FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Erykah Badu - Mama's Gun

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Erykah Badu - Mama's Gun

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TURNING twenty-five

on 18th November, I wanted to spend some time beneath the sleeve for Erykah Badu’s second studio album, Mama’s Gun. Predominantly recorded at the Electric Lady Studios in New York City with the collective Soulquarians, Mama’s Gun is an album enforced by and driven forward by live instruments. 2000 was a year when the Neo Soul genre was still very much in bloom and flourishing. Following other classics of the genre such as Ms. Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Macy Gray's On How Life Is (1999) and D'Angelo's Voodoo (2000), there is a lot to discuss when it comes to Mama’s Gun. I shall come to that in time. Although it did not make a dent in the U.K. album chart or in other countries, it did reach eleven in the US Billboard 2000. It is available on vinyl. I wanted to go deep into this album as it is so important and influential. In terms of artists who took elements of Mama’s Gun and wove it into their work. I am starting out with a feature from this website that spotlights and dissects Erykah Badu’s second studio album. They state that, “While ‘Baduizm’ turned her into a household name, ‘Mama’s Gun’ cemented Erykah Badu’s status as the new face of R&B”:

“Erykah Badu first burst into the scene in 1997, with the release of her paradigm-shifting debut album, Baduizm. Showcasing an impressive range of vocals that prompted listeners to liken her to Billie Holiday, the album also saw Badu receive credit for birthing neo-soul. In truth, however, she created an atmosphere all her own. No two of her songs are the same, but a Badu track is undeniable: a sensual, brooding sound with vocals that glide up and down. Markedly hopeful and authentic, her music is the aural equivalent of the feeling of sunshine on the back of your neck, and on her second album, Mama’s Gun, Badu took a deep dive into the pivotal moments of what it meant to be alive, learning how to bolster oneself against a crushing tidal wave of emotion.

While Baduizm turned her into a household name, Mama’s Gun cemented her status as the new face of R&B. After taking several years off to raise her first child, Badu returned to the studio to record her second album, much of which was inspired by love and her relationship with her then-partner, Andre Benjamin. Leaning into a more organic sound with less-elusive lyrics, Badu opted to speak to the state of black womanhood and the world around her.

For those expecting another downtempo collection of sultry meditations, the live-band funk opener, “Penitentiary Philosophy,” puts that notion to rest. While Mama’s Gun is stylistically ambitious, the sound is also comforting and familiar. Engineer Russell Elevado introduced a warm, honey-like sound by exclusively using vintage microphones and recording equipment for the album, which was recorded in the famous Electric Lady Studios. The studio regularly housed a collective of musicians who called themselves The Soulquarians, frequent collaborators who drew inspiration from one another, solidifying the neo-soul sound of the early 00s with era-defining albums like D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Common’s career-shifting Like Water For Chocolate”.

There are a few other features and reviews that are worth bringing in. I am getting to Classic Album Sundays. They explored the story of Mama’s Gun. It is one of the most remarkable albums of the twenty-first century. One that arrived right at the start of the century. It still keeps revealing wonderful layers and colours almost twenty-five years after it arrived:

“The songs Erykah Badu had written for her second album, Mama’s Gun, signified a major thematic development in her music and an increasingly self-assured outlook in her personal life. Around midway through the writing process her romantic relationship with Andre 3000 collapsed, encouraging a great deal of self-reflection and rumination on what it means to be both a single black mother and a successful artist. There is remarkably little vitriol in her lyrics however, which explore the beauty and complexity of love and heartbreak on songs such as ‘Orange Moon’, ‘In Love With You’ and the particularly impressive ‘Green Eyes’ which illuminates the feelings of jealousy, insecurity, and denial which plague her dwindling relationship. The song ends with a clear perspective on the doomed nature of their love, yet acknowledges the “growing pains” which will haunt the years to come.

Elsewhere Badu paints a broader picture beyond the confines of her love life, diagnosing instead the state of society and the complex experience of African-Americans within it. On the opening track, ‘Penitentiary Philosophy’, she expresses an underlying rage that seems to percolate beneath much of her work, lamenting the struggles of those around her who can only scrape together a living amidst the chaotic and competitive nature of a world which discourages unity. Aesthetically the song is a far cry from the low-slung ballads of her debut album, Baduizm, infused with a furious energy that draws from the soulful rock of Hendrix and Prince. On ‘A.D 2000’ she crafts an homage to Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 23-year old immigrant shot dead outside his apartment building in 1999 by four NYPD officers after reportedly being mistaken for a rape suspect. Badu delivers the desperately sad lines “You won’t be naming no buildings after me / My name will be misstated, surely” with a tender, melodious tone that soothed a rightfully outraged public. Whilst she had become far more direct in her lyrics, throughout Mama’s Gun her razor-sharp poetic commentary remains a vital undercurrent.

Badu’s musical aesthetic had also shifted, moulding itself to the laid-back, jazz-infused nature of the Electric Lady’s Soulquarian residents. Recorded simultaneously with D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, Mama’s Gun was woven from the same stylistic threads that would span many future neo-soul classics. Producer Russell Elevado restricted the recording equipment to purely vintage hardware and microphones, ensuring a warm and organic sound that adhered to the languorous performance styles of musicians such as drummer Questlove and pianist James Poyser. On songs such as ‘…& On’ and ‘Cleva’ her breezy, free-wheeling nature manifests itself in a sound that seems to play with time, the music dripping out of the speakers like honey from a spoon. The percussion, bass, and piano conspire on these tracks to create syncopated grooves with deep pockets to fill, whilst Badu shifts between staccato and glissando rhythms with trademark elasticity”.

There are two more things that I want to cover before finishing up. Stereogum marked twenty years of Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun in November 2020. I think that I first heard the album the year is came out. I might have heard Baduizm beforehand, though I was instantly attracted to the sound of Badu and her music. This feature is slightly different to others. There is a particular section of the piece that I want to include, as it shines new light on some of the standout tracks and the meaning and story behind them:  

“Mama’s Gun was a natural jam session, but Badu was still hyperconscious of the mistreatment of Black men while raising a son. On Feb. 4, 1999, Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo was misidentified as a rape suspect and shot at 41 times — 19 bullets fatally striking him — by four NYPD officers in the Bronx. Triggered by the news, Badu grabbed her acoustic guitar and co-wrote “A.D. 2000” with late soul vocalist Betty Wright. The track swelled with mourning through multi-instrumentalist and producer James Poyser’s Minimoog while Badu and Wright banded together in multi-generational unison. In 2016, a Pitchfork review of Mama’s Gun by Daphne A. Brooks drove Badu’s point home:

In contrast to Baduizm, Mama’s Gun offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement about what it means to get tired of waiting out and wading through the wretchedness of urban blight, the perpetual threat of police brutality and lethal force, the baggage from bad relationships and the sometimes oppressive voices inside one’s own head.

The universal origins of Black womanhood and its baggage was quite literally portrayed in “Bag Lady,” a reclamation of self-worth and the departure from generational trauma. While the album version of “Bag Lady” had a slower paced drum riff over a sample of Soul Mann & the Brothers’ “Bumpy’s Lament” — the source material for Dr. Dre’s 2001 track “Xxplosive” — the music video also featured the sample over a palatable, upbeat hip-hop tempo. Flipping the misogyny of “Xxplosive” into an affirmation of moving onward, each woman in the video — including Badu’s mother and her sister, Nayrok Wright — wore colors that symbolized chakras, Badu representing the root chakra. The women also duly portrayed characters from Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When The Rainbow Is Enuf. Like the scorned all-female characters of Shange’s dramatic elegy, Badu embodied the pain that women undergo when met with four words by men who feel suffocated in a relationship: “You crowding my space.”

At the video’s end, Badu experiences a moment of joy by cradling a then-infant Seven amidst subconsciously preparing him for hostility he’d face as a Black man in America. Though 2000 was a time where André and Badu both spoke similar languages to their son on separate albums, it was Mama’s Gun that was the armed bible for ongoing Black plight and self-preservation”.

I will wrap up with this review from Pitchfork. Singing its praises, they say of Mama’s Gun how this is an album “dense with ideas and sounds that draw from the past and look toward the future. Released in November 2000, it embodies the millennial tensions of that pivotal year”. Anyone who have never heard Mama’s Gun needs to investigate it right away:

“But Mama’s Gun turned an important page as she set out to pair songs that evoked the art of exquisite and romantically-charged lingering and hanging (the “urban hang suite,” as Maxwell would call it on his own debut album from 1996) alongside songs about being fed up with stasis, isolation, restriction and aborted dreams. In contrast to Baduizm, Mama’s Gun offers a more pointed, sustained, and grounded statement about what it means to get tired of waiting out and wading through the wretchedness of urban blight, the perpetual threat of police brutality and lethal force, the baggage from bad relationships and the sometimes oppressive voices inside one’s own head.

Those voices open the record’s first side in a cacophony of whispers as Badu admonishes herself about a laundry-list of unfinished tasks, nagging fears, and floating enigmas swirling through her mind (“I have to write a song… I have to remember to turn on the oven… warm up the apartment… Malcolm… Malcolm… I need to take my vitamin”). What cuts through the noise is a burst of sonic muscle—pure soul energy compressed into 10 initial seconds: the joyful ensemble (Chinah Blac and YahZarah) bellowing in Rufus-meets-Brand New Heavies unison as longtime collaborators Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, James Poyser on piano, Pino Palladino on bass, and Jeff Lee Johnson on guitar lay down a robust opening riff that sounds definitive and defiant. The opening moments of Mama’s Gun sound much less like anything off of Badu’s first record and instead resonate unmistakably in the vein of two other releases from earlier that year, Common’s fourth studio album, Like Water for Chocolate, and D’Angelo’s game-changing Voodoo. All three albums were recorded simultaneously at Electric Lady. All three benefitted from the skilled hand of legendary engineer Russell Elevado, who mixed each LP and drew on vintage recording techniques to evoke the ghosts of venerable albums past. And most crucially, all three featured MVP player Questlove acting improvisationally at the center of an alternative black pop universe at the turn of the millennium, one with clearly nostalgic tenets that nonetheless held fast to present communal concerns and future Wonder-inflected aspirations.

This was neo soul at arguably its most prolific and thrilling moment of growth and possibility. Innovated by black Gen-Xers who ardently valued and sought to revive their parents’ and their older siblings’ music and the albums that soundtracked their childhood, neo soul runs best on a seductive combination of cultural nostalgia, black solidarity dreams, and the will to couple sensually with an ideal partner while paying attention (somewhat but not always) to the politics of gender equality. And the list of remarkable artists who broke onto the scene alongside of Badu working this sound in the year of and leading up to 2000 underscores what a busy, passionate, and productive time it was.

From 1993, when Me’shell NdegéOcello stepped out ahead of everyone with Plantation Lullabies on Madonna’s Maverick label to D’Angelo’s 1995 first effort Brown Sugar (often erroneously referred to as the first in the genre) a year later to Maxwell’s debut (Urban Hang Suite) to Lauryn Hill’s insta-classic Miseducation in ’98 to oddball soulster Macy Gray’s one-hit smash On How Life Is in ’99, to the year 2000 when Jill Scott made her first LP (Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Volume I), these were exciting times when black singer-songwriter musicians were referencing Black Panther memoirs, African-American Studies history books, and deep cuts from reluctant soul icons like Bill Withers. In the days after Voodoo dropped into the world, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff would famously describe the genre as “a mature music, and a family music, for living rooms, rather than for the streets.”

“Penitentiary Philosophy,” the charging, opening track on Mama’s Gun pulls all of these ambitions together. Bursting with the energy and the righteous discontent of King’s letter from a Birmingham jail (in which he declared to the world “why we can’t wait” for liberation), it recalls the sonic palette of Maggot Brain-era Funkadelic while venturing further down the road of trenchant social critique that Badu had already begun to walk on Baduizm’s “Other Side of the Game,” her third single off of that album and one that planted her firmly in the run of socially-conscious hip-hop culture. With its looped sample of Stevie’s “Ordinary Pain,” “Penitentiary Philosophy” stays focused on the perils and corrosive effects of streets that don’t love you, streets that can trap you. “Here’s my philosophy/Livin’ in a penitentiary…” she declares, dropping verses like Gil Scott-Heron, “Brothers all on the corner/Tryin’ to make believe/Turn around ain’t got no pot to pee/Make me mad when I see you sad… you can’t win when your will is weak/When you’re knocked on the ground….” In the same year that David Simon dropped “The Corner” and two years before his masterpiece “The Wire,” Badu was still singing about the effects of the game from a woman’s point of view (something Simon’s shows were often, at best, half-assed about doing). Still the caring sister who observes the ensuing crisis from the sidelines, Badu has morphed on this track out of the role of devoted bystander into full-scale Last Poet”.

I do hope that there are features published in November. Twenty-five years after the release of Erykah Badu’s second album. One of those albums that I could listen to over and over again. I know there have been smatterings of activity from Erykah Badu over the past few years. However, there is a collaborative album, Abi & Alan (with The Alchemist), coming out this year I understand. Having recently toured, there will be separate tour dates to mark twenty-five years of Mama’s Gun. You can also get details from this podcast episode. It is an exciting time where Erykah Badu looks forward and back. Back at a classic. When I think of Mama’s Gun, there is really…

NOTHING quite like it.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Remembering the Great Janis Joplin

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Janis Joplin shot for the cover for her 1970 album, Pearl/PHOTO CREDIT: Barry Feinstein

Remembering the Great Janis Joplin

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ON 4th October

it will be fifty-five years since Janis Joplin died. She was one of the most accomplished, talented and iconic Rock vocalists of her generation. It is amazing to think how far Joplin could have gone. We lost her at the age of twenty-Severn. Recording two albums as lead of Big Brother and the Holding Company and two solo albums, I wanted to mark the upcoming anniversary of her death by collated some of her best tracks. Those that showcase her brilliance. A voice like no one else’s, I am going to start out with some biography. For those who may not know about Janis Joplin and why she is so revered and acclaimed. Last year, Classic Rock told the story of the First Lady of Rock. I am not going to bring in the whole thing. Instead, I was fascinating to read about Janis Joplin’s early life. Before she began her professional career. There was going to be a Janis Joplin biopic that should be out soon. There was some development and update late last year. It will be interesting see how Joplin is portrayed on the screen and what angle the biopic takes:

“Her sister Laura Joplin tells Classic Rock: “There was a certain frustration in her about some aspects of her life. It was hard to have relationships when travelling that much, and she was having ideas of… trying to live a more balanced life in terms of the amount of time she toured. I don’t think she was trying to leave the music business.”

Sam Andrew, Janis’s friend and guitarist in Big Brother & The Holding Company and The Kozmic Blues Band, agrees. He says today: “I could see her going through a ‘retirement’ and it would turn out to be a temporary phase, too. The ‘picket fence’ doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. People who want a safe harbour don’t realise they would have to lose themselves completely to obtain that safety.”

Only three months after her sisterly exchanges on the train with Bonnie Bramlett, working toward a complete withdrawal from drugs and quietly arranging for a less frantic lifestyle, Janis died from an accidental overdose of heroin.

Janis Lyn Joplin came into the world on January 19, 1943 in Port Arthur, Texas, the first child born to her parents Seth and Dorothy. After six years Janis gained a sister, Laura, and baby Michael arrived four years later to complete the family.

They enjoyed a remarkable childhood, with their mother Dorothy determined to help them develop their initiative, creativity and independence. She taught Janis to play the piano, encouraged her flair for painting, and ensured that all three children discovered the magic of books and music and imagination. Dorothy insisted that the only boundaries they need worry about were those of the family and of society; their personal limits were endless.

Their father Seth was a strong and philosophical figure, a deep thinker who urged the importance of curiosity, enquiry and knowledge, but at the same time revelled in the home-made games and toys he produced for the youngsters.

In return for the respect that both parents demanded from their children, they gave the same back. Janis, Laura and Michael grew up knowing that their ideas and opinions were valued. They were invited to choose their own mealtime menus, served from a homely kitchen rich with the aroma of Southern cooking.

Asked her favourite memories of Janis at home, Laura replies: “Oh, being girls, trying on clothes together, cooking, family dinner conversations, things like that. It’s that wonderful quality of being loved and accepted and having someone to share growing up with. Janis reading books to me when I was younger, having her read Alice In Wonderland. Just very special times.”

Michael was seven when Janis started coming and going from the family home, but he holds dear certain recollections of his sister in her late teens and early 20s: “Her playing the guitar, her painting… Those were the best memories,” he says. “Janis helping me learn to draw. She was a very good renderer, and I wanted to be as well. She helped me. And I still use the simple rules she gave to a ten-year-old.”

Dorothy Joplin, herself from tough, farming stock, would never have suggested to her daughters any possible subservience to men in later life, or any undue emphasis on appearance.

Raised to be resolutely herself, to chase her own rainbow and try to rise to its height, the teenage Janis found herself increasingly at odds with her sternly conservative neighbours.

Janis worked as a keypunch operator in Los Angeles and sang in the coffee houses of the Venice Beach beatnik community. She hitched to San Francisco, went back to Lamar College, waitressed in a bowling alley in Port Arthur, soaked up jazz in New Orleans. In 1962 she began a fine arts course at Austin’s University of Texas, where she joined a group of like-minded artists, writers, poets, cartoonists and musicians in a bunch of dingy, rented flats known collectively as The Ghetto.

This was a key period for Janis. Her personal outlook was supported by her peers and also by a growing voice from the outside world, with people starting to protest at racial and female oppression.

Her artistic endeavours began to take a back seat to music. Taking up the autoharp, she formed The Waller Creek Boys with friends Powell St John and Lanny Wiggins, playing folk and bluegrass on campus and at venues in the wider Austin area.

Threadgill’s was one such bar. Its proprietor, country singer Ken Threadgill, was the first person to recognise Janis’s star quality. He suggested she accompany herself on guitar; he stressed the emotional substance that is central to the best music; he triggered her sidestep into blues singing. She never forgot him.

Janis had made her recording debut before moving to Austin. A jingle sung to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, it was intended as an advertisement for a Texan bank. But TV and radio audiences unfortunately never got to hear the first efforts of a rock-legend-in-waiting; someone decided that the target market could live without her proclamations that ‘this bank belongs to you and me’.

At the University of Texas Janis worked on a wild and tough, protective image, swearing, drinking, smoking cigarettes, dealing grass and allegedly experimenting with peyote and Seconal. No longer just ‘one of the boys’, she became romantically and sexually involved with men and, sometimes, women. Outside her own, liberal circles, she was treated with caution, if not scorn”.

On 4th October, it will be fifty-five years since we lost Janis Joplin. One of the most remarkable artists who has ever lived, though her life was brief, she definitely left her mark. Such a powerful, expressive and spine-tingling voice, artists such as Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine, Amy Winehouse, P!nk, and Alanis Morissette are directly influenced by her. The impact of her music is still being felt…

AFTER all of these years.

FEATURE: Something Changed: Pulp’s Different Class at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Something Changed

Pulp’s Different Class at Thirty

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IT is great to…

talk about a band’s classic album when they are still together. Few would have imagined that the Pulp we heard in 1995 would still be together thirty years later. On 30th October, Pulp’s fifth studio album turns thirty. Following 1994’s His ‘n’ Hers, this was part of a golden run for Pulp. Not that they were finding their feet – as they had been around for years -, but it is clear that this band were at their peak. It is no wonder that Different Class was a massive success. Reaching number one in the U.K. and winner of the 1996 Mercury Music Prize, since then, Different Class has been ranked alongside the best and most influential albums ever. There is a thirtieth anniversary edition coming soon. NME reported the story:

“Now, to mark its 30th anniversary, the Sheffield band have announced details of an expanded reissue, to be released as both a quadruple LP set and as a double CD. It will be out on October 24 via Universal Music Records on behalf of Island Records and you can pre-order your copy here.

The release will include the full performance the band gave as Pyramid Stage headliners at Glastonbury 1995, an iconic set that came several months before the release of ‘Different Class’, after they were asked to fill in for The Stone Roses with just 10 days notice.

Speaking about the release, frontman Jarvis Cocker has said: “This 45rpm double album version of ‘Different Class’ will make it sound a whole lot better. We were obsessed with the fact that this was our ‘Pop’ album (we had finally achieved some ‘popularity’ when ‘Common People’ was a hit) &, as everyone knows, all pop albums have 12 songs on them: 6 tracks per side.

“Only problem: this took the running time of the record to 53 minutes. We were told this would compromise the audio quality of the vinyl record – but we were more bothered about not compromising the quality of our Pop Dream. Now, 30 years later, we are finally ready for ‘Different Class’ to be heard in all its glory. Different Class indeed”.

To mark thirty years of a landmark album in British music, I will explore a few features about it. A review that highlights the brilliance of Different Class. Rather than bring in some archive interviews, I want to get to some features to start us off. In 2015, NME provided an oral history of Different Class. I was twelve in 1995, so I recall how Different Class was being talked about. It is a fascinating album that was everywhere in a year when British music was incomparable:

“With ‘His ‘N’ Hers’ spawning Top 40 hits in the form of ‘Do You Remember The First Time?’ and ‘Babies’ (on its re-release), Pulp had emerged after 15 years in the indie gutter as pivotal movers and shakers of the Britpop scene. The sudden attention, however, struck Jarvis Cocker as odd after so many years as a waggle-fingered wannabe.

Jarvis Cocker (Pulp singer): “The first time the fame things really struck me was when I was on holiday in the south of England, and these big blokes would lumber up to me and I’d think, ‘Oh shit, I’m in for a right hammering here for looking like a weirdo,’ and they’d shake my hand and say, ‘Like your song, mate’. That was nice… Of course, as soon as I get used to it, some big bloke will lumber up to me, I’ll say, ‘Hello, who shall I sign the autograph to?’ and he’ll twat me for being a weirdo. There was a time when I was quite paranoid about going out. Not really getting hassled but, even if people don’t say anything to you, you can still see them nudging each other going, ‘Oh, ’e’s ’ere’, and it’s just like, ‘I just fancied a drink, really’. But I don’t complain about it, because I used to do it myself if someone famous walked in. It’s like what people say if there’s a disaster: ‘I never thought it would happen to me’.”

Melissa Laurie (Pulp’s PR in 1995): “Everybody was quite surprised, the way things were going. Pulp had spent a long time in the wilderness. There were loads of people saying, ‘They’re really old, they’re never gonna do it, they’ve been going round for years’. There was a sense of, ‘Is it really happening?’”

Jarvis Cocker: “You can kind of lose it, because people let you get away with murder, ’cos you’re a famous person. So, if you’re not careful, you can turn unto a really horrible person, just because you can take advantage of people all the time… I’ve always tried to strive to be as irresponsible as I possible can, so it’s difficult to discipline yourself”.

The first glimpse of material from Pulp’s fifth album came over the summer of 1994, when ‘Common People’, ‘Disco 2000’ and ‘Underwear’ began appearing in festival sets. But Pulp’s star really ascended, however, with the runaway Number Two success of ‘Common People’, which captured the musical and political tone of the decade (pop, anti-Tory) with its euphoric melodic crescendos and sharp-witted defiance of class tourist snobbery”.

Spotlighting twenty-five years of Pulp’s Different Class in 2020, Guitar.com commended the genius of a seismic album. One that I think altered the course of the band and those around them. Those who think Different Class is not a guitar album should rethink. This feature highlighted an album filled with “songs about love, class and leaving an important part of your brain somewhere in a field in Hampshire”:

“You might think that Different Class is not a guitar-centric album, Doyle’s Farfisa organ responsible for many of its signature hooks, but there are tonnes of guitar tracks on the record. Russell Senior used his Fender Jazzmaster throughout the sessions; Mark Webber, who’d joined the band earlier that year, played a Gibson ES-345, Les Paul and Firebird and Cocker, a seriously underrated player who according to engineer David Nicholas laid down a significant chunk of the guitar work on the record, a Vox Marauder, Ovation-12 string and Sigma acoustic. When it came to Common People, a surging multi-layered opus that gallops breathlessly from 90bpm to somewhere around 160, Cocker’s decision to add one more part to the puzzle proved crucial. Thomas having filled all 48 tracks on the desk, Cocker decided to put down an acoustic guitar part using his Sigma. “It brought the whole track together,” remembered the producer. “It was just a brilliant idea. That acoustic guitar just welded all these disparate elements together.”

“Jarvis is an incredible guitarist and I recorded him with the same mic that I used to record his vocal,” remembered engineer David Nicholas of the one-take contribution that transformed the song into a hit.

Elsewhere, there’s the the glorious strutting (F/B♭) riff that provides the basis for the wistfully nostalgic Disco 2000; and listen out in the sweeping Serge Gainsbourg-esque Live Bed Show for the sizzling EBow part. The utterly gorgeous Something Changed, carried by rich open chords, a strummed acoustic rhythm and an inspired strings section, has a delightful solo and even ode to raving Sorted For E’s & Wizz is underpinned by the crisply strummed Sigma. The dark, cinematic epic F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. presaged the shadowy post-Britpop comedown of 1998 follow-up This Is Hardcore, while the dubby Monday Morning has a darting riff that frolics joyously around Cocker’s vocal. Pulp’s three guitar players were absolutely essential to Different Class”.

I will come to a review soon. However, I found this feature from Stereogum from 2015. There will be a lot of new articles written about Different Class ahead of its twentieth anniversary on 30th October. Before coming to a final feature, I would advise people check out this one, that looks at a singular album that still sounds incredibly fresh, intriguing and filled with interesting people. I think it is the people, in the songs and on the cover, that has provoked so much discussion and theories. These visions and songs that tell these stories that so many people can relate to:

“Different Class represents the weird sort of magic that can happen when a band takes nearly two decades to find its voice. The Pulp of Different Class weren’t musically bright and brash, the way their Britpop peers were. Instead, they were slick and intricate and gauzy and atmospheric, picking up tricks from Serge Gainsbourg and Angelo Badalamenti and Lodger-era Bowie rather than Slade and Madness and Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie. Cocker might’ve been gawky and professorial in person, but he’s built up the confidence needed to sound like absolute sex on record. On Different Class, he manages to be flirty and creepy and charming and just slightly dangerous, often all at once, and it does it all while telling these grand and considered stories. The lyric sheets of Pulp’s records famously included a request: “Please do not read the lyrics whilst listening to the recordings.” Different Class is the moment that Cocker earned our compliance.

In the past year, there have been a couple of news stories about Pulp that weren’t really about Pulp. Instead, they were about women that Jarvis Cocker was singing about on different songs from Different Class, the Pulp masterpiece that turns 20 today. First story: A pioneering mental health worker, the woman Cocker was singing to on the song “Disco 2000,” died of bone marrow cancer at the way-too-young age of 51. Her name really was Deborah, and we’ll have to take Cocker’s word that it never suited her. Second story: A Greek newspaper reported that it had figured out who Cocker was singing about on “Common People,” reporting that the only woman who’d come from Greece with a thirst for knowledge and studied sculpture at St. Martin’s College, at least when Cocker was also studying there, was actually the wife of the current Greek Minister of Finance. (She must have a thing for elegant fuckups.) Cocker had once said that “Common People” was about a real woman but admitted that she hadn’t pursued him but that he’d pursued her. Both of these stories resonated in odd ways, at least to me, mostly because it had never occurred to me that Cocker was singing about real people. Instead, Deborah and the woman from Greece were pure abstractions, rendered through Cocker’s point-of-view, made to stand for things like upper-class privilege and the longing that can come from a platonic friendship. But it should’ve always stood to reason. The Cocker of Different Class was such a pointed and specific observer of human nature that it only makes sense that he’s lived his stories. And so maybe every song on Different Class is about a different real person or a different real experience. Still, finding out that the woman from Greece was a real person was like learning that Larry David is the real George Costanza. It makes perfect sense at the same time that it annihilates a whole fictional universe”.

In 2020, the BBC told the story of Different Class and discussed its impact. An album that documented modern Britain in 1995 and, then and now, does. I will pick up the article from the point where it talks about Common People and its success. It is great reading about Pulp briefly reforming and playing together but essentially that was it. Now, with them in the spotlight with a new album, this year’s More, it gives Different Class new context and weight:

“On Common People Cocker tore into class tourists, inspired by a well-to-do Greek girl he met at Central Saint Martins who wanted to try slumming it in Hackney for a while – “smoke some fags and play some pool, pretend she never went to school”. Hidden underneath those irresistible pop hooks is a mounting anger not just at her but all those who co-opt a working-class identity as a shortcut to authenticity – without ever dealing with the fear, uncertainty and absence of choice that comes with having no money. Towards the end of the song Cocker is practically spitting. “You will never understand how it feels to live your life with no meaning or control, and with nowhere left to go”.

His anger is even more palpable on I Spy, a song in which someone who has nothing observes those who have everything – all the while plotting how to “blow [their] paradise away”. While fantasising about how he’ll infiltrate this Ladbroke Grove life, he compares his own: “My favourite parks are car parks. Grass is something you smoke, birds are something you shag. Take your Year in Provence and shove it up your ass.”

Pulp had spent most of their lives on the outside looking in, making them the perfect champion of the disempowered

But if a young Cocker thought the odds were stacked against him in the 80s and early 90s, he’d be even more raging now. Class privilege – especially in the arts – has only worsened. Last year, research by Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission found that 20% of British pop stars were privately educated (compared with 7% of the general population). Figures from 2018 showed that just 44% of the intake at the Royal Academy of Music came from state schools, with the Courtauld Institute of Art only slightly better at 55%. “A bunch of young working-class kids from the north really storming into the charts and onto the front pages of the papers… back in the 90s it was hard,” says Banks. “It seems almost impossible now.”

Pulp had spent most of their lives on the outside looking in, making them the perfect champion of the disempowered. “Being able to observe without being observed yourself, you get to see the real sort of underbelly or workings of what goes off in life,” says Banks.

No detail passed Cocker by, from “the broken handle on the third drawer down of the dressing table” (F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E) to the “woodchip on the wall” in Disco 2000. His stories were specific, but reflected a wider society, too – as in Sorted for E’s and Whizz, a song inspired by Cocker attending raves in the late 80s. “Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel, or just 20,000 people standing in a field?” With illegal raves now on the rise again in the UK, he could easily be talking about 2020, not 1988. In fact, aside from calls to “meet up in the year 2000”, so much of the album and its themes of being young and out of options feels pertinent in the current day.

The album reached number one and went on to win the Mercury Music Prize. A sell-out arena tour followed. Pulp were no longer the outsiders. It felt good – to begin with, at least. “When you’ve been in the desert so long and you reach the oasis you jump in and fill your boots,” says Banks.

Cocker had achieved his lifetime ambition to be a pop star – but he would later liken it to “a nut allergy”. The infamous 1996 Brit Awards, where he ran onstage during Michael Jackson’s performance of Earth Song to wiggle his bum to the audience – and ended up getting arrested on suspicion of assault (it was video footage captured by David Bowie’s team that got him off the hook) – turned the dream of pop stardom into a nightmare. Speaking recently to the New York Times he said: “In the UK, suddenly, I was crazily recognised and I couldn’t go out anymore. It tipped me into a level of celebrity I couldn’t ever have known existed, and wasn’t equipped for. It had a massive, generally detrimental effect on my mental health.”

His disillusionment – repulsion, even – with fame, played out on Pulp’s next album, This Is Hardcore, a record about “panic attacks, pornography, fear of death and getting old.” On opener The Fear, he sang: “This is the sound of someone losing the plot/Making out they’re OK when they are not”. If Britpop was already halfway out the door, this album gave it one last brutal kick to see it on its way.

“At the time we just laughed at [Britpop],” says Banks. “We’d been lumped in with many, many scenes over the years. We just couldn't relate to it, we weren’t bothered and the nearest we were to Britpop was Russell [Senior] wearing some Union Jack socks. It was always labels that other people foisted upon us.”

After releasing their seventh album, the Scott Walker-produced We Love Life, in 2001, Pulp went on hiatus for a decade, reforming in 2011 for a series of live dates. They played their last gig – for now at least – in their hometown of Sheffield in December 2013”.

If people celebrate Different Class and very much frame it around Common People, it is worth noting how strong the entire album is. How many gems there are. From Bar Italia to Mis-Shapes to Something Changed. There is not a weak moment on the album. Every song tells a story and forms this incredible and hugely memorable whole. In 2016, Pitchfork published their review of Different Class. There are some interesting observations:

“Cocker’s ambivalence about the masses also informs “Sorted For E’s & Wizz,” which—with “Mis-Shapes” as its double A-side—became Pulp’s second UK No. 2 hit of 1995. A wistful flashback to the illegal outdoor raves of the late ’80s and early ’90s, “Sorted” sees Cocker swept up in the collective celebration yet remaining deep down a doubtful bystander. “Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?” he muses disconsolately, “or just twenty-thousand people standing in a field?” As the Ecstasy wears off and dawn peeks grimly over the horizon, Cocker finds the sensations of unity and bonhomie to have been ersatz and ephemeral: not one of the ultra-friendly strangers he’d bonded with earlier in the night will give him a lift back to the city. Still, he can’t quite shake the lingering utopian feeling that divisions of all kinds really were magically dissolved for a few hours. In the CD single booklet, a four-word statement of perfect ambiguity spells out his sense of rave’s fugitive promise: “IT DIDN'T MEAN NOTHING.”

Class is far from the only theme bubbling away in this album, though. At least half the songs continue the love ‘n’ sex preoccupations of His ‘N’ Hers, tinged sometimes with the yearning nostalgia of earlier songs like “Babies.” The treatment on Different Class ranges from saucy (“Underwear”) to seedy (“Pencil Skirt,” the hoarsely panting confessional of a creepy lech who preys on his friend’s fiancé) to the sombre (“Live Bed Show” imagines the desolation of a bed that is not seeing any amorous action). “Something’s Changed,” conversely, is a straightforwardly romantic and gorgeously touching song about the unknown and unknowable turning points in anyone’s life: those trivial-on-the-surface decisions (to go out or stay in tonight, this pub or that club) that led to meetings and sometimes momentous transformations. Falling somewhere in between sublime and sordid, the epic “F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E” exalts romance as a messy interruption in business-as-usual: “it’s not convenient...it doesn’t fit my plans,” gasps Cocker, hilariously characterizing Desire as “like some small animal that only comes out at night.”

Sex and class converge in “I Spy”—a grandiose fantasy of Cocker as social saboteur whose covert (to the point of being unnoticed, perhaps existing only in his own head) campaign against the ruling classes involves literally sleeping with the enemy. “It’s not a case of woman v. man/It’s more a case of haves against haven’ts,” he offers, by way of explanation for one of his recent raids (“I’ve been sleeping with your wife for the past 16 weeks... Drinking your brandy/Messing up the bed that you chose together”). Looking back at Different Class many years later, Cocker recalled that in those days he thought “I was actually working undercover, trying to observe the world, taking notes for future reference, secretly subverting society.”

“I Spy” is probably the only song on Different Class that requires annotation, and even then, only barely. Crucial to Cocker’s democratic approach is that his lyrics are smart but accessible: He doesn’t go in for flowery or fussy wordplay, for poetically encrypted opacities posing as mystical depths. He belongs to that school of pop writing—which I find superior, by and large—where you say what you have to say as clearly and directly as possible. Not the lineage of Dylan/Costello/Stipe, in other words, but the tradition of Ray Davies, Ian Dury, the young Morrissey (as opposed to the willfully oblique later Morrissey).

Cocker’s songs on Different Class are such a rich text that you can go quite a long way into a review of the album before realizing you’ve barely mentioned how it sounds. Pulp aren’t an obviously innovative band, but on Different Class they almost never lapse into the overt retro-stylings of so many of their Britpop peers: Blur’s Kinks and new wave homages, Oasis’ flagrant Beatles-isms, Elastica’s Wire and Stranglers recycling. On Pulp’s ’90s records, there are usually a couple of examples of full-blown pastiche per album, like the Moroder-esque Eurodisco of “She’s a Lady” on His ‘N’ Hers. Here, “Disco 2000” bears an uncomfortable chorus resemblance to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” while “Live Bed Show” and “I Spy” hint at the Scott Walker admiration and aspiration that would blossom with We Love Life, which the venerable avant-balladeer produced.

Mostly though, it’s an original and ’90s-contemporary sound that Pulp work up on Different Class, characterized by a sort of shabby sumptuousness, a meagre maximalism. “Common People,” for instance, used all 48 studio tracks available, working in odd cheapo synth textures like the Stylophone and a last-minute overlay of acoustic guitar that, according to producer Chris Thomas, was “compressing so much, it just sunk it into the track.... glued the whole thing together. That was the whip on the horse that made it go”.

With Pulp touring and with new material out, a young and unexposed generation are discovering their work. They get to hear the band play songs from Different Class three decades after its release. A chart-topping, award-winning masterpiece from the group, 30th October will see new acclaim for Pulp’s fifth studio album. If Jarvis Cocker recently joked that the album’s title is relevant when we consider an anniversary reissue will unveil the album’s full glory and sonic brilliance, it also refers to its superiority compared to other albums that were released in 1995 – in one of music’s best years. Different Class has a very…

APT title!

FEATURE: Hail to the Queens! 2025: Another Year Where Women Are Dominating

FEATURE:

 

 

Hail to the Queens!

IN THIS PHOTO: Hayley Williams/PHOTO CREDIT: Jacob Moscovitch

2025: Another Year Where Women Are Dominating

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I am going to come to…

PHOTO CREDIT: Blaz Erzetic/Pexels

some live and album reviews. An illustration of why women have been dominating music this year. I am going to mention specific artists, though I feel most of the best albums of this year have been from women. Most of the promising artists of 2025 I feel are women. It is not to sideline men or disregard their work. The music industry is still misogynist and sexist. Women still have to fight for equality, and there is imbalance through out the industry. What galls me is how slow it is seeing any progress. Some truly huge live gigs and festival appearances, together with remarkable albums and stunning songs, means that women are ruling right now. It has been this way for years now. However, this year especially, there have been some truly outstanding albums from women. I will bring in a few of those. However, more than simply celebrating women in music and how much they are adding in terms of value and legacy, it is worth looking at the industry as a whole and how far we have come. I think that, in terms of radio airplay and festival slots, there is still a gender divide. Progress slow in that regard. So many of the best newcomers are women. You do wonder how they will fare in years to come. Will they struggle to get booked as headliners or find it harder to get their music played? In terms of studios, there are small steps regarding women as producers. Even though there are still vastly more men in professional studios, incredible women like Catherine Marks are inspiring women coming through. However, taken as a whole, there has not been a vast move forward. In terms of opportunities and women in positions of power. Sexism and inequality still very much prevalent. Given the dominance that is coming from women, why is this not being translated into opportunity and parity?! It is something I write about a lot. With every slight improvement here, there is a step back there.

In terms of the best live performances of the year, there have been so many highlights to choose from. I think a few from Glastonbury stand out. CMAT arguably was the highlight of the festival. Rolling Stone UK were among those who awarded CMAT’s Pyramid Stage set a five-star rave. Her new album, EURO-COUNTRY, is among the best of the year. In terms of future festival headliners and icons, CMAT is on the precipice of superstardom:

“She tells the crowd that this is the scariest moment of her life, but commands the enormous field with apparent ease, making the crowd laugh, sing and do the Dunboyne, County Meath Two-Step with pure delight. Her songs come from a base of country music but are also packed with hooks, performed impeccably by The Very Sexy CMAT Band.

Before new song ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’, she commands the attention of the camera as she explains that the song isn’t actually a diss track about the TV chef, but a meditation on her own ability to hate. It’s one of countless songs in her catalogue to bring poignancy and laughs together in a way that dilutes neither.

Many might have been drawn to this set via the viral TikTok dance to ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’ – the ‘woke macarena’ as it’s been dubbed – but it takes more than that to become a true star with longevity.

Luckily, CMAT has it all. Her songs are catchy, poignant and well-crafted; on stage, she’s a powerhouse of performance, cracking gags and diving into the crowd, but not forgetting to make her final statement a call for a free Palestine. Come the end of 2025, she’ll be the artist that defines the year”.

There are a couple more live reviews I want to spotlight. Little Simz curated this year’s Meltdown Festival. She performed a great set with the Chineke! Orchestra. DIY heralded her captivating stage presence and prowess. Even though they called it a ‘return’ – which is a word applied to every artist at some point, and drives me nuts! -, this was not someone who has ever been away or anything less that at the forefront. Anyone who thinks Simz was returning has clearly not been following her career! She proved why she is one of the world’s best artists:

“New material from ‘Lotus’ - the latest addition to her already sparkling canon of work - chronicles Simz finding light in the dark after a dispute with close collaborator Inflo; Simz sued the producer back in January after he failed to repay a loan of £1.7m. Imagery of sharks and snakes stalk the songs, which manifest in the venom charging through Simz’s flow on ‘Thief’, bleeding directly into the thrilling industrial warble of ‘Flood’.

“I’m so pleased we can play this album for you tonight,” Simz says. “But first of all, let’s throw it back.” On her cue, the strings strike-up the doe-eyed ‘Two Worlds Apart’ which holds the audience accountable to some thrilling call and response; then, 'Marijuana' and 'Kendrick Lamar' are both belted out without restraint. The set shimmies between the light and dark at an expert pace. Pure joy erupts throughout the cathartic ‘I Love You, I Hate You’ and the double dose of guest Obongjayar on ‘Lion’ and ‘Point & Kill’. ‘Free’ and the hypnotic Latin shuffle of newbie ‘Only’ offers oxygen to the lighter moments, bobbing atop the orchestral flourishes rising behind her. These songs feel elegant, floaty and weightless in the live setting; it’s pure bliss.

The Queen Elizabeth Hall is a seated auditorium in practice, but the logic of a Simz show defies its purpose. As the band reset after a fierce rendition of ‘Venom’ - which starts off with Simz in the conductor box - a ripple of people start to nestle back into their seats. “What are you sitting down for?” she laughs, shaking her head as the groovy bars of fun throwaway ‘Young’ spark up. “Na na na, you’re not allowed to do that.” Simz is gifted at riffing with the audience, flitting between humorous and charming asides like these, to open-hearted vulnerability. “This song makes me uncomfortable,” she says ahead of the delicate ‘Lonely’. “Sort of like opening a letter in front of somebody it’s addressed to - but I think I can trust you guys,” she adds.

You catch the feeling that much of Simz’s catalogue is built for this specific grandiose set-up; a touch of theatrics always underpins her work, as is evidenced on the back and forth of ‘Blood’. Wretch 32 emerges from the corner of the amphitheatre as the pair play out a phone conversation between two siblings. They end up back-to-back, centre stage, as Cashh sings out the song’s hook and entrances the crowd into a sea of arm waving.

Judging by the darkness surrounding the new material (which drips with a loss in confidence, pain, and betrayal), it’s a wonderful thing to see Simz claw back what’s rightfully hers. The set caps off with the confessional lullaby ‘Selfish’, the anthemic ‘Woman’, and a thunderous rendition of ‘Gorilla’ - a triple threat if there ever was one. The latter sparks pandemonium, and in referencing one of her earliest bars penned aged 11 - “Sim, simmer, who’s got the keys…” - it marks a real full circle moment. Each thread loops back to the start of her career, sees her back in the city she has conquered, and finds her back at the top where she belongs. It's a spellbinding return”.

I do want to talk about rising artists. Women as solo artists and in bands. However, when it comes to highlighting the best of the best, you often have to go to mainstream artists. Sabrina Carpenter played some sold-out shows at Hyde Park in London in July. Playing at BST Hyde Park, NME heralded the command of a Pop giant who is at the top of her game. If modern Pop is dominated by Taylor Swift, there are other titans like Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx and Dua Lipa. Billie Eilish. So many compelling artists who will endure for decades:

“The announcement of her upcoming album, ‘Man’s Best Friend’, due out on August 29, whipped up a storm of controversy thanks to its cover, which sees Carpenter on her knees at the feet of a man while he pulls her hair. Discourse questioned whether her horny schtick had officially run out of road, but ‘Manchild’, the recently-released first single from the upcoming record, elicitsed one of the biggest responses of the night. Fans know every word and throw their arms in the air as they scream along with lyrics that lament the state of modern dating, proving that internet drama has no real sticking power in a field of powder-blue babydoll dresses.

From there, Carpenter cycles through a tight setlist that’s as much a showcase of her back catalogue as it is the kind of genre gymnastics she can do. She performs songs like ‘Coincidence’ and ‘Sharpest Tool’ from ‘Short n’ Sweet’ semi-acoustically, giving space to her trilling country-tinged vocals and quippy songwriting, while performances of ‘Because I Liked A Boy’ and ‘Couldn’t Make It Any Harder’ provide moments of belting catharsis.

But all of that feels like edging before the big release, which no doubt Carpenter could write an expertly cheeky lyric about. A ‘Parental Advisory’ warning emblazons the screen before ‘Bed Chem’, which Carpenter sings to a top-down camera as she lies on a bed. It’s the moment in her tour where she’s joined by a male dancer and some Austin Powers-esque shadow work with a screen that shows them enacting a sex position. This time, she invites two male dancers who kiss each other before they all fall into bed together. As the lights dim, a chorus of “Happy Pride!” breaks out in the crowd.

Then comes ‘Juno’, the big crescendo, where Carpenter does her usual bit of ‘arresting’ a hot person in the crowd. On tour, this slot is usually given to her celebrity friends and admirers, but this time, she chooses a fan who’s been warming the barricade all day. It’s a nice reminder that, though celebrity cameos make for good TikTok viral moments, there’s something much more genuinely heartwarming about seeing someone get noticed by their favourite artist.

Talking of viral stunts, Carpenter has been making waves on tour for picking new sex positions to act out as part of ‘Juno’ each night to the lyric “Have you ever tried this one?”, including a much-discussed Eiffel Tower in Paris. This time, she forgoes the bit to let off two t-shirt guns into the crowd, which is the same move she did at her most recent headline slot at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. Still, she’s far from censoring herself, as she corrals the crowd to sing “I’m so fucking horny” along with the lyrics at the top of their lungs, which may be one of the more joyful things you can experience in a field.

Finally comes ‘Espresso’, the moment even the slightly concerned dads in the crowd who are mentally figuring out how to explain the concept of bed chem to their 10-year-old daughters on the way home can’t help but bop along to. Fireworks shoot out of the stage as Carpenter sings the biggest song of her career, which is only a year old, but somehow feels like the only song ever made. It’s catapulted the singer from an artist orbiting the pop girl league tables to one of its reigning champs, but her command of this space is a testament to the years of graft it took to get there. All she needed was time”.

So many album of the year contenders are going to come from incredible women. Hayley Williams’s Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party is one of 2025’s best albums. Previously having released a surprise song cycle, it was made official with this album released last month. This is what KERRANG! wrote in their review. Whether you know her only from her work as leads of Paramore or are a fan of all of her music, there is no denying how brilliant and important Hayley Williams is. LOUDER recently wrote how Williams is slaying in an industry still dogged by misogyny and sexism:

“It’s been a perplexing summer so far for Hayley Williams fans, feeling like a whiplash of violent yellow aesthetics and sorrow-driven songs. The first glimpse of this new era came in July, arriving like sprawled out puzzle pieces on a ’00s-inspired website, which would ultimately become the Paramore vocalist's third full-length, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party. Building the jigsaw, though, was a task awarded to us, and while the vision is near complete, she's already teasing there are two more songs to come.

It’s hard to think what else could be missing from this body of work; the most beastly out of all of Hayley's solo records, EDAABP is somewhat of an enigma given she has remained relatively tight-lipped on the inspirations behind it, and the lack of order disrupting any straight narrative to begin with. The first chunk of the album nails her tactic of making high-impact, fizzing tracks that sound so incredibly alive, as an undercurrent of depression runs beneath if you listen closely enough – while the chorus of Glum ascends heavenly, Hayley quizzes, ‘Do you ever feel so alone / That you could implode / And no one would know?’

In this way, this album harks back to Paramore’s After Laughter. There’s a climbing synth motif on Love Me Different that feels familiar with this in mind, and many tracks feature the recurring theme of water – a metaphor Hayley uses to describe love and her views on relationships that she’s ran with across all of her solo records, but notably on After Laughter’s Pool.

While she excavates even deeper into herself on this release, Hayley also casts her net far and wide lyrically: True Believer, an examination of religious hypocrisy and racism, is bold, brilliant, and quietly scathing. Accompanied by dystopian, spaced-out piano, Hayley draws on how these themes play out across America: ‘They pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all their children / They say that Jesus is the way / But then they gave him a white face.’

Marking her first release outside of Atlantic Records, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party is the most vast summation of Hayley’s story so far. A musical purge of trauma patterns, depression, love, loss, and of course, ego, the wit and honesty of Hayley’s lyricism is the shining star of this work. It’s an unboundless exploration of a life lived under the scrutiny of misogyny and in the public eye from one of our time’s most creative and fearless artists”.

There is one more album I want to quote a review of. Or a mixtape, I guess. PinkPantheress released Fancy That earlier in the year. It is one of the best releases of the year. Pitchfork provide a positive take on the rise of a terrific British artist that has a distinct sound and is in her own lane. Someone that deserves a lot more attention and praise:

“Fancy That is a portal into an alternate universe where UK garage successfully crossed the Atlantic and fashion froze in 2006. But apart from the more superficial choices (the cover’s Lily Allen–inspired graphic collage, the decision to shoot the music video for “Stateside” in a JCPenney parking lot), Pink’s world-building plays out most vividly in her music. After largely forgoing samples on Heaven Knows, Fancy That is an encyclopedia of references that far exceeds stale Y2K cosplay. Subtle clues like the Panic! at the Disco strings that segue into “Tonight” or the hilarious, stoned call-and-response with a Nardo Wick sample on “Noises” are juxtaposed against some thrilling acts of appropriation. “Illegal” blazes into the mix by isolating and supercharging the synths from Underworld’s “Dark & Long (Dark Train Mix),” while “Girl Like Me” takes a Basement Jaxx sample and spins it out into a roaring speed garage banger. British dance music has caught a second life across Gen Z pop; PinkPantheress’ tour through the hardcore continuum is lived-in and substantial, bringing the legacies of producers like Sunship, Adam F, and MJ Cole into the present while strutting her own glittering new path.

Apart from garage and jungle, PinkPantheress is deeply inspired by emo, an influence heard most clearly in the bleeding-edge intensity of her songwriting. Vulnerable motifs repeat throughout her early music, like the humiliation of being caught emoting in public (“Pain,” “Just for me”), or death as a marker for a relationship’s furthest limits (“Nice to Meet You,” “Ophelia,” “Mosquito”). Though she colored in these feelings with a degree of subtlety, the metaphorical extremes exposed the youthfulness of her perspective. What’s wonderful about Fancy That is how bold and funny it is: This Pink won’t buckle under pressure or spiral when left alone. She takes romantic and everyday disappointment in glorious stride. “Stars” pulls double duty: offering a sympathetic ear to a friend who’s unlucky in love, while soundtracking her own frustration with an unreliable plug. The romantic-sounding “Romeo” is a thoroughly modern kiss-off that delivers the fatal blow with a couplet as withering as it is inclusive: “You can fall in love with boys and girls and in between/So I promise that you shouldn’t waste your time on all of me.”

Pink is equally forthright about sex and desire. It’s thrilling to hear her put Abercrombie & Fitch hotties through their paces on “Stateside,” paying her respects to Estelle and putting a sexy spin on the “special relationship” all in one go. But “Tonight” is even more impressive: a song-length come-on where the fast-paced thump mirrors a dawning sense of romantic urgency. Even if she plays the directness of a hook like “You want sex with me?/Come talk to me” for giggles, there’s an overriding sweetness that kicks the song into a higher level of feeling. She occupies the space between the bouncing, full-bodied bassline and plaintive keyboards with a plainly stated want that would be unthinkable on her introverted early releases. Having come so fully into her own, PinkPantheress still aspires to reach out to you”.

These are just a few examples of women dominating on the stage and in the studio. I do hope that the next few years sees some balance occurring. So many incredible women reshaping genres. From Pop acts like JADE to great young bands coming through that are shaking up Alternative and R&B, it is a really exciting time for music. There is a lot of emphasis on Pop. Women dominating. Last year was one where women made a huge contribution. Albums from Beyoncé and Chappell Roan among those released in a landmark year for women. Alternative Pop and Rock seeing women on top. Women also very much at the centre of the GRAMMYs earlier this year and showing why the tide should turn. The same story at the BRITs. If last year was seen as a hopeful new era for women, there have been steps back. Multiple male artists accused of sexual abuse and crimes. Airplay for women not where it should be. The majority of festival headliners at major events being men. If the music press is dedicating column inches and time highlighting wonderful upcoming artists and established queens alike, there is still a way to go. We can see future icons like Doechii. Brilliant bands like Die Spitz. Pop being dominated by women. They are adding so much to the industry but there is still a lot of darkness and imbalance. Showing them proper respect and ensuring that their phenomenal talent is recognised and true equality happens…

IS long overdue.

FEATURE: Major/Minor: Has Music Journalism Become Less Critical?

FEATURE:

 

 

Major/Minor

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

Has Music Journalism Become Less Critical?

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WHEN I asked that question…

PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

I was thinking ‘critical’ as mean or less positive, rather than detailed and in depth. It is true that the language and structure of reviews has changed through the years. Look at album reviews from the 1990s and 2000s and I do think that there has been a shift. Maybe altering to suite the Internet age and the way we digest media, I do think there have been some positive changes. I got into music from reading music reviews in publications like Q and NME. Few of those great music magazines are around today. MOJO is perhaps one of the last of those established greats. Pitchfork used to have a reputation for being very mean and edgy. They would rate albums out of ten and score most pretty low. I remember reading a review for Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature that was very insulting. Maybe critics equating being edgy and dismissive with being popular and relevant. Perhaps mirroring what was happening in film and culture. Perhaps a cynicism that mirrored political events or something rank and unseemly. I have read so many interviews from as recent as the mid-2010s that are deliberately unpleasant and try and grab you by their gall and front rather than the quality of language and criticism! I know music critics are meant to be critical when they should be, though I find there was this vein of nastiness that ran through a lot of journalism. Maybe as far back as the 1960s. Recently, I wrote a feature where I asked why albums do not get negative reviews like films do. I mean, you do get albums that get a one or two-star review, but it very rare. That was not the case years ago. Can we assume that music is better or, more likely, critics are less willing to be negative about music? It takes a particular misjudged album to get a one-star review, whereas film critics still dish them out. If not a kindness, there is an unwillingness to return to the past and a style of journalism that did see critics savage albums when required.

PHOTO CREDIT: Mikhail Nilov/Pexels

The reason I am returning to this subject is because of a new article from The New Yorker that asked if music criticism has lost its edge. Is it a case of more positive or fewer negative reviews meaning an edge is gone, or are journalists more aware of modern culture? So much negativity and hatred online, is it piling on or too much to add to that? You can be objective about music without having to be nasty. I guess you do not get the same sort of cutting or slightly sarcastic reviews as before. Critics giving an album one or two stars and throwing in some humour and bite. Is that a good or bad thing? I myself avoid reviewing albums I do not like because I can’t bring myself to be unkind. You can be honest, though I think at a certain point you tip into being actually critical. I do not see any albums reviews like that now. I do think that many critics are actually adding a star or positivity to their reviews compared to what they actually want to do so that their words do not come back to bite them. People going after the reviewer! I will continue in a minute. However, I wanted to take parts of that excellent and thought-provoking article from The New Yorker:

“There is something a bit funny, at any rate, about pop-music criticism, which purports to offer serious analysis of a form that is often considered (by other people, who are also, in a sense, critics) rather silly. In 1969, Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics, began writing a Village Voice column called “Consumer Guide,” in which he assigned letter grades to new albums. He took pleasure in irritating the kinds of rock-loving hipsters who “considered consumption counterrevolutionary and didn’t like grades either.” He described the music of Donny Hathaway as “supper-club melodrama and homogenized jazz” (self-titled album, 1971: D-), and referred to George Harrison as a “hoarse dork” (“Dark Horse,” 1974: C-). In 1970, in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus, another pioneering rock critic, began his review of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” by asking, “What is this shit?” One of the era’s best-known critics, Lester Bangs, specialized in passionate hyperbole. In a 1972 review of the Southern-rock band Black Oak Arkansas, for the magazine Creem, Bangs called the singer a “wimp” and suggested (“half jokingly”) that he ought to be assassinated—only to decide, after more thought, that he quite liked the music. “There is a point,” he wrote, “where some things can become so obnoxious that they stop being mere dreck and become interesting, even enjoyable, and maybe totally because they are so obnoxious.” Something similar could have been said about Bangs and the other early critics of what was commonly referred to as “popular music”—a usefully broad term, although sometimes not broad enough. In 1970, Christgau ruefully conceded that some of his favorite groups, like the country-rock act the Flying Burrito Brothers or the proto-punk band the Stooges, might more accurately be said to make “semipopular music.”

Over the years, “critically acclaimed” came to function as a euphemism for music that was semipopular, or maybe just unpopular. This magazine’s first rock critic was Ellen Willis, who in 1969 wrote presciently about the way that rock and roll was being “co-opted by high culture”: fans, as well as critics, were trying to separate the “serious” stuff from the “merely commercial.” One of her successors was the English novelist Nick Hornby, who eventually grew curious about the chasm that separated the records he loved from the records everyone else loved. In August, 2001, he published a funny and audacious essay titled “Pop Quiz,” in which he listened to the ten most popular albums in America and relayed his thoughts, some of which would not have sounded out of place coming from an opera box in the Muppets’ theatre. He didn’t mind Alicia Keys but was bored by Destiny’s Child and depressed by albums from Sean Combs (then known as P. Diddy) and Staind, a neo-grunge band. One need not hate this music to enjoy Hornby’s acerbic survey of it: whenever I think of Blink-182’s pop-punk landmark “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket,” which is often, I think of Hornby wondering just how everything had got so stupid. “My copy of the album came with four exclusive bonus tracks, one of which is called ‘Fuck a Dog,’ but maybe I was just lucky,” he wrote. In a sense, he was lucky: back in 2001, fans who wanted to hear “Fuck a Dog,” a brief but well-executed acoustic gag, had to seek out one of three color-coded variants of the CD.

There is another argument to ask whether we actually need music criticism. People are online and have this forum to voice their opinions. However, music journalists have this particular talent and ability to judge and describe music in a way your average music lover cannot. They have experience and this passion that means their opinions are important. I think so, anyway. Are music journalists, in their zeal to be less critical and needlessly sharp, losing perspective? One positive thing is the fact there are more websites and avenues where you can read music criticism. Get various perspectives on an album. However, I do feel that the tone and approach to reviewing has changed. Only very occasional when you get very negative reviews or an album that gets scathing or edgy attention. Websites like Pitchfork that once normalised a much more judgemental approach and rarely gave out positive scores for albums have changed their tune (slightly):

In 2018, the social-science blog “Data Colada” looked at Metacritic, a review aggregator, and found that more than four out of five albums released that year had received an average rating of at least seventy points out of a hundred—on the site, albums that score sixty-one or above are colored green, for “good.” Even today, music reviews on Metacritic are almost always green, unlike reviews of films, which are more likely to be yellow, for “mixed/average,” or red, for “bad.” The music site Pitchfork, which was once known for its scabrous reviews, hasn’t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score—0.0 out of 10—since 2007 (for “This Is Next,” an inoffensive indie-rock compilation). And, in 2022, decades too late for poor Andrew Ridgeley, Rolling Stone abolished its famous five-star system and installed a milder replacement: a pair of merit badges, “Instant Classic” and “Hear This.”

Even if you are not the sort of person who pores over aggregate album ratings, you may have noticed this changed spirit. By the end of the twenty-tens, people who wrote about music for a living mainly agreed that, say, “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” by Post Malone (Metacritic: 79); “Montero,” by Lil Nas X (Metacritic: 85); and “Thank U, Next,” by Ariana Grande (Metacritic: 86), were great, or close to great. Could it really have been the case that no one hated them? Even relatively negative reviews tended to be strikingly solicitous. “Solar Power,” the 2021 album by the New Zealand singer Lorde, was so dull that even many of her fans seemed to view it as a disappointment, but it earned a polite three and a half stars from Rolling Stone. Some of the most cutting commentary came from Lorde herself, who later suggested that the album was a wrong turn—an attempt to be chill and “wafty” when, in fact, she excels at intensity. “I was just like, actually, I don’t think this is me,” she recalled in a recent interview. And, although there are plenty of people who can’t stand Taylor Swift, none of them seem to be employed as critics, who virtually all agreed that her most recent album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was pretty good (Metacritic: 76). Once upon a time, music critics were known for being crankier than the average listener. Swift once castigated a writer who’d had the temerity to castigate her, singing, “Why you gotta be so mean?” How did music critics become so nice?

There is also this generational thing. Maybe a certain style of writers that found it normal or expected to be ‘honest’. Without filter. Many of those who were in their twenties or thirties when they started have either retired, left music journalism or have softened their approach. Perhaps knowing about musicians and struggles with mental health and the realities of being an artist has opened their mind and changed how criticism operates. If an album is objectively poor or bland, critics using less spiky and acidic language. Less directed at the artist and maybe a more muted or balanced language that is more aimed at the music and aesthetic. Even massive artists who are overhyped or release a terrible album not given a booting as once they would. In my previous feature, I gave the example of Katy Perry and Will Smith who have recently released pretty insipid and unimpressive albums. In spite of a few one-star reviews, the critics of today have written differently and less critically than they would, thirty, twenty or even ten years ago. The New Yorker made an interesting point when they highlighted how fan culture and these tribes are a lot more powerful and notable than decades ago. They can go after a journalist if they insult their favourite artist. The Internet gives them an outlet to find that journalist, or at least trash the publication or website. Share the review in question and cause issues. There is a lot to consider before you type a word of a review now.

Are critics playing it safe through fear of fans’ backlash, offending an artist or being seen as aggressive or unkind at a time when we need to be more positive and together? It is an interesting line of discussion I would like to hear other people’s opinions on:

Perhaps the most infamous review of “The Tortured Poets Department” was published in the music magazine Paste. It had a cantankerous opening sentence that Lester Bangs might have enjoyed (“Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!”), but no byline; the magazine said that it wanted to shield the writer from potential “threats of violence.” For similar reasons, the Canadian publication Exclaim! declined to identify the author of certain articles about Nicki Minaj, whose fans can be ferocious. Often, I suspect, writers have decided to keep their most inflammatory views to themselves. “I think sometimes I can tell when a writer politely demurs, without saying as much,” one editor told me. “They’re just, like, The juice ain’t worth the squeeze”.

I shall leave it there, as this is a bigger subject than I can do proper justice to. I was fascinated by the feature from The New Yorker. I have noticed how there are way more four and five-star albums reviews. The language, whilst perhaps not as colourful, idiosyncratic and fascinating, is nicer, deeper and perhaps not aimed to make headlines for the wrong reason. No longer cool or desired for critics to be edgier or curmudgeonly. Some might bemoan that, though I do think that there are two things to note. Music is experiencing this wonderful peak, so it is natural that reviews reflect that. I would like to see more bite and some subjective criticism for more albums rather than critics pulling punches. The way social media can mobilise criticism against journalists; fans are so protective of artists, and that has affected a lot of things. Critics worried about the effects of being attacked. Despite there being few characters like before where you would get these caustic or negative reviews that were entertaining to read, there is a kinder approach. I think that critics are going deeper with the music and there is this thoughtfulness and open-minded approach that was not there as much before. In my view, music criticism is…

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

BETTER for it.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Die Spitz

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Die Spitz

__________

I am writing this…

before 12th September, which is when Die Spitz’s debut album, Something to Consume, is released. Rough Trade have shared some words on it, which I shall get to in a minute. This quartet follow their 2023 E.P., Teeth, with an absolute gem. Hailing from Austin, Texas, Ava Schrobilgen (vocals/guitar), Chloe Andrews (drums), Ellie Livingston (guitar/vocals) and Kate Halter (bass) are a band to behold. Quite rightly getting so much buzz and attention! By the time you read this, there will be reviews out for Something to Consume:

“Absolute gem of an album from Die Spitz on Third Man. Ferocious, versatile, raw, and unapologetic. It has the same thrill as hearing Hole for the first time.

When the Venn diagram of passion, friendship, identity, and artistry collide, it can feel as if fighting words are spitting from your veins. And as postmodern society crumbles, Die Spitz giddily bounce between a dozen different ways to push back.

If the world of rock music were an ice cream shop, the Austin quartet have sampled each flavor, flipped the freezer over, and started dancing with the employees they helped unionize.

On their debut album, Something to Consume (via Third Man Records), Ava Schrobilgen, Chloe De St. Aubin, Ellie Livingston, and Kate Halter fight against the inescapable consumption that surrounds life. "There's a political side to it, but addiction and love can also be all-consuming," Livingston says.

And as the foursome trade off instruments, swapping songwriting and vocal duties, and generating powerful songwriting in concussive bursts, Die Spitz have created their own little pocket of the world where we can all stand on the edge together”.

I am going to end with a live review from a show in London where Die Spitz killed in London in the summer. A five-star review from LOUDER. I am coming to a few recent interviews with the group. With Something to Consume shaping up to be one of the best albums of this year, Die Spitz are also one of the most important bands around. Original and with incredible chemistry, they are both an incredible studio group but sensational on the stage. They have all the components to go very far in the music industry. The first piece I want to source from is The Line of Best Fit. Hailing a phenomenal and future-legends Punk quartet from Texas, The Line of Best Fit note how Die Spitz “abide the ‘separate but together’ approach, allowing space for each of their personalities to burn brightly”:

“Deciding on the moniker ‘Die Spitz’ – which, aptly, is German for pointy or sharp – during a Fireball whiskey-induced session, the quartet gained prominence with their evocative, mosh-ready sound. Taking inspiration from bands such as Black Sabbath and Nirvana to create distinct hits such as “Hair of Dog” and “I hate when GIRLS die”, the group have used their shared experiences to hone their sound into punchy, unapologetic rallying calls – as they put it, with the aim of inciting mayhem.

Previous EPs such as The Revenge of Evangeline in 2022 and Teeth in 2023 are a testament to this fact. Both hold nothing back, with Evangeline showcasing the band’s tenacity for anarchic and hell-raising punk, while Teeth artfully employs gruesome lyricism and power chords to connect with audiences over themes of female rage. It’s no surprise that the latter album won Album of the Year at the Austin Music Awards in 2024. Since then, the band have harnessed their experiences and expanded their process so that their debut LP, Something to Consume, builds on what came before it – using it as an avenue for experimentation in both their sound and lyrics.

“We have a lot of respect for each other,” De St. Aubin tells me, “so we’re not overbearing and trying to control the process of anyone’s writing. I think that’s why it comes about so naturally.”

“We don’t only write the song ourselves,” Schrobilgen, who had been resting her voice up until this point, says, entering the chat by sitting down on the arm of the sofa. “We bring it to the band and then we let them give their two cents and write their own parts for their instruments and all of that.”

Their debut with Third Man Records, Something to Consume finds the band experimenting with the various music genres that inform each of them individually. In doing this, Die Spitz have created a kaleidoscope of defiant, melancholic, and celebratory music that weaves together the multiple strings of alternative subgenres they grew up admiring, effortlessly telling the band’s story so far.

Hitting ears on 12 September 2025, Something to Consume also enables De St. Aubin, Halter, Livingston, and Schrobilgen to unfurl their wings and express themselves in various other ways. Girlhood is a spectrum and Die Spitz depict this in a very relatable way. This is evident in tracks such as “Punishers”, which De St. Aubin wrote after taking inspiration from the 2000 cult teen classic Twilight, creating a melancholic sound that is deeply romantic in its lyrics and evokes the blue-hued filtered imagery distinctive of the first film.

Being able to perform and travel with each other has been a huge highlight for the four women. It’s for this reason that their live shows are so energetic and memorable, like their set at Mohawk during SXSW Marshall Day 2025, which saw Livingston sing whilst sitting on Halter’s shoulders as she played bass. There is a love and trust that runs deep between the members of Die Spitz, giving them all the confidence to experiment and express themselves individually and help shape the image and sound of the band, making them a powerful group both on stage and in the studio”.

As with all of my Spotlight features, I am interested to know how other people view them. What they say in interviews. I can give my views on their music and, months or years back, I would have reviewed an album like Something to Consume. However, I feel collating interviews gives us a good impression of the artist and where they are. It brings me to the penultimate interview. This one is from FADER. A band who, they say, are on the right side of history with their music and are a wrecking ball against oppression, Die Spitz cannot be ignored. That’s what I meant then I said they are important. They are using their platform to put out music that is not just needed right now in terms of what it is saying. Their messages and music will affect and inspire people now but will also be remembered and quoited years from now. Perhaps a more casual chat with some, let’s say, mix of trivial and serious questions, I like the responses Die Spitz offer:

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

Eleanor: Go through life grabbing it by the balls.

Ava: Fake it till you make it.

Kate: Wipe front to back.

Chloe: I used to tell myself “expect the worst to get the best.” It was a motto I made up as a kid which essentially means that you should keep your expectations low so that you’re never disappointed.

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

Eleanor: "American Porn." I feel that song pretty intense when we play, especially if there are creeps at the show.

Kate: "Big Boots." This song didn't make it on the album because we had too many good songs but it always gets the crowd moving. Also I get to slap the bass.

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

Eleanor: "American Porn." I feel that song pretty intense when we play, especially if there are creeps at the show.

Kate: "Big Boots." This song didn't make it on the album because we had too many good songs but it always gets the crowd moving. Also I get to slap the bass”.

NME made no apologies when they called Die Spitz the “most exciting new rock band on the planet”. It is no exaggeration! I am relatively late to them and have only really known about them for weeks. However, the Texas four-piece have a loyal and passionate fanbase that is growing larger and larger. The band have a series of U.S. dates and some Canadian gigs. I am not sure if they are coming to the U.K. next year but, having been here before and wowed critics and fans, there is going to be demand for them to come back soon:

“Something To Consume’ also hangs together better than it ever should because of the bone-deep chemistry between the quartet. On the surging ‘Red 40’ and ‘Riding With My Girls’, their camaraderie seems impenetrable, like being confronted with a collective ‘fuck you’ from a bunch of people in their bulletproof early-twenties. It’s also deeply aspirational. You want to be a part of their team, headbanging at the lip of the stage as Livingston stomps a fuzz pedal half to death with a red cowboy boot. “I think that’s the foundation of friendship underneath our band – the collaboration that comes from that closeness,” Schrobilgen adds.

The roots of that friendship run deep. Halter, Livingston and Schrobilgen have been tight since they were kids, and began playing music together in what would become Die Spitz when Covid ran roughshod over the usual avenues teenagers have to spend time together. In a recent interview with the Line of Best Fit, they described De St. Aubin’s introduction almost in terms of pulling someone in from a life lived in parallel — different schools but the same town, same obsessions. “I think we all have similar moral compasses, similar ways of viewing life,” Livingston observes now.

Recorded with producer Will Yip, whose work with Mannequin Pussy, Nothing and Scowl seems to cover a decent amount of Die Spitz’s existing real estate, the record sounds huge, but it deliberately doesn’t sound in any way clean, precious or formulaic. You can see the dirt beneath the fingernails of every riff, glom onto the intention behind each rib-cracking kick-snare hit. “Some of the albums he’s produced are my favourites of all time – I’m a huge Title Fight fan,” Livingston says. “He made it big. It needed to be big.”

At every available opportunity, they also ramp up the chaos and theatre, adding an appropriately visceral dimension to lyrics that already read as all-consuming. In their hands, love is a dependency, apathy a lurking threat. On ‘Voir Dire’, perhaps the record’s most outwardly political song, it’s like De St. Aubin is done with it all, crushed by the rinse-repeat machinations of late-stage capitalism and American politics in protecting the dudes at the very top at all costs. “It’s easy just to fade / Disappear into the dim-lit corner that you’ve made,” she sings”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana for NME

I am going to end by heading back. Only back to July, and LOUDER’s review of Die Spitz. Playing their first London gig at the Downstairs at the Dome. Even though they played that show on 10th July, LOUDER ran their review on 18th July. However, their insistence that everyone needs to see the group and order Something to Consume echoed by so many others. There is no doubt that Die Spitz are among the greatest new bands of the past decade:

“Die Spitz's arrival in London to play their first ever UK gig coincides with the announcement of news of the forthcoming September release of their debut album, Something To Consume, on Jack White's Third Man Records. Here's a tip, pre-order it or pre-save it, or do whatever you need to do to hear it, because the Austin, Texas band are going to be stealing hearts and minds in a big way over the next 12 months and far beyond, and you will want to be on board asap.

Originally, the quartet - vocalist/guitarist/drummer Ava Schrobilgen, drummer/vocalist/guitarist Chloe De St. Aubin, vocalist/guitarist Ellie Livingston and bassist Kate Halter - were booked to play the 150-capacity Shacklewell Arms in east London tonight, but when that show sold out in a heartbeat they were upgraded to the Downstairs at the Dome, a room with twice the capacity. This too is sold out. And it's easy to see why the buzz is already building on the group. While the streaming numbers for their debut EP, 2023's Teeth, are not remarkable, their reputation as a fearsome live act has been amplified from a whisper to a scream over the past two years, thanks to tours with the likes of Amyl and The Sniffers, Viagra Boys and Sleater-Kinney, plus some wildly exuberant showcases at the SXSW festival in their hometown. And tonight, with the crowd drawing closer to the stage with every passing minute, and the energy levels in the room multiplying with each passing song, Die Spitz are nothing short of fucking awesome.

Tonight's setlist is balanced between songs already out there (the pummelling Hair Of Dog, the raging I Hate When Girls Die, the slow-burning, seething My Hot Piss), and those earmarked for inclusion on Something To Consume: the much darker-than it-sounds Pop Punk Anthem, the toxic relationship-dissecting Punishers, the punky Riding With My Girls. There are no dull moments, there's very little pausing for breath, and there's zero filler. Every so often Livingston or Halter will jokingly flex their muscles, in classic body builder poses, but you don't need the visual prompts to hear that there is no excess fat on these songs, or to know that Die Spitz won't be making themselves smaller for anyone, anywhere, as they take on the world”.

I am going to finish here. I am surprised there have not been interviews from publications like Rolling Stone or The Guardian. However, when Something to Consume is in the world next week and it picks up a raft of inevitable five-star reviews, Ava Schrobilgen, Chloe Andrews, Ellie Livingston and Kate Halter are going to be firmly under the spotlight of the biggest corners of the music press. I have heard them played on BBC Radio 6 Music here and there is a great deal of anticipation and affection in the U.K. An explosion of popularity and excitement in their native U.S. For anyone who has not twigged why Die Spitz are being hailed as the best band in the world right now, that is going to change…

VERY soon!

________________

Follow Die Spitz

PHOTO CREDIT: Nicole Miller

Official:

https://www.diespitz.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/diespitz/

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0zfZmpHTu0MlkkNr5KHeXE?si=Px7WCKgzSxO4_MnPLNURDQ

YouTube:

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

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/diespitz/

FEATURE: Spotlight: Madison McFerrin

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: VAM Studio

Madison McFerrin

__________

I was pretty sure that I had…

written a Spotlight feature about the wonderful Madison McFerrin. Maybe she can correct me but, looking through the archives, there does not seem to be one! Rectifying this, I wanted to explore an artist who I have been following for a while. Her debut album, I Hope You Can Forgive Me, was released in 2023. I raved about it when it came out. Her new album, SCORPIO, was released on 24th June. It is another fabulous album from an artist that people need to know about. Perhaps more acclaimed in her native U.S., there are fans here in the U.K. that would love to see her perform. I will end with a review for SCORPIO. However, before getting there, I want to include a few interviews from earlier this year. Maybe it does not go into as much depth about SCORPIO as other interviews. However, FLOOD Magazine recently chatted with Madison McFerrin about a successful Tiny Desk performance and a remarkable second studio album. This stood out to me:

“McFerrin is thriving, fresh off a successful Tiny Desk, a new album—Scorpio—and a blooming relationship through it all. So when she tells you how well she’s doing, understand: this is not bragging, it’s the factual self-assessment of an artist objectively on the rise. “[The Tiny Desk video], in terms of the numbers that I’ve been seeing, has been doing better than a lot of the videos in the last couple of months,” she tells me frankly one sunny Los Angeles morning over Zoom about a month prior to the album drop. “I’m really excited because I think I’m a really great performer, and I think that the fact that now people get to see that is only going to help expand my career, because performing is also my favorite thing to do. I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity to do it.”

This is Madison: no aw-shucks-who-me? false modesty, which can be so grating anyway. She’s ever humble and ever grateful, but we both know the drill. If she weren’t also very, very talented, we wouldn’t be talking about her music. So let’s talk about her music: Her instrument is her voice, layered over itself and looped back to create smooth and funky soul a cappella harmonies unique in the modern pop canon. “I hear harmony in my head and can sing it best—it takes me a second to figure it out on the piano, but if I hear harmony in my head, I can sing it. I feel very rooted in that,” she says, explaining that her signature vocal layers developed organically during her early live shows, playing around with a loop pedal and synthesizer.

She’s also extremely generous—generous with praise (re: Tiny Desk: “For my band mates who went along with me, I think we all did a really fantastic job and it wouldn’t be doing as well as it is if it weren’t for the collective”) and generously judicious with her output. She knows listeners don’t have infinite hours to listen to new music, and if she wants them to digest an entire album in one go, well, it just can’t be that long”.

I want to go back to 2023 for now. I found an interesting interview with Fifteen Questions that I think provides some good background. A bit of context around her debut album. The point of these features is to discover as much as possible about artists who are either coming through or hit a new stride. It is worth heading back a couple of years to get a sense of what McFerrin was being asked in 2023:

“Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

I honestly can’t say where the impulse comes from, I can only explain it to be from a higher power.
Even though I’m really into writing down my dreams, they don’t often make it into my songs. Instead, I’m usually drawing from personal experiences, relationships and what’s happening in the world around me.

For example, my song “(Please Don’t) Leave Me Now” came directly from experiencing a near-fatal car accident.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I don’t, but maybe I should start! I love some green tea. Baking also gets me in a zone.

I’ll try writing a song after the next time I make scones.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

I always start with the groove, be it the chords or the drum beat. Having that flushed out makes the rest of the writing process flow much easier.

When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

Lyrics come last nine times out of ten. I really love writing melodies, that’s where I try and challenge myself. A great example of that for me is my song “Know You Better.”

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

All the time! But in the spirit of following the ideas, I generally just go with it. Sometimes you need to go someplace else to really figure out where you’re going.

Some of my best songs are the product of going in that other direction when it wasn’t my intention.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

It’s one-hundred percent spiritual for me. My creative state, being writing or performing, is when I feel most connected to a higher power”.

I am going to move to a feature where Madison McFerrin took a track-by-track guide through SCORPIO. However, before getting there, I want to bring in this interview from Type.Set.Brooklyn, as she is one of three singers who appears on Tyler the Creator’s new album, Don’t Tap the Glass. For her, this is a huge moment where she has that Tyler co-sign and also has released her second album. An artist that you definitely cannot ignore:

“That conviction has been with McFerrin since childhood. She decided she’d be a singer in kindergarten and never looked back. Now 33 and based in Los Angeles, she’s spent the past decade quietly building a body of work that reflects both her artistic lineage and her distinct vision. Her father is Bobby McFerrin, the legendary jazz vocalist behind “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and Madison says watching someone live out their passion daily gave her permission to believe it was possible, too.

“I never had any kind of question that it wasn’t a possibility for my life,” she recalls. “People keep asking me what I'm going to be when I grow up. I’m going to be a singer. And I just stuck to it.”

That belief is paying off. This year alone, she’s delivered a standout NPR Tiny Desk set and released Scorpio, her second full-length album, both of which show an artist in full command of her craft. And now, she’s found herself alongside Yebba and Pharrell as one of the few featured voices on Tyler new project.

Despite the moment of mainstream shine, McFerrin isn’t switching gears. She’s still independent—and still moving on her own terms. This summer, she’s headed out on tour, determined to continue her momentum.

“I've gotten so many messages from people being like, ‘Wow, I can't wait to dive into your catalog,’ and that’s such a big win for me,” she says. “If you're going to be independent, you have to have confidence. You can't be independent and be like, ‘Oh, I don't think I'm very good.’ It’s not going to work that way. I had to stick to my guns and just be like, ‘I’m really that girl,’ and now the rest of the world is going to find out”.

I am going to shift now to a great piece from Wonderland. Talking them through the making and creation of her sophomore album, Wonderland hailed SCORPIO as “Groove-laden and subtly cinematic”. If you have never heard Madison McFerrin, then I would thoroughly recommend you dig this album out. It is one of the best of the year. McFerrin talks about all the phenomenal tracks on SCORPIO. I have selected a few from the interview:

“From the very opening refrain of “Heartbreak”, the first track that blesses the stunning sophomore album from Madison McFerrin, the artist’s intention is clear — to overawe. Across SCORPIO, the acclaimed singer-songwriter uses her voice with purpose and nuance, an instrument as well as a guiding narrator, deftly spin webs of encompassing harmonies that complete and augment much of the subtle soul-tinged backdrops.

It’s a work that is confident and exploratory, full of musical highlights and sticky songwriting; the produce of an artist fully accomplished in her lyrical vision and sonic ideology. To breakdown the record, McFerrin drops by Wonderland for the latest edition of our track-by-track series.

Read the track-by-track…

Track 1 (Side A): “Heartbreak”

“Heartbreak” was one of the last songs I wrote on SCORPIO, but I instantly knew it was the opener. It goes on a musical journey that is very similar to my own – starting a cappella and gradually adding more instrumentation. Not only that, it sets the stage for the storytelling of the album, which is very important to me as a songwriter. It’s the full Madison McFerrin experience in a single track.

Track 2: “Ain’t It Nice”

When co-producers Julius Rodriguez and Maddi St John first played me the beat for “Ain’t It Nice,” I was hooked. I was having so much fun listening to the music that the melody and lyrics just flowed out of me. I was freshly single and dating when we wrote this and I wanted something that reflected that fun cat and mouse period that happens at the start of a new connection. The song is flirty and fun in an old school kind of way that I absolutely love – you can’t help but dance!

Track 7 (Side B): “Run It Back”

I go back and forth, but “Run It Back” might be my favourite song on the record. I wrote it late one night, hours before I was going to be hopping on a flight to Tokyo. Horniness is a pretty universal feeling, particularly when you’re single. This is essentially the drunk text you want to send, but definitely should not. Originally it was just going to be me on piano, but why do that when you can have the incredibly talented Cory Henry instead???

Track 8: “Lesson”

The 2 saddest songs on SCORPIO are also the hardest technically for me to sing (there’s a therapeutic analysis in there somewhere). I cried while writing “Lesson,” it struck that deep of a cord. This had been my first breakup, and after 8.5 years, there was a lot of grief to deal with. I was asking myself a lot of questions around why I had gone through such a difficult relationship, “Lesson” is all of that in song form. I knew I wanted significant strings on, so I brought on my friend JasmineFire (who also provided strings on “I Don’t”) for some added co-production. Grief is an important part of life, writing this song really helped me get through mine.

Track 9: “blue”

So the joke of it all is that I’m being dead serious when I say the refrain “but it seems it isn’t fair/when blue’s the only colour that you wear” – he very literally only wore blue. Because of that, it took me a second to not only associate that colour with him. I needed a blue detox, and my favourite way to detox anything is to write about it. It’s an intimate song, so my dear friend, Balam Garcia, and I got together to make this beautiful piece. Sometimes voice and guitar is all you need”.

Let’s come to the review that I said we would end with. Albumism shared their views on the tremendous SCORPIO. They rightly point out how Madison McFerrin’s vocal and lyrical gifts come to the fore on her second studio album. The more I listen to it, the more I get from it. Such a rich collection of songs that demands repeat listening:

“Madison McFerrin’s second album SCORPIO finds her making strides forward from her loveable, if at times, slight debut album I Hope You Can Forgive Me (2023). Here, she extends and develops her vocal arrangement skills and songwriting whilst retaining the same attitude to brevity that her debut embraced.

Affairs of the heart, the breakdown of relationships and ex-lovers’ comeuppances are the main subjects and what she excels at is changing the dynamics in a song and making songs that last barely three minutes seem greater in scale as a result. There is also a feeling that her voice is stronger here than on her debut album—the delightful harmonizing was always there, but here there are runs and notes held than belie extra confidence and strength, such as on one of the standouts, “Run It Back.”

And “Run It Back” is a fine example of the various strengths of the album. It begins with just her voice and the piano, before handclaps and backing vocals arrive as it builds to a climax. There’s no bass and drums, but it is funky, a prime example of the notion that sometimes it is not the notes themselves that create the atmosphere (as pretty as they may be), but rather the gaps between them. McFerrin drips with sultry seductiveness throughout and her vocals are magnificent.

“I Don’t” is another song that feels grand in scale but is actually less than three minutes. Once again (as throughout) her vocal harmonies are a delight, but the intensity of the piece is accelerated by a welcome fuzzed-up guitar solo from Willow (Smith). I’m always really happy to hear an electric guitar solo in R&B or soul music, as it echoes work by such luminaries as Ernie Isley and Prince—reminders that Black guitarists from those genres belong in the upper echelons of those never-ending (and slightly boring?) conversations about “the greatest” and so forth.

On “Blue,” it is the acoustic guitar that accompanies McFerrin’s remembrance of a loved one and the simplicity of the accompaniment offers proof that her vocals don’t need to be steeply banked and harmonized to kingdom come to be striking, emotive and memorable. There’s a rare appearance of strings on the melancholy “Lesson” and, again, her voice shines while there is a hint of Billie Holiday phrasing when she sings “you were a lesson.”

Perhaps the overriding impression on the album is strength. I’ve mentioned already the change to her voice, but the lyrics also tell the tale of someone knowing when to walk away from a relationship. On penultimate track “The End” she says, “I need a little more than you’re willing to give” and on the dance floor inflected “Over > Forever” she sings, “time to get your shit together” to her (ex) lover. She knows when to demand her worth.

This album definitely demonstrates a deepening and widening of McFerrin’s talents and deserves a place in people’s collections or on their playlists”.

At the end of this month, Madison McFerrin starts a tour of the U.S. and North America. She is going to bring SCORPIO to her fans. I do hope that she plays in the U.K. soon. It has been an important and exciting year for her. I loved her debut, I Hope You Can Forgive Me, so I was curious what she would deliver with a second studio album. It is remarkable and affirms my love of her music! An extraordinary artist that I know is going to keep building and searching and will be making albums for many years to come, everyone needs to follow…

THE supreme Madison McFerrin.

___________

Follow Madison McFerrin

PHOTO CREDIT: Carianne Older

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FEATURE: A Broadcast Queen and Radio Royalty: Why 2025 Is Among the Most Important Years in Lauren Laverne’s Career

FEATURE:

 

A Broadcast Queen and Radio Royalty

PHOTO CREDIT: Sarah Jeynes

Why 2025 Is Among the Most Important Years in Lauren Laverne’s Career

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AROUND about this time last year…

IN THIS PHOTO: A selection of Lauren Laverne’s personal vinyl, which she brought into BBC Radio 6 Music for this year’s Record Store Day in April

we learned that Lauren Laverne had been diagnosed with cancer. It is a bittersweet time. Recently on her Instagram account, she marked twenty years of marriage. Posting a message and including a photo of the day she married her now-husband Graeme, she also is aware that, a year ago, she was given some devastating news that means she was not completely sure whether she would be around today to post that wonderful anniversary post. That sounds pretty morbid, though summer 2024 must have been a particularly strange and awful time for Lauren Laverne and her family. Fortunately, she received an all clear in November. Last Christmas must have had even more meaning and importance given the previous months. One of the biggest pleasures of this year is Lauren Laverne returning to her radio duties! She previously hosted the breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music. That is now being covered by Nick Grimshaw. He has slotted into that role seamlessly and made it his own. Lauren Laverne follows him at ten. She carries the schedule to one in the afternoon. As I write this (31st August), she is off and being covered by other broadcasters. Tomorrow, Jamz Supernova takes her slot and sits in. Laverne has also returned to captain BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Unlike her BBC Radio 6 Music show, nobody was sitting in whilst she underwent cancer treatment. There were other commitments, and things that were put on hold until she returned. Among them, her presenter role on BBC One’s The One Show. Now, in the summer of 2025 (though tomorrow is the start of meteorological autumn), she is in the position of being back on two radio stations, having that presenter role on BBC One, and also having some wonderful opportunities and bookings ahead. There is one in particular that I want to mention.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jonty Davies

Before I get there, there are a few interviews from this year that I want to bring in. As it has been a year where Lauren Laverne has come back to work after what must have been an impossible second half of 2024, I also feel like her passion and drive has grown. One of the jewels in the BBC Radio 6 Music crown, I have gained new appreciation and respect for her broadcasting! Surely, one of the best and most knowledgeable broadcasters in radio history! It is no surprise that there were interview opportunities following her all clear from cancer. Rather than it being opportunistic, it was a chance for people to show their love and hear words from someone who is much loved and missed. Someone who, thankfully, has been able to return to her life and work. Times when there was massive uncertainty about that. Good Housekeeping spoke with Lauren Laverne back in March. It was her first interview after receiving her cancer diagnosis:

“Last summer, Lauren Laverne received a shock diagnosis of cancer, resulting in multiple surgeries, an extended stay in hospital and several months off work. In her first interview since, she sat down with Good Housekeeping to share her experience, and the relief of now being cancer-free.

“I think it’s only when the storm passes that you realise what you’ve been holding in," she says of the emotional release she felt when she left hospital.

The Desert Island Discs presenter shared how cancer was something that had played on her mind, having lost her mother and closest confidante, Celia, to the disease during Glastonbury weekend.

“It was something I’d always been anxious about. Especially if you have family members who’ve been through it, you have a sort of watchfulness about your own health, which is obviously why I got tested for everything and why it was picked up, thank God, so early on,” she says.

Now cancer-free and having returned to The One Show, Desert Island Discs and BBC 6 Music in her new mid-morning time slot, she’s retained a positive outlook, sharing how she might even love her life more than she did before her diagnosis.

“And the truth of that is, like it or not, going through big stuff expands your emotional vocabulary. I’ve learned a massive amount and I hope I’m a better person now. And actually, I probably love my life more now than I did then, because I appreciate everything about it.”

Having been a worrier for much of her life, Lauren has noticed herself let go of the sort of anxiety she’d once have felt, too.

“There’s a new fearlessness. I mean, what’s life going to throw at me that’s worse than that? You’re not frightened of things going wrong because things have gone wrong," she says.

“It was like the monster came out from under the bed and you got a good look. And it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, well, I’ve seen it now.’ And so there was a kind of peace about that and I didn’t know how long that would last, but it’s very much still there. I don’t worry in the way that I used to worry”.

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I think it was important to source that interview, as Laverne is very open and honest. The experiences of cancer in her family. How her own diagnosis came as a massive shock, but it also came a time when she was hugely busy with work. It is good that a positive has come from things! How Laverne has encountered something as awful as cancer. So what else can come at her?! She has passed through it and, let’s hope, everything moving forward will be success, love and happiness! I think you can hear and feel that positivity and new strength in her work. Going from strength to strength on Desert Island Discs in terms of her interview brilliance and the range of guests/castaways she has spoken with, I also feel that she has hit a new stride on her BBC Radio 6 Music show. Perhaps the later timeslot is more favourable! The only other interview I could find from this year is from Town and Country House. They spoke with Lauren Laverne ahead of the 6 Music Festival in Greater Manchester in March. Laverne talked about all things joy:

“What’s bringing you joy at the moment?

Music, which has always been a huge part of my life. Last year I had a period of illness and for a while couldn’t listen to it – it was just too much emotionally. When I found the joy in it again I knew I was getting better. Now I’m back on 6 Music every weekday 10am–1pm and discovering new music all the time. I love it more than ever.

Best life hack you can share with us?

If you’ve got something good to say, say it. Speak up for what you love, praise people when they deserve it, give compliments. It makes other people happy and it makes your own life better.

A moment that changed everything?

Meeting my husband. We worked together on a TV show. That day it was his job to throw a bread roll at my face (don’t ask) but for budgetary reasons the roll was stale. It cut my nose and we had to film the rest of the day in profile, but it did mean I noticed him.

Where do you go to escape?

Alexandra Park. Seven acres with the most beautiful views overlooking London. Having grown up with easy access to the beach I always loved the perspective sea views give you. This is my city equivalent.

How can we save the world?

By choosing to. When I interviewed the climate scientist Corinne Le Quéré for her episode of Desert Island Discs she told me that we already have the scientific innovations and means, what we lack is the will to implement them.

Your greatest failure?

I didn’t go to university. I was supposed to take up a place at Durham University to read Medieval Studies but signed a record deal instead. I still daydream about going back sometimes.

Lauren Laverne’s Quick Fire Favourites

Scent… Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady

Box Set… Mad Men

Chocolate… Green & Black’s 70%

Song… Fela Kuti, ‘Let’s Start’

Dish… My husband’s Sunday roast

Gadget… Lakeland heated airer

Restaurant… J Sheekey.

Holiday… Puglia with my best friend’s family”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jonty Davies

I will end by returning briefly to that Good Housekeeping interview and another extract. Rather than dwell on the uncertainty and struggles of last summer, it is worth highlighting this year. Since returning to Desert Island Discs at the end of last year and BBC Radio 6 Music earlier this year, Laverne has undertaken some hosting duties and has experienced some career highlights. However, few can compare to her receiving the 2025 MPG Special Recognition Award in March. It was a moment that not only confirmed how influential and important a broadcaster she is. It also added something extra special to a year of return, regrowth and rebuild. Connecting with her BBC Radio 6 Music family has been especially important. Music Week reported on a modern broadcasting great rightly being awarded and recognised:

“The Music Producers Guild, in association with Dolby and Mix With Masters, has revealed Lauren Laverne as this year’s winner of the MPG Special Recognition Award. The announcement comes as Laverne returns to BBC Radio 6 Music with a new show, following her return to Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs at the end of last year.

Lorna Clarke, BBC director of music, commented: “Lauren is a world-class broadcaster who we are privileged to say has been sharing her knowledge and passion for music with 6 Music listeners for over 16 years. It’s wonderful to see her dedication celebrated with this MPG Special Recognition Award, following her recent return to the station with her new mid-morning show. Congratulations Lauren, this is richly deserved.”

“The Music Producers Guild is delighted to honour Lauren Laverne with this year’s Special Recognition Award for her unwavering commitment to championing new music,” added Anu Pillai, executive director of the MPG. “As a celebrated broadcaster on BBC Radio 6 Music and television, Lauren has continually spotlighted emerging talent and the innovative music production that is a hallmark of British musical culture. This accolade recognises her impact on the music industry and reaffirms our dedication to nurturing the dynamic relationship between artists and the producers who bring their music to life”.

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Very recently, Lauren Laverne was announced as the host of this year’s Mercury Prize. Having hosted the awards before, it is great news that she gets to do it again! It is another piece of great news in a year that has been so important for so many reasons. The twelve albums in the Mercury Prize shortlist will be announced on 10th September. I think that Sam Fender, Lambrini Girls and Heartworms will be among those in the running:

“BBC Radio 6 Music's Lauren Laverne has been announced as the host of this year's Mercury Prize.

The ceremony will take place in Newcastle on 16 October, marking the first time the event has been held outside of London.

The Mercury Prize is one of the most prestigious industry awards, celebrating the best British and Irish albums of the year and previous winners include Ezra Collective, Little Simz, Arctic Monkeys, Portishead and Pulp.

Alongside the awards show, the Mercury Prize Newcastle Fringe has also been announced with events taking place across the north-east of England.

Laverne, from Sunderland, has hosted the awards before and is a champion of the North East music scene.

Music agency Generator is organising the fringe events, which will span all seven council areas of the North East Combined Authority and will provide opportunities for local talent.

Running from 9 to 15 October, live gigs, workshops and roundtables will be taking place at The Glasshouse in Gateshead, Pop Recs in Sunderland, Queen's Hall Arts in Hexham, and World Headquarters and the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle.

English Teacher won the Mercury Prize in 2024

The Mercury Prize shortlist will be announced on 10 September.

The 16 October ceremony, held at the Utilita Arena and to be broadcast by the BBC, will feature live performances from some of the 12 shortlisted artists, culminating in the announcement of the winner”.

PHOTO CREDIT: BBC/Ray Burmiston

Although not technically and strictly related to work, there is another interview I want to highlight. It provides a bit of insight into Lauren Laverne’s London. The Standard spoke with her in June. We got to learn about some of her hangs, favourite spots and treasures. Having called Muswell Hill home for the past two decades, it is interesting learning about Laverne’s relationship with the city and who her heroes are:

“Which shops do you rely on?

Liberty — if it’s good enough for Emma Stone’s Cruella it’s good enough for me. Space NK in Covent Garden, where I could happily spend the whole day just smelling things. Foyles bookshop — same as Space NK but the smell is books. Audio Gold in Crouch End is my local record shop and sound system experts. The loveliest people and so knowledgeable. Dunns Bakery in Muswell Hill is an institution. Get the rosemary sourdough with salted crust, toast and butter it and watch your life change.

Who is the most iconic Londoner?

Dickens. He knew every side of the city and the way he articulated its energy and people has become part of our collective memory.

What’s the best thing a cabbie has ever said to you?

We always end up talking about music! I had one who has a successful sideline as a house DJ and had just bought a record label. We had a good time chatting a load of Balearics …

What’s your biggest extravagance?

Museum memberships and theatre tickets.

What’s your London secret?

Going to the clock gallery in the British Museum at 10 to twelve on a weekday and just waiting for everything to go off … symphonic!

What are you up to for work?

Getting the nation to start its day dancing on my 6 Music show, talking about life and music with a fascinating castaway on Desert Island Discs, and chewing the fat and having fun with The One Show team each. I’m also about to head back to Glastonbury to bring the event into listeners and viewers’ homes with the BBC.

Who is your hero?

Annie Nightingale taught me how to be joyful while also changing things — she always made being a pioneer look like a party! And my mam, who was the wisest, cleverest, most encouraging person I have ever known”.

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I forgot to mention that Lauren Laverne also hosted at Glastonbury this year. It has been a busy and varied year for her! Not only stepping back into her radio roles and being back at a BBC One flagship show, she has presented, collected an award, seen a new audience flock to her morning show, and she will host the upcoming Mercury Prize. She can look back at the past eight or nine months with huge pride! Although she has already accomplished so much in her career, I think this year has been particularly special and important. She has hosted some of her best Desert Island Discs episodes. She sounds happier and more passionate about her BBC Radio 6 Music family than ever before. I also love the fact that there are various events that I have not even mentioned that she has been involved with. Announced as the first-even Patron of the Children’s Book Project, this is something that means a lot to her: “Childhood book poverty means fewer opportunities for families to share time together, for children to discover new ideas, or to find refuge in stories and pictures. It affects how young people see themselves and their access to education. I’m proud to support the Children’s Book Project and look forward to working with them to shine a light on this important issue – and to engage publishers and book-buying families in making a difference”. Also, back in May, Laverne hosted the British Book Awards 2025, also known as the Nibbies, with Rhys Stephenson.

IN THIS PHOTO: Lauren Laverne at this year’s Glastonbury Festival/PHOTO CREDIT: Ali Dunwell

I am going to end by returning to the first interview I sourced, from Good Housekeeping. This extract is a good place to end. I would urge anyone who may not e familiar with Lauren Laverne to check out her amazing work. Come listen to her BBC Radio 6 Music show and work on Desert Island Discs:

“The relationship one has with a radio audience member is uniquely intimate,” she says. “It’s also reciprocal. I mean, me and our listeners, we’ve gone through a lot of things together.

“I was sent a holy medal from a lady in Ireland and a healing Indian herbal tea from another listener. PJ Harvey sent a letter. And that’s the mad thing with radio – you’re kind of sitting there in a room talking to yourself on one level. You don’t know how far your voice reaches.”

Ultimately, Lauren's diagnosis and recovery hasn’t brought on some urge to to swim with dolphins or hike the Inca trail. Rather, she’d simply like more of the same.

"When I was ill with cancer, the only thing I wanted to do was to get well enough to be home with the kids watching telly. All I want now is more of those things,” she says”.

Lauren Laverne has received so much love (gifts and cards too, I would imagine!) since getting an all clear after her cancer diagnosis and returning to the air and T.V. As an ardent BBC Radio 6 Music fan, it is wonderful she is in a new timeslot and is at her very best! This year has been a fantastic one for her. Could she have ever envisaged that this time last year? Rather than use this to mark a year since her cancer diagnosis, instead we should just embrace the fact that someone so beloved and missed is very much back with us and in good health. That is why I wanted to show my respect and love for…

A broadcasting queen.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Don McLean – American Pie

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Don McLean – American Pie

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I am probably not going to…

IN THIS PHOTO: ‘The day the music died’ … the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly is thought to be one of American Pie’s references – but Don McLean hints it could be about his father’s death/PHOTO CREDIT: Hulton Archive/Getty Images (via The Guardian)

teach you too much about a song that is considered to be one of the defining moments of twentieth-century music. American Pie was written and recorded by Don McLean. Recorded at Record Plant in New York, it was included on the 1971 American Pie album. The single was a number-one U.S. hit for four weeks in 1972. The reason I am focusing on this song now is because Don McLean turns eighty on 2nd October. Many might remember Madonna’s cover of American Pie that was released in 2000. Simply, yes, American Pie is in part about the day Buddy Holly died (3rd February, 1959) and, with it, music dying. It is, as the song goes, “The day/the music died”. Don McLean is, and I say this with all the respect I can muster, an artist like Van Morrison. Part of a different time, they probably view this woke and more progressive age as something cynical, wrong or bullsh*t. Perhaps sharing the same emotional palette as Van Morrison, you cannot argue against the fact both are masterful songwriters. Also, this is a case of perhaps separating the art from the artist. Saluting his contributions and amazing career, and this incredible and world-class song, but also not entirely relating to the man behind it. In terms of his politics and views. However, as Don McLean is eighty on 2nd October, I couldn’t pass up on the chance to spotlight his best-known song. I am going to start with features that look inside the track. Its origins and why it is so effecting, historic and brilliant. Even if the song unfortunately inspired a series of gross and terrible films of the same name, we can overlook that. Get back to the genius of the 1971 song. Why, fifty-four years later, it has taken on a whole new light and meaning. If its creator might not relate to Gen Z and younger listeners who have their own relationship with American Pie, that is okay. We salute the genius who created the song!

I am going to come to an interview with Don McLean from The Guardian that was conducted in 2020. Even if people think American Pie is about the souring of the 1960s and the death of Buddy Holly, there is also family relevance and tragedy that connects to it. American Pie has spawned, among other things, a film, stage show, and a children’s book. It has this amazing and evolving legacy. I want to move to Tom Breihan’s piece for Stereogum and their Number Ones series. He wrote about American Pie. Even though he is indifferent and recognises American Pie means a lot to many but not him, his interpretations at least are really interesting. He explores the lyrics and the origin of the song:

“Don McLean was 13 on the day the music died. One night in February 1959, Buddy Holly and his band had just played a show in Clear Lake, Iowa. This was a ridiculous tour, all small upper-Midwest cities and cold climates. The routing didn’t make any sense. Holly was sharing the bills with Dion & The Belmonts, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, and a young Waylon Jennings was playing bass in his band. Holly usually travelled by bus, but he was sick of wearing dirty clothes, and he wanted a little time to unwind and do laundry before the next gig. So he chartered a plane to fly him to the next show in Moorhead, Minnesota. That plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board. The Big Bopper was 28. Buddy Holly was 23. Richie Valens was 17, just four years older than Don McLean.

McLean grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and he was working as a paperboy in 1959. When he learned about the crash, he was folding the newspapers that he’d have to deliver that morning. It left an impact. McLean found his way into folk music, playing up and down the East Coast and falling under Pete Seeger’s wing. And a decade after that plane crash, McLean started writing “American Pie,” a sprawling and portentous epic that did its best to tie that crash to the death of a whole generation’s innocence.

If you’re going to attempt to interpret the lyrics of “American Pie,” you’re going to venture into the realm of pure conjecture. McLean isn’t talking. Of those lyrics, McLean once wrote, “They’re beyond analysis. They’re poetry.” In one interview, asked about the meaning of the song, McLean snapped, “It means I don’t ever have to work again if I don’t want to.” Four years ago, McLean sold his handwritten lyric sheet at auction for $1.2 million, and he wrote, “I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.”

McLean left those lyrics cryptic and elliptical enough that high-school English classes and stoned kids in dorm rooms have been puzzling over them for decades. There are all sorts of little references in there: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Kent State, Altamont, Janis Joplin, Charles Manson, the Byrds, the Cold War. There’s a Lennon/Lenin pun, which might also be a pun about Karl Marx and Groucho Marx. Pretty much everyone agrees that the Jester, a recurring character in the song, is Bob Dylan. Dylan steals James Dean’s coat and Elvis’ throne, and then, after his motorcycle crash, he finds himself sidelined in a cast. And all this has something to do with the burst of excitement that greeted the birth of rock ‘n’ roll — that whole mythic ’50s ritual of drag-races and backseat makeouts — and the way it eventually turned into nothing. The levy was dry”.

There are actually a couple of Don McLean interviews I will source, as it is interesting reading his reflections. Let’s get to that interview with The Guardian from 2020. I was not alive during the 1960s so not really aware of the impact of what Don McLean was writing about and where he was coming from. I was not alive in 1971 when American Pie came out. However, I get something different from the song. Someone younger, looking at it through a different lens. I did not know how old Don McLean was when he wrote American Pie, so it is startling to discover that fact! A huge achievement for any songwriter but, only in his twenties, it gives American Pie extra meaning and weight I think:

“McLean wrote it half a century ago, at the age of 24 – and to mark the anniversary, a new documentary, inevitably titled The Day the Music Died, will be released. A Broadway show is planned for 2022, and even a children’s book. That’s a lot of fuss for one song: McLean’s moment, perhaps, to tell the world once and for all what the lyrics actually mean.

There’s general agreement that the song is about the cultural and political decline of the US in the 1960s, a farewell to the American dream after the assassination of President Kennedy. “Bye bye Miss American Pie,” he sings. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.” But McLean has always kept stumm about the allusions in his verses. “Carly Simon’s still being coy about who You’re So Vain was written about,” he says. “So who cares, who gives a fuck?”

Plenty do. Every line of American Pie has been stripped bare. There are fan websites dedicated entirely to decoding it. Who was the jester who sang for the king and queen in a coat he borrowed from James Dean? What exactly was revealed the day the music died? The Vietnam war, social revolution, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, JFK, Mick Jagger, Martin Luther King, Charles Manson, Hells Angels, The Beatles, hallucinogenic drugs, God, the Devil – they’re all in there, aren’t they? No one can be totally sure, except one man.

For McLean, though, the genius of the song is in its structure, not its words: a perfect fusion, he says, of folk, rock’n’roll and old-fashioned popular music. The slow intro is the pop part, but then the piano kicks in and the tempo speeds into the chorus – that’s the rock’n’roll bit. The folk component is in the verse-chorus-verse composition. “I’ve never said that to anybody in 50 years,” says McLean.

Hmm, I say, that’s not really the scoop I was looking for. But then there’s no point asking McLean direct questions about what the song means: he’s too well practised at flicking them off. “It means I’ll never have to work again,” he used to quip.

For all its catchy sing-along jauntiness, there’s little to really cheer about in American Pie. It’s devoid of hope. McLean did come up with a more upbeat verse where the music gets “reborn” at the end. But he ditched it. “Things weren’t going that way,” he says. “I didn’t see America improving intellectually or politically. It was going steadily downhill, and so was the music.”

He takes me back in time again – to the innocent days, supposedly, of the 1950s that American Pie is lamenting. But McLean hated growing up in what he describes as a small house in an upper middle class neighbourhood of New Rochelle, in New York. People discriminated about everything, he says. “If you didn’t drive the right car, if you didn’t have enough money, if you didn’t wear the right shoes. I hated those fuckers.”

He’s burdened by the pain and grief of his childhood, even now. The opening of American Pie is largely accepted as mourning Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash in 1959. Holly was McLean’s musical idol as a kid, but could that verse equally be about his father? “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” he says. “I mean, that’s exactly right. That’s why I don’t like talking about the lyrics because I wanted to capture and say something that was almost unspeakable. It’s indescribable.” He adds: “American Pie is a biographical song.”

That’s how he feels, he says, thanks to the legacy of American Pie. “Writing a song that everyone on Earth knows shouldn’t make you resentful,” he says. “But you better have a lot inside you – because it’s gonna get sucked out”.

I am going to pick up from a bit later in a Goldmine interview from 2022. A particular point that interests me. They spoke with Don McLean to mark fifty years of a masterpiece that he still beams with pride about when people ask how he wrote the song. McLean was also very kind about Madonna and her cover version. Recognising how she provided her own take. I do wonder if any modern artists will cover American Pie very soon. It might take on a new angle given where America is now under Donald Trump:

“Eventually, the topic changes to interpretation, a topic McLean is used to addressing, especially the burning question about whether Bob Dylan is the inspiration for the jester.

“If I had wanted to say Dylan was the jester, I would have said his name, and if the king was Elvis, I would have said Elvis. Only Jesus had a thorny crown, so I meant these things to be open-ended because it was a dream. That’s the idea of the song, it’s always morphing.

“I mention James Dean by name, so it’s not like I didn’t want to mention names.”

McLean never mentions Buddy Holly by name, either. Nevertheless, he thinks it is a waste of time to overanalyze the song’s iconic lyrics for some hidden or deeper meaning.

“It’s a mistake to do that with the song. When you see this movie that is coming out next year about the making of the song, it goes everywhere; it goes to the drugstore where I wrote the chorus, the house where I wrote the rest of the lyrics, the music store that I said was the sacred store in the song on Main Street in New Rochelle. It will shed a lot of light on a lot of things.”

What is clear when you talk to McLean, is the song’s impact on the career of his musical idol, Buddy Holly.

“I got a letter from John Goldrosen, I found it the other day. He said that when he wrote his book about Buddy Holly, nobody was interested in a book about a dead rock star until after the song came out, and that is what elevated Buddy to the status he deserved. He probably would have anyway because of Paul McCartney or something, but it happened because of ‘American Pie.’

“I met both of his brothers; he had one named Larry and another named Travis. They were both involved in the Holley Tile Company (Buddy’s stage name was spelled differently) and Buddy would have either been picking cotton or laying tile in Lubbock if he wasn’t a musician.

“Larry was a nice guy, but he always liked to hold court. Travis looked like Buddy but was more shy and reticent. I have several letters from him.

“Travis was at a thing we did in 1979 or 1980, and he told me he wanted to shake my hand and told me he was driving in his truck, heard ‘American Pie’ and he pulled over to the side of the road and jumped for joy.

“You have no idea how wonderful it made me feel,” McLean said.

McLean and Holly’s legacy will be forever entwined. It is a huge source of pride for McLean and lends insight to what makes “American Pie” so special. At its core, it’s a song about the relationship between Holly and McLean, a fan and artist relationship any music lover can appreciate. “I brought Buddy back to life, and he brought me back to life”.

I will finish with an article from Metro from last year. Not to sour or take anything away from the more glowing recollections of American Pie, Don McLean was asked what American Pie means today. Even if his opinions on a more progressive and woke society is misguided and ill-informed, it is interesting hearing McLean discuss the song, and America, fifty-four years after he released one of the greatest song ever:

“When asked what American Pie means to him today, McLean begins: ‘The song really does open up a whole historical question about what happened in the 60s and assassinations and the history that forms the backbone of the song as it moves forward.

‘This song talks about the fact that things are going somewhat in the wrong direction, and I think that they’re still going in the wrong direction. I think most people looking at America now kind of think that too.

‘I mean, we certainly have a wonderful country, and we do wonderful things, but we also are in the middle of all this woke bulls**t, you know, and all this other stuff that there is absolutely no point to, as far as I can see, other than to undermine people’s beliefs in the country. That’s very bad.’

Expanding on so-called ‘wokery’ and what type of person he is, McLean declares himself as someone

But there’s a constant flow of information and suddenly nothing makes much sense. You have to concentrate in order to write songs like I did, or like other songwriters did in the past, or screenplays or novels or poetry.’

He continues: ‘We have the opportunity to make a change and make a difference in people’s lives simply because we’re alive and you can do a good thing for somebody, you can forgive someone, you can help someone, you can love someone, rather than be angry all the time.

‘There’s so much anger out there. So many of these college students have been given everything, and they’re just angry. They don’t know why they’re angry. They don’t even know what to be angry about.

‘It’s really a symptom, I think, of the fact that they’re frustrated. They don’t have a path that they can tread in life that leads to a better life’”.

Don McLean celebrates his eightieth birthday on 2nd October. Rather than put out a career-spanning playlist, I wanted to focus in on his best-known and loved song. He has written other classics (such as Vincent), through American Pie is the most enduring and adored. One that is still being talked about to this day. I have heard American Pie numerous times, and its appeal and power still hits hard. It moves me as much as the…

FIRST time I heard it.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: All Emotion and with Devotion: Is Kate Bush the Most Visually Engaging and Arresting Artist Ever?

FEATURE:

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

All Emotion and with Devotion: Is Kate Bush the Most Visually Engaging and Arresting Artist Ever?

__________

THIS is not a question that asks…

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

whether Kate Bush is the most beautiful artist ever. Though, if you look objectively, there is not many who can challenge her! It would be slightly prurient and debasing reducing Kate Bush to her looks. However, as so many of her early interviews revolved around (mostly men) fantasising, objectifying and discussing her beauty and sex appeal, luckily the narrative did change. However, there is no getting around the fact that Kate Bush is one of the most beautiful women ever! Breath-taking and a goddess, she was a crush and pin-up for so many people. However, this feature relates more to the photographic side. I know I spend a lot of time in this area. I am going to move to other areas in future features. This is a question I posed a while back, so I wanted to update and revisit. Not many people have discussed this. In terms of thew photos and videos. How you get this impact and effect that you do not get from other artists. To do with the clothing, the poses and the looks. David Bowie might be seen as the most visually engaging and memorable artist ever. However, think about Kate Bush. From the very start when there were promotional photos of Wuthering Heights and The Kick Inside (1978) by Gered Mankowitz. Remarkable photos for 1985’s Hounds of Love by Guido Harari. Some gorgeous photos around Aerial’s release in 2005 by Trevor Leighton. Kate Bush looking remarkable and so engaging for 2011’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow. The latter was released when she was fifty-three. Still one of the most photogenic and remarkable artists ever. How she can grab your soul and heart with a simple look!

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in promotional shot for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow

Perhaps it is not a surprise that she could seduce and drop the jaw. Having been photographed professionally since she was a teenager and shot by her brother John as a young child, Kate Bush and the camera had this relationship that went back to the 1960s. Even if there has not been a public or professional photos of her for over a decade, you only have to look at the archives to see how Kate Bush commands the visual media. It is not only her remarkable photos. Her videos too are so visually rich. In photos, she can look everyday and girl-next-door but have this aura and potency that I have not seen from another artist. In other shots, she is almost this classic Hollywood actress! One has to credit the photographers she collaborated with and their concepts. However, I think the reason why the photos are so stunning and timeless is because of Kate Bush. It is almost hard to explain. Something deep and spiritual. One also has to recognise Kate Bush’s natural beauty. It is hard to get around the fact! A timeless beauty, her promotional images for her later albums are as striking and heart-melting as those for her earlier albums. However, to me, it is the dynamics and layers of each photo that resonate. In terms of the outfits worn and the expressions. The poses and emotions that come out of her. The same for videos. You watch Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) (Hounds of Love), The Sensual World (The Sensual World), Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside) or Babooshka (Never for Ever) and the sense are overwhelmed There is something magical and mystical. This allure that Kate Bush has. You watch these videos and they stay in your mind forever. An exceptional dancer and someone whose physical movements connect with the music and bring the songs to life, this was also evident for anyone who has seen her perform live.

I guess David Bowie and Madonna have that same ability. They can adopt a manner of looks and personas and make them feel unique and ageless. Inspiring artists decades later. The same with Kate Bush. I have long-argued that there needs to be an exhibition or new volume of photos. Looking through the years, maybe shots that people have not seen. There are so many photos that either have not been seen or are reserved to more expensive coffee table books – that most cannot afford to buy. When you read interviews from photographers who have worked with her – from John Carder Bush to Brian Griffin to Gered Mankowitz -, they always commend Kate Bush’s commitment, kindness, professionalism and passion. How she is so patience, collaborative and inspiring. Making them better photographers! I don’t feel there is another artists whose photos and videos will create a bigger impact than Kate Bush’s. I would love to see a series of photos of her now, though I can understand Bush wants her privacy. When she does release an eleventh studio album, promotional photos might not even feature her. It is unlikely she will ever feature in a video. There will be no T.V. interviews. 2014, and for those who saw her Before the Dawn residency, would have witnessed the end of Kate Bush as a visual (or visible) artist. In terms of seeing her in the flesh. That is not to say that we will never see a new photo of Kate Bush. However, when we talk about her photographic, cinematic and visual legacy, we are probably ending the story at 2014.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush rehearses her song, The Red Shoes (for the 1993 short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve), while the crew are setting up lights and camera/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari (via the BBC)

Perhaps Kate Bush would balk at the thought of this incredible retrospective or exhibition. However, she cannot argue against the fact that her visual output is among the most distinct, beautiful, nuanced, emotion-provoking and important in all of music history. There are photos of her that I first saw years or decades ago that are still in my mind. The fact the Wuthering Heights video has stayed in my brain for thirty-something years is because of the expressions. The wide eyes and the choreography. The way Kate Bush somehow draws you into the video and the song! The same with the photos. Even if it is a shot of her on location or a simple portrait, there is something undeniably electric and seductive. You are fascinated and entranced! Again, this is not about the beauty of Kate Bush. It goes beyond the surface. A deeper and rare quality. Few artists have that Midas look. The innate and natural ability to not only immerse and transfix those who see her photos. She does the same to the photographers! The fashion throughout the years is also a major reason. She can be this divine and Hollywood-esque star or someone in jeans and boots. She can be quirky and eccentric (she has been photographed with a stuff/fake crocodile before!) but also so unvarnished and bare. Everything coming from her eyes or something she does with her mouth. Like I said, it is so hard to explain how she does it or what that secret ingredient is! To me, there is no other artist whose promotional photos and album covers are as visually remarkable. Those that stir the senses! The same with her captivating music videos. Even if she is made up to look dirty as in the case of There Goes a Tenner (The Dreaming) or shot from the waist up for King of the Mountain (Aerial), these videos linger long in the memory. Those artists that have almost this supernatural or divine sense of gravity, wonder and something that stops the heart, Kate Bush is very much in a league of her own. I don’t think that there is another artist…

WHO comes close.

FEATURE: In the Arms of Sleep: The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

In the Arms of Sleep

The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness at Thirty

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IT is always a risk…

when artists put out a double or triple album. In terms of how they will be received and whether they are going to have a lot more filler than they should. It can be a case of quantity over quality. However, I admire the ambition at play. In the case of The Smashing Pumpkins’ third studio album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, there is no denying that it is phenomenal. A classic! Released on 23rd October, 1995 in the United Kingdom and the following day in the United States, I wanted to mark thirty years of an album that arguably changed the face of Alternative Rock. I want to start out with a 1995 interview from Guitar World, where the band’s lead, Billy Corgan (who was the lead songwriter), and James Iha (guitars) spoke about Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and also some of the gear that they used on the album:

“There's everything from piano ballads to the thrashy-trippy guitar rave-ups that have won the Pumpkins their honored place in the alternative rock pantheon. There are also moments of Beatles-esque music hall whimsy, of Queen-ish massed guitar grandeur, and trips to that sub-aquatic textureland where Prince and Jimi chase foxy mermaids through eternity.

Produced by the British dream team of Flood and Alan Moulder, the record is one whopping huge canvas, which Corgan and co-guitarist James Iha have covered with every guitar color at their collective command.

Guitar World: Did you know from the outset that this was going to be a big album?

Billy Corgan: "Yes. We almost had enough material to make Siamese Dream a double album. With this new album, I really liked the notion that we would create a wider scope in which to put other kinds of material we were writing."

With this new record, I think you've found a way not to repeat yourself, but still to satisfy people's expectations of a Smashing Pumpkins record.

Corgan: "Well, we really went into the record with the notion that this would be the last Smashing Pumpkins record. I mean, we plan on doing another record, but we don't plan on doing another record as the band that most people know. This kind of approach, style, music... everything is going to change."

Are you disbanding? Is that what you're saying?

"No, I'm saying we've reached the end of one creative ebb and flow. And it's time to go down a different musical path. Our options are either to disband, or that we will force ourselves to go in a different direction.

"We've got a lot of different viewpoints on the culture at the moment. We believe that, to a certain degree, we're taken for granted. It's hard to explain, but you just reach a point where you know it's time to move on."

How did you get involved with Flood?

James Iha: "Billy and I are both real big fans of his work. I'm sure both of us own at least 10 CDs that Flood has worked on. And they're all different. Not typical rock bands – all very individual".

There are a couple of features I want to include before a review from Pitchfork. In 2016, Medium published their feature about Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, which they argued might have been the swansong for Alternative Rock. With ambition and ego, Billy Corgan and his bandmates might have arguably released their generation’s The Beatles (or ‘The White Album’):

“But as alternative rock was quickly slipping into the past, The Smashing Pumpkins released Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, arguably the genre’s last great album. It’s the perfect swan song. While rock music was going towards a friendlier, but slightly fatigued sound, Mellon Collie was a whirlwind of energy — even its ballads were dynamic and exciting. To do so they drew from the entire history of the alt-rock, which seems impossible considering the genre itself is so diverse. But somehow the Pumpkins captured all of it and made what could be considered their generation’s White Album: a final recap of the movement made by the only band who was both egotistical and talented enough to take on the task.

It’s ironic that the band who released an album summing up alternative rock was in many ways an outsider to the rest of the scene. Many of the bands came out of a punk tradition where the ultimate sin is acting like pompous, self-centered rock stars. But that’s exactly what they were — especially Billy Corgan, the band’s dictator of a leader, who rivals Kanye West for having the most bloated ego in music history. Unlike the other alternative bands who eschewed fame, or at least wanted to look like they didn’t want to be famous, Corgan was explicit about his desire for the Pumpkins to be recognized as the best and biggest band in the world. And they certainly looked the part, being the only alternative band to fully embrace the glammed out rock star look.

Musically, the difference between Corgan and his peers was just as apparent. On their previous album, Siamese Dream, he famously layered dozens of guitar tracks on each song to make the album sound as grandiose as possible —Mellon Collie co-producer Flood calls this the “Pumpkin Guitar Overdub Army” tactic. When asked about this in a Guitar World interview, Corgan said “When you are faced with making a permanent recorded representation of a song, why not endow it with the grandest possible vision?” But his peers thought the exact opposite. Most alternative bands wanted their records to sound exactly how they performed live, without any studio frills. For those bands this was an important sign of authenticity that they learned from their punk rock upbringing. But Corgan was a maximalist at heart, growing up inspired by flashy arena rock and metal bands rather than the punk rock that inspired most of the scene.

Corgan’s “grandest possible vision” philosophy is laid out in full display on Mellon Collie — it’s an incredibly long and bloated journey. It opens with a three minute piano intro saturated in strings and woodwinds that makes it sound like its straight out of an old Hollywood cinema classic. And over the next 27 songs they do everything from electronic ballads (“Beautiful”) to pop-rock (“Muzzle”) to obnoxious, borderline unlistenable, metal (“X.Y.U.” and “Tales of a Scorched Earth”). Even the album’s most subtle moments sound like they’re added in to make the big moments sound absolutely huge.

This kind of sprawling epic wasn’t what typically sold in 1995, but it became a sensation because of Corgan’s ability to balance out his experimental side with the ability to write different kinds of hit singles that appealed to different audiences. Songs like “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” and “Zero” were as nihilistic and heavy as any Soundgarden single, while the soaring ballads “Tonight Tonight” and “1979” fit perfectly in the new softer landscape they found themselves in. As different as these songs are from one another, they all became smash hits. This diversity is how they managed to become the most successful band in the world — if only briefly — in such a wildly transitional year for music”.

Before coming to a review from Pitchfork, it is worth bringing in Guitar.com’s take on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. This is an album where guitar is very much key in the mix. Up front and loud. It is a sprawling album in many ways – not surprised given that it has twenty-eight tracks! –, but it never feels bloated or has too much filler:

“There are a lot of bells and whistles on Mellon Collie but it’s saved from the double album scrapheap by the clear-eyed purpose of Corgan’s writing. It’s instructive, for example, to note how much of Tonight, Tonight’s pomp carries over to its guitar-bass-drums demo, with its majestic strings cast almost as the icing on the cake rather than a crucial structural element. There is the temptation to cut off disc one at the knees (or after the monstrous Bullet With Butterfly Wings) and draft in tracks like 1979, Stumbleine and X.Y.U. from disc two to create one all killer-no filler record, but that would betray the scope of the undertaking.

Mellon Collie is not a concept piece, and neither is it prone to meandering instrumentals or empty statements, but it is big. The singles are all hall of famers, and yet it’s impossible to discount the raw power of Here Is No Why (the Lemonheads with a violent streak) or singsong weirdness of We Only Come Out at Night (listen again with the Shins in mind, remarkable). Corgan knits the whole thing together with a sense of howling bombast, from the guitar freakouts of Jellybelly to the sweeping To Forgive, which knows precisely how affecting it is and lays it on real thick.

Triumph into disaster

Upon release, Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness did what the Pumpkins wanted it to do. It sold. It became their first and to date only number one on the Billboard 200 and quickly went platinum. In 2012, it crossed the diamond threshold in the US. Similarly, it was generally well-reviewed and has matured like a fine wine. In a 9.3 review of the LP’s deluxe edition, Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen observed: “During a time when rock heroes were hard to come by, Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed.”

But on the ground Mellon Collie was followed by a string of tragedies and fallings out. Touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin died of an overdose in the summer of 1996 after injecting heroin with Chamberlin in a Manhattan hotel room. Chamberlin was subsequently arrested on drug possession charges and later sacked. The tour was cancelled as it was about to crest at Madison Square Garden. Months earlier, a 17-year-old fan had been fatally injured at a show in Dublin despite the band’s vocal anti-mosh stance. Corgan was rocked by the loss of his mother, and he got divorced. By the time Adore was released in 1998 they were splintering. Wretzky’s dislocation from the group became permanent and the lights were turned out altogether following 2000’s Machina/The Machines Of God.

This ending cast a long shadow, but Mellon Collie’s legend has only deepened over time. With the Pumpkins back in action (Corgan joined by Iha, Chamberlin and Jeff Schroeder) each move they make is placed next to its high watermark. Outside of the music, its status as a priceless 90s rock artefact has been sealed in amber by tens of thousands of ‘Zero’ t-shirts and the band’s guest spot in Homerpalooza, a classic episode of The Simpsons. Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins. Homer Simpson, smiling politely. It doesn’t get bigger than that”.

In 2012, Pitchfork published their review of an album that they rightly stated was a very generous offering. One that was purely intended for teenage listeners. It communicated with them. For many, it was the only album that they needed. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness still sound remarkable and bracing thirty years later. There are great features like this, that look at the legacy and brilliance of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness:

“This is perhaps the only Smashing Pumpkins record where they acted like an actual band rather than Corgan and his resentful charges. It's hard to pinpoint where the influence of James Iha or D'Arcy came into play (not so with the phenomenal drumming of Jimmy Chamberlin), but with the oversight of producers Flood and Alan Moulder, Mellon Collie was developed through protracted jam sessions and personal interplay. Siamese Dream, for all of its symphonic grandeur, was a fairly standard rock album and a solitary one-- nearly all of the guitar and bass parts were rumored to have been performed by Corgan himself. Meanwhile, Mellon Collie indulges in styles more associated with hermetic artists-- ornate chamber-pop ("Cupid De Locke"), mumbly acoustic confessionals ("Stumbleine"), and synthesized nocturnes (mostly everything after "X.Y.U."). And it does so while feeling like the work of four people in a room.

Mellon Collie's remarkable breadth is the best indication of Corgan's ability to let loose. You could pick five songs at random and still end up with a diverse batch of singles that would make a case for Smashing Pumpkins being the most stylistically malleable multi-platinum act of the 90s. Maybe it wouldn't sell as many copies, but picture an alternate universe where heavy rotation met the joyous, mechanized grind of "Love", "In the Arms of Sleep"'s unabashed antiquated romanticism, the Prince-like electro-ballad "Beautiful", "Muzzle"'s stadium-status affirmations, or the throttling metal of "Bodies".

The ubiquity of the five songs that did become singles overshadows just how idiosyncratic and distinct they were in the scope of 1995. Has there been anything like "Tonight, Tonight" since? Orchestral strings typically signify weepy balladry or compositional pretension in rock music, not wonderful, lovestruck propulsion. While "Tonight, Tonight" is now inseparable from its Le Voyage dans la lune-inspired video, that the music existed without its guidance only stresses the Pumpkins' sonic creativity. "Thirty-Three" was the final and least heralded of the singles-- where on alt-rock radio was there room for a slowpoke, time-signature shifting country song with phased slide guitars and shuffling drum machines?

"Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" are the ones that riled up the older folks and, yes, the lyrics are pissy and juvenile and fairly embarrassing. That said, they're far more interesting from a sonic perspective than they're often given credit for. They're the songs where Flood's digitized production fits better than the saturated, analog warmth Butch Vig lent to Siamese Dream. They're basically new wave performed as pop-metal.

And of course, there's "1979", the one everybody can agree on. On a record that reveled in 70s prog and pomp without being restricted to it, it sounds futuristic. And while just as youth-obsessed as everything else here, it's one of the few times where high school sounds like something that can be remembered fondly. Corgan loves to stress how it was the last song to make the record, and while its chorus does have an effortless charge embodying the "urgency of now," it's the only Mellon Collie song that functions best as nostalgia. That reading is no doubt abetted by another fantastic video, but while "1979" is an unimpeachable song, the rush to praise it as an outlier does its surroundings a tremendous disservice. While Mellon Collie is the realization of all Billy Corgan's ambitions, most of the criticisms surround the lyrics for not being as personal as those on the tortured Siamese Dream. It's this way by design.

The terms "sad machines" and "teen machines" are interchangeably used during "Here Is No Why", a pep talk to the outwardly sullen mopes who Corgan urges to break free of either and ascend like its heroic guitar solo. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" is notorious for its chorus, but teen angst doesn't fight fair; you need some seriously heavy ammo to resist it. The mudslide of distortion that ushers in its bridge leads towards two minutes of the most viscerally exciting music that Smashing Pumpkins produced. Then immediately after, the mournful "To Forgive" devastates with a personal detail that gives Corgan credibility in all of this: "And I remember my birthdays/ Empty party afternoons." This is the kind of youthful, inexplicable emotional whiplash that can result in an immolating hatebomb called "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)" being followed by a giddy proclamation that "love solves everything." It's clearly not a mature way of dealing with life, but that's only a problem if you somehow believe Mellon Collie isn't meant as rock 'n' roll fantasy. When Corgan declares "I know that I was meant for this world" during "Muzzle", it's your happy ending.

So, yes, most people who have developed a meaningful relationship with Mellon Collie did so in their youth. The question is whether you can get anything new from this in 2012. As with all of the Smashing Pumpkins reissues, Mellon Collie is giving: the Deluxe boxed set justifies its sticker shock by containing "re-imagined cover art, velvet-lined disc holder and decoupage kit for creating your own scenes from the Mellon Collie Universe," which is everything you'd imagine and thensome. There are an extra 64 tracks and only a few of them appeared on The Aeroplane Flies High, though most of these inclusions are demos or alternate takes, the sort of thing that should only be listened to multiple times by people who are being paid to do so, i.e., music critics and Flood.

But there is a way of hearing the same album differently as you refract it through your own experiences. "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" is rumored to have contained 70 guitar tracks; it's a wedding vow punctuated by Corgan snarling "youth is wasted on the young." This isn't meant to negate the intent of the 90 minutes that preceded it, it's a reminder of how Mellon Collie can communicate different things to someone who's 30 as opposed to 15”.

On 23rd October, we mark thirty years of The Smashing Pumpkins’ third studio album. I guess, because of costs, you do not really get many albums that are a double or triple. There is always that risk that people will tune out and there will be too many fillers tracks. When it came to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, there was so much to love. It is a pioneering, groundbreaking and hugely influential album. If it was one of the last great Alternative Rock albums, in a wider sense, it is regarded as one of the best albums ever. This phenomenal work from a visionary Billy Corgan has lost none of its spark and potency…

AFTER three decades.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Radio Free Alice

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Moran

Radio Free Alice

__________

I will come to some interviews…

with the sensational Radio Free Alice very soon. In modern music, I think that solo artists get most of the attention. When it comes to the best albums released, most of them are from solo acts. However, there are plenty of promising and strong bands around. One of them is Radio Free Alice. The Australian quintet of Noah Learmonth (vocals, guitar), Jules Paradiso (guitar), Michael Phillips (bass, saxophone) and Lochie Dowd (drums) might be new to you. Big Hassle provide some background and biography of this terrific band:

“I can’t eat you, I can’t fuck you, so why the fuck would I come?”

Those were the parting words of Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe to Radio Free Alice’s band members. Hobbling over to the band, tequila in hand, as the band finished the early set of their Sydney residency at Newtown’s The Duke, the wiry icon offered words of praise. BJM were playing at the venue the next block down, and enjoying the natural rapport between them, the band invited Newcombe back to watch Radio Free Alice’s late set that night after BJM’s show. The invitation only to be rejected in the dry wit typical of the BJM founder, “I can’t eat you, I can’t fuck you, so why the fuck would I come?!”

At the vanguard of a new wave of high energy guitar rock and fast emerging as one of Australia’s most exciting young bands, Radio Free Alice released their first two EPs Radio Free Alice and Polyester.

With an operatic swagger and an angular, guitar-driven sound, the Melbourne group emerged with an art school musical palette, painted from a suburban Australian canvas. Immediate and arresting rock arrangements from the quartet meld with frontman Noah Learmonth’s distinctive yearning throaty vocal, harking to the stylings of Ian Curtis and Robert Smith. Guitars with clean tones and clever notes, melodic bass lines, urgent drum beats, and the occasional sax translate the band’s DIY recordings to an energetic, charismatic live show from the young quartet.

Following 2023 singles “Paris Is Gone” and “Look What You’ve Done,” which have received support from triple j, FBi and 3RRR, the band have opened for The Killers, Royel Otis, Sorry, Django Django, High School, The Snuts and a sold out four week residency at inner Melbourne’s Nighthawk. The band’s captivating live show saw them emerge from Brisbane’s BIGSOUND showcase and SXSW Sydney as one of the breakout artists for 2024, and backed up by NME who included them in their NME 100 list for 2025.

Having recently played festivals around Australia, a two month stint of club shows and festivals in UK/Europe and a sold out headline tour at home in Oz, expect more music from this frenetic new young band in 2025”.

I am going to end with a review of Radio Free Alice’s new E.P., Empty Words. I will also bring in some interviews from this year. Now, I want to step back to last year and CLASH’s spotlighting of an exciting, charismatic and atmospheric band who even then were being tipped as future greats:

“When a song grabs your ears and the band then plays your local independent grassroots venue then it’s a no brainer.  You have to go, especially when the band is from the other side of the world. ‘Paris Is Gone’ had been stuck in my head when I spotted Australian band Radio Free Alice were scheduled to play Sneaky Petes in Edinburgh – cap. 90. They did not disappoint. Charismatic and commanding the five-piece brought something a little different to the crowded post-punk landscape, but just what that is hard to define. With the band back on home soil CLASH decided to find out more – especially as their second EP ‘Polyester’ has just landed on streaming. Lead singer Noah Learmonth provided the answers – first-up, where does the bands name come from and were there any other names under consideration?

“There’s a good answer and a more truthful, boring answer to that question. The good answer is that in the 60s there were pirate radio stations based on ships and one of them was called Radio Free Alice. I’m not entirely sure if this is true. The more truthful, boring answer is that we ripped it off a record store in Darlinghurst in Sydney of the same name. I’ve been told the owner doesn’t mind. Funnily enough the band name that I was considering for a while was ‘Polyester’, but I don’t think people really took to it so I thought maybe I’ll just save it for an EP or something, which is where we landed. I still think ‘The Suicidal Pussycats’ is a great name but I’m yet to find anyone that will agree with me.”

Radio Free Alice are completed by Maayan Barnatan, Michael Phillips, Jules Paradiso and Lochie Dowd.  They formed in Sydney in 2020, inspired by the likes of Talking Heads, The Strokes and HighSchool, and are now based in Melbourne. They have just finished an extensive tour with headlines dates in the UK and Europe as well as festival appearances including The Great Escape, Live at Leeds, Supersonic and Dot to Dot.  Noah shares: “The responses were really good, probably better then in Australia, although we obviously have a bigger fan base here. I think we’re more suited to the UK. Surf rock is still the thing in Australia, which is worrying on a few different levels. The standout for me was a festival we played in Amsterdam called London Calling. One of the acts pulled out so we played twice in one day. There was just a massive crowd and it sounded great. Whenever it sounds great I’m happy. I care less about the crowd, I just want to feel like we’re actually a good band.”

Second EP ‘Polyester’ follows hot on the heels of their self-titled debut released in 2023 which includes the aforementioned ‘Paris Is Gone’. CLASH was interested to know what the main difference is between the two EPs in terms of inspirations. Noah explains: “The main difference for me is that Polyester is more subtle. On the first EP every song has these massively cathartic choruses, which will always have a place in my heart, but on this EP it’s all a little more restrained. More tasteful and considered. Probably darker too.”

Intriguingly Radio Free Alice undertook a slightly unconventional approach to the recording of Polyester.  It began in Melbourne but was then finished in studios, backstage areas, tour vans, street corners, hostel bunk beds and train stations while on tour.  “That sounds extremely romantic but it plays back to us feeling most inspired while on the road. We recorded the skeleton of the tracks in Melbourne but then recorded some extra bits and some vocal things while over here, and then did the final mixes in London.  We have a constant conveyer belt of songs and those four were the best of the old ones so it made the most sense.”

The opening bassline on ‘On The Ground’ immediately grabs you, and the lyrics are vivid including: “Dinner’s in the fridge you can eat it on the couch. I slap you on the back and say ‘you can’t afford that, afford that.'” Noah expands: “The song roughly follows the narrative of a toxic man who is seducing, or manipulating, a woman into being with him through his money. Something like that.”

Creatively the music always come first with Naoh admitting: “I often won’t write the lyrics till a day or so before going into the studio and will just sing gibberish at the live shows. That can go on for over a year. I can be very lazy”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Harry Baker

Last month, Wonderland chatted with Radio Free Alice as they were over in the U.K. performing. Playing to crowds in London venues and how different that was to the vibe in Australia. They were gearing up to release the much-anticipated Empty Words E.P. Radio Free Alice are gaining such momentum at the moment:

“How would you define your essence as a band?

Melodic post-punk would be a simple way to describe it.

Do you feel at home in the UK?

Yeah very. Culturally, musically, comedically, we love the UK and its history. We’ve borrowed so much from it, not just musically. I think history is really important. You could be writing lyrics in the same pub that Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Australia’s got a lot of talent, but there’s a low ceiling.

How have the London crowds been? What’s a live show like?

Surreal. Seeing Brits shout lyrics back at us is very strange and cool. We’d love to think of our live shows as frenetic and vulnerable.

How’s the Aussie indie scene vs. British? Who should we watch?

The Melbourne scene is full of talent. Bands like Raindogs, Belair Lip Bombs, NPCEDE, shock corridor, sex mask are amazing, just to name a few. It’s a great scene for fostering talent. I’m unsure if London is a good in that respect, in terms of growing talent. Possibly not which I why I’m glad we started in Melbourne.

What’s the story behind the title “Empty Words”?

The title touches on the theme that threads the EP together, which is having been promised a future that never came. The 20th century, although we didn’t live through it, appeared to all be leading up to some kind of real change, a true social revolution, and yet all the turn of the millennium offered was a never ending cycle of repeating itself. We haven’t progressed culturally in 20 years, it’s all just recycled pastiches of the past. Movies, TV, fashion, music. It feels like society was promised something better than this. All the revolution talk of the 20th century amounted to nothing. We are aware however of the irony of talking about this whilst being a nostalgic sounding band, and there is an element of frustration about that, feeling like we’re part of the problem.

What’s next?

We’re touring UK/Euro till September, then America and then UK/Euro again, then Australia. So a lot of shows. We’re also in the process of finishing our first album, which is going to come out next year”.

I will actually move to this review from Hard of Hearing Magazine as they witnessed Radio Free Alice launch Empty Words at Brixton’s The Windmill. One of this year’s most startling, memorable and superb E.P., you come away from it with this deep impression. The band make a real impact across the tracks. It must have been thrilling for the crowd to witness the tracks played live:

“The EP is brimming with raw emotion and nervy momentum. Opening with the title track, first released back in March, ‘Empty Words’ sets the tone with a biting line, “They say that everything has changed / But nothing has happened,” delivered with jarring, unfiltered vocals. The sharp, witty lyrics add a tangible texture to the gritty and tightly wound instrumentation, which is feverish without ever losing precision.

‘Toyota Camryn’ follows, opening with pounding drums and a driving bassline that lays the groundwork for a jagged guitar melody. Raw, immediate vocals lead the verse, cutting through with the line “I believe in violence, the violence of killing time”, a bold phrase that nails the track’s restless spirit. When the chorus hits, it lands with melodic clarity and razor-sharp control.

Radio Free Alice do not shy away from dissonance, letting noise and euphony collide, embracing the tension. On ‘Regret’, a searing guitar bridge slices through rasping yet melodiously restrained vocals, delivering lines of visceral confession that feel both intimate and confrontational. Then, closing the four-track EP, ‘Chinese Restaurant’ is led by a persistent guitar melody underpinned by steady percussion. Learmonth’s vocal performance carries a restrained depth reminiscent of The Cure’s Robert Smith, giving the track a timeless and unsettled energy.

The raw urgency of the EP reflects the chemistry of four creatively ambitious musicians in their early twenties, forging a sound unbound by genre. Radio Free Alice are building something entirely their own, vital, unfiltered, and alive with possibility.

On ‘Empty Words’, Radio Free Alice confront the limits of language with biting precision. “I said I could kill them with my empty words or I could kill them all” is not just a lyric, it is a thesis statement for a band pushing back against meaninglessness with noise, dissonance, and the sheer force of presence. On stage, they embody this tension with songs that speed ahead of themselves without ever losing control. Their disarray is never accidental.

Together, the EP and the live show form a complete portrait that is neither polished nor resolved, but immediate and alive. It is a sound built on instinct, fueled by friction, and grounded in the kind of truth you only find when you scream it into a room full of strangers.

I am going to end with a review of Empty Words from DORK. For anyone who has not heard Radio Free Alice or knows a bit about them, do go and listen to their music. I think they will be back in the U.K. soon. Noah Learmonth, Jules Paradiso, Michael Phillips, Lochie Dowd and Maayan Barnatan are a sensational force:

“A wistful energy runs through Radio Free Alice’s third EP, ‘Empty Words’, like the fuzzy glow of a half-forgotten youth drama on VHS. Drawing on their art-school post-punk palette, the Naarm/Melbourne band deliver four tightly wound tracks that feel both urgent and full of romance.

The title-track, ‘Empty Words’, opens with nervy guitars and restless momentum. It takes a sideways glance at performative activism, mixing jagged riffs with a touch of melody that keeps things grounded. Frontman Noah Learmonth’s vocal shifts between operatic flair and raw-edged restraint.

On ‘Toyota Camry’, it hits a sweet spot. Laced with shimmering production and 80s-style backing vocals, the track pairs crisp, chiming guitars with a lyric sheet that captures fleeting teenage moments in sharp detail. It’s nostalgic, but not stuck in the past: cinematic, effortless and one of their finest songs to date.

‘Regret’ brings the mood down a notch, without losing any drive. The rhythm section holds it steady while Learmonth wrestles with emotional fallout. Closing track ‘Chinese Restaurant’ takes a more reflective turn, inspired by touring through UK venues stuck in nostalgic limbo. It’s quietly sad, offering a final glance at the past through steamed-up windows.

‘Empty Words’ doesn’t just build on Radio Free Alice’s earlier work, it sharpens it, deepens it and launches them somewhere far more interesting. Every track is a standout; every moment is considered. This isn’t just another promising EP from a buzzy guitar band, it’s a properly brilliant one: smart, stylish and already sounding like a future cult classic”.

After releasing Empty Words and completing a string of U.K. dates, the band headed to Europe. It has been a busy year for them. I can imagine an album coming along soon and there being opportunities for Radio Free Alice to play big festival stages. There is such a lot of great music around at the moment and the Australian five-piece are among the best and brightest. Make sure they are on your radar, because it is clear that this band are…

GOING to go far.

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Follow Radio Free Alice

PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Moran

Official:

https://www.rfa.band/

TikTok:

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

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/radiofreealiceband/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4cCA6V2DRIDqeYDyGIcEoj?si=jzpq73xXTwqukPrOitnD5Q

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBrBj0T42DmzYQw_g2NqGgw

FEATURE: Content/Content: Artist Burnout, Industry Expectation, and the Misnomer of the ‘Return’

FEATURE:

 

 

Content/Content

IN THIS PHOTO: Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine)/PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn de Wilde

Artist Burnout, Industry Expectation, and the Misnomer of the ‘Return’

__________

IT is not a new thing…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sam Fender is an artist who has spoken about his mental health struggles through the years

and in fact has been an issue in music for many decades. That idea of artists, especially those in the mainstream, producing a lot of content. Putting out music, doing interviews, touring, and generally not being out of the public eye for a second. The idea being that, if they are not visible or active for longer than a few months or so, then they are seen as dormant or, even worse, irrelevant. It is miserable that the industry thinks like that! Though maybe unavoidable. It is something that is present to this day. Social media perhaps puts pressure on artists that means they need to be putting content out all of the time. Some artists do like that, as it means they can engage with fans. However, I still think that there is this sense of expectation that means, unless you are releasing music regularly, touring, and also active online constantly, then you will be overtaken or seen as inactive. I wrote about the subject before, but I am coming back to that idea of the artist ‘returning’. Not to rant, it is relevant that the music industry – especially radio and music websites – stops using that word. ‘Return’. I mention this because, not only is it used constantly when any artist releases music after daring to be quiet for a few weeks. Two massive artists have had that label attached to them. Wet Leg released their eponymous debut album in 2022. Since then, they have been releasing singles and touring. They have not announced they are stepping away from music or they are going on hiatus.

Their new album, moisturizer, was released on 11th July. Three years between albums is seen as an artist stopping. The fact that Wet Leg were ‘returning’ is not only incorrect, but it also puts pressure on artists and is not good for their mental health. That they have to keep releasing music or else they are seen as faded or retreating. The same word was applied to Florence + The Machine. They released Dance Fever in 2022. Another three-year gap, Everybody Scream is out on 31st October. Like Wet Leg, Florence + The Machine have been touring and putting out music. It is something that drives me insane! It is not celebratory or right to say an artist is returning or ‘back’. It has this subtext. That you need to put out an album every year and never seemingly step away for a second. These artists are not taking a break. In the eyes of radio and the music press, they have gone away and are coming back. That must put this pressure on them that they need to up their game and never stop. We do need to recontextualise and actually think how we view artists. I know there is a lot of music out there so, to some degree, artists do need to put out new albums within a certain timeframe. However, the more people expect and the more we mislabel or hail this ‘return’ for an act who has left a three-year gap between albums, that then creates this push. They tour more, release more music and that has a big impact on their mental and physical health. It also means that we are going to lose artists. The prospect of burnout is very real. Streaming and physical sales do not make artists as much money as they would like – especially the former. Touring is a way of making money but, even then, artists sometimes lose money at gigs. It is an impossible situation.

I face the issue myself when it comes to content. The more I put out the more, I hope, it brings people in and attracts new followers. The long-term goal for me is being able to sustain my blog but also become more ambitious and have larger artists interested in interviews. Being able to expand my horizons. I do find that artists have this burden on them. A normal album cycle means so much work before a song is released. Teaser, trailer video, filmed pieces where artists talk about albums before the first of perhaps four or five singles is released. You then have all the promotional interviews before an album is released. Then there is as much touring as they can afford so they can make some money and be able to record again. A reason artists leave gaps between singles and albums is partly financial. Studios are very expensive and recording an album can cost thousands. If you want to sustain a career in music and do it full-time, then you either have to tour relentlessly or take another job. I know music fans can appreciate this. However, I have been annoyed by stations and the music press unconsciously adding weight onto the shoulders of artists. Digital burnout and the pressures of social media are also real. In 2022, this article reacted to Charli xcx leaving social media because of unkindness from fans. She has since come back, yet the pitfalls of always having to be online is being exposed to criticism, abuse and pressure from fans. Tegan and Sara were also affected by it:

“In January, Tegan and Sara launched a Substack newsletter offering in-depth insight into their creative process, which has more than 6,000 subscribers and a paid-for tier priced at $6 (£4.40) a month. “Substack is us unselfconsciously saying, ‘We like our words and our ideas and our stories have value’,” says Quin. “So much of what social media feels like is that we work for those companies, like Spotify, Instagram and Facebook, and don’t necessarily feel any benefit. It feels like I’m always just supplying more content for the food chain.”

Still, these alternatives aren’t wholesale replacements for social media. “I want to find people where they are,” says Quin. “I’m not trying to siphon them all into one place, but I’m never going to lie and tell you that I like social media. I hate it but I will do it because I don’t want people to miss out.”

Welsh agrees: “Sleeps Society and social media are complementary for us. Our social channels are there for casual fans who want to engage on and off but the community is for those who would consider us ‘their’ band.”

Despite the emerging alternatives available, the catch-22 remains for artists trying to have a healthier relationship to the internet while also promoting their work in an ever-more competitive field.

“Fans are intelligent people who can immediately see through artists spending time trying to do it all or having an impact just because they feel they need to be,” says Sophie Kennard, manager of Chase & Status. “The moment that it feels a bit disingenuous, it’s game over anyway. So they might as well utilise their time elsewhere.”

Ultimately, despite all the pitfalls of social media, there may be no going back. “Sometimes I wish the electrical grid would go down so I wouldn’t have to do it any more,” says Quin. “But we’re in the maze and I don’t know how to get out”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Thirdman/Pexels

Last month, Rolling Stone India ran a feature that asked what would happen to artists that didn’t want to feed the feed. That idea of constantly feeding the beast. Not only reserved to Indian artists, the industry is not talking enough about this expectation of always being visible. If, as I have repeated, you are not constantly on and out there, any new music after a brief spell is seen as a return. From where?! It is something that needs to change:

“In a 2025 study led by researchers at Goldsmiths and University College London (UCL), musicians described social media as a “content factory”—an environment that made them feel emotionally disconnected, anxious, and compulsively engaged, often at the cost of creativity. The paper, published in Frontiers in Psychology, featured interviews with 12 UK-based artists, who admitted that social media often made them feel “inferior,” triggered unhealthy comparisons, and took time away from songwriting and rest. One participant said, “I come off stage and the first thing I do is check my phone to see what people said online. It’s no longer about how the show felt—it’s about how it looks.”

This aligns with broader mental health data. A separate December 2024 study from UCL, involving over 15,000 UK adults from different nationalities, found that posting on social media—not browsing, not lurking—was linked to increased psychological distress one year later. Participants who posted daily reported significant declines in well-being, even after accounting for pre-existing mental health conditions. In contrast, those who consumed content passively showed no such decline. The lead researcher noted that the pressure to share publicly may fuel anxiety and identity stress, particularly among people whose careers depend on performing for an audience. Furthermore, a global study across 29 countries also found that excessive social media use is associated with lower well-being and higher psychological distress, especially in places where it’s widely used.

And it’s not just emerging artists feeling this strain. Addison Rae, one of the most recognizable faces of TikTok-era pop culture, has spoken openly about stepping back from the internet after feeling “so misunderstood” online. She described how the constant push to stay relevant made her feel disconnected from her real self. Actor Taron Egerton, while promoting his new show She Rides Shotgun, told the press that being back online after a hiatus made him feel “worse,” and that he intended to leave again soon. Their honesty speaks to something deeper—that even those who seemingly benefit most from social media can find it emotionally draining and creatively suffocating.

The music industry hasn’t made stepping back easy either. Let’s be honest: visibility is as close to currency as it gets. Algorithms reward frequency, not quality. Artists often feel like they’re being penalized for not posting enough—losing playlist spots, falling off festival shortlists, or being passed over for campaigns. Even artist managers and PR teams now factor in engagement rates before pitching for gigs. The assumption is: if you’re not online, you’re not working.

The current system incentivizes performance over process, packaging over patience, and audience growth over artistic exploration. Social media is framed as a solution, but for many artists, it’s another arena in which they must constantly compete, adapt, and sacrifice peace of mind.

It’s worth asking: why has an industry built around creativity become so tethered to platforms built around performance metrics? Why are artists expected to maintain a digital persona to validate their real-world output? And why does choosing rest or privacy still feel professionally risky?

If music is to remain a space for truth-telling, experimentation, and emotional honesty, then the systems that support it must also evolve. That means expanding definitions of success beyond visibility. It means supporting models where artistry doesn’t rely on feed frequency. And it means respecting an artist’s right to log off without disappearing because not every musician wants to be an influencer. And they shouldn’t have to be”.

There is a mental health issue in music that needs addressing, as this recent piece from The British Psychological Society explores. I guess this expectation for artists to perpetually be visible and feeding fans and the industry links to digital and psychological burnout. Artists limiting touring and, as a result, losing money. Which then causes another blow to their mental health. In March, at this year’s BRITs, The Last Dinner Party shared their experiences of burnout with NME:

“Looking back at how they were forced to cancel several live shows at the end of last year due to “emotional, mental, physical burnout”, the group told NME about the realisations they have had going into 2025.

“[It’s about] planning your year with limitations. Not just seizing every single opportunity because it’s great,” bassist Georgia Davies told NME. “You have to value yourself as the greatest thing. If you don’t put that first, everything else will crumble. Setting out your expectations for the year and what your physical and mental limitations are [is vital].

She continued: “We hope other artists learn from that, because we learned a really valuable lesson from having to [cancel shows], and we hope the industry at large absorbs some of it. A lot of other artists have had to do the same thing, and it’s tragic for the fans and everyone involved. I hope it’s something we all learn from going forward.”

Keyboardist Aurora Nishevci agreed, explaining how the band hope to encourage more widespread awareness across the industry: “There is not a lot of discussion. Historically, artists have not had a good time.”

She continued: “When you start a band, you just want to write music and play music. It’s something you love, but you don’t think you’re starting a business. You have to set the safeguarding for yourself, you have to learn how to run it and employ people. So when you enter into making any music from music — which is really hard in the first place — then there is that whole other learning curve that comes”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Billie Marten/PHOTO CREDIT: Frances Carter 

I think it is relevant to being in part of an interview that The Independent conducted with Billie Marten around the promotion of her new album, Dog Eared. An artist whose debut album arrived almost a decade ago, Marten is still seen as a ‘rising’ artist. Even though she is one of the hardest-working artists and has toured so much and released five studio albums, there is this perception she is still a teenage artist coming through. She also revealed how most artists are in financial ruin:

“Mostly, artists are in financial ruin no matter how successful they appear to be,” Marten affirms. “I’ve worked the hardest and the longest and I am the most busy I’ve ever been – and I am not doing great.”

Fair compensation has always been tricky to advocate for, considering that most musicians are more passionate about making music than money – “It’s cool to be in music, so why should you also get paid?”, Marten quips. She describes it as a reverse pyramid scheme: the artist is treated like they’re kings and queens at the top, waited on and chauffeured, with everyone else bowing down. But the reality is starkly different. “Everyone that’s hanging onto the artist is buying houses and having families and going on holiday,” says Marten wryly. “And the artists could never dream of doing that. It’s funny.” Though perhaps not “funny ha-ha”.

Rising overheads, inflation and shrinking show fees for touring artists are all major issues. But the biggest problem, financially, is the way we now consume music, which favours the tiny number of players at the top.

“There’s too much music and there are too many famous people,” Marten says frankly. She describes the Spotify royalties’ structure, which rewards those with the most plays with a bigger piece of the financial pie. “Less money is going to mid-level and low-level artists. It’s a capitalist mentality, essentially, and we’re all paying Taylor Swift.”

Though, I must admit, I have no regrets about meeting mine this time around (and not just because I’ve largely managed to avoid humiliating myself). Here is a woman who has, against the odds, managed to hold onto principles and idealism alongside the world-weary ennui. Who, despite her undeniably pretty voice, has done more than make a pretty record. “I just always hope that I’m making work that I believe in, and I’m making work for the right reasons,” she says when I ask whether her dreams have changed. “I hope that people find a home in it. And I hope that it’s an antidote to whatever their poison is – because I’ve seen people go through a lot of pain”.

I do wonder if there is any way to break this miasma and broken system. Most artists not being able to make money and facing burnout. This expectation that they need to put out content all the time. They can never be content and settled. They have to keep pushing and feed the machine. There being this discrepancy between artists at the top level and the rest. Such a massive gulf in terms of earnings and attention. Too much focus put on wealthy artists and not enough on other artists. The media and industry also need to stop expecting artists to keep releasing music! Not saying how they are ‘returning’ and ‘back’, rather than them simply continuing their career and actually not having been anywhere at all. That sort of labelling and misnomer is toxic and insulting! They need to realise the realities of the music industry today and what artists face. How they can’t afford to pump out albums every year and put out content every day. If things stay as they are and issues like burnout and pressure to put out content all the time is not addressed, then artists and the industry as a whole…

IS in real trouble.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty: Twenty: The Legacy and Influence of a Masterpiece

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at Forty

Twenty: The Legacy and Influence of a Masterpiece

__________

THIS is kind of bittersweet…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

as I am ending this twenty-feature series marking the fortieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. It turns forty on 16th September. In two days, we celebrate a masterpiece. The fifth studio album from Bush, I have covered all the songs and various aspects around the album. The final salute to Hounds of Love will look at its legacy and influence. I am going to source from a few different places. I will return to a recent edition of PROG, where multiple incredible artists talk about Hounds of Love and how Kate Bush has inspired and helped shape them. I will also get to Leah Kardos’s 33 1/3 Hounds of Love book. I will drop in a feature or two. However, starting out, I want to source from Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Thomson writes, in his amazing book, how “Hounds Of Love was enormously significant in determining the path of Bush’s future career and her subsequent media profile. It is both her best-selling blockbuster and her escape route, amassing the kind of sales and critical hosannas that allow an artist to do whatever  they want, whenever they want”. At this point, just before Hounds of Love was released, EMI left Kate Bush alone. Letting her get on with things. There would have been nerves that the album would have sounded like The Dreaming. The predecessor to Hounds of Love, that 1982-released album was lacking natural singles and was not seen as a massive commercial success. Regardless, and credit to them, EMI were not really forcing Bush to move in a different direction. The fact that Kate Bush was a producer and was almost showing the world why she was the right person to guide her own music, she proved any doubters and critical voices wrong.

Graeme Thomson notes how Kate Bush, and the way she handled fame and new attention, could have taught “Madonna a trick or two about how to be an emotionally and intellectually engaged female Pop phenomenon”. If someone like Madonna was embracing that stardom and toured, acted, and pretty much got her name and face everywhere, Bush recognised that this exposure and vulnerability was not desirable. Hounds of Love’s success, and Bush having her own home studio, meant that she did not have to work at a series of other studios, pay God knows how much, and very much be in the rat race. She never looked back. Thomson ends his chapter on Hounds of Love by writing the following: “Making and recording Hounds Of Love was not just a creative peak, but the first practical application of Bush’s working ethos: her career hereafter has become a self-sufficient cottage industry conducted in real time, at home, alone or among friends, keeping the industry and most other observers at several arms’ length”. Thomson observes that, once the heat and energy around the album started to die down after 1986, we would see less of her. Bush herself noted in an interview how she came out into the world to say that an album is out and then she would go away. Rather than be on this treadmill like most Pop artists, she was happier writing and being away from the spotlight. This is a legacy and aspect that has impacted so many artists. Maybe some would say it is impossible to be a major Pop artist today and not constantly being engaged and on social media. I will talk more about the legacy of Hounds of Love in terms of how it affects artists today. Or at least how it has enforced the ethos and sound of so many artists.

I shall quote a bit from the absolute final section of that Graeme Thomson chapter. He says how Hounds of Love “marked the birth of the Kate Bush we all now take for granted: an unimpeachable goddess, the critic’s darling, iconic, influential, a national treasure. Before 1985, the jury was divided. Hounds Of Love eventually settled the matter once and for all. It was a high watermark of artistic and aesthetic excellence – those songs, those videos, the languidly erotic sleeve, the mastery of technology – which she found almost impossible to better”. It is clear that Bush was at her happiest making Hounds of Love. You can hear and feel it in every note of the album. The same can be said of 2005’s Aerial. Another vast album with a conceptual aspect, this was when Bush was a relatively new mother and was infused with love for her new son, Bertie. I am going to skip to Leah Kardos’s words from her 33 1/3 book. How she goes so deep with Hounds of Love. She notes how “It’s a pop-historical monument; visionary, complex yet accessible, a high watermark in Kate Bush’s career, an ethereal masterpiece by all critical consensus. And yet the middle-aged record still vibrates with freshness in the continually evolving zeitgeist”. No doubt the new success for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) in 2022 - and 2023, when it surpassed a billion streams of Spotify - following its appearance in Stranger Things helped bring new eyes to the album it is from. A younger generation picking up the 1985 L.P. “But it’s also true that the reason Hounds Of Love remains so vital is because artists from every successive musical generation since it came out have carried its influence and embodied its legacy into the cultural fabric”. It is fascinating how Leah Kardos writes how (Hounds of Love’s) “impact on self-producing singer-songwriters, particularly non-male ones, has been seismic. The stunning triumph of Hounds Of Love cleared a path for future would-be innovators who now had less to fear from being labelled ‘eccentric’ or ‘hysterical’ by the misogynistic music press”. Bush’s stubbornness for advocating for herself and staying true to her vision also resonates through the years. Kardos writes how this belief and strength kicked doors open for artists who followed. “Her imagistic songwriting and immersive productions stretched the boundaries of what pop could be”.

Many have commented how Tori Amos’s debut album, 1992’s Little Earthquakes, bares similarities with Hounds of Love. Although a lot of the comparisons are lazy, there is no denying that Kate Bush’s influence is in there! From the sound of the album to its cover art, you  can feel Bush and Amos’s heartbeats entangled. Amos shared in an interview how The Ninth Wave, the second side of Hounds of Love, changed her life and turned it inside out. It made her brave enough to leave the man she was living with at the time. Leah Kardos asks us to look beyond Tori Amos and the other artists who have been inspired by Hounds of Love. They include Florence Welch, Natasha Khan (Bat for Lashes), Cat Power, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Annie Clark (St. Vincent) and even Taylor Swift. Björk, Grimes and Imogen Heap are also inspired by Bush and Hounds of Love. In terms of how it showed that you can produce your own work in an industry that is sexist and often dominated by men. Bush, this role model for D.I.Y. artists  “wishing to control every aspect of their presentation, from studio construction to image curation”. It is not only that autonomy that has influenced a wave of artists but its “emotionally articulate artistry”. Artists like Jenny Hval Julia Holter and Brian Molko (Placebo) talked about how Hounds of Love shaped their lives. For Suede’s Brett Anderson, Hounds of Love was the album that made him want to make albums. Leah Kardos ended her book by saying, even though she is not a famous musician, Hounds of Love had a profound impact. In terms of how it allowed her to follow her muse and work the way she wanted to. The success of Hounds of Love allowed Bush the opportunity to wait three or four years between albums (twelve in fact between 1993’s The Red Shoes and 2005’s Aerial). “All evidence suggests that Hounds Of Love will continue to remain relevant, resonant and alive. Its beauty and generosity are timeless. Its message of love’s triumph over pain, isolation and darkness is something we need to hear, to feel, now more than ever”.

IN THIS PHOTO: The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies)/PHOTO CREDIT: Lily Warring

I cannot quote everything from the section of PROG’s celebration of Hounds of Love, where we get some reaction and insight from artists and how Hounds of Love has affected them. The Anchoress, Within Temptation’s Sharon den Adel, Auri’s Johanna Kurkela, The Blackheart Orchestra’s Chrissy Mostyn and Exploring Birdsong’s Lynsey Ward explored the magic and influence of the album. Mostyn spoke about how Bush’s “songwriting and sonic choices feel sophisticated and wholly deliberate”. She continued that Hounds of Love “feels like every facet of Kate Bush’s artistry at the very peak of its powers”. Chrissy Mostyn also raised an interesting observation: “Kate builds songs like Roman roads, not letting the hills and rivers of convention or comprise get in the way and not getting tempted by the gentle slopes and easy valleys”. She concludes how “Every song is a cathedral of creativity”. The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies) bought Hounds of Love from Fopp in Covent Garden (which is still there today). The first Kate Bush album in her collection, it was a revelatory moment: “I fell headlong in love with the album as an example of how you could be completely in control of your own vision as a songwriter, producer and performer”. The Anchoress was also moved by the unity of technology ambitiousness and the raw emotions explored and exposed through the album: “What was startling to me was the uncompromising collision of her playful sonic imagination, as heard in the dense production and use of Fairlight samples, alongside the emotional heft of her vocal performance. I was hooked. It’s been a touchstone for me ever since”. Lynsey Ward was a teenager when she first heard Hounds of Love. Captivated by Hounds of Love and instantly struck, she was not expecting an album like this, having heard Wuthering Heights (from 1978’s The Kick Inside) and the sound of that single. “I knew from the first listen that I’d carry her influence with me every day for the rest of my life”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Lynsey Ward (Exploring Birdsong)/PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Pallant

The Anchoress commended Hounds of Love, and it was influential in terms of her debut album, 2016’s Confessions of a Romance Novelist. The Ninth Wave more compelling to her than the A-side of Hounds of Love. As it was the first Kate Bush album she heard, there was this feeling that this more experimental side was normal. So it was natural that The Anchoress would harness this in her own music. A review did also say how The Anchoress’s debut is a Hounds of Love for the twenty-first century, something that delights The Anchoress! A very flattering description from someone who adores Hounds of Love! Johanna Kurkela was born when Hounds of Love came out. However, she admires Kate Bush and her explorative and experimental nature. A pioneering and explorative artist. Her band, Auri, has the same energy and ethos. “The best music is always born from authenticity and freedom”. The Anchoress highlighted how Hounds of Love shows how you can write more commercial songs like Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) “whilst simultaneously satisfying your more experimental urges” on tracks like Mother Stands for Comfort. Obviously, go and buy Hounds of Love and experience this album. Many of you will have heard it multiple times, though many are coming to it new in 2025 – forty years after its release. It is this masterpiece that continues to influence artists sonically, emotionally or visually. Even Taylor Swift’s cover art for her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, distinctly nods to Kate Bush and her promotional images for Hounds of Love’s second side, The Ninth Wave.

I will actually end with one feature. It is from Rolling Stone UK from last year. In fact, this it is an extract from Leah Kardos’s Hound of Love book. However, I think it relevant when considering how the album became universally adored and went on to become this classic:

“As years pass, the album continues to accrue cultural value. Music publications like Rolling Stone, Q, NME, Uncut and Mojo have voted Hounds Of Love among the greatest albums of all time. In their 2016 retrospective review, Pitchfork gave the album a perfect ten out of ten, with critic Barry Walters lauding it as ‘the Sgt. Pepper of the digital age’s dawn; a milestone in penetratingly fanciful pop’. In a 1985 interview with Musician, Bush said her newest album was ‘the one I’m most happy with’. Twenty years later, speaking to Tom Doyle for Mojo, she admitted that she still felt proud of how Hounds Of Love turned out, calling it, ‘probably my best album as a whole’.

It is significant that her 2014 London concert residency Before The Dawn, the artist’s late, and so far only, return to live performance following a gap of thirty-five years from her last shows in 1979, the Tour of Life, had a setlist that included all but two songs from Hounds Of Love (the exceptions being ‘The Big Sky’ and ‘Mother Stands for Comfort’). Nestled in the middle of a three-act structure, The Ninth Wave was presented in its entirety as an immersive, music-theatrical experience, fulfilling Bush’s long-held aspiration to develop the piece in a visual direction (‘for me, from the beginning, The Ninth Wave was a film. That’s how I thought of it.’) Those lucky ones in attendance at Before The Dawn could finally experience something of the artist’s personal vision for the work. Bush’s unexpected return to the stage saw fans from all corners of the globe making pilgrimages to the Hammersmith Odeon (known today as the Eventim Apollo, formerly the Hammersmith Apollo). It was the same venue where she performed the final Tour of Life show in 1979, which was, until that point, assumed to be the last show she would ever do. Tickets sold out in a matter of minutes, and as a result of the incredible amount of buzz the concerts generated, Bush saw eight of her albums enter the UK top 40 chart simultaneously, becoming the first woman to have ever done so. On this particular statistic, she reigns alongside rarefied male company: Elvis Presley (with twelve entries in 1977 following his death) and The Beatles (eleven entries off the back of their 2009 reissues).

As of late, Hounds Of Love has been experiencing a fascinating renaissance in popular culture. During the summer of 2022, ‘Running Up That Hill’ reappeared on the worldwide charts due to a sudden and dramatic surge in its popularity, sparked by a prominent sync placement in the fourth season of Netflix’s sci-fi fantasy series Stranger Things. ‘Running Up That Hill’ (or ‘RUTH’, as the artist herself later referred to it) became a global phenomenon. Within weeks of the first seven episodes being released on 27 May, it was clocking eight-million-plus streams per day. Across June and July, it was the most-played track in the world, twice topping the Billboard Global 200 and reaching number one spots in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, Belgium, Lithuania and Luxembourg. Even though it was a significant hit in the UK back in 1985 (reaching number three), the song eclipsed itself in 2022, staying put in the number one spot for three weeks. ‘Running Up That Hill’ was named the UK’s Song of the Summer by the Official Charts Company, and its latent success broke a number of Guinness World Records: the single that took the longest time to reach number one (thirty-six years and 310 days from date of release); at sixty-three, she became the oldest female artist to reach number one, snatching the title from Cher, who was fifty-two when ‘Believe’ hit the top spot in 1998. In a Christmas message posted to her website, Bush reflected on her ‘crazy, roller coaster year’, saying, ‘I still reel from the success of RUTH, being the No 1 track of this summer. What an honour! . . . It was such a great feeling to see so many of the younger generation enjoying the song. It seems that quite a lot of them thought I was a new artist! I love that!’

The contemporary resurgence of ‘Running Up That Hill’ was surely a confluence of many factors and not purely reducible to the lyrical and musical qualities of the song itself, stunning as they are. Part of it was immaculate timing: 2022 was a difficult year, beginning as it did in the grip of the Covid variant Omicron, with people reeling from the fog and fatigue of lingering lockdowns, tentatively re-emerging into a terrifyingly altered world at war. In our collective experience of that fear and uncertainty, with the forced separations, traumas and losses of the pandemic’s stolen years, and in the face of a truly frightening ecological future, all the while we continue to be forced to navigate an increasingly toxic, socially and politically polarized reality, Bush’s song of radical empathy, trust and determination felt like a tonic. But the song was only one part of a larger work of art that many newcomers would soon discover. Hounds Of Love is a journey through the beautiful and difficult terrains of vast and complicated emotional landscapes. Within it are songs of stubborn desire, bravery and cowardice, magical thinking, guilt and innocence, cold love, childlike joy, darkness and whimsy, self-doubt, surviving something extremely difficult and emerging on the other side of it stronger, wiser, transformed. It’s a work of sweeping, thrilling ambition with a wealth of meticulous detail rendered in widescreen cinemascope – a work that was borne from a major work-life change that allowed the artist to write and record privately, in time with her own creative rhythms, returning to the same spaces where she sought emotional refuge in music as a child. Literate, musically elemental and atmospherically complex, the material strikes a balance between the accessible and strange, commercial and conceptual.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Structures are confidently grounded in intensifying repetition and the whole is elegantly stitched together with subtle, recurring themes, familiar harmonic angles, imagistic echoes. The music and lyrics are supercharged by Bush’s virtuoso vocal production and stunning use of the Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer, with which she creates immersive soundworlds and sumptuous arrangements that combine the precision of cutting-edge music tech with the warmth and energy of rock and folk instrumentation. Familiar images return: pleading ghosts, sea, sky, night, land and dreamscapes; references to romantic literature; horror movies; books; Arthurian and folkloric symbolism; and uncanny animalia. The blackbird appears, a potent symbol that becomes a repeating reference in Bush’s work from this point onwards. From the album art on the front and back covers, we recognize the correspondence between different points of view from above and below; with the stars in her hair and the sea around her legs, we see the female body in the water and of the air”.

I will end it there. In two days (16th September), all Kate Bush fans will remember Hounds of Love. Many will share their opinions on social media. Why they love the album and how it touches them. For me, although it is not my favourite Kate Bush album (that is 1978’s The Kick Inside), it is one I recognise as flawless. The fact it has this first side with more commercial singles that are astonishing in their own right, but also this conceptual second side, The Ninth Wave. They both fit together but are very different! I was not lucky enough to see Bush mount most of the songs from Hounds of Love for her 2014 Before the Dawn residency, though those who went attest to how moving it was! In this twenty-feature run, I have explored the album’s songs and I have learned so so much. I have new appreciation and love for Hounds of Love. Kate Bush as a producer. How it is timeless and so relevant today! These amazing artists who have all been affected in personal and distinct ways. We will be listening to and discussing this phenomenal album...

FOR generations more.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential October Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: Cat Burns

Essential October Releases

__________

PERHAPS of the busiest months…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sigrid

for great new music, I am going to recommend albums due next month that you will want to pre-order. I am referencing this website. I am starting out with 3rd October and Idlewild’s Idlewild. The Scottish Rock band formed in 1995. Thirty years after their start and they prepare to release their eponymous album. This is one that you will definitely want to pre-order:

“Immediately, there is the sense of a band in motion, their storied past not an anchor but a spur. Idlewild's songs offer a string of compelling answers: "Everything adds up to the present moment, doesn't it?" Woomble asks.

Idlewild have been a lot of different things. They were a teenage punk band, slinging buzzsaw riffs and barbed refrains, before becoming one of the most compelling mainstream rock groups of their generation. With 2019's Interview Music, they made sprawling art-pop. On Idlewild, they welcome each of these past selves into the room.

Work on a follow-up to Interview Music was initially planned to begin immediately after the band wrapped up touring, but the pandemic put things into a skid. Touring the 20th anniversary of The Remote Part in 2022 was a visceral reminder of where they'd been and a prompt for what might come next.

They assembled songs that celebrated pop hooks and livewire distortion, as well as expressive interplay. Writing continued at Post Electric Studio in Edinburgh and the Isle of Iona Library, before a short, sharp burst of recording in early 2025.

The result is a lean, focused document -- 10 tracks that get in and out in 30 minutes and change. With Jones engineering and mixing, the production reflects a collaborative, in-house approach. "We were referencing ourselves... realising that we had a 'sound'," Woomble says. Facing forward, not back, Idlewild captures beauty, nuance, and clarity from three decades of sound and feeling -- spontaneous, purposeful, and unmistakably them”.

One of the biggest albums of this year comes from Taylor Swift. The Life of a Showgirl is out on 3rd October. You can pre-order it here. I am writing this feature on 30th August, so there will be more details revealed by the time you are reading this. However, Billboard provide us with some details of what we know so far:

“Taylor Swift didn’t rest for long after wrapping her global Eras Tour. After just eight months of downtime, the pop superstar all but broke the internet by revealing at 12:12 a.m. ET Tuesday (Aug. 12) that she’d be embarking on a brand new era with the release of an album titled The Life of a Showgirl, which will mark the 12th studio LP in her discography.

What was almost as eye-popping as the announcement itself was the way she shared the news. In lieu of her more recent method of unveiling new albums during award-show acceptance speeches — like she did for 2022’s Midnights at the VMAs and 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department at the Grammys — Swift instead chose a much more casual route of spreading the word this time. Joining boyfriend Travis Kelce on his and Jason Kelce’s New Heights podcast, the 14-time Grammy winner simply revealed the project’s existence and title in a clip posted to the show’s social media accounts, just one day before the full episode’s release.

“So, I wanted to show you something,” she said in the video, pulling a blurred-out vinyl from a “T.S.” brief case as the Kansas City Chiefs tight end beamed beside her. “This is my brand new album, The Life of a Showgirl.”

When the podcast episode finally dropped, filled with fresh details about the album, Swift also shared information about its cover art, release date and tracklist in an Instagram announcement. “And, baby, that’s show business for you,” its caption read.

As fans continue to clamor for all the information they can get on the LP leading up to its release date, Billboard is keeping track of every detail Swift reveals in the meantime. Keep reading to see everything there is to know — so far — about The Life of a Showgirl below.

The Title

The title of The Life of a Showgirl was the first detail Swift revealed about the project, doing so in the New Heights clip, which was posted after a timer on her website ticked down to 12:12 a.m. ET on Aug. 12. Fans immediately started to come up with theories about what inspired the theatrical name, with some people pointing out that scenes from Gold Diggers of 1933 — a 92-year-old film about showgirls — just so happen to match the aesthetic of her Eras Tour performance of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”

“Okay wait I’m already obsessed with this album concept,” one fan wrote of the title on X. “The Life of a Showgirl potentially being about Taylor’s life during the eras tour, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, the physical and mental toll, the glitz and the glam, the celebrations, the constant travel, the longing and long distance… I am OBSESSED”.

There are a few from 10th October that I want to get to. LANY’s Soft is an album that I think people should pre-order. For those who might not be familiar with the band. LANY are an American Pop-Rock band/duo from Los Angeles. They formed in Nashville in 2014 and consist of guitarist and lead vocalist Paul Jason Klein and drummer Jake Clifford Goss. There are additional musicians on Soft. However, at its core, LANY are a duo:

“Lany have quietly cracked the mainstream on their own terms as one of the most ubiquitous, unpredictable, and undeniable bands of this era. Tallying billions of streams, selling out legendary arenas, and earning widespread critical acclaim, the platinum-certified Los Angeles group consistently deliver rafter-reaching anthems anchored by airtight songcraft and the outsized personality of enigmatic frontman and songwriter Paul Jason Klein. Lany release their brand new album Soft. Thematically and visually Soft exists in tension — an intentional contrast of the hard and soft. Tangible, literal, physical hardness juxtaposed with metaphorical, relational (and, at times too, physical) softness. Sonically, the album explores these same tensions — much of the softness and vulnerability of lyric that has defined Lany’s acclaimed career, now with a harder, braver edge to the production”.

Another terrific album out on 10th October that I think people should get is Madi Diaz’s Fatal Optimist. You can pre-order the album here. This is a terrific American artist that everyone should know about. There are not that many details available about the album. However, this feature from July does give us some information about the Fatal Optimist and its lead single, Feel Something:

“Madi Diaz is set to delve deeper into the raw emotional landscape of heartbreak with her newly announced album, Fatal Optimist, scheduled for release on October 10, 2025, through ANTI-. The announcement is accompanied by the lead single and video, “Feel Something,” a track that offers a poignant first glimpse into what promises to be her most hauntingly sparse record to date.

Following her 2021 breakthrough, History of a Feeling, and the two-time Grammy-nominated Weird Faith from 2024, Fatal Optimist is being positioned as the powerful final chapter in a trilogy of albums exploring the nuances of heartache. This new collection of songs finds Diaz at her most vulnerable, cutting to the core of her experiences with startling precision.

The album was born from a period of intense isolation for Diaz. After the end of a significant relationship, she retreated to an island, a physical manifestation of the emotional solitude she was navigating. “I was already describing myself as an emotional island swimming in so much of an ocean of feelings,” Diaz shared in her journal. This time of introspection, confronting rage, embarrassment, and grief, ultimately led to a sense of inner wholeness and became the fertile ground for Fatal Optimist. “The only person I’m never gonna leave is myself,” she affirms.

Initially attempting to record the songs with friends, Diaz realised the album demanded a sound that mirrored her solitary experience. She restarted the process in Southern California with co-producer Gabe Wax (known for his work with Soccer Mommy and Zach Bryan), stripping the production down to its essentials: Diaz, her acoustic guitar, and subtle accompaniments.

The lead single, “Feel Something,” encapsulates the urgent, oscillating emotions of post-breakup limbo. Propelled by energetic acoustic strumming and Diaz’s masterful phrasing, the track captures the desperate yearning to reconnect with a love that has already been lost. The accompanying video, directed by Allister Ann, visually portrays this futility as Diaz reaches for a connection that is no longer there.

Reflecting on the single, Diaz says, “‘Feel Something’ is about the deep yearning and desire to connect. It’s the moment when you’re trying to call in the love that was lost. It’s the first single off the album because it has the sense of urgency and panic that I felt at that first moment I noticed I was alone in my relationship.”

In support of the album, Diaz has also announced an extensive North American tour for the autumn, offering audiences a chance to experience the profound intimacy of Fatal Optimist live”.

There is one more album due out on 10th October that I want to get to. The following three weeks are especially busy, so I will get there soon. However, The Wytches’ Talking Machine needs to be mentioned. I think I covered the Brighton four-piece quite a few years ago now. A band who have been around for a long time now but have never really got the full credit they deserve. I do think that Talking Machine should be investigated by all. You can go and pre-order the album here:

“The Wytches return for their latest incendiary album, Talking Machine, the Brighton 4 piece bringing a whole new avalanche of their undeniable psych inflused jet black soundscapes alongside a pleasingly lengthy tour. "I saw the term “Talking Machine” in a book I was reading about Thomas Edison" lead singer Kristian muses. "It was a nickname for gramophones. I thought that was fitting enough for an album title but I guess like a lot of people, the whole AI thing has been on my mind a lot and I saw a connection there too. Thomas Edison would host these events called Tone Tests where he’d demonstrate how much audio recordings had advanced by fooling the audience in to thinking they were listening to musicians playing live but it was actually all pre-recorded, playing from a gramophone. People feared that a lot of jobs in the entertainment industry and beyond would be replaced by technology, a lot like what’s going on now”.

There are five albums due out on 17th October I want to cover off. The first is bar italia’s Some Like It Hot. Another amazing band that I guess are a bit more underground, if you are unfamiliar with their work, you should definitely get involved with Some Like It Hot. For those who recognise the title, as Rough Trade explain, it bears some parallels with the classic 1959 film:

“Some Like It Hot is a 1959 film starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon about a group of rogue musicians on the adventure path. It is funny, sexy, rambunctious and evergreen – a showcase of a triple-threat cast at full-throttle. Some Like It Hot is also the new album by London three-piece bar italia – on Matador – and certain parallels are perhaps not accidental. It pulses with romance, intrigue, self-discovery and rapture over lustful rockers, spellbinding folk pop, punch-drunk ballads and undefinable moments that sneak up on you like a burst of 5pm sunshine. The record is the culmination of the joint world of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton – three singer-songwriters who have transcended their underground roots to embrace a bold, widescreen horizon.

The synergy of this three-way blunt rotation is embedded in the trio’s DNA. Cristante brings a studied actors’ sensibility to vocals ranging from honeyed (the aforementioned ‘Marble Arch’) to hell-bent and possessed (‘rooster’). Fehmi ranges from airy, brooding baritone (‘Lioness’) to mic-chewing megaphone histrionics (‘omni shambles’). Fenton, a wispy tenor, can veer between mystical melodicism and soaring blue-eyed soul within the same 8 bars (‘Plastered’).

The cultivation of their sound, from early homespun recordings like hand drawn sketches (the band presented an exhibition of their drawings in 2023) into the ceiling-wide brush strokes of Some Like It Hot, was chiselled via a relentless writing and touring schedule. When bar italia emerged in 2023 from an underground following to release two critically acclaimed albums on Matador only several months apart – the poised Tracey Denim and the grand The Twits – they were a shy, eye-contact-avoiding band, starting sets in darkness and just as soon disappearing backstage. They spent the next two years traversing the globe, with headline performances from Istanbul to Tokyo, sold-out multi-night stints in New York and Los Angeles, and festivals including Corona Capital, Glastonbury and Coachella. With over 160 shows worldwide across 2023-2024, they dispelled any mystique by becoming an exhibitionist and muscular five-piece that gives multiple encores – equally comfortable at festival mosh-pit incitement and moments of pin-drop intimacy.

Some Like It Hot is telling of this journey: a collection of rock songs voraciously embracing the main stage. The lightning choruses of ‘omni shambles’ and ‘Eyepatch’ show a band who have mastered melding their idiosyncrasies into tightly coiled pop songs. A pining for tangibility abounds: “just show me the face that you've been trying to hide”, Fenton opines on the Balkan-tinged waltz of ‘bad reputation’. Other songs surrender to abandon wholesale: “I was lost to the world from the moment we kissed”, Fenton sings on ‘rooster’, while on the 12-string new wave majesty of ‘Lioness’, Fehmi states, “You have no idea what I can do for you when I’m in this mood”.

One of the most consistent artists around, Miles Kane releases Sunlight in the Shadows on 17th October. Most of you will know about Kane, but for anyone who is perhaps fresh, I think that his latest release is going to be well worth seeking out. You can check out the album here. He is a remarkable songwriter. I have no doubt that this album is going to collect a lot of positive reviews. Small wonder when you consider his back catalogue and how he has produced stunning album after stunning album:

“Miles Kane's 2025 release, Sunlight In The Shadows, marks his first Easy Eye Sound album teaming up with Grammy-winning producer Dan Auerbach. Co-written with Auerbach, Patrick Carney, Daniel Tashian, and Pat McLaughlin.

The guitar-driven album signals a fresh direction in Kane’s ever-evolving solo career. Featuring “Love Is Cruel,” “I Pray,” and “Electric Flower.”

A dynamic performer and songwriter, Kane has spent over a decade shaping a distinctive path – both as a solo artist and as co-frontman of The Last Shadow Puppets, alongside Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner.

His previous solo albums include Colour of the Trap (2011), Don’t Forget Who You Are (2013), Coup De Grace (2018), Change the Show (2022), and One Man Band (2023), each showcasing a new side of his sound and artistry”.

An album I am particularly excited about is Poliça’s Dreams Go. The U.S. band formed in 2011. This album follows from 2022’s Madness. You can find out more about Dreams Go here. You can also pre-order it from Rough Trade. This is going to sit alongside the best albums of this year, I have no doubt. I have been following their music for a long time now and am always amazed. Such an incredible band that everyone should know about:

“Since their emergence from Minneapolis’ vibrant underground in 2011, Polica has carved out a singular space in electronic indie-pop, blending shadowy synths, pulsating rhythms, and the unmistakable vocal presence of Channy Leaneagh.
With Dreams Go, Polica deliver their most emotionally resonant and texturally rich work to date—a poignant meditation on loss, resilience, and the fragile beauty of holding on. Written and recorded in the shadow of bassist Chris Bierden’s glioblastoma diagnosis, the album is both elegy and act of preservation, capturing the band at a moment of profound transition.
The LP is a collection of eight new songs recorded at Pachyderm Studio in Minnesota, marking the band’s final sessions with Chris Bierden before he lost the ability to play. The record pulses with a raw, elegiac energy, a testament to the chemistry that defined Polica's first decade.
Though born of grief, Dreams Go is anything but static. It breathes, shimmers, and ultimately insists on the power of making art in the face of uncertainty. Dreams Go stands as a moving testament to the band’s creative bond, and to Bierden’s indelible role within it”.

Let’s round off with two albums that you will definitely want to get. One might be the best-reviewed album of the year. A huge release that you will not be able to avoid. I want to start with Sudan Archives’ THE BPM. You can pre-order the album here. In July, DJ Mag ran a feature that promoted the forthcoming THE BPM. They also published an interview with her:

“Sudan Archives has announced a new album. 'The BPM' will land on 17th October via Stones Throw.

You can check the LP tracks 'MY TYPE', which the artist describes as her first "rap rap song", and 'Yea Yea Yea', below. These follow 'DEAD', which landed in June accompanied by a video directed by Jonah Haber. A video for 'MY TAPE' has also been released and can be watched below.

Real name Brittney Parks, 'The BPM' is the vocalist, violinist, and producer's third album, and centres on the idea of striking out alone and following your own path to achieve artistic fulfilment.

Recorded in Chicago and Detroit — reflecting her mother's Michigan roots and her father's upbringing in Illinois — the album pays homage to the storied electronic music legacies of both cities and states. Shades of other regionalised US dance sounds, including Jersey club, are also evident, alongside more experimental beats. Meanwhile, fans are introduced to a new persona, Gadget Girl: a technologically advanced musician.

"I feel like my beats have always sounded a bit like where my parents are from, but this time it had this more experimental vibe to it, and I was very intentional about the fact that I wanted to make a dance record," Parks told Vogue in a recent interview. "My music has always been basically made with a lot of technology, a lot of little robots.”

"I was never the girl in a band in high school – I could only express myself for the first time when I got my first iPad and started making beats on it, and when I got my first electric violin. I’m all gadget girled out now, but I’ve never felt so free as a human,” Parks said.

Revisit DJ Mag's feature interview with Sudan Archives here”.

The album I am referring to that is going to scoop huge reviews is The Last Dinner Party’s From the Pyre. The second album from the London group, it follows the Mercury-nominated debut, last year’s Prelude to Ecstasy. Having toured extensively since that album’s release, it is impressive they have followed up so quickly with an album that has pushed their sound forward but seems like it might also top Prelude to Ecstasy in many ways:

“The Last Dinner Party on the new album: “This record is a collection of stories, and the concept of album-as-mythos binds them. ‘The Pyre’ itself is an allegorical place in which these tales originate, a place of violence and destruction but also regeneration, passion and light.
“The songs are character driven but still deeply personal, a commonplace life event pushed to pathological extreme. Being ghosted becomes a Western dance with a killer, and heartbreak laughs into the face of the apocalypse. Lyrics invoke rifles, scythes, sailors, saints, cowboys, floods, Mother Earth, Joan of Arc, and blazing infernos. We found this kind of evocative imagery to be the most honest and truthful way to discuss the way our experiences felt, giving each the emotional weight it deserves.” 
“This record feels a little darker, more raw and more earthy; it takes place looking out at a sublime landscape rather than seated an opulent table. It also feels metatextual and cheeky in places, like a knowing look reflected back at ourselves”.

There are three albums form 24th October that I want to highlight. I am really looking forward to Circa Waves’ Death & Love Pt.2. One of the very best bands around, Circa Waves are going to launch an album that will be among this year’s best. You can pre-order it here. I am a fan of the band, though I would also urge those who know little about the band to buy it:

“Circa Waves release their double album Death and Love via Lower Third. Death and Love Pt.1 was both terrifying and liberating to write, and is the first installment of urgent, 9-track hits of cathartic guitar-pop, serving as a powerful coping mechanism to help process frontman Kieran Shudall's near-death experience.

The album sees supreme indie hits including a nice big slab of Strokes-y dancefloor destruction of "Like You Did Before" to its first offering "We Made It", as well as the extremely topical and longing "American Dream".

Back in early 2023, Kieran received a call from doctors to say that the main artery in his heart was severely blocked. Two days later, he was lying on an operating table watching a wire being inserted into his heart to fix it. What followed was the canceling of a lot of shows, working out a lot of medication, and most crucially, now having to navigate a new way of life. And the results are quite simply stunning.

Self-produced by Kieran, and engineered by Matt Wiggins (Adele, Lana Del Rey, Glass Animals), the nine tracks that make up Death and Love Pt.1 ooze nostalgia, and hark back to the sounds and themes that made Shudall want to pick up a guitar in the very first place.

Death and Love is an incredibly powerful snapshot in time - a reflection on a moment of true terror, and the joy of coming through the other side. It's a brave and remarkable next step for a band in the finest form of their career”.

The second album from 24th October I am highlighting is Just Mustard’s WE WERE JUST HERE. The County Louth band need to be on your radar. Their 2022 sophomore album, Heart Under, was hugely acclaimed. You can pre-order their forthcoming album here. I have never seen Just Mustard live but can imagine that the band are a sensational live experience. Here is some detail about the upcoming WE WERE JUST HERE:

“On WE WERE JUST HERE, Dundalk’s Just Mustard surge out of the shadows from the submerged world of Heart Under with a sound that leans toward light and euphoria. Their signature elements remain intact - warped guitars, cavernous low ends, twisted sound design - but this time the noise is channeled into something warmer and more melodic. Inspired by club spaces and physical joy, the songs strive for immediacy and feeling. Katie Ball’s vocals rise higher in the mix, capturing a conflicted pursuit of happiness that she describes as “trying to feel euphoric, but at a cost.” Produced by the band and mixed by David Wrench (FKA Twigs, Frank Ocean, Caribou) the album expands their emotional palette while keeping things strange, textured, and uniquely their own. WE WERE JUST HERE explodes into technicolor, creating a world that feels immediate, haunted and ecstatic”.

Before rounding up with four great albums that are due to be released on Hallowe’en, there is another big album out on 24th October you need to know about. Sigrid’s There’s Always More That I Could Say is an album I cannot wait for. I have been following her music since her 2019 debut album, Sucker Punch. You can pre-order’s new album here. This article from DORK provide more some detail about the Norwegian artist’s new work. One of the great artists in the world in my opinion. Someone else that does not get the full credit that she deserves:

“Sigrid is set to release her third studio album, ‘There’s Always More That I Could Say’, on 24th October 2025 via Island / EMI, and has shared a new single, ‘Fort Knox’, which landed as BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record.

Written and co-produced with a renewed sense of creative freedom, the record is described as spanning infatuation, heartbreak and reflection. ‘Fort Knox’ channels post-break-up fury, recorded at a rustic studio by the harbour in Bergen — the same space where much of ‘Sucker Punch’ took shape.

‘Fort Knox’ follows ‘Jellyfish’, which Sigrid described as “easy, like a Scandinavian summer.” Both songs mark a return to instinct-led writing after she stepped back from “content culture” in 2024, with solo trips to remote parts of Norway and festival sets in South America helping reignite her creative spark.

“I love using my voice as a vessel to pour my heart out,” she shares, “but on this song, I wanted it to sound carefree, joyful and playful – maybe a bit nonchalant.”

‘Jellyfish’ was written with longtime collaborator Askjell Solstrand, who co-wrote and produced Sigrid’s breakthrough ballad ‘Dynamite’. This summer, Sigrid returned to European festivals, including Rock Werchter and a headline set on the Second Stage at Latitude. She also joined Ed Sheeran at Ullevaal Stadium in Oslo.

The tracklisting for ‘There’s Always More That I Could Say’ reads:

‘I’ll Always Be Your Girl’
‘Jellyfish’
‘Do It Again’
‘Kiss The Sky’
‘Two Years’
‘Hush Baby, Hurry Slowly’
‘Fort Knox’
‘There’s Always More That I Could Say’
‘Have You Heard This Song Before’
‘Eternal Sunshine’”.

The first album due out on 31st October that you need to pre-order is Anna von Hausswolff’s ICONOCLASTS. There is a recent interview between her and Iggy Pop that is well worth reading. There are not many details available about ICONOCLASTS. You can pre-order the album here. This follow’s 2020’s All Thoughts Fly. Her music is truly remarkable, so I am keen to see what comes from her sixth studio album. There is so much atmosphere and drama. Her 2020 album was entirely instrumental, performed entirely on pipe organ:

“Centered around her incomparable voice and expressive organ playing, the album features Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain among others. Together with producer Filip Leyman, she has crafted a true epic of experimental rock music, full of bombast and emotion. Growing out of her dance-theater piece Atlas Song which had a sold out run at Gothenburg's Opera, this is a singular artist at the absolute height of her powers”.

Cat Burns’s How to Be Human is available to pre-order here. Again, there is very little about the album available, but there are one or two recent interviews with Burns. Here is one that I would recommend you have a read of. Cat Burns is one of our finest songwriters and someone who is primed for huge and long-terms success. Anyone who has not heard her music and is not familiar with her then I would suggest you out her debut album from lats year, Early Twenties. Quickly following it up, I feel that How to Be Human will gain huge reviews:

“Multi-Brit and 2024 Mercury Prize nominee Cat Burns returns with How To Be Human.

It’s a deeply personal and introspective record, channeling Cat’s personal thoughts and even voice notes as she’s moves through a huge time of upheaval in her life, into a bright new chapter.
Cat’s written all songs, plus production comes from Rob Milton (Holly Humberstone/Chloe Qisha) plus Jordan Riley, Humble The Great, GG Stok. It's 16 tracks in duration, including the previous single ‘GIRLS!' and brand new ‘All This Love’”.

The penultimate album from October that I want to spotlight is Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream. You can pre-order it here. This feature from NME states how Everybody Scream is her most personal record yet. Florence Welch has been inspired by JADE’s new music and her experimental Pop. An amazing group, this is another remarkable album from Florence + The Machine. When the title track was released, there was such a hugely positive reaction. So much anticipation to hear what will come from their sixth studio album:

“Florence Welch has spoken about the moodboard she shared with IDLES‘ Mark Bowen when creating Florence + The Machine‘s new album ‘Everybody Scream’.

The London band are due to release their sixth studio record on October 31, and have previewed the project with its epic title track. Welch and co. had previously teased the follow-up to 2022’s ‘Dance Fever’ with a series of eerie videos.

The album contains contributions from Bowen, Mitski, and The National’s Aaron Dessner – all of whom worked with Welch on the title track, too.

During a new interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Welch was asked about the cryptic series of photographs she shared on social media last month. One slide included the note “Swans vs Adele“, suggesting that inspiration had come from these two acts.

“When we started working together, I sent Bowen a playlist, and [Swans’] ‘It’s Coming It’s Real’ was on there,” Welch told Lowe. “I remember hearing that song, and just the build and intensity of it… it’s so ominous.

“I think that I was looking for was an ominous feeling, but that also has clarity and beauty, and those incredible soaring choruses of Adele, and incredible ballads.”

The singer-songwriter went on to reveal that she had been “looking a lot at pop” when making her new album. She referenced “the amazing things that are happening in pop” currently, “where it’s so experimental”.

“We were listening to ‘Angel Of My Dreams’ by JADE a lot in the studio, and it was like pulling all those things together,” Welch continued.

“Me and Bowen started sharing a notes app as well, and I would put lyrics in there. I just had ‘Florence + the Machine, Everybody Scream’, and that was it. Bowen came in and was like, ‘That looked like a title track to me’.

“He had this glam rock thing that started out, but then it broke down into this drone discordance that was really shocking, and sounded like a sonic scream. I was just listing ‘Everybody do this, everybody do that!’, and the song really didn’t become what it was until Mitski came on board.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Florence Welch/PHOTO CREDIT: Autumn De Wilde

Explaining what Mitski brought to the table, Welch said: “She came to the studio one day and was like, ‘You need a chorus. I just feel like there’s a chorus coming after this drone –  it’s so striking’.”

She added: “Working with her… honestly, she’s one of my favourite artists of all time. Getting to work with Bowen and Mitski on this record is just so special to me. I didn’t know if she even worked on other people’s records, but I reached out: ‘I know you’re in town for shows, would you like to come to the studio?’ And she said yes!

“We discussed what the song was about because it was just a list of commands at that point, and she was like, ‘I think you’re talking about the intimacy you have with the stage – and I have that, too’. We just started talking about that, and the song emerged from us talking about this thing. It was such an amazing couple of days.”

Inspiration for the ‘Everybody Scream’ album came from Welch undergoing lifesaving surgery during the ‘Dance Fever’ tour in 2023. She also began to look into spiritual mysticism and folk horror – understanding the limits of her body and questioning what it means to be “healed”.

These are themes that helped shape the record, along with exploration of womanhood, partnership, ageing and dying.

As for the title track, Welch told Lowe that the song “is about being an artist, and also being someone who’s kind of stressed sometimes about being visible or being out in the world, and who finds it kind of overwhelming to put out work”.

“There’s always a bit of me that wants to keep hiding – like, ‘No, no, no – I’m not ready, put it off’,” she said. “This time, I challenged myself to not delay a record. I was like, ‘Just move through the fear and put it out’. The song itself is about the pull back to the stage and why I always keep going back there, even though every time it takes a little bit more from me.”

She went on to say: “The title for this song came before there was even a song, because honestly, I just wanted to write a song that rhymed with Florence + the Machine. I was like, Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a title track that’s also the title of a record that rhymed with Florence + the Machine?’ [Laughs]. I was just like, ‘I just really want it to rhyme!’”.

The final album I am recommending is The Charlatans’ We Are Love. You can pre-order the album here. The band’s fourteenth studio album is one I am going to get. NME spoke with The Charlatans’ lead, Tim Burgess. Their first album in eight years, this is the band in a euphoric mood. Sounding at their very peak. Even if you have not been a fan since the beginning, I feel you need to get this album. I have been following them since I was a child and love the fact they are still going and strong:

“You worked with Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange, who produced the album. How did he get involved?

“We wanted to work with Dev, and I’ve known Dev for a long time. The first time I saw him was [at] The Old Blue Last [in London], and he was playing drums for Florence, before Florence became the Florence that we know. It was just the two of them on stage, and I thought, ‘This is great’. They’ve stuck in my mind.

“And then, of all places, we met him again in New Zealand, and he was then Lightspeed Champion. We both talked about how much we liked each other, and so it was like a thing. I’ve always thought about him, and then I just dropped him a line. He was just really into it, and the timing was right for him.”

Dev’s credited as a producer alongside Spector’s Fred Macpherson and legendary producer Stephen Street…

“[Hynes] brought along Fred, and it was great because Dev had the control board and that power. And Fred really held the room. We’d worked with Thighpaulsandra [who performs in Burgess’ solo band] quite a lot as the engineer at Rockfield. We had ideas, but he helped shape them into songs.

“And then we went to do a few songs with Stephen Street. One we finished, and that’s on the album. The rest is Dev, Fred and Rockfield – and all that’s amazing, amazing stuff.”

Dev’s worked with the likes of Sky Ferreira, Carly Rae Jepsen and Kylie – did he sprinkle any pop magic on The Charlatans’ sound?

“I did like the Sky Ferreira track that he did [2013’s ‘Everything Is Embarrassing’]. But I think he just has a deft hand and a lightness of touch, and he really wanted The Charlatans to reconnect to their place of origin. We talked about hauntology and psychogeography.

“And the place that we were in, Rockfield – we have a lot of history with that. To reconnect to the place of origin, to have an appreciation of everything that we’ve done in our history – it’s a huge thing.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Tim Burgess/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Cannon/Microdot 

What else inspired those sessions?

“We talked about The Madness Of Love, we talked about ‘La folie’ by The Stranglers, John Cassavetes and his incredible observations of love through film. It was just a great sharing of titan minds.

“[The album] sounds like us, but obviously it’s been mirrored through other people’s views of us, which is really interesting. It all helped to bring us to appreciate the power of the sound of The Charlatans, which is what everyone was aiming for.”

Your last album featured contributions from Paul Weller, New Order and Johnny Marr, among many guest musicians. Were you focused more on just the four members after a long time away?

“Yeah, it felt like we couldn’t have any more collaborators. But Kevin Godley actually popped up and sang some backing vocals on one of the tracks. Kevin Godley from 10CC, who we’re all big fans of, and Godley & Creme. And Peter Gordon – Dev recorded him in Manhattan, on the saxophone. So we only had very limited collaborators on this record.”

You’ve had three solo albums since The Charlatans’ previous record. Was this necessary to rejuvenate the band? Why is now the right time to return?

“Yeah, I think it’s important. We all felt we had to have the desire to make something, to have something to say, to be able to have something worthwhile that we all felt good about. We all love all 11 tracks, which is an amazing feat – for us all to love everything.

“So we’re all very happy with the record – I’m in awe of it. I think it’s the best record that we’ve done. I’m filled with elation and pride around it. I guess there’s times where it felt like a long time coming together. It’s at least two-and-a-half years making this one, off and on. But yeah, it’s great. It’s amazing”.

I will round it up there. You can look at other albums out in October here. I have missed quite a few out, though I think the ones that I have included are among the best and most interesting of the month. I hope that my suggestions have given you some guidance. From Taylor Swift and Florence + The Machine to Sigrid, Cat Burns and The Charlatans, October is shaping up to be…

A huge month for music.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Tems

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe McConnell for Billboard

Tems

__________

I think there…

PHOTO CREDIT: Bet Bettencourt

is a lot of desire and demand for a new Tems album. Her previous album, 2024’s Born in the Wild, was one of the best from the year. It was one of my favourites from the 2024. A remarkable and inspiring artist, she is a GRAMMY-winning Nigerian singer-songwriter and producer. Born Temilade Openiyi (in Lagos, Nigeria), after gaining traction and hype with her 2018 single Mr. Rebel and the incredible 2019 hit Try Me, Tems’s fame and name grew through collaborations on Wizkid's Essence and Drake's Fountains. I want to start by taking us to last year and an interview from W Magazine. Writing how Tems is ready for Pop queendom and how she was made for this moment, “Her name, Temilade, means “the crown is mine”. The release of Born in the Wild elevated her to a new level.

“Tems, 29, was born in Lagos to a British-Nigerian father and a Nigerian mother, who named her Temilade—which means “the crown is mine” in Yoruba. After a few years in the U.K., her parents separated, and Tems moved back to Lagos with her mother. She has described herself as a quiet child, and music soon became a passion and source of solace. Although her mother played Christian music at home, Tems eventually got her hands on a Destiny’s Child CD, which she studied as if it were the Rosetta stone. Last year, she opened up about the challenges she faced as a woman with a lower-register voice, which she and her bullies believed to be manly and unbecoming. Despite spending most of her teenage years attempting to sing in falsetto, eventually, at the urging of a cherished music teacher, she embraced her authentic tone. “I started to want that deepness. I wanted to lean into my weirdness,” she has said. Now the velvety, androgynous quality of her voice is one of the things that makes her so immediately recognizable and so impossible to impersonate.

When she was a college student, Tems reached out to many Nigerian producers, but they were not interested in helping to engineer the hybrid sound she was chasing: something more introspective, melancholic, and complex than the joyful and jubilant sounds of Afrobeats, which dominate Nigerian charts. Using Internet tutorials and Logic software, Tems learned how to record and produce in her dorm room, and in 2018 she shared her track “Mr Rebel” with the world. The release attracted a loyal following and interest from radio DJs, and resulted in her first management contract.

Not long after came “Know Your Worth,” a collaboration with Khalid, Disclosure, and Davido. Before she knew it, “Essence” ended up on Barack Obama’s 2020 annual playlist. Then Beyoncé’s team was knocking on her door, asking for a collaboration on Renaissance (Tems is featured, along with Grace Jones, on “Move”). She quickly established herself as one of the most distinctive forces in global pop. “What I’m trying to do,” she said in 2022, “or what I hope that god does through me, is change the image of the African woman to be something luxurious, or desired, or sought after. For the demand of the African woman to go up.… Let us not be chasing foreign things; let us be something to be chased.”

With the advent of TikTok and Reels, the music industry has been irrevocably altered by the attention economy. Artists are told by managers and major labels that their primary task is to capture people’s focus in the shortest amount of time possible, and to hold it for as long as they can. The rise of Gen Z has also seen the triumph of the relatable superstar: figures who are flawed, unfiltered, candid, and easy to identify with, for people still figuring out who they are. But one of the most interesting things about Tems is that there is almost nothing easily relatable about her. Her songwriting is mature, literary, and spiritual, and her cathartic melodies—many of which are freestyled—seem to pour out of her innermost psyche. Her music and visuals are an ode to everything that Internet culture seems to be eradicating: nuance, patience, depth, and an ability to see beyond the self.

For Born in the Wild, Tems wrote and produced many of the tracks herself. “It’s definitely more expansive,” she said of the record. “You know that Lion King song?” she asked rhetorically, before singing the lyric: “I just can’t wait to be free!” She claimed it’s been stuck in her head for the past six months. “That’s what I’m most looking forward to right now: sharing this story and being free”.

At the GRAMMYs earlier this year, Tems won the award for Best African Music Performance for Love Me Jeje. It has been a big year for her. She has just completed a series of gigs with Coldplay at Wembley Stadium. Someone that is going to go from strength to strength. Billboard spoke to Tems in May as she dealt with the demands of grind and globe-trotting stardom. As she was climbing the charts and making history, she was picking up legions of new fans:

“In March, Tems became the first artist to perform at The Dome, the new, 10,500-capacity venue in Johannesburg that Live Nation launched with Stadium Management South Africa and Gearhouse South Africa earlier this year. “We’re always looking to create epic moments,” Awoniyi says. “Live Nation let us know about the venue that they were building. Our agents spoke to them, and because we are very moments-focused, for her to be the first artist to perform there is cool.” Her team is carefully planning on rescheduling her show in Rwanda while adding new stops in Kenya, Ghana and, of course, Nigeria.

Bringing the fruits of her success back home remains fundamental to Tems’ mission. Pave Investments — an African private investment firm that backs platforms creating opportunities to develop and support African talent globally, such as Tems’ company, The Leading Vibe — reached out to her camp with the opportunity to join the San Diego FC ownership group. “I grew up around my uncles and brother watching matches, and because they’re so loud, I’m forced to pay attention. I always wondered about being able to be in the business of it because it’s a man’s world,” Tems says. In her role, she’ll work closely with the Right To Dream Academy, a youth association football academy that started in Ghana and has since expanded with branches in Egypt, Denmark and the United States. “That’s something that piqued my interest, being able to build other Africans up, build other children up and give them more opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise seen,” Tems says.

Her historic entrance into the sports realm aligns with the ethos of The Leading Vibe, which she established in 2020 and where she serves as a director. Named for a lyric from “Mr Rebel” — “I’m the crown, I’m the vibe, I’m the leading vibe” — it allows her to “[lead] by example” and make a “difference in the world” by holding and managing her assets (she fully owns her masters for For Broken Ears and co-owns the masters for If Orange Was a Place and Born in the Wild) while serving as an incubator for investment, philanthropy and new business ventures. Through The Leading Vibe, she’s working on an initiative to support young African female artists, songwriters and producers.

“The way her brand is constructed is not limiting. You can see her at a football match today, you can see her at Formula 1 tomorrow,” Awoniyi says. In February, Aston Martin reported that 15,000 people watched her perform “Higher” at the unveiling of its new car design for the 2025 F1 season at London’s O2 Arena. She’s yet to headline her own show at the famed venue, but Awoniyi says they “haven’t been trying to rush” her growth as an artist to ensure the longevity of her career.

Tems says she’s currently making music “that I’m really excited about that sounds nothing like Born in the Wild,” and that after contributing to the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack, she wants to hear more of her music in film — maybe even in the form of an original score — and possibly get in front of the camera. But while her universe may be continually expanding, Tems still wants her impact on the world to be fulfilling”.

I am going to end with a feature from the BBC. Tems told them that women are not really respected in the industry. Tems has been helping African women overcome many of the hurdles in the music industry through “The Lagos-based nonprofit Audio Girl Africa, which describes itself as a “pan-African sisterhood building the future”, holds workshops and mentors female artists, A&Rs, marketers, and other music business professionals”:

“The two-time Grammy award-winner told the BBC that at the start of her career, she struggled to be taken seriously.

"I realised that there's always a cost. There's always a price that you pay. And a lot of those prices I wasn't willing to pay and there wasn't a lot of options," Tems said.

Afropop has gained immense global popularity over the past decade, but despite this growth it remains notoriously male-dominated.

The industry's so-called "Big Three" - Burna Boy, Davido and Wizkid - are all male - while their female counterparts, such as Tiwa Savage, external and Yemi Alade, have spoken out about the barriers they face because of their gender.

Earlier this year, Tems hit out following negative comments about her body, which were made online after a video of her performing was posted onto X.

She wrote on the social media platform: "It's just a body, I will add and lose weight. I never once hid my body, I just didn't feel the need to prove or disprove anyone. The more you don't like my body the better for me actually."

Tems told the BBC she wants "to change the way women see themselves in music", and hopes to achieve this through her new platform, The Leading Vibe Initiative.

The project aims to provide opportunities for young women throughout Africa's music industries.

"I promised myself that if I get to a place where I can do more, I will make this initiative for women like me and maybe make it easier for women to access platforms and access a wider audience and success," Tems said.

The initiative kicked off on Friday in Tems' hometown, Lagos. Vocalists, songwriters and producers were invited to a series of workshops, masterclasses and panel discussions, all with the aim of developing skills and connections.

Asked what advice she would give to young women wanting to crack the industry, she said: "I think it's important to have an idea of what you want for yourself, what your brand is, what's your boundary.

"What are the things that you wouldn't do for fame and the things that you would do?"

Tems, who has scored hits with the likes of Love Me Jeje, external and Free Mind, external, said anyone trying to break into the industry must be passionate about their craft.

"It's not everybody that sings that loves music. If I wasn't famous, I would still be doing music. I would be in some kind of jazz club... randomly on a Friday night," she said.

But this is far from Tems' reality. Five years on from her debut EP, she has collaborated with the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna, racked up more than 17m monthly listeners on Spotify and headlined international festivals.

And next month, she will be supporting British band Coldplay during their sold-out run of gigs at the UK's Wembley Stadium.

Tems puts her success down to being "authentic" and "audacious".

One of the most important artists in music, Tems is not only building her own success and carving her own path. She is also ensuring that women in the industry, particularly African women, are heard and have opportunities. Subjected to barriers and sexism, this artist is empowering so many others. It is going to be interesting seeing what the next year offers Tems. How she moves from here. I have been a fan for a while now, though I feel her best days are still ahead. If you have not heard her music or know too much about the magic of Tems, then do go and follow her. The amazing Tems is someone that…

EVERYONE should salute.

__________

Follow Tems

PHOTO CREDIT: Shaniqwa Jarvis for W Magazine

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FEATURE: Spotlight: Maruja

FEATURE:

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Oxley for NME

Maruja

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THIS month…

this amazing band have some dates in the U.K. They get to play home crowds. Playing Crash Records in their native Manchester on 15th September, they then head out to the U.S. and Canada, before they return to play dates in the U.K. and Ireland. Even though the band formed back in 2014, I think now is a real moment of excitement where they are getting on the radar of some big sites and sources. Maruja are a quartet consisting of Harry Wilkinson (vocals/guitar), Joe Carroll (saxophone/vocals), Matt Buonaccorsi (bass) and Jacob Hayes (drums). Their incredible and hugely popular music combines elements of Jazz, Post-Rock, Noise Rock and Spoken Word. Their lyrics blend themes around the socio-political whilst addressing and tackling subjects such as mental health. Their hotly-anticipated debut album, Pain to Power, will be released on 12th September. It was “recorded at Low Four Studio and produced by Samuel W Jones, who the band worked with on their three EPs to date. The extraordinary collection not only confirms the four piece as a creative force of nature but finds a deeply emotional and empathetic band concerned primarily with the power of community, both in the nuclear sense, as a tight knit creative unit, but also as a wider force for social and political change in the age of the individual”.  There are some great new interviews with the group that I want to take parts from. They are a hugely important force for good who use their voice to speak out and support those in need. Saoirse is a moving and powerful song for peace shared in solidarity for the people of Palestine. So many reasons to love Maruja and throw your weight behind them!

I am going to start out with an interview from CLASH that was published back in March. This was released around the release of their E.P., Tir na nÓg. The final part of a trilogy of E.P.s, the band ended 2024 with a huge run of gigs. One of the most exciting and exceptional live bands in the country, they were looking ahead to a possible debut album. We now know that this is a matter of days away:

“It’s been an extraordinary year for Maruja, from the offer to play Glastonbury off the back of an interview with Tom Ravenscroft and Deb Grant on their New Music Fix show on BBC Radio 6Music, to playing in 25 countries, releasing ‘Connla’s Well’, playing Ireland for the first time and of course (perhaps most notably) signing for Music for Nations towards the end of the year, the independent record label owned by Sony.

They have grafted at their craft and decided to take the plunge over a year ago, quitting their jobs and spending a month in a house writing music together.  They then immediately went out on their first headline tour. Jacob makes the not unsurprising observation that “we struggled to make money, and we put records on sale for the first time. But this year it’s been more comfortable. We’re glad we made the decision to take a financial loss last year, to focus 100% on the music, because the things that we’ve been able to do this year wouldn’t have been possible without the set-up of last year. You really knuckle down all the business things and really understand how vinyl works and merchandise and selling, and touring and how all of it works. Each of us now know it.”

For Maruja the live performance is integral to their very being. It’s an exhilarating experience to see the four-piece on stage, and their audiences have been growing quickly over the last 18 months or so, a testament to their work ethic. Their music goes from the extremes of chaos and mayhem to calm and quiet, Harry and Joe getting into the crowd, wiping up the mosh-pit, which is not usually required to be honest.

Whenever they play in Manchester the reception goes through the roof. Two nights at The White Hotel were extraordinary last spring, the walls dripping with sweat and the electricity in the air palpable. Harry shares: “Playing to a home crowd with us all living and being from Manchester, people go even harder because they know that we’re from there. It’s been a while since a band has come up through Manchester and has been like making waves as we have. So I think there’s a lot of people who are very excited for us as well, and they want to be a part of that movement. And it’s a beautiful thing to see, is to see us bring together so many different groups of people.”

“We were chilling with our boys after the show and they were saying, “Nothing gets everybody out like a Maruja gig. Nothing brings all the friends together like a Maruja gig.” And I thought that is great symbolism. Somebody asked me the other day, what does Maruja mean to you? Maruja means family to me, you know, I’m saying these are my family. And that’s the values that we reflect, solidarity, you know, and that’s the message we have. So whenever we play Manchester, there’s a overwhelming sense of pride in community.”

Joe added: “Until the music starts, and then it’s just unadulterated carnage!”

Looking forward to 2025, Maruja kick things off with the EP release before heading to North America for their first headline tour across the pond, including a prestigious SXSW slot. As a matter of fact, the New York show had to be upgraded such was the demand for tickets. Matt shares: “It’s just going to be a privilege, really, because we know that our fans over there are absolutely feral for us. We can see it on our social medias. They’re always like, come to Toronto, come to Baltimore, come to… I was about to say Bolton, but that’s England!” he laughs. “We’re all very excited, it’s going to be great.”

A debut album is in the planning, but for now the focus is on their North American trip this spring.  One thing is abundantly clear, Maruja mean business. Prepare yourself North America, there is a whirlwind coming”.

IN THIS PHOTO: The cover of Maruja’s debut studio album, Pain to Power

Last month, The Needle Drop spent some time with Harry Wilkinson, Joe Carroll, Matt Buonaccorsi and Jacob Hayes. With news of an album coming, it was an exciting and interesting chat. I want to take from a part of the interview that followed on from the band talking about their 2019 E.P., Knocknarea, and how there was a darker sound. A Tory government who were tyrannical. COVID-19 was not far away, and there was this awful mood and feeling in Britain. That radically changed how Maruja wrote and looked at the world:

“So there was literally an ideological shift that everybody in the band was going through at the time that started to seep into the music and seep into the creative process?

MB: Yeah, sure.

JH: Yeah. What Matt was saying is, when we first discovered jamming/improvising when it was just us four, there was maybe a few moments where we first discovered flow state and subconscious communication. Artists out there that are aware of what flow state feels like will know what we mean, and it's a really obvious thing to us that what we were doing — creating music this way — was completely democratic, ego-less, and a way to just connect spiritually and emotionally through the music you're making. And it was just the most complete way of creating a song because there's no one agenda that you have to meet. You know one person presenting an idea. It's all just coming from within us. We just decided that was the only... That's how we're going to create music from now on. The themes that we talk about are just...We improvised all the songs, and then from that, we then tweaked them, added lyrics, and have shaped different structures from them. Previously — sorry, after having improvised it, those emotions that we feel is reflective of the times. Matt was saying about the Tory rule. We'd just gone through Brexit. We was having an increasingly more right-wing shift in politics, seeing lots of more blame on immigrants and migrant workers. And then, yeah, COVID happened. So it was really just an outpour of what we were seeing and living around us. And I think improvising is just a really pure vessel for translating those emotions into music.

You're talking about the democratic creative process here, but how exactly... I think we have an idea of how that manifests in conversation, but how does that also manifest when you guys are literally playing in the moment and maybe one of you has a random idea, and you decide to just throw it out there? You know what I mean? Is there a way of one person does something and everybody follows in their direction in the moment, and it goes from there? Or maybe something gets thrown out and it doesn't quite take, and it just gets thrown into the abyss and we're moving on to the next thing?

JC: Wow. Yeah, it's pretty accurate! We definitely like... With the whole democratic thing, once you get locked into that, there isn't as much thought as that, to be honest. And you don't really... Because it's equally about listening as much as it is about playing. You're so tapped into what else is going on that every decision you make is following or influenced by something that has come before it. Or, you might make a little accident, and you'll then follow that. So it's almost... It's less like, "Oh, I might throw this in here!" and it's more like, you're discovering together and pushing yourselves with the energy in the room. That has led to us exploring really unique ways of approaching our instruments or really unique ways of transitioning from a certain sound into another sound. And with that approach, it just makes everything feel so cohesive, even though it can be like, some of the wildest shit you've ever heard. It's still all in the same world and all perfectly fit in with each other because it's all spawned from each other.

Specifically Harry, because I want to know how your lyrics play into this part of the band's creative process. I mean, obviously, you guys have up until this point — and I'm sure we'll continue to emphasize the importance of improvisation and everything...Obviously, one of your most recent EPs was this hugely instrumental improvisation release. There was also that vault project that you guys dropped that fans seem to be loving the hell out of. But what mind state or planning do you guys go into when you make that separation between "We're going to do a jam, we're going to record something that's going to be completely improvised," versus "We're going to move into something that is completely premeditated, we're laying lyrics to it, we're laying a message to it, and we're really working out the structure and all of the finer details," and everything like that.

HW: Yeah, I think a lot of the time we create...So like the boys are saying, the music is spawned from improvisation when we are literally just vessels for creative energy to flow through us. At that moment, we'll take the jam, we'll listen back to it and be like, "Yo, this five minutes here is absolutely amazing. Let's take this for a song." And then we will tweak it, and we'll be like, "Okay, well, we could have a verse here. Maybe this is a place for a chorus," or, "This is a bridge," or whatever it is. Sometimes we'll literally take the jam and just reenact the jam exactly how it is, and it's instrumental, or I might then write lyrics on top of it. But often it's taking a jam and then manipulating it into a song format that is a little bit more digestible, essentially. I'll then take away the landscape that we've created musically, and I will add my lyrics/message on top, depending on the sonics and how that's making me feel, what that is displaying to me creatively. This is me in a place of like, "Okay, maybe it's about this topic, or about this topic!" It really depends on what that song is giving to me, the music that we've written, how that's affecting me emotionally”.

There are two more interviews that I want to bring in. The Quietus spoke with Maruja about their telepathic connection and their searing and unforgettable energy in the live arena which is replicated in their music. This connection between studio and stage. The Quietus note how there is solidarity on every note that Maruja play:

“That energy, that unified experience ravaging through the album, replicates their visceral live performances. It’s here where one can understand why Pain To Power feels the way it does. In their embryonic, improvisational stages Hayes says that tunes “reveal themselves in different ways”, often pulling, stretching, speeding up, and slowing down. In these moments, the roles of artist and audience overlap in fascinatingly spontaneous and sensory entanglements. Be it the immersion of the band in the pit of a live crowd. Be it the message of ‘see you in the trenches’ issued to those about to watch them perform before a gig. Be it the unanimously repeated mantra at the end of every gig Wilkinson initiates: “We wish you peace, prosperity and unity in these times of global oppression. Together we are stronger.”

If the medium is the message, Maruja’s message is clear. With the notion of community forever at the core, their aural bolt of sweat and flesh and scraps of clothing and calloused palms is a reactive force to be reckoned with. “Everything that’s gone on with Palestine Action,” says Wilkinson, “where a protest group has been turned into a terrorist organisation, shows the importance again of those safe spaces where people can release their emotions about the tragedy of what’s going on in the world, and protest. It is a place to protest and a place to show solidarity with each other and feel safe to be yourself around people that you maybe admire and that you connect emotionally with through their music.”

With a burning bullseye in sight, jazz, as Maruja grasp it, is less about genre, but more a yearning to breach certain emotional as well as sonic thresholds. As their music collapses into a concave of its own making, Maruja surpasses the physical realm as we know it, the result of a surge towards musical telepathy. “It’s those moments where we don’t need to be democratic about anything,” says Carroll. “The thing has been made. It’s more of a self-discovery than being taught in an academic way. There’s no sort of archaic depth to it. People like Miles Davis and Pharaoh Sanders are really big influences for us because you can really hear that, the way that they’re pushing the instrument and making these bizarre noises”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Samuel Edwards

I am going to end with some words from an NME interview published in May. I wanted to head back a bit before finishing because there are some sections of this interview that outline why Pain to Power might be one of the most urgent, important and, as we may discover, best albums of the year. I can see this gaining lots of five-star reviews from critics. If you have never heard of the band, then I would urge you to pre-order their album and support them as much as you can:

“A lot of themes on this album – and I mean stuff that the four of us, our generation and people across the world are experiencing right now – are about seeing so much turmoil, war, corruption, greed, horror through the screens of our phones,” the bassist told NME. “It’s easy to feel powerless when looking at all of this happening. Decades ago, you would have just heard about stuff like Palestine through the newspaper, but now the world is an open stage. We’re getting angles about all kinds of incredible suffering from different countries, different peoples.

“It’s so horrifying to try and take in all of this collective pain. The fact that we can try and turn this pain into power, into action, to come together to protest and form communities and celebrate solidarity and love over division – that’s quite powerful. ‘Pain To Power’ means to transform something that is making our lives so difficult and trying to change the world with that. The whole album is a study on that phrase.”

Ready to hit the road this summer ahead of their newly-announced dates across the UK, Europe, China, Japan and the US later this year, Maruja find themselves refreshed and inspired after a break following their recent and lengthy North American tour.

“It was wonderful,” said Buonaccorsi. “It’s a big culture shock going there, because it’s such a massive, grand place. Every single state, and in Canada, every single fan is lovely. There was a warm presence from them all and they were some of the most energetic and frightening crowds we’ve ever had. New York was just possibly my favourite show ever.”

Alluding to the ongoing debate and campaign around freedom of expression within music following Kneecap’s Coachella stunt for Palestine,  Buonaccorsi said he felt encouraged by the engagement from their fans.

“With the discourse, we’re in very politically sensitive times for both our countries – probably more so for America right now,” he told NME. “It meant that on some level, we could really relate to the fans that we were meeting. For the fans that were coming down to our shows across the States, they understood that our message is very much to be wary of authoritarianism and how that can descend into all kinds of ugly places.

“America is having a tough time right now. All the fans that were coming down were the exact type of crowd that would cheer, go crazy in moshpits. We welcomed each other with open arms. We look forward to much more of that”.

I will end there. I am fairly recent to Maruja, but I am definitely converted. A band that are so essential and not only speaking to people on a personal and intimate level, but also at a global level. In terms of their words around Palestine and how they are part of a growing group of artists risking more than their careers speaking out against genocide and showing solidarity with Gaza and those being displaced, starved and skilled. Despite a career together that has lasted over a decade, I think that their time is now. Pain to Power could well be among the best albums of 2025. It will definitely elevate them to a new level. With a huge fanbase in North America, I wonder where else they will head. 2026 is going to be their biggest year I feel. Maybe a Mercury Prize nomination for them? Big slots at major festivals? Who knows! When it comes to the mighty Maruja and how far they can go…

ALL bets are off!

___________

Follow Maruja

Official:

https://www.marujaofficial.co.uk/

TikTok:

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FEATURE: When You Can Dance I Can Really Love: Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush at Fifty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

When You Can Dance I Can Really Love

Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush at Fifty-Five

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THE third studio album…

IN THIS PHOTO: Neil Young rehearsing backstage in Philadelphia in 1970/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Bernstein

from Neil Young, After the Gold Rush was released on 19th September, 1970. Déjà Vu was the second studio album released by Crosby, Stills & Nash, and the first as a quartet with Neil Young. It is really interesting hearing the albums stand up against one another. Neil Young wrote Helpless and Country Girl for Déjà Vu. He co-wrote Everybody I Love You with Stephen Stills. However, After the Gold Rush is a singular effort. Except for a cover of Don Gibson’s Oh, Lonesome Me, this is Neil Young in full flight. After the Gold Rush, Southern Man, and Don’t Let It Bring You Down among the highlights. The album reached number seven in the U.K. and number eight on the US Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart upon its release. I wanted to mark the upcoming fifty-fifth anniversary of a classic album. I will come to a couple of features about After the Gold Rush. In 2015, on its forty-fifth anniversary, Ultimate Classic Rock & Culture discussed the album and its background. How Neil Young turned After the Gold Rush into a '60s requiem:

“Released on Sept. 19, 1970, it's also the end of an early chapter in Young's career. After breaking from Buffalo Springfield and releasing his debut solo album in 1968, the singer-songwriter would begin what would become the first of many career left turns. On 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, he plugged in and scraped away at the scabs with the young Crazy Horse.

But by the following year, when he was set to make a follow-up LP, he had fired them (but retained a few songs they had already laid down) and retreated to his basement in Topanga, Calif., where he started recording tracks for the follow-up record, a 360-degree turn into acoustic country and folk music with a group of musicians whose approach was a bit more delicate.

Rubbing against the plugged-in numbers left over from the Crazy Horse sessions, the new songs – which featured 18-year-old Nils Lofgren on guitar and piano, an instrument he was mostly unfamiliar with – helped create a ragged and almost disjointed record that's never quite sure if it's electric or acoustic, part of the '60s or part of the '70s.

And it's a brilliant juxtaposition, one that gives After the Gold Rush a feeling of frustration and resignation. It's a romantic album too – the soft "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" is a highlight – but the sting of "Southern Man," which immediately follows in the track listing, tempers the mood.

The entire album is like that: soft, hard. Quiet, loud. Acoustic, electric. It's almost as if Young was carrying around too many ideas – his first album with Crosby, Stills & Nash, Deja Vu, had only come out in March – and decided to pour them all out onto a 35-minute LP that serves as both a literal and metaphorical link between the abrasive Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and the plaintive Harvest.

But more than any of this, After the Gold Rush puts an end to '60s idealism through a mix of songs that cut specifically – the meditative title track, a piano-driven ballad that ranks among Young's very best – and more abstractly (the album's opening cut, "Tell Me Why") into the deep, overriding sorrow that runs throughout the record. "Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s," he sings on "After the Gold Rush," pretty much sealing a fate nine months into the new decade.

After the Gold Rush became Young's first Top 10 album, making it to No. 8 (he'd score his only No. 1 two years later with Harvest). Two singles were pulled from the record – the acoustic waltz "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love," recorded with Crazy Horse – but neither cracked the Top 30. It eventually sold more than two million copies.

And it remains one of Young's greatest works, a summation of his career up to that point and a sign of things to come. He'd explore the album's two opposing sides many times over the years, sometimes together (like on 1979's Rust Never Sleeps) but more often on separate projects that occasionally struggled to make sense of his whims and genre jumping.

One of the most fascinating aspects of After the Gold Rush is how and where it was made. Having listened to the album for decades, I was not aware of its recording and the conditions Neil Young was recording in. Maybe repeating some of the feature above, Classic Album Sundays told the story of After the Gold Rush in their article. Two years on from After the Gold Rush, Neil Young released another masterpiece with Harvest. Many argue, though, that After the Gold Rush is Neil Young’s finest work:

“Young’s dogged self-determination, despite its interpersonal downfalls, was a major artistic virtue that fed directly into what was perhaps his first true masterpiece. After The Gold Rush had its beginnings in an unlikely place. Dean Stockwell, a former child star of the ‘40s and ‘50s, had been encouraged by his friend Dennis Hopper to write a screenplay whilst the pair were in the jungles of Peru producing a film entitled The Last Movie. Hopper assured Stockwell that he had the relevant connections to help get the film made, and once back in the US the latter retreated to his home at Topanga Canyon in the Los Angeles Mountains to commence the writing process.

A fellow resident of the canyon and a close friend of Stockwell’s, Young was suffering through a prolonged period of writer’s block and was under growing pressure from his label to record an album of new material. After learning of the writer’s creative endeavour he was intrigued to learn more and asked Stockwell if he could read a draft of the story. The script, which has since been lost, was an unconventional, non-linear narrative with religious and psychedelic undertones. It loosely detailed an end-of-the-world scenario centred on the local Californian environment, in which a biblical flood threatened to pull the state into the ocean. Captivated by this messy but intriguing tale, Young recalls: “I was writing a lot of songs at the time, and some of them seemed like they would fit right in with the story.”

Ironically Hopper’s proximity to the project scared off any interested executives, and before long the film seemed destined to remain in limbo. Nonetheless, Young was fired up and undeterred, commencing work immediately on what he imagined to be the soundtrack of this deeply counter-cultural Hollywood film. Finding time to write and record was difficult, as large swathes of 1970 were blocked out by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s huge US Tour and further live obligations with Crazy Horse. In the precious gaps between shows, Young made initial recordings at Hollywood’s Sunset Studios, yielding “I Believe In You” and “Oh Lonesome Me” but quickly realised he preferred the atmosphere of the Canyon, continuing the process at the home studio set up in his lead-lined basement. It was here that his ensemble of bassist Greg Reeves, drummer Ralph Molina, and guitarist Nils Lofgren assembled.

The studio was a small and sweaty space, adjoined to a side control room from which producer David Briggs kept an eye on proceedings. The youngest of the ensemble, eighteen year-old Lofgren was brought in to play keyboards despite being a relative novice at the time of recording, highlighting Young’s unconventional laid back approach. Accordingly the musician recalls that “Neil didn’t mind rehearsing a bit” but they “didn’t belabour stuff.” It’s often considered that Young was attempting to merge musicians from both Crosby, Stills & Nash and Crazy Horse on this album, and Stephen Stills even appears on “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” to provide backing vocals.

The basement’s make-shift setup influenced the stark and plaintive sound of After The Gold Rush. Young featured solo on piano throughout the album, most notably on the title track which is often praised as the centrepiece of the album. Charting a surreal and fantastical course through three verses, the song starts in a medieval era of knights and peasants and ends in outer space with the remnants of humanity, after the world has descended into apocalypse”.

There are some reviews I want to end with. For Audioxide, André Dack, Frederick O'Brien and Marcus Lawrence penned their views on 1970’s After the Gold Rush. I want to share Dack and O’Brien’s assessment of one of the best albums of the 1970s. A sublime and mesmerising album that has touched so many people through the decades:

“André

After the Gold Rush is Neil Young at the absolute top of his game. It’s a masterpiece, plain and simple. His third studio album is as accomplished as any he’s ever released: an astonishing feat given he was only 24 years of age at the time. After the Gold Rush is a tight package that displays extreme versatility, covering an extraordinary range of musical ground and lyrical depth. Provocative rock jams with soulful guitar solos stand alongside romantic country ballads and heart-warming numbers led by playful piano.

For all its musical and personal scope, Young does incredible things with, seemingly, so little. Simple vocal melodies sung over elementary chords have no right to be as effective as they are here, but Young has the capability to floor listeners with his presence. If there’s an album that best showcases Young as a songwriter, After the Gold Rush is the most immediate choice. His poetry comes naturally, with no metaphor feeling forced. His personal musings and intricate stories aren’t bound by genres. Though his folk and country background is well known, Young’s songs transcend these origins. This is music for everyone.

It’s crucial to recognise that Young has been aided by some of the most extraordinary backing bands that contemporary music has ever seen. After the Gold Rush now celebrates its 50th anniversary, which is absurd given these songs do not sound like they were conceived half a century ago. There are a number of reasons for this, but most notable are the incredible arrangements that comprise the albums deeper cuts. The extraordinary tale of “Southern Man” is driven by stirring guitar, percussive piano parts, and the most glorious vocal harmonies you can ever dream of. It’s the kind of thing Radiohead have been replicating throughout their illustrious career.

“Don’t Let it Bring You Down” is another gem in this respect, showing the full force of the piano as an accompanying instrument. It puts many modern arrangements to shame. Young’s versatile vocals add a sprinkling of magic to these songs that propel them to legendary status. Whilst Bob Dylan’s voice has been a note of contention throughout the years, there’s simply no denying Young’s abilities. At its best, his voice smoothly sails through the mix like a delightful breeze, meaning that the music is not just magnificent, but accessible too.

Sounding as good as ever, After the Gold Rush remains one of the definitive albums released by, quite possibly, the greatest singer-songwriter we’ve ever seen. To those looking to probe Young’s daunting discography: start here.

Favourite tracks //

1. Southern Man

2. Don't Let It Bring You Down

3. Oh, Lonesome Me

9 /10

Fred

Reviewing albums of this calibre is a bit of a double-edged sword. They’re a delight to listen to, and writing about them almost feels redundant. What is there to say about After the Gold Rush that hasn’t been already? It’s vintage Neil Young, as fine a blend of rock, blues, and country you’re ever likely to hear. Beautifully produced too, which always helps.

I suppose the best I can do is put the record in context with the other Young release we’ve reviewed. On the Beach is my favourite Neil Young record, and one of my favourite records ever. After the Gold Rush is not On the Beach. They’re different animals. This is a more jumbled, less miserable affair. The songs have a spring in their step, the zest of a born traveller going it alone. The record is an ideal introduction to Neil Young in that sense; it’s super accessible.

There are a good few classic tunes crammed into the 35-minute runtime. “Southern Man” is a one-inch-punch of a song, with low key one of the greatest rock solos going. The cover of “Oh, Lonesome Me” is so pathetic that it becomes kind of adorable, like Droopy the dog in musical form. The songs are eclectic, but they’re held together by the band which, with a few Crazy Horse members among their ranks, accompanies Young beautifully.

Young has always had a lightness that makes him more approachable than the icier singer/songwriter greats, be they Bob Dylan or Laura Marling. Few — if any — albums showcase that wamth better than After the Gold Rush. It’s Young on a roll, with a fire in his belly and love overflowing from his big Canadian heart. Half a century on, it remains a joy.

Favourite tracks //

1. Southern Man

2. When You Dance I Can Really Love

3. Don't Let It Bring You Down

9/10”

I am going to end with AllMusic and their five-star review of After the Gold Rush. On 19th September, this phenomenal album turns fifty-five. I am not sure whether there will be new features and retrospectives. Perhaps a fifty-fifth anniversary is not as big as a fiftieth or even a sixtieth. However, I do hope that some take the time to share some thoughts and insights. After the Gold Rush is an album that needs to be shared and heard by the new generation:

“In the 15 months between the release of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush, Neil Young issued a series of recordings in different styles that could have prepared his listeners for the differences between the two LPs. His two compositions on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Déjà Vu, "Helpless" and "Country Girl," returned him to the folk and country styles he had pursued before delving into the hard rock of Everybody Knows; two other singles, "Sugar Mountain" and "Oh, Lonesome Me," also emphasized those roots. But "Ohio," a CSNY single, rocked as hard as anything on the second album. After the Gold Rush was recorded with the aid of Nils Lofgren, a 17-year-old unknown whose piano was a major instrument, turning one of the few real rockers, "Southern Man" (which had unsparing protest lyrics typical of Phil Ochs), into a more stately effort than anything on the previous album and giving a classic tone to the title track, a mystical ballad that featured some of Young's most imaginative lyrics and became one of his most memorable songs. But much of After the Gold Rush consisted of country-folk love songs, which consolidated the audience Young had earned through his tours and recordings with CSNY; its dark yet hopeful tone matched the tenor of the times in 1970, making it one of the definitive singer/songwriter albums, and it has remained among Young's major achievements”.

Frequently voted among the best albums of all time, After the Gold Rush sits alongside the all-time best Neil Young work. It may be his very best release. Still touring and recording to this day, his forty-ninth studio album, Talkin to the Trees, released under Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts, came out in June. Fifty-five years after its release, and Neil Young’s masterpiece After the Gold Rush…

CONTINUES to shine.

FEATURE: Groovelines: The Bluebells – Young at Heart

FEATURE:

Groovelines

The Bluebells – Young at Heart

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THIS might seem…

slightly random to include now. A song that was last a hit decades ago being spotlighted now. I often get ideas and inspiration from The Guardian. In terms of articles they publish and artists they spotlight. I also look at websites like NME, though I tend to find The Guardian is more worthy and varied when it comes to what they publish. If I am influenced by them, I will try and expand on what they write and bring in other sources. That is the case for the Groovelines. A song that was originally recorded by Bananarama and featured on their 1983 debut album, Deep Sea Skiving, it was then recorded by The Bluebells, where it appeared on their 1984 album, Sisters. Almost a decade after The Bluebells had disbanded, Young at Heart was re-released as a single on 15th March, 1993 after being featured in a British T.V. advert for the Volkswagen Golf. It has this odd history. Released on two different albums by two different groups within a year of each other and then coming back into the spotlight in a bigger way about a decade after its original release. Over three decades since it briefly brought The Bluebells back together, it is still being played and performed live. The band’s most recent album, In the 21st Century, was released in 2023. I will end with a new feature by The Guardian that brought together Robert Hodgens, a.k.a. Bobby Bluebell, and Siobhan Fahey (formerly of Bananarama and Shakespears Sister (who are still together), as they reminisced about the creation of this much-loved song. I am going to come to some other articles in a bit. However, there are some personal reasons why I want to include The Bluebells’ Young at Heart in this Groovelines.

I have talked about this a lot, but the first album I recall buying with my own money as a child was the Now That’s What I Call Music! 24 compilation that was released in April 1993. A month before my tenth birthday, I would have seen an advert for this album. I can’t recall if I bought it as soon as it came out, although it was not long after. This incredible compilation that had all these great hits from artists including Arrested Development, Duran Duran, Paul McCartney, 2 Unlimited, World Party and Shaggy, it also contained The Bluebells’ Young at Heart. I think I saw the song used on that Volkswagen Golf advert. I think that I bonded with the song when Now That’s What I Call Music! 24 came out and I was playing it. Sharing it with friends. I was captured by the spirit of the song and how uplifting it is. I never knew that it was originally recorded by Bananarama. Years later, even though the track is a bit dated and some might consider it corny, I have a lot of affection for it. Because its lyrics and mandate is quite pure and cannot be criticised. Concerning a child understanding about their parents' adult choices and compromises as they navigate their own growing up and the complexities of life. Young at Heart’s lyrics present and unveil this sense of budding maturity and empathy for the adults in their lives. Siobhan Fahey, who co-wrote the song, was inspired by watching the Frank Sinatra movie, Young at Heart. I love that. Before coming to that new article from The Guardian, where we get some contemporary perspective on the song from two of its writers, there are a few things I want to bring in.

As The Bluebells’ Sisters has been reissued, there have been some new interviews. Ayrshire Magazine spoke with founding member if the band, Ken McCluskey. It is hard for any artist that is associated with one song and that is what the fans want to hear. Maybe it can be a burden though, if this song unites generations and is so loved, it is also a  good thing:

“Mention The Bluebells and there’s one song that immediately springs to mind. ‘Young at Heart’ is undoubtedly the band’s biggest success having spent time in the top ten of the Official UK Singles Chart in both 1984 and 1993. When it was first released, it peaked at number eight but, thanks to Volkswagen using the song for what was, at the time, considered a rather audacious TV commercial, it climbed to number one nine years later.
It’s fair to say that the song remains a fan favourite, but what does founder member, Ken McCluskey, think about it?
“It’s good to play live because it gets the crowd up. Some people only know us for ‘Young at Heart’ and if you’ve got a big hit like that you should really play it, because that’s why most people come and see us”.

Classic Pop Mag chatted with The Bluebells’ Robert Hodgens about the reissue of Sisters. I do wonder how Young at Heart will fare decades from now. Is it a song that will resonate with young generations? I don’t think that it is reserved to those who are fans of The Bluebells or Bananarama. I loved the song as a ten-year-old, but I still love it now. It is a song that never fails to lift me up:

“And talking of ‘commercial appeal’, Sisters has subsequently been dominated by the success of Young At Heart after it featured in a TV advert. What do you put the extraordinary long-term appeal of that track down to?

Its commercial appeal and long-term success is down to the fact that it’s just very catchy. The lyrics, too, they’re kind of eternal really, about people not realising what their parents have done for them until they actually leave home and become parents themselves. I think we all take our parents for granted and that’s a great theme to write about. The bassline by Lawrence Donegan has got a lot to do with it, too. The drumming by David was really different at the time, but overall, it’s Ken’s singing that makes it really timeless. Everyone seems to know the song, and I’m very grateful for the success it’s had.

Bananarama’s version of Young At Heart is very different to The Bluebells. Did you set out with the aim of radically reinventing the song or was it just a natural expression of your band’s sound?

When we wrote the song in Siobhan [Fahey’s] flat in Holborn, we always  intended that both of our groups would do it.

The Bluebells, in fact, played it for a long time in our live set. We did the kind of Northern Soul version of it and played it live on Switch, a Channel 4 TV programme. You can actually watch that version on YouTube if you want to look it up.

Bananarama recorded it with Jolley and Swain and I don’t think the girls were pleased with the recording. We actually played it live once with the girls at the Lyceum for a Gary Crowley night. It was really great. I wish someone had filmed that…

But when we came to record it, we’d evolved it into a Bluebells style. I was quite influenced by I Want You by Bob Dylan and really liked those kind of shuffling drums. We found a way to do it as a band that we really loved. And when Roger Ames heard it, he just thought it was a smash right away. We originally intended to get Helen O’Hara from Dexys to play the violin on it from, which was one of his bands, too, but Roger wasn’t too keen on the cross fertilisation of one of his most successful bands and one of his least successful bands! Helen has played with us live recently, though. She’s fantastic and hopefully we’ll have her again as a guest, somewhere special in the future”.

I have seen some reviews of Young at Heart that attack it or put it down. The fiddle solo sounding jarring or a novelty. The title and chorus corny. A song that could be compared to Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen, which is about being young or genuinely young at heart. The Bluebells’ Young at Heart more about being older. And a song that sounds old and dated. Having these faults and flaws. If it does not sound captivating now, people need to remember how it affected people like me back in 1993. Why it was a hit in the first place. It is a song that some cannot see the appeal of but it is very special for so many others. A track that I feel has a lot of charm. Even though I don’t like everything about The Guardian’s new article, and it might be nitpicking – the headline quote spells the Pope without a capital B and The Bluebells without a capital B -, it is great to read Robert Hodgens and Siobhan Fahey discuss the origins of Young at Heart:

Robert Hodgens, AKA Bobby Bluebell, songwriter, guitar, vocals

“Siobhan is Irish but her father was in the British army, so she’d moved around and changed schools a lot. I think she had just wanted to escape, so we started writing lyrics about how her parents had got married young to have sex and have kids, because that’s what people did then. It was the first time since I’d left home that I also realised what our parents had done for us, which fed into the line: “How come I love them now? How come I love them more? / When all I wanted to do when I was old was to walk out the door?”

Bananarama recorded Young at Heart, but their version didn’t quite have whatever their big hits had at the time. Our record company boss Roger Ames suggested the Bluebells record it. We were big pals with Dexys Midnight Runners so thought of asking Helen O’Hara, who played fiddle on Come on Eileen, to play on our version. Roger said that would be “too much cross-pollination”, but the old story about us finding a fiddle player in the pub isn’t true – Bobby Valentino, who played on the single, was a session-player who laid the part down in a few minutes, and Lawrence Donegan came up with a killer new bassline.

In 1984, the song got to No 8 but then nine years later it was used on a car advert and it spent four weeks at No 1. The pope actually complained that the lyrics promoted divorce, which I thought was really funny – although my mum is Italian so she wasn’t best pleased.

IN THIS PHOTO: The Bluebells in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport/Getty Images

Siobhan Fahey, songwriter

Bananarama had been living in a leaky loft space above the Sex Pistols’ rehearsal room, although we were all in a council flat when Bob used to come down and stay in my room. We weren’t long out of school, we were practically children, but it was an incredible time to be in London. We’d go dancing in the Wag Club and everyone there was in a band: Wham!, Culture Club, Sade.

Once Bananarama started having hits, we had to disguise ourselves to sign on for the dole in case they’d seen us on Top of the Pops. Then suddenly we needed material for an album. I remember Bob sitting with a guitar and going: “Let’s write a song.” He came up with the title Young at Heart after we watched the film, then I started writing lyrics about my relationship with my parents. You can hear the difference between our personalities in the song. My words reek with pain, his are more loving: two very different experiences of growing up.

Bananarama recorded Young at Heart as a northern soul stomper. We’d wanted Soft Cell’s producer but were told he only did synth bands, so instead we ended up with Barry Blue. It’s a flawed production but I like our version, although it doesn’t have the fiddle hook, which is so important to the Bluebells’ one. The song’s mix of dark and cheery lyrics with uptempo, uplifting music reminds me of Tamla Motown, which was the reason we formed a girl group. It was such an amazing time to be young, and we were two kids who wrote a song about our parents from the heart”.

Whilst it divides some and it may be a generational thing, I think about Young at Heart a lot. Although the Bananarama version is great, there is something about The Bluebells’ that gets me. Maybe it is a bit cheesy or corny, its lyrics and story is brilliant. Has real weight and depth. A track that is still thrilling fans to this day! Over forty years since it was first released, this is a track I would recommend to everyone. If you only listen to it once. This is a rousing and thought-provoking song that…

DESERVES more compassion and respect.

FEATURE: Thank You for Hearing Me: Who Will Be Cast As Sinéad O'Connor in a Planned Biopic?

FEATURE:

 

 

Thank You for Hearing Me

IN THIS PHOTO: A 1992 portrait of Sinéad O’Connor at a concert rehearsal, with the image of the celebrated Observer photographer Jane Bown reflected in her pupils/PHOTO CREDIT: Jane Bown/The Observer 

Who Will Be Cast As Sinéad O'Connor in a Planned Biopic?

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IT may already…

IN THIS PHOTO: Sinead O' Connor in Bray, Ireland in 2008/PHOTO CREDIT: Kim Haughton/Shutterstock

be in the works but, as a planned biopic of Sinéad O'Connor has been announced, there will be speculation around the casting. I am going to come to that and one name who has been mooted as the frontrunner. However, first, it is worth getting to the news about a biopic of an artist that we tragically lost in 2023. Aged only fifty-six, it was heartaching learning of the passing of the Dublin-born icon. An artist whose influence is so vast! The outpouring of sadness was immense. That love and respect for O’Connor. It is inevitable that a biopic would be announced at some point. The Guardian provides some details about an anticipated music biopic that charts the early career of the irreplaceable Sinéad O'Connor:

“A biopic of Sinéad O’Connor is in the works, with its backers including the company involved in Nothing Compares, the acclaimed 2022 documentary about the singer.

According to Variety, the film will be directed by Josephine Decker, who made a much-liked biopic of horror writer Shirley Jackson, starring Elisabeth Moss, in 2020. The script will be by Stacey Gregg, who has credits on TV series Mary and George, Little Birds and The Letter for the King.

Production companies behind the project include See-Saw Films, whose past output includes The King’s Speech, Shame, The Power of the Dog and Slow Horses, alongside Nine Daughters (God’s Creatures, Lady Macbeth) and ie:entertainment, which acted as executive producer on Nothing Compares.

O’Connor died in 2023, aged 56, after a string of hit records including the huge-selling Nothing Compares 2 U in 1990, and a tumultuous life marked with outspoken protest and controversy. In 1992 she ripped up a picture of the pope on US TV; in 1999 she was ordained as a priest by an independent Catholic group, and in 2018 she converted to Islam.

According to Variety, the film will follow O’Connor’s early years in the music industry, “tell[ing] the story of how one young woman from Dublin took on the world, examining how her global fame may have been built on her talent, but her name became synonymous with her efforts to draw attention to the crimes committed by the Catholic church and the Irish state”.

Even though Winona Ryder is someone who looks very similar to Sinéad O'Connor, you do wonder about the age of the actor who will play her. If they are focusing on the early years of Sinéad O'Connor’s career, will the actor be de-aged? Winona Ryder is fifty-three. The frontrunner at the moment is Natalie Portman. Again, someone who very much resembles Sinéad O'Connor and could portray her seamlessly, is the fact Natalie Portman is forty-four rule her out? I would hope not! If, as the Irish Times rightly observes, many films love to relish in the downfall and decline of women and female stars, this is a film that will not do that. As such, it cannot be restrictive or ageist regarding the actor who will play Sinéad O'Connor. It will be interesting to see what approach the film takes. I don’t think they necessarily need an actor in her twenties or thirties to play Sinéad O'Connor. However, it would also be nice to have a relative unknown portray her. Maybe an upcoming talent or someone coming through like Emma Mackey. She has appeared in a few big films and T.V. shows, though this could be her biggest role. It is important to remember that, if Sinéad O'Connor were alive today, she would be the most vocal against the genocide in Gaza and Palestine. She would have written songs about it and taken to the stage to voice her disgust! I can imagine her risking prison by protesting. An actor who plays her, in political terms, needs to be on the right side. Someone who is actively opposed to the genocide and has spoken about it. Or someone who has spoken against Israel and what they are doing. Natalie Portman could be a fit in that sense as, if the casting it wrong in that sense, it could be a disaster from the start. She is someone who has voiced her anger at the mistreatment of Palestine people and the violence that has beset them. That was back in 2018. In terms of recent comments and news, this article explains how Portman has shown support for Gaza:

“Among the posts was a call to donate to humanitarian efforts in Gaza, a rare move from a high-profile "Israeli"-American celebrity amid the ongoing war.

Portman, who was born in Jerusalem and holds dual citizenship, shared content featuring demonstrators in Tel Aviv demanding an end to the war and the return of "Israeli" captives held in Gaza. One of the posts specifically pointed followers to a campaign collecting donations for Palestinian civilians affected by the genocide, a gesture likely to spark both praise and criticism across the political spectrum.

IN THIS PHOTO: Natalie Portman photographed in 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Lachlan Bailey for Vogue Australia

The Oscar-winning actress has long held a nuanced position on the "Israeli"-Palestinian issue. In 2018, she famously declined to attend the Genesis Prize ceremony in "Israel", citing her distress over recent events and her refusal to appear as endorsing then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Like many Israelis and Jews around the world, I can be critical of the leadership in Israel without wanting to boycott the entire nation,” she wrote at the time.

Portman has previously criticized the "Israeli" nation-state law as "racist" and expressed concern about policies that, in her view, undermine equality and democracy. Yet, she has also remained firmly opposed to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement and has maintained her cultural ties to "Israel", including directing a Hebrew-language film in 2015.

However, her posts add to growing voices challenging official narratives and calling attention to Gaza’s humanitarian crisis”.

It is impressive that an Israeli-born actor would take this stance. One might say it is simply humanitarianism, however, there are many actors in Hollywood who have either shown support for Israel or have revealed themselves to be Zionist. Natalie Portman could simply not be cast as Sinéad O'Connor if she was part of that group. O’Connor’s estate would definitely not allow it. Although it is more important to cast someone who will sound and look like Sinéad O'Connor and capture her personality and genius, we know full well the horror of what is happening today in Gaza and what O'Connor would say. Anyone playing her, even in her early career, needs to match O’Connor’s ethics, politics and worldview.

IN THIS PHOTO: Niamh Algar/PHOTO CREDIT: Christian Tierney

Belfast actor Lola Petticrew and Westmeath-born Niamh Algar are also among those who have ben tipped to play Sinéad O'Connor. Again, they are closer in age to when Sinéad O'Connor career began, though I would still like to think that the filmmakers would not use that as a barrier. Saoirse Ronan is someone else that could play Sinéad O'Connor. Will we see a huge actor like her cast or someone that is more unknown? Nothing is confirmed yet in terms of who will play O’Connor. Many on social media said it should be an Irish actor. Someone who is a naturally great singer. To be fair, Natalie Portman has a great voice and could easily learn the accent and O’Connor’s singing style. The delivery, intonations and cadence of her voice. Unless, like some recent music biopics, the actor will mime to the recordings, it will be quite a lot of work and preparation needed to accurately portray someone as unique and rich as Sinéad O'Connor. Even though Natalie Portman seems like a favourite and someone who definitely looks like the late icon, there is a lot to consider and balance. In terms of the age range, nationality of the actor and their experience. Whether you go for a big name that would naturally help bring people into the cinema or a newer actor who might be a more natural fit. Whoever is cast is going to get this wonderful opportunity to play a music genius early in her career. Whether the film starts before the release of Sinéad O'Connor’s debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, in 1987 or in 1990 when she released her second studio album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. It is going to be a biopic that will naturally receive scrutiny. I do think that the filmmakers will get the balance right in terms of the script and narrative. Casting the right lead is essential. Whether it is Natalie Portman or Niamh Algar, you know they will pour their heart, passion and every ounce of their being into the role! It is the least the dearly-departed queen deserves. An artist that…

WE all sorely miss.