t inspired by a specific artist because I didn’t even have knowledge of this genre.

What’s the meaning behind your name?

My real name is Nohelys Jiménez, so “Noa” comes from Nohelys and the “J” from my last name, which is Jimenez.

If you weren’t making music, what would you be doing instead?

In university studying psychology, or who knows, maybe I would have been involved in another project related to art, because since I was very young, I’ve been very inclined towards art, especially live show.

What’s success to you?

Feeling good about what I’m doing, making my family happy and being well mentally.

What moment in your life/career forced you to change direction?

I believe that moment hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve been doing the same thing since I started, and I haven’t taken another path or direction. Hopefully, things will continue this way.

Where can people keep in touch with you?

On my Instagram channel, or you can also message me directly on Instagram DM”.

It is timely focusing on J Noa. Her debut album, Matanse Por La Corona, is released on 23rd May. I would advise people to seek it out. Such a phenomenal Rap artist, this teenage prodigy is going to go places! NME spotlighted an artist with a strong and compelling voice. Someone whose incisive storytelling puts her out in front:

“J Noa was only 15 years old when Sony Music first reached out to her; she signed with the major label soon after. In the years since, trips to the US for recording and promo events have become the norm, but she’s been determined not to let the hype get to her, and insists that her creative process has remained the same throughout.

She recalls entering large recording studios for the first time and having to adapt to the new environment, from observing how different producers worked to learning how other artists worked on vocal melodies without having lyrics in place. But it’s worth noting that by this point, she had already been rapping for years.

Jiménez first started spitting bars at the age of eight, freestyling with local boys in the streets of her neighbourhood in San Cristóbal. Her hometown is located 30km west of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, and her local area — which she recently showed fans around in the video documentary ‘Mi Barrio’ — has greatly impacted her capacity for storytelling, the poverty and struggle she saw firsthand giving her a greater sense of perspective from an early age. As she raps on ‘Betty’, the heart-rending tale of a young, vulnerable teenage girl from the hood who unexpectedly winds up pregnant, “a ustedes le sorprende para mí es normal” (“You are surprised, for me it’s normal”).

“I witnessed all of that in the flesh,” she tells NME. “I was just telling the story, so there wasn’t really pressure. But once it was out, I felt that feeling; I started seeing comments and seeing people realise what ‘Betty’ was about, and when I detect pressure I feel that I have to lead by example. If I’m going to tell these kinds of stories and bring light to these problems, I can be part of the problem. If I’m making a rap about being an educated person and here in the interview I portray myself as being an uneducated person, that’s not being consistent, so I need to be true and lead by example.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Fiona Garden

This reflects Jiménez’s belief that rappers are “the journalists of the hood”. It’s a viewpoint she backs up consistently in her music, which explores a wide range of pertinent issues relating to social inequality, politics, relationships, and mental health, all of which she feels a responsibility to document. Her recent single ‘Era de Cristal’ is a good example. Its video displays Jiménez confined in a box bedroom, tossing, turning and visibly struggling to keep it together, these visuals reflecting lyrical content that centres around anxiety and insomnia, with lyrics like “mirando como cae la noche el cielo, una lágrima que adorna mi cara y rueda y mi cuello” (“watching the night fall into the sky, a tear adorns my face and rolls down my neck”).

“Rap is history,” she continues. “History needs to be told, and where I come from, the hood, there was a lack of a voice. There were stories, but no one to tell those stories. I’m part of the hood that now has a voice, and I want to use that voice to tell those stories. With my genre, with my skills, I’m capable of bringing light to these narratives.”

This attitude is a central facet of her forthcoming debut album (due out May 23), ‘Matanse Por La Corona’ (‘kill for the crown’). Produced largely by Honduran-born, LA-based producer Trooko – “he’s a master,” says Jiménez – the album leans heavily on recrafted jazz and soul melodies, from the neat double bass riff that opens ‘Cenicienta’ to the coarse Chubby Checker vocal sample that’s chopped-up and scattered across the tough hip-hop track ‘Arrogante’. Mirroring the figurative violence of its title, ‘Matanse Por La Corona’ sees her spit rapidly against an intense, jumpy beat centred on tight, triumphant bursts of horns that evoke the open credits of a 1960s detective drama (they’re sampled from Canadian composer Dennis Farnon’s 1974 track ‘Snowmobile’). What was the intention behind that evocative album title?

“The point is to acknowledge that I’m not working towards this objective [of ‘killing for the crown’]. It’s not something that matters to me, having that recognition or fame,” she says. “I’m doing this because it’s what I like, I’m working on my own agenda, with my own goals of growing as an artist. I’m telling everyone that they can kill for the crown, but that’s not my agenda, I will be here doing my own thing!”

Perhaps it’s this singularity, this lack of regard for petty beef, commercial success or the trappings of fame, that makes J Noa such a likely candidate to rise to the top. Posing for her NME shoot against a deep red backdrop, her hair braided and fashioned into a majestic floral shape above her head, she exudes the energy of a star. She seems comfortable, staring down the camera, and shuffling with ease to the light reggaeton beats that blast from a speaker by the side of the studio.

The following day, she jumps onstage at renowned Camden venue Electric Ballroom to support Venezuelan funk/soul four-piece Rawayana, and stomps around with the same assured self-confidence. For an 18-year-old, Jiménez has a formidable stage presence and command of the room; she strides around with purpose, and the mostly Spanish-speaking crowd respond fervently to bold lyrics like “Piden guerra, pero vienen sin bala no hay quien resista / A una barra que te deja en coma el tiempo que tú exista” (“They ask for war, but they come without bullets, there is no one to resist / To a bar that leaves you in a coma for as long as you live”). You get the feeling she was built for this.

“Rap is a lifestyle,” she says. “I’m pure hip-hop. There are many ways to do hip-hop, but for me it’s about focusing on the lyrics while also being a bit aggressive. It comes from my personality; I’m bold, I’m aggressive, and I want to represent that I am a strong Black woman. What I do, it comes out of my heart”.

With her debut album out on 23rd May, and a growing fanbase in the U.K., the Dominican Rap artist will take over the world. She is ambitious, keen and hugely impressive. Someone who is a teenager but has this amazing maturity and focus. It will be fascinating seeing where her career heads in years to come! Make sure you follow her. We are seeing the rise of…

A future icon.

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Follow J Noa

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/jnoamusic/

TikTok:

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

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/jnoamusic

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzvn-o81V4DOyE0XHSq9Ubw

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4gknAwZk7sfjge8Bho6xre?si=Cvr7q12nSxqrgskkNJKA6A

FEATURE: Queens to the Front: How Women Are Leading the Way in the Industry

FEATURE:

 

 

Queens to the Front

N THIS PHOTO: Billie Eilish/PHOTO CREDIT: Petros Studio

How Women Are Leading the Way in the Industry

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I guess we are years away…

PHOTO CREDIT: Wellington Cunha/Pexels

from truly being able to say that parity has reached the music industry. In terms of pay and power, I think it is going to be a very long time before women are on the same level as men. I have written before how the music industry would benefit from being a matriarchy. Rather than it being a case of women ruling sternly and in the same way as the patriarchy, a much more considerate and progressive leadership would hugely benefit all through the industry. I do think that we need to have discussions about how women need to be at the forefront when it comes to the industry. How we need to ensure that future generations coming into music are not subjected to the same inequality and barriers women are subjected to now. Rather than this being anything against men in the music, it is very clear that women are really pushing things forward. Some might disagree but, in terms of the music being put out, women are still very much on top. I am always going to be biased in favour of women. That is not a subjective thing. It is very clear that the most brilliant and original albums over the past few years have been from women. The biggest and most spectacular tours of the past couple of years have been from female artists. Many of the best-reviewed gigs have been. So many of the tipped artists for this year are women. It is clear that the queens are dominating. It is the story across most genres. It is too much to list all the amazing albums made by women the past few years. It is not only across genres that women are ruling. In terms of age demographics and countries, there does seem to be this phenomenal consistency. Two new albums, one from Billie Eilish and the other from Beth Gibbons, demonstrate the sheer brilliance and variety that there is out there.

There is a bigger point that I want to lead onto. How there has been improvements and development yet, still, I don’t think women are valued as much as they should be. The majority of power in the hands of men. Things need to change. The incredible passion and brilliance that they bring to all corners of the music industry warrants a lot more. I want to start with reviews for brilliant new work from two very different female artists. The Guardian reviewed Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft:

“The album tellingly reserves its brightest hues for Lunch, a track that presses a distorted drum machine, ska-inflected guitar and a sudden explosion of noisy, EDM-inspired bass into the service of a lascivious thumbs-up for lesbian sex. Eilish, who built her image on a very recognisable kind of teenage surliness – in photographs taken during her rise to superstardom, she tended to fix the camera with a look of uncomprehending contempt – sounds as if she’s grinning as she sings it.

There are beautiful melodies here, and some very distinctive lyrical touches – on Birds of a Feather, she pledges her love until “I rot away, dead and buried … in the casket that you carried”. But you do start wondering if Hit Me Hard and Soft might not be a little too opaque for its own good. Wildflower slips in one ear and out the other pleasantly enough, an underwhelming state of affairs given how arresting Eilish’s music has proved in the past.

But, as if on cue, the album suddenly shifts focus midway through. The temperature drops, the atmosphere turns more discomfiting, the songs become longer and more wilfully episodic. Subject to jarring shifts in mood and tempo, they frequently end up somewhere completely different from their starting point. The soft rock of L’Amour de Ma Vie is usurped by a clipped beat and burbling synth bass that recalls Joe Jackson’s 1982 hit Steppin’ Out, but not before Eilish’s vocal is warped to the point where she sounds as though she’s retelling the story of a doomed love affair in a mocking baby voice. The Diner melds creepy vocals to an echo-drenched reggae-esque lope, then suddenly slows down, re-emerging as an eerie show tune as the lyrical saga of unrequited love turns murderous. The thick synthesiser chords of Bittersuite swell until they overwhelm the song entirely in a dark, instrumental coda. Blue seems to concern a relationship with another wounded celebrity – “too afraid to step outside, paranoid and petrified of what you’ve heard” – alternating between empathy and the sense that the celebrity is simply too damaged to deal with: the rhythm track sounds similarly indecisive, spluttering in and out of life to haunting effect.

Odd lines and images from earlier lyrics keep reappearing in the second half of the album, as if the later songs here are commenting on, or updating, the previously depicted events. The effect is both enigmatic – when a line from Skinny about feeling “like a bird in a cage” reappears in the completely different setting of Blue, it isn’t clear whether it’s reiterating or undercutting the point – and compelling: what initially seems straightforward becomes deeper and murkier.

An album that keeps wrongfooting the listener, Hit Me Hard and Soft is clearly intended as something to gradually unpick: a bold move in a pop world where audiences are usually depicted as suffering from an attention deficit that requires instant gratification. Hit Me Hard and Soft isn’t in the business of providing that. In its place, it offers evidence that, among the ranks of mega-selling pop stars, Billie Eilish remains a fascinating law unto herself”.

One of our best artists, Beth Gibbons, has just released a stunning solo album. In an industry that is still ageist, we have seen an album from a young U.S. Pop artist and an older and established queen producing equally wonderful work. This is what The Guardian said about Lives Outgrown:

“No one is ever going to accuse Beth Gibbons of over-exerting herself in the rapacious pursuit of fame: her solo debut arrives 22 years after her collaboration with Rustin Man, Out of Season, 16 years after the last Portishead album, Third, and 11 after it was first announced.

In fairness, Lives Outgrown has a unique sound you suspect was only arrived at after lengthy experimentation. The Rustin Man album echoes through the acoustic guitar and folky melody of Tell Me Who You Are Today, and on Reaching Out; so do the hypnotic rhythms that underpinned Third’s We Carry On and The Rip. But Lives Outgrown ultimately draws you into a soundworld entirely its own. Strings play mournfully low and squeal discordantly; the snare-free drumming resolves into a Bo Diddley beat on Beyond the Sun, and elsewhere rumbles ominously, like the last sound you’d hear before being ritually sacrificed.

Gibbons’ careworn voice threads through it: intimate, in-your-face and utterly distinctive as ever, singing about ageing and loss. “Come through my heart when you can”, she pleads on Whispering Love, apparently to the ghost of a late friend or relation. The album’s autumnal gloom is affecting and enveloping, although occasionally dappled with warmth and light, as when Lost Changes’ lovely chorus arrives, or a solo violin spirals skywards on For Sale, or a children’s choir appears during Floating on a Moment, albeit singing “we’re all going to nowhere”. A dispatch from the darker moments of middle age, Lives Outgrown is occasionally challenging, frequently beautiful and invariably gripping”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sound On/Pexels

We are heading into festival season. I may sound like a broken record when it comes to highlighting the slow movement forward made by the industry compared to what women are producing. How truly vital and important they are. I spotlighted only two new albums. The truth is that every month we are receiving such stunning work! From great emerging artists coming through to some icons of the scene. I wanted to salute that on its own. How each year is dominated by women. It makes me think about the continuing gaps and issues that need to react to the merit from female artists. I know that we are seeing steps forward though, with each bit of good news, there seems to be two steps back. When we hear of women discriminated against and sexually assaulted. Prejudice and ageism still very much present. Festival bills and radio playlists still not balanced and where they should be. Women having to work harder to get the same opportunities as men. It is always angering knowing that such phenomenal artists and women are not being given their dues. It is worse than that. If we look at the side of the scales where women are releasing the best music, putting on the most captivating gigs and are these amazing advocates and representatives, they are still seen as somehow commercially inferior. Having to endure so much abuse and this real lack of respect. Male advocacy and allyship is not where it needs to be either. Few of their peers tackling what is happening and helping to call for change. I have said the same thing time and time again. I am always stunned – but not surprised – when hearing a magnificent album or discovering this unforgettable artist. These inspiring women. Beyond albums and gigs, label owners, venue bosses, journalists and D.J.s together with their sisters are changing the industry. Making it so much stronger. Will we see the day in our lifetimes when women are equal and the industry moves away from the male dominance and patriarchy to a better landscape. Not that the music industry is as toxic and unshifting as other areas of society. It is one where women are clearly worthy of a lot more than they get. Made to feel safe, respected and heard. You have to ask…

WHEN will that happen?!

FEATURE: So Here I Come: Neneh Cherry’s Raw Like Sushi at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

So Here I Come

Neneh Cherry’s Raw Like Sushi at Thirty-Five

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ONE of the greatest and most important…

PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Eichner/WireImage/Getty Images

albums of the 1980s was released right at the end of the decade. Neneh Cherry’s astonishing debut album, Raw Like Sushi, was released on 5th June, 1989. Released through Virgin, it is an iconic album from one of music’s true greats. A queen of the industry. Boasting huge songs like Buffalo Stance and Manchild, this is an album that will stand the test of time. It already has. I think it will endure for decades more. As it turns thirty-five soon, I wanted to spend some time with it. I will end with a review from Rolling Stone that was published in 1989. Reaching number two in the U.K., I remember the album when I was a child. I was a bit too young to remember when it first came out. I definitely got to know Raw Like Sushi better in the 1990s. I want to start out with a few features that examine this stunning album. I will start out with this feature from 2023. For those who are new to Neneh Cherry or might not know about her debut album, you get a real understanding of Raw Like Sushi and its significance:

“A rich musical heritage

Neneh Cherry is part of a lineage of music royalty. The daughter of Sierra Leonean drummer Ahmadu Jarr, and step-daughter of jazz legend Don Cherry, her siblings include Eagle-Eye Cherry and Titiyo, both of whom followed Neneh into the charts. She married her regular collaborator Booga Bear, aka Cameron McVey, and her musical offspring include recent pop sensation Mabel.

This rich musical heritage shows through in Cherry’s work, from her initial records with post-punk groups The Slits and Rip Rig + Panic, through sessions with a bewildering array of artists as diverse as Cher, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, The The, Steve Beresford, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Chrissie Hynde, Pulp, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, Gang Starr, The Notorious BIG, Timo Maas, and Loco Dice. There have been collaborations with Bernard Butler (on her hit “Woman”) and Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour (on their famous duet “7 Seconds”), her Dreem Teem-produced garage hit “Buddy X 99,” and recordings with Scandinavian jazzers The Thing, electronica maverick Four Tet, and Swedish pop legend Robyn.

A career springboard

Cherry’s career springboard, Raw Like Sushi, however, contains some of her best-loved music. She put together the Madonna-esque sass of the go-go influenced rap opener and smash lead single “Buffalo Stance” with Bomb The Bass’ Tim Simenon and Mark Saunders. It’s based on – and successfully commercialized – her appearance with her future husband McVey, the singer Jamie J Morgan and Bristol’s The Wild Bunch on Morgan/McVey’s choppy 1987 B-side “Looking Good Diving With The Wild Bunch.” Single remixes for “Buffalo Stance” included one from American dance legend Arthur Baker, who pushed the Madonna comparison to the max, as well as one from DJ Mushroom of The Wild Bunch (which was then morphing into Massive Attack). Massive Attack clearly learned a lot from Cherry about how to get their ideas across to a wider audience.

Nellee Hooper from Soul II Soul helped his Wild Bunch colleague 3D on the massive, strings-led “Manchild,” 3D writing, and Hooper arranging. Focusing on male immaturities gave an indication of the music to come from 3D, almost a decade ahead of his inward-looking work on Massive Attack’s classic 1998 album Mezzanine, while Cherry channeled New York’s iconic Roxanne Shanté on the rap. “Manchild” is one example of the prescient third-wave feminism that percolates throughout Raw Like Sushi, from the anti-prostitution lines of “Buffalo Stance” onwards. This time the remixes came from Massive Attack themselves (thickening up the bass and sounding like Portishead several years early, with rave stabs limply slurring in musical metaphors), as well as from their collaborators Smith & Mighty.

The uptempo, poppy, multilingual coming-of-age single “Kisses On The Wind” features lively scratching from Mushroom, with remixes coming from Latin dance figureheads David Morales and The Latin Rascals. Low-slung single “Inna City Mamma” follows. Its title is a perfect moniker for Cherry, but the track opens out to reveal the “shattered dreams” of city life, with the city personified as a pimp. “The Next Generation” was produced by Mushroom, and it shows: block-rocking breakbeats, jazzy samples, and scratches underscoring Cherry’s call for the 90s generation to embrace multiculturalism and to raise their children correctly.

Predicting the future

The second half of the album keeps up the diversity. The skittery, feisty love triangle of single “Heart” introduced Cherry’s brother Eagle-Eye to the world (while some editions of the album also feature the rawer demo version of the song). The synth-poppy “Phoney Ladies” pleads for female unity, while the lustful “Outré Risqué Locomotive” is a James Brown-sampling swingbeat piece. School-days tale “So Here I Come” features production from hip-hop stalwart Bryan “Chuck” New, plus turntable work from Mushroom, and some versions of the album finish with “My Bitch,” a two-hander with rapper Gilly G in which he inevitably comes off worse.

Raw Like Sushi predicted work by Cherry collaborators such as Bomb The Bass, Soul II Soul, Massive Attack, Smith & Mighty, Portishead, Groove Armada, and Gorillaz, but, for some reason, isn’t often spoken of in the same breath. It’s time the album was fully re-appreciated, taking its place beside those acts’ most vaunted collections as a progressive modern classic”.

DJ ran a brilliant feature last year. They discussed how Neneh Cherry was a freethinking and extraordinary talent who was also part of this forward-thinking and boundary-pushing music collective. Raw Like Sushi arrived at the end of the 1980s and would help open doors for the Bristol scene of the 1990s. Incredible acts like Massive Attack, Tricly and even Portishead would no doubt have gained energy and inspiration from Neneh Cherry:

“Buffalo Stance,’ which was released in November 1988, has the rare distinction of sounding both perfectly of its time and incredibly unique. The lyrics are a tale of defiance, the ‘Buffalo Stance’ being a pose to protect against "gigolos and moneymen", delivered in a tone of sheer rebellious cheek, while the music is an idiosyncratic mixture of vinyl scratches, a lilting saxophone sample, rave-inspired keyboard lines, and beats that sit somewhere in between hip-hop, house, and freestyle. 

Cherry’s next single would be further proof of both her vast songwriting talent and her ability to nurture promising young talent. ‘Manchild’, which was released in May 1989, was the first song Cherry ever sat down to write, using the autochord function on a Casio keyboard to create a chilling tale of male immaturity, underachievement, and busted dreams. Nellee Hooper, then a fledgling producer for Soul II Soul, provided a beat, Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja contributed to the rap, and Cameron McVey helped to shape the song into its ultimate form. (Massive Attack themselves would also contribute a remix to the single release, as would Bristol breakbeat pioneers Smith & Mighty.).

Once again, the song sounded truly distinctive. Sure, there were elements of Soul II Soul, hip-hop, and contemporary R&B to ‘Manchild’, but Cherry’s songwriting was strikingly original, using seven chords in the song’s verse, where most pop songwriters rarely go beyond three (Don Cherry apparently was impressed). The string arrangement, meanwhile, nodded to where Massive Attack would soon go on their own debut album, ‘Blue Lines’. The song’s subject matter and tone were fascinating, too: how many tracks in 1989 dared to make such a devastating critique of male ego? And how many could do it with the beguiling mixture of tenderness and despair that Neneh Cherry evoked, the song’s few moments of major-chord hope quickly subsumed by murky waves of sadness?

‘Raw Like Sushi’, Cherry’s debut album, was released in June 1989 with ‘Manchild’ high in the UK charts. Again, Cherry had assembled a crack team: production came from McVey, Jonny Dollar (who would later work extensively with Massive Attack), and Mark Saunders, a key collaborator on Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’. Nellee Hooper provided arrangements; Tim Simenon brought beats; and Mushroom, from Massive Attack, contributed scratches and programming, making the record a virtual who’s who of 1980s UK street soul.

If you want to know where the Bristol scene that would go on to rule the ’90s started, ‘Raw Like Sushi’ is key, with the record helping to nurture some of the maverick talents that would later make Bristol one of the world’s most vibrant music cities, some two years before Massive Attack dropped ‘Blue Lines.’ But all this would mean little if the music on ‘Raw Like Sushi’ wasn’t so brilliantly innovative. While the record’s production situates it at the tail-end of the ’80s — absolutely no bad thing, for fans of ’80s R&B, hip-hop, and early house — its free-thinking, globe-trotting attitude makes ‘Raw Like Sushi’ feel like a very modern record.

‘Raw Like Sushi’ is full of many different things: fantastic pop hooks, flavourful vocals, fresh attitude, and exploratory spirit. But the key lies in its liberty. You can’t imagine anyone setting out to make a record like ‘Raw Like Sushi', much less being told to do so; it’s too freewheeling and loose, an expression of musical love that feels in line with the radical cultural mix of Bristol at the time. This was a city where local sound system The Wild Bunch — who counted Massive Attack and Nellee Hooper among its members — were known for mixing punk, R&B, and reggae, while Rip Rig & Panic added jazz skronk to post-punk guitars”.

Cherry and her various collaborators were inspired by American (and Jamaican) musicians. But they didn’t want to recreate the sounds they were hearing. They wanted to re-model them, to make hip-hop, R&B, soul, and house in their own punky image. “Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were really scoring gold and their songs were everywhere back then,” Cherry told Billboard. “They were the kind of producers we were wishing that we could maybe work with one day. But then it was like, in a way, we were also deconstructing that style and making it our own and turning it into something more punk in a way. That’s the beauty of the kind of DIY aspect of rap or jazz or punk. It’s about engineering your own universe and telling your own story.”

And what a story ‘Raw Like Sushi’ would tell: An inspiring, liberating tale of the strength of community and collective music inspiration, driven by a bohemian free thinker, one that would blaze a trail for British music for years to come, a Bristol finishing school for punks, freaks, and beautiful soul weirdos that became a global musical force”.

Before coming to a review for Raw Like Sushi, the BBC interview Neneh Cherry in 2020. The interview was to celebrate and mark a thirtieth anniversary release of Raw Like Sushi. Cherry also gave a track-by-track discussion where she gave thoughts and insights. I have selected a few notable numbers. I would urge anyone who has not heard the album to check it out. In 1989, critics noted how Raw Like Sushi has commercial edges and accessibilities. Yet it came from a singular and unique artist who was doing things in Pop music nobody else was:

“Her second daughter, Tyson, was born eight weeks later, at the same time as Cherry was putting the finishing touches to her debut album, Raw Like Sushi.

Released in June 1989, the record was a vital, energetic blend of street rap and sweet soul, with Cherry addressing topics like urban deprivation, emotional blackmail and the challenges of parenthood.

"Think of this newcomer as the Joni Mitchell of hip-hop," enthused the Chicago Sun-Times in its review.

"That's a bit much, isn't it?" laughs the singer, as she talks to the BBC in 2020.

"I guess I always wanted to write songs that mean something - but at the same time, I wouldn't say I write directly political lyrics. They always end up being about being human."

Those words, combined with Raw Like Sushi's pulsating pop melodies, definitely struck a chord. Raw Like Sushi sold more than 100,000 copies in its first week, went platinum four months later, and Cherry was nominated for best new artist at both the Brits and the Grammy Awards.

To celebrate the album turning 30 (30-and-a-half, to be precise) it's being re-released with two discs of bonus tracks and remixes, and Cherry agreed to share the story of those songs, track-by-track.

"It's going to be an interesting journey because I don't really listen to the album," she remarks. "And when I do, I'm like, 'My God, you sound like a little kid!'"

Buffalo Stance

A Buffalo Stance is "an attitude you have to have in order to get by", Cherry told the New York Times in 1989. "It's not about fashion but about survival in inner cities and elsewhere."

The song started life as the B-side to Jamie Morgan's Looking Good Diving, external, with a rap Cherry composed as she visited her local supermarket.

"I stepped up on the kerb and, as my foot came down, I was like, 'Who's that gigolo on the street?'" says the singer. "And pretty much between going into the store and coming out, I had half of the rap.

"I remember doing the second half, 'The girls with the curls and the padded bras,' back in my house, and we more or less did the song in an afternoon."

Although Morgan's single flopped, Cherry's B-side caught the ear of Bomb The Bass's Tim Simenon, who asked to remix it for her album, adding samples from Miami's Chicken Yellow (for the sax riff) and Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals (for the hip-hop scratches).

"It was amazing going into the studio with Tim," says Cherry. "He had such a clear idea of what he wanted to do. He was like, 'I don't want any harmonies, I just want the vibe.'

"And thank God he had the vision because I never would have gone back and considered re-doing [Looking Good Diving]. To us, it was like done, ready, whoop, doop, forgotten about."

Manchild

Cherry's second single was an accusatory but compassionate ballad about a man who has some growing up to do. The haunting lyrics and sumptuous strings, recorded at Abbey Road, signified there was more to the singer than the upbeat party vibes of Buffalo Stance.

"I was on the bus after going to see Matt Johnson from The The," says Cherry (the pair had recorded a duet called Slow Train To Dawn). "And I started singing 'Is it the pain of the drinking or the Sunday sinking feeling?'

"I just had that phrase in my head. Then I went home and found the chords and just totally went off piste."

Cherry attributes the song's unusual chord progression to a Casio keyboard she borrowed from her partner Cameron McVey (credited on the album as Booga Bear).

"It had this little auto-chord accompaniment system," she explains. "Cameron, who's a great musician and a great songwriter, didn't really know how to play, so he was always pulling out and finding strange chord sequences on that [keyboard] when we wrote together.

"And when I sent that song to my stepdad, Don Cherry, who was a jazz musician, he said, 'Damn, there's seven chords in the verse. That's not bad!'"

Inna City Mamma

Inna City Mamma opens with a sample from Stevie Wonder's Living For The City - "New York, just like I pictured it" - which was a direct inspiration for the album's fourth and final single.

"There's a bit in that song where it just goes from telling the story of this young girl, her legs are sturdy, she's growing up in the countryside, to someone getting off a bus and arriving in the city," recalls Cherry. "Then they get thrown in jail and you hear the gate being shut, and a voice goes, 'You've got 10 years'.

"I listened to that track a lot when I was growing up. So it inspired another version of that New York City story, through my own eyes."

It's not a flattering portrait. "I trusted you and you crushed me to a pulp," sings Cherry as the song draws to a close.

"What I was trying to do was portray New York as a lover," she says. "It's an interesting city because after you've been there for a while, you become part of the city and it becomes part of you. Not many places affect you like that. So Inna City Mamma was my way of trying to have a conversation with the actual place."

So Here I Come

A blistering coda, So Here I Come sees Cherry deliver her manifesto, "If you're gonna do it, you got to do it right", before she signs off for good.

But the song also paints a vivid picture of her upbringing, including the crushing disappointment of her first day at school.

"I'll never forget it," she says. "I was so proud of the fact I could read and I wanted to show my teacher, but she just basically ignored me.

"I suppose in her mind she didn't want to treat me different to anyone else in the class but it was heartbreaking.

"I didn't last at school for very long. I'm so thankful my parents had the guts to say, 'This situation isn't right, let's work it out.'

"To have that understanding and that faith is brilliant. And that's why I'm still here”.

I am going to end up with a review from Rolling Stone. Their review from August 1989 makes some interesting observations. I can only imagine what it was like hearing this album when it came out. Even though 1989 is one of the best years ever for music and boasts more than a few classics – from the likes of Madonna, Pixies, De La Soul and Beastie Boys -, there is nothing like Raw Like Sushi:

“Talk about a sign of the times: Earlier in the decade, Neneh Cherry was a peripheral member of the postpunk warriors the Slits, then played anarchic funk with Ríp Rig and Panic. Now, on her solo debut, Cherry reappears as a hip-hop adventurer. Raw Like Sushi is an artsy interpretation of current dance styles that recognizes the music as today's most inventive and self-expressive form while attacking the social attitudes that commonly accompany it. The twenty-four-year-old Cherry has made an album that, intoxicated with rhythms and rhymes, is funny, timely, inventive and thrilling.

"Buffalo Stance," the year's best and boldest hit single, indicates her motives. Opening with a scratch, it proceeds as a vibrant collage of tambourines, synths and raps. But Cherry is no stock B girl; she uses these hip-hop tricks to address the selfish machismo of rap posses and to dispute the gold-chain priorities of boy rappers, as she declares, "No money man could win my love."

Cherry is attracted to hip-hop as an expression of black pride and culture, but, like De La Soul, she seems to regret the music's attendant stupidities – materialist villains reappear in "Phoney Ladies" and "Heart," and in "The Next Generation" she baits crotch grabbers whose greatest pride derives from "the size of your dick."

Cherry's tongue wags but never drags. The album's potency mainly comes from her lyrics, which scramble sharp phrases throughout even a well-worn sexual pun like the orgasm travelogue "So Here I Come."

But don't mistake the kinky submissiveness of "Outre Risque Locomotive" for dance-dolly compliance. She insists on having orgasms and respect. In "Manchild," a spooky, minor-key ballad worthy of Dionne Warwick, Cherry raps in a reference to Otis Redding's "Respect." Cherry manages to pair her maternal concerns ("Inna City Mamma" and "The Next Generation" attack abusive parents and negligent government policies in defense of children) with ultratough raps.

Produced by a shifting team of young musicians, the most established of whom is Tim Simenon of Bomb the Bass, Raw Like Sushi never runs out of tricky beats. Whether incorporating Latin freestyle ("Kisses on the Wind") or go-go percussion ("Inna City Mamma"), the production ensemble eschews the easier option of sampling for its own catchy thump and consistently matches Cherry's bravado with episodic surprises. During the last several years, many musicians have built retirement funds by imitating the musical and sexual paths of Prince and Madonna. Neneh Cherry may be the first newcomer inspired by them who also poses a threat to their preeminence. (RS 558)”.

On 5th June, Raw Like Sushi turns thirty-five. One of the greatest debut albums ever, Neneh Cherry announced herself as one of the most astonishing and original artists of her generation. I loved it when I first heard it and still do not. It is a remarkable album that everyone needs to hear! Ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary, spend some time and listen to it. The astonishing Raw Like Sushi sounds and feels…

LIKE nothing else.

FEATURE: A Divine Light: Why a Tenth Anniversary Cinema or Streaming Release of Before the Dawn Would Be Embraced

FEATURE:

 

 

A Divine Light

PHOTO CREDIT; Trevor Leighton

Why a Tenth Anniversary Cinema or Streaming Release of Before the Dawn Would Be Embraced

_________

IT may seem obvious…

asking why fans around the world would embrace a screening of Before the Dawn. This time ten years ago, Bush had already released he return to the stage. She would embark on twenty-two nights at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith. It was a critically acclaimed and sell-out run. That is perhaps no surprise. Given the preparation and planning, Bush’s concepts and ideas were always going to captivate and stand out as original and unforgettable. Maybe her nerves and the sense that this was such a big deal could have jeopardised the quality. It would have been understandable. In May 2014, Bush was a matter of weeks away from getting back onto the stage. Her first large-scale performance since The Tour of Life ended in 1979. On 26th August, 2014, Before the Dawn opened. In the same venue that Bush ended The Tour of Life – on 14th May, 1979 -, it was an emotional and important space. I was not lucky enough to get a ticket. The dates sold out so quickly. Almost 80,000 people saw Kate Bush on the stage. After Bush announced Before the Dawn on 21st March, 2014, there was no real sense of what it would entail and how it would look. One of the most notable aspect is how she united Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave and Aerial’s A Sky of Honey. These are two different but powerful conceptual suites that were beautifully worked into the show. An unbelievable and hugely well-received residency, seats were cleared out of the venues to accommodate cameras. Recording took place over several nights. There was an initial idea to release the footage. It made it to Abbey Road and was being edited. That is as far as it got.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features

People have said how the footage was at Abbey Road and was being edited. Kate Bush released a live album for Before the Dawn through her Fish People label in 2016. She was interviewed by BBC Radio 6 Music’s Matt Everitt and said that there was a DVD of the show but it was not being released. The reason Bush said she wasn’t putting it out is because the experience wouldn’t be the same as being there. She discussed an Elton John live album, 17-11-70, and being moved by it. The fact that she heard the album and not the visuals. A more moving experience. The fact that she got so much from imagining what was happening. That vital listening experience. Bush also said how she hated it when DVDs were sold or available alongside a C.D. - and the C.D. would end up tossed away. She hated that. Someone who loved the album and wanted people to experience that. Those were her feelings in 2016. The footage is still available and, one presumes, could be upgraded to 4K or HD and streamed. It could be turned into a film. Given the fact there are no plans for her to release an album or any new music, fans are very keen for something new to come from her. I love the recent release of the documentary, The Beatles: Let It Be. It was originally released in 1970. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, it now looks even better and sharper. Always considered to be a very dark and depressing documentary, after we have seen The Beatles: Get Back, new light and context has come in. We can now see the band and that time from a fresh perspective. The positivity and celebration that has greeted The Beatles: Let It Be has been amazing! It has been an event seeing this documentary.

The Tour of Life has not been released as a documentary or concert film. Bush’s 1993 short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, was released widely in 1994 but has not been re-screened or re-released widely since then. We have various documentaries made through the years. Nothing that has been brought to the big screen. Nothing like The Beatles’ documentaries. The tenth anniversary of Before the Dawn is a major thing! It allows fans to think back to that magical time. I do feel like a documentary could be released. Maybe an introduction with some news/archive feature or a face to face with some famous or well-known fans who were there. Perhaps locating Albert McIntosh – Kate Bush’s son, he performed on stage with his mother – and having words from him. I feel that there has always been this urge for that footage to be released. A tenth anniversary showing of footage collected would be amazing. So much time has passed since the dates. Since the live album came out. We have experienced one or the other. Taken all of that in. In no way would a documentary detract from this. It would provide fans who were not able to see Before the Dawn a chance to have that dream realised. I keep calling it a ‘documentary’. It would be a concert film. There could be breaks or asides between the various acts. Some visual or various effects between certain songs. The emotion that many have got from The Beatles’ Let It Be has got me thinking. The circumstances regarding The Beatles and Kate Bush are different, I know. What is similar is how this amazing footage would impact fans of all generations.

Maybe it is too late to put together something quickly enough so that it could be on a streaming site or small cinemas by late-August. My hope is that Kate Bush is thinking about something. She knows how significant Before the Dawn was! How significant it still is. I don’t know if there will be any anniversary magazine articles, books or podcasts/documentaries from others. Hopefully something can come. One can understand the reasons why Kate Bush did not want to release the filmed footage in 2014 or 2016. Maybe it was too soon. I don’t think her reticence has anything to do with the quality of the footage. I may have had doubts regarding the quality before. It can be improved and remastered. Perhaps the angles and restrictions of camera does not give one the same movement, immersive quality and sense of cinema, you would get from being at the gigs. Handheld and smaller camera too would have created extra movement and flow. Perhaps the cameras are too far away and you only get a far-off view of a show that is best viewed up-close. I don’t know. The fact that the footage supposedly made its way to edit and was considered for release is telling. It makes me think timing rather than quality was the reason for it being shelved. Bush has said why she was not keen to put it out. I never heard much determination and finality in her words. Always a sense that the decision is open to some negotiation. I can respect her prioritising the sound and live album over something filmed. She also wanted to honour the thousands who attended Before the Dawn and paid to be there. Releasing a film might have seemed like she was cheating them and giving free access to people.

On 26th August, it will be ten years since Bush stepped on stage in Hammersmith. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive! I am going to bring in a review from The Guardian. They gave Before the Dawn a five-star review. It is clear that everyone who was at one of the shows was left stunned and affected:

“There have been a lot of improbable returns to the stage by mythic artists over the last few years, from Led Zeppelin to Leonard Cohen, but at least the crowd who bought tickets to see them knew roughly what songs to expect. Tonight, almost uniquely in rock history, the vast majority of the audience has virtually no idea what's going to happen before it does.

The solitary information that has leaked out from rehearsals is that Bush will perform The Ninth Wave, her 1985 song cycle about a woman drowning at sea – which indeed she does, replete with staging of a complexity that hasn't been seen during a rock gig since Pink Floyd's heyday – and that she isn't terribly keen on people filming the show on their phones.

The rest is pure speculation, of varying degrees of madness. A rumour suggests that puppets will be involved, hence the aforementioned mannequin, manipulated by a man in black and regularly hugged by Bush during her performance of another song cycle, A Sky of Honey, from 2005's Aerial.

The satirical website the Daily Mash claimed that, at the gig's conclusion, Bush would "lead the audience out of the venue, along the fairy-tale Hammersmith Flyover and finally to a mountain where they would be sealed inside, listening to Hounds of Love for all eternity".

In fairness, this was no more demented than the thoughts of the august broadsheet rock hack, apparently filing his report direct from the 1870s, who predicted that Bush would not take part in any choreographed routines because dancing in public is "unbecoming for a woman of a certain age".

As it turns out, the august broadsheet rock hack could not have been more wrong: for huge sections of the performance, Bush's movements look heavily choreographed: she moves with a lithe grace, clearly still drawing on the mime training she underwent as a teenager forty years on. Her voice too is in remarkable condition: she's note-perfect throughout.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features

Backed by a band of musicians capable of navigating the endless twists and turns of her songwriting – from funk to folk to pastoral prog rock - the performances of Running Up That Hill and King of the Mountain sound almost identical to their recorded versions - but letting rip during a version of Top of the City, she sounds flatly incredible.

You suspect that even if she hadn't, the audience would have lapped it up. Audibly delighted to be in the same room as her, they spend the first part of the show clapping everything she does: no gesture is too insignificant to warrant a round of applause. It would be cloying, but for the fact that Bush genuinely gives them something to cheer about.

For someone who's spent the vast majority of her career shunning the stage, she's a hugely engaging live performer, confident enough to shun the hits that made her famous in the first place: she plays nothing from her first four albums.

The staging might look excessive on paper, but onstage it works to astonishing effect, bolstering rather than overwhelming the emotional impact of the songs. The Ninth Wave is disturbing, funny and so immersive that the crowd temporarily forget to applaud everything Bush does. As each scene bleeds into another, they seem genuinely rapt: at the show's interval, people look a little stunned. A Sky of Honey is less obviously dramatic – nothing much happens over the course of its nine tracks – but the live performance underlines how beautiful the actual music is.

Already widely acclaimed as the most influential and respected British female artist of the past 40 years, shrouded in the kind of endlessly intriguing mystique that is almost impossible to conjure in an internet age, Bush theoretically had a lot to lose by returning to the stage. Clearly, given how tightly she has controlled her own career since the early 80s, she would only have bothered because she felt she had something spectacular to offer. She was right: Before The Dawn is another remarkable achievement”.

I hope that we get to see Before the Dawn come to the screen. A cinematic limited run would be ideal, though something on Disney+ would also be awesome. Getting to see this iconic artist on stage. Something few thought would ever happen! Things have changed since 2016. Bush has revisited past material and been closely involved with Stranger Things and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) being used. Knowing legions of new and young fans are discovering her work. She realises people want something new. There seems few genuine or compelling reasons why the footage captured from Before the Dawn cannot be released to the public. On its tenth anniversary, it would be a rare thing from Kate Bush: a new release. Technically, it is not new to 80,000 people or so, though it is for the vast majority of her fans. Hearing news of the footage out in a concert film with some new and archived footage together. That would blow minds! One can never rule it out. Seeing this once-in-a-lifetime show come to the screen would be embraced for sure. What better time to make that happen. A decade after Kate Bush…

STEPPED onto the stage in Hammersmith.

FEATURE: Beyond BBC Radio 6 Music’s Change the Tune… Raising Awareness of Trolling and Abuse Against Artists

FEATURE:

 

 

Beyond BBC Radio 6 Music’s Change the Tune…

IN THIS PHOTO: Rebecca Lucy Taylor (Self Esteem)/PHOTO CREDIT: Philipp Mueller via Red Bull

Raising Awareness of Trolling and Abuse Against Artists

_________

I want to build on something that I wrote…

IMAGE CREDIT: BBC

about fairly recently. Now more than in recent years, there is a lot of hatred and abuse online. Alongside the sort of division and trolling that can afflict people on an average day, there is also the intensity and acceleration of a very toxic and troubling wave of abuse connected to the genocide happening in Gaza. It is a very disturbing space to be in for a lot of reasons. Looking on social media and seeing videos of death and destruction. Some of the comments that seem to support or ignore the violence taking place. Others that are abused for supporting Palestine. Away from that, there is also political division in the U.K. and U.S. Online abuse is something that can affect and impact us all. There is something particularly hazardous when it comes to artists being on social media. The degree and type of abuse they can face. From tomorrow (12th), BBC Radio 6 Music’s Change the Tune begins. There is this serries of programmes and initiative that is designed to highlight abuse that artists face online. I shall expand more on why now it is especially important that artists are protected. That the online space is a safe and accepting one. It is not something that only affects major artists. There is so many different wats that online abusers and trolls can reach an artist with their intolerance and hatred. From sexual abuse and misogyny that women face to threats and explicit messages, this can have a hugely detrimental affect on their wellbeing. I know of any artists who have faced so much online abuse. They also face abuse and assault at gigs and away from the digital world. At the moment, there is not a lot in place regarding barriers from trolling online. You can block someone who sends abuse or trolls, though there is not really a filter on sites like Twitter and Instagram to prevent it coming through.

I do think that artists are especially exposed to online abuse. From simple unkindness and judgement to the worst and most shocking forms of abuse, I get the feeling that things have intensified and declined over the past few months. It is a very challenging and horrifying time right now. It is awful for so many people. For artists, who are trying to launch their careers and get their work heard, they often have to face harassment and abuse. Whether it sexual aggression or racial threats, we need to make sure that there is a safe and loving community online. It is good that BBC Radio 6 Music are spearheading such an initiative. A very timely and important endeavour. Here are more details:

“As part of the BBC’s Mental Wellbeing season, BBC Radio 6 Music will launch Change The Tune - an on-air, digital and social media initiative to raise awareness of the impact that online abuse has on the lives of artists.

We will hear from musicians and presenters, who will share their online experiences, as well as from mental health professionals about the effects that personal attacks online can have on individuals and their lives.

In response, 6 Music will launch a clear code of conduct and a new means of reporting comments of concern on its own social media platforms.

The initiative will feature:

• A Journeys In Sound special on 6 Music (Monday 13 May, 11pm-12am), presented by 6 Music broadcaster and psychotherapist Nemone and featuring Rebecca Lucy Taylor (Self Esteem), Lauren Mayberry of CHVRCHES, Nitin Sawhney CBE and SHERELLE.

• Lauren Mayberry: I Change Shapes – a 1 x 15 minute documentary for BBC iPlayer (live from 6am on Monday 13 May).

• A social media initiative across 6 Music’s platforms (from 10am on Monday 13 May) which will see the station share: a clear code of conduct for its online community; a new means of reporting comments of concern; and films from 6 Music’s AFRODEUTSCHE, Craig Charles, Deb Grant, Jamz Supernova and SHERELLE, as well as Gossip and Hak Baker about their own online experiences.

Working in partnership with 6 Music for Change The Tune is Music Minds Matter – sister charity of Help Musicians, which supports the mental health of everyone working in music in the UK.

Lauren Mayberry says: "The internet has been such an intrinsic part of my career, positively and negatively. Social media was really baked into the way that CHVRCHES first got discovered but there were consistent side effects to that which I don't think I would ever have anticipated. We know a lot more now in terms of the impact that can have on people but I'm not sure how we change that behaviour, or the conversation around it."

In support of Change The Tune, 6 Music presenter Guy Garvey says: “Our social media is for celebrating artists. It celebrates the people listening as well. By tuning into 6 Music, you're already part of this community. I'd say the rule should be, support good ideas, and if you don't like something, keep it to yourself.”

Nemone says: “It’s been really thought-provoking speaking to artists about their lived experience with social media and to hear first-hand about the impact that online comments of a personal nature have. It brought home to me how important it is for us all to reflect on how we show up online and the kind of community we want to shape.”

Samantha Moy, Head of BBC Radio 6 Music says: “6 Music has always aimed to be a positive and uplifting place for artists and fans alike, where we celebrate the widest range of music possible, both on-air and across platforms. With Change The Tune, we want to give musicians the space to share their online experiences, the good and the bad. At the same time, we will put measures in place that we hope will make our corner of the internet a kinder, encouraging and more supportive place for musicians’ work. I’d like to thank all the artists, presenters and our colleagues across the music industry who have contributed so openly to Change The Tune, as well as to Music Minds Matter for their support.”

Laurie Oliva, Director of Services and Research, Help Musicians and sister charity Music Minds Matter says: “Musicians pour their souls into their performances and records in a uniquely personal way, which means sharing their music is an inherently vulnerable endeavour. At Music Minds Matter, we understand the mental health pressure that can come with a job in music, especially for artists who often need to be on social media to grow their fanbases and build sustainable careers. However, being online should be a place to find your tribe, not to divide. We’re so pleased to partner with 6 Music on this important series and ensure those who may be struggling know they have a charity that will listen, understand and help.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Marianna Spring/PHOTO CREDIT: Sane Seven for The Times Magazine

Journeys In Sound (6 Music)

On Monday 13 May (11pm-12pm), 6 Music will broadcast a Journeys In Sound special, in which 6 Music presenter and psychotherapist Nemone hears from Rebecca Lucy Taylor, otherwise known as Self Esteem, Lauren Mayberry of the synth-pop band CHVRCHES, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney CBE, the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring, 6 Music presenter, DJ and artist SHERELLE, as well as psychotherapist and former Babyshambles member Dr Adam Ficek about their perspectives on online abuse and the challenges they have faced in the digital space.

Rebecca, Lauren, Nitin and SHERELLE talk openly and frankly in the programme about their use of social media as a tool to promote their music and connect with fans, and reveal how such platforms have made them a target for shocking misogynistic and racial abuse.

Marianna comments on the digital world in which we find ourselves now. She shares her own experiences of receiving extreme hate online, the repercussions it has on her everyday life as an investigative reporter and the importance of shining a light on the darker areas of the internet.

Nemone also explores the subject with Dr Adam, the founder of Music & Mind, an independent service that helps musicians, creatives and music industry workers navigate their mental health and wellness.

Lauren Mayberry and Nemone will also discuss Change The Tune on Lauren Laverne’s BBC Radio 6 Music show on Monday 13 May (7.30am-10.30am) and Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 show on Wednesday 15 May (12pm-2pm).

A BBC Audio production.

All radio programming will be available on BBC Sounds.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels

Lauren Mayberry: I Change Shapes (BBC iPlayer)

Live on BBC iPlayer from 6am on Monday 13 May, CHVRCHES frontwoman Lauren reflects on the highs and lows of her journey in music as she launches her solo career.

From worldwide success to online trolling and misogyny, the singer-songwriter speaks candidly about putting negative experiences as an artist behind her - including online threats – and the cathartic nature of her solo writing, which she describes as ‘psychological unstitching’.

Before her time as the frontwoman of CHVRCHES, multi-instrumentalist Lauren made an impact locally in the Glasgow music scene and was surrounded by a group of like-minded friends, who she met through TYCI: a DIY feminist fanzine that she co-founded to address gender imbalance in music.

National and international success followed and Lauren was quickly thrust into an exciting new world, however, there was a darker side. Lauren recalls how the narrative around her success was often centered on gender and image, rather than musicianship, and how she frequently faced abuse online, including misogynistic comments and violent threats.

This documentary will see Lauren explain how her fight against abuse made its way into her writing and how her experiences motivated her to move forward in an empowering and progressive way.

Commissioned by BBC Scotland and produced by BBC Scotland Productions

Social media

On Monday 13 May from 10am, 6 Music will launch Change The Tune across its social media platforms.

The station will reaffirm its mission for its online spaces - which includes the support and celebration of artists - and outline a clear code of conduct for its online community. The code of conduct is as follows:

In addition, there will be a new and simplified method for reporting comments of concern, with artists and fans alike able to contact the station via an email address that will be available on 6 Music’s social media platforms from 10am on Monday 13 May.

Across the week, (Monday 13 – Friday 17 May) 6 Music’s social media accounts will post films from artists and 6 Music presenters - AFRODEUTSCHE, Craig Charles, Deb Grant, Gossip, Hak Baker, Jamz Supernova and SHERELLE - in which they’ll share their personal experiences of online abuse.

IN THIS PHOTO: Pixabay/Pexels

Music Minds Matter

Partnering with 6 Music on Change The Tune is Help Musicians’ sister charity Music Minds Matter – its range of services include a 24/7 support line, available for free to everyone working in music in the UK.

Audiences can visit BBC Action Line for more information about how to get in touch with Music Minds Matter, from Monday 13th May onwards.

The BBC’s Mental Wellbeing season

Change The Tune is part of the BBC’s Mental Wellbeing season, which takes place throughout May. The BBC will be bringing audiences a range of mental health and wellbeing content across its platforms and services, highlighting stories of those who have faced mental health struggles as well as helping audiences understand how to look after their mental wellbeing, and where to go for support. More information is available here.

Journeys In Sound

The Change The Tune special of Journeys In Sound marks the start of a new four-part series of the returning programme (Monday 13 – Thursday 16 May, 11pm-12am). Journeys In Sound sees 6 Music’s Nemone explore the link between music and the mind and combine her role as broadcaster and integrative psychotherapist to find out how music really affects us.

Further episodes will see Nemone in conversation with Alison Mosshart (Tuesday 14 May), Paul Weller (Wednesday 15 May) and Jane Weaver (Thursday 16 May) about the songs that have soundtracked the ups and downs of their lives.

Alison Mosshart, artist and one half of enigmatic duo The Kills, discusses: growing up in the sleepy town of Vero Beach in Florida; how she convinced her parents to let her travel abroad as a young teenager with her first band Discount; her surprising love of Annie the musical; how she met her bandmate Jamie Hince on a trip to London; letting go on stage; long car journeys as a form of self-care; and how she has maintained a level of mystique in a world of social media. Featuring music from Led Zeppelin, Gang Green, PJ Harvey, Fugazi, The Dead Weather and Captain Beefheart.

Speaking about whether she feels it’s difficult to maintain distance in the era of social media, Alison Mosshart says: “I don’t really think it is, you just have to not post every day. I think it is up to you. I get it, I get the pressure, especially with work, especially with the way things are, having to brand yourself on such an extreme level to actually have a career in music and it’s really sad. It’s horrible. I hope I never have to do that because I will be the worst at it. It’s not going to come naturally to me.”

Paul Weller, the prolific, award-winning singer and songwriter affectionally known as “The Modfather” by his fans, reveals: what life growing up with the Wellers in Woking was like; the impact of The Jam’s success and subsequent split had on him; working with his musical ‘brother’ Steve Cradock of Ocean Colour Scene; the joy he feels playing live; how his life has changed since giving up alcohol; and how he tries to look after himself. Featuring music from The Beatles, Little Richard, The Four Tops, The Who, The Sex Pistols and The Clash.

Speaking in the programme, Paul Weller says: “Music was my escape […] I used to peer over the city walls and think ‘yeah one day I’m going to escape this and I’m going to go and do something else’. And that’s what music’s enabled me to do. But also in the first place, music made me realise there were other possibilities as well.”

Jane Weaver, who has performed as part of the Britpop group Kill Laura, the folktronica project Misty Dixon and as a solo artist, talks to Nemone about: growing up in Widnes; the influence the Liverpool music scene had on her as a teenager; the pitfalls of the music industry; living with coeliac disease and the long road to a diagnosis; overcoming an eating disorder and postnatal depression; and the tragic disappearance of her Misty Dixon band mate, Dave Tyack. Featuring music from Prince, U2, OMD, 10,000 Maniacs, The Icicle Works, Hawkwind and The Velvet Underground.

Speaking in the programme, Jane Weaver says: “It’s made me kind of resilient but I have experienced quite a lot of sexism in my time. Just people treat me differently because I’m a woman […]. I seem to get some kind of Columbo-style detective people who will interview you and say ‘exactly what did you do on your record’ […]. I’m fine being a nerd and talking about process or talking about instruments or technical things or things I did or didn’t do. I’m quite happy to do that but a long few minutes in I realise ah, you’re only asking me that because you think a man is behind everything”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul Weller/PHOTO CREDIT: GQ

There is a lot of information here that I included in the earlier feature. I wanted to keep on the topic of online abuse as, more and more, there is this pressure on artists to market themselves. So much competition right now. It is so tough to make a break and get traction. Even if many artists wat to pull away from social media, it is still a hugely affective form of promotion and awareness. Even if Instagram is seen as a less toxic and troublesome space as Twitter or TikTok, there is no platform where artists are truly free from abuse and trolling. Not only is it the viciousness and bile they get from other people. I also feel the pressure of being online so much in itself is draining. A combination of posting about their own music and also having to see such horrible images, news and posts from others. Maybe more successful artists seemingly doing better. It can add its own sting. The reality is that no artist is immune from the worst side of social media. The more we use it and the worst things are in the world, the worst the experience is. I don’t think that cases of misogyny and abuse have massively reduced. So many women are still receiving the most disturbing and aggressive messages and comments. The mental health of many male artists is being damaged by what they have to read online. I think that BBC Radio 6 Music’s Change the Tune is very important.

It is good that there are resources and organisations that can help. Music Minds Matter is a great and needed charity. I also want to bring back in Tamsin Embleton’s Touring and Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual. This is also an invaluable resource at a time when the extra pressure and drain of touring goes alongside the forms of abuse and discrimination many artists experience online. It is worrying that so many artists are caught between a rock and a hard place. They need to be online and get their work shared and heard. That said, even though they mostly receive love, there are those that can make their life very unpleasant. A general demand too that they connect with fans. Even fi they are close to their fans, sometimes the boundaries can get blurred. It can be exhausting having to be upbeat and always engaging on social media when the industry and musician lifestyle can be enough on its own. Throw in some of the abuse that comes there way and it is clear that many musicians are being impacted. What is the combined cost of this?! We can never know how they feel behind closed doors. The true impact that of this abuse and trolling online. Making sure that social media and online spaces are safe is paramount. It should be the case: if you don’t like something then keep it to yourself. People think they are entitled to say what they want because they have that veil of anonymity and are not face-to-face with an artist. We need to ensure that conduct and behaviour is corrected. Let those who abuse and troll realise the damage they are doing. Whether it is sexual or racial abuse, it is having such a damaging and harrowing affect on artists. It will lead to many artists leaving the industry and social media to get away from it.

PHOTO CREDIT: Liza Summer/Pexels

Also at the moment, there is a real issue with misogyny and gender inequality in the industry (something that has always been there and is slow to go away). It is disappointing to see a comparative lack of male allyship and action from many artists. I do hope that this improves. In terms of tackling those who abuse and harass female artists online, I do hope that more men through the industry stand up. Of course, an unpleasant and sometimes dangerous online environment is something that affects all genders. The more that initiatives like Change the Tune spread and are taken to heart, the better it will be for everyone. Maybe we will never see the eradication of abuse and trolling online. We can get a lot closer than we are not. The fact that artists are so important and valuable to all of us should compel instant change. It will be slower than that, though Kudos to BBC Radio 6 Music for doing this. Through next week, tune into the station; follow BBC Radio 6 Music on Instagram. Opening the conversation so that we can all help make social media and the online world a much nicer place. It is long overdue. Hearing from artists like Rebecca Lucy Taylor, Lauren Mayberry and their peers discuss the challenges they have faced through the years – and still do – will bring to light the extent and severity of the problem. Change the Tune is a worthy and fascinating initiative that is going to be invaluable and eye-opening. When it comes to the negativity and toxicity that is still very present online, let’s hope we can all come together to help change the tune…

FOR good.

FEATURE: New Dawn Fades: Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

New Dawn Fades

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures at Forty-Five

_________

THERE are plenty of…

PHOTO CREDIT: Lex van Rossen/MAI/Redferns

interesting features around Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Ones like this and this are well worth reading. I am going to bring in a couple. The reason for this is that the debut album from Joy Division turns forty-five on 15th June. Recorded and mixed over three successive weekends at Stockport's Strawberry Studios in April 1979, with producer Martin Hannett, many consider this album to be one of the best of all time. I will end with a couple of reviews. There are some features that are expansive and detailed that are worth uniting. Giving a clear impression of Unknown Pleasures. How it came together and the impact it has had. I will start out with Irish Times. They celebrated, what they called, an accidental masterpiece on the fortieth anniversary of Unknown Pleasures in 2019:

“Unknown Pleasures seemed to have arrived through a slipstream, from another time and place. And though it could be enjoyed as both a bleak pop revue and an exorcism (ultimately unsuccessful) of singer Ian Curtis’s demons, the LP was above all profoundly mysterious. All these decades later there’s a case that it remains fundamentally inscrutable. You may think you’ve got its measure – but you’re never quite there, never really all the way in.

“Unknown Pleasures once sounded like the future – its genius is that, four decades later, it still sounds like the future,” says John Robb, Manchester musician, rock journalist and author of The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City 1976–1996.

Melancholy

“It is a remarkable and astonishing record made by a band who had no idea how good they were, with a singer who didn’t live long enough to see how important they would become. Its bass-driven soundscapes utilise space, emotion and melancholy in ways the generations of bands are still trying to unravel.”

Robb cuts to the heart Unknown Pleasures’ dark charm in describing it as the sound of the future glimmering over the horizon. Steeped in the social-realistic science fiction of JG Ballard and raised amid the infinite greys and browns of postwar greater Manchester, Joy Division had transcended punk and gone somewhere sadder and scarier.

They did so in part thanks to the expressive lyrics of Ian Curtis, lines delivered with the lights out, words recited from the heart, during the late-night sessions at Strawberry.

“To the centre of the city where all roads meet, waiting for you/ To the depths of the ocean where all hopes sank, searching for you,” Curtis sang on Shadowplay, a fever-dream striplit by halogen street-lighting and the flash of passing traffic.

“I could have lived a little better with the myths and the lies,” continued the narrator on She’s Lost Control. “When the darkness broke in, I just broke down and cried.”

Foreshadowing

She’s Lost Control was about a woman with epilepsy Curtis had met at the Macclesfield job centre where he worked. She died during an epileptic fit and, with Curtis himself diagnosed with the condition, the track is both a requiem and also a foreshadowing of his own future (he died by suicide in May 1980). But it chills even outside of that context, as a mediation on how ill-prepared we all are when life throws its worst at us.

Curtis’s unflinching lyrics were counterpointed by Bernard Sumner’s minimalist guitars and by the funereal stomp of bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris. To this was added Peter Saville’s instantly iconic cover sleeve, based on the zig-zag radio frequency of a dying star.

“Unknown Pleasures may very well be one of the best white, English debut LPs of the year,” wrote the group’s future biographer Jon Savage in Melody Maker the week of its release. ”Without trying to baffle or overreach itself, this outfit step into a labyrinth that is rarely explored with any smidgeon of real conviction,” said the NME. Soon it was agreed that Joy Division had created a masterpiece.

Everyone in Manchester knew they were the best band in the city. I saw them play and sometimes they were s**t but most times they were great

All of this the band achieved, as already pointed out, largely by accident.Their ambition had been to make a cacophonous punk record in the vein of their idols Buzzcocks and The Sex Pistols. But Strawberry Studios, bankrolled by members of soft pop ensemble 10CC, was the domain of control freak producer Martin Hannett. He took care that Unknown Pleasures was his vision as much as Joy Division’s.

Eating glass

Hannett was an eccentric taskmaster. He taped, during the sessions, the sound of breaking glass, someone eating crisps (which he then played backwards) and the chilling clunk and shudder of the antiquated Strawberry Studios lift. “[Joy Division] were a gift to a producer, because they didn’t have a clue,” he would reminisce. “They didn’t argue.”

After the fact, though, they groused at length. “The production inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album,” guitarist Sumner complained. “We’d drawn this picture in black-and-white, and Martin had coloured it in for us. We resented it.”

Joy Division were not at that point regarded as potentially one of the most significant British groups of their generation. Nonetheless, they were perceived as the Manchester band most likely to step up and break out.

“Joy Division were such a great band,” Jez Kerr of contemporaries and label-mates A Certain Ratio would later state. “Everyone in Manchester knew they were the best band in the city. Ask anyone from that era who was the best band in Manchester and they all say Joy Division. I saw them play and sometimes they were s**t but most times they were great. It’s the mark of a good band that starting out you can be crap but at other times totally brilliant.”

Hannett was introduced to Joy Division by Tony Wilson, a local scenester who had signed the group to his label, Factory Records. The Factory story is closely bound up with the north of England punk movement. But it also boasts several unusual Irish connections. Many of Factory’s most famous releases – including the 1979 Factory Sampler EP, and Joy Division’s timeless single Love Will Tear Us Part – were pressed at the Carlton Productions vinyl pressing plant on the John F Kennedy estate on the Naas Road.

Friendship

Wilson, meanwhile, maintained a lifelong friendship with Meath football manager Sean Boylan. They had met when Wilson’s family was holidays in Dunboyne, where they struck up an enduring connection.

“Tony fell in love with our family and everyone around Dunboyne,” Boylan would recount. “So he came every Christmas. He came at Easter. He came at summer. He came at Whit. Every break there was he came, even when he went to Cambridge . . . Once you were a friend of Tony, that was it.”

Joy Division were also a huge influence on early U2. Hannett recorded the Dubliners’ seven-inch 11 O’Clock Tick-Tock, imbuing it with a Factory-ish veneer of monochrome angst. A Day Without Me, a single from U2’s debut album, Boy, was, moreover, partly a lament for Curtis (albeit one U2 had debuted in uncompleted form prior to his death).

Its black-and-white sleeve shot of Booterstown railway bridge was perceived as echoing Joy Division’s famous photoshoot at Epping Walk bridge in Hulme. Bono would later tell Wilson that U2 were ready to take the Manchester’s group’s place.

“Bono once said to me, he [Ian Curtis] was the best,” Wilson remembered. “‘I was always the number two, but he was the best. But you know, I’ll do it anyway. Now he’s gone.’ But I think Bono did do it. I mean, I’ve never been a massive U2 fan, but when I saw him, that wonderful performance at Live Aid, I thought, well, there you are.”

Wilson was a dedicated schmoozer, it’s worth acknowledging. As portrayed by Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom’s 24-Hour Party People, he seemed to enjoy the spotlight more than his bands did. Still, he wasn’t a shill – and he gave Joy Division the freedom they required.

Extraordinary

What they, and Hannett, did with it was extraordinary. “I was such a fan of punk I thought all good music would end at that point, nothing would top the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Jam etc,” recalls Tom Dunne, radio presenter and Something Happens frontman. “Then Unknown Pleasures arrived. I found it jarring initially. It was so unlike what had come before. I didn’t take to it at once. But slowly it crept into me. Ian Curtis singing those lonesome, plaintive words drew me in. He was mesmeric. There was an intensity about them.”

Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Peter Hook of Joy Division. Photograph: Harry Goodwin/Rex Features

If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it's because they capture the depressed spirit of our times

Listened to today, what’s most striking is how contemporary Unknown Pleasure feels. It really hasn’t aged at all.

“If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed spirit of our times. Listen to Joy Division now, and you have the inescapable impression that the group were catatonically channelling our present, their future,” wrote Mark Fisher in his 2005 essay collection Ghosts of My Life.

Unknown Pleasures would inevitably be overshadowed by Curtis’s death. He hung himself in the kitchen of the Macclesfield terraced house he shared with his wife and baby daughter 11 months after the album’s release. Joy Division had just completed their second LP, Closer, and were planning a tour to America.

Curtis was just 24. He had married young and become a parent barely out of his teens. And while he had a sincere and thoughtful streak – as manifested in lyrics that referenced Ballard and Burroughs – he was a young man in a successful band.

An affair with a Belgian music journalist left him crippled with guilt. But it also stoked resentment towards his wife, Deborah, and the opportunities denied him by dint of his responsibilities towards her and their daughter. The heavy medication he was required to take for his epilepsy didn’t help.

I will come to some reviews now. There are so many tributes to the album and features about it. Going into detail about its brilliance. I hope that this feature gives you a better impression and understanding of Joy Division’s debut album. Unknown Pleasures is considered one of the greatest albums ever. If some in 1979 were mixed in their reception, things have changed now. Some noting that there was bleakness and this nightmare sound running through the album. Not sure how to take it. In the years since, the reviews have been unanimously positive. This is what NME noted in their review:

“Joy Division’s reputation has grown with every year after their abrupt and tragic end in May 1980, when Curtis hanged himself in his Macclesfield home on the eve of the band’s first American tour. It’s a story told in full in the forthcoming Anton Corbijn biopic Control, an intoxicating mixture of musical triumph and personal tragedy. But it’s the music alone we’re here to talk about, as both studio albums (along with the posthumous compilation ‘Still’) are receiving timely reissues complete with extra CDs of live material.

The band’s debut ‘Unknown Pleasures’, originally released in 1979, is simply one of the best records ever made, and is still powerful enough to floor you 28 years on. With an almost dub-like, spacey atmosphere sculpted by studio genius Martin Hannett, the band’s sound – Peter Hook’s rumbling basslines, Barney Sumner’s eerie guitar shrieks and Steven Morris’ machine-like drumming – was almost the polar opposite of the punk music which had brought them together after a Sex Pistols show in 1976.

The album’s raw power is still gripping, most notably on the haunting ‘Day Of The Lords’ and ‘She’s Lost Control’, which Curtis, who was epileptic, wrote in sympathy after hearing that a girl he

knew with the same condition had died.

‘Closer’, released just months after his death in 1980, is an appropriate epitaph for Curtis. With personal problems and his medical condition causing him extreme pain both physically and mentally, the likes of clattering opener ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and the harrowing ‘Decades’, which both refer to psychosis and mental breakdown, offer compelling evidence that this was a man at the end of his tether. Even the most upbeat moment is chilling – ‘Isolation’’s icy synths adding a sinister edge to what is essentially an electropop tune.

‘Closer’ almost touches the same heights as the band’s debut, but lacks an anthem – but then the contrary bastards did decide to release the peerless ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ as a stand-alone single instead, just because they could.

The remaining members regrouped after Curtis’ death and, as New Order, went on to change the alternative rock landscape again after investing in a sampler. But that’s another story entirely. The happy ending here is that, thanks to the astonishing, timeless, awe-inspiring music, Ian Curtis, Tony Wilson and Joy Division will all live forever”.

I am going to end with a review from AllMusic. It will be interesting to see how others react to the upcoming forty-fifth anniversary of Unknown Pleasures. On 15th June, I am sure that we will get a lot of new perspectives about a classic debut album. Joy Division followed Unknown Pleasure with 1980’s Closer. Even though I did not discover the album until fairly recently, I can recognise that it is an astonishing debut. A hugely influential album. If you have not heard it then I would advise that you spend time with it:

“It even looks like something classic, beyond its time or place of origin even as it was a clear product of both -- one of Peter Saville's earliest and best designs, a transcription of a signal showing a star going nova, on a black embossed sleeve. If that were all Unknown Pleasures was, it wouldn't be discussed so much, but the ten songs inside, quite simply, are stone-cold landmarks, the whole album a monument to passion, energy, and cathartic despair. The quantum leap from the earliest thrashy singles to Unknown Pleasures can be heard through every note, with Martin Hannett's deservedly famous production -- emphasizing space in the most revelatory way since the dawn of dub -- as much a hallmark as the music itself. Songs fade in behind furtive noises of motion and activity, glass breaks with the force and clarity of doom, and minimal keyboard lines add to an air of looming disaster -- something, somehow, seems to wait or lurk beyond the edge of hearing. But even though this is Hannett's album as much as anyone's, the songs and performances are the true key. Bernard Sumner redefined heavy metal sludge as chilling feedback fear and explosive energy, Peter Hook's instantly recognizable bass work was at once warm and forbidding, and Stephen Morris' drumming smacked through the speakers above all else. Ian Curtis synthesizes and purifies every last impulse, his voice shot through with the desire first and foremost to connect, only connect -- as "Candidate" plaintively states, "I tried to get to you/You treat me like this." Pick any song: the nervous death dance of "She's Lost Control"; the harrowing call for release "New Dawn Fades," all four members in perfect sync; the romance in hell of "Shadowplay"; "Insight" and its nervous drive toward some sort of apocalypse. All visceral, all emotional, all theatrical, all perfect -- one of the best albums ever”.

Released on 15th June, 1979, we are not far from the forty-fifth anniversary of Unknown Pleasures. Songs like Shadowplay and She’s Lost Control still sounds so powerful and haunting to this day. So arresting and compelling, there are few albums that have the same legacy and significance as Unknown Pleasures. Once heard, this is an album that will…

NEVER be forgotten.

FEATURE: Oh England, My Lionheart: Kate Bush and the Importance and Relevance of Home

FEATURE:

 

 

Oh England, My Lionheart

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at her family home, East Wickham Farm, on 26th September, 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Moorhouse/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images 

Kate Bush and the Importance and Relevance of Home

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WHEREAS so many major artists…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush working hard in the studio in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

have travelled the world and spent years living in different countries, Kate Bush is someone who has always very much been rooted in England. She has spent time with family in Ireland. Her mother, Hannah, was Irish. The Bush family travelled to Australia and New Zealand. She has been all around the world during her career. I think that people think of Kate Bush as a quintessential English woman. Despite the fact her D.N.A. goes deeper and she has travelled far and wide, for the most part, she has not moved beyond the south of England. I have been thinking about the importance and relevance of home to Kate Bush in terms of her career, sound and her and this image we have of her. I am going to be writing about her first three albums – 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart; 1980’s Never for Ever – following a recent MOJO spread that was written by author Tom Doyle. Kate Bush was born in Bexleyheath is a town in the London Borough of Bexley, which is located in Greater London. It is situated in the historic county of Kent. Her family lived at East Wickham Farm in Welling (Welling is an area of South East London, within the London Borough of Bexley and the boundaries of Kent). She had that balance of being on the edge of London and the city but having the countryside and something all the more peaceful at her feet. I want to look more at her later career and how home and a permanent base was important after 1993. I guess Bush’s upbringing and the stability that she saw was important when it came to how her career and recording changed in the 1990s onwards. Not common among her peers, even before she released her debut album, she had this safety at home. A financial security and a very fostering family. A beautiful house in an ideal part of England, I also think that the way she experienced homelife as a child and teen affected how Bush would act and run things as a producer.

Kate Bush has amassed a heap of demos and recordings at her family home. With her brothers Paddy and Jay hugely interested in music and introducing her to so many different sounds, she also found a patient and encouraging audience in her parents. Her doctor father, Robert, was particularly encouraging and would listen to her perform at home. He played piano and was a big influence when it came to Kate Bush taking up the instrument. That nurturing and warm environment was crucial. Kate Bush did not really have the opportunity to record albums at home until she was established and could afford to. Even so, she was not moving far. Recording in London studios, really the only time she broke that rule was recording Lionheart in France in 1978. Perhaps more relaxing and picturesque than AIR Studios in Central London, there were issues in France. I think, for its faults and griminess, the locality to her family home and a sense of convenience was important. Bush spent time living with her brothers and had a flat in London. She has never really moved too far from where she grew up. Home and family has been at the heart of everything she has done. From that safety net and art-filled home when she was a child and teen, Bush always made sure she was never too far from that focused centre. It is also interesting how conduct and hospitality at home impacted her. A very warm and welcoming family who were at hand to greet musicians and guests with tea and a warm smile, that definitely would have made home and attractive place to record and create. Also, when Bush started producing from 1980’s Never for Ever, she brought a lot of that parental warmth and support to the people she worked with. Always running through her blood.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the grand piano at Studio Two, Abbey Road, London on 10th May, 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport

1982’s The Dreaming changed things a lot. Even though she recorded at studios through London and lived in the area, it was exhausting and a tough period. Solo producing and packing so much into the album, there was not a lot of time for rest and any real bonding with her musicians. Even though that did happen, perhaps more time and budget would have been beneficial for so many reasons. When she could afford to build her own studio for Hounds of Love (1985), she put it right by her family home at East Wickham Farm. I know that that blossom and safe environment meant she could have support from the family and build her own recording and creative environment. Home once more being vital. At that time, prior to the album being released, there was hospitality and support from her family. Bush – who was still in her mid-twenties – was providing that same sort of support and warmth to her musicians. I often think of Kate Bush and her home. Right now, as we speak, the fact is that she does not need to travel. She can record at home. Everything around her can feed directly into her music. Life has changed since she recorded Hounds of Love. She now has a grown-up son, Albert, who is in his twenties. I wonder whether there was ever temptation for her to move to another part of the world. You feel like being rooted and remaining relatively close to where she was born and grew up was always the plan.

After Hounds of Love, it was clear things had changed for the better. How beneficial and enriching it was to be around family. To have control and say when it came to the studio and her environment. The next two albums, The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, saw Bush record at professional studios. A lot of The Sensual World was recorded at Wickham Farm Home. She also recorded at Windmill Lane (Dublin, Ireland) and Angel (Islington, England). Again, a connection to her family and ancestorial home. Having one foot in Ireland and the other in England. The Red Shoes took her to Abbey Road. That was released in 1993. During the recording of the album, Bush’s mother died (in 1992). She also was in a new relationship with Danny McIntosh. Feeling tired and in need of a career break, as soon as that album came out, Bush was more than ever committed to home. Bits of Aerial (2005) were recorded at Abbey Road though, as has been the case from there, home studios have been dominant. Having that stability. Not having to move between studios. She had started her own family too. It is wonderful reading features and interviews with Kate Bush from 2005. Unlike past interviews where she was in various locations and was pushed from pillar to post, album promotion was largely taking place from her home. People would be invited in. Bush would welcome with food and drink. Much like her mother and father in the 1970s and 1980s, Bush was embodying them when she was promoting at home. I don’t think Kate Bush would have released any albums after The Red Shoes if she could not record at home. The lure of professional studios and commuting had gone.

Aerial is a double album where home is at its heart. Lyrics and lines that reference her mother and domesticity. The garden and nature. Memories of the past and the comfort of home. It has always been vital to her. Receiving such love and support from her parents when she was a child through to years aspiring of being an artist, that has been held in her heart. The need to be close to home and have that base. 2011’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow. Bringing collaborators and artists into her home studio. I always get the impression that travel and exposure was an unwanted by-product of the music industry for Kate Bush. If she could have remained local or not travelled as much she would have been happy. I am sure that she did enjoy The Tour of Life and seeing people around the U.K. and Europe. Promotional trips to the U.S., Australia and Japan. It was all important. All the same, it took Bush from the studio and writing. Even when she was writing in London flats and elsewhere, one always get the feeling that she was not as happy and inspired as she was back at East Wickham Farm. Returning there for Hounds of Love, it might have ignited something in her. By 1993, when she was thirty-five, I think there was this resolution that she was going to set down foundations and keep home close to her. She had been traveling and going from place to place since she was a teen, but she always felt that pull and importance of family and being in and around where she grew up. Even since 1993, her moves have not been drastic. A home studio means she does not commute and can have a solid base. So many people she has interviewed in years since 1993 – including Tom Doyle – have reported her legendary hospitality. The fact that she is both this huge artist and impressive figure but also down to Earth and accessible. I have been thinking about it a lot. Kate Bush and home. Wanting to lead a more normal and modest life. Somewhere she feels more settled and inspired. Thinking back to that 2022 interview with Woman’s Hour where she was speaking from home on a landline. How unshowy and relatable that was! Distinctly Kate Bush! From the teen posing at her East Wickham Farm home in 1978 to right now, a sixty-five year old Kate Bush not living too far away from that place, I do wonder what the future holds. There is a lot of love out there for Kate Bush. We all want a new album, though one can appreciate how a quieter life would suit. Not wanting to do promotion and put out new work. Who knows. I have been pondering Kate Bush as someone who has always moored herself towards family and home. That magnetic and epicentre that remains to this day. Kate Bush really is this unique blend of musical deity and…

A homegrown and grounded queen.

FEATURE: Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. at Forty

FEATURE:

 

 

Glory Days

Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. at Forty

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ONE of the biggest and most important albums ever…

IN THIS PHOTO: Bruce Springsteen performs on 24th July, 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: Ebet Roberts/Redferns

Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. turns forty on 4th June. A 1984 commercial success that soon became a classic, Springsteen recorded Born in the U.S.A. with his E Street Band. He worked alongside producers Chuck Plotkin and Jon Landau. Compared to albums like 1982’s Nebraska – which Springsteen was recording at points during the same time as Born in the U.S.A.-, his seventh studio album contains more uplifting, brighter, Pop-focused songs. The synthesizer very much at the fore. In terms of its themes and inspirations, Born in the U.S.A deals more with topics like working-class struggles, disillusionment and patriotism. The iconic album cover was taken by legendary photographer, taken by Annie Leibovitz. Born in the U.S.A. has often been selected as one of the best albums ever. Topping the charts in nine countries when it was released in 1984, it has sold over thirty million copies worldwide. It is one of the best-selling albums in history. Even though Bruce Springsteen has released other classic albums – such as 1975’s Born to Run -, nothing quite compares with Born in the U.S.A. Some may disagree. I think, it terms of its depth, impact and accessibility, Born in the U.S.A. is his pinnacle. It is surprising there have not been more features written about the album. More podcasts and documentaries about it released. As it is approaching its fortieth anniversary, I wanted to spend time with it.

I will come to a couple of detailed reviews. As you can imagine, the reviews in 1984 were hugely positive. It has only got even more praise and platforming in the years since. As Born in the U.S.A. has impacted and influenced other artists and made its way into popular culture and the wider landscape. Stereogum saluted this work of brilliance back in 2014. Marking thirty years of Born in the U.S.A. I hope there is more celebration to mark forty years of a gigantic album:

“For you to remember the first time you heard Born In The U.S.A., you have to be above a certain age. It’s just one of those albums. Once it was out there, it was ubiquitous. That tends to happen when you produce seven top ten singles from one album, or when a record goes platinum, let alone fifteen times over. The latter distinction means that Born In The U.S.A. sold about 15 million copies in America, a number that seems like total and complete fantasy compared to the anemic record industry of today, and one that ranks it within the top twenty or so highest selling albums, ever, in this country. This is not the kind of situation where you are still able to hear a record entirely on its own original terms, with remotely fresh ears. Even if you somehow all your life avoided hearing its title track, or “Dancing In The Dark,” or “Glory Days,” Born In The U.S.A. is the sort of work that, by virtue of its sheer magnitude and inevitable overexposure, comes with a whole lot of years of baggage down the line.

As of today, that would be thirty years of baggage, to be exact. Three decades on, Born In The U.S.A. has a shifting and at times conflicted legacy. In pop history, it’s simple enough — it’s one of the defining records of the ’80s, the one that jettisoned Springsteen to true superstar status. It’s one of those albums that’s never hard to find on a rack at Target or whatever, next to Thriller or Dark Side Of The Moon or Metallica. Those albums that I guess somebody somewhere will always feel like buying, the sort of stuff that’s never really out of style because it’s at such a level as to be beyond trends altogether. In Springsteen terms, it gets a little more complicated. Born In The U.S.A. is the Springsteen album for a certain generation of fans, and something else for those who came before or after. Every now and then I’ll talk to an older fan who still grimaces at memories of Born In The U.S.A. as the album where Bruce got too big, too pop, perhaps even sold out — if that’s still a thing you can really do when you were already on the covers of Newsweek and Time in the same week a decade prior. They’ll value the preceding six albums in a different way, maybe considering them more authentic. With a career as long and varied as Springsteen’s you’re bound to get those sorts of divides in a fanbase. Even something as widely beloved as “Backstreets” has been played frequently enough at Springsteen’s shows that it’s someone’s holy moment and someone else’s cue to go buy another beer. The dividing line always struck me as a bit more severe with Born In The U.S.A. tracks, though. Maybe you’re enraptured when “Dancing In The Dark” inevitably pops up in the encore, maybe you head to the parking lot early. (But if you’re the latter, I’m not sure we can be friends.)

Before we get too far down this rabbithole, it might be necessary to issue a disclaimer. I’m already on record, in a few places, about the extent of my Springsteen fandom, and the resulting amount of thought I put into his music. It’s only in the last year or two, however, where I’ve begun to listen to Born In The U.S.A. more than any of this other work. I don’t know what would be in second place, but it isn’t close. There are days when it’s my favorite Springsteen album. There are days when I think it’s a perfect album, and other days when I’m a bit more sensible and realize that if “My Love Will Not Let You Down” had taken the place of “Cover Me,” and if “Janey Don’t You Lose Heart” had replaced “Glory Days,” then it would’ve been perfect. (And, still, there are other days where I realize those maybe still wouldn’t fit, even if they’re brilliant.) And then, just about everyday, “Dancing In The Dark” is pretty much my favorite song ever. What I’m getting at here is that we’re dealing with a bias on my part.

But, more importantly, I’m also getting at the fact that I’m one of those Springsteen fans who grew up with Born In The U.S.A. as something that was just in the air, the most ever-present material from an ever-present artist, and it’s only in recent years where I’ve started to get truly obsessed with the thing, where I’ve learned to find personal resonance in an album that’s too easy to take for granted due to its inherent ubiquity. The weird thing about an album so readily ranked in the “Classic” category by every other rock retrospective of one form or another, is that people can just start to think of it as This Thing That Happened, a piece of work from some distant time and place that has little meaning to them. This is the territory in which an album like Born In The U.S.A., against most logical expectations, could become underrated.

Back around the time Springsteen released Magic in 2007, he was well into a career resurgence following a mixed bag of a decade in the ’90s. There were many factors to this, but one of them was that he’d attained a certain hipness in the ’00s; as Stephen M. Deusner put it in his review of Magic, Springsteen had replaced Brian Wilson as the “indie ideal.”

Bands like the Gaslight Anthem, the Hold Steady, and the Killers bore the influence sonically, where others like the National and the Arcade Fire were perhaps more so thematic descendants. Without fail, when people talk about Springsteen’s influence on pockets of this century’s generation of indie-rock, it’s easiest to draw the line back to Darkness On The Edge Of Town or Nebraska (especially in the case of Dirty Beaches).

Born In The U.S.A. gets a little less credit, but at times it feels like perhaps the most important Springsteen record when it comes to newer artists being influenced by his work. Given the age of some of these musicians, this is the one that would’ve been new when they were kids, just getting into music; chances are, it was the formative one. They would’ve been the young fans for whom this was their Springsteen album. Before they went all Sandinista! on Reflektor, Arcade Fire’s anthemic qualities seemed more in the lineage of Born In The U.S.A.-era Bruce, the themes of The Suburbs a mash-up of stuff like “My Hometown” and “Downbound Train” with Darkness and The River. Tellingly, when Win Butler chose his fourteen favorite Springsteen songs for Rolling Stone in 2010, most of them were from the ’80s. Butler might’ve gone onstage to play Nebraska’s “State Trooper” with the man himself, but when it came time for Arcade Fire to cover the Boss, they chose “Born In The U.S.A..” At this point, “I’m On Fire” seems destined to live on as a standard of sorts. You’ve got everyone from Mumford & Sons to Chromatics covering it. Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon, long the Springsteen acolyte, has been known to perform it solo, while his band’s own “High Lonesome” quotes/references the song”.

I am going to round off with a couple of the reviews for Born in the U.S.A. It is a shame there have not been more deep dives into the album. Anyway. This is what Pitchfork wrote when they reviewed Born in the U.S.A. in 2021. They show the appreciation of a bold, brilliant Rock blockbuster from Bruce Springsteen. An album that arrived at the apex of his career. An imperial phase as they put it. Although misunderstood by some – the title track was famously misinterpreted by so many people –, it caught fired and stole people’s hearts and minds. It still does to this day:

“As the release of Born in the U.S.A. approached in spring 1984—and with it, one of the greatest commercial ascents in the history of popular music—Bruce Springsteen was feeling apprehensive. It wasn’t because of “Dancing in the Dark,” which he added last-minute after his manager convinced him to write one more surefire attempt at a hit. It wasn’t because of the title track, a booming anthem whose chorus could be misinterpreted as a rallying cry for Reagan-era jingoism. And it wasn’t because of the cover art, a photograph by Annie Leibovitz that could be mistaken for a man urinating on an American flag. It was because of a song called “No Surrender,” and, in particular, its final verse:

Something felt off as he sang these words. Who could be so blindly optimistic? During the tour for Born in the U.S.A., which spanned 16 months and brought the E Street Band to the biggest audiences they had ever played, Springsteen tried retooling the driving arrangement as a tender acoustic ballad; he rewrote the verse and changed his delivery. By the end of the run, it only appeared sporadically in setlists. “It was a song I was uncomfortable with,” he wrote years later. “You don’t hold out and triumph all the time in life. You compromise, you suffer defeat; you slip into life’s gray areas.”

So how did it wind up on the album? It wasn’t for a lack of material. Most casual fans know that as Springsteen was in the process of piecing together this full-band masterpiece, he first recorded an entirely different one: 1982’s solo acoustic Nebraska, originally intended as demos for the follow-up to 1980’s The River. But there was more where that came from. Before he landed on the dozen songs that would comprise his bestselling album, Springsteen continued down Nebraska’s folky path with story-song outtakes like “Shut Out the Light”; he worked with the band on epics like “This Hard Land” and straight-ahead rockers like “Murder Incorporated.” He wrote a goofy song about having his story told in a TV movie and a strange, apocalyptic one about the KKK. He is estimated to have recorded somewhere between 50 and 100 songs, hoping to amass enough material for one cohesive record 

IN THIS PHOTO: Bruce Springsteen on stage in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: The Picture Collection LLC

In his early 30s, and a decade into his recording career, this was a period of introspection and desperate searching. For the first time after an album release, Springsteen didn’t go on tour for Nebraska. Instead, he went on vacation, taking a cross-country road trip with a friend. The type of open-road escape he sang about so convincingly, however, ended up being an emotional breaking point. As the trip took him from Jersey, through the South, and eventually to a new home he had purchased in the Hollywood Hills, Springsteen found himself crushed by waves of hopelessness and debilitating depression: collapsing in tears, feeling isolated, losing touch with whatever momentum had kept him burning down the road all this time.

The culture around Springsteen’s music was also shifting. MTV had evolved into a legitimate arm of the music industry, and Springsteen’s new look helped him gain traction in an image-centric medium. Meanwhile, vinyl had given way to cassettes, which were now ceding to compact discs. (Upon release, Born in the U.S.A. was advertised as the first CD manufactured in the United States; previous releases were mostly Japanese imports.) Adapting to the new technology, pop radio gravitated toward electronic strands of dance music, an innovation that Springsteen found inspiring. One song on the album, “Cover Me,” was something he originally wrote for Donna Summer, and you can hear her influence in his fiery, percussive delivery. (“She could really sing,” he wrote, “and I disliked the veiled racism of the anti-disco movement.”)

Because of its monocultural success, the ’80s gloss of Born in the U.S.A. can be somewhat overstated. It is a pristine and precise record whose synth pads, massive drums, and front-and-center vocals represent the defining qualities of the decade’s mainstream rock production. But listening to it now, I am struck by how physical, how alive the music sounds. Most of the songs were recorded live by the band in just a few takes, with Springsteen shouting cues, whooping and hollering off mic. And the writing, which blends the detailed narratives of Nebraska with the tighter pop structures of The River, is as thoughtful and emotional as any of his less polished material.

It is the sound of the E Street Band, then, that makes this feel uniquely like pop music. Roy Bittan’s synth is particularly effective—a thick humidity against the train-track momentum of “I’m on Fire,” and a taught fuse serving as a secondary bass line in “Dancing in the Dark.” Drummer Max Weinberg often takes center stage, calling the shots during the turnarounds in “Glory Days” and the title track with snare hits that match the energy of Springsteen’s prolonged runner’s high. He leads the band with such a locked-in sense of motion that, in the fadeout codas to songs like “Cover Me” and “Dancing in the Dark,” their backing tracks can feel a little like electronic music. It’s a sound that 21st-century bands like the War on Drugs would reinterpret as a kind of psychedelia, and that dance producer Arthur Baker capitalized on at the time with a fascinating series of club remixes.

After the willfully unmarketable Nebraska, Springsteen’s commercial reinvention thrilled the label executives, who are reported to have risen from their seats to dance during the playback sessions. (One said—upon hearing single after single, each better than the last and all mixed by Bob Clearmountain to sound tailor-made for radio—he might have actually pissed his pants.) It was also a windfall for Jon Landau, the music critic-turned-manager whose career-long belief in the life-saving power of rock music was gratified by these aspirational songs, some of which were actually about the life-saving power of rock music. Springsteen himself, already viewing his career with the analytic lens of a critic, couldn’t help but notice what this shift represented. “I was fascinated by people who had become a voice for their moment,” he would later say. “I don’t know if I felt I had a capacity for it or just willed my way in that direction, but it was something I was interested in.”

There was one person who wasn’t so interested. It was E Street Band guitarist Steven Van Zandt, a man with rare access to the inner workings of the artist’s brain. The pair united as like-minded outcasts growing up in New Jersey, where they bonded at battles of the bands and spent countless nights in each other’s homes, side-stepping their intimidating fathers and evangelizing the records they loved. As they embarked on their careers together, Van Zandt is often credited with helping his pal lighten up a little: arranging the ecstatic horn parts on Born to Run, suggesting the title track’s iconic riff be transposed into a major key, and helming the party-in-my-garage production on The River.

A co-producer on Born in the U.S.A., Van Zandt brings the same sense of uplift to these songs. The most joyful moment comes in “Darlington County.” When Van Zandt honks his way through the vocal harmonies—“He don’t work and he don’t get paid”—Springsteen starts to laugh: Boy, does that sound ugly, you hear him think, it’s perfect. Same goes for the mandolin part in “Glory Days,” which Van Zandt recorded impromptu into a vocal mic so that it couldn’t be edited out without scrapping the entire take.

Fitting for an album that buries its anxiety beneath a bright veneer, these moments coincided with a new tension between the two. Recording under the name Little Steven, Van Zandt was completing his own album, ambitiously titled Voice of America, and its raw sound and spirit of protest felt at odds with the commercial intent of Springsteen’s latest music. Van Zandt floated the idea of promoting their albums together on a joint tour—I love imagining the response to this proposition—and confessed to feeling a bit undervalued. Sensing a crossroads, and by now well-acquainted with his friend’s stubborn self-reliance, Van Zandt quit the band.

While Springsteen stood his ground, he wasn’t as confident as he might have seemed. With an overabundance of material, he extended his creative process beyond the inner circle, inviting friends into his home to pore over the multitude of tapes and piece together a tracklist while he went out for runs or waited patiently at the kitchen table. His engineer, Chuck Plotkin, went so far as to present an acetate copy of the record he envisioned. Landau wrote a five-page letter justifying his preferred sequence. Eventually, Springsteen took some of their advice, ignored a lot of it, and turned in his completed album.

He played it for Van Zandt, who was not a fan of “Dancing in the Dark.” The lyrics—so self-conscious, so vulnerable—were anathema to his image of rock’n’roll heaven, where everyone’s young and beautiful, forever strutting. And don’t get him started on the production. Still, his main concern was “No Surrender,” his favorite song, which was nowhere to be found. The hope, the romance, the guitars—that’s the whole point of what we do! At the eleventh hour, Springsteen slotted the song back into the tracklist, right at the start of Side B.

If this operation sounds haphazard for a noted perfectionist like Springsteen, it kind of was. To this day, he speaks about Born in the U.S.A. with a sense of discomfort. The bookending songs—the title track and “My Hometown,” the only explicitly political material that made the cut—are what he’s proudest of. “The rest of the album,” he writes, “contains a group of songs about which I’ve always had some ambivalence…. [It] really didn’t flesh out like I had hoped it would.”

But while the recordings span several years of sessions, plagued with interpersonal struggle and self-doubt, bouncing between genre and mood, built on creative compromise and commercial aspiration, overexposed and eternally misunderstood, there’s really not a dull moment. With its grab-bag nature, the whole thing explodes like an encore run—when the lights are up and there’s nothing left to play but the hits; when fatigue converts into a kind of euphoria and the energy builds until it seems a little dangerous.

That’s how “No Surrender” earns its place; the optimism is hard-won, doomed to be short-lived. “You say you’re tired and you just want to close your eyes,” he sings against the rhythm, “and follow your dreams down.” But down where? If you were to place a compass in the wide open country of this album, down is where the arrow would constantly point. It’s in the opening lyric (“Born down in a dead man’s town”), and it’s the next move for the couple in the closing “My Hometown,” who plan on packing up the family, “maybe heading south.” It’s where all the signposts of security—work, marriage, community—send the narrator of “Downbound Train,” and it’s a syllable that gets stretched into a slapstick, rockabilly hiccup in the chorus of “I’m Goin’ Down.” For many of the characters in these songs, down becomes homebase: the direction you’re cautioned to ignore when you’re at the top; the inevitable crash after any high.

The momentary bliss of “No Surrender” is followed on the tracklist by “Bobby Jean,” and while Springsteen has never explicitly confirmed its inspiration, fans have long seen it as his farewell to Van Zandt. Like all his writing about friendship, “Bobby Jean” flirts with the language of love songs—the gender is intentionally ambiguous—and, paired with a bittersweet piano melody, the sentiment is so heartbroken and earnest that it feels almost childlike. The crucial lyric arrives just before the last verse, and it’s a simple but effective choice of words: “Now there ain’t nobody, nowhere, nohow/Gonna ever understand me the way you did.” Not love me, not know me, but understand me. It’s a rare quality in a companion—especially in adulthood—and it’s a hard thing to let go of when you find it”.

I am going to round up shortly. Before that, Rolling Stone’s five-star review from 1984 is well worth illuminating. In a year when there were plenty of classic albums – Madonna’s Like a Virgin among them -, Bruce Springsteen’s masterpiece stands alongside the best of them. Recorded between Power Station and Hit Factory in New York City, we are going to be discussing and dissecting this album for generations to come. Such is its importance:

“THOUGH IT LOOKS at hard times, at little people in little towns choosing between going away and getting left behind, Born in the U.S.A, Bruce Springsteen‘s seventh album, has a rowdy, indomitable spirit. Two guys pull into a hick town begging for work in “Darlington County,” but Springsteen is whooping with sha-la-las in the chorus. He may shove his broody characters out the door and send them cruising down the turnpike, but he gives them music they can pound on the dashboard to.

He’s set songs as well drawn as those on his bleak acoustic album, Nebraska, to music that incorporates new electronic textures while keeping as its heart all of the American rock & roll from the early Sixties. Like the guys in the songs, the music was born in the U.S.A.: Springsteen ignored the British Invasion and embraced instead the legacy of Phil Spector’s releases, the sort of soul that was coming from Atlantic Records and especially the garage bands that had anomalous radio hits. He’s always chased the utopian feeling of that music, and here he catches it with a sophisticated production and a subtle change in surroundings — the E Street Band cools it with the saxophone solos and piano arpeggios — from song to song.

The people who hang out in the new songs dread getting stuck in the small towns they grew up in almost as much as they worry that the big world outside holds no possibilities — a familiar theme in Springsteen’s work. But they wind up back at home, where you can practically see the roaches scurrying around the empty Twinkie packages in the linoleum kitchen. In the first line of the first song, Springsteen croaks, “Born down in a dead man’s town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground.” His characters are born with their broken hearts, and the only thing that keeps them going is imagining that, as another line in another song goes, “There’s something happening somewhere.”

Though the characters are dying of longing for some sort of payoff from the American dream, Springsteen’s exuberant voice and the swell of the music clues you that they haven’t given up. In “No Surrender,” a song that has the uplifting sweep of his early anthem “Thunder Road,” he sings, “We made a promise we swore we’d always remember” no retreat, no surrender.” His music usually carries a motto like that. He writes a heartbreaking message called “Bobby Jean,” apparently to his longtime guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt, who’s just left his band — “Maybe you’ll be out there on that road somewhere . . . in some motel room there’ll be a radio playing and you’ll hear me sing this son/Well, if you do, you’ll know I’m thinking of you and all the miles in between” — but he gives the song a wall of sound with a soaring saxophone solo. That’s classic Springsteen: the lyrics may put a lump in your throat, but the music says, Walk tall or don’t walk at all.

A great dancer himself, Springsteen puts an infectious beat under his songs. In the wonderfully exuberant “I’m Goin’ Down,” a hilarious song that gets its revenge, he makes a giddy run of nonsense syllables out of the chorus while drummer Max Weinberg whams out a huge backbeat. And “Working on the Highway,” whips into an ecstatic rocker that tells a funny story, hand-claps keeping the time about crime and punishment. Shifting the sound slightly, the band finds the right feeling of paranoia for “Cover Me,” the lone song to resurrect that shrieking, “Badlands”-style guitar, and the right ironic fervor for the Vietnam vet’s yelping about the dead ends of being “Born in the U.S.A.” Though there’s no big difference between these and some of the songs on Springsteen’s last rock LP, The River, these feel more delightfully offhanded.

The album finds its center in those cheering rock songs, but four tracks – the last two on either side — give the album an extraordinary depth. Springsteen has always been able to tell a story better than he can write a hook, and these lyrics are way beyond anything anybody else is writing. They’re sung in such an unaffected way that the starkness stabs you. In “My Hometown,” the singer, remembers sitting on his father’s lap and steering the family Buick as they drove proudly through town; but the boy grows up, and the final scene has him putting his own son on his lap for a last drive down a street that’s become a row of vacant buildings. “Take a good look around,” he tells his boy, repeating what his father told him, “this is your hometown.”

The tight-lipped character who sings “I’m On Fire” practically whispers about the desire that’s eating him up. “Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull,” he rasps. The way the band’s turned down to just a light rattle of drums, faint organ and quiet, staccato guitar notes makes his lust seem ominous: you picture some pock-marked Harry Dean Stanton type, lying, too wired to sleep, in a motel room.

That you get such a vivid sense of these characters is because Springsteen gives them voices a playwright would be proud of. In “Working on the Highway,: all he says is “One day I looked straight at her and she looked straight back” to let us know the guy’s in love. And in the saddest song he’s ever written, “Downbound Train,” a man who’s lost everything pours his story, while, behind him, long, sorry notes on a synthesizer sound just like heartache. “I had a job, I had a girl,” he begins, then explains how everything’s changed: “Now I work down at the car wash, where all it ever does its rain.” It’s a line Sam Shepard could’ve written: so pathetic and so funny, you don’t know how to react.

The biggest departure from any familiar Springsteen sound is the breathtaking first single, “Dancing in the Dark,” with its modern synths, played by E Street keyboardist Roy Bittan, and thundering bass and drums. The kid who dances in the darkness here is practically choking on the self-consciousness of being sixteen. “I check my look in the mirror/I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face,” he sings. “Man, I ain’t getting nowhere just living in a dump like this.” He turns out the lights not to set some drippy romantic mood but to escape in the fantasy of the music on the radio. In the dark, he finds a release from all the limitations he was born into. In the dark, like all the guys trapped in Springsteen’s songs, he’s just a spirit in the night”.

I will leave it there. On 4th June, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. turns forty. If you are a fan of the album, it is worth reading up about it. In terms of its legacy, background and recording. Wikipedia has some good information. A fortieth anniversary edition of the album is coming out on 14th June. I would very much everyone to order it:

“Sony Music will commemorate the 40th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s history-making “Born In The U.S.A.” on June 14, with a special-edition release featuring new colored vinyl and expanded packaging. Arriving via translucent red LP, this anniversary edition of “Born In The U.S.A.” will feature a gatefold sleeve and exclusive booklet with archival material from the era, new liner notes penned by Erik Flannigan and a four-color lithograph. Released on June 4, 1984, “Born In The U.S.A.” had an unprecedented seven top 10 singles on its tracklist, has sold approximately 25 million copies to date and captured the pop culture zeitgeist with once-in-a-generation impact. Springsteen and The E Street Band’s accompanying Born In The U.S.A. tour included 156 sold-out performances across the globe, while tracks like “Dancing In The Dark,” “No Surrender” and “Glory Days” remain staples of their live show to this day”.

I am excited looking ahead to the fortieth anniversary of Born in the U.S.A. On 4th June, there will be a new wave of affection and interest in this album. Bruce Springsteen’s next studio album would be 1987’s excellent Tunnel of Love. A very different-sounding album, it was another huge commercial and critical success. Even though The Boss has released quite a few world-class and timeless albums, I don’t think he soared as high and punched as hard as he did…

ON the magnificent Born in the U.S.A.

FEATURE: Our Friends Electric: Dr. Robert Moog at Ninety: An Ultimate Synthesizer Playlist

FEATURE:

 

 

Our Friends Electric

PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Robinson

Dr. Robert Moog at Ninety: An Ultimate Synthesizer Playlist

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ON 23rd May…

it will be ninety years since Dr. Robert Moog was born. He helped shape music in a way few others have. A hugely important and influential figure. He was an American engineer and Electronic music pioneer. Dr. Robert Moog was the founder of the synthesizer manufacturer, Moog Music. He was also the inventor of the first commercial synthesizer, the Moog, which debuted in 1964. That was introduced on 12th October, 1964. Think about all the songs that feature the Moog synthesiser and how it shaped music - especially during the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps not as synonymous today as it was a few decades ago, there is no denying the impact the Moog synthesizer made. Its inventor was born on 23rd May, 1934, so I want to commemorate the upcoming ninetieth birthday. I will end with a playlist of songs that feature the distinct and iconic Moog synthesizer. Before that, from the Moog Music website, here is some background and biography concerning a pioneer and key figure in the history of music technology:

“Bob’s innovative spirit continues to inspire us each day here in the Moog Factory, and we are forever grateful to be a part of this creative legacy.

It might seem like hyperbole to say that Bob Moog was destined for electronic instrument engineering.

But his lifelong curiosity with circuitry, especially the type that yielded sounds, proved prophetic. As he told Torsten Schmidt in a 2003 interview, he “got off on electronics” as a kid, especially electronics that made sound.

“And when I say electronics, it was not the electronics of today,” Moog said. “Back then, electronics was one or two vacuum tubes, a couple of resistors, capacitors and these big, fat transformers. You could put the whole thing together on the kitchen table, it was a hobby.”

Moog’s father, one of the first amateur radio operators, helped nurture Bob’s love of circuitry and sound. Instead of playing baseball, as he recalled, Moog messed around with electronics.

Born in 1934, Moog was chronologically well-positioned to get into electronic instruments. The vacuum tube, which had been around since 1906, had just revolutionized radio and film, and had already been incorporated into electronic instruments like Lee de Forest’s Audion piano (1915), Theremin (1920), Maurice Martenot’s Ondes instrument (1928), and Friedrich’s Trautwein’s Trautonium (one of the inspirations for Moog’s Subharmonicon). And by the 1930s and 1940s, audio oscillators, filters, envelope controllers, and basic effects units were in existence.

A teenage Moog attended Manhattan School of Music until the age of fourteen, an education that would later help him communicate well with musicians in the development of electronic instruments. As he recalled in a 1974 interview with Keyboard magazine, it was there that he received ear training, sight singing lessons, and instruction on the basics of music theory. He also attended the Bronx High School of Science during his teen years, and visited an area of Lower Manhattan to find parts for his electronic experiments. In 1958, Moog graduated with a B.S. in physics from Queens College and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Columbia.

By age 19, he and his father were building and selling theremins. In his foreword to Albert Glinsky's Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, Moog described the Russian inventor Leon Theremin as the person who “virtually single-handedly launched the field of electronic music technology.” So dedicated to the Theremin was Moog that Radio News magazine actually published his design for the electronic instrument while still in college.

“I was actually making Theremins for a living,” he told Keyboard. “So from then, which was in 1954, through my entire college career, I made Theremins, and enough money to get through graduate school [at Cornell].”

“Electronic organs were just coming out at that time. I remember spending whole days at the Baldwin Organ display room in New York City: Listening, imposing myself on them, being a pain in the ass,” Moog recalled. “It had controls that were not too different from today’s synthesizer. You changed attack, switched filters in and out, switched in different octaves; all in all, not a bad instrument considering the time.”

After a failed attempt to market a musical amplifier kit, Moog serendipitously met composer Herb Deutsch in November of 1963 at the New York State Music Conference, where Moog was demonstrating his Theremin music kits. Deutsch had been using the Theremin for ear training, and the two immediately began discussing the possibilities of having synthesis at your fingertips at home.

“More or less in my spare time I built two voltage-controlled oscillators and two voltage-controlled amplifiers, and some kind of controller that could turn the sounds on and off and change the pitch and rates of modulation,” Moog said of this first modular synthesizer. “It might have [amounted to] a couple of doorbells. When Herb [Deutsch] came up . . . he just flipped when he heard what my breadboards could do. By the end of that session and the one that followed, together we had come up with the basics of a modular analog synthesizer.”

Moog Soon developed a modular synthesizer prototype...

Moog soon developed a modular synthesizer prototype, which he gave to Deutsch. It included a keyboard and two boxes: one equipped with two oscillators and an envelope generator, the other with Moog’s first iteration of his analogue filter concept.

A year later, in 1964, Moog demonstrated his modular synthesizer at the Audio Engineering Society convention, and began taking orders. Within a few years, Moog’s R.A. Moog, Inc. (the predecessor of Moog Music, Inc.) produced the Moog Modular Synthesizer models I, II, and III. And it was during the mid-1960s that pop culture began catching onto the sonic possibilities being explored by Moog, Don Buchla, and other synthesizer engineers.

The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz was one of the first musicians to bring the Moog Modular system into the popular music realm on the band’s 1967 album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. It was also around this time that Moog’s modular system was shown at the Monterey Pop Festival. Paul Beaver began incorporating the Moog modular sound into his film scores, starting with The Trip in 1967. A year later, Wendy Carlos, who had studied at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (to which Moog had sold modules and later modular systems), used a Moog modular synthesizer to record her revolutionary electronic album Switched On Bach. In 1969, The Beatles would use it on their final album, Abbey Road, and a year later in 1970, rock keyboardist Keith Emerson would add the modular Moog Synthesizer to his sonic arsenal.

But Moog’s realization of that early dream of making the synthesizer truly portable, in the form of the Minimoog, would have an even greater lasting influence. Suddenly, synthesizers weren’t just for experimental composers and adventurous pop musicians. Keyboardists all across the musical spectrum, from jazz fusion (Chick Corea, Jan Hammer) to prog rock (Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman), and the developing Krautrock scene exemplified by Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, were not just using the synthesizer on recordings, but demonstrating its strengths as an expressive live instrument—one that was every bit the sonic equal of the guitar.

The synthesizer even found its way into the world of disco by way of Giorgio Moroder’s electronic disco recordings. Modern ambient music, particularly with Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno, also came of age as the Moog and other synthesizers became culturally ubiquitous. Beyond these popular music movements, Moog’s commitment to giving musicians the tools they needed to sonically express themselves indirectly helped give birth to modern electronic music through the underground movements of Chicago House, Detroit Techno, and New York City’s Hip-Hop scene.

And yet, across his decades of work, Moog remained characteristically modest and low-key, giving credit to the musicians who used his instruments in ways he hadn’t imagined back in the early 1960s. Like his contemporaries Don Buchla, Dave Smith, and the folks from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Moog lived to see electronic music develop from a curiosity in electrical engineering and avant-garde composing to a worldwide artistic culture. Rather fittingly, it’s still a creative tech culture in a constant state of innovation, which is something Moog would surely appreciate”.

On 23rd May, we mark ninety years since the birth of Dr. Robert Moog. From its humble beginnings, it went on to change music forever. If you want to know more, there is a great book, Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog synthesizer, that was published back in 2004. Later in the year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Moog synthesizer. I am going to wrap up there. I hope that radio stations give a little salute to Dr. Robert Moog on 23rd May. Play some classics that feature his crucial invention. Without the Moog synthesiser, who knows what the music world would have lost out on. The Moog synthesizer arrived in 1964 and made…

A gigantic impact.

FEATURE: Shades of Cool: Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

Shades of Cool

Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence at Ten

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PERHAPS one of or Lana Del Rey’s…

PHOTO CREDIT: Geordie Wood

more underrated albums, I am looking ahead to the tenth anniversary of Ultraviolence. That turns ten on 13th June. I think that it is a brilliant album that warrants more love and focus. I shall come to some positive reviews of it. In terms of Del Rey’s career, Ultraviolence arrived a year before Honeymoon. Different albums in terms of their tone and subjects, the album covers are also starkly different. Whereas Honeymoon is in colour and gives impressions of Del Rey in the 1950s/1960s down by the beach, Ultraviolence is a black-and-white portrait where Del Rey looks like pensive and thoughtful. Maybe many assume that Ultraviolence is quite inaccessible or darker. It is a beautiful album with a few of Lana Del Rey’s best songs. It reached number one in the U.S. and U.K. Singles like Shades of Cool and West Coat make it a modern classic. The reviews were positive, though there were a couple that were a bit more mixed. Ten years after its release, Ultraviolence still holds this strange pull and power. If some think Ultraviolence was a point where Lana Del Rey was repeating herself and there was a sense of predictability, others feel her third studio album was too dark. Maybe glamorising domestic violence or not dealing with it in a proper way. I think some of the reviews do not find the beauty, cinema and potency in Ultraviolence. I feel retrospective reviews would be different. I would advise people to check out interviews from 2014. Rolling Stone, FADER and NPR all featured her. I am going to start with a 2019 retrospective from Medium:

“I shared my body and my mind with you. That’s all over now.”

That’s how Lana Del Rey opens her sophomore release Ultraviolence back in 2014. This bold declaration is also her first statement since her 2012 release Born To Die. In those two years, Ms. Del Rey had established herself as an eccentric enigma, whose affinity for rich, old men, cocaine, and hopeless romanticism broke pop’s meticulous formula for success. Her submissiveness contrasted sharply to the empowerment-based music that most women in pop chose to do at the time. She became a countercultural icon in the entertainment industry. She also became the poster child for controversial pop stars of the 21st century.

It’s rare for any artist, let alone a woman of pop, soaked in such an absurd amount of controversy and infamy, to release an equally polarising and bold sophomore follow-up. However, once again, Lana Del Rey proves that she’s anything but predictable. Her enigmatic personality, combined with a now refined sense of character and production, fuelled this album to become her best-selling LP yet. It also immortalized it as one of the most memorable moments in music for 2014. Everyone may not have liked Ultraviolence, but everyone most certainly had an opinion.

Ultraviolence is interesting, in that it’s an album where one can discern the very real and tangible control she exudes regarding the narrative. There are three songs that showcase this the best.

Cruel World, in my opinion, is one of the best non-singles of her discography. In her words, it’s a song that sets the basis for the rest of the record. Her particularly strong vocal performance and uniquely chaotic yet melancholic string-based production set the scene, not for Ultraviolence the album, but rather, for Ultraviolence — The Movie. The raw emotion and anger she exudes contrasts wildly to the ‘damsel-in-distress’ persona of Born To Die. Lyrically, it’s one of those rare times where her character actually manages to end a bad relationship. Sure it still borrows many of Born To Die’s themes, including prostitutes, drugs, God, and money, to name a few. However, this time, she is in control.

Money, Power, Glory is one of the more flashy tracks on the album. A sarcastic interpretation of the holy trinity, the song is a 4 minute and 30-seconds long snarky response to all the critics and journalists who dragged her in op-eds and articles during her Born To Die era. Lana sums it up herself best, saying,

“I felt like all that anybody was going to allow me was maybe, if I was lucky, was money, and power, in the form of infamy, rather than fame.”

The media repeatedly showcased Lana as superficial, materialistic, and privileged. Rather than fight fire with fire, Lana chose to embrace the narrative the world had given her. If that was all that she was going to be given, might as well make the most of it. Once again, Lana embraces and takes over the reins of a narrative that was actively hostile to her. She is in control.

Along with her supposed thirst for money, her sensual stage persona also branded her as a sugar daddy seeker. The media and the public alike couldn’t help but speculate the various wild and sensational sexual favors she must have had to do given her meteoric rise to fame. Once again, in typical Del Rey fashion, we get one her best femme fatale performances yet with track 9, F**cked My Way Up To The Top.

Now, there is a caveat. Lana hasn’t exactly denied the validity of the title explicitly. In an interview, she mentioned,

It’s commentary, like, “I know what you think of me,” and I’m alluding to that. You know, I have slept with a lot of guys in the industry, but none of them helped me get my record deals. Which is annoying.

Now, technically speaking, it is false, given that said favors didn’t actually get her anywhere. That is, of course, assuming that this is true, which, given her black comedy-esque casualness when talking about it, likely means that it’s not.

Ultraviolence tells the story of a visibly abusive relationship between the singer and a man named ‘Jim’. Lana opens the song with the ways in which the female protagonist is described by ‘Jim’. ‘Deadly Nightshade’ and ‘blessed with beauty and rage’ are terms assigned to femme Fatales. Women whose external beauty and softness hid a powerful entity within. She is clearly alluding to the women in the aforementioned songs like Cruel World, where their force of will controls their fate. However, this woman is different.

At the end of the pre-chorus, we are given one of the more publicized lines of the album, where she sings,

Jim told me that, he hit me and it felt like a kiss

Some may call this the glorification of domestic violence. Some may call it a darker shade of eloquence and grace. Many believe ‘Jim’ to be a reference to Jim Beam, a brand of alcohol and making the song out to be about losing to alcoholism. Regardless, it puts her in a position with no power, despite those previous descriptions of hers. In a way, Ultraviolence is the climax of her Born To Die persona. Her blind romanticism, unsubstantiated hope, and insensitivity to obvious red flags harkens back to her 2012 classic and gives her listeners a taste of the past. This and its more digestible sequel Pretty When You Cry, in short, positioned a powerful woman in a powerless position.

Of course, these two themes aren't the only ones on the album. One of the best songs on the album (and the lead single), West Coast, is a casual beat that revolves around an innovative and psychedelic production and fleeting emotions of casual flirtation and romanticism. Brooklyn Baby is a rather upbeat, optimistic detour to the east coast, where Del Rey pays tribute to all things Brooklyn, from Beat Poetry to Lou Reed. There’s Old Money, which sees Lana return to do what she does best, break hearts. The haunting piano melody, which she borrows from the original score of Romeo and Juliet, remains a favorite among romantics. The Other Woman, her first of two covers of Nina Simone, provides a poignant ending to the standard version of the album, which sees the woman of this movie end the narrative with a return to her former power. Both vulnerable and sarcastic simultaneously, you get the feeling that no one could’ve done this cover better than her. I’ll also give a shoutout to Black Beauty, the only worthwhile track on the deluxe version and a track whose omission from the standard version will forever remain a deep mystery to me.

Ultraviolence, along with Honeymoon, remain her least recognized works of art. Despite being one of the best selling LPs of the year, few awards ever bothered nominating it, let alone winning.

However, in its own institutional way, Ultraviolence remains an album that never needed awards season vindication to succeed. This is in part due to the fact that Ultraviolence’s job was never to sell well, at least from an artistic perspective. I couldn’t help but see the parallels between this and Taylor Swift’s Reputation.

They’re wildly contrasting in terms of lyricism and production, no doubt. Yet they both share one thing. They were born out of the flames of infamy that scorched their creators. They were crafted meticulously to silence them forever. When Born To Die was released, many believed that Lana would just be another one-hit-wonder. A failed studio fabrication that yielded no return on investment. With Ultraviolence, she not only proved that the queen of alternative was here to stay, but that she was also a conniving beauty. A snow-covered volcano”.

I will finish with a couple of reviews. Although there were some three-star takes and those that pointed at flaws, there were those more positive. I do think that Ultraviolence is a dark album, though that is not a negative. It is fascinating and immersive. A departure from 2012’s Born to Die. This is what CLASH wrote in their review of the brilliant and underrated Ultraviolence:

“Lana Del Rey has always looked to ageless superstars as idols: to Marilyn Monroe, to Elvis, to players in a Great American Adventure that she was born too late to participate in. The cover to her third album ‘Ultraviolence’ goes so far as to reflect, albeit perhaps coincidentally, this era: black and white, the colour has to come from the performance, not the film it’s captured on.

Don’t let the title fool you: ‘Ultraviolence’ doesn’t dream to provoke like its A Clockwork Orange inspiration might suggest. It doesn’t prickle, or poke. Throughout, what comes through clearest is a coherency defined by the distinct reluctance to do much to unsettle a trajectory that’s taken Del Rey from complete unknown through blog-hyped ‘newcomer’ to legitimate pop superstar.

Songs, predominantly produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, ally themselves with expected conventions: strings sweep in, drums march with funereal weight, and Lana sings like she’s calling to the stars themselves. To those in the dirt who went too soon, those whose legacy feeds so palpably into this artist’s oeuvre; and those above us, dying slow the other side of so many light years. In this respect, ‘Ultraviolence’ marks real progression: never has Del Rey sounded so compellingly crystalline on a set of recordings.

Thematically, though, tracks can appear content to splash in the shallows. ‘Money Power Glory’, ‘F*cked My Way To The Top’: these songs of meeting aspirations via never-mind-the-nefariousness means might be conceived with a wicked tongue in cheek, with a detached role-playing perspective. But such is Lana’s gravitas that the listener immediately connects the dots between song and singer, excluding the possibility of transplanted players and relative characteristics.

But when Lana’s singing about what we all need, beyond money, power and glory, she’s amongst the best the 21st century has to call its own. ‘Old Money’ is a love song that completely floors anyone who might feel that pop can’t carry emotion like it used to, high-shined as it’s become by technology. Here, pianos chime and violins peak, while Lana’s vocal is drawn in choir dimensions, echoing with real effectiveness across the barrier separating sit-at-home audience from studio-residing artist. To be in the room must have been electrifying.

The bruises of relationships beaten down to dust take no time in blossoming: the title cut, coming in at track two of 11, speaks of hits that feel like kisses, be those of the fist-dealt or pharmaceutical variety. The song plays, too, on her coast-to-coast migration, from east to west: “We could go back to New York,” she sings, like that’d make everything, anything, the slightest bit better. ‘Cruel World’ states, “I’m so happy, now that you’re gone,” but sounds as much like its maker feels rather the opposite; and ‘Shades Of Cool’ examines a partner who can’t be trusted, just a Mad Men sync away from contemporary cultural greatness.

The very best songs are probably those that have previewed this collection, not least amongst them ‘West Coast’. In the album context it takes on greater significance, a fulcrum at track five that balances the whole into leaving a better impression than it otherwise might. The track’s all drama and damaged dreams, fractured friendships and a deep-set heartache. It also displays a rarely witnessed ability to switch tact mid-song, to alter the arrangement so that it plays almost like a mini-suite.

‘Cruel World’ does this, too. The album’s opener is Lana’s favourite, the track’s “juxtaposition of two worlds” summing up her “personal circumstances of everything going easily, and then being f*cked up”. So she tells us here.

A cover closes proceedings. ‘The Other Woman’, penned by the late Jessie Mae Robinson, is more epilogue than credits accompaniment, a gentle kiss goodbye once the bluster’s died to silence. It’s slight and beautiful, relating to Lana’s personal themes but actually doing what her own songs can’t: it successfully casts Lana as the removed observer rather than the direct experiencer. It’s a role that suits her well, too, as she sounds so much freer here than on several of the preceding tracks.

What there’s not is a number that will arrest the attention like ‘Video Games’ did – but then, Lana had the element of surprise on her side. The sometimes haphazard diversity of previous album ‘Born To Die’ has gone, too, at the expense of including a great but mismatched song like the more hip-hop-inflected, A$AP Rocky-starring ‘National Anthem’ (far and away this writer’s favourite from its parent record). To some, this will make for a collection that suits its monochromatic cover: several shades of the same themes, neatly hung together but lacking lasting resonance.

But of course, to others ‘Ultraviolence’ will stand as the first Lana Del Rey album that really embraces its format, which aims for definitive statement status and only falls short through its self-imposed restrictions. It encapsulates much that the press, that her public, feel Lana is about – from the Hollywood nostalgia to the gentle snipes at those who’d prefer to write about her looks than her art. (“They judge me like a picture book,” she sings on ‘Brooklyn Baby’, surely a dig at some journalists’ past coverage.)

For all its lows-inspired highs, ‘Ultraviolence’ is not quite the complete picture. But should a true director’s cut of this beguiling artist come at the next time of asking, she’ll realise a timelessness that so many of her influences had to die for.

7/10”.

I will end with a review from AllMusic. It is interesting that the cover for Ultraviolence is in black-and-white. Compare that to the albums it is sandwiched between – Born to Die and Honeymoon – and you get something standout. Perhaps an emotional representation of darkness and loss. Trying to give the impression of an old film. Maybe signalling a departure from her earlier albums, Ultraviolence does warrant new ears. It is a modern classic in my view:

“The maelstrom of hype surrounding self-modeled Hollywood pop star Lana Del Rey's 2012 breakthrough album, Born to Die, found critics, listeners, and pop culture aficionados divided about her detached, hyper-stylized approach to every aspect of her music and public persona. What managed to get overlooked by many was that Born to Die made such a polarizing impression because it actually offered something that didn't sound like anything else. Del Rey's sultry, overstated orchestral pop recast her as some sort of vaguely imagined chanteuse for a generation raised on Adderall and the Internet, with heavy doses of Twin Peaks atmosphere adding a creepy sheen to intentionally vapid (and undeniably catchy) radio hits. Follow-up album Ultraviolence shifts gears considerably, building a thick, slow-moving atmosphere with its languid songs and opulent arrangements. Gone are the big beats and glossy production that resulted in tracks like "Summertime Sadness." Instead, Ultraviolence begins with the protracted, rolling melancholia of "Cruel World," nearly seven minutes of what feels like a sad, reverb-drenched daydream. The song sets the stage for the rest of the album, which simmers with a haunted, yearning feeling but never boils over. Even the most pop-friendly moments here are steeped in patient, jazz-inflected moodiness, as with the sad-eyed longing of "Shades of Cool" or the unexpected tempo changes that connect the slinky verses of single "West Coast" to their syrupy, swaying choruses. Production from the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach might have something to do with the metered restraint that permeates the album, with songs like "Sad Girl" carrying some of the slow-burning touches of greasy blues-rock Auerbach is known for.

A few puzzling moments break up the continuity of the album. The somewhat hooky elements of "Brooklyn Baby" can't quite rise above its disjointed song structure and cringeable lyrics that could be taken either as mockery of the hipster lifestyle or self-parody. "Money Power Glory" steps briefly out of the overall dreamscape of the album, sounding like a tossed-off outtake from the Born to Die sessions. Despite these mild missteps, Ultraviolence thrives for the most part in its density, meant clearly to be absorbed as an entire experience, with even its weaker pieces contributing to a mood that's consumptive, sexy, and as eerie as big-budget pop music gets. Del Rey's loudest detractors criticized her music as a hollow, cliché-ridden product designed by the music industry and lacking the type of substance that makes real pop stars pop. Ultraviolence asserts that as a songwriter, she has complete control of her craft, deciding on songs far less flashy or immediate but still uniquely captivating. As these songs shift her sound into more mature and nuanced places, it becomes clear that every deadpan affectation, lispy lyric, and overblown allusion to desperate living has been a knowing move in the creation of the strange, beguiling character -- and sonic experience -- we know as Lana Del Rey”.

There is actually one more feature I will bring in before wrapping it. It was published last year. It is true that Ultraviolence was Lana Del Rey’s darkest release to that point. There is such richness to be found through the album. I would encourage people to listen to it. It is one of my top five Lana Del Rey albums for sure:

“Perfect for a James Bond film”

Shot in stark black-and-white, the album cover was a Polaroid photo taken by Neil Krug, showing Lana blank-faced, standing in her driveway and dressed in a casual white T-shirt. As Krug told Complex, “The cover needed to feel like the last frame of a 60s Polanski film, where the audience has been properly traumatized, and this is the last thing they see before the credits roll.” It was a perfect match for the music: every song on Ultraviolence is slow to midtempo, flowing seamlessly into the next with a sad, melancholic feel.

A soft rock track centered around an electric guitar and wobbly synth, “West Coast” was the first sign of Lana’s new direction. Released two months ahead of Ultraviolence, in April 2014, it was, Lana told Radio.com, “inspired by Eagles and The Beach Boys”, while her “mind and roots were in jazz” – reference points which can all be felt in the song. With an unusual structure that relied on two different tempos (slowing down drastically for the chorus, which gave the track a laidback, ethereal feel), “West Coast” found Lana ignoring the conventional rules of songwriting, moving away from the sort of arrangements and lengths that would guarantee radio play.

Unique among the songs on Ultraviolence, “Shades Of Cool,” co-written with her regular writing partner, Rick Nowels, found Lana singing in a higher register than usual. Hailed by Rolling Stone’s Caryn Ganz as being “perfect for a James Bond film directed by Quentin Tarantino,” the song received a suitably cinematic video treatment courtesy of director Jake Nava. When Lana steps out of a brightly lit swimming pool as the guitar solo peaks, the turquoise of the pool and the red of her lips are so saturated as to create a beautiful symbiosis of music and art.

“Two minutes later, he died”

Taken from a slang term in Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange, Lana picked the album’s title because, as she told BBC News, “I like that luxe sound of the word ‘ultra’ and the mean sound of the word ‘violence’ together.” Further exploring such juxtapositions on the album’s title track, Lana included a reference to The Crystals’ Phil Spector-produced song “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” in the original lyrics, though she later stopped singing that line live, telling the BBC, “I don’t feel comfortable with that lyric anymore.”

The fourth single from the album, “Brooklyn Baby,” was intended to be a collaboration with Lou Reed, but the former Velvet Underground frontman died before it could come to fruition – though Lana had traveled to New York to meet the singer. “I took the red eye, touched down at 7am… and two minutes later, he died,” she told The Guardian. The finished track still referenced him, however, in the lyric, “Well my boyfriend’s in a band/He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed.”

“Whatever people think of you becomes a facet of your psyche”

“Hands down” Lana’s favorite song from the album, as she told radio station 96.5 TIC, was “Cruel World,” a six-minute slow-burner built on wah-wah guitars and reverbed vocals, and which was recorded in one take with her guitarist Blake Stranathan. Elsewhere, however, “F__ked My Way Up To The Top” best summarises her usual approach. Though never released as a single, the song remains important for understanding Lana’s lyrical content.

Her songs often speak of passionate but dysfunctional relationships with older men, and of being the other woman. With “F__ked My Way Up To The Top” she admitted to an autobiographical theme the likes of which feature on many of her records, telling The Fader: “I had a seven-year relationship with the head of this label, and he was a huge inspiration to me. I’ll tell you later when more people know. He never signed me, but he was like my muse, the love of my life.”

“F__cked My Way Up To The Top,” however, is ironic: it’s Lana taking power out of the public’s hands by claiming to be everything they may have said she is. Speaking to Complex, she said, “I know what you think of me, and I’m alluding to that. You know, I have slept with a lot of guys in the industry, but none of them helped me get my record deals. Which is annoying.” Other songs on the album, such as “Money, Power, Glory,” follow this same theme, with Lana embodying a public persona, enacting the Carl Jung theory that, as she told The New York Times, “what other people think of you becomes a small facet of your psyche, whether you want it to or not.”

In replacing the hip-hop drums and vocal samples that dominated Born To Die with laidback basslines and dreamy guitar riffs, Ultraviolence emerged as a more stripped-back, simpler album than its predecessor. Exceptionally produced dream-pop at its finest, there isn’t one individual standout song on its 11 tracks – rather, Ultraviolence is an atmospheric work designed to be listened to in its entirety, engulfing you in its beautifully dark, cinematic mood”.

On 13th June, it will be ten years since Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence was released. If some critics were not completely on board in 2014, I think that there have been reviews since that have been a bit kinder. I wonder whether anything special will happen for the tenth anniversary. It deserves some new inspection and features. An intoxicating and powerful album, you put it on and are soon…

LOST in its grip.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Lenny Kravitz at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Seliger

Lenny Kravitz at Sixty

_________

ONE of my favourite artists…

the legendary Lenny Kravitz turns sixty on 26th May. The New York-born musician has created more than his fair share of classic songs. I think I first heard his music when his second studio album, Mama Said, was released in 1991. Since then, I have been following his career. His latest album, Blue Electric Light, is out on 24th March, To mark the upcoming sixtieth birthday of the wonderful Lenny Kravitz, I have assembled a playlist with some of his best songs and interesting deep cuts. I hope that it helps introduce a few new people to his music. Before I get there, AllMusic provide some biography about the incredible Lenny Kravitz:

“A staunch believer in the enduring power of classic rock, Lenny Kravitz refashions familiar fuzz guitars, soulful rhythms, and psychedelic melodies into sleek, sinewy modern rock. Quickly eschewing the neo-hippie vibe of his 1989 debut Let Love Rule, not to mention the gossamer gloss of his first big hit "It Ain't Over 'til It's Over," Kravitz landed upon a combination of heavy guitars and stylish flash on 1993's Are You Gonna Go My Way. It was a sound that powered a trio of Grammy-winning Y2K-era hits -- "Fly Away," a cover of the Guess Who's "American Woman," and "Again" -- that solidified Kravitz's stardom and served as the template for the records he released over the ensuing decades, from 2001's Lenny to 2024's Blue Electric Light. 

The son of Roxie Roker -- an actress famous for her role as Helen Willis on the '70s sitcom The Jeffersons -- and NBC News producer Sy Kravitz, Lenny Kravitz was surrounded by music as a child, exposed to everything from radio pop to jazz and classical. As a teenager in Los Angeles, he was drawn to rock & roll, finding particular inspiration in Prince. Initially, he attempted to launch a career under the pseudonym Romeo Blue, recording a full demo in Hoboken, New Jersey with engineer Henry Hirsch, incorporating elements inspired by John Lennon, Bob Marley, and the Velvet Underground.

While shopping his demo, Kravitz met actress Lisa Bonet on the set of A Different World, a sitcom spinoff of the cultural phenomenon The Cosby Show. Kravitz and Bonet became a couple around the time he signed with Virgin Records in January 1989. Reverting to his birthname, Kravitz released Let Love Rule in September 1989, with its title track earning play on MTV and modern rock radio. It was enough to gain the attention of Madonna, who had Kravitz co-produce and co-write "Justify My Love," a provocative and sultry single that became a number one hit for the superstar in 1990. It wasn't the only extracurricular activity for Kravitz: he produced, played, and co-wrote the bulk of Vanessa Paradis' eponymous 1991 debut album.

By the time he released his second album, Mama Said, in April 1991, Kravitz had separated from Bonet -- the pair divorced in 1993 -- and this sophomore set was fueled by heartbreak, as evidenced by "It Ain't Over 'til It's Over," a Curtis Mayfield-inspired tune that went to number two on Billboard's Hot 100. Slash, his old high school classmate, played on the album's "Always on the Run," the first sign that Kravitz was running with rock royalty. Soon, he appeared on records by Mick Jagger and David Bowie, and co-wrote a tune with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry for Aerosmith's Get a Grip album. These classic rock sounds flourished on Are You Gonna Go My Way, a 1993 album that turned into Kravtiz's mainstream breakthrough thanks to the rock hits "Are You Gonna Go My Way," "Believe," and "Is There Any Love in Your Heart."

After stumbling with Circus -- the 1995 album's lead single "Rock and Roll Is Dead" failed to crack the Top 40 -- Kravitz righted himself with 5, a 1998 album that tempered his classic rock inclinations with slight electronica inflections. At first, 5 didn't cause many waves but its fourth single, "Fly Away," became a major hit in early 1999, reaching 12 on Billboard's Hot 100 on its way to winning the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. A cover of the Guess Who's "American Woman," cut for the soundtrack to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, became his second big hit of 1999; it also won a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, as did "Again," a new song added to his 2000 Greatest Hits compilation.

Lenny, his sixth solo album, appeared in October 2001. Benefitting from the momentum generated by 5, it reached number 12 on the Billboard 200 and spawned the singles "Dig In," "Stillness of the Heart," and "If I Could Fall in Love." "Dig In" earned the singer his fourth straight Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. A seventh full-length, Baptism, arrived in 2004 heralded by the single "Where Are We Runnin'?" It peaked at 14 on the Billboard 200 and also featured an appearance by rapper Jay-Z on the track "Storm."

After starting a residential, commercial, and product design company called Kravitz Design, he recorded a funky version of John Lennon's "Cold Turkey" for Amnesty International's 2007 benefit compilation Instant Karma. In February 2008, he returned with the studio album It Is Time for a Love Revolution, accompanied by the singles "Bring It On," "I'll Be Waiting," and "Love Love Love." It proved to be one of his highest-charting albums to date, reaching number four on the Billboard 200.

Kravitz made his acting debut in the Academy Award-nominated 2009 film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. As he was filming his next role -- a spot in the eagerly awaited adaptation of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games -- he released his ninth album, Black and White America, in the summer of 2011. Reprising his role of Cinna in the second Hunger Games movie in 2013, Kravitz wouldn't return to the studio until the following year. He released his tenth studio album, Strut, in September of 2014. It marked the launch of his own Roxie Records label, named in honor of his mother. Anchored by the disco-rock single "The Chamber," Strut debuted at 19 on the Billboard Top 200.

After a four-year break, Kravitz returned in September 2018 with Raise Vibration, a socially conscious production that found him exploring themes of political division, racism, and positivity in the face of turmoil. The single "Low" featured a posthumous vocal collaboration with Michael Jackson and yielded a deluxe remix collection later in the year. It peaked at 43 on the Billboard 200. In 2019, he embarked on the Here to Love Tour and returned to acting, appearing in the 2022 comedy Shotgun Wedding. A single, "TK421," arrived in October 2023 as the first song released off his twelfth studio album, 2024's Blue Electric Light”.

I am looking forward to seeing how the world marks the sixtieth anniversary of Lenny Kravitz. There will be a lot of love for him I know. I have always had so much respect and love for his music, so I hope that he puts out albums for years to come. So brilliant and consistent, there is something in Kravitz’s music for everyone. It is also annoying that the man has hardly aged at all! It has been a pleasure compiling a playlist of his work. Ahead of his sixtieth birthday, it is a chance to…

SALUTE him.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Dan Whitlam

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Dan Whitlam

_________

THE wonderful…

Dan Whitlam is an artist that everyone needs to get behind. I am quite new to his work. I have been introduced to him by BBC Radio 6 Music as they recently played his music. I have also seen an interesting interview with NME – one I shall source from soon. I am going to get to some interviews soon. In terms of Whitlam’s style, he is more of a Spoken Word artist. Someone setting poetry and moving words to music. With some Hip-Hop flow in there, he definitely stands out from his peers. I am not normally a fan of Spoken Word in music, yet it makes more sense and is more affecting if not mixed into other genres I feel. I want to start out with some biography and background from Curtis Brown:

“Dan Whitlam is a poet, spoken word artist, rapper and actor from South London.  He has gained notoriety from his music videos on TikTok which narrate the lives of 20-somethings through spoken word and rap.  His soulful voice and poignant lyrics have quickly made him one-to-watch.

His poetry has been featured on BBC Radio 4, Radio 1 and Radio London as well as in a series of successful shows performed in venues around London.  This has earned him a place as one of the most ‘intriguing’ up and comers in the UK alternative hip hop scene (Jess Iszatt – BBC Radio London/ Radio 1)”.

In fact, I shall concentrate on parts on the NME interview. I want to look back earlier in the year. Paper People, one of Dan Whitlam’s most powerful singles to date, was released back in February. CLASH shared new of a song from a remarkable talent. An artist who can bring his acting experience and discipline into his music. As much a poet as an artist. Someone who deserves more airplay and attention:

“South London artist Dan Whitlam has shared powerful new track ‘Paper People’.

The performer uses social media to spread his music, sharing ideas and demos online. Blending UK rap aspects with spoken word, Dan Whitlam embraces creativity as a means to overcome trauma – he was stabbed when he was 16 years old, and suffered a collapsed lung.

Word is already out on this brave talent, whose first UK tour has sold out – including shows in Manchester, Bristol, and London’s historic Union Chapel.

Out now via Needwant, ‘Paper People’ blends his evocative rumination on the fragmentation of a relationship to downcast, atmospheric production from Oscar Moose.

House of a deeper than deep shade, check out the poetry behind ‘Paper People’ after the jump.

I don’t know if we can be friends. 

Not like you imagined anyway. 

Cos…

That would mean writing over what we were. All those rose tinted days. 

And, turning it into something less special

and slightly more mundane. 

A lower level, of pain where you no longer want me as your lover. 

But, wanna hold onto my best bits while your chest hits the arms of another.

I don’t think we can be friends.

But then everyone says it will get better with time. 

A cruel irony cos…

the thing about time is it takes time”.

It does surprise me that there has not been more focus on Dan Whitlam. I wanted to spotlight him now in the hope that his name and music reaches new ears. The fact big stations like BBC Radio 6 Music have played his songs is early indication that he is the real deal. An artist who is going to go on to bigger things. Lots of live dates will be in the diary. I think that Dan Whitlam is someone who ranks alongside the best new British artists coming through. He is hard to compare with anyone else. Perhaps that is a good thing. Maybe touches of Loyle Carner or Antony Szmierek. I think comparisons are also good, as you can see how these other artists have progressed. The venues they have played and the success they have had. Dan Whitlam is perhaps more Spoken Word than Hip-Hop, yet he manages to seamlessly blend music, poetry, an incredible backdrop and a commanding and affecting vocal that takes you inside the song. I want to me to an NME interview. It is the only recently and detailed interview with Dan Whitlam. I cannot think of too many Spoken Word artists coming through right now. It has always been a style that has been marginalised or seen as a less commercial and marketable. Dan Whitlam can change that:

“Social media presents us with an infinite number of options when it comes to consuming music. But how much of what we see stays with us for longer than the time it takes us to scroll to the next thing? How does art that requires patience and time survive in a climate governed by fast moving mediums? Yet, arguably, there is a growing appetite for art that challenges this status quo, and spoken word artist Dan Whitlam is at the forefront of this wave.

Interestingly, Whitlam’s weapon of choice has been TikTok. Bringing content that is not purpose-built for the doom-scrollers into their domain is bold, yet his music has been a huge success on the app, with the Londoner building an impressive following of over 100,000. Although Whitlam’s tracks might lean towards the melancholic, they are always beautifully juxtaposed by his warm, baritone vocals which serve as the perfect vessel to grab the attention of anyone that happens to be scrolling by.05

Spoken word wasn’t always confined to the screens in our pockets; back in 2002, Def Poetry Jam took it across around the world. The TV series was a place where up-and-coming poets shared the stage with legends like DMX and Mos Def. Seeing some of the biggest artists in hip-hop at the time perform poetry on primetime television gave a global audience an entirely new perspective on a genre that had previously existed outside of the mainstream.

Since then, spoken word has largely remained on the periphery, though acts like George The Poet and Kae Tempest have made groundbreaking progress over the last decade. Whitlam’s current success suggests he could join them. The ability to distill the universal experiences of lovestruck twenty-somethings across the world on tracks like ‘Quick Intimacy’ and ‘Exit Sign’ are what have gained him such a loyal following.

PHOTO CREDIT: Loan Nguyen

What was your upbringing like?

“I was born in London, then I straight away moved to Russia. I grew up in St Petersburg and then I was there for about five years, and then I moved to Turkey and grew up in Istanbul until I was 11 before coming back to London. Musically, I had influences like Tarkan from Turkey, and all these sounds which were very different from mainstream Western culture. In Turkey, my mum got ill so we came back to London, and then she sadly passed away when I was 11.”

What is it about the performing arts that you were drawn to?

“I’ve got Tourette’s [syndrome], and at first whenever I was on stage it would just go away, and there was a feeling of ease being up there. It’s so ironic that when more eyes are on you, you feel more free. I think being in the spotlight is nice, isn’t it? Whether it’s your friends laughing at your jokes or being on stage, it’s a nice feeling. I enjoyed reading someone else’s words and it continued from there. Then, I started writing my own words and I was like, ‘Oh this feels even better.'”

You said you wanted to make poetry more accessible, but what does that actually look like?

“I think the overriding topic of spoken word on social media is that it’s ‘cringe’, it’s dead, it’s not an art form people like, apart from this tiny little percentage of people who really enjoy it. First of all it would be to try and make it – and I hate using the word – ‘cooler’, but that’s what it is.

“In schools, they should start realising that rap is rhythm and poetry, and start teaching work from more mainstream or relatable people, you know? Dissect Kofi Stone, or dissect Chance The Rapper… Tupac wrote this incredible poetry book. Make things more about day-to-day issues going on now, because people get interested in stuff that’s happening to them, rather than stuff that happened in 1650, you know?”

How do you manage to make your music work on a platform like TikTok, which is typically geared towards instant gratification?

“The answer is I don’t know. But I hope it’s because there is some sort of validity in what I’m putting out there, and people are enjoying what I’m doing. What people keep saying to me is that [my music] grabbed them in the moment. A lot of the time people say that they don’t like poetry; I hated poetry at school simply because it was either like poets from a long long time ago that I found no kind of comfort or relatability.

“I think it’s about having an attention-grabbing hook: in the first three seconds you say something big, bold and relatable – that’s how I work. I try and say things that are quite universal.”

Why do love and loss feature so heavily in your writing?

“After losing my mum at a young age, I’ve always had a mad respect and adoration for the women who come into my life, whether they’re friends, lovers or family. Love naturally is so entangled within that, and I write really passionately about it because potentially I didn’t have a lot of that when I was growing up. Breakups happen, love and loss happens; people find comfort in how I write about the latter so candidly.

“In the beginning when I put [music] out, I was like, ‘This is way too personal’. But then it takes one person to be like, ‘Wow, I felt this way too – I didn’t know that you felt that way as well.’ Traditionally, men have been put down in terms of being so open. A lot of artists do this, but I think a man speaking about things so openly and being vulnerable is going to breed nothing but positivity.”

Is there anything that you’d like to write more about that you haven’t yet?

“Yeah, my mum, that’s one thing for sure, I don’t think I ever will though. I wrote a poem about me getting stabbed, and it took so long because I was like, ‘I wanna get everything right.’ I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do my mum justice, so I don’t think I’ll ever write [about her].

“I’ve got another tour coming up, and I’d love to write a few more upbeat things. At my live shows at the moment, everyone is very engaged, but I’d love to see people lose their head a little bit and have the best time”.

I know that the more live performances Dan Whitlam undertakes, the more his magic and incredible music will travel. I was hooked the first time I heard him. The Our Mind E.P. was released earlier in the month. It is phenomenal. Ever since releasing the single, Exit Sign, in 2021, Dan Whitlam has released some stunning and unique music. His debut E.P. will lead to bigger things. A debut album and a headline tour. I love his music videos. He is the complex artistic package. I do hope that more journalists feature interview with Whitlam. He want a wider exposure and celebration. If you are unfamiliar with him and his amazing blend of Spoken Word and Hip-Hop, then you need to check out Dan Whitlam…

AS soon as possible.

___________

Follow Dan Whitlam

Official:

https://www.danwhitlam.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/danwhitlam

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@danwhitlam1

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/danwhitlam

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@danwhitlam4110

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4t4zanmCp0GBomHaX5hXt8?si=nznUDaZvTNaSBCXzG_3HqA

FEATURE: Eat the Music: The Artistic Brilliance of Kate Bush’s Album Covers and International Versions

FEATURE:

 

 

Eat the Music

ART CREDIT: Nick Price

The Artistic Brilliance of Kate Bush’s Album Covers and International Versions

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I have covered this before…

PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

in another feature, though I thought that it was worth revisiting. There are artists who have a knack for putting out incredible album covers. Not just in the country that the act comes from. You also get these amazing international versions. Kate Bush is certainly an artist who has been responsible for some of the most striking, individual and enduring album covers ever. Although the U.K. originals are great, I also love some of the international options. I have seen a few posted on social media. In fact, the main image for this feature is the Japanese version of Never for Ever (the Japanese promotion is pretty awesome too). Even if the cover design is not altered or radically changed, seeing the cover with foreign language and other symbols brings something from the imagery. There is a curious case of The Kick Inside. That is Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album. There are quite a few different photos depending on the country. I am not exactly sure why the U.K. version, which features Bush mounted against a kite with some Eastern-influenced lettering, was not used worldwide. It is one of those album covers that perhaps is better intentionally. I am thinking again of the Japanese cover that was shot by Gered Mankowitz. That shot, of Kate in a pink leotard and the camera being focused on her face and neck – and top of her chest – is iconic. It was originally slated for the Wuthering Heights. The shot was not used because a version that was leaked and featured in the wider world showed Bush’s erect nipples. It was not the shot that would necessarily have been used. Something from that session. It was confusing. The photo could have been cropped slightly. The image that we see on the Japanese version of The Kick Inside is the photo that should have been the Wuthering Heights cover.

It goes to show that various images and photos can bring something different from the same album. People say not to judge a book by its cover. Maybe the same with an album. Even so, the cover is a portal into the music. The first image. Maybe the defining one! I feel that the album covers became truer to Kate Bush from Lionheart on. That front cover was also taken by Gered Mankowitz. As much as I like some of the international variation for The Kick Inside, the U.K. version for Lionheart is amazing. It is almost edible. If not food for the soul, it is an image that stays in the mind. It is curious that The Kick Inside was the first and last time that a wide range of photos was used around the world. I guess EMI wanted Bush to come across as this varied artist. Maybe a little rigid releasing the one cover. Perhaps some nations would not understand that kite image and its relevance. It got me thinking about how Kate Bush’s album covers would translate. How they would be interpreted by particular nations. I think that Bush had this in mind when she was thinking about the covers. Not only releasing something that was standout and would somehow define the album’s themes. It is designed so that people would look at the photo/image and it would cross language barriers. Something that was figured by EMI after the debut album. Even though I am not a fan of the covers for 2005’s Aerial and 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, they do the album justice. They are intriguing works of art and design that speak loudly.

When I see someone sharing a Kate Bush album cover or even a single cover, it makes me think about the connection and relationship between that image and the music. That Never for Ever cover springs to mind. You can read more about the album here. The 1980 album was Kate Bush’s third. A year after her extensive The Tour of Life, it was the first time producing. She produced with Jon Kelly. Maybe the cover had to be different and bolder. The first two albums are great, though Never for Ever is more fantastical, odder and beautiful. It has qualities that separate it from anything Kate Bush released. Not only her and this self-portrait. Though Lionheart has its own vibe and story – one gets a sense of children’s literature, disguise and sexuality too -, the pencil drawing from artist Nick Price was turned into this wonderful illustration. Bush would steps away from a photographic cover for Aerial and 50 Words for Snow. Even 2011’s Director’s Cut. I feel every album cover has its own personality and standout quality. The Kick Inside has this sense of movement and mystique alongside one another. International versions feature Kate Bush front and centre. The U.K. version is more about Kate Bush as an album mystical woman. A spirit or strange figure. It raise so many questions. The symbolism and relevance of the kite and the style of letting. Lionheart is the mixture of grown up and child-like. Bush young and naïve still but also hugely confident and bold. Never for Ever is more imaginative and bigger. Ideas bursting out of Kate Bush. This sense of quintessential English with the intangible, spiritual, fantasy and beyond. The Dreaming directly related to one of the album’s tracks, Houdini, but I also think that it is Kate Bush creating some mystery. Making escaping from the past and trying to break free from constraints. Hounds of Love is a mix of the literal and figurative. Her hounds, Bonnie and Clyde, are on the cover (shot by her brother, John Carder Bush), though there is also the more metaphorical representation in the Hounds of Love title track.

The Sensual World is womanly, sexy and coquettish. Seductive too. The Red Shoes has only Bush’s feet in red shoes (albeit an illustration of her feet rather than a photo). Balletic. Perhaps more literal than anything, it is also a chance to focus on more than Kate Bush. To get away from her image and the face. Less about the woman behind the album. An image that is enduring in its beautiful simplicity. That is the first not to feature Kate Bush’s face/body. She would not appear on any album cover after that. I love how there are different colour schemes and backdrops. A fresh canvas for each album. Compare the slightly misplaced and odd design of The Kick Inside and the range of international alternatives. How a teenage Kate Bush was portrayed around the world. How the U.S. photo was very different to, say, the one in Uruguay. A Japanese version of Never for Ever is stunning and highly desirable, in spite of the fact there is not much different to the original cover. I don’t think enough people have gone into depth about Kate Bush’s album covers and their significance. How each are vastly different. That bond between cover and the music. There is a lot more to explore. Single covers too. Think about Eat the Music and its recent reissue for Record Store Day. How there is something collectable and desirable about buying a physical version because of that beautiful cover. So many other single covers are extraordinary in their power and beauty – including Symphony in Blue (a Japanese single from Lionheart), Babooshka (Never for Ever) and King of the Mountain (Aerial). I get transported when I see a Kate Bush album cover! Get all these sensations and thoughts when seeing international version. Whether it is a different photo or a different language, you get something very different with each. Her album covers are representations of her art. A window into her soul. A visual connection to the music and its them. It is also a tantalising sign and signal of…

WHAT can be discovered within.

FEATURE: Second Spin: David Bowie – Diamond Dogs

FEATURE:

 

 

Second Spin

David Bowie – Diamond Dogs

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THERE are a couple of reasons…

IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie in 1974/PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O’Neill

why I am spotlighting David Bowie’s eighth studio album, Diamond Dogs. It is one of his more underrated releases. Prior to his Berlin Trilogy and the introduction of the remarkable Station to Station in 1976, there was this run of albums that had mixed reviews and were vastly different to one another. 1975’s Young Americans is a great album, though it is another not considered among his best. I have seen some mixed reception to it. A year prior to Diamond Dogs, Bowie released the covers album, Pin Ups. It is interesting in places but not essential. Bowie also released the hugely acclaimed and iconic Aladdin Sane in 1973. Wanted to ditch that persona and reinvent himself Diamond Dogs isn’t necessarily a moment of identity crisis. It was another evolution and revolution from Bowie, though it is not an album one can compare alongside, say, Hunky Dory or even Low. I think that Diamond Dogs is more worthy and impressive than many critics have given it credit for. Also, on 24th May, Diamond Dogs turns fifty. It is always important to recognise Bowie’s albums on big anniversaries. I want to spend some time with Diamond Dogs. I would suggest Bowie fans grab a copy of Diamond Dogs:

“After George Orwell's widow refused Bowie the right to use 1984 as the title of his forthcoming album, he instead used the novel as a conceptual blueprint for what became Diamond Dogs. Accompanied only by keyboardist Mike Garson, bassist Herbie Flowers, and drummers Aynsley Dunbar and Tony Newman, Bowie played guitar, sax, moog, and mellotron, in addition to his contributions as vocalist, composer, arranger, and producer of the album. With the Orwellian themes as a loose backdrop, Diamond Dogs has much of the apocalyptic sense of future shock that informed Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. While the album doesn't have the musical punch or the songwriting strengths of Ziggy, its gems make it more than worthwhile. the lush strings and dominant wah-wah guitar of 1984 seem like a nod to Isaac Hayes, while Bowie's howls and snarling sax on the title track make it instantly memorable. The glam rock classic Rebel Rebel, with its edgy guitar riff and strutting 4/4 beat, is the disc's highlight, and one of Bowie's all-time great songs. amidst the imagery of a gray, totalitarian future, Bowie injected some optimism by including the nostalgic Rock 'n' Roll With Me, a good time, rootsy number that presaged his next transformation into the blue-eyed soul singer of Young Americans”.

It is lucky we are in a position to knowingly celebrate fifty years of Diamond Dogs. For years, the exact release date of the album was debated. Some claimed it was 24th April, 1974; others 31st May 1974. David Bowie’s own website set the date as 24th May, 1974 in 2014. Diamond Dogs was given a $400,000 promotional campaign in America. This included huge billboards in Times Square and Sunset Boulevard, subway posters, adverts in the press, and a made-for-television promo clip. It was a huge event. So much expectation around the album. Diamond Dogs, whilst not as critically acclaimed as some of his album, was a big commercial success. It topped the album charts in the U.K. and reached five in the U.S. It was Bowie’s highest placing in the U.S. at that point. I am going to finish with two positive reviews for Diamond Dogs. I am going to get to a couple of features in a minute. Before that, as the album has divided opinion, this Wikipedia article about retrospective acclaim is interesting. How it still does not unite critics:

“Retrospective appraisals have been mixed. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine said that, because Bowie did not completely retire the character of Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs suffers from him being unsure how to move forward. Although he praised "Rebel Rebel", he further criticised the exclusion of Ronson and ultimately concluded "it is the first record since Space Oddity where Bowie's reach exceeds his grasp". Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune gave the album a mixed review, calling it "an overproduced concept album inspired by Orwell's 1984". Eduardo Rivadavia was also mixed in Ultimate Classic Rock, questioning the presence of Ziggy, whom Bowie supposedly retired the year before. Despite the album's commercial success, Rivadavia concluded: "with decades of hindsight, Diamond Dogs now seems more like the gateway from the Ziggy Stardust era to his Thin White Duke blue-eyed soul period, and beyond".

The record has attracted positive reviews. Pitchfork's Barry Walters described the album as "a bummer, a bad trip, 'No Fun' – a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration". He also believed it foreshadowed Bowie's Thin White Duke persona. For punknews.org, C. M. Crockford wrote that Diamonds Dogs is Bowie's "utterly most distinctive work: melodramatic, raw, challenging, and ambitious even when crammed with catchy songs". Crockford ultimately called it one of Bowie's essential releases and argued that he would "never make an album that was so obviously his own again". In a 2013 readers' poll for Rolling Stone, Diamond Dogs was voted Bowie's fifth-greatest album.

In subsequent decades, Bowie biographers have described Diamond Dogs as one of Bowie's greatest works. Cann writes: "Diamond Dogs is arguably [Bowie's] most significant album, a pivotal work and the most 'solo' album he has ever made." Although Spitz calls it "no fun", he states it was Bowie's "best-sounding, most complex record to date, and it still pulls you into its romantic and doomed world three and a half decades on". Trynka calls it "a beautiful mess", while Buckley says the album proved that Bowie could still produce work of "real quality" without Scott or the Spiders. Doggett writes it anticipated the "sonic audacity" of Low and "Heroes", while it simultaneously "capsized the vessel of classic rock". Perone argues that "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" predated Talking Heads' exploration of African rhythms and experimentation in the late 1970s. Pegg writes that with tracks like "We Are the Dead", "Big Brother" and the "Sweet Thing" suite, the album contains "some of the most sublime and remarkable sounds in the annals of rock music". He further states that Bowie's new voice on the record, a "basso profundo", particularly evident on "Sweet Thing" and "Big Brother", was a major influence on gothic rock bands in the 1980s. It ranked number 447 in NME's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

In fact, I am going to concentrate on one feature rather than two. I would also recommend people check out this feature from The Quietus. Their 2016 feature is fascinating and makes some really interesting observations. I have edited sections out of this one. Louder’s 2022 feature is remarkable in its detail. They talk about how Diamond Dogs is when David Bowie shed his Glam Rock skin. He then embarked on this expensive and dangerous tour. It was a turbulent time for him:

“Released in the summer of 1974, Diamond Dogs found David Bowie navigating the dog days of the glam-rock era – a hot and sultry period before the cultural weather broke. Having surfed and defined the pop zeitgeist about as well as any individual star since Elvis Presley, he was now cresting the last stretch of a wave as it came crashing into shore.

Diamond Dogs was a resounding commercial success – No.1 in the UK, No.5 in the US. But the album was marked down at the time. “A rather grandiose mood piece… It’s okay, you know, but is it really necessary?” was the NME’s verdict. And, retrospectively, it tends to get brushed aside in the grand sweep of things as a transitional album, marking the point in Bowie’s artistic timeline at which he was shedding his glam-rock skin and stepping into his role as the ‘plastic soul’ man of his next studio album Young Americans. (NME later revised its opinion and, in 2013, rated Diamond Dogs one of “The 500 Greatest Albums of all Time” – albeit ranked at No.447, a long way behind many of his other albums.)

Bowie himself was quick to recognise the record’s limitations. “It was not a concept album,” he told Robert Hilburn in September 1974. “It was a collection of things. And I didn’t have a band. So that’s where the tension came in. I couldn’t believe I had finished it when I did. I had done so much of it myself. I never want to be in that position again. It was frightening trying to make an album with no support behind you. I was very much on my own. It was my most difficult album. It was a relief that it did so well.”

Whatever the sense of “tension”, both musically and personally, which overshadowed the making of Diamond Dogs, the album is nevertheless a remarkably pure distillation of Bowie’s genius. Indeed, if you are looking for a collection of recordings that stands as a monument to Bowie’s across-the-board prowess as a songwriter, singer, guitarist, saxophonist, keyboard player, producer and allround media maven, there is no other album in his entire catalogue that compares to Diamond Dogs. Transitional or not, it remains as true an expression of his artistry on every front as anything he ever released.

The album was recorded in London, mostly at Olympic Studios, and Hilversum in the Netherlands, between December 1973 and February 1974. Having famously disbanded the Spiders From Mars live on stage at Hammersmith Odeon the previous July, Bowie’s first challenge was to fill the guitar genius-shaped hole left in his musical life by the departure of Mick Ronson. In a defiant display of ambition and bravado, Bowie resolved to do the job himself.

“I knew that the guitar playing had to be more than okay,” he said, looking back in 1997. “That couple of months I spent putting [Diamond Dogs] together before I went into the studio was probably the only time in my life where I really buckled down to learn the stuff I needed to have on the album. I’d actually practise two hours a day.”

Having also dispensed with the services of longstanding producer Ken Scott, Bowie’s initial plan was not only to produce the album but also to play every instrument himself – perhaps reaching the point at which ambition gave way to hubris.

Wiser counsel prevailed and he found a new rhythm section comprising session bass player Herbie Flowers (the man responsible for the swooping bass line on Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side) and drummer Tony Newman (best known for his stint in the Jeff Beck Group). Pianist Mike Garson and drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who had both contributed to Pin Ups, the album of cover versions which Bowie had somehow slotted into his schedule and released in October 1973, were also brought in.

All sorts of grand ideas were floated in the build up to Diamond Dogs. Bowie had spoken of his intention to mount a “full-scale rock musical” re-telling the story of Ziggy Stardust. He’d also let it be known that he was planning to write and direct a musical production for TV of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of his favourite novels.

IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie captured in the studio during the recording of Diamond Dogs/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives

“I’d failed to obtain the theatrical rights from George Orwell’s widow,” Bowie told the Mail On Sunday in 2008. “And having written three or more songs for it already, I did a fast about-face and recobbled the idea into Diamond Dogs: teen punks on rusty skates living on the roofs of the dystopian Hunger City; a post-apocalyptic landscape.”

And if the general fraternising that went on during the course of the sessions wasn’t enough to reinforce the connection, Bowie and his then-wife Angie (Angela Barnett) had recently moved into a grand terraced house in Chelsea where they were now near neighbours of Mick and Bianca Jagger, with whom they socialised. Indeed, according to the American singer and model Ava Cherry, who stayed in the house for a time with David and Angie, there was a lot more than socialising going on.

“Mick Jagger knew David, and I was friends with both of them,” Cherry told Bowie biographer Dylan Jones. “So all three of us used to hang out a lot, and yes we did have some fun together.”

According to Cherry, at the end of one party in New York, everyone had left apart from her, Bowie and Jagger. “So it just ended up with the three of us sleeping together. That was it. And we had a wonderful time and we had a lot of fun.”

Diamond Dogs performed disappointingly when released as a single in June 1974 (after the album was released) in the UK, where it peaked at No.21. Far more resonant and enduring as a flagship track for the album was Rebel Rebel – the song that most clearly marked both the end of an era for Bowie and the jumping off point for Diamond Dogs.

Recorded on December 27, 1973, Rebel Rebel was the first song of the sessions and the last song that Bowie recorded at Trident Studios in Soho where he had recorded the majority of his work since 1968. Released as a single in the UK in February 1974, ahead of the album, Rebel Rebel reached No.5 and remains one of Bowie’s touchstone songs.

The lyric is as pertinent today – maybe even more so – as it was almost 50 years ago: ‘You’ve got your mother in a whirl, cos she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.’ And the riff is a masterpiece: simple, original and instantly recognisable in the way that only a handful of pop-rock riffs – Sweet Jane, Jumping Jack Flash, You Really Got Me – could ever truly claim to be. Did Bowie really come up with that and play it completely off his own bat? 

PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images

“He had the riff about seventy-five per cent sorted out,” recalled Alan Parker, a session guitarist credited for his contribution to one track (1984) on the album. “He wanted it a bit like a Stones riff and he played it to me as such, and I then tinkered around with it. I said: ‘Well, what if we did this and that and made it sound more clangy and put some bends in it?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, I love that, that’s fine.’”

Whatever Parker’s contribution to the sculpting and performing of the song behind the scenes, Bowie is the sole writer and guitarist listed on the credits. While Rebel Rebel and the title track echoed the triumphs of Bowie’s glam-rock past, the rest of the album offered a tantalising glimpse of the future-Bowie that was yet to fully materialise.

At the heart of Side 1 is the three-piece song suite Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise), which was originally intended to be the centrepiece for the would-be stage production of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is a yearning yet chilling sequence, with lyrics rendered as a collage of bittersweet images and ideas. ‘I guess we could cruise down one more time, with you by my side it should be fine/We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band, then jump in the river holding hands.’

The sequence is notable for its intensely detailed arrangement – brought to life not least by Bowie’s contributions on saxophone and guitar. The end of the Reprise section (which runs into Rebel Rebel) has him conjuring a screeching, crunching, overdriven guitar noise that prefigured the industrial sounds that Earl Slick would later develop on Station To Station and Reeves Gabrels would take to another level on the Tin Machine albums. Bowie wrote the lyrics for these and other songs on Diamond Dogs using the ‘cut-up’ method popularised by the ‘beat’ writer and literary figurehead William Burroughs.

The comparatively jaunty music on tracks such as Rock’N’Roll With Me and Big Brother sounds like it should be part of a stage musical – as indeed it was originally intended to be. The Rocky Horror Show, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1973, was on the way to becoming a cult phenomenon at the time Bowie was writing the album and there was a lot of musical theatricality in the air.

IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie and William Burroughs/PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images

There was also evidence of the looming switch of musical pace and persona that Bowie would effect on his next album, Young Americans – most obviously represented in the track 1984, which took its inspiration from the wah-wah guitar and string arrangements of Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack to the 1971 film Shaft.

“When we worked on the song 1984 he was already referencing Barry White,” said Ken Scott, who had produced an earlier recording of the song as part of the Aladdin Sane sessions in January 1973. “He wanted the hi-hat and the strings to sound like they would be on a Barry White album. He was already anticipating the sound of Young Americans.”

The faintly shocking, sci-fi cover artwork by the Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, featuring a picture of Bowie with his lower body transformed into that of a dog complete with genitalia (airbrushed from most versions at the time) became instantly iconic. Bowie got the idea after Mick Jagger told him that Peellaert was designing the sleeve of the forthcoming Stones album It’s Only Rock’N’Roll.  

“I immediately rushed out and got Guy Peellaert to do my cover too,” Bowie admitted later. When It’s Only Rock’N’Roll was released several months after Diamond Dogs, everyone assumed the Stones had copied Bowie. “He [Jagger] never forgave me for that!” Bowie said.

“Diamond Dogs scared me because I was mutating into something I just didn’t believe in any more, and the dreadful thing was, it was so easy,” Bowie said, looking back in 2008. “The Diamond Dogs period was just an extension of Aladdin Sane, which in itself was just an extrapolation of Ziggy Stardust.

“But by the time of Diamond Dogs that persona had started to feel claustrophobic, and I needed a change… Diamond Dogs was making me sick, both physically and creatively, and I was shifting into melodrama."

I am going to conclude with a couple of reviews. Punk News shared their opinions about one of David Bowie’s most divisive albums. He was clearly at an awkward moment in his career. One where he was looking to shift his past and move on. There is something chaotic, dark and often unfocused in Diamond Dogs…yet it is an album that has many highlights and is a lot stronger than people say it is:

“Diamond Dogs is famously one of the Bowie albums that's really for fans, and it's probably his most utterly distinctive work (even Low sounds like other art-rock albums of the time): melodramatic, raw, challenging, and ambitious even when crammed with catchy songs. And as he later noted it was extremely influential on the British punk scene in sound and scope. Bowie's violent, amateruishly scraping guitar playing here would be echoed in the late-70's post-punk bands and Diamond Dogs' concept of street gangs roaming London was echoed in the gleeful nihilism of the Sex Pistols. Notably Bowie made much of the album itself, including guitar and sax, and the musicianship here is unconventional, playful, a little off-kilter (one suspects Bowie was listening to Here Come The Warm Jets closely). Diamond Dogs is the goofy, abrasive place where punk and art-rock meet, dance a little, and depart.

It was never well-recieved by critics, probably because it was such a radical departure from Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust, but Diamond Dogs took the rock-theater approach of "Rock n' Roll Suicide" and "Lady Grinning Soul" and ran with it. One of the important aspects of Bowie and the glam school was de-heteroizing rock n' roll and making it more dramatic, combining Elvis Presley with Judy Garland standards, and that's evident on the centerpiece "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)", a song cycle of vulnerability, sneering sex, curdling violence, and at the close effeminate, passionate need. It's one of Bowie's greatest works as a singer and he morphs from a crooning Sinatra to Lotte Lenya then a heartbroken Sandie Shaw. The music and lyrics here are a startling mix of dreaming piano, guitar, and mourning saxophone: "We'll buy some drugs and watch a band/Then jump in a river holding hands." Then "Rebel Rebel" follows and is there anything to say that hasn't been said? The best riff Bowie ever wrote on his own and a joyful coda to the glam rock world that would fade then emerge as the punk scene in 76/77.

The rest of the album by turns is changing constantly, veering from cheeky blues-stomp ("Diamond Dogs") to haunted showstopper ("We Are The Dead)" - more than his other work, Diamond Dogs is a reflection of Bowie's mercurial musical nature, never quite satisfied with one sound or idea, though the Curtis Mayfield-esque "1984" absolutely foreshadows the Philly sounds of Young Americans and would probably be more of a hit if it was't so gloomy and apocalyptic. "Big Brother" and the extremely fucked up "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" sum up Diamond Dogs perfectly, poppy and dyspeptic than deeply unsettling.

As a Bowie fan I'd give this 5/5, but the music writer in me might knock off half a star- the music is not always as strong as the aspirations behind it and "Rock n' Roll With Me" is a pretty tedious soul song. But Diamond Dogs is essential for those who want to go deeper into Bowie and for amateur music historians eager to find early sources of punk. Bowie would do better albums in the future, including the masterpiece Low and the glorious Station to Station, but he'd never make an album that was so obviously his own again (Bowie is notably one of the great collaborators of pop music). When you listen to Diamond Dogs, you're immersed in a cruel, romantic, and feral world, one that at it's worst you still don't want to leave”.

The final review I am referencing is from Pitchfork. They reviewed the album in 2016. In spite of the fact they note it has dread and a bummer vibe, Diamond Dogs is also an album that is a “work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration”:

“The last glam gasp of Bowie's English years, Dogs also sprawls toward Bowie’s forthcoming Thin White Duke persona, embracing Blaxploitation funk and soul, rock opera, European art song, and Broadway. The album cracked FM radio with "Rebel Rebel," an Iggy Pop-like blast aimed at America’s teenage wasteland. Recapitulating his earlier achievements while raising their stakes, it stomped on whatever good vibes remained in British rock, and cleared the stage for punk and goth. As Bowie noted decades later, the tribal "peoploids" that rummage through the album’s fantastically bleak Hunger City like the orphaned pickpockets of Oliver Twist presaged a generation of Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses. Dogs envisioned a no-future future just before the next breed of pop stars lived it.

As befitting a post-apocalyptic work, Dogs was born from the frustration of failed opportunities. Bowie initially endeavored to create a TV musical adaptation of George Orwell’s totalitarian milestone 1984—until the social critic’s widow refused permission. Around the same time, Rolling Stone’s London bureau arranged for Bowie and William S. Burroughs to interview each other, which introduced the singer to the author’s Nova Express. Immediately thereafter, Bowie began penning lyrical non sequiturs via that novel’s cut-up technique, and planned a Ziggy musical to be similarly shuffled each night. This, too, faltered, although it inspired new tunes. These two projects, sharing dystopian themes, fused together to form the mutant Dogs.

While all this was happening, Bowie shed the Spiders from Mars, who enabled his transformation from folky space oddity to eclectic, hard-rocking freak. The biggest break was with guitarist Mick Ronson, whose biting, formally schooled style and arrangements had redefined Bowie. Rather than replacing his sidekick, the singer handles most guitar parts himself, as well as contributing sax and electronic keyboards while solely producing this emphatically solo project. Tony Visconti—who oversaw 1970’s metallic The Man Who Sold the World while providing bass guitar—returns only to assist the final mix and fulfill the singer’s request for "Barry White strings" on "1984"; he’d later co-produce much of Bowie’s output. If you measure his albums by how much he calls the shots and actually plays, Diamond Dogs is the Bowie-est one of all.

He sets the scene with "Future Legend," a spoken-word intro soundtracked by synths evoking dripping Dalí clocks, buzzing bee guitars quoting "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," and other experimental studio scuzz. This slides into the bonking backward cowbell of the title track, which filters the Stones’ slam-bam boogie through a woozy mix. "As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent/ You asked for the latest party," it begins—a line Bowie later admitted as self-descriptive. Set in forthcoming years yet capturing the squalor of then-contemporary London, New York, and the Eastern Bloc nations through which Bowie recently passed, the lurid lyrics flash with gang violence: "The Diamond Dogs are poachers and they hide behind trees/ Hunt you to the ground they will/ Mannequins with kill appeal." The vibe is celebratory despite the menace, if unstable—right down to the track’s note-bending central riff. Contemporary critics mourned Ronson’s absence, but Bowie’s guitar here and throughout the album is thrillingly off-kilter with unconventional chord fragments that the Edge, Sonic Youth, shoegazers, and dream-poppers alike would draw from for decades to come.

Because Bowie so convincingly portrayed decay, it went often unacknowledged how far he advanced his compositional and arrangement skills in just a few post-"Space Oddity" years. Their showcase, "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)" begins with Bowie growling at the bottom of his register, but even before the chorus hits, he’s wailing near the top of his tenor while Mike Garson’s tinkling jazz keys supply the sophistication Bowie’s squawking guitars deny. Topically shifting from a hustler turning tricks to a politician spewing empty promises to cocaine’s brain-freezing bliss, the suite’s interconnected segments assert that all three demand submission to all-conquering power—this concept album’s central theme. The tempo accelerates as his poetry gains density, then subsides again as the melody soars before surrendering to guitars that grind with metronomic precision until sputtering out on the root note of the opening chord on the album’s masterstroke.

As melodically constricted as that suite was expansive, "Rebel Rebel" is Bowie’s answer to all those deliciously dumb Sweet, Slade, Mud, Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, and T. Rex hits he indirectly enabled during glam’s peak. Androgyny is subtext to these acts, but the main man, per usual, pushes it to the forefront: "You’ve got yer mother in a whirl/ She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl," goes the opening line, but he never definitively assigns gender: Bowie’s dissident has torn [their] dress, but wants to "be there when they count up the dudes." Yet there’s nothing ambiguous about that glorious guitar groove, the track’s stomping beat, the "hot tramp" pause between both, and their return. If Bowie often drifted above listeners’ heads, here he shoots straight at their solar plexus and scores with what ranks among the greatest, most insistent riffs of the '70s. Rockers who’d dismissed Bowie as a dandy now gave the dude a pass.

Aside from a stray super-Bowie line about lizards crying in the heat, side 2's opening track, "Rock ‘N Roll With Me," is even more forthright—a ballad of appreciation for his fans that provides reprieve from the sleaze and offers further proof that Bowie could belt. It’s stagey to be sure, but so is it sincere. "I’ve found the door that lets me out," he positively roars; performance sets him free.

The album is queasy soul music signifying soullessness; on the Shaft-like tableau "1984," he rewrites Orwell’s authoritarian state as a worldwide ghetto populated by junkies overseen by surgeon thugs who manipulate thoughts and misguide identities, all set to wah-wah guitars. The album culminates perversely, joyfully, as "Big Brother" segues into "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family," a fuzzed-out danse macabre where irregular time signatures alternate every few measures and the percussion keeps changing accents; there’s no center, just brief, blissful release before a stuttering loop of Bowie yelping in distress fades as if to black.

All this hopelessness and annihilation would be suffocating if it weren’t for Bowie’s exuberance. He throws himself into Orwell’s draconian hell as if strutting around in Kansai Yamamoto’s Aladdin Sane-era bodysuit; it fits his skeletal contours. Determined to reaffirm his relevance in spite of his setbacks, the singer sparkled so brightly that he offset the darkness of his material. Just as Watergate was coming to a boil, singer-songwriters and prog-rockers were glutting the charts, and '60s resistance was morphing into '70s complacency, this sweet rebel (rebel) made revolution strangely sexy again. Glaring at you from Dogs’ cover with canine hindquarters and emaciated features like the circus sideshow Freaks he footnotes in the title cut, he served notice that rock’s outsiders remained more compelling than the softies who increasingly occupied its center, even as his ever-growing popularity chipped away at it. You can bet Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Television sat up and took notes”.

On 24th May, Diamond Dogs turns fifty. I have a lot of time and respect for it. It is very important in terms of Bowie’s career and legacy. The 1970s was his most successful decade. Whilst Diamond Dogs was not his most acclaimed of the 1970s, I think it is important in terms of where he came from and where he would head. In 2016, Ultimate Classic Rock ranked the album as his fourteenth-best. SPIN placed it in fifth when they ranked the albums in 2022. The A.V. Club ranked it fourteenth in their feature. Rough Trade placed Diamond Dogs fourth earlier this year. In 2013, Rolling Stone placed it in fifth. As you can see, through the years, there has been a division of opinion. Good to see that some people consider Diamond Dogs to be a great work that is underrated. Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary, I wanted to dive into it. You may have never heard the album or might not have listened for a while. It is clear that 1974’s Diamond Dogs is…

WORTHY of fresh assessment.