FEATURE: Back to Black? The Downsides and Complicated Legacy of Indie Sleaze

FEATURE:

 

 

Back to Black?

IN THIS PHOTO: Blake Fielder-Civil with Amy Winehouse/PHOTO CREDIT: Denise Truscello/Getty Images

The Downsides and Complicated Legacy of Indie Sleaze

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THERE is a lot of…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Nash hosts the new eight-part BBC podcast, The Rise and Fall of … Indie Sleaze

romanticising a period of music and culture called Indie Sleaze. It was fashionable and in vogue between 2006 and 2012. Not necessarily only happening in London, the capital was a hub for this party-focused and messy aesthetic. Though its roots can be traced back to the New York in the late-1990s/early-2000s. Although we can reminisce about the vintage clothing and grungy/glamorous look, do we look at that times through rose-tinted glasses?! Artists such as Charli xcx are probably the modern-day epitome of a time in music and entertainment that is over twenty years old. That idea of care-free recklessness and a sense of freedom without much consequence. If that idea of going back to that time or recalling it with fondness seems attractive and escapist against a modern world that is brutal and relentless bleak, it is worth remembering the realities of that time and how difficult it was – especially for women. TikTok particularly is fuelling this narrative and feeling that the Indie Sleaze years were a wonderful and easy time to be around. Maybe it was for some. However, as Emily Maddick recently wrote for Glamour, Gen Z need to stop glamourising and romanticising this time:

“There’s a lot of hype around the ‘indie sleaze’ era of the mid to late noughties right now. According to the internet, the media and Tiktok, Gen Z are currently obsessed with the period from around 2006 - 2012; its fashion, its music, its icons. “‘Such a cool time to be alive’: why Gen Z is so nostalgic about ‘indie sleaze’” ran one BBC headline last month. There are thousands of videos on TikTok mythologising this period and heralding its revival, mimicking its makeup, looks, style and trends, with many posts having views in their millions.

Britain was very much the centre of this moment. The fashion was hipster subculture, performativley vintage, mixing 70s, 80s and grunge. Think Kate Moss and Alexa Chung at Glastonbury with their bum-cheek-grazing denim cut-offs; skinny scarves, skinny jeans, scruffy hair, band t-shirts, lashings of gold jewellery; Amy Winehouse with her winged eyeliner, tattoos and tennis dresses holding court at The Hawley Arms in Camden. Topshop Oxford Circus was the fashion mecca - and this month’s revival of the hallowed Brit high street brand, which closed its doors in 2021, has only intensified the indie sleaze revival. Last week, musician Kate Nash, who rose to fame at this time, released a BBC Sounds podcast, The Rise and Fall of Indie Sleaze. The 6-part podcast features interviews with many of the musicians from the British bands that defined this era: The Libertines, The Arctic Monkeys, Razorlight, The Kooks. And while it was these male Brit musicians who provided the soundtrack to this scene, it was their love lives and the party kids surrounding them that provided the scandal. As Kate Nash points out on the podcast:

“By 2007 - the UK music scene had jumped from the pages of music magazines to The Sun, The Mirror and The Daily Mail and the girlfriends who played a big part in this” she says on the podcast.

On her podcast, Kate Nash describes how while it was definitely a liberating, fun and unique moment, it also, “contained a lot of darkness and chaos” adding, “I feel lucky that I grew up in it and lucky that I survived it too.”

And while I really don’t want to be a buzzkill, here are some key points that I believe might prompt the younger generation to reconsider romanticising this unique moment in pop culture history.

Sleaze. The clue’s in the name. Although this moniker has been bestowed on the era posthumously, there’s no getting away from it - it was a sleazy, seedy, grubby, druggy and dangerous time. It was also a horrendous time to be a woman in the public eye.

Yes, I’m talking about the very real, very pervasive and very shitty attitude to women’s bodies that was very much the norm. This was peak toxic diet culture, a time pre the Body Positivity movement (although RIP to that in 2025, thanks Ozempic). The notion that we could actually love our bodies and celebrate them whatever size they were and have women in the public eye extolling exactly that, was completely alien. Skeletal thin was the aspiration. And yes, I know that it was perpetrated by the magazines of the time (who can forget Heat magazine’s circle of shame?) and working in that culture is not something I am proud of. In fact, I remember Amy Winehouse giving an interview to Grazia, published around the end of 2007 and shockingly saying that she believed she only got really famous when she got really skinny. And we now know that eating disorders were just some of the many demons she battled with in her short life.

Also, the very real and pervasive shitty attitude to female celebrities at that time in general - not just their bodies. Nineties ‘ladette’ culture was still hanging around and famous women were held to toxic and damaging double standards. No one spoke about mental health ( and I mean, no one) and the abusive behaviour and predatory power dynamics in the entertainment industry that eventually led to the #MeToo movement of 2017 was standard”.

A new podcast, The Rise and Fall … of Indie Sleaze is available on BBC Sounds. No doubt its influence on today’s artists is huge. A lot of the acts who were popular during the Indie Sleaze years – such as The Libertines, Amy Winehouse, Razorlight, Arctic Monkeys – are influencing today. Noy only in terms of their sound and fashion. Their attitude and how they conducted their careers. It is always amazing when artists look back at genres and times in music and utilise aspects but update them. Make them unique. I will drop in some of the tracks that could be defined as Indie Sleaze bangers or anthems. Songs that takes many of us back to a time that did seem less foreboding and liberated. Living in areas like Camden must have been fascinating at this time. The artists playing there and the buzz of the street! We should look fondly at the music because some terrific artists started during the Indie Sleaze era. It must have been energising for them to see like-minded artists around them. Some classic albums from that time. Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black (2006) and The Libertines’ eponymous album of 2004. Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights of 2002. Even though many see Indie Sleaze as a scene that started or exploded around 2006, its origins can be dated and traced back over half a decade before then. This 2024 article from Rough Trade captures the spirit of the time with the album recommendations. Those that were soundtracking the lives of so many people. In terms of what defined the time and where its roots formed, it does sound quite idealistic and evocative:

“Sweaty floors, skinny jeans and angular indie rock. The term ‘indie sleaze’ was coined in 2021 to encapsulate the grimy, energetic, carefree sound and aesthetic of a scene which emerged in the early noughties. The music of indie sleaze all shared a distinctive 'hedonistic' aesthetic, one which prevailed in the music videos and the fashion of its artists, in their low-maintenance sometimes kooky clothing, a 'partying chic'. The Instagram account @indiesleaze, run by a Toronto-born creator, has further defined the era, curating a totally engrossing profile dedicated to some of the most iconic and representative pictures and figures of the period - from early 2000s Kate Moss at Glastonbury to BTS photos of the Skins cast.

With its primary origins tracing back to a wave of New York City indie rock bands with a post-grunge attitude (The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol), indie sleaze broadened over time to become an umbrella for various styles of indie music. The era gave us many albums characterised by their fusion of dance and punk (Digitalism, CSS, Mason, Daft Punk, Justice, LCD Soundsystem and more) whilst at the same time, many indie sleaze artists were better defined by their pure rock and roll energy, with the likes of Arctic Monkeys, The Kills and The Libertines and later Vampire Weekend prominent in an unforgettable stretch in music's history”.

Those who are using TikTok to shine new light onto Indie Sleaze are probably not aware of how bad and dark it was for so many people. Of course, the music is fantastic and it was an amazing time for many. However, for many others – especially women -, the reality was quite grim. And those who might not have even been alive at the time and are learning about Indie Sleaze through modern acts who are reviving the genre – such as The Dare, as DAZED wrote in 2024 – need to understanding true context and the downsides. Returning to that Glamour article, life for many high-profile women was awful and defined by harassment and abuse. When we think about the music and the ‘good time’, we also need to think about those for whom the Indie Sleaze period was a living nightmare:

“Speaking to GLAMOUR, drag queen, DJ and music producer, Jodie Harsh, whose memoir on the noughties, You Had To Be There is published this September, says: “[back then] everything was a little darker, a little later, a little more smudged and ripped-up…" Jodie, who was a staple on the London party circuit - and who was once famously pictured handing out cups of tea to paparazzi with Amy Winehouse outside her Camden home - also recalls how misogynistic it was. “The noughties were a really strange time to be famous and female. The paparazzi were up-skirting eighteen year old girls and hurling abuse outside people’s front doors to rile up a reaction, and images of broken dreams seemed to be what sold the most. It was of course misogynistic, and famous girls were almost expected to put up with the behaviour, as if it was part of the fame contract - a trade-off for making lots of money. We know what happened to Amy, and I don’t know that we’ve learned from it yet”.

I would advise people to listen to the eight-part The Rise and Fall … of Indie Sleaze podcast. We will get a real sense of that period and the incredible music and artists who made so many feel loved, happy and understood. It was quite a free and hedonistic time, though that is not what we should solely remember. It was a hugely important time in music. You can feel the effects and reverberations to this day. However, for so many women in the public eye and out, it was a truly frightening and unrelenting time. If so many right now are romanticising Indie Sleaze and there is this new wave of affection for the cool and party lifestyle, we cannot ignore the grim and sleaze. It is good to remember the music and artists but, in terms of its legacy regarding how so many women were viewed and treated, we really do not want to go…

BACK to black.

FEATURE: Shining a Light on a New Kate Moss-Hosted Podcast: David Bowie: 1970-1975

FEATURE:

 

 

Shining a Light on a New Kate Moss-Hosted Podcast

IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Schapiro

David Bowie: 1970-1975

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ALTHOUGH it has been…

IN THIS PHOTO: Two icons: David Bowie and Kate Moss/PHOTO CREDIT: Ellen von Unwerth

nine years since we lost David Bowie, there is still this massive interest. It was a huge shock to learn of his death in January 2016. Almost a decade after that terrible blow, there has been plenty of retrospection and some posthumous released. The archive is still pretty packed I think and I would imagine more albums and songs coming through. Documentaries and David Bowie books. Even though there are few artists around now you can directly link to Bowie, his influence is spreading right through music and so many other industries. In terms of his fashion and reinventions. So many aspects of his career and life. Such a fascinating artist who released seminal albums. With a career spanning fifty years, there are so many amazing eras and periods where he moved between looks, styles and sounds. Every fan will have their own favourite David Bowie album, period or character. In terms of his most important time in music, one could argue it occurred between 1970 and 1975. From 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World to 1975’s Young Americans, there was this evolution and shift. This artist growing in confidence. Aladdin Sane of 1973 was a huge album. 1975 ended a very productive and successful period for David Bowie. In 1976, Bowie released Station to Station and then, in 1977, Low and “Heroes”. It is startling to see how much he grew between 1970 and 1975. How that five-year period enforced his work for the next few years.

I mention this, because there is going to be a new eight-part series broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Music next month (it is available from 10th September). Music Uncovered, David Bowie: Changeling will be fronted and hosted by Kate Moss. She and David Bowie were friends. No doubt, Bowie’s style and fashion genius influenced Kate Moss. Also, his music was hugely important. Part of a series of shows on the station this autumn, I am excited to learn more about David Bowie’s 1970-1975. This is what Rolling Stone UK said in their feature:

“A new podcast series hosted by Kate Moss which explores the life and music of David Bowie is among the new programmes being offered by BBC Radio 6 Music this Autumn.

Music Uncovered, David Bowie: Changeling will see the supermodel, a close friend of Bowie, exploring how the music icon transformed into Ziggy Stardust in the early 1970s and the path he forged to becoming a rock legend.

“David Bowie was a very special person. Someone who was much more than a friend – he was an enigma. So, when the chance came to dive into this extraordinary five-year chapter of Bowie’s life for 6 Music and BBC Sounds, hearing from those who joined him on his creative journey and those he continues to inspire, I was excited to help share the story of such an incredible transformation. This podcast is a real celebration of my friend, a true British icon,” Kate Moss said.

The new eight part podcast will explore Bowie between 1970-75 and features rare and unheard interviews with him, including audio from the BBC Archive and a 2001 chat with Des Shaw, the creator of the podcast.

Other notable names lending their thoughts to the new series include Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, Boy George, Edward Enninful, Chrissie Hynde, Elton John, Goldie, Robbie Williams and Twiggy. It will also feature archival interviews from the likes of Lady Gaga, the late Sinéad O’Connor and Lou Reed, and Tracey Emin”.

I am going to end this feature with a playlist collating the best tracks and deep cuts from David Bowie’s albums between 1970 and 1975. I want to look at each end of that half-decade. Starting out with this feature from last year that documents and dissects the making of 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World. This was a moment of real growth and creative breakthrough. A moment that set him on course to stardom. I think David Bowie defined music in the 1970s. This album was the first statement from an artist who would soon be seen as an icon and true innovator:

“By March 1970, Major Tom was becoming something of an albatross to his 23-year old earthly counterpart David Bowie. The success of his single Space Oddity, which reached No.5 in the UK and sold nearly 150,000 copies, had pushed up fees for Bowie’s live shows and made him flush for the first time in his six-year career. But the song’s connection to the Apollo Moon landing had coloured it with a novelty status that he was finding it difficult to get past. His latest single, The Prettiest Star, written for his new bride Angie and featuring Marc Bolan on lead guitar, sold only 800 copies and didn’t even make the charts.

Bowie had other troubles on his mind too. He was grieving for his father, who had died a few months earlier at the age of 56. His management contract with Ken Pitt had soured to the point where he wanted out. There was also the delicate matter of his schizophrenic half-brother Terry, who’d been living with his parents. After Bowie’s dad passed away, his mother, unable to cope with Terry, committed him to Cane Hill Asylum. Bowie visited him regularly, but felt increasingly guilty over not being able to do more to help.

Looking back in a 1971 Phonograph interview, Bowie summed up his state of mind at that time: “I really felt so depressed, so aimless, and this torrential feeling of: ‘What’s it all for anyway?’ A lot of it went through that period.”

So it made sense to stay cocooned with Angie in their flat at Haddon Hall, a shambling old Victorian house in Beckenham. Sharing the rent was Bowie’s producer pal Tony Visconti, and his girlfriend. The record that became The Man Who Sold The World began with their late-night conversations about the idea of moving away from singles toward albums.

“We wanted to make an art-rock album,” Visconti said in Dylan Jones’s book David Bowie: A Life. “On the Space Oddity album we had no idea what we were doing. It was all over the map. So we tried something different, something harder. We just threw caution to the wind. It had to be seen by our peers as a work of art rather than just a pop album, as David and I were into the idea of a concept album. The single went out of favour for a while because the likes of Led Zeppelin and Yes were making albums that were outselling singles for the first time We wanted to be seen as a great album group.”

The Man Who Sold The World was released on November 4, 1970 in the US, and April 10 the following year in the UK. Rolling Stone described it “intriguing and chilling”. Phonograph Record praised it for “trying to define some new province of modern music”.

In support of the album, Bowie did a brief tour of US college radio stations, showing up in his Mr. Fish dress, confounding and charming DJs. But since Olav Wyper, his champion at the label, had departed, Mercury did little to promote the record. By early 1971, Tony Defries was already busy engineering Bowie’s move to RCA Victor.

The pushy manager’s increasingly hands-on presence in Bowie’s life ended up forcing Visconti out of the picture and on towards his fruitful partnership with Marc Bolan and T.Rex.

“David was assigning his power to other people,” Visconti said in The Golden Years. “When he meets someone, and he falls in love, forget it. The person’s the one until he’s severely hurt. I said to David: ‘If you go with Tony Defries, I’m not going to go with you.’”

The album enjoyed a brief resurgence in 1974 after Lulu had a UK No.3 hit with her cover of the title track. Produced by Bowie and Mick Ronson, and featuring the Spiders From Mars as a backing band, it veered even further towards the Berlin cabaret feel that was hinted at in the original.

“I didn’t think The Man Who Sold The World was the best song for my voice, but it was such a strong song in itself,” Lulu told author Marc Spitz. “Bowie kept telling me to smoke more cigarettes, to give my voice a certain quality”.

I want to bring in a feature that Dig! published in 2020 that took us inside the making of David Bowie’s Young Americans. That 1975 was another music shift. Not one that thrilled all fans and critics. However, if you look at where he was in 1970 and where he ended in 1975, he had undergone so many changes and was constantly shifting and discovering. Young Americans is one of his most exceptional and underrated albums:

“Young Americans was the first Bowie album to offer a truly startling musical about-face. A shift from the doomy glam of 1974’s Diamond Dogs, it featured his take on the soul and funk music he’d loved as a youth, and then fallen back in love with on that album’s US tour, the final leg of which was variously known as The Soul Tour and The Philly Dogs tour, after the sound Philadelphia International Records had minted on their rise to becoming the Motown of the 70s.

Remarkably, Bowie pulled off his transition from red-haired alien to blue-eyed soul boy. Released on 7 March 1975, Young Americans was a Top 10 hit in the US, and its second single, the irresistible sparse funk of Fame, became his first US No.1. Not only that, but in November 1975 Bowie received the ultimate nod of approval when he was invited to be one of the first white artists to perform on the hugely influential US TV show Soul Train. The success of Young Americans gave him the artistic freedom to follow his muse wherever it took him.

“Young Americans, the album Fame is from, is, I would say, the definitive plastic soul record,” Bowie told Playboy in 1976. “It’s the squashed remains of ethnic music as it survives in the age of Muzak rock, written and sung by a white limey.” Despite what he said after the fact, Bowie went out of his way to make his take on R&B and soul as authentic as possible.

While on the first leg of his Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie connected with the soul music ruling the US airwaves at the time, reawakening a deep musical love and providing inspiration for his next move. Over the course of the first leg of the tour (captured on the 1974 album David Live, which had been recorded from 10 to 13 July 1974 at the Tower Theater, Pennsylvania), Bowie began rearranging his own songs and covering classic soul tracks like Eddie Floyd’s Stax hit Knock On Wood, to reflect his new musical crush. When it came to demoing material for his new studio album, he was keen to go to the source of the “Philly sound” – Sigma Studios’ house band, MFSB, a loose group of more than 30 crack studio musicians who’d backed The O’Jays, Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes and The Spinners, while finding huge success of their own with 1973’s Love Is The Message”.

IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie is seen with a large barking dog while working on the artwork for his album, Diamond Dogs, in London in 1974/PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O'Neill/Getty Images

I will end with this feature from TIME. It was excerpted from TIME’s David Bowie: His Life on Earth, an eighty-page, fully illustrated commemorative edition. Available at retailers and at Amazon.com. It is clear that the first half of the 1970s was a hugely important period for David Bowie. It will be interesting to hear the eight-part BBC Radio 6 Music series about this period. How David Bowie’s 1970-1975 was this fascinating time. One that not only changed his career but the music landscape around him:

“Call him clairvoyant: Way back in the 1970s, David Bowie envisioned key parts of our culture today. During the most crucial decade in Bowie’s career, his forward-thinking approach to sexual identity, celebrity image and musical presentation tipped off many of the hot-button issues that currently obsess us. Think about it: the way social media allows us to create alternate selves at will, the manner in which society increasingly views gender as fluid, as well as the theatrical identities of modern stars from Daft Punk to the hip-hop collective Odd Future all have seeds in Bowie’s quick-change run of characters in the ’70s. Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke and the Man Who Fell to Earth, taken together, made a statement that rejected the very notion of a fixed self. At the same time, they gave rock a wholly new theatrical flourish.

Just as prime-time Bowie tried on and discarded characters as blithely as one would clothes, so he ran mad through a dizzying range of musical styles. He made innovations in art pop, glam rock, German industrial music and more, along the way minting a dense discography of classics. During that pivotal decade, he didn’t release a single less than defining work, creating a dozen successive touchstones.

While Bowie’s lithe figure and pretty face gave him an androgynous aura from the start, he didn’t use that role in so focused, and shocking, a way until the U.K. cover of his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. It found him draped over a chaise longue wearing a dress and sporting long tresses that seemed less like the hippie casual norm of the day than like something out of old Hollywood. When he appeared in a similar fashion for an interview with Rolling Stone, its writer described him as “ravishing” and “almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall.” Even so, Bowie’s U.S. label of the era, RCA, reissued the album in a less provocative cover, depicting Bowie in a more common rockstar pose: a macho kick. The music inside led Bowie in a harder-rocking direction than its folk and pop-leaning predecessors. The title track proved enduring enough to inspire an aching cover version by Nirvana on their 1994 concert album, MTV Unplugged in New York.

It was Bowie’s next work, Hunky Dory, that kicked off his classic run. On one level, that 1971 album seemed to boldface the star’s influences, with one track titled “Song for Bob Dylan” and another “Andy Warhol.” A third cut, “Queen Bitch,” nodded to the decadent rock flash of the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Bowie transformed those references into a sound very much his own, marked by high-drama vocals and a deep melodic command. “Life on Mars?” had such a theatrical flair, it later provided a suitable cover for Barbra Streisand. Bowie advertised his ability to move swiftly between all these styles with the album’s opening proclamation, “Changes,” a song that doubled as a mantra.

To that end, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars found him performing in an entirely new guise, as the title character backed by his raging Spiders rock band. “Offstage, I’m a robot; onstage, I achieve emotion,” Bowie said back then of his love of assuming characters. “It’s probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David.”

Bowie could have tarried longer on the glam-rock bandwagon he had helped create, but he changed yet again on 1975’s Young Americans. Enlisting a talented but then little known singer, Luther Vandross, who co-wrote a track and helped with arrangements, Bowie offered what he called “plastic soul,” a cheeky label for his co-opting of African-American R&B and funk, heard in hits like the title track and the No. 1 dance standard “Fame.”

Bowie’s description of the music may have advertised its inauthenticity, but that only enhanced his consistent outsider stance”.

The interview archives and unheard audio will be a treat for David Bowie fans. It will provide new context and insight into David Bowie and his 1970s. Contributions from Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, Boy George, Edward Enninful, Chrissie Hynde, Elton John, Goldie, Robbie Williams and Twiggy. Those sharing their memories and reasons why David Bowie is so important. His 1970-1975 saw this shift from him becoming this properly established artist at the start of the decade, to this icon by the mid-1970s. Hearing Kate Moss talk about David Bowie and fronting this incredible podcast series. It goes to show that David Bowie is still enormously relevant today. So much to explore and discuss. His legacy and brilliance will…

BURN bright forever.

FEATURE: The Life of a Showgirl: What Impact and Effects Will Taylor Swift’s Twelfth Studio Album Create?

FEATURE:

 

 

The Life of a Showgirl

PHOTO CREDIT: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Taylor Swift
 

What Impact and Effects Will Taylor Swift’s Twelfth Studio Album Create?

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SIX days ago…

 IMAGE CREDIT: TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management/Guardian Design

Taylor Swift announced the release of her twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl. You can pre-order the album here. This TIME article writes how the release and announcement is essentially Swiftynomics. This term is the title of an upcoming book,, Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy, that is expected on 27th January, 2026. “Swiftynomics assesses the complex economic lives of American women. Drawing insights from pathbreakers like Taylor Swift, Misty Heggeness digs into the data revealing women’s hidden contributions and aspirations—the unexamined value they create by following their own ambitions. She confronts misconceptions about the roles women play in today’s economy by highlighting the abundance of productive activity occurring in their daily lives and acknowledging the barriers they still face”. There are positives and negatives associated with this album announcement. In terms of what it will do for the music and gig economy. It is a moment of positivity in a very bleak moment of history:

“On Aug. 12, Taylor Swift announced her 12th original studio album, The Life of a Showgirl and a sparkly orange era on her website.

This news spread like a ray of golden sunshine, cutting through some bleak headlines for women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lost its female leader because President Donald Trump did not like the published jobs numbers. And as TIME reported, this labor market data also revealed that women are leaving the labor market in droves

The next day on New Heights, Jason and Travis Kelce’s podcast, Taylor complimented Travis’ sweatshirt. “Thanks, sweetie, it’s the color of your eyes,” responded Travis, sending Swifties into a tailspin.

Finally, Swift revealed more details. Her album will be released on Oct. 3 and she shared its artwork and tracklist. The announcement is not just a reflection of modern American gender dynamics, but a masterclass in modern advertising.

In less than 24 hours, everything turned orange. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was in on it. The Empire State Building, New York Times Square, and the Kansas City Union Station lit up in orange lights Tuesday evening. M&Ms, Playdoh, and Sesame Street came out to play, flouting orange and the number 12 in honor of Taylor Swift’s twelfth album. The Olive Garden flashed a garlic bread turned showgirl in honor of the era’s new album title. Petco brought out Meredith, Taylor’s cat, in an orange haze. Even Aquaphor hand lotion showed up in sparkle. The list of brands getting in on the mania went on and on.

Orange became the new social marketing technique. Business classes in universities across the nation will ponder Taylor’s successful grip on our psyche. With the economy-moving Eras Tour behind us, companies had caught on to Swift’s success even if they could not understand how she had done it. They were grasping for the attention of Taylor’s fans, riding the coattails of her brand.

But what is Taylor’s brand? “I am in the business of human emotion,” said Swift while discussing her decision to buy back her music catalog from the private equity firm Shamrock Capital with Jason and Travis. “I would so much rather lead heart-first in something like this.” Not music, not entertainment, not writing, but human emotion.

And though Swift maintains she has not made such business decisions because of the projected returns or dividends, her emotion-focused approach has still been key to her success. Throughout her career, Swift has remained true to herself and invested in getting to know and understand her audience. She builds her product around human emotions—hers and ours.

The day before the announcement, I had been working with a librarian discussing how to build research muscle among a new class of incoming freshmen who would be taking my new class, The Academic Lore of Taylor Swift. The librarian began telling me she came to the fandom late, that the romance between Taylor and Travis really drew her in because it gave her so much joy to watch.

More than a million listeners tuned in to the New Heights podcasts the night of Swift’s announcement. The emotional tug of a new announcement or any crumb of new information into the life of the artist had a magnetic pull far and wide. Human emotion sells.

In critical, historical moments like the one we are in now, where immigrants are being unfairly targeted by the federal government, inequality is ever increasing, and moms cannot catch a break in the labor market, it sells even more. As advertisers continue paying attention to who’s controlling the market today, they’ll look to megastar influencers like Taylor Swift and latch themselves to her sparkly orange belt.

She will, in turn, look to her fans who are more than happy to dig deep into their pockets for a chance to experience the human emotions she’s selling, whether via CD, vinyl, cassette, and any other form. Maybe all of her fans won’t buy the orange Playdoh, but they will buy the music that she ever-so-delicately, perfectly, and precisely laid out to a sound track—and they will devour it. She’ll make them happy in what might be seen as otherwise depressing times.

This is what I call “Swiftynomics.” It is women’s ability to dominate consumption and marketing patterns by harnessing their human experiences for economic benefit. It is women investing in one another, and it thrives today, even in these challenging times”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Taylor Swift

There are a lot of positives in what TIME write. How her fans will get an opportunity to purchase this new album on a variety of formats. That is will boost physical music sales. Also, the excitement over an album release. In the modern age, can artists generate the same kind of fervour and anticipation as decades ago? Ass we can stream albums and so much music is out there, the fact Taylor Swift can get people buying physical music in such huge quantities is to be applauded. In spite of her enormous wealth, it is inspiring that she is this successful businesswoman. Someone who took bac control of her music and has re-recorded studio albums. Someone who deals in human emotions and felt like, at a point in her career, she was being taken advantage of and her rights and control was being taken away. Now, as the biggest artist in the world, she is inspirational to other women in music. Someone who will give a leg up to other artists. If the recent Eras Tour was a record-breaking phenonium, when she tours this album, what impact will that have?! Something even bigger! They could have hugely positive impact on the towns and cities she plays. Also, a new Taylor Swift album is going to be quality thing. She is not an artist who sells and is successful because of hype. The songwriting is always incredible. At thirty-five, Taylor Swift is recognised as one of the finest songwriters in the world. You feel she could be releasing music for decades.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Taylor Swift

Seeing this powerful and accomplished woman at the forefront of the music industry is incredible. Someone who has all this success but is very much not someone who does it for money. She gives money to charity and helps others. With each album comes a new persona and a sense of reinvention. Like Madonna in the 1980s and 1990s, here is a huge global superstar who is growing bigger and bigger. I am very pleased that there is going to be this whole campaign and aesthetic. The visuals of the album and photoshoots. What the songs will be about and whether the album will be conceptual. Is it charting a fictional showgirl and her life or discussing Swift’s own experiences of being a modern showgirl in a sense. Her life on the stage and being under the lens all of the time? According to the Wikipedia page for the album: “Swift described the project as a vibrant and lively album about her life as an entertainer. The Life of a Showgirl contains 12 songs, with Sabrina Carpenter featured on the title track. Photographed by Mert and Marcus, Swift adopted a provocative, showgirl-inspired, orange theme for the album; journalists described it as the most glamorous and flamboyant visual aesthetic of her career. She announced the album on the August 13, 2025, episode of New Heights, the sports podcast by Jason and Travis Kelce, which became the most-watched podcast premiere ever”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Taylor Swift

There are mixed blessings regarding the potential explosion that will come with The Life of a Showgirl. The song titles are already out there. The Fate of Ophelia and Elizabeth Taylor. Actually Romantic. Maybe a mix of personal insights and nods to historic and contemporary women. Swift has created this new aesthetic and colour scheme for The Life of a Showgirl. However, as The Times write, has a more girl-next-door and ‘innocent’ look and appeal been replaced by something more provocative, unwholesome or risqué?!

“Clad in a silver bejewelled bralet and fishnet tights, Swift has leant into the traditional showgirl aesthetic for the album’s artwork, complete with bedazzled corsetry, ostrich feathers, and of course, her trademark red lipstick. In various snaps, taken by the legendary fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, she pouts and looks suggestively down the camera lens, all vampish insouciance. Like a sad, sexy siren.

Is it all a touch … male gaze? Unlike some of her industry counterparts, including Sabrina Carpenter, with whom she collaborated on the album’s title track, Swift has never been one to sexualise her public image. At least not quite so explicitly, anyway. Of course, regardless of what she wears and does, Swift has always been subjected to just as much (if not more) objectification as any other woman in the public eye. But sex hasn’t been something she’s centralised, or even discussed.

That looks set to change with this album, which could be her most illicit yet. There’s even some erotic melancholy too. The album’s first track, The Fate of Ophelia, aligns with artwork featuring a recreation of John Everett Millais’ painting depicting the tragic Shakespearean character drowning after she has been driven to madness.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Taylor Swift

While I’m all for women celebrating their sexuality, particularly if they’ve been relentlessly slut-shamed for most of their adult and teenage lives, I can’t help but feel that this sultry new era is out of sync with everything Swift has told us about who she is: the one we can relate to rather than look up to, the goofy best friend rather than the unapproachable hot girl, the one in the bleachers rather than the cheer captain. She’s someone you’d spend hours trying to decode a man’s texts with; the woman you’d recruit for a mission to make your ex jealous. Part of her popularity is rooted in the fact that she’s always felt like one of us.

That’s not to say Swift can’t or shouldn’t reinvent herself — if anything, that’s what her record-breaking Eras tour was all about. But if The Life of a Showgirl is all coquettish glances, flirty poses and fluttering eyelashes, it’s going to inevitably feel less like an album that’s for the girls, and more like one for the boys.

Suffice to say, this diehard Swiftie is a little wary of the Showgirl era. Like most businesses, music moves where money goes, and given Carpenter’s success, this new album could well be the result of industry juggernauts trying to cash in on what’s doing well right now. I’d like to give Swift a little more credit than that; she’s never been one to bend to trends”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna/PHOTO CREDIT: Madonna

Artists like Madonna broke down barriers and blazed a trail for women who followed. She received so much criticism and misogyny when her work became more expressive, revealing and sexual. Have we taken a step back when it comes to how huge female Pop artists are judged when they are independent, confident and push boundaries?! In terms of the images, others have said how Swift is sparkly and fabulous. A classic showgirl. Others noting how Swift has taken back control of her image and body. Some have noted how the cover for The Life of a Showgirl could be Taylor Swift’s reference to John Everett Millais's Hamlet-inspired painting, Ophelia. Not the first time a women in Pop references this. Kate Bush, in promotional images for Hounds of Love’s second side, The Ninth Wave, embodies images of Ophelia. I think, like Sabrina Carpenter and her upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend, too much attention could be on sex. People judging Taylor Swift and her image rather than focusing on the music. I wonder about potential negative impacts on Taylor Swift’s mental and physical health. Her Eras Tour, running from May to December 2024, became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time. Is there pressure to top that?! What impact will that have on her life? Someone whose privacy and personal life are exposed and discussed constantly, has she reached a point where the hysteria and adulation means people are expecting bigger and bigger?!

IN THIS PHOTO: Sabrina Carpenter, seen here at the GRAMMYs earlier this year, will feature on The Life of a Showgirl’s title track (Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album is released on 3rd October)/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images

Also, many artists feel like Taylor Swift is taking too much focus away from others. Her albums stream in the billions and the money she generates is immense. Is the industry being too dominated by one person? Is that a good thing? The Life of a Showgirl could well create records and lead to massive things. Taylor Swift going down in history as the most important artist ever. However, her relationship with Travis Kelche could also be impacted. How much time and privacy will they have when this new album is released?! You do wonder whether they can ever be an ordinary couple. Instead, there is a danger that their every move will be scrutinised! Laura Snapes, writing for The Guardian, asked if The Life of a Showgirl will propel Taylor Swift to almost unseen levels of fame and success. Is this more of a bad than good thing?! What impact will that have on Swift and the music industry as a whole? Something that will make her and Travis Kelche famous beyond words, is this their plan all along? In some ways, the multi-format campaign for her previous album, The Tortured Poet’s Department (2024) and its excess has led Taylor Swift to rethink a bit and revise her promotional angle. Despite a demand which will exceed all her other albums, some lessons have been learned:

“Swift’s new album does not arrive until 3 October, but this week’s edition of the industry newsletter Record of the Day led with a tongue-in-cheek congratulations to “everyone at EMI and Taylor Swift on her latest No 1 album The Life of a Showgirl”. Supernova success is a foregone conclusion: last year’s introspective The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) was the first album to pass a billion streams in its first week, reaching 1.76bn.

IN THIS PHOTO: Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift after Kansas won the AFC Championship in January/PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Landis/AP

Swift is beloved on an unfathomable scale. She is one of the last monocultural pop stars. You suspect she could have toured Eras for five years and still sold out every night. Her devout Swifties, casual pop fans and curious rubberneckers will likely propel Showgirl past TTPD’s record, such is the critical mass behind her, no matter what it sounds like. Her reign, says Annie Zaleski, the author of Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs, is unprecedented because “she’s so consistent and continuing to evolve”.

But on the podcast, Swift sounded surprisingly aware of the limitations of TTPD – too wordy, too long, too downbeat – and keen to course-correct. That project, she said, had been about “catharsis”, “mess” and “rawness” following an apparently humiliating fling with the 1975’s Matty Healy. TTPD comprised 16 songs; and on release day, Swift dropped a previously unannounced 15-track sister album, The Anthology. For Showgirl, she said she craved “focus and discipline”: just 12 songs going behind the scenes of her Eras life, with “melodies that were so infectious you’re almost angry”. She made a surprising admission about her recent quality control: “Keeping the bar really high is something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time.”

Swift’s monitoring also cannot have failed to note that her brand of hermetically sealed, grown-up pop has been ceding ground to Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli xcx, who have seized culture’s centre with less inhibited and far rowdier hits than the exacting Swift has ever made. Or perhaps ever could: one insurmountable difference is that Roan and xcx are unlikely to ever monitor fan desire or cater to it. And Martin, despite being second only to John Lennon and Paul McCartney for having the most US No 1 singles, has waned as a hitmaker. “I don’t think she can get ahead of those artists because she’s such a millennial pop star,” said a publicist for comparably superstar acts who asked to remain nameless. “She can’t create trends like those younger artists because they have a lot less to lose.”

There is a sense that Swift is catching up: that she’s clocked criticisms, read the room. She released 19 physical variants for TTPD, and was accused of exploiting fans and damaging the environment with excess vinyl production, a practice Billie Eilish has called “wasteful”. Showgirl appears to have a fairly industry-standard four. She is also competing with herself: if there is a tour, says the music business expert Eamonn Forde, it will have to take a significantly different form to Eras – residency-style, perhaps Vegas or in a bespoke venue, as recently done by Adele – to avoid unfavourable comparisons to the biggest tour of all time”.

A new Taylor Swift album can not simply be an album. It is a campaign, an era. A new invention. A chapter! It is a potential globe-straddling, billion-dollar industry that could be released on multiple formats, have reissues and a new album of extras and then lead to a gigantic tour that breaks records and sees Swift pushing the limits of what a live show could be. Will she be able to sustain a string of sets that last three hours or more?! At what point does she have to strip back and slow down? And will Swifites (the name for her fanbase), the industry, critics and everyone allow that?! I like to think of the positives. The excitement fans are feeling. The quality of the songs and seeing a Pop artist take back control of her music and, with it, releasing new albums that are influencing women and girls around the world. Artists coming through that cite Swift as an idol. I want to end with exerts from an article from Rose Gallagher for Stylist. She explains that fans are excited about The Life of a Showgirl because Taylor Swift fandom and admiration is an antidote to loneliness:

“The Eras tour changed the way I saw live music. Since then, talking to fans has become a real passion project of mine. Meeting Chappell Roan’s fans at her concerts and making videos of their outfits has been one of my favourite ever projects. I also got a real-life lesson that you can’t judge a book by its cover when I covered the final Ozzy Osbourne gig. Those heavy metal fans were some of the nicest people I’d ever met – I’ve never been in a friendlier fandom.

The reason the internet is in a meltdown about Swift’s next album, The Life Of A Showgirl, is that we can get excited about it together. It’s a shared joy. We won’t just listen to it in the comfort of our homes – we’ll savour it as a collective. TikTok will be awash with fan theories. YouTube tutorials will emerge recreating Swift’s make-up from her music videos. We’re all invited to bask in the digital footprint, and it connects us.

So, just why do we crave these connections with other people? The truth is, when we get older, we can love our friends and be in different life cycles – and this can sometimes feel exceptionally lonely. Some of my friends are raising young children. I can’t relate and I never will, as I have decided I want to be child-free. Many are trying to conceive, and the road isn’t smooth; I’m thinking of three different friends right now. It’s a heartbreak like no other for them and there are no words of comfort for a sadness like that. Then there’s me, caring for elderly parents and knowing that one day our shared responsibility for my brother with special needs will be mine. Every day feels like I’m growing apart from my friends, even though they’re some of the people I love the most in my life. They can’t relate to me and I can’t relate to them. We support one another, for sure, but without a connection to someone who really gets it, you can feel very alone.

Being in a fandom like Taylor Swift’s, you find an antidote to the loneliness. For a moment, someone truly understands your excitement. Something as simple as looking at memes on Instagram is a moment of total bliss. You understand the jokes. You know the lore. You get the references. You finally have people who truly get what you’re excited about, and they feel it too. It’s a nice feeling”.

On 3rd October, we will see what Taylor Swift’s twelfth studio album has to offer. The Life of a Showgirl seems to beckon in a new phase. The album cover is colourful, bright and poetic at the same time. Compared to black-and-white images for the covers of The Tortured Poets Department, folklore (2020) and reputation (2017), this is an update of a cover like 2019’s Lover. The twelve tracks of her twelfth studio album are intriguing. With only one collaboration (the title track will feature Sabrina Carpenter) and maybe not the same excessiveness of The Tortured Poet’s Department (multiple formats ands repacking did seem a bit too much!). Above all else, The Life of a Showgirl is the latest scene and chapter from…

A modern-day cultural phenomenon.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Sixteen: The Album's Promotion, Launch Party, and Bringing It to the Stage

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the Hounds of Love launch party at the London Planetarium on 9th September, 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Sixteen: The Album's Promotion, Launch Party, and Bringing It to the Stage

__________

I am going to bring in…

a couple of promotional interviews for Hounds of Love, talk about its launch party – that took place on 9th September, 1985 -, and conclude with some words about Kate Bush bringing this album, and especially The Ninth Wave, to the stage in 2014. However, as Hounds of Love was released on 16th September, 1985, it is almost forty. It is wroth going back four decades and the promotion Bush was doing. This was an album that did not break her in America, though it did get her a lot of positive reviews. It reached thirty on the US Billboard 200.  An album that has been reissued, remastered and performed almost in its entirety on the stage, you wonder what else you can do with it. I shall end with that. I would love to see the album’s songs covered, reworked and remixed for its fortieth anniversary. Artists and producers taking a song and making them their own. However, let’s start with a couple of interviews. In 1985, many thought that Kate Bush was done. That her career was over. Consider the sound of 1982’s The Dreaming and how experimental it was. Many were not expecting another album, let alone one that was both commercial and ambitious. Her most acclaimed work. Journalists having to interview Kate Bush without realising (in some cases) how good the album was. That this masterpiece would be unleashed. I am going to start out with this interview from Keyboard/Totally Wired/Songwriter that was published in early 1985. Bush not only discussing the new album and having her own studio. We learned about some of the technology and keyboards that she had to work with:

“Your vocal arrangements are often complex enough to suggest that a keyboard instrument was involved in coming up with the parts. Is this the case?

"Sometimes the backing vocals just come in automatically as part of a song when I'm writing it. Other times, maybe it won't be until I've recorded the main voice and a few events in the song. And then I'll think it needs something there. Those are really the two extremes: I either come up with the backing vocals in the initial writing, or I hear a hole that needs filling. Whether I build up a really thick, grand vocal depends on the song. If the song needs that, then I'll just overdub the voice and build the vocals up. If it's a very intimate song between the singer and the subject matter, then you'd write it with just one voice."

You process your voice quite a bit.

"I'm sure there are quite a few people like me who really prefer the sound of their own voice when it's affected a bit. To hear your own voice absolutely straight with nothing on it can be very painful. Again, it depends on what the songs are about."

Where do you work your songs out?

"I've had a home studio for the last few years. For this album, we put together a master home studio. The difference it makes is fantastic. The obvious difference is that we're not paying a phenomenal amount of money every hour for a London studio. That makes you feel so much more relaxed. The amount of pressure that the studio situation puts on you is quite surprising. You also feel a lot freer to experiment."

We understand that before, you'd do the demos and often not be able to duplicate the same feeling in the studio.

"I think that's one of the most impossible things to do, and everyone in the business must have it happen to them. You do a demo and it's the song, the spontaneity of how you put it down, that little inflection in the voice there, or something in the demo says it all. Even though the vocals are rough and the drums are out of time, it's got the feel of the song. Them you come to master it and it's not there. It's too fast or too clean. It's just not the same. Trying to recreate the moods of something you did so spontaneously can be so impossible. What we've done on this album is make the demos the masters. We demoed in the studio so that there were no demos anymore. They've transformed into the masters."

When you started working with electronic instruments, did you start listening to what other people were doing?

"Yes, you can't help but hear other people's electronic music. music is an inspiring thing to hear. But unfortunately, 99% of my time is eaten up listening to my own and nothing else. And then, it's only listening to what I'm working on at that moment. When I'm finished, I go through these big phases of listening to other people's stuff. It's so exciting."

Who do you listen to at those times?

"I'm particularly into a label called Windham Hill. That's beautiful music--absolutely gorgeous. And there's a German label called ECM that has a lot of jazz-rock music. One of my favorite artists there is (bassist) Eberhard Weber. He's fantastic [Weber appears on The Dreaming]. I find that the most enjoyable thing for me to do when I get in from the studio, other than listen to music, is to watch videos. My ears are so tired. You get such a form of concentrated listening--you've got to listen for clicks and drums and the voice...So when you get back, you want to rest your ears and let your eyes watch rubbish for half an hour."

Why do you sometimes use other musicians to play certain keyboard parts on your records? Listening to your piano playing, you wouldn't have any trouble covering the parts that they play.

"Well, I don't play the Synclavier. I play the Fairlight, but I didn't have a Fairlight of my own until the last album, and that was only towards the end of it. In fact, that's why I had to get people in. I had to hire their Fairlight and Synclavier and I had to have them play it as well-- until I had my own."

What do you have in your studio?

"We have a Soundcraft mixing deck, a Studer A-80 tape machine, lots of outboard gear, and Q-lock. We normally use 48 tracks now, even if it's for a vocal idea or something. 24 tracks doesn't seem to go anywhere with me. And the Fairlight, of course. We have a room simulator called a Quantec, which is my favorite. It would be lovely to be able to draw the sort of room you wanted your voice to be in. I think that's the next step”.

I want to highlight one more interview before moving on because, sadly, it was pretty typical. In terms of the language used and some of the patronising and condescending language! Maybe not reserved to male journalists, there was this somewhat sneering and belittling tone. However, whilst there is plenty of that here from Melody Maker’s Ted Nico, we do get some typically professional and interesting answers from Kate Bush. Someone who had to encounter so many inept and insulting interviews.

“Over the past two years the name Kate Bush has once more receded to the back of the common consciousness, joining the smoldering ember of The Buzzcocks, et al - set for the scrapyard. Yet once more she has confounded the rumour-mongers who had already pronounced her the Lady Lucan of pop, missing presumed dead. Once more she has created an album to besot and bewitch the coldest of hearts. Once more she has come out of her isolated refuge with the charm of a siren, and the innocence of a child. Ms. Bush is incapable of growing old, she has merely grown up.

But what, you ask, has sister Kate been doing during this hiatus, this self-imposed exile? As usual Kate explains much, but reveals precious little, slamming the doors of privacy with a single coy look.

"After the last album, I had to promote it, and that took me to the end of '82, so it hasn't really been that long. My life is quite extreme really; I go from a very isolated working situation, to going out and promoting my work and being very much a public creature. After you've ben through months of that kind of over-exposure, you're left feeling a bit shell-shocked. I need to take some time off and go somewhere quite different to write this new album. I didn't want to produce it in the wake of The Dreaming."

A wise move. Music vogues move with such alacrity, that two years off can finish off a career. In fact, such a time-span is the beginning and the end of most groups lifespan!

"I didn't really bother thinking about that sort of thing. I spent the time seeing films, seeing friends, building my own studio, and doing things I hadn't had a chance to do for ages."

Things? You couldn't elaborate on what these strange and wondrous things would be. Trout fishing? Hang-gliding? Hamster hunting?

"I found an inspirational new dance teacher," Kate replies with growing enthusiasm. "The teacher's energy made me really enthusiastic about writing again."

And once again the conversation turns back to the studio. Kate talks about her beloved studio a great deal - a great deal more than she's willing to chat about herself. She really doesn't have any hobbies, mainly because they wouldn't be beneficial to her work - the subject around which her entire universe evolves. The one exception is an avid interest in archery. And even this she has turned toward work, with the cover shot of the new single, believing it to be symbolic of Cupid's bow - an image which ties the threads of the single together.

And so, naturally, we turn to Kate's new album, Hounds Of Love, and the current success of the new single. Another new departure? Another rebirth? Another quest for new pastures?

"Yes, I wanted something new, and to begin with it was extremely difficult. All the songs I seemed to write sounded too much like the last album. I've never seen any point in repeating things you've already done before. I think it's a dangerous thing not to search for new ways of approaching songs. Too many people sit and think 'it'll just come to me', instead of getting off their arses and going for it."

Kate, of course, is far too polite to name names...

"If you get out and go for things then those things will come to you. I think it's too easy to wait and expect things just to come to you."

A certain Mr. M. Thatcher said similar words, but this time they ring with verity. Must be her smile. Kate's new studio, hidden away in the overgrown wilds of Kent, enable her to exorcise the ghosts of The Dreaming without sending EMI executives into prolonged thromboses over the expense of the operation.

"The pressure of knowing the astronomical amount studio time cost used to make me really nervous about being too creative. You can't experiment forever, and I work very, very slowly. I feel a lot more relaxed emotionally now that I have my own place to work and a home to go to."

Sitting on floor cushions, drinking cups of tea, I can't help thinking if things got any more relaxed they'd be sound asleep. Speak more of the new material Kate. Speak words of love...

"This time I wrote a lot of songs and just chose the best ones to put on the A side of the album. I like to think there's not a song there that's been put there for padding. Sometimes people get the impression that if you take a long time over something that you're literally going over the same piece again and again, and instead of making it better, you're making it worse. I hate to think I've ever done that.

This striving for perfection might well be cause by fears about disappointing her audience or her pet cats. The longer the wait, the greater the expectation.

"There are always so many voices telling me what to do that you can't listen to them. All I ever do is listen to the little voices inside me. I don't want to disappoint the little voices that have been so good to me."

Of course not. The finely-tuned songs that made the final selection on the album differ greatly from the diversions of previous albums. They are all love songs (sigh) using elemental imagery that form a cogent and cohesive panoply of emotion. A search and struggle to secure some sort of meaning. The discovery that although you can strip away everything form a person, there will always be a residue of love awaiting resurrection. Sounds mawkish doesn't it? Jane Austin world have loved it. All those over expressive vocals and delicate orchestrations channelled into such pathos. Sounds risible, doesn't it?

Yet the songs' style and eloquence rise above bathos through their haunting overtones. Phantasmagorical voices tilt the rose-coloured world off its trite axis with jagged eerie phrases. Outside observations are slanted metaphors revealing states of mind. No longer are we presented with the eclectic collage of The Dreaming whose continual shifts and spirals allowed an escape with diversity. No longer is the entire story of Houdini crammed into three minutes, until a new fable takes up the torch. Now the texture is more subtle, the production more adroit, and the mesmerism unrelenting.

"The last album contained a lot of different energies. It did take people to lots of different places very quickly and some people found that difficult to take. I think this album has more of a positive energy. It's a great deal more optimistic.

"I rather think of the album as two separate sides." How astute. "The A side is really called Hounds of Love, and the B side is called The Ninth Wave. The B side is a story, and that took a lot more work - it couldn't be longer than half an hour, and it had to flow. This time when you get to the end of one track, what happens after it is very affect by what's come before. It's really difficult to work out the dynamics within seven tracks. The concept took a long time."

Whoops! There goes that word again. Concept - a word mauled by the memory of Floyd, flares, baked lentils and chronic boredom. It took some time to extract my nails from the ceiling and climb back down to earth. It took even longer to summon up the courage to ask what this concept might entail. Kate looks upset that I'm not jumping up and down with ecstasy.

"It's about someone who comes off a ship and they've been in the water all night by themselves, and it's about that person re-evaluating their life from a point which they've never been before. It's about waking up from things and being reborn - going through something and coming out the other side very different."

Sounds suspiciously like The Ancient Mariner revisited...

"Oh no! It's completely different. It ends really positively - as things always should if you have control."

And Kate certainly has that. From the writing, recording, performing, production of her tunes to the choreography on the accompanying video. As usual the visual imagery is gleaned from a wide variety of sources: from the films of Godard, Herzog and Coppola, to The Book Of Dreams, yet their accretion with Kate's own personal fears and desires is shrouded in mystery.

"There are many films that you don't think much of at the time, but weeks afterwards you get flashbacks of images. Sometimes films like Don't Look Now and Kagemusha have really haunted me. You don't necessarily steal images from films, but they are very potent and take you somewhere else - somewhere impossible to get to without that spark."

At this moment it is difficult to see how such a placid, genteel, and downright normal musician could ever produce songs like "Get Out Of My House" and "Sat In Your Lap". Perhaps some strange transformation takes place over when she is asleep!

"Yes, I have very strange dreams you know. Over the years I've collected the most incredible star cast of them. Very famous people come and visit me."

Curiouser and curiouser...

"Peter O'Toole came round to dinner last week and my mum met him and thought he was wonderful. Keith Moon often comes round for tea as well. I have a lot of vivid dreams, most of which I can't mention. The images I get from them sometimes bleed into my songs”.

Navigating a plethora of interviews and having finished this enjoyable but hard production, Hounds of Love was ready for the world. I do think that the choice was ideal. Even though it is not there anymore, on 9th September, 1985, Kate Bush launched Hounds of Love at the London Planetarium on Marylebone Road. She looked fantastic dressed in purple! Matching the album cover’s colours and accompanied by her then-boyfriend Del Palmer. He engineered the album and played on it. A perfect location to launch this dazzling album that is very much about nature, the natural world and the wider universe. Songs like Hello Earth take us above the clouds and have us look down from space. I think that, technically, the Hounds of Love launch party was in the Laserium. There was a lot of press focus on Kate Bush and the fact that arrived arm in arm with Del Palmer. It was not known by all that they were an item. Rather than celebrate this wonderful album, there was a lot of chatter about her love life! However, it was an eventful and successful night. A drunk Youth (who played bass on the album’s track, The Big Sky) called Palmer a “wally”. Youth (Martin Glover) was jealous and was probably acting out of anger and envy when he called Palmer that. Some of the press coverage for that launch was not kind. Many feeling Bush was this air-headed ingénue. Focusing on her looks and sexuality. The jealous Youth. It was not just him. Others who worked with Kate Bush definitely had to hide feelings of attraction. One musician stopped working with her entirely because he was besotted. However, what comes out of that launch party is how confident Bush looked. Knowing what she was about to release into the world. The Laserium witnessed this wonderful event where one of the greatest albums ever was unveiled. I wonder whether the entire album was played or they got snippets.  Not a lot has been written about it. It was a huge moment in her career. One where she almost had to bounce back from some of the disappointment that surrounded The Dreaming. That it did not have this major success story and some felt Kate Bush was past her best.

THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Del Palmer at the London Planetarium on 9th September, 1985 during the launch party for Hounds of Love/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

I do think that there is further potential for The Ninth Wave especially. Never filmed and put on the small or big screen, it was finally mounted for Before the Dawn in 2014. Kate Bush always saw that suite as a cinematic piece, but it was never realised. Almost thirty years later, she finally brought it to the stage. However, I do feel that it can go beyond the stage and onto a cinema screen. However, what was realised in 2014 in front of adoring fans over twenty-two nights was a huge accomplishment. When reviewing the live album of Before the Dawn in 2016, this is what Pitchfork wrote about Hounds of Love and how it translated to the stage:

“In Act Two, Bush realized her long-held desire to dramatize “The Ninth Wave,” the conceptual B-side of 1985’s Hounds of Love, which documents a woman’s dark night of the soul as she fights for life while lost at sea. While her “husband” and real-life son Bertie McIntosh blithely carried on with domestic life inside a tiny, sloping living room set, a video depicted Bush stranded in dark, choppy waters (now released as the “And Dream of Sheep” video). Moments later, the real Bush reappeared on stage to fight sinister “fish people” who carried her body off through the aisles. The whirring blades and desperate search lights of a rescue helicopter descended from the Hammersmith Apollo’s ceiling, illuminating and buffeting the crowd. Despite some hammy dialogue, it was staggering, and in sharp contrast to Act Three, which focused on Aerial’s second side, “A Sky of Honey.”

It’s a shame that the terror of “Hounds of Love” gets swapped for sentimental optimism, but the band recreate that album’s second half to sound as avant-garde and bracing as any current young outsider.

“Jig of Life” is the midpoint of Before the Dawn, and its crux. It forms the part in “The Ninth Wave” where Bush’s character is exhausted of fighting against drowning, and decides to succumb to death. A vision of her future self appears, and convinces her to stay alive. “Now is the place where the crossroads meet,” she chants, just as her (then) 56-year-old voice channels her 27-year-old one. Despite her alleged taste for burning one, Bush’s voice has gained in power rather than faded with age. It’s deeper now, and some of the songs’ keys shift to match, but it’s alive and incalculably moving, still capable of agile whoops and tender eroticism, and possesses a newfound authority.

Both Acts Two and Three take place in transcendent thresholds: “The Ninth Wave”’s drowning woman is beset by anxiety and untold pressures, with no idea of where to turn, mirroring the limbo that Bush experienced after 1982’s The Dreaming. That suite’s last song, the cheery “The Morning Fog,” transitions into Aerial’s “Prelude,” all beatific bird call and dawn-light piano. The euphoric, tender “A Sky of Honey” is meant to represent a perfect day from start to finish, filled with family and beautiful imperfections. “Somewhere in Between” finds them atop “the highest hill,” looking out onto a stilling view, and Bush’s eerie jazz ensemble anticipates the liminal peace of Bowie’s Blackstar. “Not one of us would dare to break the silence,” she sings. “Oh how we have longed for something that would make us feel so… somewhere in between.”

Purgatory has become heaven, and in the narrative Bush constructs through her setlist, “A Sky of Honey” represents the grown-up, domestic happiness that staves off the youthful fears explored on Hounds of Love. For her final song, she closes with a rendition of “Cloudbusting,” a song about living with the memory of a forbidden love, which is even more glorious for all the hope that it’s accumulated in the past 30-odd years”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in a moment during Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave that she performed during her Before the Dawn residency in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Gavin Bush/Rex

Hounds of Love’s translation to the stage was a success. Not sticking rigidly with the album sounds and being entirely faithful to the 1985 version, there was this opportunity to give the songs new life and an older voice. Hounds of Love’s title track was not as exhilarating and electric as on the album. However, it still enraptured audiences.  Bush adapted the melody line and threw in a new line (“Tie me to the mast”). The visual representation of the songs was a true highlight. If songs on The Ninth Wave could only be imagined, on stage, there was this whole new life. On Watching You Without Me, there was this mini-set on the stage. “Lamps flickered and a television slide from one end of the building to the other”, as Graeme Thomson writes in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Jig of Life was this tour de force. On Hello Earth, “a huge buoy, bathed in red light of the emergency flares, ascended from the waves”. Whilst Bush is struggling against the waves and fighting for survival, “a couple of stagehands assembled a short ramp that led up from the floor of thew auditorium to the right hand side of the stage. As the song’s stunningly sombre choral passage rang out, an inert Bush was lifted from the waves, carried slowly down the ramp and into the audience”. The Morning Fog, as Graeme Thomson notes, was a gesture of gratitude. One which transcend The Ninth Wave and reflected Bush’s feeling to the audiences. She smiled and gestured to them when singing the line on The Morning Fog, “I love you better now”. I am skimming through what Graeme Thomson writes but, as that was only the end of Act I – and we still had the entirety of Aerial’s A Sky of Honey to come –, Bush had staged “one of the most extraordinary  pieces of imaginative theatre  ever staged by a popular musician”. I would read the entirety of what he says about Before the Dawn and Hounds of Love. Bush also performing the singles, Cloudbusting, Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). A staggering achievement and dazzling theatrical spectacled. I will leave things there. In a future feature, I am going to talk about the legacy and impact of Hounds of Love as we celebrate this masterpiece’s fortieth anniversary…

ON 16th September.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Bryan Ferry at Eighty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Bryan Ferry at Eighty

__________

ONE of music’s…

true greats turns eighty on 26th September. Bryan Ferry is the frontperson of Roxy Music. The band’s eponymous debut album was released in 1972. Ferry’s most recent album was released earlier this year. Loose Talk is a collaboration with Amelia Barratt. These are essential Roxy Music demos reimagined as duets. Barratt, a spoken word artist, narrating the songs. Ferry’s role is primarily as musician rather than singer. I do wonder where Ferry will head next. To honour his upcoming eightieth birthday, I have compiled a mixtape of his best solo and Roxy Music songs. Demonstrating what a remarkable songwriter and singer he is. Someone who has had this amazing legacy and inspired so many artists. Before I get to that playlist, I want to bring in some biography. AllMusic provide a comprehensive look at the career of one of the music world’s giants:

“As both the frontman for Roxy Music and as a solo artist, Bryan Ferry offers a glamorous blueprint for art rock, brilliantly updating the parameters of the pop songbook. Although Ferry's solo career has included several excellent self-penned tracks, most notably the synthy, romantic ballad "Slave to Love" off 1985's Boys and Girls, he's equally well-known for his adventurous interpretations of songs from the rock and pop canon. Combining a studied, wry, lounge-singer persona with a genuine passion for everything from Motown and Bob Dylan to the Great American Songbook of the 1920s and '30s, Ferry's albums, beginning with 1973's These Foolish Things, find him adding a post-modern gloss to pop standards. He has continued to move between sleek sophisti-pop originals and distinctive covers, releasing albums like 1987's Bete Noire, 1994's Mamouna, 2010's Olympia, and 2014's Avonmore. He has even reworked his hits in an instrumental 1920's fashion with his big band the Bryan Ferry Orchestra. Along with Roxy Music reunion tours, Ferry has remained busy, releasing concert albums like Royal Albert Hall 2020 and archival sets like Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023. Loose Talk, an artful collaboration with writer Amelia Barratt, arrived in 2025.

Born September 26, 1945, in Washington, England, Ferry, the son of a coal miner, began his musical career as a singer with the rock outfit the Banshees while studying art at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne under pop conceptualist Richard Hamilton. He later joined the Gas Board, a soul group featuring bassist Graham Simpson; in 1970, Ferry and Simpson formed Roxy Music.

Within a few years, Roxy Music had become phenomenally successful, affording Ferry the opportunity to cut his first solo LP in 1973. Far removed from the group's arty glam rock, These Foolish Things established the path that all of Ferry's solo work -- as well as the final Roxy Music records -- would take, focusing on elegant synth pop interpretations of '60s hits like Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," and the Beatles' "You Won't See Me," all rendered in the singer's distinct, coolly dramatic manner.

Roxy Music remained Ferry's primary focus, but in 1974 he returned with a second solo effort, Another Time, Another Place, another collection of covers ranging from "You Are My Sunshine" to "It Ain't Me, Babe" to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." His third venture, 1976's Let's Stick Together, featured remixed, remade, and remodeled versions of Roxy Music hits as well as the usual assortment of covers. Released in 1977, In Your Mind was Ferry's first collection of completely original material; the following year's The Bride Stripped Bare, a work inspired by his broken romance with model Jerry Hall, was split evenly between new songs and covers.

Ferry did not record another solo album until 1985's Boys and Girls, a sleek, seamless effort that was his first "official" solo release following the Roxy breakup. For 1987's Bete Noire, he was joined by former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr on the shimmering "The Right Stuff," and notched his only U.S. Top 40 hit with "Kiss and Tell." Another covers collection, Taxi, followed in 1993; Mamouna, an LP of originals, appeared a year later, and in 1999 Ferry returned with a collection of standards, As Time Goes By. After a brief tour in support of As Time Goes By, there were rumors of a Roxy Music reunion. The next summer, the practically unimaginable came true when Ferry joined Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera for a tour of Europe and the U.S. It was a celebration of hits, and the band's first jaunt out in more than a decade.

In summer 2002, Ferry returned to his solo career for the electrifying Frantic. Dylanesque, a set of Bob Dylan covers, followed in 2007, featuring assistance from several longtime associates (including Brian Eno, Chris Spedding, Paul Carrack, and Robin Trower). Ferry signed with the Astralwerks imprint for the release of 2010's Olympia. In 2012, he assembled the Bryan Ferry Orchestra and recorded The Jazz Age. This completely instrumental album featured his band re-recording some of his biggest hits in a 1920s jazz style.

Ferry returned to the studio with longtime collaborator Rhett Davies in 2014 to record his 14th studio album. The resulting Avonmore -- which included guest spots from Johnny Marr, Nile Rodgers, and Marcus Miller and revived Ferry's mid-'80s sound -- appeared in November. In the spring of 2017, after embarking on a major world tour, Ferry made his debut at the legendary Hollywood Bowl amphitheater, performing nearly the entire set backed by a full orchestra. That same year, he also appeared as a cabaret singer in the 1930s set drama Babylon Berlin, for which he also contributed several songs. Those tracks were then included on a full-length album recorded by Ferry and his jazz orchestra, 2018's Bitter-Sweet.

Ferry continued to tour into the last years of the 2010s, a period highlighted by Roxy Music's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. The archival set Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 appeared early in 2020. That same year, he again appeared at the storied London venue for a concert that was recorded and released in 2021 as Royal Albert Hall 2020 with proceeds helping to support his touring band and crew during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, he reunited with fellow Roxy Music bandmates Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Paul Thompson for a 50th anniversary tour. He also released the solo EP Love Letters. Along with other archival reissues, 2024's Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023 offered a sweeping overview of the singer's solo output. In 2025, he released Loose Talk, a collaboration with performance artist, writer, and painter Amelia Barratt”.

To properly honour the eightieth birthday of Bryan Ferry on 26th September, I thought it only right to bring together all his terrific songs from throughout the years. From the first Roxy Music album through his solo material, this is a celebration of a legend who is still going strong. Let’s hope that we hear more Bryan Ferry music soon. He is surely one of the most important artists who…

HAS ever lived.

FEATURE: Our Arrows of Desire Rewrite the Speech: Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Six

FEATURE:

 

 

Our Arrows of Desire Rewrite the Speech

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Six

__________

I will celebrate…

the album of the same name closer to its thirty-sixth anniversary on 16th October. The Sensual World is the sixth studio album from Kate Bush. Coming four years after Hounds of Love, there was this expectation and anticipation. The lead single from it was the incredible title track. Released on 18th September, 1989, it reached number twelve in the U.K. I have covered the song quite a bit in the past, so I shall try to not repeat too much of what came before. People might not commemorate the single this year as its anniversary comes two days after the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love. I am going to spend some time with The Sensual World. As I have mentioned before, there is a long history to The Sensual World’s title track. Originally, Kate Bush wanted to take words from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly Bloom’s impassioned soliloquy. However, she was sadly refused permission. It was not until 2011, when she released Director’s Cut and renamed the song Flower of the Mountain, that these classic literary words finally appeared. I think that the original is best. Bush’s own words. The Sensual World was a hugely important single. She had released Experiment IV (in 1986) from her greatest hits album, The Whole Story. However, this was from a new studio album. Fans not sure what direction Kate Bush would take after Hounds of Love. There is a fair bit written about The Sensual World. It is amazing song that is so seductive and beautiful. Kate Bush spoke about this gorgeous song in 1989:

“The song is about someone from a book who steps out from this very black and white 2-D world into the real world. The immediate impressions was the sensuality of this world – the fact that you can touch things, that is so sensual – you know… the colours of trees, the feel of the grass on the feet, the touch of this in the hand – the fact that it is such a sensual world. I think for me that’s an incredibly important thing about this planet, that we are surrounded by such sensuality and yet we tend not to see it like that. But I’m sure for someone who had never experienced it before it would be quite a devastating thing. (…) I love the sound of church bells. I think they are extraordinary – such a sound of celebration. The bells were put there because originally the lyrics of the song were taken from the bookUlyssesby James Joyce, the words at the end of the book by Molly Bloom, but we couldn’t get permission to use the words. I tried for a long time – probably about a year – and they wouldn’t let me use them, so I had to create something that sounded like those original word, had the same rhythm, the same kind of feel but obviously not being able to use them. It all kind of turned in to a pastiche of it and that’s why the book character, Molly Bloom, then steps out into the real world and becomes one of us.

Roger Scott, Interview. Radio 1 (UK), 14 October 1989”.

Kerrang! were positive towards The Sensual World. This is what they noted: “She sings of a deep sensuality that ensures that I have to wear baggy trousers when I dance. Beautiful, warm, and ever-lasting”. Because The Sensual World was updated in 2011 and given a new title, there is this evolution. I am glad that Kate Bush got permission to use text from Ulysses. However, her own poetry stands out more. With Charlie Morgan on drums, Del Palmer on bass, Davy Spillane on uillean pipes, Dónal Lunny on bouzouki, John Shehan on fiddle and Paddy Bush on whips, there is this phenomenal sound. Irish instruments connecting to Ulysses. Irish instrumentation appeared on Hounds of Love. I think The Sensual World is the last song that it featured prominently. I am going to move on in a bit. However, I want to revisit an interview that appeared in NME. Len Brown spoke with Bush about her new album. Bush offered a guide to the tracks and provided insights. It is interesting what she says about the stunningly beautiful and sensual title track. One that still sends shivers nearly thirty-six years after its release:

"Because I couldn’t get permission to use a piece of Joyce it gradually turned into the songs about Molly Bloom the character stepping out of the book, into the real world and the impressions of sensuality," says Kate, softly, almost childlike. "Rather than being in this two dimensional world, she’s free, let loose to touch things, feel the ground under her feet, the sunsets, just how incredibly sensual a world it is.

"I originally heard the piece read by Siobhan McKenna years ago and I thought ‘My God! This is extraordinary, what a piece of writing!’ it’s a very unusual train of thought, very attractive. First I got the "mmh yes" and that made me think of Molly Bloom’s speech, and we had this piece of music in the studio already so it came together really quickly. Then, because I couldn’t get permission to use Joyce, it took another year changing it to what it is now. Typical innit!"

The result is extraordinarily sensual mouth music, far removed from the cod-pieced crassness that usually passes from physical love songs: "And at first with the charm around him, mmh yes / he loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts / He’d rescue it, mmh yes".

"In the original piece it’s just ‘Yes!" – a very interesting way of leading you in, it pulls you into the piece by the continual acceptance of all these sensual things. ‘Ooh wonderful!’ I was thinking I’d never write anything as obviously sensual as the original piece but when I had to rewrite the words I was trapped.

"How could you recreate that mood without going into that level of sensuality? So there I was writing stuff that months before I’d said I’d never write," she laughs. "I have to think of it in terms of pastiche and not that it’s me so much."

Having begun her career on The Kick Insider singing lines like, "Oh I need it oh oh feel it feel it my love" and "feeling of sticky love inside", and then gone on inLionheart to write a lyric like "the more I think of sex the better it gets", her reluctance to get too sensual, too fruity a decade later may seem a little strange.

But as Bush has increasingly gained control over the presentation of her music and her image during this period, stepping back from early marketing attempts to titillate (God, how they worked!) these reservations are understandable.

She claims The Sensual World contains the most "positive female energy" in her work to date and compositions like ‘This Woman’s Work’ tend to enforce that idea.

"I think it’s to do with me coming to terms with myself on different levels. In some ways, like on Hounds of Love, it was important for me to get across the sense of power in the songs that I’d associated with male energy and music. But I didn’t feel that this time and I was very much wanting to express myself as a woman in my music rather than as a woman wanting to sound as powerful as a man.

"And definitely ‘The Sensual World’, the track, was very much a female track for me. I felt it was a really new expression, feeling good about being a woman musically."

But isn’t it odd that this feminist or feminine perspective should have been inspired by a man, Joyce?

"Yes, in some ways but it’s also the idea of Molly escaping from the author, out into the real world, being this real human rather than the character, stepping out of the page into the sensual world."

So is this concept of sensuality the most important thing to you at the moment, is it one of the life forces?

"Yes, it’s about contact with humans, it could all come down to the sensual level. Touch? Yes, even if it’s not physical touch, reaching out and touching people by moving them. I think it’s a very striking part of this planet, the fact there is so much for us to enjoy. The whole of nature is really designed for everything to have a good time doing what they should be doing…

"Fancy being a bee, leading an incredible existence, all these flowers designed just for you, flying into the runway, incredible colours, some trip…"

Mmh, buzz.

Many mumbles have breathed their last since Kate Bush first arrived on our screens, flouncing about in dry ice and funeral shroud, oddly crowing ‘Wuthering Heights’; obviously different and apart from any musical movement before or since. But whereas the all-conquering, universally acclaimed Hounds Of Love affair at least slotted into the-then pop world, The Sensual World is clearly even more out of step with the current piss poor post-SAW scene.

Probably because it’s got a slightly ethnic feel, founded on Kate’s use of Irish and Bulgarian musics and musicians in the creative process. Perhaps because she’s been free from pop for so long. Maybe because she’s crossed the threshold of 30?

"God! Yes, I’m sure it’s all tied in with it," she laughs. "I think it’s a very important time from 28 to 32-ish, where there’s some kind of turning point. Someone said in your teens you get the physical puberty and between 28 and 32 mental puberty. Let’s fact it, you’ve got to start growing up when you’re 30, it does make you feel differently, I feel very positive having gone through the last couple of years”.

I will wrap up soon. One reason why I want to highlight this piece from Kate Bush News from 2016 (actually, it was them re-publishing a piece they wrote years earlier) is because I learn new things about The Sensual World. Including how Paddy Bush was incorrectly credited as playing ‘whips’ on the song. Also, learning how Kate Bush felt about being denied permission by the James Joyce estate to use text from Ulysses. She discussed that quite a bit and, with each answer, you can hear the frustration:

“The music was recorded at Windmill Lane studios in Dublin, arranged by Bill Whelan. The featured players were Davey Spillane on uilleann pipes, Donal Lunny on bouzuki, John Sheahan on fiddle, Charlie Morgan on drums and Del Palmer on bass. Kate’s brother Paddy would be credited on the sleeve-notes with playing ‘whips’ on the record, an error he quickly rectified. “I’m actually playing a pair of fishing rods. I wanted to get the impression of a beautiful Irish lakeland and the swishing sound of the rods should conjure the atmosphere of fly-fishing, tweed hats and long Wellingtons.”

Kate’s good cheer at this progress was short-lived however. The Joyce estate would not grant her permission to use the words directly from the book. Attempts to change their minds continued for about a year. “We approached the relevant people and they just would not let me use them. No way. I tried everything. Obviously, I was very disappointed. It was completely their prerogative, but it was very difficult for me, then, to re-approach the song. In some ways I wanted to just leave it off the album. But we’d put a lot of work into it. The Irish musicians had worked so hard.”

Despite this frustration Kate set about completely transforming her song. “I gradually rewrote it, keeping the same rhythm of the words and the same sounds but turning it into its own story.” The piece, now titled The Sensual World, became about Molly Bloom the character stepping out of the book world, a black and white two-dimensional world, into the real world. “The immediate impression was the sensuality of this world. The fact that you can touch things, that is so sensual – the colours of trees, the feel of the grass on the feet, the touch of this in the hand, the fact that it is such a sensual world. I think for me that is an incredibly important thing about this planet, that we are surrounded by such sensuality and yet we tend not to see it like that. I’m sure for someone who had never experienced it before it would be quite a devastating thing.” Later in her career Kate returned to this theme, a euphoric appreciation of everyday experience, on her ‘Aerial’ album in 2005 to huge critical acclaim.

The song opens with the sound of church bells, perhaps echoing Leopold’s proposal to Molly on Howth Head. “I’ve got a thing about the sound of bells. It’s one of those fantastic sounds: a sound of celebration. They’re used to mark points in life; births, weddings, deaths, but they give this tremendous feeling of celebration. In the original speech Molly’s talking of the time when Leopold proposed to her, and I just had the image of bells, this image of them sitting on the hillside with the sound of bells in the distance. In hindsight I also think it’s a lovely way to start an album. A feeling of celebration that puts me on a hillside somewhere on a sunny afternoon.”

A piece of traditional Macedonian music (called ‘Antice’) was re-worked to fit the ‘stepping out…’ chorus in the song’s new structure. The song would become the lead single for her new album, also titled ‘The Sensual World’. The accompanying promotional video had Kate, swathed in a velvet gown, dancing hypnotically through woodland as the sunlight turns to dusk, moonlight and back to sunrise again. In interviews in the autumn of 1989 Kate explained that the song and album contained the most positive female energy of her work to date.

“In some ways, like on Hounds Of Love, it was important for me to get across the sense of power in the songs that I’d associated with male energy and music. I didn’t feel that this time. I wanted to express myself as a woman in my music, rather than as a woman wanting to sound as powerful as a man. And definitely the song The Sensual World was very much a female track for me. I felt it was a really new expression, feeling good about being a woman musically”.

Even if Hounds of Love’s fortieth anniversary on 16th September will capture a lot of people’s attention, two days later, The Sensual World turns thirty-six. It is important to mark the anniversary of this song. Such a bewitching song that you immerse yourself in, I love everything about it. The B-side, Walk Straight Down the Middle. The video, which Bush co-directed with The Comic Strip co-creator Peter Richardson, and the fact it did get reworked in 2011 for Director’s Cut. However, to me, the 1989 original version is…

IMPOSSIBLE to better.

FEATURE: John Lennon at Eighty-Five: Double Fantasy: The Final Chapter

FEATURE:

 

 

John Lennon at Eighty-Five

Double Fantasy: The Final Chapter

__________

THERE have been posthumous releases…

 IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon and Yoko Ono at the Hit Factory in Manhattan on 7th August, 1980, the first day of recording for Double Fantasy/PHOTO CREDIT: Roger Farrington

but, just a month before John Lennon as murdered in December 1980, Double Fantasy was released. A John Lennon and Yoko Ono album, I think there was a feeling that, five years after the underwhelming Rock ‘n’ Roll, a new John Lennon album would be just him. Even though it is not as esteemed and highly regarded as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Imagine (1971), I think that Double Fantasy is hugely important. Seeing as it was John Lennon’s only album of the 1980s. Where he was heading creatively. His eighty-fifth birthday is on 9th October. My second feature to mark that is about an album that divides people. I think it includes some of his best solo tracks. Including Mother, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy), (Just Like) Starting Over and Watching the Wheels. I want to start out by highlighting some sections of Rolling Stone’s January 1981 edition. The month before (just days before John Lennon’s death), they published this incredible interview. Jonathan Colt spoke with Lennon about his art and the new album, Double Fantasy:

"In 'Beautiful Boys,'" I add, "Yoko sings: 'Please never be afraid to cry... / Don't ever be afraid to fly... / Don't be afraid to be afraid.' "

"Yes, it's beautiful. I'm often afraid, and I'm not afraid to be afraid, though it's always scary. But it's more painful to try not to be yourself. People spend a lot of time trying to be somebody else, and I think it leads to terrible diseases. Maybe you get cancer or something. A lot of tough guys die of cancer, have you noticed? Wayne, McQueen. I think it has something to do -- I don't know, I'm not an expert -- with constantly living or getting trapped in an image or an illusion of themselves, suppressing some part of themselves, whether it's the feminine side or the fearful side.

"I'm well aware of that, because I come from the macho school of pretense. I was never really a street kid or a tough guy. I used to dress like a Teddy boy and identify with Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, but I was never really in any street fights or down-home gangs. I was just a suburban kid, imitating the rockers. But it was a big part of one's life to look tough. I spent the whole of my childhood with shoulders up around the top of me head and me glasses off because glasses were sissy, and walking in complete fear, but with the toughest-looking little face you've ever seen. I'd get into trouble just because of the way I looked; I wanted to be this tough James Dean all the time. It took a lot of wrestling to stop doing that. I still fall into it when I get insecure. I still drop into that I'm-a-street-kid stance, but I have to keep remembering that I never really was one."

"Carl Jung once suggested that people are made up of a thinking side, a feeling side, an intuitive side and a sensual side," I mention. "Most people never really develop their weaker sides and concentrate on the stronger ones, but you seem to have done the former."

"I think that's what feminism is all about," John replies. "That's what Yoko has taught me. I couldn't have done it alone; it had to be a female to teach me. That's it. Yoko has been telling me all the time, 'It's all right, it's all right.' I look at early pictures of meself, and I was torn between being Marlon Brando and being the sensitive poet -- the Oscar Wilde part of me with the velvet, feminine side. I was always torn between the two, mainly opting for the macho side, because if you showed the other side, you were dead."

"On Double Fantasy," I say, "your song 'Woman' sounds a bit like a troubadour poem written to a medieval lady."

"'Woman' came about because, one sunny afternoon in Bermuda, it suddenly hit me. I saw what women do for us. Not just what my Yoko does for me, although I was thinking in those personal terms. Any truth is universal. If we'd made our album in the third person and called it Freda and Ada or Tommy and had dressed up in clown suits with lipstick and created characters other than us, maybe a Ziggy Stardust, would it be more acceptable? It's not our style of art; our life is our art.... Anyway, in Bermuda, what suddenly dawned on me was everything I was taking for granted. Women really are the other half of the sky, as I whisper at the beginning of the song. And it just sort of hit me like a flood, and it came out like that. The song reminds me of a Beatles track, but I wasn't trying to make it sound like that. I did it as I did 'Girl' many years ago. So this is the grown-up version of 'Girl.'

"People are always judging you, or criticizing what you're trying to say on one little album, on one little song, but to me it's a lifetime's work. From the boyhood paintings and poetry to when I die -- it's all part of one big production. And I don't have to announce that this album is part of a larger work; if it isn't obvious, then forget it. But I did put a little clue on the beginning of the record -- the bells... the bells on 'Starting Over.' The head of the album, if anybody is interested, is a wishing bell of Yoko's. And it's like the beginning of 'Mother' on the Plastic Ono album, which had a very slow death bell. So it's taken a long time to get from a slow church death bell to this sweet little wishing bell. And that's the connection. To me, my work is one piece."

"All the way through your work, John, there's this incredibly strong notion about inspiring people to be themselves and to come together and try to change things. I'm thinking here, obviously, of songs like 'Give Peace a Chance,' 'Power to the People' and 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over).'"

"It's still there," John replies. "If you look on the vinyl around the new album's (the twelve-inch single 'Just Like Starting Over') logo -- which all the kids have done already all over the world from Brazil to Australia to Poland, anywhere that gets the record -- inside is written: ONE WORLD, ONE PEOPLE. So we continue.

"The last album I did before Double Fantasy was Rock 'n' Roll, with a cover picture of me in Hamburg in a leather jacket. At the end of making that record, I was finishing up a track that Phil Spector had made me sing called 'Just Because,' which I really didn't know -- all the rest I'd done as a teenager, so I knew them backward -- and I couldn't get the hang of it. At the end of that record -- I was mixing it just next door to this very studio -- I started spieling and saying, 'And so we say farewell from the Record Plant,' and a little thing in the back of my mind said, 'Are you really saying farewell?' I hadn't thought of it then. I was still separated from Yoko and still hadn't had the baby, but somewhere in the back was a voice that was saying, 'Are you saying farewell to the whole game?'

"It just flashed by like that -- like a premonition. I didn't think of it until a few years later, when I realized that I had actually stopped recording. I came across the cover photo -- the original picture of me in my leather jacket, leaning against the wall in Hamburg in 1962 -- and I thought, 'Is this it? Do I start where I came in, with 'Be-Bop-A-Lula'?' The day I met Paul I was singing that song for the first time onstage. There's a photo in all the Beatles books -- a picture of me with a checked shirt on, holding a little acoustic guitar -- and I am singing 'Be-Bop-A-Lula,' just as I did on that album, and there's a picture in Hamburg and I'm saying goodbye from the Record Plant.

"Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder. I know we make our own reality and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way -- there's a choice and it's very strange sometimes... And that's a good ending for our interview."

Jack Douglas, coproducer of Double Fantasy, has arrived and is overseeing the mix of Yoko's songs. It's 2:30 in the morning, but John and I continue to talk until four as Yoko naps on a studio couch. John speaks of his plans for touring with Yoko and the band that plays on Double Fantasy; of his enthusiasm for making more albums; of his happiness about living in New York City, where, unlike England or Japan, he can raise his son without racial prejudice; of his memory of the first rock & roll song he ever wrote (a takeoff on the Dell Vikings 'Come Go with Me,' in which he changed the lines to: "Come come come come / Come and go with me / To the peni-tentiary"), of the things he has learned on his many trips around the world during the past five years. As he walks me to the elevator, I tell him how exhilarating it is to see Yoko and him looking and sounding so well. "I love her, and we're together," he says. "Goodbye, till next time."

"After all is really said and done / The two of us are really one," John Lennon sings in 'Dear Yoko,' a song inspired by Buddy Holly, who himself knew something about true love's ways." People asking questions lost in confusion / Well I tell them there's no problem, only solutions," sings John in 'Watching the Wheels,' a song about getting off the merry-go-round, about letting it go.

In the tarot, the Fool is distinguished from other cards because it is not numbered, suggesting that the Fool is outside movement and change. And as it has been written, the Fool and the clown play the part of scapegoats in the ritual sacrifice of humans. John and Yoko have never given up being Holy Fools. In a recent Playboy interview, Yoko, responding to a reference to other notables who had been interviewed in that magazine, said: "People like Carter represent only their country. John and I represent the world." I am sure many readers must have snickered. But three nights after our conversation, the death of John Lennon revealed Yoko's statement to be astonishingly true. "Come together over me," John had sung, and people everywhere in the world came together”.

I am moving to some features about Double Fantasy. An album I heard a lot as a child, I do think that it is worthy of a lot more love and inspection. I think that John Lennon’s death recontextualised Double Fantasy. If some critics felt the songs were quite syrupy and Lennon moving towards the middle of the road and away from his best, I do think this is someone just in their forties reflecting on his life, family and love. I think it was not going to be the start of a new phase where subsequent albums sounded like this. I do feel Lennon would have become more experimental and followed Yoko Ono’s lead and influence. Double Fantasy is fascinating. In 2015, Ultimate Classic Rock write why Double Fantasy did not connect with many people at first:

“Charles Shaar, writing for NME, memorably said Double Fantasy "sounds like a great life, but it makes for a lousy record. ... I wish Lennon had kept his big happy trap shut until he had something to say that was even vaguely relevant to those of us not married to Yoko." Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, at least at first, weren't much kinder – and the record-buying public greeted the project with notable diffidence.

Double Fantasy, with its comfy domesticity and too-slick, of-its-moment production, never felt dangerous enough to be a top-tier John Lennon record. Well, at least half of the time. Yoko Ono, who was co-featured in an every-other-song format, took far more chances than he did.

It seemed, as much as anything else, like a record lost in time. Even the best of Lennon’s solo material after 1970’s Plastic Ono Band suffered from similarly dated, shag-carpet production. He loved a big sound, when sometimes a smaller one would have been more effective. Earlier in Lennon’s final decade, that meant pasting on herds of fiddles, a thudding drum clomp, gaggles of girl singers and bawdy, burlesque saxophones – something that must have brought him back to the '50s pop radio of his youth.

When Lennon returned to music after a five-year hiatus, he was still steadfastly double-tracking his vocals too. It afforded him a deeper, multi-layered sound but also needlessly softened the edges on one of rock music’s best sneers. Couple that with the compression typically employed back then, and Double Fantasy — considered apart from his death — often ended up more gossamer than necessarily great.

No matter. After Dec. 8, 1980, those earlier negative notices were forgotten as a funereal fervor pushed Double Fantasy to multi-platinum sales and a Grammy award for Album of the Year.

Seemingly forgotten was that Lennon, at his zenith, had been a scratched-and-dented treasure, laconic and all edge. Here, he seemed to have settled into a middle-aged tameness — both figuratively and, by employing the prevailing pop veneer, literally. That ultimately gave surprising gravitas to 1983’s Milk and Honey and 1986’s Menlove Ave., a pair of loose, unfinished posthumous follow-ups. (Yoko Ono added another edition to that collection when a stripped-down version of Double Fantasy was released in 2010.)

Only on the muscular “I’m Losing You” do you get the sense of Lennon's old sinewy grit. It's the most kinetic moment on Double Fantasy, and it points to the long-hoped-for return of Lennon’s muse — the vibrant, angry yang to the bread-making househusband yin of recent years. Unfortunately, little else rises so completely out of the project's cozy, contemplative vibe.

Of course, "Starting Over" and "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" resonate in entirely new ways now. There's no getting away from the awful headlines that followed – no separating this album, even decades later, from Lennon’s fate. He’ll always be 40. So, when he whispers “Good night, Sean, see you in the morning” on the latter, it’s like a cold hand closing around any fan's heart.

Meanwhile, interspersing moments like "Woman," the record's most obviously Beatlesque ballad, with a series of nervy, New Wave-influenced Ono cuts certainly helps Double Fantasy live up to its subtitle: "A Heart Play." But it also underscores something about Lennon that his devastated followers weren't willing, or maybe even able, to admit.

While Lennon was making his way back into the business, Ono was far more in sync with the prevailing post-punk zeitgeist. Lennon was only just beginning to come to terms with things as they were — with middle age, with a settled life, with love and work and parenthood. How long could it have been before he was ready to push back, and hard? Unfortunately, we never got to hear his next great rock record”.

In November 2020, The Independent published a feature about Double Fantasy. Whilst it was not considered John Lennon’s best album, they are how it is his most personal. That is why it so meaningful to me. Jack Douglas produced Double Fantasy with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. At a time when Lennon was committing to a more domestic life and settling with family, Douglas did not expect to get the opportunity work with him. The start of the feature, where we learn how Jack Douglas got involved with Double Fantasy, is fascinating. I am starting with a passage further down. Selections from the feature that are especially relevant and interesting:

“Double Fantasy, released 40 years ago on 17 November, is not Lennon’s best album. But it may be his most revealing, for reasons that stretch beyond the music. For an artist who always wrote songs about his life, this record in particular - highlighted by “(Just Like) Starting Over”, “Woman” and “I'm Losing You” – is the most autobiographical of all. It also serves as an important, heartbreaking coda to a singular life. Lennon wanted Double Fantasy to restart his career. Instead, his tragic death, coming three weeks after its release, turned the music he made for the album into his final artistic statement.

Double Fantasy is the best way to tell the story of Lennon’s last years, from his retreat to house-husbandhood to his return to the top 10. It opens a window into the intense and often private relationship between Lennon and Ono.

“It's like a movie, though, and the script is constantly changing” is how Lennon explained it to Playboy’s David Sheff in an interview on the eve of the album’s release.

“We have some songs on the album that can be considered negative,” Ono added in the same interview, “but at the same time the fact that we can honestly state those feelings is very positive and we get a certain atonement for that.”

Double Fantasy is also, of course, not purely a John Lennon record. The decision to split it with Ono so completely – they would alternate songs – is the boldest play on an album that’s otherwise the slickest and most commercially focused of his career. In sharing the release, Ono and Lennon meant to create a kind of pop music diary of a relationship, or “heart play” as they called it. There was also a greater goal: to give Yoko access to the wider public.

Double Fantasy was meant to not just reinvent Lennon, the abrasive agitator turned doting dad, but also to recast Ono, who had been unfairly villainised as the woman who broke up the world’s biggest rock band. Her dissonant music was an acquired taste that had been widely mocked.

This is before digital playlists allowed us to self-edit. You could pick up the needle or fast-forward the cassette, but if you wanted your favourite Beatle’s latest release, you had to also take his wife as part of the purchase.

The dynamic with Ono did not go unnoticed. He seemed intent on using their relationship as a vehicle to reshape the traditional gender roles he had grown up with. When it came to Double Fantasy, she was an equal partner.

Which is why the “heart play”, as they called it, was both a concept and a reintroduction. Lennon and Ono’s relationship had always been shared, played out for the public.

In 1970, when the Beatles came apart, Lennon railed in Rolling Stone that they had “despised” Ono from the start and described Paul, George and Ringo as “the most bigheaded, uptight people on earth.” He also had little patience for fans who nostalgically longed for the mop tops of “She Loves You”.

In “God”, released on Lennon’s solo debut in 1970, he declared that “the dream is over” and detached himself from, among other things, magic, Buddha, Kennedy, Elvis, Jesus, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. “I just believe in me,” he sang. “Yoko and me.”

They wanted Double Fantasy to sell – they would tape the weekly Billboard chart to their bedroom door – but Lennon also wanted to deliver a message. The album had to update his sound and his image.

“This isn’t an album we want to sell to kids,” he told Douglas. “I’m going to be 40. This is an album we’re going to sell to the people who have been through the wringer of the ’60s and the ’70s. It's about a guy who’s married, whose life has changed. He’s cleaned up his act. And that’s what I want to say.”

Double Fantasy came out the third Monday in November. The reviews were mixed and sales were decent, if sluggish. At one point, Ono called Geffen with a plan to move more copies.

“She said, ‘I want you to go out and buy records at every record store,’” says Geffen. “She thought it could be operated, which it really can’t.”

On 9th October, we will mark John Lennon’s eighty-fifth birthday. I will publish another feature. However, for this one, I wanted to look at his final studio album. A very personal and revealing one that, despite some mixed critical reviews, I feel is thoroughly deserving of retrospection. When John Lennon was killed weeks after the album came out, Double Fantasy took on new perspective and meaning. Forty-five years after its release, I think Double Fantasy stands up. A sign of where, briefly, Lennon might have headed. Or maybe a stepping stone to other sounds. In my opinion, this 1980 release is a…

BEAUTIFUL album.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Fifteen: The Morning Fog

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

Fifteen: The Morning Fog

__________

PERHAPS there is…

less to be said about this track than the rest of Hounds of Love’s. Kate Bush’s fifth studio album turns forty on 16th September and, to mark that, I am writing a series of twenty features that take us inside the album and around it. The promotion, legacy and success. The final feature about its songs takes us to the uplifting finale, The Morning Fog. The second-shortest track on the album (behind Under Ice), it clocks in at 2:37. In terms of streaming on Spotify, it is the ‘least popular’. Maybe because it is the final track, or others fancying the singles rather than other songs. It is a track that is not played much or has been talked about much. It did appear in an episode of the U.S. series, The Bear. There are a couple of things I want to cover off. I will come to Leah Kardos once more and her book, Hounds of Love for 33/1. Maybe not surprising that she does not expend as many words on this song as most of the remainder of the album. It is a short track but perhaps the most important. Because it is the end, but also the end of this struggle. A woman lost at sea is rescued and taken to land. That is what we hope and assume. This sense of relief and making it through the night. The chance for her to tell family what they mean to her. A rebirth and rescue. Even if it is a fairly brief song, it packs so much in! I want to start out with the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and their article on the song. Specifically, a section of an archive interview from 1992 where Kate Bush shared some words on The Morning Fog:

“Well, that’s really meant to be the rescue of the whole situation, where now suddenly out of all this darkness and weight comes light. You know, the weightiness is gone and here’s the morning, and it’s meant to feel very positive and bright and uplifting from the rest of dense, darkness of the previous track. And although it doesn’t say so, in my mind this was the song where they were rescued, where they get pulled out of the water. And it’s very much a song of seeing perspective, of really, you know, of being so grateful for everything that you have, that you’re never grateful of in ordinary life because you just abuse it totally. And it was also meant to be one of those kind of “thank you and goodnight” songs. You know, the little finale where everyone does a little dance and then the bow and then they leave the stage. [laughs]

Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992”.

There has not been much written about this song. A tiny bit here and there. You cannot talk about Hounds of Love and ignore the importance of The Morning Fog. It the end of the ordeal that Kate Bush’s heroine faces during The Ninth Wave. This 2023 article is a review of Hounds of Love. Here is what was written about The Morning Fog: “It’s warm acoustics and comforting tone allows us to breathe again after facing such a taxing psychological journey. It is through her near-death experience that she has gathered a new respect for her loved ones and life itself, “I’m falling/ And I’d love to hold you now/ I’ll kiss the ground/ I’ll tell my mother/ I’ll tell my father/ I’ll tell my loved ones/ I’ll tell my brothers/ How much I love them.” Some fans have argued that this song is her spirit looking back at her life and taking the lessons from this life to the next”. I am going to include pretty everything Leah Kardos says about The Morning Fog because, amazingly, I don’t think anyone has ever written this much about the track (apart from me). “As the world comes back into focus in the morning light, the final track of The Ninth Wave concludes the suite with lightness”. After the haunting and epic Hello Earth, we get this real shift with The Morning Fog. It is a moment where there is either this salvation or chance to return home. Or else, this is the afterlife. I like to think that the woman was rescued and everything worked out okay. Leah Kardos mentions how the lyrics are ambiguous regarding the fate of the woman. I shall end by looking at some of them. In terms of the music. It is “reassuringly bright in B major, bobbing down from, B to Asus2 and E/G# and back up again without a hint of darkness or danger. John Williams’s double-tracked nylon string guitar decorates the gently pulsing LinnDrum sequence with delicate picked rhythms and improvised melody  overflowing in sunlit sweetness”.

<

I do wonder why few have gone inside the songs. Looked beyond the singles. Even though The Ninth Wave should be seen as a suite, each of the seven songs deserves more words and examination. I am not sure whether that will happen as we head towards the fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love on 16th September. Del Palmer’s upbeat and bouncy bass is one of the standout elements of The Morning Fog. “Bush sings about falling ‘like a stone, like a storm’, which could suggest to some that she is being pulled down into the water’s depths one last time, or alternatively that she is falling to earth with gravity, back to safety”. I have mentioned this when I last covered The Morning Fog. However, there is this mystery about the song. No clear outcome. That ambiguity is what makes the track and The Ninth Wave so intriguing and nuanced. That being “born again  into the sweet morning fog” is either literal or it could be Bush/the heroine on the other side. Whichever it is, you can feel this real sense of safety. After the hours of being stranded at sea, this is a moment she thought she would never experience. Following the communication struggles and issues that we have heard through Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave, this is clarity. Bush able to tell her family exactly how she feels. Themes of love and how to appreciate and understand people. The greatest and most sincere declaration of love left to the very end. Kate Bush’s ecstasy at being back on land. Bush said how she wanted The Morning Fog to be this bowing to the audience. This “thank you and goodnight” track. Where the performer thanks those watching. Seeing Hounds of Love as this concept album or production, this is the glorious curtain call. I always wonder whether a filmed version of Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave could come about. Bush did perform most of the album during her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. However, I think there is more life to come from this classic album!

At the end of The Morning Fog, Bush takes a minute to namecheck her family. She thanks “her mother, father, partner and brothers. And with that, the song takes a small bow, resolving with a dainty falling 5th on Williams’s classical guitar”. In terms of the lyrics, I love the mix of the poetic and personal. The vivid images of the opening few lines: “The light/Begin to bleed/Begin to breathe/Begin to speak/D’you know what?/I love you better now”. It is heartfelt and passionate but there is also this connection to nature and the world around. Something that runs right through Hounds of Love. In almost every single song. The line, “I love you better now” is perhaps the standout of the album. The meaning behind it. The choice of ‘better’ rather than ‘more’. Not just the quantity of her love but the quality. More appreciative than before, perhaps. The composition is fascinating too. Her brother Paddy Bush on violins and fujare. This instrument originated in central Slovakia as a large sophisticated folk shepherd's overtone fipple flute of unique design. Kevin McAlea on synthesiser alongside John Williams on guitar and Del Palmer on bass. Coming together to create this sumptuous, evocative and delightful sound. I am going to end now. In the final five features of my twenty-feature run, I am going to look at the legacy of Hounds of Love, Bush as a producer, and its meaning and significance forty years later. Saying goodbye to the songs themselves, it has been great revisiting The Morning Fog. Though not as popular as the other cuts on Hounds of Love, I have a lot of affection for it. Such a brilliant song that has this importance. In terms of the narrative of The Ninth Wave but also the concept and narrative of Hounds of Love. The title track is anxious and fearful. Bush running away from these hounds of love. Scared to commit. On The Morning Fog, it is like when people find God after trauma. Discovering this type of faith after a harrowing event. After the darkness, turbulence and fear that came before, The Morning Fog is the moment we see this transition through the cold and chill. Past the foggy morning and…

INTO the light.

FEATURE: Oasis’ (What's the Story) Morning Glory? at Thirty: Inside the U.K. Singles

FEATURE:

 

 

Oasis’ (What's the Story) Morning Glory? at Thirty

Inside the U.K. Singles

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ONE of the biggest albums…

of the 1990s turns thirty on 2nd October. There will be a lot of attention around Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? The second album from the band, they are currently on tour. Having played many dates in around the world, they are heading back to the U.K. for some London dates. Reunited and playing on a global stage, no doubt their 1995 album is getting a lot of love for new and decades-old fans alike. For this second anniversary feature, I am focusing on the U.K. singles. In total, four singles were released in the U.K. They were released elsewhere too, but these are ones U.K. audiences could buy. Two more were released, though they were not U.K. releases. Morning Glory was a U.S./Australia single, whilst Champagne Supernova was released in Australia. The latter would have been a huge hit here! I think Morning Glory should have been released in the U.K. instead of Roll with It. Going up against Blur’s Country House in the summer of 1995, I think it would have won the race to the top of the U.K. chart. That said, Wonderwall and Don’t Look Back in Anger were huge. I am going to tackle the single chronologically. In each case, bringing in some background and reviews for each song. Giving my rating on each of them. From the lead-off single, Some Might Say, to the final U.K. release, Don’t Look Back in Anger, this was a wild ride for a band that achieved world domination! Let’s get down to these distinct and amazing singles. Ones that live to this day and still sound new and thrilling…

Some Might Say (8/10)

U.K. release date: 24th April, 1995

The Backstory:

“Noel has never been shy about his influences, or the fact that he would happily “repurpose” songs he loved in his own work. The Beatles, Bowie and Pink Floyd were obvious touchstones in Oasis songs but the inspiration behind Some Might Say is one of Noel’s more curious lifts, taking its cue from a song by long-forgotten US rockers Grant Lee Buffalo.

“They were an American indie band who had this tune called Fuzzy,” Noel explained in an interview to mark …Morning Glory’s 25th anniversary a few years ago. “You can see it’s a big influence on Some Might Say. I’ll obsess about a song for years and I’ll rip it off 12 times and get 12 different tunes out of it.”

“Everything I do is a nod to something or other,” he continued. “I’m not a genius, I’m a fan of music. Paul McCartney is a genius and Morrissey and Bob Dylan. I’m not, I’m just fans of theirs. I’ve got a good knack of putting shit together but I’m not a snob about where it comes from – I’ll tell you. Nothing is original, there’s only 12 notes anyway.”

The similarities are clear as soon as Fuzzy begins, not so much in anything about the songs themselves – one is a delicate acoustic number and the other is a chugging rocker but both are rooted in a swinging, bluesy riff.

Some Might Say, as Noel explained to Fran Healy in an interview for the Travis frontman’s radio show a few years ago, was written almost a year its release. “When I wrote it, I was living opposite a studio in Chiswick called Eden Studios,” he recalled. “Across the road, they had a house where if you were working at Eden Studios, you could rent one of the rooms. But I wasn’t working there and for some reason I was living there, on the top floor, above Mike Oldfield’s ex-wife, not that that has anything to do with anything. I wrote it over a couple of days in the top flat. I’d just moved to London and was sampling the nightlife of London and I remember coming home at all hours of the morning and writing, which is why the lyrics are quite nonsensical… dogs itching in the kitchen and all that, I was quite hammered when I wrote it. Everybody would read different things into the lyrics and I’d just agree with all of them, going, ‘Yeah, that’s what it is!’.”

Returning from a bout of touring a few months later, Noel was determined to get a demo on tape, not a regular occurrence at the time, he said. “I was so excited about it I wanted to do a demo. At that point, I wasn’t big on doing demos. It was the only demo I did for Morning Glory.”

He contacted Owen Morris, the producer who had rescued Definitely Maybe when sessions weren’t going to plan and who was away working with The Verve on what would become their second record A Northern Soul. “He said, ‘I’m in Wales with The Verve but I think they’re having the weekend off, so why don’t you come down for the weekend?’,” Noel remembered. “I jumped on the train and went to Loco Studios and the demo is actually recorded with all of The Verve’s equipment, it’s me playing the drums and the bass and all that but it’s Nick McCabe’s rig and Simon Jones’ bass.”

It proved to be a journey worth taking – on the way back Noel’s train broke down in the Severn Tunnel and whilst sitting there, he wrote the classic Oasis B-side Acquiesce. “It turned out to be one of the best weekends ever,” he beamed.

The band recorded a new take of Some Might Say for the single release but Noel says he prefers the demo version. “It was a tiny bit slower and a bit more 70s,” he explained. “The way we did it with Oasis was a bit more Britpop. The demo was a bit dirtier and sleazier. The demo was slow and a bit more boozy.”

Released in April 1995, Some Might Say went to Number One and also marked the end of Oasis Mk 1 – original drummer Tony McCarroll plays on the track but by the time it was top of the charts, he had been replaced by Alan White behind the kit.

“It’s a funny song in the Oasis catalogue cos we gave up playing it pretty quickly because Liam struggled with it,” Noel reflected. “It’s probably my favourite Oasis song, I think the chorus is brilliant. I’ve always got fond memories of it” – LOUDER

A Critical Review:

“Who out there’s one of the lucky people going to the Oasis reunion gigs in the summer? If you are and reading this, I hope you have a good time. I could say I was jealous, but I feel all right knowing that the Gallagher brothers are way past their ’20s and probably won’t be as great live as they were 30 years ago. But it’s nice knowing that Noel and Liam seem to be getting along now, or so it seems. I guess everyone will have to wait and see until that big tour starts in July. It’ll be a spectacle, I’m sure. I like a bunch of Oasis songs. Most of them happen to be singles. I got the Stop the Clocks compilation a long time ago, which is an ideal package if you want to start getting into the band. For any artist, the singles are picked ’cause they’re considered to be the best songs. But that’s something that truly applies to Oasis. ‘Some Might Say’ was the first single from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, released in April 1995 – six months in advance of the album. Oasis were already a name in the UK ’cause of Definitely Maybe, and people liked ‘Some Might Say’ so much that it shot straight to number 1 in the charts after its first week.

It’s up there as one of my favourite Oasis songs too. Just like its music video shows, the chugging guitar introduction feels like a rocket ship launching and when the band enters you’re just taken into the stratosphere and never come down from that point on. The song sees Noel Gallagher on some kind of quasi-philosophical line of thinking. “Some might say they don’t believe in heaven/Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell.” “Some might say that we should never ponder on our thoughts today ’cause they hold sway over time.” Some good, good lines. The main line to focus on is the one that precedes the chorus, “Some might say we will find a brighter day.” We all hope for that, don’t we? And then there’s lines about standing at a station in need of education and sinks full of fishes and dirty dishes. The chorus is a bunch of nonsense, but alongside the music, it sounds out of this world.

And like the songs that were listed on Definitely Maybe, ‘Some Might Say’ is designed to be played loud. Guitars levels are boosted to the max, tracks and tracks of overdubs are existing on there. Noel Gallagher’s said before that he doesn’t like the sound of …Morning Glory, but at least to me, this song is where the way it’s loudly mixed works massively to its advantage. Liam Gallagher sings the track very, very well, and I thoroughly enjoy the back and forth between he and Noel during the song’s final moments amidst the feedback and uplifting chord progression. Those guitars that go on and on for the gradual fade-out outro, I could listen to for at least two more minutes, and the story goes that the band kept on playing that outro for a long while after the album’s fade because they were enjoying it so much and didn’t want to stop. I read that somewhere, I’m sure. Or watched Noel say that in a video, I wish I could find it. He does consider it to be one of the band’s finest moments, I have the evidence for that. And as a listener, I wouldn’t argue” – The Music in My Ears

Roll with It (7/10)

U.K. release date: 14th August, 1995

The Backstory:

“Coming out in the autumn of 1995, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was the soundtrack to a pair of different life-changing events. The first one was my job at a company in San Francisco called Art & Science, an agency that built websites for other companies.

In late 1994, I’d discovered the World Wide Web, so in early 1995 I taught myself HTML, built my own personal web page (which still exists!), and that summer, responding to an ad on Usenet, got myself a temporary gig with Art & Science building the first website for The American Association of Neurological Surgeons.

It was supposed to be a three month gig, but the day after I got it, I walked into the weird, small, libertarian ad agency I’d been working for — the job that allowed me to move from Fresno in the first place — and quit, because I had every confidence in the world that if I worked my ass off, it would become a permanent gig. And that’s what ended up happening, and while I was at Art & Science, I worked on early websites for Joe Boxer and SoCal Gas before I left for the greener pastures of Organic Online.

And throughout that fall I tortured my co-workers with repeated playings of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? which was both a bit popular and a bit rock ‘n’ roll for the cool younger kids I was working with. But I didn’t care, cos I loved it so much.

You gotta roll with it
You gotta take your time
You gotta say what you say
Don’t let anybody get in your way
‘Cause it’s all too much for me to take

The other major thing that happened was that Rox & I decided to move in together, so the days of flying back-and-forth just to be with each other ended and the days of just being with each other began. And she loved this album as much if not more than I did, so it was a soundtrack to the weekends of apartment hunting in Oakland even more than Definitely Maybe had been the soundtrack of driving around L.A.

Don’t ever stand aside
Don’t ever be denied
You wanna be who you’d be
If you’re coming with me

“Roll With It” has more hooks that a wharf full of bait shops, kicking off with a big echoing guitar, and even bigger before Liam Gallagher slams in, sneer and confidence fully intact leading off with the chorus. Or if it’s not the chorus, it would be the chorus of a lesser song. Given Noel Gallagher’s penchant for writing songs with a shitton of repetition, it’s nearly impossible to know for sure exactly what the chorus is. So it could be this.

I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
I think I’m gonna take me away and hide
I’m thinking of things that I just can’t abide

Or maybe it’s this, with Noel’s backing vocals echoing around Liam’s lead.

I know the roads down which your life will drive
(Drive life will drive life will drive)
I find the key that lets you slip inside
(Slip inside slip inside)
Kiss the girl, she’s not behind the door
(Behind the door, behind the door)
But you know I think I recognize your face
But I’ve never seen you before

There’s a really nice drum part here were Alan White double times at the end of the verse (or chorus or bridge). Yeah. It’s a bridge, because it sets up a repeat of the chorus, only this time Noel is doing a totally boss falsetto harmony, and then it goes directly into the guitar solo.

You gotta roll with it
You gotta take your time
You gotta say what you say
Don’t let anybody get in your way
‘Cause it’s all too much for me to take

And’s its a great guitar solo, too, taking its fucking time, because Oasis never cared how long their songs were, especially the catchy ones, and so Noel plays long arcing lines against the echo chamber he’s created, though, if listen carefully, you can hear a cowbell buried in the plethora of percussion they layered on.

There’s a bit more static and noise and echo on (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? than there was on Definitely Maybe, like they were trying to get rockier while at the same time writing poppier tunes. And “Roll With It” pulls off that trick with aplomb, gliding into the coda with squealing guitars and one last Noel / Liam counterpoint vocal.

I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaay)
I think I’ve got a feeling I’ve lost inside
(So take me awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay)

Noel’s final vocals fade into the ether as the guitars rise up and take “Roll With It” to its ending, a whole entire universe in a little under four minutes. Say whatever you want about their public personae as complete and utter yobs, they sure as shit knew how to craft a great pop song.

And while “Roll With It” was totally ignored here in the United States, where it was clear that nobody gave a rats ass about Britpop, it was their fifth straight top ten single in the U.K. making it all the way to #2, and they were just getting going” – Medialoper

Critical Reviews:

“The AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine described 'Roll with It' as "an assured stadium rocker that unabashedly steals the crown from Status Quo". David Stubbs from Melody Maker wrote, "This isn't the mounting cascade of manna and adrenalin that was 'Some Might Say' or 'Acquiesce'. It's subdued by comparison, a light shower after that musical thunderstorm, something for us to kick through the puddles to until their next mighty moment of precipitous pop. Rolling along, marking time, fair enough." A reviewer from Music & Media said, "When was it that dance fans predicted the end of rock? By going two steps back to the '60s Oasis takes it six steps forward. So roll over you sceptics, "my my, hey hey, rock 'n' roll is to stay."" Mark Sutherland from NME wrote, "Have no fear, you will la-la-la-like it. It is, after all, a pretty good record." Andrew Harrison from Select named it "Oasis' weakest single, but still far from the Quo travesty of legend, even if the song might conjure visions of flying wetlook perms." Leesa Daniels from Smash Hits gave it two out of five and named it "the weakest track" of the album, "and Liam sounds like he's got a sore throat” - Wikipedia

Wonderwall (10/10)

U.K. release date: 30th October, 1995

The Backstory:

“Liam Gallagher is rarely at a loss for words, snide or otherwise. But during a recent interview with Rolling Stone, the singer was left momentarily speechless after being informed that “Wonderwall,” the monster 1995 ballad he sang with his old band, Oasis, is on its way to approaching 1 billion streams on Spotify.

“That’s pretty big, man,” Gallagher says, finally, as if it took a few seconds for the enormity of that figure to sink in. Then the old Liam, the one who loves to bash his songwriting brother, Noel, returns. “You know who that is — that’s Noel, probably. He sat there for an hour and a half, constantly on that finger, click click, click. That’s why he’s always pointing at people.”

Jokes (and typical Gallagher-brother shtick) aside, “Wonderwall” has become the song that will not die — a Nineties hit that has transcended its era and become a new standard. Released 25 years ago next month on Oasis’ second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, “Wonderwall” regularly streams about 500,000 times a week (or 750,000, if audio and video streams are combined), according to Alpha Data, the data-analytics provider that powers the Rolling Stone Charts. Last year, Rolling Stone’s Tim Ingham estimated that “Wonderwall” was generating about $2,650 in recorded-music royalties on Spotify every 24 hours, or $1 million a year. In recent years, as Ingham notes, it’s been one of the few songs from the previous century to appear in the Spotify Top 200, a chart dominated by new pop, hip-hop, and Latin tracks.

“Wonderwall” stood out the moment it was released, not simply because it didn’t adhere to the hopped-up new-British-Invasion blare Oasis had become known for. A declaration of love and support for someone who was struggling, it didn’t swagger the way the band’s previous songs had; it was openhearted and earnest, with a melody and busker-simple arrangement that made both Oasis and Liam sound vulnerable. From the start, the song felt timeless — a feeling born out by the fact that it’s been covered roughly 100 times. One Direction harmonized to it on a beach; Ryan Adams and Cat Power each turned it into skeletal mood pieces; Paul Anka recast it as big-band lounge tune; LeAnn Rimes made it a pop-country ballad; and pianist Brad Mehldau transformed it into jazz. “Something about ‘Wonderwall’ has always moved me,” says Rimes. “In the Nineties, I was enveloped in full-blown teenage angst, and it was the perfect soundtrack for it” – Rolling Stone

A Critical Review:

“Despite Robson & Jerome denying it the UK top spot, this song went on to become Oasis’s best-selling single in the UK, and it’s not hard to find reasons. Liam’s instantly recognisable vocal tone, of course, must rank high on the list, balancing super-focused midrange, cutting nasality, and (on higher-register lines such as “I don’t believe that anybody” at 0:33) a hint of tastefully grainy break-up.

However, I really rate the drums here too. The choice of brushes is a great production move, as this instinctively feels like it better matches the arrangement’s prominent acoustic guitar and solo cello. Delaying the drummer’s second-verse entry by three beats is also inspired, not only because it’s so unexpected, but because it prevents the drums obscuring the cello’s first entry and also adds stress to Liam’s vocal rhythms on “street that the” — wisely resisting the temptation to plant a snare under the word “backbeat”, which I don’t think would have been nearly as attention-grabbing. And that fill after the first chorus is also a classic!

The harmonies are impressive as well, because of the way Noel manages to puzzle out a satisfying progression using five different chords ( A, B7sus4, D9, Esus4, and F#m7) which all share two notes ( A and E). This means that those notes can be sustained as upper pedal tones pretty much throughout — no wonder U2’s guitarist Edge has apparently said he wishes he’d written ‘Wonderwall’, because those pedal tones would have been ideally suited to his trademark long-tail echo effects.

What mystifies me a little with this song, though, are the disparities between the original album and the version on the band’s Stop The Clocks (2006) and Time Flies (2010) greatest hits collections. Now I can understand why the drum fill after the first chorus appears to have been drastically EQ’d, because the kit was clearly mixed to leave plenty of room for the harmonic and melodic parts, which means it does sound rather thin in isolation at that moment. But why has the entire mix apparently been polarity-inverted for the compilation? I accept that some people feel this makes a sonic difference, but if the improvement were so cut and dried, then it’s curious that the very same mastering engineer didn’t repeat the polarity-inversion move for his 2014 album remaster.

Then there’s the fact that the left and right channels appear to have been swapped for the compilation. Compare the positioning of the clean guitar counterpoint under “all the lights that lead us there are blinding” (1:11), for instance, or the electric guitar’s sustain at the end of chorus one. But what’s weirder is that this doesn’t remain consistent, since the verse sections don’t seem to have been channel-swapped — the opening acoustic guitar is noticeably brighter and pickier on the left side in both cases, for instance. What could possibly have been gained by doing this? It makes no sense to me at all. Yet if it’s a simple goof, then isn’t it actually the kind of thing you’d expect a top-flight mastering house to be quality-controlling for, especially with their highest-profile artists?” – The Mix Review

Don’t Look Back in Anger (9.5/10)

U.K. release date: 19th February, 1996

The Backstory:

“Saturday, April 22, 1995, Sheffield Arena: a momentous Oasis date for two reasons. Sadly for Tony McCarroll, it was his last ever gig drumming for the band. But when one thing ends another begins, and it was in Noel Gallagher’s acoustic set that night that he played ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ for the first time, sandwiched between ‘take Me Away’ and ‘Talk Tonight. “I only wrote this on Tuesday,” he told the crowd, before sort-of dedicating it to The La’s frontman Lee Mavers: “You’ve not heard this one before, mate.” The original inspiration for the song came from Noel Gallagher visiting Paul Weller at The Manor studios in Oxford to play on the track ‘I Walk On Gilded Splinters’. While there, Weller played his song ‘Wings Of Speed’, and that was that.

Things were less simple in the recording studio. It began when Noel played both ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ to Liam, and asked him which one he wanted to sing. Liam chose ‘Wonderwall’, which was committed to tape without a hitch. When the time came to do ‘…Anger’, Liam wasn’t needed so went to the pub. Friendly man that he is, he proceeded to invite around 30 pissed Monmouth locals back to the studio from local boozers The Old Nag’s Head and The Bull. Noel turned up a few hours to find, according to Alan McGee, “half of fucking Monmouth” in his room, and “complete strangers playing with £30,000 worth of guitars”. He adds: “one of them asks him for the number of a cab and Noel kicks them out. A punch-up ensues, and Noel chases Liam out with a cricket bat.”

As Owen Morris tells it: “The next morning, Noel had left. The band was over. The album dead. No one knew if he was coming back. We were all gutted.”

A couple weeks later Noel did come back, and the band got back to business. But the question remains: do any versions of Liam singing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ exist? Opinions differ. When quizzed by David Huggins of the Oasis Recording Info website, Rockfields Studios engineer Nick Brine said in an email: “My understanding is that Liam did record a vocal on the album version, but I think it was just one run-through for a bit of fun really.” Owen Morris refutes this claim: “Liam absolutely did not sing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ at any point. Nick Brine’s memory is incorrect”.

But, intriguingly, Noel Gallagher said this to MOJO in 1997: “When I gave [Liam] ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ he’s singing ‘But don’t back in anger, not today’. I’m saying, It’s ‘don’t look back in anger’. ‘He’s saying, ‘Well, that’s not what’s fuckin’ written ‘ere, Chief.’” Whether anything was recorded, and whether it will ever be released, Noel only knows” – NME

A Critical Review:

“Their title-belt rhetoric, Liam’s snarl, and the brick-wall loudness of Oasis’ radio sound made it easy not to notice how thoughtful Noel Gallagher’s lyrics could be. They weren’t especially clever lyrics, or meaningful, or even coherent, but “Whatever” and “Some Might Say” and “Roll With It” and “Wonderwall” and this one all have a reflective streak – bits and bobs of beermat philosophy giving the lie to the idea that Oasis were only a gang of sneering blusterers. Of course, this is more evidence that Oasis weren’t ever really a Britpop band – that scene had an art-pop appreciation for smart, satirical or formally dense lyrics, and even the unworked songs are very knowing about it (“Woo-hoo!”, indeed)

Noel seemed to prefer offhand sincerity, collages of lines that sound good sung, their emotional payoffs poking through puns, rhymes and boilerplate. According to both brothers, the “So, Sally can wait…” line that rouses “Don’t Look Back In Anger” from its slumberous verses was a happy collaborative accident, Liam pouncing on a phrase Noel had pulled from the air and ordering him to keep it. But the whole song feels like a similar patchwork, really good lines – “Please don’t put your life in the hands / Of a rock and roll band” side by side with fumbling about slipping inside the eye of your mind. The magpie phrase-lifting of the title sets the tone for the whole thing.

It might seem perverse to focus on “Don’t Look Back In Anger”’s lyrics, which are a tiny part of why it got to Number One and why it’s one of the band’s milestone tracks. But the rest of it leaves me almost completely cold, even when I can see what it’s up to. The opening piano, a lift from “Imagine”, is one of the group’s least subtle bits of behavioural priming – this is going to be a Big Song, Noel shooting for the Hall of Fame with a pained, ponderous rock ballad. I rarely like that kind of thing, and no surprise, I don’t really like this. It’s a treacly, high-gravity listen – guitars and drums and strings all jostling for space, dragging each other down. And while Liam’s singing wouldn’t have fitted this song’s rueful tone, Noel’s delivery veers between heartfelt and maudlin – particularly when he lets the song fizzle out at the end. Comparisons to “Wonderwall” – with Liam in total, electrifying command of a much tighter arrangement – are inevitable, and don’t flatter this song.

But something I do appreciate about it is that, in the context of rock tear-jerkers and lighter-wavers, the scrappy lyrics are an asset. There’s a sort of story here* – bye, Sal! – but no message or particular claim of wisdom, nothing you’re expected to agree with. Instead, the song flails about in a sump of self-justification and sentimentality, and is all the better for it. I have been drunk, and I have put big, sentimental rock music on when drunk, and felt the beery swell of nameless emotion just out of reach of my befuddled mind, and while I’d never use this track for it, I can recognise that use in it. That just-out-of-reachness – that catalyst for messy, dredged-up, inchoate feels – is the one way “Don’t Look Back In Anger” does stand comparison with “Wonderwall”.

*Though one particular coherent reading did jump out at me – what if that opening steal isn’t just a signal of the type of song this is going to be, but is an explicit admission: this song is Lennon fanfic, and Lennon is its “you”. It’s a fantasy where Noel gets to be John’s buddy – a Mary Stu. “Take me to the place that you go…” – and there’s Noel hanging out in Strawberry Fields, being there at the bed-in, helping him out – saving him, maybe – with some down-to-Earth Gallagher wisdom, vibing off his presence as “Sally” is left behind – no wonder Liam didn’t get to sing this – and kissed off with a snide cultural reference because that’s the kind of thing John Lennon does for Noel, his best friend forever. And there, walking on by, we shall leave them.

Score: 4” – Popular-numer1s

FEATURE: Spotlight: ADÉLA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Savanna Ruedy

ADÉLA

__________

I am going to come to…

PHOTO CREDIT: Patricia Garate

some recent features and interviews with the incredible ADÉLA. Adéla Jergová is a Slovak singer-songwriter and dancer. She took part in Hybe and Geffen Records' 2023 survival show, Dream Academy, a competition to form a global girl group. As a solo artist, she has released some amazing singles. This year, Machine Girl and DeathByDevotion have thrilled critics and fans. Her new E.P., The Provocateur, is out on 22nd August. I am writing this before that date but, by the time this is shared, that E.P. will be out. I think that there will be a call and demand from her fans to release a debut album. I starting out with a 2024 interview from Out. She talked about, among other things, her single, Homewrecked, and her biggest musical influences:

“Earlier this summer, streaming giant Netflix casually released Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE and sent international pop stans from all over the world into a frenzy.

The eight-part docuseries chronicled dozens of teenage girls traveling to LA to begin a training and development program produced by K-Pop record label HYBE to form their first "global girl group." This is how we meet Adéla, a girl from Slovakia whose big dreams outgrew her small town and country. And the dream was just within reach until the production revealed, after over a year of training, that the Top 20 girls would actually be competing against each other for just 6 spots.

Thus began Dream Academy, a global show that concluded last fall and produced the girl group KATSEYE. Though Dream Academy waded into some unethical waters, Pop Star Academy shows the highs and the lows of the participating contestants and what it takes to put together a group that can capture the entire world's attention.

Out: You're releasing your debut song tomorrow. How does it feel?

Adéla: I feel so f--king excited. Ever since the show came out, I've been getting so much attention, and when the show ended and during the last couple of months of the show, I knew that that wasn't the place for me. And I just felt like I needed to find my own path and my own artistry. And that's what I've done ever since the Dream Academy social media part of the show ended. I've been here and I've been working with producers and writers and trying to find a sound that feels like me and that I really can hone in on.

I feel like when you're training for something like a girl group, it's a lot of adapting to each other, feeling each other out, also trying to give a certain fantasy and vision that's put on you because it has to be. After I came out of that, I was like, 'Wait, what the f--k? Who am I?'

But this song, I wrote it with me and [Liam Benayon] and produced it with Dylan Harrison and Riley Aki, and it just feels exactly like me. The story is super personal and I'm so excited. It's so campy and weird and dramatic and way too much. And honestly, that's a lot of what I've always been told. Even down to my face. They used to tell me, you have a Jim Carrey face. And I was like, wait, work? Yeah, I do. But now I get to do that, and it feels really fun, and the people haven't responding to it really well, and I just really appreciate it. So I was super excited. This is the first one, and it's only going to get better and bigger.

Can you tell me about the lyrics of "Homewrecked." Is it about your experience on the show? A man?

I kind of like people not really knowing. If you put whatever meaning you want to it, I leave it up to you. Just know that it is rooted in real experience, and whether you take it literally or you go the more abstract route, I kind of enjoy seeing everybody's take on it.

When I wrote it though, in my head, it was about infidelity and it was about dealing with the worst feelings that you have of somebody close hurting you in such a way. And it's basically about killing the mistress that they cheated on somebody with. So it's about killing the person that they hurt you with. And it's not in the sense of let's put all the blame on the girl, but it's about, I want to hurt you so bad that this person that makes you happy, I want to kill them because you hurt me. Which didn't that happen in real life? And if it did, I wouldn't be telling you.

Who are your biggest musical influences? Who do you grew up listening to?

I am the biggest Beyoncé stan there is. I'm the biggest BeyHive you've ever f--king met. I've watched Homecoming, no joke, 17 times. I've watched it so much. And I made everybody in my closest circle watch it too. And I actually dragged Emily and Megan to the Renaissance world tour and to the movies too. I was like, if we want to do this. Let's f--king learn from the best. Yes, the tickets are expensive as f--k. We're going. We have a shoot tomorrow. I don't care. We're going.

Lady Gaga is a huge inspiration. I think seeing her artistry and seeing how absolutely unhinged she's been in her career. But how it's so intentional though, to me, that's so interesting and beautiful. And seeing all the different parts of her. You have the Fame monster, and they have Joanne, and then it's like, now we're in her jazz era with Tony Bennett. What an artist. And I think that's a huge inspiration. I obviously love Chappell Roan. I think she's so amazing. I think she's doing something that hasn't been done before, and it's just so fresh and amazing to see vocally. I grew up listening to Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston. And Mariah and Ariana. I was the biggest Ariana Grande stan. The pop girl is Britney. I really grew up just immersed in pop through and through, and I used to get ridiculed a lot growing up. People love to make fun of pop. It's like, girl, pop stands for popular, and it's popular for a reason. Oh, also Troye Sivan and Charlie xcx.

As someone who quite literally studies this industry and what it does to pop stars, just keep uplifting each other up because people will try and try to tear y'all down. This is all just entertainment and fake for them.

And everybody has been. KATSEYE members, non-KATSEYE members, everybody. We've all been very just drilling it in, like, are you okay? Are you good? I'm seeing what's being said. It's so actually loving, and it's actually what was so surprising about, honestly, the whole experience is the entire time, the whole class of the girls, or the cast of the show, it was just such an example of what people paint out girls to be. You would think that it would be so catty and mean, but there was none of that. Seriously none. Our project managers, they would say, 'F--k, we were so scared. But honestly, we got so lucky with all of you.' There was so much maturity and love with everything. The way that we handled each other. Everybody was so aware that it's such a tough thing to go through. We're all in such a weird position, and nobody intentionally tried to hurt anybody. And if there were issues, we talked them out, whether they showed it on camera or not, there's so many conversations honestly, that we also chose to have off camera. We we're real people, and you're seeing real things, but some things you don't want to show. You know what I mean? So it was definitely interesting. But I think for me and for all of us, where it was very authentic and it showed us actually going through what we were going through, and we're all just glad that we have each other and that we know what happened and that we're all good. Everybody wishes everybody the best. Seriously. That's how we feel”.

In this interview with The Line of Best Fit, ADÉLA talked about being raised in a conservative household and her early obsession with American Pop music and culture. The Slovakian artist has her own blueprint for Pop. Now residing in Los Angeles, this is someone who is primed for long-term success and endurance:

“Jergová was quite the determined pre-teen. Raised on the homogenised Internet, she had a "deep, guttural knowing" that she could attain fame — she saw bloggers like Bethany Mota go from a regular girl to a superstar influencer, along with countless others liker her gaining a following by sharing their talent. Performing "was the only thing that I ever wanted to do," she tells me, and the rigorous demands of becoming a professional ballerina — eight hours of practice, followed by more after hours — gave her a hardened sense of discipline, as well as a competitive, sly mindset. "I got off on the fact that I was working when everybody else was sleeping," she says.

"I was so narrow-mindedly, like, how do I get from Point A to Point fucking Z?" she asked herself. It’s not easy to go from a child in a small, foreign country to one of the most exciting Gen-Z pop stars of the moment — or even have the guts to think about such a feat in the first place. "In a childlike, stupid way," Jergová says with a smile, "and it really worked for me."

Her approach — working very very hard — has resulted in some spectacular results. Her latest single, February’s "MACHINE GIRL", is a succinct and sharp send-up to entertainment television where reality is distorted, people are treated like pawns, and extremity triumphs over nuance. "Why you comin’ at me, baby? Yell at the machine, girl!" she taunts. The video, choreographed by Jergová and Miguel Zárate, is angular and violent; a line of six women battle each other while playing to the camera, swinging at heads and threatening ankles. Grimes, who co-produced the track after DMing Jergová out of the blue, cameos at the end to advise the catfighters to turn up the rage.

It’s a not-so-subtle jab at her time in Pop Star Academy, the Netflix competition show where contestants audition to join the meticulously-created global girl group that would become KATSEYE. Jergová was one of the first to be eliminated and is not shy about the fact that it hit her hard: "It was the worst year of my life," she says, calling it "identity-stripping."

Most girls went home after being kicked off, to reprogram or destress, but it wasn’t an option for her: "I just knew that if I went home in that moment and I wallowed in that rejection and sadness that comes with such a life altering thing, I would not be back."

A trip back to Slovakia would mean starting over, back to a childlike blankness, which didn’t fit with the curated life plan she set out for herself. "Do you think I'm gonna go to college after I spent two years doing this every single day?" she asks. "For years, doing singing and dance lessons? I didn't have a childhood, and you want me to go to college? What are you talking about?"

Jergová knew she had to stay in LA and undergo the artist’s rite of passage — to find "a really shitty apartment and move out here and figure it out." After a quick trip home to renew her visa, it was a year of exploration and trial and error — before she arrived at her now-cemented electronic, explosive pop, she went through an indie rock phase she knew didn’t suit her ("The only music that I've ever listened to is pop music. Like, what am I doing?" she says). On her vision board are the typical influences of Britney, Madonna, Lady Gaga, as well as more esoteric picks like Imogen Heap and M.I.A. Her songs are brash, cutting, unafraid to show Jergová's vision for ADÉLA first and foremost.

"My whole ethos as a human is that I'm extremely imperfect, and so is everybody else, and I find that so beautiful," she says. "I find both sides of me interesting. Obviously, my first song was about me wanting to kill my dad's mistress. I mean, probably not the right emotion to have. But it's real! You would be mad too!" She’s talking about “HOMEWRECKED”, her revenge hit-and-run fantasy that unfurls with a "rotten, ugly rage inside of me." After she makes her mark, she flees to America. "I'm not very interested in keeping it very PC or down the middle of the line, nice girl, because I don't think I'm that at all. If you've seen the show, and if you've watched any of my content or consumed any of my music, I think one can tell I'm just interested in expressing myself to the fullest."

Not having full control of her vision would be incompatible with how Jergová operates. Maybe getting eliminated from Pop Star Academy was a blessing in disguise — now she has the full opportunity to progress independently. "If there’s six people in a group, you can’t let everyone have creative freedom, it’s never gonna work. That’s what K-pop is. But now being a solo artist at an American label, I get to completely be myself." Do you think she’d come all this way just to acquiesce to someone else’s ideas? In fact, when she auditioned, being in a group was never really a part of her plan. The executives on the show agreed, saying she’d work more as a solo artist, which she learned retroactively. "That would have been nice to hear," she says.

Her music videos are filled with comments from fans relieved she went solo, but she’s been receiving somewhat misguided pushback, too. I bring up her post I saw a while ago, with a pouty Jergová sitting atop a Capitol Records contract. "I sold out fr," she says in the caption. In our conversation, she has no qualms about reaping the benefits of a team behind you – "Being a pop artist is hard. You need budget, time, effort, people to be passionate about it" – but some may see a label backing not as a career boost but as autonomy regression.

Jergová’s plan is assertive and bold, uncompromising and commanding (when people hear it, she hopes that they’ll have a thought – whether it’s admiration or irritation). Two songs that complete her upcoming EP are gritty, sublime, perfect for the club’s flashing lights, like if Tate McRae fused with Charli xcx with the help of Grimes. There was a lot of "speed dating," Jergová says, to make the perfect team, which is now made up of Alex Chapman, Leland, Dylan Brady, Blake Slatkin, among others. It’s a conceptual project that centers an exaggerated version of ADÉLA — sort of a character anyway — growing up, moving to Los Angeles, making it as a pop star. There’s some truth to the mistress-killing — or at least, she certainly felt the visceral rage at the time. "I saw this Greta Thunberg quote the other day, where she says, 'I think we need more angry women.' I agree. I am quite the young angry woman”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jason Omar Al-Taan

I am finishing off with an interview from NME around the release of The Provocateur. That title very much describes her role in Pop. Someone pushing boundaries and staking her claim as a future legend. For anyone who has not heard her music, do go and check out the stunning ADÉLA:

“Dropping on August 22, her debut EP ‘The Provocateur’ has plenty of depth. As it pivots from MARINA-esque electro (‘Homewrecked’) to Britney-style robopop (‘Superscar’) and industrial club thumpers, ADÉLA documents the thrills and pitfalls of navigating the music industry as a self-aware and very ambitious young woman. “Maybe I should count myself so lucky, so lucky,” she sings on ‘Superscar’. “All these dirty hands, they wanna touch me, so touch me.”

The project is smart, sharp and savagely catchy, but “not musically very cohesive” in ADÉLA’s eyes – something she’s perfectly happy with. “It’s got the first song I ever made and the last song, which was finished literally last week,” she says. “So to me, it’s meta in a way, because it’s this snapshot of, like, ‘How does this girl feel about what she’s trying to achieve, and how is she finding all the things she has to do to get there?'”

One such thing is dealing with the way “the public is suddenly perceiving her”, which she believes is “so different from who I am as a person, really”. But ultimately, she “doesn’t give a fuck” about it all. On the hyperpop stomper ‘Machine Girl’, which was co-produced by Grimes, ADÉLA sings about being a “pinned up poster of pop perfection” who’s “d-d-drippin’ in drama”, but also tells us: “Past her lips, you will find her brain.” She’s committing to the role of high-maintenance pop starlet with a knowing wink.

When she moved to Los Angeles three years ago to pursue a music career, she felt immediately at home. “Whereas in Slovakia,” she adds, “I stick out like a sore thumb.” Did she try to soften her natural bluntness? After all, LA’s entertainment enclaves practically run on tactful euphemisms. “No, I refuse!” ADÉLA replies gleefully. “I think it’s kind of funny, and people actually like it because they’re just not used to it.”

In 2023, she landed a place on The Debut: Dream Academy, a YouTube reality series that created the K-pop-inspired girl group KATSEYE. ADÉLA was the first of 20 hopefuls to be eliminated, but again, she was undeterred. When it was followed a year later by the Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE, she was ready with an attention-grabbing debut single. “I’ll catch you with that dirty little whore,” she sings on ‘Homewrecked’, chastising her father for his extramarital affair.

“I was very logical about it,” she says. “Because no matter if I was a background character or more prominent, I knew I’d have the most eyes on me ever. But I ended up being quite the provocateur on the show.” ADÉLA isn’t exaggerating: after the series premiered, the first comment she read was from a troll calling her an “ugly, stupid ass bitch”.

ADÉLA wrestles with her post-reality show reputation across the EP: her way of telling trolls that “I’m not gonna be submissive just to win over public perception, because that’s not reality, it’s bullshit”. Besides, bullshit would get in the way of her purpose as a pop star. “I’m here to make people more comfortable with being uncomfortable,” ADÉLA says. “Being human – truly human – in pop music, I like to talk about my imperfections. To me, the negative sides of myself are just as interesting as the positive sides”

One of the most promising and talented artists coming through right now, there is going to be a lot of new fans discovering the music of ADÉLA. A new E.P. is due and there will be a string of live dates. She plays London’s Basing House on 19th September. There will be global dates and some huge moments ahead. For anyone new to the magic of this amazing artist, do go and make sure that you…

CHECK her out.

____________

Follow ADÉLA

PHOTO CREDIT: Jason Omar Al-Taan

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/adelajergova/

TikTok:

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

Twitter:

https://x.com/adelajergova

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2qanRMyA5bNuTvz1dK45OP?si=0whPNP3ZR5yffb4kr6VR0A

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@AD%C3%89LAJERGOV%C3%81

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Nick Drake - Five Leaves Left

__________

BEFORE discussing…

IN THIS PHOTO: Nick Drake in 1969/PHOTO CREDIT: Keith Morris

the album and giving a bit more detail about its brilliance and legacy, it is worth noting that there is an expansion on Five Leaves Left. Nick Drake’s debut studio album was originally released on 3rd July, 1969. It has recently had this reissued and expanded edition. The making of edition gives us demos, alternative versions and outtakes. Giving us greater insight into this classic album. One that still sounds remarkably engrossing and beautiful fifty-six years after its release. This feature gives more details about Nick Drake’s 1969 debut:

“Between 1969 and 1972, Nick Drake recorded three stunning studio albums of detached yet vivid Blake-ian lyricism ripe with images of the elements and an autumnal brand of chamber folk rolling behind his handsomely burnished baritone. If you can imagine David Sylvian, only sadder and still somehow more alive, you can picture Drake’s glass-spun wonder and doomed romanticism. Produced by legendary aficionado of all things rural Joe Boyd and featuring Fairport Conventioneer Richard Thompson along with a small string section, Five Leaves Left was Drakes’s first album, one filled to the brim with his delicate and bluesy bounty, yet somehow leaving the listener with something incomplete about the process. Where did he come from and how did he find his way to the UK’s king of all things dulcet and rustic, Boyd? Why was this guy so moody and sullen? Could he, perhaps, speak up a bit?

To answer these questions, Island/UMe has just released a dissection of the debut across four vinyl albums—a collection that starts not with the singer-guitarist’s 4-track demo recorded in his college dorm room in January 1968, but rather mere months later when Boyd got wowed by the composer-vocalist and pushed him immediately into Sound Techniques studio that March. Meant to tell a story of Five Leaves Left’s construction, each demo, outtake, and previously unheard version on The Making Of radiates the piecemeal feel of a novice grasping his way through a new endeavor (didn’t all of Drake’s music sound randomly unvarnished despite their ornate orchestration?) and one’s personally burgeoning art form. That this box’s final disc is the original album—lustrously remastered, but not over-mastered, by its original engineer, John Wood—gives the new collection a sense of history to go with its mystery.

Not that its third album of sessions toward the end of 1968 isn’t musically valuable, lending new ears to the fresh, previously unrecorded “River Man” as it does—but it’s albums one and two of The Making Of that show off, in great detail, how something so unassuming got assumed. Here, the never-before-heard tapes of Drake’s Cambridge buddy Paul de Rivaz and fellow student and string arranger Robert Kirby from October 1968 unfurl with Drake doing his assuredly skeletal thing on warm, weird moments such as “Blossom” and “Made to Love Magic” while preparing for an upcoming live performance. The intimacy and unhampered realness of “Day Is Done” and “Time Has Told Me” are weighed starkly against Drake’s surprisingly talky bits of conversation where he’s very clear on what he wants: sounds that should be “as expansive as possible” and “celestial.” Lest anyone think that Nick Drake wasn’t career-minded, stop here. “I’m afraid this is proving to be an unprofessional tape altogether partly due to intoxication,” he says, quietly, before moving into a spirited take on “Mickey’s Tune.”

Album one is the logical starting point for this box—one where you hear Boyd in March of 1968 announcing, “OK, here we go, whatever it is, take one,” before Drake leapt into the small, pretty storm of “Mayfair,” run roughshod into “Time Has Told Me.” Oddly enough, Drake’s spare, rustic takes of “Fruit Tree,” “Man in a Shed,” and “Saturday Sun” are the same three songs that close out the windswept, fall-weather luster of Five Leaves Left and its silvery sophistication in its finished version. Not only is this box set a gorgeous addition to the recent dissection of Nick Drake’s valued work, it’s also a schematic on how his other two studio albums should tell their stories in full”.

I will explore this new box-set very soon. It is not only important for existing Nick Drake fans. The Making of Five Leaves Left is a perfect introduction for new listeners. Those who might not know anything about Nick Drake. In 2019, The Student Playlist provided a detailed and interesting examination of Five Leaves Left and Nick Drake’s career. There are some sections from the feature that I want to use here, but do go and read the whole thing:

“A keen student of literature, having read English Literature at Cambridge University, Drake’s lyrics are evocative yet cryptic enough to withstand almost endless analysis. Inspired chiefly by a childhood of English Romantic poets, the likes of Blake, Yeats and Vaughan in particular, the lyrical and musical themes on his 1969 debut album Five Leaves Left are instantly timeless and transportive. Fascination with human behaviour and interaction is one core theme, but his observations haven’t yet been steeped in the hopeless alienation that would characterise Drake’s later work.

Quite aside from the breathtaking and consistently excellent quality of Drake’s songwriting at the age of just 20, on top of Joe Boyd’s generous production and the virtuoso musicianship from the aforementioned Thompsons as his backing, what’s most striking about Five Leaves Left is how clear and visionary it is. Although every single note is almost obsessively arranged and rehearsed, it never feels like a museum piece – instead, it’s a living, breathing musical document, as relevant today as it was back then, and one that just as accurately reflects the late Sixties as Sgt. Pepper’s or Tommy. Instead of the sunshine and love of the California hippy vision, Five Leaves Left was something more debonair and English. Although Boyd’s production was warm, Drake’s songs and delivery were pastoral and melancholic, like the cool shade of a tree on a blazing summer afternoon. His carefully picked and strummed acoustic guitar rings out with crystalline beauty, tying together the album’s (slightly) more upbeat moments with its baleful ones.

The clean, stern string arrangements on the stunning ‘Way To Blue’, its bittersweet atmosphere underscored by the shifting minor-major key shifts, were the result of Nick Drake’s insistence on getting his schoolfriend Robert Kirby to score the strings for it, against the advice of Boyd and the label. It’s minor, but it does show that Nick Drake wasn’t always an introverted, self-questioning soul, and in artistic terms was capable of getting his vision across with assurance.

“So I’ll leave the ways that are making me be / What I really don’t want to be,” he sings in his floaty, peculiarly English baritone on the lush opening track ‘Time Has Told Me’, a gorgeous moment that speaks to a quiet optimism, a mood that ended up being all too rare in Drake’s writing. The fantasia of ‘The Thoughts Of Mary Jane’, with its (incredibly) uncredited flute-playing adorning a wistful melody. and evaporates like a daydream. The spectral ‘Fruit Tree’ could almost pass for a McCartney-esque rumination on existence (“Life is but a memory / Happened long ago / Theatre full of sadness / For a long forgotten show”), and the galloping piano of ‘Man In A Shed’ chases Drake’s guitar around the mix in an upbeat moment that breaks the pace.

These moments are all brilliantly reflective of the British folk scene at the time, but Five Leaves Left also drifts in to darker and less musically conventional territory for the genre. Take the weary, questioning lyrics of ‘River Man’, for instance, Drake making allusions to concepts about actions and consequences. That mood is ruminative and mysterious, but tracks like the bare-boned ‘Day Is Done’ are much starker, reading like a heartbreaking essay on negativity and the futility of effort (“When the game’s been fought / You sped the ball across the court / Lost much sooner than you would have thought”). On the beguiling ‘Three Hours’ and the hidden gem of ‘Cello Song’, Drake and his musicians explore quasi-Eastern sounds that pitch his music halfway between folk and psychedelia.

Although it failed to register any kind of commercial impact, Drake’s backers at Island felt it logical to carry on in the same vein as Five Leaves Left. He and Boyd went all-out for his second album Bryter Layter, released in 1971 and festooned with a much more generous backing of organs, bass guitars, and choir and strings in places”.

I have heard some recent interviews where Gabrielle Drake, Nick’s sister, talks about Five Leaves Left and her brother. I am going to move to a feature from Rolling Stone about The Making of Five Leaves Left. I think we learn more about Nick Drake as a songwriter with these outtakes and demos. This peerless talent working out these songs that have endured for decades and inspired so many other artists:

“Sound Technique’s control room overlooked the recording floor, and Boyd often sat there while Wood and Drake worked below. The engineer spent a lot of time with Drake, even sometimes driving the songwriter back to Cambridge on his own way home to Suffolk. “I always had a very easy relationship with Nick, and we’d talk about anything,” Wood says. “He had a sense of humor. He wasn’t dour at all, but he was quiet.”

You can get a sense of Drake’s personality on the second tape, cut on a Grundig reel-to-reel recorder in the fall of 1968 by fellow Cambridge student Paul de Rivaz, whom Drake met the previous year. “I will never forget his rendition of ‘House of the Rising Sun,’” de Rivaz tells Rolling Stone. “The guitar riff at the beginning was absolutely made for him.”

Drake was working with arranger Robert Kirby, who was also attending Cambridge at the time. It’s fascinating and intimate, as though you’re sitting in the room with these university students. Fans will likely lose their minds here as they hear Drake actually speaking before each track, appearing chatty and joyful, a stark contrast to how the public perceives him. “As you can tell from some of the comments in the tape, he was jolly about a number of things, and quite jokey,” says de Rivaz. “I’m so glad we can reveal the true Nick,” adds Gabrielle.

Before the crisp, delightful “Mickey’s Tune” — completely unheard until now — Drake admits the tape is proving to be “unprofessional,” and jokes that he’s intoxicated, though de Rivaz says he was probably just hungover. (When I mention this moment to Wood, he said, “Nick certainly smoked weed, but he never, ever worked when he was anything other than absolutely stone-cold sober.”)

The direction that Drake gives Kirby on the tape — possibly some flute here, a string quartet there — demonstrates that even before his debut was recorded, Drake knew how he wanted his music to sound. (The liner notes reveal he was a fan of the Beach Boys’ 1966 classic Pet Sounds.) “At that very young age, he knew exactly what he wanted, and this recording showed it,” Gabrielle says. This proved to be especially true when musician Richard Hewson first contributed arrangements to the album, and an unsatisfied Drake used Kirby instead. “I think it’s a bit of a sore subject, to be honest,” Storey says of Hewson’s early involvement.

De Rivaz ended up keeping the tape, and never forgot about it in the ensuing decades. “I knew it was worth keeping,” he says. “I thought, ‘Well, a little bit of history, I’ll keep it.’” Though de Rivaz traveled the world for his job with British Petroleum, he kept the tape safe in his London home, refusing to fly abroad with it in fear of magnetic scanners at airports. A lifelong horse rider, he connected with Chandler in April 2017 through his fellow polo player Kenney Jones (drummer for the Faces and the Who). “I was sitting at home,” de Rivaz remembers. “The phone rang, and somebody said, ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Chandler from Island Records, and I think you might have an interesting tape.'”

De Rivaz then met with Callomon and Gabrielle at Abbey Road. “I duly appeared and said, ‘This is the tape, which you’re not going to play, and this is the CD, which has a copy of what’s on it,’” he said. “When it finished, there was this sort of silence, and poor Gabrielle was physically a bit upset, hearing her brother after so many years.”

Asked about this moment, Gabrielle tells Rolling Stone, “It was a sudden light thrown onto the Nick of my youth and his — a Nick too often hidden behind the cloud of his final sad years”.

I am going to end with a review for The Making of Five Leaves Left. However, it is worth thinking about the legacy of the album. Even though it was not really a commercial success, that does not really matter. The fact that we are still talking about the album and it has been so talked about. That is much more important than sales. Classic Album Sundays wrote about how Five Leaves Left sold low. However, it went on to inspire other musicians and now is this timeless album:

“Although Boyd was sure that Drake’s first album would follow in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen’s debut that sold 100,000 copies despite the singer/songwriters refusal to tour, the response to the release of ‘Five Leaves Left’ was underwhelming. The only British radio DJ to give the album airtime was John Peel but even this behemoth’s support did little to spark sales which totalled about 6,000 (a lot by today’s standard’s but depressing by those of the late sixties).

However, with time yet sadly decades after Drake’s early death, ‘Five Leaves Left’ and Drake’s following two albums ‘Bryter Layter’ and ‘Pink Moon’ have grown in popularity inspiring musicians such as R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Dream Academy (who penned a song in tribute to the late musician) and Paul Weller (who helped champion Drake’s music), amongst countless others. Perhaps the fact that Drake did not neatly fit into a popular sound and genre at the time of his debut’s release in 1969 prompted his posthumous cult status as ‘Five Leaves Left’ does not sound like a reflection of the times but in effect, timeless”.

I will end with a review from The Line of Best Fit for The Making of Five Leaves Left. You can buy that album here, though you can obviously stick with the original. It is a gorgeous and rich album that I first heard when I was a teenager and I have loved it ever since. Even though I have not revealed much about the making of the album, I hope I have taken you a little deeper into Five Leaves Left and its brilliance:

“Earlier issuings of material not included on the original three albums have necessarily been rather fragmentary in nature, and although it is good to have both Time of No Reply that has unreleased songs, in addition to more familiar ones in different arrangements, from the years 1968 and 1974, and Made to Love Magic that similarly provides unreleased recordings from those years, this new issue is, in so many respects, by far the finest of all, including so much in an appropriately-presented way that allows a remarkable insight into the work and the decision-making behind that first record within the more concentrated 1968-69 timeframe.

For instance, the de Rivaz-tape version of “Made to Love Magic” is beautiful and, wonderfully, has Nick carefully explaining how a flute would accompany his guitar at certain points. The version orchestrated by Richard Hewson and included on Time of No Reply, though manifestly better recorded, seems a little over-lush, lacking the elemental quality of the college room rendering. On the Made to Love Magic album, a composite version, simply called “Magic” (from Sound Techniques [1968] and Landsdowne Studios [2003]) that has some creative orchestration and re-mixing by Robert Kirby and John Wood, is undoubtedly better than Hewson’s, not least because it has the flute part prominent, but it has not the extraordinary combination of delicacy and starkness that makes the student account so compelling.

The choice and sequencing of material from various dates and sessions show both intelligence and sensitivity. Of course, as the Preface, written by Cally Callomon (who, with Gabrielle Drake, manages Nick’s Estate) in the accompanying book acknowledges, some would like to have everything on the record, as it were. However, what is presented has been judiciously selected and respectful of the artist, and shows both development and, in places, roads that could have been, but were not, taken. A fine illustration is provided by a comparison of “Strange Face” from the Beverley Martyn reel (a spare rendition, with just vocal and guitar) with the rough mix of a very different version (vocal, guitar, congas, shaker and various other unspecified instruments) from six months on; the composition later became “Cello Song”. Similarly, the accounts of “Day Is Done” include some imaginative instructive reconstruction to highlight the thought processes over the period April ‘68 / November ‘68 / April ‘69.

Neil Storey’s extensive research in locating all surviving tapes and takes is worthy of the highest praise. The physical quality of the book is uniformly excellent (textured covers and thick glossy pages, with finely reproduced images), and the extensive essay covering the recording processes is especially good on the discussions concerning the arrangements, with valuable detailed recollections from Joe Boyd and double bassist Danny Thompson, as well as from Robert Kirby, a music student friend who not only recorded Nick doing an exquisite one-off piano and vocal version of “Way To Blue” in Cambridge, but also carefully worked out some fine orchestration features: “He’s done a rather beautiful string quartet arrangement for “Day Is Done” … Naturally, it’s rather a lengthy process” noted one letter home.

The narrative of Five Leaves Left is long and complex. Now that it has been told, in words and music, the record’s greatness is surely only enhanced. This release is the culmination of a remarkable project for which we should all be grateful to Gabrielle Drake and the archival team”.

One of the all-time best debut albums, Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left should be heard by everyone. I would recommend it to everyone. Despite the fact Nick Drake’s recording career was quite short, his influence is huge. His songwriting genius clear. His 1969 debut is sublime. If you have not heard  Five Leaves Left yet, then make sure you do. It is a listening experience…

YOU will not forget.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Fourteen: Hello Earth

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Marius Herbert (from the book, Finding Kate, written by Michael Byrne) 

Fourteen: Hello Earth

__________

THE penultimate song…

on Hounds of Love, I am now at the incredible and epic Hello Earth. After I have focused on the tracks and have come to the end of the album, there are a few other features that I want to cover. For now, I am going deep with one of the standout moments from Kate Bush’s fifth studio album. A track that shows her true skill as a producer. I am going to refer to Leah Kardos and her book, 33 1/3 Hounds of Love. She goes into detail about this track. Before then, there is some interview archive from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, where Kate Bush talks about the song. It sounded like it was a real challenge realising this amazing moment! One that comes at a crucial moment in The Ninth Wave. Following Jig of Life and this spirited number where the heroine is urged to stay awake and survive, here we have this vision of the woman floating above Earth. Or someone looking down on her. It is atmospheric and cinematic:

“‘Hello Earth’ was a very difficult track to write, as well, because it was… in some ways it was too big for me. [Laughs] And I ended up with this song that had two huge great holes in the choruses, where the drums stopped, and everything stopped, and people would say to me, “what’s going to happen in these choruses,” and I hadn’t got a clue.

We had the whole song, it was all there, but these huge, great holes in the choruses. And I knew I wanted to put something in there, and I’d had this idea to put a vocal piece in there, that was like this traditional tune I’d heard used in the film Nosferatu. And really everything I came up with, it with was rubbish really compared to what this piece was saying. So we did some research to find out if it was possible to use it. And it was, so that’s what we did, we re-recorded the piece and I kind of made up words that sounded like what I could hear was happening on the original. And suddenly there was these beautiful voices in these chorus that had just been like two black holes.

In some ways I thought of it as a lullaby for the Earth. And it was the idea of turning the whole thing upside down and looking at it from completely above. You know, that image of if you were lying in water at night and you were looking up at the sky all the time, I wonder if you wouldn’t get the sense of as the stars were reflected in the water, you know, a sense of like, you could be looking up at water that’s reflecting the stars from the sky that you’re in. And the idea of them looking down at the earth and seeing these storms forming over America and moving around the globe, and they have this like huge fantasticly overseeing view of everything, everything is in total perspective. And way, way down there somewhere there’s this little dot in the ocean that is them.

Richard Skinner, ‘Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992”

I am going to come to what Leah Kardos notes about Hello Earth. She notes how the song draws together all the music, sonic and lyrical themes ad layers of the album. At over six minutes, it is the longest song on Hounds of Love. It also has the most players on it. If some feel that Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) is the most epic song, it really is Hello Earth. Almost like a climax. The biggest moment in the film where the action reaches its peak. We have “drummer Stuart Elliott, guitarist Brian Bath, bassist Eberhard Weber, pipes by O’Flynn and bouzouki by Lunny, in addition to a choir (by Richard Hickox Singers), orchestral strings, horns and percussion, arranged again by Kamen”. Michael Kamen and his orchestral arrangements is crucial to the swell and epic nature of Hello Earth. As Bush’s heroine looks down on the seas from way above, she is “helpless to stop a destructive storm she sees forming over America and moving out to sea (‘Can’t do anything…’)”. Leah Kardos observes how “Bush calls back to ‘Hounds of Love’ (the declarative ‘Here I go, don’t let me go! becomes a regretful ‘Why did I go?’), ‘Waking the Witch’ (‘Get out of the waves, get out of the water’), with keyword nods to ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’ (‘Murderer!’) and ‘Cloudbusting (‘Out of the cloudburst’)”. It is, as Kardos writes, like a Broadway musical. Bringing all the themes that have gone before into this big number. All coming to the surface of the narrative. All the pieces fit together. The only problem is the gaps. Where the chorus should be, there was the decision as to what would be there.  Composer Michael Berkeley transcribed and arranged a Georgian folk song, Zinzkaro – for the Richard Hickox Singers –, which needed to be similar to the Werner Herzog/Nosferatu piece that Bush had heard and wanted to use. Michael Berkley “characterized Bush’s creative approach as ‘zany (and) ambitious’, later recalling how he was sent a cassette with copious colourful notes, adding ‘she talked of the sound quality in the most graphic terms … indeed, she was thrilled when I suggested we create our own new language for this chorus of the spheres”. “With the lowest strings oozing down from F to C# and the highest strings inching upwards from high C to C#, is a spine-tingling musical manoeuvre, a panoramic aspect radio shift”.

There is a slow-motion portamento that slides to this widescreen drone. There are moments of whale song and sonic blips. Suggestions that the heroine could be sinking. Bush whispers in German “Tiefer, Tiefer, irgendwo in der tiefe gibt es ein licht”. This translates to “Deeper, deeper, somewhere in the depths there is a light”. Maybe this is the moment of death where Bush’s stranded woman – whether she truly casts herself in this role or someone else – or a psychological awakening. It almost comes full circle. And Dream of Sheep was when she wanted to sleep and drift to rest after being lost at sea. Kardos notes how Hello Earth “fulfils the promise of ‘And Dream of Sheep’, with Bush finally  soothing the ‘little earth’ to sleep after the long struggle to stay alert”. Whatever your interpretation regarding the fae of the heroine, one cannot deny what a pivotal and huge moment Hello Earth is. You can also hear why it would have taken so long to put together! Bush, as producer and songwriter, having to realise her vision and provide this suitably epic song that also keeps the narrative moving and stands alone in its own right. Completely different to the songs either side of it (Jig of Life and The Morning Fog). The Morning Fog could be the death-dream of the heroine as she envisions a happy rescue, or it could actually be the rescue after so long struggling to stay alive. The realisation of that hope and bravery. Hello Earth truly showcases Bush’s gifts as a producer and composer. Few other artists in Pop in 1985 were writing songs like this. I am looking forward to moving to The Morning Fog. This conclusion of a wonderful album. You never really know what occurred at sea. If Kate Bush/the heroine escaped and was rescued. I think it is left in the minds of the listeners as to….

WHAT really happened.

FEATURE: A Fresh Focus: Anton Corbijn’s Icon Award and the Importance of Music Photography

FEATURE:

 

 

A Fresh Focus

IN THIS PHOTO: PJ Harvey in 1998/PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn

Anton Corbijn’s Icon Award and the Importance of Music Photography

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THIS was announced…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn

a little while ago, but I want to come to it now. Music photography is hugely important. I think that it is underrated and not talked about a lot. I can see why artists get coverage and attention. However, we cannot really overlook the importance and role of music photographers. There are so many great music photographers working today. Award shows celebrating them should very much be highlighted more. I grew up reading music magazines and seeing artists of the day shot. Wonderful poses and terrific compositions. Images that will endure forever. I guess all big music fans have their favourite music photographer. There are these icons that have worked with some of the all-time best artists. One of those legends who is being honoured very shortly is Anton Corbijn. I think I mentioned him recently in a Kate Bush feature. He took some shots of her in 1982. He photographed her for an NME interview around the release of her fourth studio album, The Dreaming. I am going to come to a feature about Corbijn soon. However, Rolling Stone wrote how this wonderful and decades-successful photographer is being awarded at the forthcoming Abbey Road Music Photography Awards:

“Dutch photographer, filmmaker, and music video director Anton Corbijn will be presented with the Icon Award at the annual Abbey Road Music Photography Awards.

Corbijn has photographed numerous notable subjects over the course of his 40-plus-year photography career, including Tom Waits, David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Clint Eastwood, Bryan Adams, Cameron Diaz, Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, Robert De Niro, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, and Lucian Freud. He is considered to be the house photographer for U2 and Depeche Mode, and has shot both artists for several decades. He has directed music videos for artists like U2, Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Metallica, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, Arcade Fire, Coldplay, and The Killers.

“Photographing musicians was a love that became a full-on mission in the early ‘70s,” Corbijn said in a statement. “From hanging around the front of the stage to being 100 percent in charge, it’s been an exciting place to be. I like to think I evolved over the years, but I am still excited by music and photographing musicians now and then. To receive recognition from a body that contains the name of Abbey Road and with some of my peers as judges, I can only be grateful! Thank you!”

Abbey Road’s Director of Marketing & Creative, Mark Robertson, added, “Anton Corbijn’s work has been part of the cultural fabric of modern music for over five decades. His photography doesn’t just document — it defines, it innovates, and it inspires artists, fans and photographers alike. At Abbey Road, we’re thrilled to celebrate a true icon whose artistry continues to influence.”

Previous winners of the Icon Award, selected by the Music Photography Awards’ judging panel, include Jill Furmanovsky in 2024, Henry Diltz in 2023, and Eric Johnson in 2022. This year’s judging panel include Rankin, Nile Rodgers, Eric Burton, Joe Keery, Scarlet Page, Dimitri From Paris, Julia Cumming, and Simon Wheatley.

Abbey Road Music Photography Awards will be held at Abbey Road Studios in London on Oct. 2. The awards were founded in 2022 and span numerous categories, most of which are open for public entry. Last year, the Abbey Road Music Photography Awards attracted more than 22,000 entries from 30 different countries. This year’s awards will feature two new categories: Portrait and Festivals. Nominees for the remaining categories will be announced in September”.

It is well timed that Anton Corbijn is being honoured. As this DAZED feature from last month outlines, the esteemed and hugely respected photographer is being honoured with a new show at Fotografiska in Stockholm. With a career spanning over fifty years, this is someone that is going to be inspiring photographers coming through:

“The oldest son of a preacher, Anton Corbijn grew up in a religious island community in the Netherlands – far from the revolutionary cultural scenes where he’d later make his name as a photographer. “Across the border from the island was the ‘promised land,’” he says. “That’s where music was made. It was a different, freer life. I elevated the idea of a liberal lifestyle, as opposed to the lifestyle I had.”

For Corbijn, the camera was a route out of the place where he grew up, to get closer to the musicians and their liberated way of living. 50 years later, he’s worked with many of the most important artists of our age, from Björk to Joy Division, Nirvana to Depeche Mode, Kate Bush to Captain Beefheart and David Bowie. But in 2001 he briefly returned to his hometown, taking time to reflect on its place in his life and career to that date. The resulting photo series, titled Staged, sees the photographer himself dress up as dead music idols, including Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, and John Lennon.

“I combined the obsession I had with music [and] my parents’ obsession with life after death,” he explains. The intent was “playful” and never actually meant to deceive, but it helped shape a new mythology for the village nevertheless. “We had an exhibition in the town hall,” he adds, “and I heard people saying, ‘Gee, I didn’t realise Bob Marley was in our village!’”

There are some photographers who can show us our favourite celebrities (musicians, actors, artists, models, and so on) in a totally new light. Then, there are photographers who shape how we see those icons to begin with, who help write their foundational myths. Anton Corbijn is among the latter. Picture many of the famous faces he’s worked with over the last 50 years, and there’s a good chance you’ll see them as imagined through his lens: Nick Cave frowning in a raw black-and-white portrait, a moonlit Courtney Love in the shadowy Atlantic ocean, Patti Smith turning her own camera on the viewer.

“For five decades, Anton Corbijn’s visual language has found expressions through photography, feature films, graphic design, music videos, stage design, books, and more,” says Pauline Benthede, global vice president of exhibitions at Fotografiska, opening a career-spanning retrospective of Corbijn’s work at the Stockholm gallery to celebrate its 15th anniversary. “He is an artist who has changed popular culture as we know it.”

Since its opening in 2010, Stockholm’s Fotografiska has hosted exhibitions of Corbijn’s work on three occasions – the photographer himself says the gallery feels like a “second home” by now. On the flipside, Corbijn’s work has had a ripple effect on the culture of the city itself. Born and raised in Stockholm, the 32-year-old photographer Noah Agemo used to skip school to visit Fotografiska. “I’ve never really been good at school,” he tells Dazed in his studio. “So I got a year’s [Fotografiska] membership, and I just went there like every day... That’s when I saw Anton’s first exhibition.” He was particularly affected by a photo of the trip-hop musician, and early member of Massive Attack, Tricky, with a butterfly on his chest. “I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you could do that with musicians,’” he says. “I was like, ‘Maybe I can do that as well”.

PHOTO CREDIT: ATC Comm Photo/Pexels

I hope that the Abbey Road Music Photography Awards not only honours and spotlights modern greats, but gets people discussing music photography. Those working for music magazines and independently. You can read more about Abbey Road’s Music Photography Awards here. An article that showcases some of his best shots. In an age where everyone is a photographer and we see countless images on Instagram and social media every day, is it harder to stand out as a photographer? I follow a few music photographers online, including Phoebe Fox, and I always marvel at their work! I use quite a few photographers for my features. Maybe with fewer prominent print magazines as there were decades ago, we discuss music photography less. However, I think that the Internet and music journalism online does allow plenty of opportunities and exposure. These amazing interviews where photographers’ work can be seen. I recently wrote about music photography and how I love long-form interviews where an artist is captured in a number of different settings. There are a lot of ambitious and passionate young photographers whose work deserves more attention. There is a lot to be discussed regarding music photography in the modern age. I would love to see more music photography award ceremonies.

IN THIS PHOTO: FLETCHER/PHOTO CREDIT: Phoebe Fox

More exhibitions that collect the work of modern photographers and established icons. I also think photos are more than individual snaps and moments. They shape our understanding of music and can inspire not only other photographers and fans. The artists themselves can be inspired.  I shall end with some words from the Managing Director at Abbey Road, Sally Davies: "Music photography doesn’t just document culture — it plays a vital role in shaping it. With the Music Photography Awards we're proud to champion the image-makers capturing music’s most powerful moments and pushing the boundaries of visual creativity. And as the awards evolve into the cornerstone of our Music Photography Accelerator, it's exciting to not only spotlight talent, but continue to nurture it, helping it connect and thrive. It's about opening doors for the next generation of music photographers, and we can’t wait to see the incredible work they will submit this year”. Music photography and the print media that I grew up with is perhaps less common now. I think the artists rightly get a lot of love and exposure, but those who photograph them and take these amazing live shots do not get discussed in the same breath. It is hard to ignore just how important music photography. For artists, it can craft and build their identity and connect with their audiences. Live shots capture these very special moments. I think, with so many photos shared online, the form can be disposable and a little overwhelming. Music photography is about the quality and precision. These very special moments that we can cherish for years. It is crucial that music photographers are given more light and love and really put…

BACK in focus.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Rubberband Girl (The Red Shoes)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

Rubberband Girl (The Red Shoes)

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I have written about this track…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed in 1993 during filming the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

a few times through the years. Rubberband Girl is a song that is on Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes. Released as a single, it had two videos made. Not that many people have spoken about Rubberband Girl. I might revisit some of what I have written before. However, as it is coming up to its anniversary, I am featuring it again. I am going to be grabbing some information from Kate Bush Encyclopedia and what they have said about this song. Released in the U.K. on 6th September, 1993 and 7th December, 1993 in the U.S., it is one of the most underrated Kate Bush singles. The single release schedule was a bit odd for The Red Shoes. The first single release was an obvious one. Rubberband Girl is a natural lead single. However, a day after this song was released as a single, Eat the Music was released in the U.S. That decision to bring out one song in the U.K. (and other countries) and another in the U.S., three further singles were released. The final one, And So Is Love, was released on 31st October, 1994. Maybe an odd choice for a Hallowe’en single in a year when Britpop was ruling! However, I think the album as a whole is incredible. Maybe the production does suffer some of the worst traits of 1990s music. A bit compressed and lacking in depth and soul. Bush addressed this for 2011’s Director’s Cut. That was an album where Bush reworked and re-recorded songs from The Red Shoes and 1989’s The Sensual World. Rubberband Girl was one of the songs included for re-examination. I don’t think Bush had any strong attachment to the song or was overly-keen to include it. Maybe she felt the first single from that album was too important to leave it as it was. However, I love the original.

This fantastic single came out in the U.K. as a 7” single, a 12” single picture disc, a cassette single and a C.D.-single. The U.S. only had the C.D. version. The B-side to Rubberband Girl was Big Stripey Lie. This is a great deep cut where Bush played electric guitar for the first time on record. A reasonable chart success, Rubberband Girl did get to number twelve in the U.K. I am going to go into a bit more detail. Kate Bush merely thinks of Rubberband Girl as a bit of a fun. A pop confection, I think that it is better and deeper than this. The Red Shoes has some truly wonderful moments. Moments of Pleasure, Eat the Music and Lily. Maybe there are a few slightly weaker tracks, though the album as a whole is a lot stronger than it is given credit for. Also from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, this is what Bush said in 2011 about the superb Rubberband Girl:

“I thought the original ‘Rubberband’ was… Well, it’s a fun track. I was quite happy with the original, but I just wanted to do something really different. It is my least favourite track. I had considered taking it off to be honest. Because it didn’t feel quite as interesting as the other tracks. But I thought, at the same time, it was just a bit of fun and it felt like a good thing to go out with. It’s just a silly pop song really, I loved Danny Thompson’s bass on that, and of course Danny (McIntosh)’s guitar.

Mojo (UK), 2011”.

In the November 1993 edition of Future Music, we get some perspectives from Del Palmer. He was responsible for engineering and mixing on The Red Shoes. He and Bush used to be in a relationship. By the end of 1993, that relationship had ended. However, he continued to work alongside her up to and including her latest studio album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. He sadly died last year. He was an essential and enormous part of her career. Here is what he had to say about Rubberband Girl: the exciting and catchy lead track from Kate Bush’s seventh studio album:

“Chosen as first single from the album, Rubberband Girl is up-tempo and infectiously melodic. Originally, the first single was intended to be Eat The Music. but during the production of the film to accompany the album, Rubberband Girl seemed to be catching everyone's imagination, and has proved to be a substantial chart success.

Although the song has a relatively straightforward pop/rock feel, the vocals are multi-tracked and some of them seem incredibly low-pitched. "This song and And So Is Love are typical of the live band feel," explains Del. "We were trying to create a very accessible, live sound and the fastest way to record was to have at least two or three people playing together initially.

"On Rubberband Girl the bass, drums and basic keyboards were all done together, but we did change the whole track afterwards in the sense of editing it digitally rather than re-doing tracks. The bass and drum sound was important because we wanted to have them consistent throughout the album."

Although Stuart Elliot and John Giblin's performances tended to go on to tape 'live' at an early stage, this didn't avoid the need for subsequent changes. "When you put later tracks down, the earlier ones sometimes have to change because the whole feel of the piece changes. Sometimes we had to do the bass and drums three or four times, not because we were unhappy with the original performances, but because the feel of the song had altered as new tracks were added. Rubberband Girl is one of the few that worked first time - it just has a basic rock feel with a riffing guitar, the backing vocals went down first and then we tried various lyrics and lead vocal ideas.

"In most songs the lyrics change a lot during the recording process, although a basic seed remains solid. It often gets to the point of struggling over just one word which has to be returned to many times -there's never any pressure to write a song to fill a particular function, like acting as a single or being a very slow ballad, so the whole feel can often change”.

There has been a bit of a mixed reception to Rubberband Girl. I last wrote about it late last year. I don’t think that it has aged badly. It is coming up for its thirty-second anniversary. I want to collate some of what has been said already. In 2022, Classic Rock History placed Rubberband Girl in their top ten Kate Bush songs: “The Kate Bush song “Rubberband Girl” was a bit of a departure for Kate Bush, but it was still so brilliant. Anything Kate Bush composed, recorded, and performed was simply stunning. She was that rare of an artist. We should have done a top 100 Kate Bush songs list instead. The song “Rubberband Girl” was released on the album The Red Shoes. The record was issued in 1993. The album featured an incredible lineup of guest musicians, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Prince”. This blog provided a very generous review of Rubberband Girl: “Rubberband Girl 9.5/10. This is Kate Bush's most dance-poppy track. "Running Up That Hill" was a big hit on the club scene, but this one seems even more danceable. However, this is far from a cheap track. The groove is fairly off-kilter but still danceable --- in that way it's comparable to a Roxy Music song…

She has enough taste to have a nice rhythmic saxophone, xylophones, awesome guitar solos, her brand of freaky singing (including a bit of 'play acting' ... dialog and even some goofy "rubber band" vocals) ... All of this PLUS a melody that's catchier than anything... There's really quite a lot in this song, and you'll have fun hearing it multiple times I'm sure”. Although Bush wrote the song quite quickly in the studio (not something she did often), I feel there is something personal about Rubberband Girl. Maybe personal circumstances and a slight downturn in critical praise after the massive success and 1985’s Hounds of Love might have made her feel like she needed to bounce back. Some critics writing her off. Entering the 1990s and trying to adapt to a very different music scene with a lot of ‘new Kate Bushes’ being spotlighted, it was a moment for strength and resurgence: “A rubberband bouncing back to life/A rubberband bend the beat/If I could learn to give like a Rubberband/I’d be back on my feet/A rubberband hold me trousers up/A rubberband ponytails/If I could learn to twang like a Rubberband/I’d be a rubberband girl”. On 6th September, Rubberband Girl turns thirty-two. The first taste of a new album following 1989’s The Sensual World, the public did respond to it. However, I think critics were muted in their praise. People need to reassess. It is a fantastic elastic track from one of music’s…    

ABSOLUTE best and strongest.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sasha Keable

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Hahn

Sasha Keable

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THIS is an artist…

PHOTO CREDIT: Becca Wheeler

who has been around for a very long time. Over a decade. However, like so many artists I feature in this series, I spotlight those who I feel are either not as known as they should be or are hitting a new stride. It is definitely an exciting moment for Sasha Keable. Her latest E.P., act right, was released earlier this month. This is someone that should be known to everyone. I am bringing together a few different interviews so that we get to know better this incredible talent. I want to start out with this article from The Outlook. I am a little late to Sasha Keable. It is evident that this artist is primed for massive things:

“Sasha Keable, a singer-songwriter hailing from South London, has been making waves in the music scene since 2013. That year marked her first significant recognition as she featured in several singles, including DJ Zinc’s “Only for Tonight” and Disclosure’s “Voices.” Her unique style, combined with her Colombian heritage, adds a rich authenticity to her artistry, allowing her to express her identity. With a dynamic voice, emotionally raw lyrics, and a musical range that spans trip-hop, classic R&B, and soul, she has captivated listeners around the globe.

Keable began to gain momentum with the release of “That’s the Shit,” one of her breakout tracks in 2018. Her reputation furthered in 2021 when she collaborated with renowned London R&B artist Jorja Smith on “Killing Me.”

Throughout her life, Keable has drawn inspiration from various experiences that have shaped her both as an artist and an individual. In a 2021 interview with “Coeval Magazine,” she reflected on how growing up without a television fueled her passion for music. “I was drawn into music when my parents split up, we didn’t have much money, so we didn’t have a TV. He [Dad] would print off tabs of songs and to entertain ourselves when he got back from work, he would play guitar, and I would sing along.”

The connection provided comfort during her parents’ divorce and solidified her deep bond with music. As she discovered her singing ability, her musical journey took off. She recounted that at 10 or 11, she fell in love with writing music long before her passion for singing fully blossomed. This pivotal moment encouraged her to explore her potential rather than simply absorb the artistic expressions of others.

Around the same time, she uncovered her musical preferences. Keable grew up listening to R&B, rock, and Colombian music while delving into works by 1970s Motown legends. The passion and heartbreak found in these classics resonated deeply with her and played a significant role in shaping her as a musician. Her work frequently revolves around themes of love and heartbreak.

These elements prominently feature in her hit song “Hold Up,” the first track she released in three years, which garnered attention when released in April 2024. The song’s impact was amplified by a live performance on BBC Radio and a music video that amassed over 723,000 views.

With raw emotion, she confronts heartache from infidelity, expressing feelings of betrayal: “What’s the point in feeling? Yeah/ Been kicked, I been bruised/ And it’s me I turn to/So if you think I need you get that out your head.” In an interview with “New Wave Magazine,” she shared that the song emerged from a desire to reclaim her power: “The new music came from a place of feeling powerless in everything else in life, the only place I felt safe and like I had control over the outcome was in the studio.”

Keable continued to build on her momentum with consecutive releases and collaborations. In June 2024, she released “Auction,” featuring the R&B singer Destin Conrad, known for his sultry sound. In September, she unveiled another collaborative track with American singer and rapper 6LACK titled “Take Your Time.” The momentum from these singles paved the way for her own single “Why,” which delves deeper into love: “Who gave you permission to be this perfect?/ I think you should go ahead and thank your mama for me/ Lord knows what I did to deserve this.” This track captured considerable attention, leading her to perform it on the popular YouTube show “A COLORS SHOW,” where artists perform in a one-color room with only a microphone.

With her rising popularity, the video has garnered over 793,000 views. Her most recent release in December 2024, “NIGHT OFF,” a collaboration with fellow R&B artist Isaiah Falls, has become her most streamed song on Spotify, amassing over 6.6 million streams. Keable’s dedication and hard work are yielding impressive accolades.

In January 2025, she was featured on Spotify’s “Artists to Watch 2025” list, as well as Amazon Music UK’s “Artists to Watch 2025.” Her extraordinary achievements in 2024 have set a strong foundation for her continued success in 2025. In February, she received a nomination for Best R&B/Soul Act at the annual Music of Black Origin (MOBO) Awards.

Sasha Keable’s journey, driven by a lifelong passion for music, has shaped her into the remarkable artist she is today. As she continues to evolve and grow, fans eagerly anticipate what she will create next”.

There are two recent interviews that I need to get to. The first is from NOTION. For the Amazon Music Breakthrough UK: Artists To Watch 2025 list, they spoke with an artist who was on the rise. Even though she has been performing and releasing music for years, 2025 is a year when so many new people are looking her way. Such a distinct and stunning name. The minute you hear her music, you will be captivated and under her spell:

“Bursting onto the scene thanks to collaborations with the likes of Disclosure and DJ Zinc, Sasha Keable’s chameleonic voice has been captivating listeners for over a decade. Sasha has since found her own lane: a soulful force, she weaves together R&B, pop, and jersey with emotive storytelling to create an intimate and electrifying sonic experience.

The release of her EP Intermission, which includes ‘Killing Me’ featuring Jorja Smith, was followed by a three-year hiatus before she returned with the gospel-tinged ‘Hold Up’. Quickly becoming a beloved track in the industry and beyond, with co-signs from the likes of John Legend, Wu Tang Clan, and Maya Jama, Sasha Keable has dropped banger after banger since.

As she continues to evolve and collaborate with some of the world’s most exciting artists like 6LACK and DESTIN CONRAD, we sit down with Sasha Keable, to talk falling in love with music and where her most unexpected inspiration comes from…

Do you remember the moment you fell in love with music?

Music has always been my world. My dad would print off tabs of songs and after work, he would play guitar and I would sing along. My older sister was the person that got me into R&B and my mum and Abuelita played a lot of Cumbia & Vallenatos. I guess I fell in love with music because it allowed me to connect deeply with who I am and tell my story in a way nothing else could.

What are you manifesting for 2025?

I’m manifesting growth, freedom, and fearless creativity. Moving to Miami is something I’ve been dreaming about—it feels like a place where I could thrive both personally and musically. It’s strange coming to a place that’s not in South America and hearing so many people speak Spanish, but I love that connection to my heritage. I’m also manifesting Grammy nominations, sold-out shows, and creating music that resonates globally while staying true to myself.

What’s the proudest moment of your career so far?

Definitely when Beyoncé mentioned me as one of the next-generation artists to watch. That kind of recognition is insane. But also, hearing fans sing back my lyrics at a EU sold out tour, that’s a feeling I’ll never get used to, and it makes me so proud.

What do you hope people take away from your music?

I want my music to feel like a safe space. Whether you’re celebrating, healing, or just figuring things out, I want people to feel like my songs are there for them. It’s all about connection and making people feel seen and saying things people can’t find the words for themselves”.

I will end up with a review for act right. No doubt one of the best E.P.s of this year. You can sense that next year will be the biggest one for Sasha Keable. DAZED spoke with Keable in June. After a decade of working hard, she is now getting her flowers and finding her feet:

“There isn’t one recipe for success in the music industry. For some artists, the ascent can be quick (too quick even), with TikTok unlocking the power to make someone a star overnight. For others, success is an uphill battle that takes decades of hard work, determination and resilience. Even the ones who do get boosted by social media streams have, more often than not, been grinding behind the scenes for years prior – take Doechii, Raye or Charli xcx, for example.

Towards the end of last year, Sasha Keable made her Colours Show debut – the music platform and YouTube channel that showcases emerging talent from around the world. She’s also been drip feeding us new music (her first in over two years), while over on TikTok, a quick scroll through any R&B lover’s feed and you’ll likely be told that Sasha Keable is one of the hottest new artists coming out of South London. By definition, she is an emerging artist. But Sasha has been releasing music and laying the groundwork for her career for well over a decade now.

Blending R&B with gospel and soul, the British-Colombian artist is known for her emotionally-charged lyricism and smoky, winding vocals. Since graduating from The Brit School in the early 2010s and being whisked off on tour with Disclosure and Katy B at the height of their fame, Sasha’s career has felt like two steps forward and one step back. In an interview from last year, she confessed that this would be her final attempt at making it as a musician – if it doesn’t work this time, she’ll change her focus to writing for other artists instead.

So far, at least, it seems like her patience is paying off. All six of the singles that she’s released in the past 12 months have garnered multi-millions of streams (each). She’s playing Glastonbury, Jools Holland, Little Simz’ Meltdown festival and she doesn’t plan on slowing down with the new music either. Even Beyoncé is a fan – she listed Sasha as one of the best artists she’d heard in 2024 in an interview with GQ.

Hey Sasha! How’s life at the moment?

Sasha Keable: Life is good! Life is busy. It’s pretty insane, actually, but it’s good.

How did it feel to release your latest single, ‘Act Right’?

Sasha Keable: It felt really good to put that out. I’d been going through a heartbreak, and it felt good to say my piece in a clear and concise way. The response has been great. I’m always shocked at how engaged everyone is with every release that I’ve put out.

People online are desperate for more music from you…

Sasha Keable: I honestly get harassed online. I’ll tease something, and after an hour, they’re like ‘Release it already!’ I'm like, let’s build up some excitement and mystery. But I think people really want a project from me, which is why I’m really excited to put out a body of music and let that tide people over for a second.

You once said that if it didn’t work this time, you would give up trying to make it as an artist and write for other people instead. Do you feel like it is working this time?

Sasha Keable: Yeah, absolutely. I’m not about to give up. It’s a really difficult industry and when you’ve been working at it for as long as I have, you have so many moments of doubt. It can be really lonely and a lot of stress from a lot of different angles. It’s a really hard industry to crack. But I’m definitely nowhere near the space that I was when I was feeling those feelings, because it’s actually working now and I’m doing the right things.

I’ve never cared if I’m famous, I’ve never cared about any of that. I’ve always just wanted to do music because I enjoy it so much

What kept you going when you thought you might give up?

Sasha Keable: For me, it’s being in the studio and making music. When I’m not creating, I lose sight of my purpose. I’ve never cared if I’m famous, I’ve never cared about any of that. I’ve always just wanted to do music because I enjoy it so much. It’s my number one love in life. But even me saying that if I don’t make it then I’ll write for other people – that’s still a win for me, being able to create will always be a win”.

NME awarded act right a five-star review. Grit, grace and heart infuses the E.P. NME noted how act right is a “rich, honey-voiced collection with sapphic desire, Motown soul and the bite of contemporary UK R&B”. It is hard to argue with that assessment. If that does not convince you to follow Sasha Keable then nothing will! She is a music treasure:

“Sasha Keable has long been propped up as the future of R&B. At first, she was seen as a dance-floor powerhouse – her breakthrough with Disclosure on ‘Voices’ marked her as a voice that could command a club in one note. Her first two EPs, 2013’s ‘Black Book’ and 2014’s ‘Lemongrass and Limeleaves’, were released to great fanfare.

After a three-year hiatus, she came back in 2024 bigger and badder than ever with ‘Hold Up’, showcasing her emotionally rich and unfiltered perspective on life and love that truly cemented her artistry. With Adele comparisons and a blessing from Beyoncé earlier this year, the British-Colombian star could easily have buckled under the pressure on her fifth EP, ‘Act Right’. Instead, Keable shrugs it off and delivers seven tracks that feel like the gold standard for modern R&B.

We’ve already tasted much of this feast. Singles like ‘Why’ and the titular track are conversational and gut-wrenching. The former is rooted in the purest and happiest form of love, yet there’s a pang of self-doubt in the mournful question: “Why is it me… you give all this love to?” It’s the sort of line that could have been penned by Aretha Franklin or Lauryn Hill when they redefined pain as power. ‘Act Right’ carries the raw frustration and emotional depth of Donny Hathaway, wrapped in the warm, confessional soul of Amy Winehouse. That emotive nuance is what makes this project such a stunning reintroduction to the world.

There are earworms at every turn, especially on the deeper cuts. The Leon Thomas-assisted ‘Move It Along’ wraps you in a warm sonic blanket with heavenly stacked ad-libs and a churchy, whining guitar, and when Keable’s opening guttural “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeaaaah” hits, you soon realise you’ve just downloaded your newest vocal stim for the week.

‘Work’ – featuring Jamaican-born rapper BEAM – is a steamy slow-burner, too. The whiplash between Sasha’s silken croon and BEAM’s slackness might feel jarring at first, but listen closely. Hidden in her velvet phrasing, she’s a temptress, seductively commanding her lover to “lift up my skirt, grab my neck and say you care for nothing” – her sapphic desires a match for the rapper’s crassness.

The new cuts prove just as irresistible. ‘Can’t Stop’ finds Keable dropping into a just-between-us coolness, almost bragging about her toxic potential before roaring through the chorus about her addiction to the chaos. Her effortless runs beg to be mimicked (badly), while the post-chorus swirls with echoed, muffled layers that pull you deeper in”.

I will wrap up here. One of our brightest and best artists, here is someone who has been working tirelessly for over a decade. However, it seems like now is her time. A moment where Sasha Keable is releasing her best music and seems primed for many more years in the industry. Who knows how far she can go?! The superb act right is a truly brilliant work. It is going to be fascinating to see where Sasha Keable goes…

FROM here.

__________

Follow Sasha Keable

PHOTO CREDIT: Yana Van Nuffel

Official:

https://www.sashakeableofficial.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sashakeable

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@sasha.keable

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7MxGWmiAbqjNOGmj23wbWf?si=wxX9CcC6T9C8_o9X5O0KqA

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1_Ej3EWAay6ACKFS8eYfNg

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/SashaKeable

FEATURE: Now He’s Sitting in His Hole: Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Now He’s Sitting in His Hole

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of the Army Dreamers music video in 1980

Kate Bush’s Army Dreamers at Forty-Five

__________

AHEAD of the…

forty-fifth anniversary of Never for Ever on 8th September, there are a few features I want to put out. Kate Bush’s third studio album is among her best yet remains underrated. On 22nd September, the album’s third and final single turns forty-five. Army Dreamers reached sixteen in the U.K. In 2024, Army Dreamers gained new attention through TikTok increasing its popularity among younger generations. The surge in interest saw a 1,300% increase in streams. That song being used to score so many short videos. I have written about Army Dreamers a lot, so I will try not to repeat too much of what has come before. However, as the song is almost forty-five, I do want to start off with some valuable interview archive. Kate Bush talking about this song. At this point in her career, many were associating her with a particular imagine and sound. Nothing seen as political or serious. Breathing, the first single from Never for Ever, was a definite reaction to her. Now in her early-twenties, being influenced more by subjects around warfare and the nuclear threat. Army Dreamers is Bush talking about the insanity and futility of war. Where it takes young lives for no reason:

“It’s the first song I’ve ever written in the studio. It’s not specifically about Ireland, it’s just putting the case of a mother in these circumstances, how incredibly sad it is for her. How she feels she should have been able to prevent it. If she’d bought him a guitar when he asked for one.

Colin Irwin, ‘Paranoia And Passion Of The Kate Inside’. Melody Maker (UK), 10 October 1980

The song is about a mother who lost her son overseas. It doesn’t matter how he died, but he didn’t die in action – it was an accident. I wanted the mother to be a very simple woman who’s obviously got a lot of work to do. She’s full of remorse, but he has to carry on, living in a dream. Most of us live in a dream.

Week-long diary, Flexipop, 1980

No, it’s not personal. It’s just a mother grieving and observing the waste. A boy with no O-levels, say, who might have [??? Line missing!] whatever. But he’s nothing to do, no way to express himself. So he joins the army. He’s trapped. So many die, often in accidents. I’m not slagging off the army, because it’s good for certain people. But there are a lot of people in it who shouldn’t be.

Derek Jewell, ‘How To Write Songs And Influence People’. Sunday Times (UK), 5 October 1980”.

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

There are a couple of features that I want to get to that provide more insight and depth. I am moving to Kris Needs's first ZigZag interview from 1980. I am not sure of the exact date, but it must have been after Never for Ever went to number one in the U.K. Right near the end of 1980. It is a good interview and has some useful observations and information. There is a part about Army Dreamers in it. Kate Bush did a lot of promotion in 1980, and each interview provides something different:

“It'd be good if people could see that you're doing stuff that's pretty new, too. You could never mistake Kate Bush for anyone else.

"Oh, great. I'd like to think that, but it's not for me to say. When you first come out, people say you're the new thing. then when you've been around for two or three years you become old hat, and they want to sweep you under the carpet as being MOR, which I don't feel I am from the artistic point of view. It doesn't feel like MOR to me at all, although I wouldn't call it Punk! Sometimes it's not even rock...I don't know, I think it's wrong to put labels on music. Even Punk, that's really just a label for convenience--it covers so many areas. I think sometimes it can actually kill people, being put under labels. I think it's something that shouldn't be encouraged. If people could just accept music as music and people as people, without having to compare them to other things...which is something we instinctively try to do."

The way you're presented in the press could alienate some people, I s'pose.

"Don't you think any form of publicity alienates the person who is not involved in it? I think that's part of the whole process. That's why I feel that the good thing about albums and gigs and even radio is that you are directly communicating with your audience, but with papers and appearances on TV you're not really relating directly."

Does the bad criticism hurt you?

"No, I don't get hurt. I've read a few reviews of the album, an some of them really couldn't stand me, probably much more than the album. In fact, one guy didn't like me so much, he had to write four columns of 'I can't stand Bush!' That's cool. Sometimes I find it funny. I think a bad review is a good omen in some papers."

At least that's a positive reaction.

"Yeah, if they really hate you, it's just as good as really liking you. You're really getting under their skin so much that they've got to speak about it. That's great!"

And the album still came in at number one.

"I can't believe it, still. Every time I tell someone I feel like I'm lying. I couldn't have asked more for such an important step in what I'm doing, because I feel that this album is a new step for me. The other two albums are so far away that they're not true. They really aren't me anymore. I think this is something the public could try and open up about. When you stereotype artists you always expect a certain kind of sound.

"I'd really like to be able to leave myself open to any form of music, so if I wanted to, I could do funk tracks on the next album, I could do classical, I could do bossa novas. I think it's best to stay as open as you can. As a person I'm changing all the time, and the first album is very much like a diary of me at that time--I was into a very high range. The same with the second album, and I feel this is perhaps why this one is like starting again. It's like the first album on a new level. It's much more under control."

You took a long time doing it. [You think that one took a long time!]

"Yeah, it did. It took a lot of work, but it was very beautiful work because it's so involving and it's so like emotions. It's totally unpredictable and you can fall in love with it or you can hate it or if you want to you can ignore it: you know, all the things that you can do with people."

That's one of the main things I like about the music--the emotions running around.

"I think everyone is emotional, and I think a lot of people are afraid of being so. They feel that it's vulnerable. Myself, I feel that it's the key to everything, and that the more you can find out about your emotions the better. Some of the things that come into your head can be a surprise when you're thinking."

The next single is Army Dreamers, which sounds like a wistful little waltz-time ditty on first hearing, though a bit sombre. Kate adopts a lilting Irish accent--all very nice. But listen to the words and she's mourning her dead son, killed in the army. I thought Kate was singing about Northern Ireland, but not necessarily...

"It's not actually directed at Ireland. It's included, but it's much more embracing the whole European thing. That's why it says BFPO in the first chorus, to try and broaden it away from Ireland."

What about the Irish accent?

"The Irish accent was important because the treatment of the song is very traditional, and the Irish would always use their songs to tell stories, it's the traditional way. There's something about an Irish accent that's very vulnerable, very poetic, and so by singing it in an Irish accent it comes across in a different way. But the song was meant to cover areas like Germany, especially with the kids that get killed in manoeuvres, not even in action. It doesn't get brought out much, but it happens a lot. I'm not slagging off the Army, it's just so sad that there are kids who have no O-levels and nothing to do but become soldiers, and it's not really what they want. That's what frightens me”.

I will finish off with my personal thoughts about the song. Why it is so important. First, Dreams of Orgonon published a deep and detailed feature about Army Dreamers. Some interesting analysis and fascinating thoughts. I have selected a few sections. Hopefully providing additional texture. Army Dreamers is one of Kate Bush’s finest songs. One that is so relevant to this day:

“Since we’re used to Bush being asleep to political infrastructure and class, we can at least turn to her complex politics of domesticity. While she doesn’t interrogate the structural causes of political violence, she’s still centering a song around the vulnerable people whose lives are destroyed by it. Never for Ever is populated by mothers and wives. Five of its eleven songs explicitly focus on maternal and uxorial figures, and that’s if we don’t count the broadly familial “All We Ever Look For.” Bush’s wives and mothers tend towards fatigue over their familial roles, experiencing emotions that contradict their outward actions or social operations. Bush’s mothers are an intrinsic good whose absence or loss is a tragedy, and whose losses are a social catastrophe. Key to the mother’s characterization in “Army Dreamers” is absence. She bemoans not merely her lost son, but his lost opportunities and the things she couldn’t provide for him. “What a waste of army dreamers,” muses Bush, in a ritual mourning of military casualties, which treats them as a cessation of dreams.

Most impressive is the way “Army Dreamers” treats the mother as an individual while also stressing her importance to her family. Stripped of her duties to her son, she is left with no more motherhood to perform. This suggests that while war is horrible, the people who are left behind have their own experiences of it. Men get sent off to die, and the women they leave behind are expected to grieve dutifully. Yet they’re prescribed a performative kind of grief — the actual effects of trauma are widely besmirched and ignored by the jingoistic reactionaries who send civilians off to die. Women are usually seen as broken when their soldiers fail to come home — this isn’t quite what Bush does. Is the mother broken? No, of course not. Has she had a vital part of her life snatched from her? Utterly.

There’s a touch of sentimentalism to this, if at least a grounded and humanitarian one. Violent deaths are often devastating because they cut short the lives of unsuspecting civilians who’ve been planning to go live their lives as usual the next day. Bush’s anti-militarism is hardly strident, but “Army Dreamers” has an edge to it even in its understatedness, blaming the services of “B.F.P.O” for overseas tragedies (although interestingly, her son’s death appears to be an accident — there’s little fanfare of death, no suggestion of the glory of battle). The horror of the death is largely its silence — all the things that couldn’t happen, no matter how much saying them would make them so.

The politics of the situation are left understated, as is typical for Bush, and yet with a light inimical rage, as if Bush is finally turning to the British establishment and shouting “look at what you’ve done!” While “Army Dreamers” is far from an indictment of the military-industrial complex (indeed, it has more to do with the British Army’s consumption of Irish civilians than anything else), its highlighting of war as futile is striking. “Give the kid the pick of pips/and give him all your stripes and ribbons/now he’s sitting in his hole/he might as well have buttons and bows” is a line of understated condemnation that spits on military emblems (pips are a British Army insignia) and consolidates trenches and graves. “B. F. P. O.,,” intone Bush’s backing vocalists again and again. In interviews, Bush backpedals from any perceived anti-militarist sentiments in her work (“I’m not slagging off the army…”), but her song tells a different story: nothing comes with B. F. P. O. except carnage.

In the song’s music video, Bush’s final collaboration with director Keef MacMillan (the two strong-willed auteurs could only collaborate together for so long), the visceral glimpses of departed loved ones that plague mourners gets captured in one devastatingly simple moment. Bush, a soldier stationed in a forest and surrounded by men in camo, turns to a tree to see her lost son. She runs to embrace him, and he’s gone before she reaches the tree. There’s a hard cut to Bush’s eyes flashing wide open. There it is: trauma and grief in a glance. Waking up, but still living the same dream.

Recorded in spring of 1980 at Abbey Road. Released with Never for Ever on 7 September 1980; issued as a single on 22 September 1980. Performed for television numerous times, including on programs in Germany and the Netherlands. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, production. Stuart Elliott — bodhrán. Brian Bath — acoustic guitar, backing vocals. Paddy Bush — mandolin, backing vocals. Alan Murphy — electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar, backing vocals. Duncan Mackay — Fairlight CMI. Jon Kelly — production, engineering. Photo: BTS picture from music video (cred. John Carder Bush)”.

I have brought in some information and resources that I featured in previous features. One as recently as last year. However, back in June, Kate Bush News reported how Army Dreamers was in with a shot at overtaking Wuthering Heights (from 1978’s The Kick Inside, this was her debut single) on Spotify. As I type this (11th August), Army Dreamers is less than a million streams shy of overtaking Wuthering Heights (update, 16th August: Army Dreamers has now overtaken Wuthering Heights). Its video has thirty millions views on YouTube:

“We’ve certainly been keeping an eye on streaming and digital services since Kate’s global smash hit with Running Up that Hill in 2022. And later this Summer something quite unexpected is likely to take place on the world’s biggest music streaming platform, Spotify. While none of Kate’s songs are now ever likely to overtake Running Up That Hill as her most streamed track, if daily streams continue as they currently are, Army Dreamers will supplant Kate’s signature hit single, Wuthering Heights, on the 15th August as her second most-streamed song on Spotify. We project it to reach in excess of 230 million streams in or around that date.

This milestone is significant for a couple of reasons. Firstly, of all of Kate’s well-known hits, even just a few years ago it would have been expected that only Cloudbusting, This Woman’s Work, Babooshka, The Man With The Child In His Eyes or Hounds of Love would be among the songs that could possibly challenge Wuthering Heights in global popularity, even on streaming services which traditionally skew to a younger demographic. Army Dreamers, while well-loved, never seemed to have the same traction as those huge hit songs.

Secondly, as we reported last year, Army Dreamers has captured the imagination of young people the world over and has become a viral sensation on TikTok and Instagram, with that demographic latching on to the beautiful sentiments in the song as they grapple with at least two dreadful major world conflicts happening on the news in Ukraine and Gaza. Kate is not unknown in the wider world anymore (thank you, Stranger Things) and here she is spelling out the futility of war in perhaps the most effecting way possible, through this achingly timeless song.

The Army Dreamers phenomenon has not, we imagine, been lost on Kate herself. We have reported in March that Kate has helped raise over £500,000 for the charity War Child in just the last year alone, with the release of her animated film Little Shrew, and the money raised from her signed Soundwaves art prints and Boxes of Lost at Sea vinyl presentations. And, if you visit Kate’s official Fish People website landing page today, you will notice that the Army Dreamers music video is presented in all its glory (in a good quality Vimeo stream) for fans old and new to enjoy. We’re also very fond of the “Mrs Mop” performance above that Kate did on Rock Pop in Germany in 1980, along with Paddy Bush, Del Palmer and Andy Bryant as her performing soldier pals”.

There is new and continued relevance when we think of Army Dreamers. Apart from the war that is happening in Ukraine and the destruction and violence from Russia, there is also genocide in Palestine. The young soldiers that are being killed in the Ukraine-Russia conflict means Army Dreamers’ lyrics are as powerful and important now as they were in 1980. It is the murder of children in Palestine that I feel also gives Army Dreamers gravitas. Not young soldiers being killed and their lives being cut short. We can see the victims of genocide. Those being wiped out. By the time this feature is shared – in less than a month -, Army Dreamers would have comfortably overtaken Wuthering Heights on Spotify as Kate Bush’s second-most-popular song. Maybe it is the timeliness of it. How it is relevant to what is happening in the world now. It is a magnificent song that I also hope shines a light on Army Dreamers. The album turns forty-five on 8th September, so I hope that there is a lot more written about it. Still under-discussed and not seen as one of Bush’s best albums. MOJO ranked Kate Bush’s fifty best songs last July. They placed Army Dreamers eleventh (“The third and final single to be lifted from Never For Ever delivered a sucker-punch in a gossamer glove. A haunting waltz, built around double bass, gentle stabs of cello, sampled pistol-cocks and a spectral mandolin figure, its message was an unsettling mix of the motherly and political: that working-class boy soldiers join up, and die, because other more glamorous occupations aren’t open to them. Delivered in Bush’s best wide-eyed whisper, it matches Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding for its profoundly humanist reading of the everyman’s tug of war and pride”).

When ranking her twenty-nine singles in 2018, The Guardian placed Army Dreamers sixth (“Subtly affecting, promoted with a supremely bizarre performance on German TV – involving a rubber-glove-sporting Bush sweeping the stage while dressed as a cleaner – Army Dreamers demonstrates the influence of folk music on her work. Its anti-war message is straightforward, but its eerie mood gets under your skin and into your bones like cold weather”). I will leave things there. The third single from Never for Ever, Army Dreamers turns forty-five on 22nd September. One of her most important, affecting songs to that point, its lyrics might seem only relevant to 1980 and the violence then. The Iran-Iraq War started in September 1980. In 1979, there was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ongoing Troubles in Northern Ireland. Kate Bush undoubtably affected by images of young soldiers losing their lives. Some of Army Dreamers’ lyrics strike hard: “But he didn't have the money for a guitar/(What could he do?)/(Should have been a politician)/But he never had a proper education/(What could he do?)/(Should have been a father)/But he never/even made it to his twenties/What a waste/Army dreamers/Oh, what a waste of/Army (army) dreamers (dreamers)”. Forty-five years after it was released, this incredibly potent and moving song has connected with a new generation of artists and fans alike. It has found life on TikTok and it is understandable why many can relate to the song in 2025. Someone who wrote a masterpiece that moved people in 1980 and continues to forty-five years later, it is just shows what a…

REMARKABLE artist Kate Bush is.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Tori Amos

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Carroll/Corbis

Tori Amos

__________

IN the next part…

of The Great American Songbook, I am keen to share a twenty-song mixtape from Tori Amos. The North Carolina-born artist recently turned sixty-two. She is one of the most singular and distinct artists. An incredible songwriter and voice, Amos has influenced generations of songwriters. Her debut album, Little Earthquakes, was released in 1992. Her seventeenth album, The Music of Tori and the Muses, was released earlier this year. It is the soundtrack to the children's book, Tori and the Muses. Before I get to the mixtape that salutes a tremendous artist whose catalogue is one of the most impressive in all of music, I am getting to some biography that charts the life and career of Tori Amos:

“American singer/songwriter Tori Amos is one of several artists to have a breakthrough in the '90s by combining the stark, lyrical attack of alternative rock with a distinctly '70s musical approach, creating music that fell between the orchestrated meditations of Kate Bush and the stripped-down poetics of Joni Mitchell. In addition to reviving those singer/songwriter traditions of the '70s, she has also reestablished the piano as a rock & roll instrument, commanding the keys with both intimacy and aggression. After a late-'80s critical stumble with her glam rock-inspired project Y Kant Tori Read, she paused to realign, following her instincts as she returned her focus to piano-based compositions. The resulting album -- 1992's landmark classic Little Earthquakes -- set her on a path to a decades-spanning legacy that also established one of the most dedicated fan bases in popular music. Expanding on her debut's deep confessionals and unflinching, provocative perspective, she soon achieved platinum success with chart hits with the seminal Under the Pink (1994) and experimental Boys for Pele (1996). With each successive album, Amos and her piano remained at the core, even as she expanded her scope with forays into electronica on 1998's From the Choirgirl Hotel and 1999's To Venus and Back. Hopping from Atlantic to Epic, her albums began to swell in both length and storytelling, delving into concepts like American identity (2002's Scarlet's Walk and 2007's American Doll Posse) and life and death (2005's The Beekeeper). At the turn of the 2010s, she took a detour from pop with a holiday album (Midwinter Graces) and classical crossovers with Deutsche Grammophon (Night of Hunters and Gold Dust) before returning to her trademark style on 2014's Unrepentant Geraldines and 2017's Native Invader. In 2021, she continued a late-era streak with her 16th album Ocean to Ocean.

he daughter of a Methodist preacher, Myra Ellen Amos was born in North Carolina but raised in Maryland. She began singing and playing piano in the church choir at the age of four, and songwriting followed shortly afterward. Amos proved to be a quick learner, and her instrumental prowess earned her a scholarship to the preparatory school at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory. While studying at Peabody, she became infatuated with rock & roll, particularly the music of Led Zeppelin. She lost her scholarship at the age of 11 -- quite possibly due to her interest in popular music -- but continued writing songs nevertheless, eventually moving to Los Angeles in her late teens to become a pop singer. Atlantic Records signed her in 1987, and Amos recorded a pop-metal album called Y Kant Tori Read the following year. The record was a failure, attracting no attention from radio or press and selling very few copies; nevertheless, she didn't lose her record contract. By 1990, Amos had adopted a new approach, singing spare, haunting, confessional piano ballads that were arranged like Kate Bush but had the melodies and lyrical approach of Joni Mitchell. Atlantic sponsored a trip to England in 1991, where she played a series of concerts in support of an EP, Me and a Gun. The harrowing "Me and a Gun" was an autobiographical song, telling the tale of Amos' own experience with rape. It gained positive reviews throughout the media, and both the EP and the supporting concerts sold well. Little Earthquakes, Amos' first album as a singer/songwriter, was released in 1992 and fared well in both the U.S. and the U.K. Earthquakes featured some of the most enduring songs in her catalog, including "Silent All These Years," "Precious Things," "Winter," and "Crucify." The same year, she released the Crucify EP, which featured cover songs like Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Led Zeppelin's "Thank You." 

Delivered in early 1994, Under the Pink -- the proper follow-up to Little Earthquakes -- was an even bigger hit, selling over a million copies and launching the iconic singles "God" and "Cornflake Girl." Pink also included a duet with Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor on "Past the Mission."

Two years later, Amos delivered her third album, Boys for Pele. The LP was her most ambitious and difficult record to date, adding harpsichord, gospel touches, and jazzy overtones to her piano-driven style. Pele debuted at number two and quickly went platinum. The Hey Jupiter EP arrived later that summer and featured live versions of B-sides "Honey" and "Sugar."

Amos spent much of 1997 dealing with personal matters, including a devastating miscarriage and a new marriage. These events would shape the entire tone of her fourth album, From the Choirgirl Hotel. Released in the spring of 1998, Choirgirl debuted in the Top Five and was certified platinum. After years of Amos flirting with the dance world -- she sang on BT's "Blue Skies" and hit number one on the dance chart with Armand van Helden's remix of "Professional Widow" -- Choirgirl was notable for the inclusion of dark electronic textures and synth programming. The album also provided the backdrop for her first tour backed by supporting musicians. The Plugged '98 trek featured Steve Caton on guitar, Jon Evans on bass, and Matt Chamberlain on drums. Selections from the journey were preserved on the two-disc To Venus and Back, which was released in September 1999. In addition to the transformed live versions of songs from her early era, Venus included a disc of new material like the Grammy-nominated single "Bliss." In 2001, Amos returned with the covers album Strange Little Girls, which featured her takes on songs by acts like Depeche Mode, Lou Reed, Slayer, Neil Young, the Beatles, and Eminem. The collection also marked her last release of new material for Atlantic.

The next year, she found a new label home with Epic and unveiled her sprawling conceptual post-9/11 epic, Scarlet's Walk. Home to hit single "A Sorta Fairytale," it was eventually certified gold i the U.S. A retrospective best-of collection, Tales of a Librarian, was issued on Atlantic in 2003. Librarian compiled notable hits and deep cuts from the first five albums of her solo career, as well as two new tracks and re-recorded B-sides.

Her eighth studio album, The Beekeeper, was released in 2005. Her fifth Top Ten debut, it was later certified gold. In conjunction with the LP release, Amos also published her first book, the New York Times best-selling autobiography Piece by Piece, written with Ann Powers. The massive five-disc Piano collection arrived in 2006, boasting a cornucopia of album cuts, B-sides, unedited and alternate versions, demos, and seven previously unissued tracks.

Amos issued the eclectic and hard-rocking American Doll Posse in 2007, a sprawling group of songs that found the artist assuming five archetypal personalities, all of whom were based on feminine gods in Greek and Roman mythology. As she toured in support of the album, Amos released live digital recordings of each concert as part of the Legs and Boots concert series, which grew to encompass 27 albums. Although each release was made available to fans, Amos also released a "best-of" Legs and Boots compilation in March 2009, creating its track list from various recordings during the tour.

Meanwhile, she also focused on writing new material during the tour. Those songs would find their way onto her tenth studio album, Abnormally Attracted to Sin. Released in May 2009, it was the first with Amos' new label, Universal Republic. It marked her seventh Top Ten debut on the charts. A holiday album, Midwinter Graces, followed closely behind, appearing before the end of 2009 and garnering warm reviews.

Afterward, Amos began a period in her career where she delved headlong into the world of classical music. In September 2011, she unveiled her 12th album, the classically based song cycle Night of Hunters, on Deutsche Grammophon. A conceptual work based on familiar motifs by composers like Satie, Chopin, Schubert, and Bach, Amos' recording centered on a couple torn apart by life's difficulties and monotonies, and the female protagonist's journey to find wholeness within herself. In addition to featuring her daughter Natashya Hawley and niece Kelsey Dobyns on vocals, Amos also collaborated with the string quartet Apollon Musagete, arranger John Philip Shenale, and clarinetist Ernst Ottensamer. While Night of Hunters only peaked at 24 on the Billboard 200, it helped Amos become the first female artist to simultaneously chart in the Top Ten on the rock, alternative, and classical charts. An instrumental version of the album -- Sin Palabras -- was also released that year.

Inspired by her classical foray, Amos' next move was to re-record some of her older songs, newly arranged by John Philip Shenale with the Metropole Orchestra. The resulting set, 2012's Gold Dust, appeared almost exactly a year after Night of Hunters; it debuted at 63 on the Billboard 200. Amos continued her creative exploration in 2013. After several years in gestation, the musical The Light Princess -- based on the fairy tale by Scottish fantasy writer George MacDonald and with music and lyrics by Amos -- premiered at the National Theatre in London to wild critical acclaim and was nominated for best musical in the prestigious Evening Standard Theatre Awards. The original cast recording would be released in 2015.

In May 2014, Amos announced her return to pop with her 14th studio album, Unrepentant Geraldines (Mercury Classics). Heavily inspired by her marriage and love of fine art, the album returned Amos to the Top Ten for the first time in five years. A world tour in support of Geraldines saw Amos return to performing solo on her piano without accompanying musicians. Deluxe reissues of the seminal Little Earthquakes and Under the Pink arrived in 2015, including a disc of the remastered album and a second that featured B-sides and other rarities. Boys for Pele received the same treatment for its 20th anniversary in 2016. The following year, Amos returned in September with the self-produced Native Invader. Her 15th full-length, Native Invader was heavily influenced by nature, the sociopolitical turmoil following the 2016 U.S. election, and her mother's failing health. The album included the singles "Reindeer King" and "Up the Creek," which once again featured her daughter on vocals.

Closing out the decade, Amos penned another memoir that was released in 2020. Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage chronicled her own personal history through specific songs and their placement in American history. At the end of the year, she returned to holiday music with the seasonal EP Christmastide, which reunited her with her 2000s bandmates, drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Jon Evans. The rhythmic pair later joined Amos for her 16th set, Ocean to Ocean, which arrived in October 2021. Recordings from her extensive 2022-2023 tour that followed -- where she was accompanied by bassist Jon Evans and drummer Ash Soan -- were released in 2024 in the form of Diving Deep: Live. Her next project came in the form of a New York Times bestselling children's book titled Tori and the Muses, which was accompanied by a companion album, The Music of Tori and the Muses. Released in February 2025, the whimsical nine-song set featured contributions from Jon Evans, Matt Chamberlain, Ash Soan, and John Philip Shenale”.

In terms of the greats of music, Tori Amos is up there with the best of them. I do hope that she has many more albums in her, as each one is extraordinary. It has been impossible distilling her career into twenty songs, but the mixtape to end this feature is, in my view, the best of her best. This extraordinary artist produced music that could…

ONLY come from her!

FEATURE: Iceblink Link: Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Iceblink Link

Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas at Thirty-Five

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THE sixth studio album…

IN THIS PHOTO: Cocteau Twins, left to right: Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser and Simon Raymonde/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Tonge/Getty Images

from the Scottish band, Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas turns thirty-five on 17th September. Released two years after Blue Bell Knoll and three years before Four-Calendar Café, this was a golden run from the band. However, Heaven or Las Vegas might be the best and most influential album they released. Reaching number seven in the U.K., this was one of the first classic albums of the 1990s. Led by Elizabeth Fraser, who has one of the most distinct and unique voices in music history, there is something intoxicating and unforgettable about Heaven or Las Vegas. Fraser creates her own worlds when she sings! Her own language. Ranked alongside the best albums of the 1990s – and of all-time -, I know there will be fresh retrospection closer to its anniversary. On 17th September, 1990, this amazingly beautiful and strange album was released. I have found some features and reviews for Heaven or Las Vegas. Even if they may repeat some background and facts, they are all well worth reading. I want to start with Guitar and their 2020 salute. They write how Heaven or Las Vegas is defined by the band’s influential guitarist and producer, Robin Guthrie:

“The ethereal splendour of Heaven Or Las Vegas disguises the dark cloud under which it was crafted, the sessions at the band’s September Sound studio, once owned by Pete Townshend, overshadowed by the transience of death, birth and heartbreak. “It was trying to mask all the other shit that was going on that we didn’t want to stop and think about for too long,” says Raymonde, whose father the composer and arranger Ivor Raymonde died while they were making the record. Furthermore, Fraser and guitarist/producer Robin Guthrie welcomed their first child, Lucy Belle, into the world just as their relationship began to falter under the weight of Guthrie’s struggles with addiction. It’s all chronicled on an album of transcendent beauty, with a guitarist at the peak of his powers its central figure.

A gentle sort of player

While many Cocteaus fans were swept away by Fraser’s hypnotic vocal layering, Guthrie was an equally essential force, and Heaven Or Las Vegas was a personal crusade to get the intricate symphonies that occupied his brain onto tape. Initially a punk fan and under-confident player, the self-confessed gearhead from Grangemouth, Scotland, developed his own singular style, eschewing solos and instead constructing composite parts out of stacked chords and icy arpeggios lavished with effects. Alongside Kevin Shields, he became the source from which a crop of ‘textural’ guitar players drew inspiration. “I’m a very gentle sort of player, and I let the electronics do the work,” Guthrie told xlr8r.com “It’s quite an opposite approach from the vast majority of electric guitar players who bash the hell out of their instrument.”

On Heaven Or Las Vegas, Guthrie played four electrics – a 1959 Jazzmaster, 1959 Stratocaster, a PRS and on the title track’s divine slide solo a modified Levinson Blade JM, running into the desk through Marshall 9000 Series and Gallien-Krueger preamps. Alongside an array of rack effects, he used BOSS chorus, phaser, flanger and vibrato pedals, a Cry Baby wah, a Yamaha D1500 delay and an Electro-Harmonix Clone Theory chorus/vibrato. The result was, to borrow The Verve’s debut album title, a storm in heaven, and it often sounded uncannily like a synthesiser. “The aim was to make music with punk’s energy but more finesse and beauty, and that shiny, dense Phil Spector sound,” said Guthrie.

Their finest hour

“We like it better than all our last records,” said Guthrie on Heaven Or Las Vegas’ release on 17 September 1990. “That’s why we continue to make more – because if we made the perfect record we’d sit back and say, ‘We can’t do any better than that’. We think all our other ones are fucking crap.”

Q’s Martin Aston concurred, calling the record “their finest hour”. Colin Larkin ranked Heaven Or Las Vegas at 218 in his All-Time 1000 Albums book, noting “their music has a sustainable beauty free of regard for contemporaries or peers”. The album was the band’s most successful, landing at No.7 in the UK chart, but it was to be their last for 4AD. While they released two more LPs on Fontana, Cocteau Twins finally split in 1997, later calling off a reunion because Fraser couldn’t stand the idea of being on stage with Guthrie.

If it was a final flutter before everything began to fall apart, Heaven Or Las Vegas was an astonishing success, and Robin Guthrie’s playing left behind a smouldering torch that the coming wave of stompbox-hungry sonic sorcerers would pick up and carry forth – many of them on 4AD and Raymonde’s Bella Union label. Heaven Or Las Vegas? The Cocteaus’ sixth album is emphatically the sound of the former”.

Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser and Simon Raymonde released one of the best albums of the 1990s only nine months into the decade! Even now, you cannot compare anything to Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas. Such a beguiling and bewitching album. Transformative and transfixing music, Pitchfork reviewed the 2014 reissues of Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas. They say how the 4AD-reissued albums spotlight Cocteau Twins as “boundary-pushing innovators as first and foremost a pop band”:

“Even as the band soared commercially and creatively, personally they suffered. Between the release of Blue Bell Knoll and the recording of Heaven or Las Vegas, Fraser gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, yet Guthrie remained deep in the throes of drug addiction, which made him paranoid and angry. Raymonde mourned the death of his father. Suddenly the stakes for the Cocteau Twins seemed impossibly high. “Fraser named the album Heaven or Las Vegas [as] a suggestion of music versus commerce, or perhaps a gamble, one last throw of the dice,” Martin Aston writes in Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, implying that the band was close to imploding.

Instead, they turned all that turmoil and uncertainty into the best album of their career. Heaven or Las Vegas explodes in Technicolor from the first melty guitar chords on “Cherry-Coloured Funk”. Every note sounds like a new and richer shade of indigo and scarlet and violet than the previous one, and it doesn’t fade until closer “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” descends into silence. If Blue Bell Knoll is spare and ambient, Heaven is supersaturated: lush without being vulgar, luxuriant without being indulgent. Tellingly, some lyrics bubble up to the surface, often loaded with personal meaning: “cherry,” “perfection,” “burn this madhouse down.” On a song called “Pitch the Baby”, ostensibly written for—or at least sung to—the couple’s infant daughter, Fraser repeats, “I’m so happy to care for you, I only want to love you,” as a sweet lullaby. We may not always be able to understand her lyrics, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. In fact, her lyrics would never be more vital or confessional than they are on Heaven or Las Vegas, which lends the music added emotional and conceptual heft.

What’s particularly remarkable about the album is how compact it is: All but two of these 10 tracks clock in around three-and-a-half minutes, and the whole thing is over and done with in a mere 38 minutes. That succinctness may have something to do with Raymonde’s increasing role in the group. His bass playing, especially on “Pitch the Baby” and “Fotzepolitic”, not only adds to the texture and, yes, the groove of the music, but also gingerly anchors these songs: He prevents them from flying off into the ether, but never lets them grow rigid or staid. The result is an album that perfectly balances ambition with accessibility. Together, these two releases—which were their last for 4AD—present the Cocteau Twins as first and foremost a pop band, and pop rarely sounds as transformative and as transfixing as it does here”.

I don’t know if I heard Cocteau Twins or knew much about their music in 1990. I would have been seven. I think it was years later when I discovered them. However, I do listen to tracks from Heaven or Las Vegas every so often. I can appreciate how special the album is. When I do listen to the entire album, it is this phenomenal and engrossing listening experience. I wonder if there are any plans for the thirty-fifth anniversary on 17th September. Albumism wrote about the band’s fifth studio album in 2020:

“Pitch” picks up where “For Phoebe Still a Baby” on Blue Bell Knoll (1988) left off; she has now given birth to Lucy Belle. Where “Phoebe” drifts and wavers, “Pitch” is rooted and grounded in the act of giving birth and mothering, rather than the abstract. “I only want to love you,” she coos in her lullaby. Fraser’s lyrics are still the ethereal spellcasting of previous albums, but her pronunciation is clearer and, as such, more accessible to the wider audience the band was given after signing with Capitol Records in 1988.

Though hardly a concept album, the twin themes of birth and death echo across the landscape. Raymonde’s father Ivor, a renowned composer for acts including Dusty Springfield, died during production, and “Frou-Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires,” the album’s final track, wrestles with “a war we all lose.” Fraser whispers and the boys play sparsely until the chorus, not a dirge, but a reflection on the passage of life and time.

Appearing as the second track on the album, “Iceblink Luck” ties both themes together, Guthrie and Raymonde’s wall of sound turned glass and lit from the dance floor like New Year’s Eve. It’s a tender song, a last-ditch dream as Fraser tries to honor the elder Raymonde’s past and resolve her soon-to-dissolve future with Guthrie. “You’re really both bone-setters / thank you for mending me babies,” she sings to the man and the ghost and the babe in her arms, a mending that, like the plaster of a cast, is only temporary. Three years later, while recording Four Calendar Café (1993), she would suffer a nervous breakdown and Guthrie’s drug problems would worsen, the relationship soured and never recovered. But for the moment, there is love between the three Twins, there is hope.

The hope doesn’t last, alas, crumpling on “I Wear Your Ring” and “Fotzepolitic.” They held it together for two more albums before their contract ran out and they disbanded. All three have gone on to produce and record a lifetime’s worth of music since, though a reunion in 2005 was scrapped when Fraser admitted she couldn’t endure being on stage with Guthrie”.

There is one more feature I want to include here. It is from CRACK. Published in 2021, the feature coincided with Miley Cyrus covering Heaven or Las Vegas’s title track. Singing the song when opening the Resorts World Casino in Las Vegas, it was a nervous moment for fans of Cocteau Twins. A band and discography that is hard to cover and make different, how many can tackle the Scottish band’s incredible music and make it sound original or even competent?! Though Miley Cyrus did a good job, one of the incredible things about an album like Heaven or Las Vegas is that is so distinct and untouchable:

“Heaven or Las Vegas, the album, was the moment Cocteau Twins became the band they had always threatened to be. It’s the record with the strongest pop songs and the most sparkling instrumentation. Both the happiest and the saddest work in their canon, Heaven or Las Vegas was when it all seemed to work for them, not so much a step-up from the preceding Blue Bell Knoll as a vast leap into the ether. The artistic success of Heaven or Las Vegas is often linked to Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie – lead guitarist and Fraser’s then-romantic partner – becoming parents during the recording of the album. Fraser once said that being pregnant had given her clarity and confidence, which was lost when the baby was born and the couple were plunged into parenthood. A number of songs on Heaven or Las Vegas directly address Fraser’s experience of motherhood, in particular Pitch the Baby, a moment of ecstatic optimism.

But mixed with this hope is the creeping influence of the darker side of life, as Guthrie’s cocaine use became increasingly problematic. This gave Heaven or Las Vegas an intriguing – and perhaps unique – push and pull in the band’s catalogue, as anxiety stalked contentment and joy looked nervously down on depression. Bassist Simon Raymonde wrote brooding album closer Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires the day after his father died, while opener Cherry-Coloured Funk feels like a blues song on a gloomy day in heaven, the mournful melody and moody chords of the verses bursting into a chorus of glorious joy, like a plane breaking through storm clouds to reveal blue skies.

This may sound like over-exuberant nonsense. But it’s hard not to get hyperbolic when faced with a work as perfectly different as Heaven or Las Vegas, a record that takes the base elements of rock music – guitar, drums, bass and voice – and alchemises them into something entirely foreign. You can trace the influences of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Kate Bush on the Cocteau Twins, particularly in their early years. But by 1990 nobody really sounded like them, their music instantly recognisable in its immaculate shimmer, as if washed clean of dirt to take on more emotion.

Cocteau Twins eventually split in 1997, with personal animosity so far preventing a reunion. But the band’s reputation has only grown since, becoming a touchstone for a kind of rapturous mysticism, to the point that The Weeknd sampled Cherry-Coloured Funk on his 2011 mixtape House of Balloons and no one batted an eyelid. Even Prince tried to emulate the Cocteau Twins, recording Tictactoe for his 2014 album Plectrumelectrum after a night partying to the band’s music”.

An album like no other, I am curious to see what is written about Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas on 17th September. Although I am slightly late to the band and this masterpiece, I can now appreciate why it is so admired and has this incredible reputation. Even if Heaven or Las Vegas had a troubled past and gestation, in its finished form, it sounds more extraordinary and resounds harder than any other album by the Cocteau Twins. Did fans of the band know what would come with Heaven or Las Vegas…

BACK in 1990?!

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Dame Julie Andrews at Ninety

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Dame Julie Andrews in 2019

Dame Julie Andrews at Ninety

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THIS is perhaps a bit…

IN THIS PHOTO: Dame Julie Andrews photographed in 2013/PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Rinaldi

of a detour for me. I would not normally discuss someone like Dame Julie Andrews on my blog. Nothing against her but, as she is not releasing music, it would be unusual for me to otherwise write about her. However, on 1st October, Dame Julie Andrews turns ninety. The British-born actor, singer and author possess one of the greatest voices ever. I am going to end this feature by assembling some songs from films that starred Andrews. Some of her best performances. Not all the soundtracks were available on Spotify, so I have accessed and included as many as I could find. Cast recordings and film soundtracks. Andrews achieved significant chart success, particularly with soundtracks for Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965), both of which topped the U.S. and U.K. charts and earned multi-platinum certifications from the RIAA. Before getting to a playlist, I want to source this extensive and comprehensive biography of the magnificent Dame Julie Andrews:

“The star we know today as Julie Andrews was born Julia Elizabeth Wells in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, then a small village, roughly 18 miles south of London, England. Her father, Ted Wells, was a schoolteacher and enjoyed the simple life of the countryside. Her mother, Barbara, a talented pianist, taught piano but longed for a career on the stage. Ted and Barbara Wells divorced on the eve of World War II, and Barbara married Ted Andrews, a professional singer. Ted and Barbara Andrews formed a musical act and toured England entertaining the troops. Ted Andrews gave the little girl her first singing lessons, and was immediately impressed with the child’s strong voice, large vocal range, perfect pitch and precocious musical ability. At age eight, she was taken to study with Lilian Styles-Allen, a noted concert singer. Styles-Allen trained her pupil in operatic repertoire and taught her the perfect diction for which she would become famous. Although Julia remained close to her father, she lived with her mother and took her stepfather’s surname when she joined the family act at age ten.

Julie Andrews, as she was now known, made her radio debut in 1946, singing a duet with Ted Andrews on a BBC variety show. She gave her first performance as a solo artist at London’s Stage Door Canteen, where she was seen by two members of the Royal Family, the mother and sister of the present Queen. The exquisitely self-possessed little girl with the crystal-clear voice was attracting the attention of serious theatrical management and was soon ready to make the move from provincial music halls to the theaters of London’s West End. At age 12, Julie Andrews was cast in a musical revue, Starlight Roof, at the London Hippodrome. Her first appearance stopped the show, and the revue ran for over a year. Julie Andrews became the youngest performer ever to appear at a Royal Command performance, singing an aria from Mignon for King George VI at the London Palladium.

IN THIS PHOTO: Twelve-year-old Julie Andrews at play in the family music room in this 1947 publicity photo/PHOTO CREDIT: Bettmann/CORBIS

The American film studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had recently opened a London branch, made a screen test of the young singer, perhaps seeing her as a successor to the child singing stars of the pre-war era. The studio failed to offer her a contract, dismissing her as “unphotographable.” Nevertheless, she soon appeared on one of Britain’s first television variety programs.

The teenage Julie Andrews was a regular presence on popular British radio shows in the 1950s, and as she grew into young womanhood, she played leading roles in a series of Christmas pantomimes. The “pantos,” a holiday tradition in Britain, are popular family entertainments, usually based on a familiar fairy tale. Far from being silent, as the name might suggest, they typically include lots of singing, dancing and male comedians in drag. Each holiday season of her teens found Julie Andrews playing another fairy tale heroine, from Little Red Riding Hood to princesses in Aladdin and Jack and the Beanstalk. She was appearing in one of these when she met an aspiring artist named Tony Walton, who would play a large role in her later life. During the regular season, she continued to perform as a solo artist and with Ted and Barbara Andrews.

Julie Andrews was playing the title role in the pantomime Cinderella when she was first seen by the songwriter Sandy Wilson and the American producer Cy Feuer. Wilson was the creator of a popular West End musical, The Boy Friend, a pastiche of the musical comedies of the 1920s. Cy Feuer planned to bring the show to Broadway and wanted to recruit a British cast to preserve the flavor of the London production. When Feuer and his partner, Ernest Martin, offered Julie Andrews the lead in the Broadway production of The Boy Friend, she was reluctant to travel to America. She was only 18 and had never traveled so far from her family. She finally agreed to a one-year contract, and boarded the plane for the country where she would spend most of her life.

IN THIS PHOTO: Julie Andrews in High Tor, filmed in 1955 by Desilu Productions and broadcast 10th March, 1956, on the television series, Ford Star Jubilee. The film starred Bing Crosby, Nancy Olson, Hans Conreid, and Keenan Wynn/PHOTO CREDIT: CBS

The Boy Friend was an immediate success on Broadway, and the teenage Julie Andrews was a sensation, delighting critics and audiences with her fresh good looks, grace, sparkling singing voice and gem-like diction. She was asked to audition for the words and music team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who were preparing the original production of My Fair Lady, their musical version of the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Lerner and Loewe had not enjoyed a success on Broadway since Brigadoon, almost a decade earlier, and many Broadway hands doubted that the two could make a

The role of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion — a bedraggled street urchin in the first act, transformed into a regal society beauty in the second — had already been played by many distinguished actresses on stage and screen. The musical adaptation called for a versatile young actress who was also an accomplished singer. Although a number of established stars coveted the part, Lerner, Loewe and director Moss Hart decided to take a chance on the 20-year-old Julie Andrews, who had never before acted in such a demanding role. Her costar, Rex Harrison, an experienced stage and film star, had never sung on stage before. The rehearsals were difficult. Although Andrews was more than capable of carrying off the demanding songs, her relative lack of acting experience caused unease in the company. Director Hart worked with her tirelessly, a process she recounts in her interview with the Academy of Achievement.

When My Fair Lady opened in 1956, it was an unprecedented success. Critics acclaimed it as the greatest musical ever staged and it sold out months in advance. Julie Andrews won universal praise for her incandescent performance. The original cast recording became a best-seller, one of the most successful releases in the history of Columbia Records. It remained a mainstay of the label’s catalogue for many years.

Days before the show opened, Andrews also made her American television debut in a musical version of the Maxwell Anderson play High Tor, appearing opposite Bing Crosby. After playing Cinderella in pantomime and starring in the most successful of modern Cinderella stories, Julie Andrews was asked to play the role yet again when America’s premier theatrical songwriters, Rodgers and Hammerstein, wrote an original musical for television with the new star in mind. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella aired live on CBS, with Andrews taking a night off from her eight-performance-a-week schedule in My Fair Lady.

After two years of playing Eliza on Broadway, Julie Andrews returned at last to England to star in My Fair Lady in London’s West End. The show was just as successful in London as it had been in New York, and she settled in for a second long run in the show. While in London, she renewed her acquaintance with her childhood friend Tony Walton, who was now embarking on his own theatrical career as a designer of sets and costumes. Andrews and Walton were married in 1959.

Back in New York, Lerner, Loewe and director Moss Hart were eager for Julie Andrews to star as Queen Guinevere in their new musical, Camelot, with Richard Burton as King Arthur and Broadway newcomer Robert Goulet as Lancelot. Despite the acclaimed performances of a prodigiously talented cast, the show’s Broadway run got off to a rocky start. Initial ticket sales were slow, but when Andrews and Burton performed scenes from the show on the popular Ed Sullivan television program, box office demand skyrocketed. The original cast recording sold well and was a particular favorite of President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy in the White House.

During her two-year run in Camelot, Andrews was approached by Walt Disney to star in a film musical of the children’s book Mary Poppins. At the time, she was expecting her first child, but Disney was willing to wait until after her child was born to begin production. Andrews and Walton had a daughter, Emma, in 1962. Andrews had hoped to be cast in the film version of My Fair Lady; she and her many admirers were disappointed when Warner Brothers chose to cast an established film star, Audrey Hepburn, in the role. Publicity surrounding the choice was intense; Hepburn was not a trained singer, and her vocals were dubbed by singer Marni Nixon.

Meanwhile, Julie Andrews set to work on her film for Walt Disney. Mary Poppins was a huge success and immediately established Julie Andrews as an international film star. Her triumph was confirmed when she won the 1964 Best Actress Oscar for her very first film appearance. She followed up this success with her dramatic film debut in the World War II satire The Americanization of Emily with James Garner, who would become a frequent co-star and lifelong friend.

IN THIS PHOTO: 1965: Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp in the motion picture classic, The Sound of Music. A heart-warming story, it is based on the real-life adventures of the Von Trapp Family singers, one of the world’s best-known concert groups in the era immediately preceding World War II. Andrews plays the role of Maria, the tomboyish postulant at an Austrian abbey, who becomes a governess in the home of a widowed naval captain with seven children, and brings a new love of life and music into the home. The Sound of Music is the third-highest-grossing U.S. movie of all time

Andrews scored the most spectacular success of her career with the starring role in The Sound of Music, another Broadway musical adaptation and the most successful motion picture made up until that time. Andrews was nominated for an Oscar again, and the film was honored as Best Picture of the Year. It remains a beloved classic. Forty years after its original release, it draws huge crowds to massive outdoor sing-along screenings such as those held in the 25,000-seat Hollywood Bowl. The reigning international film star of the mid-1960s, Andrews starred in the most successful film of 1966, Hawaii, and in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Torn Curtain with Paul Newman. In 1967, she shone in yet another successful musical, Thoroughly Modern Millie. That same year, her marriage to Tony Walton ended, although the pair remained close friends and have often collaborated in the years since.

A film biography of the British singer and actress Gertrude Lawrence — Star! — was a box office disappointment. Audiences were turning away from musical films. Her next starring vehicle, a musical spy story of the First World War, Darling Lili, was also a commercial failure, but proved to be a personal success for Andrews on another level. Her first collaboration with director Blake Edwards, it marked the beginning of a 41-year partnership in art and life. Andrews and Edwards were married in 1969. The couple raised his two children from a previous marriage and adopted two more of their own.

 After a number of successful television specials with her friend Carol Burnett, Julie Andrews hosted her own weekly variety show on CBS television in the 1972-73 season. She also enjoyed great success as a concert artist, with appearances at the Royal Albert Hall and the London Palladium. In these years, she also began writing children’s books under her married name, Julie Andrews Edwards. After the success of Mandy (1971) and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (1974), she collaborated with her daughter, educator Emma Walton Hamilton, on Dumpy the Dump Truck and its many sequels, a popular series of books for very small children. Her novels Dragon and Simeon’s Gift introduce young readers to the lore of the Middle Ages. Several of her books have been illustrated by her ex-husband, Tony Walton.

Although Hollywood was no longer producing the kind of musical films that had made her famous, Julie Andrews continued to develop her dramatic talents in a wider variety of roles in the 1970s and ’80s, appearing in a number of films directed by her husband, Blake Edwards, including The Tamarind Seed, 10, S.O.B. and That’s Life. Andrews and Edwards enjoyed a notable success with the 1982 film Victor/Victoria, in which Andrews played a woman who disguises herself as a young man and achieves success on stage as a female impersonator. This comedy of gender confusion struck a chord with international audiences in the 1980s and reunited her with co-star James Garner.

In the 1990s, Andrews became increasingly involved in international charities. Since 1992, she has served as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), which assists women and their communities in impoverished countries. Another favorite charity is Operation USA, a California-based international relief agency.

Andrews returned to the New York theater in 1993 with an appearance in the small ensemble cast of the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting It Together. It was clear that theater audiences wanted more of Julie Andrews, and she brought a stage version of Victor/Victoria to Broadway in 1995. An enormous success with critics and the public, Andrews appeared in the show for two years. After developing vocal problems, due to the growth of ovules on her vocal cords, she sought treatment through surgery, but the operation damaged her larynx irreparably, effectively ending her singing career. Expert opinion concluded that the surgery had been improperly performed and Andrews received a settlement, reported to be as high as $30 million.

Her speaking voice remained unimpaired, and Andrews has continued her acting career. A new audience discovered Julie Andrews through her role as the Queen in the film The Princess Diaries and its sequel. Her speaking voice has also been heard in the animated Shrek films and in 2010’s Despicable Me. In the sixth decade of her career, Julie Andrews explored still more avenues of the performing arts, directing a successful revival of The Boy Friend, the show that first brought her to America as a teenager. She has continued to act, direct, write and contribute her boundless energy to favorite causes, including Operation USA and Haitian earthquake relief.

In 2008, Andrews published the first volume of her autobiography: Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, recounting her life up until her departure for Hollywood to star in Mary Poppins. The book received excellent reviews and immediately went to the top of The New York Times bestseller list. The same year, she toured the United States  in a concert performance with orchestra and backup singers, Julie Andrews: The Gift of Music.

IN THIS PHOTO: During the Academy’s 2006 International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles, Dame Julie Andrews shared her vivid memories of shooting the timeless classic The Sound of Music right there at the 20th Century Fox studio

She topped the bestseller lists again in 2010 with her 23rd book, A Very Fairy Princess. The same year saw Julie Andrews back on the big screen in The Tooth Fairy, and marked her return to the London stage for the first time in 21 years, in a performance of Julie Andrews: The Gift of Music at the O2 Arena before 20,000 adoring fans. This triumphant year came to a sad end with the loss of her husband of 41 years, Blake Edwards, shortly before Christmas. Julie Andrews and her children were with Edwards at the time of his death in a Santa Monica hospital. The couple had long maintained homes in Los Angeles and in Gstaad, Switzerland.

Julie Andrews published a second volume of autobiography, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years, in 2019. She continues her alternate career as children’s book author and advocate for literacy and the arts.  To date, Andrews and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, have written more than 30 books for children and young adults. In April 2020, as families all over the world sheltered at home to arrest the spread of the COVID-19 virus, American Public Media announced a new weekly podcast series, Julie’s Library, in which Andrews and her daughter read their favorite children’s books aloud, with music, sound effects and special guests.  Andrews hopes these podcasts will “bring the comfort of storytelling to families during these unprecedented times.”

I have not really been able to do her justice her! In terms of her interviews and screen appearances. The body of music she has recorded. Amazing to think that Andrews’s first film credit was for 1952’s La Rosa di Bagdad. Her most recent was in 2022, where she provided a voice for Minions: The Rise of Gru. I wanted to provide this small salute and love letter to one of the greatest actors and singers…

WHO has ever lived.

FEATURE: John Lennon at Eighty-Five: His Best Beatles and Solo Songs

FEATURE:

 

 

John Lennon at Eighty-Five

PHOTO CREDIT: Linda McCartney

His Best Beatles and Solo Songs

__________

I am going to write…

a few features before 9th October. That is when we mark what would have been John Lennon’s eighty-fifth birthday. Lennon was killed in 1980. One of the greatest songwriters ever, as founder of The Beatles, his place in cultural history is clear. Such an important songwriter, he has been responsible for some of the greatest and most influential music ever. So many artists cite John Lennon as an influence. For this first feature, I have compiled a playlist of the best Beatles songs he wrote. I also have included some incredible solo songs. Ones he recorded as part of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Before I get there, I want to bring in some biography about a musical genius:

“Out of all the Beatles, John Lennon had the most interesting -- and frustrating -- solo career. Lennon was capable of inspired, brutally honest confessional songwriting and melodic songcraft; he also had an undying love of straight-ahead rock & roll. But the extremes, both in his music and his life, were what made him fascinating. Where Paul McCartney was content to be a rock star, Lennon dabbled in everything from revolutionary politics to the television talk show circuit during the early '70s. After releasing a pair of acclaimed albums, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, in the early '70s, Lennon sunk into an infamous "lost weekend" where his musical output was decidedly uneven and his public behavior was often embarrassing. Halfway through the decade, he sobered up and retired from performing to become a house-husband and father. In 1980, he launched a comeback with his wife Yoko Ono, releasing the duet album Double Fantasy that fall. Just as his career was on an upswing, Lennon was tragically assassinated outside his New York apartment building in December of 1980. He left behind an enormous legacy, not only as a musician, but as a writer, actor, and activist.

Considering the magnitude of his achievements with the Beatles, Lennon's solo career is almost overlooked. Even during the height of Beatlemania, Lennon began exploring outside of the group. In 1964, he published a collection of his writings called In His Own Write, which was followed in 1965 by A Spaniard in the Works, and in 1966, he appeared in Dick Lester's comedy How I Won the War. He didn't pursue a musical career outside of the group until 1968, when he recorded the experimental noise collage Unfinished Music, No. 1: Two Virgins with his new lover, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. Two Virgins caused considerable controversy, both because of its content and its cover art, which featured a nude photograph of Lennon and Ono. The couple married in Gibraltar in March 20, 1969. For their honeymoon, the pair staged the first of many political demonstrations with their "Bed-In for Peace" at the Amsterdam Hilton. Several months later, the avant-garde records Unfinished Music, No. 2: Life with the Lions and The Wedding Album were released, as was the single "Give Peace a Chance," which was recorded during the Bed-In. During September of 1969, Lennon returned to live performances with a concert at a Toronto rock & roll festival. He was supported by the Plastic Ono Band, which featured Ono, guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Klaus Voormann, and drummer Alan White. The following month, Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band released "Cold Turkey," which was about his battle with heroin addiction. When the single failed to make the Top Ten in Britain and America, Lennon sent his MBE back to the Queen, protesting Britain's involvement in Biafra, America's involvement in Vietnam and the poor chart performance of "Cold Turkey."

Before the release of "Cold Turkey," Lennon had told the Beatles that he planned to leave the group, but he agreed not to publicly announce his intentions until after Allen Klein's negotiations with EMI on behalf of the Beatles were resolved. Lennon and Ono continued with their campaign for peace, spreading billboards with the slogan "War Is Over! (If You Want It)" in 12 separate cities. In February of 1970, he wrote, recorded and released the single "Instant Karma" within the span of the week. The single became a major hit, reaching the Top Ten in both the U.K. and the U.S. Two months after "Instant Karma," Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles were splitting up, provoking the anger of Lennon. Much of this anger was vented on Lennon's first full-fledged solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, a scathingly honest confessional work inspired by his and Ono's primal scream therapy. Lennon supported the album with an extensive interview with Rolling Stone, where he debunked many of the myths surrounding the Beatles. Early in 1971, he released another protest single, "Power to the People," before moving to New York. That fall, he released Imagine, which featured the Top Ten title track. By the time Imagine became a hit album, Lennon and Ono had returned to political activism, publicly supporting American radicals like Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and John Sinclair. Their increased political involvement resulted in the double-album Sometime in New York City, which was released in the summer of 1972. Recorded with the New York hippie band Elephant's Memory, Sometime in New York City consisted entirely of political songs, many of which were criticized for their simplicity. Consequently, the album sold poorly and tarnished Lennon's reputation.Sometime in New York City was the beginning of a three-year downward spiral for Lennon. Shortly before the album's release, he began his long, involved battle with U.S. Immigration, which refused to give him a green card due to a conviction for marijuana possession in 1968. In 1973, he was ordered to leave America by Immigration, and he launched a full-scale battle against the department, frequently attacking them in public. Mind Games was released in late 1973 to mixed reviews; its title track became a moderate hit. The following year, he and Ono separated, and he moved out to Los Angeles, beginning his year-and-a-half long "lost weekend." During 1974 and 1975, Lennon lived a life of debauchery in Los Angeles, partying hard with such celebrities as Elton John, Harry Nilsson, Keith Moon, David Bowie, and Ringo Starr. Walls and Bridges appeared in November of 1974, and it became a hit due to the inclusion of "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night," a song he performed with Elton John.

At the end of the year, John helped reunite Lennon and Ono, convincing the ex-Beatle to appear during one of his concerts; it would be Lennon's last performance.

Rock 'n' Roll, a collection of rock oldies recorded during the lost weekend, was released in the spring of 1975. A few months before its official release, a bootleg of the album called Roots was released by Morris Levy, who Lennon later sued successfully. Lennon's immigration battle neared its completion on October 7, 1975, when the U.S. court of appeals overturned his deportation order; in the summer of 1976, he was finally granted his green card. After he appeared on David Bowie's Young Americans, co-writing the hit song "Fame," Lennon quietly retired from music, choosing to become a house-husband following the October birth of his son, Sean (he had an elder son, Julian, by his ex-wife Cynthia).

During the summer of 1980, Lennon returned to recording, signing a new contract with Geffen Records. Comprised equally of material by Lennon and Ono, Double Fantasy was released in November to positive reviews. As the album and its accompanying single, "(Just Like) Starting Over," were climbing the charts, Lennon was assassinated on December 8 by Mark David Chapman. Lennon's death inspired deep grief throughout the entire world; on December 14, millions of fans around the world participated in a ten-minute silent vigil for Lennon at 2 p.m. EST. Double Fantasy and "(Just Like) Starting Over" both became number one hits in the wake of his death. In the years after his death, several albums of unreleased recordings appeared, the first of which was 1984's Milk and Honey; perhaps the most substantial was the 1998 four-disc box set Anthology, issued in conjunction with a single-disc sampler titled Wonsaponatime. Further archival projects arrived throughout the 21st century, including the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, and a reissue series in 2010 that restored the original mixes of his catalog, while debuting a "Stripped Down" remix of Double Fantasy. Imagine received a lavish box set edition in 2018”.

On 9th October, we will remember John Lennon. It will be a sad day in many ways, as we imagine what Lennon could have achieved had he lived. However, we can also celebrate his legacy and work. Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade is a new documentary and features contributions from people who knew John Lennon. We get an insight into his final years. What he was planning in 1980 and what he was working on that year. It was a time when Lennon was going to return to England (from New York) and visit his aunt Mimi. Heartbreaking that he never did make it back. However, we need to remember him as a pioneering and iconic songwriter who helped changed popular culture. Someone still unmatched as we head towards…

HIS eighty-fifth birthday.