FEATURE: Free As a Bird: The Importance of The Beatles’ Anthology 4

FEATURE:

 

 

Free As a Bird

The Importance of The Beatles’ Anthology 4

__________

I realise that I have…

spent a lot of time with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon and The Beatles in general over the past month or two. I will move away until closer to December, when Rubber Soul turns sixty. However, with the upcoming release of Anthology 4, I need to return to them. Actually, these are expanded editions. I am writing a separate feature where I talk about Deluxe Editions of albums and artists like Taylor Swift who will release multiple versions of albums. How much is this costing diehard fans?! In the case of The Beatles, there is quite a lot of activity when it comes to reissues. We have seen several of the studio albums reissued on various formats. I am not sure if there are plans for Giles Martin and his team to reissue Rubber Soul or even A Hard Day’s Night with outtakes and extras. It is exciting that we get these reissues and expanded editions, as we get to hear outtakes ands demos. Getting a bigger and wider impression of an album compared to the finished studio release. The Anthology 4 releases are particularly intriguing, as we get to hear various takes and demos of Beatles songs from throughout their career. On 14th October, an Anthology book will be available:

“The landmark international bestseller—The Beatles’ own story, in their own words—reissued on the 25th anniversary of its first publication.

The Beatles Anthology is, uniquely, the story of The Beatles by The Beatles. Created with the full cooperation of Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko Ono Lennon, it also includes the words of John, painstakingly compiled from sources worldwide. Interwoven with The Beatles' own memories are the recollections of such associates as road manager Neil Aspinall, producer George Martin, and spokesman Derek Taylor. From their years growing up in Liverpool through their ride to fame to their ultimate breakup, here’s the inside story.

The Beatles Anthology is, in effect, The Beatles autobiography.

The Beatles Anthology also features over 1300 images, most previously unpublished. Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko Ono Lennon all opened their own archives just for this project, as did Apple, EMI, and others long associated with The Beatles, allowing the unprecedented release of photographs, documents, and other memorabilia from their homes and offices. The result is an extraordinary wealth of visual material brimming on each and every page”.

Depending on your budget, you can invest in a twelve-L.P. version of Anthology 4. Even though it is expensive, it is good value when you consider how that breaks down for that much music. It might be one of the most important releases, as we get to hear these demos and raw recordings. Some live recordings too. There is this staggering array of music for £319.99! Although a lot of fans can’t afford that, just consider what you are getting for that money:

“4 x 3LP albums in triple gatefold sleeves and slipcase + 4 x photo art cards in unique numbered envelope

The Anthology Collection 12LP set includes the three groundbreaking Anthology albums from the mid-1990s, remastered in 2025 by Giles Martin, plus a new compilation, Anthology 4. Containing 191 tracks, the collection’s studio outtakes, live performances, broadcasts and demos reveal the musical development of The Beatles from 1958 to the final single ‘Now And Then’ released in 2023.

Anthology 4 features 13 previously unreleased tracks and 17 songs selected from Super Deluxe versions of five classic albums. In addition to fascinating outtakes dating from 1963 to 1969, the album includes new 2025 mixes by Jeff Lynne of ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’.

Furthermore, Anthology 4 presents 26 tracks that have never previously been released on vinyl.

Pressed on 180g black vinyl, each 3LP album will be housed within a triple gatefold sleeve, featuring the original art, sleevenotes by Mark Lewisohn, and restored photos for Anthology 1-3; Anthology 4 has brand new sleevenotes written by Kevin Howlett alongside photos. The outer slipcase features the original Klaus Voorman triptych art, and a 3/4 O-Card image of the band with detailed track listing.

The Beatles Store exclusive format will contain 4 x 12” band photo art cards in a custom black, numbered envelope (8500 total)”

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Of course, there will be a digital version of Anthology 4 available on 21st November. In the 1990s, three Anthology volumes were released. Anthology 3 took us to their final recordings in terms of the chronology. Between the volumes, we got to hear these early and alternative versions of songs that defined our childhood and young years. I think the fourth volume is going to be the definitive one. Some might say it is cashing in. However, thirty years after the first Anthology, it is a chance to own a slice of Beatles history. You can see all the Anthology options here. It is not only the music we will get and a book. There is an Anthology 4 documentary that will feature on Disney+. This feature explains more:

“The Beatles Anthology arrived in November 1995 as an eight-part TV documentary and three double albums of unreleased outtakes and alternate mixes (released over a 12 month period). Now 30 years on, this landmark examination of The Fab Four returns, offering remastered and remixed audio, restored visuals and new content, in the form of a fresh episode of the documentary and a fourth volume of music available in new 8CD and 12 LP Anthology Collection box sets. The book, issued in 2000, is also being made available again.

New physical music releases

In terms of the music, the new Anthology Collection box sets have been remastered by Giles Martin. The original three double albums are unchanged (remastering apart), but are joined by Anthology 4, newly curated by Giles, including 13 previously unreleased demos and session recordings and other rare tracks. This extra volume also includes new mixes of the 1995 and 1996 singles ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’. They have been freshened up by original producer, Jeff Lynne, using de-mixed John Lennon vocals (the original ‘Free As A Bird’ music video has also been restored). ‘Now and Then’, the last Beatles song, is also on Anthology 4. There is no mention of Dolby Atmos Mixes of any of the 191 tracks that make up The Anthology Collection. That would be a massive undertaking, to be fair.

Both 8CD and 12LP box sets include the original sleeve notes for Anthology 1, 2 and 3; the new Anthology 4 includes track notes written by Kevin Howlett and an introduction compiled from 1996 interviews recorded with The Beatles’ close friend and adviser Derek Taylor. If you are wondering about the packaging, as far as I can tell, that rather dubious photo that has been chosen of The Beatles appears to be a ‘bellyband’ which is removable to reveal the classic Anthology artwork below. Phew!

Documentary coming to Disney+

The original eight episodes of The Beatles Anthology documentary series have been restored and remastered. These were originally screened on TV networks around the world (ITV in the UK) at the time and were released on VHS and Laserdisc in 1996 and then on DVD in 2003. They never made it to blu-ray and there is a question mark over whether that will now ever happen, since as with The Beatles Get Back and Let It Be, restored Beatles Anthology is coming exclusively to Disney+, beginning in late November.

The restoration has been overseen by Apple Corps’ production team, working with Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films & Park Road Post teams along with Giles Martin, who has created new audio mixes for the majority of the featured music.

There is now a completely new Episode Nine, including unseen behind-the-scenes footage of Paul, George and Ringo coming together between 1994 and 1995 to work on “The Anthology” and reflecting on their shared life as The Beatles.

The book

The Beatles Anthology book took so long to come to market (five years after the first episode and the first album was released) it felt like something of an afterthought at the time. That’s not to say it’s not an impressive tome and the 368-page book remains the only official Beatles Autobiography. It’s back in print for what is its 25th anniversary, although it appears to be exactly the same content as before, and as such is the least exciting element of this reissue campaign.

The 8CD and 12LP vinyl Anthology Collection box sets are released on 21 November, The Beatles Anthology documentary will screen on Disney+ from 26 November and the book is available from 14 October 2025”.

Some might say that this is a bit too much. With all these options. Is it better to have something more focused so that you get this true essence of the band?! Is the Anthology 4 release a bit unwieldy and unfocused? I think that having this expansive and definite collection of takes, demos and live recordings is a dream. Surviving members of The Beatles, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, will be around to see how fans take to it. Whilst the studio albums are immense, I think Anthology 4 is more powerful and intimate. We are listening to the process and some earlier versions. More involved with the creative process and development of the band compared to the final versions. Remastered and brand new, it is going to be exciting hearing these songs in a new light. Recently, Free As a Bird was remastered and reissued. Blending all the harmonics and elements beautifully, it have extra weight and gravity to a song that I remembering hearing back in 1995. This review nails why the remastered version is perfect:

“One of the worst-kept secrets of the last week has been the impending announcement of Anthology 4. A fourth instalment to the gold mine of The Beatles’ earliest and remastered recordings. It remains a project of Herculean efforts, one which seemed to be capped off nicely two years ago with Now and Then. But there is more in the archives. More worth sharing. We hold our breath and wait for Carnival of Light to be snatched out of the vault by Paul McCartney, dressed as a cross between Indiana Jones and the man on the cover of Trout Mask Replica. While we wait for this heist to take place, presumably after the North American Got Back dates, we have a remaster of Free as a Bird. It was certainly in need of sprucing up. There was nothing wrong with the original, though the new technology Peter Jackson has used on previous Fab Four projects is notable.

Free as a Bird is amplified with this mix. A clearer sound is presented, and that, effectively, is the major change. But what a change it is. A necessary one, too. We should not take for granted just how different a sound comes from this and the original. Free as a Bird, one of three originals worked on during the Anthology project, is given a touch-up, which brings a cleaner sound not just to John Lennon’s vocals but the acoustic guitar work, too. Those layers of instrumental brilliance are that little bit clearer. We can use this Free as a Bird remaster as an indication of how the rest of the project will sound. Granted, there will be changes here or there, not because of studio personnel but because of tape quality. Free as a Bird sounds magnificent, though. It doesn’t have that slight, uncanny valley feeling Now and Then had, nor the awful music video.

Vocal similarities between this and the work Paul McCartney featured on Flaming Pie is clear. You can tell it’s from the period, but the cleaner production injects new life into it. George Harrison, too, sounds fantastic. The vocal quality is continued, the three Beatles harmonising over some steady, crashing drum work from Ringo Starr. Like Now and Then, it’s as close as many generations will get to a fresh-sounding Beatles track. An added tambourine is the big change here. How a little instrumental flair can make such a major change is truly inspiring, and it works well here. It gives the song a lighter flourish, a detail which feels like more than an easter egg for returning listeners. It’s a change which breathes a little bit of new life into the song but does not overwhelm it, nor turn it into a whole new project.

Walking the line, not falling into hailing the old versions or overriding them either, is tricky. But trust in the Anthology process and hear out those changes. They are for the better, and a slightly louder, more present instrumental range, is clear. Remastering can often feel like a non-event, just take a look at the Pink Floyd discography, but it is the subtleties of these changes which can revitalise a song. Free as a Bird sounded good in ‘95, it sounds better in ‘25. Tech has come a long way in thirty years, and those touching lyrics Lennon penned on a tape still hold incredible meaning. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr all sound magnificent, be it in their vocal work or, in Ringo’s case, the instrumental steadiness. All of it sounds just right. A perfectly balanced remaster which is far stronger than the original”.

There will be more interviews and articles about Anthology 4 closer to its release in November. With the book out before then, it is another great year for fans of The Beatles. If we might not get a reissue and expanded edition of one of their studio albums again, there is always activity. I would like to think, in 2026 and 2027, there will be even more. I think 2027 marks seventy years since Paul McCartney and John Lennon first met. However, before then, we can enjoy the delights of Anthology 4. These are not just throwaway releases and music to listen to and discard. This is something to cherish and keep for years to come. To pass down to other people. The eight-C.D. and twelve-L.P. vinyl Anthology Collection box sets are released on 21st November, The Beatles Anthology documentary will screen on Disney+ from 26th November, and the book is available from 14th October. Early takes of some of the greatest music the world has ever seen, Anthology 4 is going to be an essential purchase…

FOR every Beatles fan.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Little Richard

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Little Richard

__________

WHEN we think about…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ralph Morse/Life/Getty Images

the all-time most influential American artists, Little Richard comes close to the top of the list. The Beatles were fans of his, and they covered his work and performed some of his songs live. He undoubtably inspired Led Zeppelin, Freddie Mercury, Elton John and so many other titans. Born in Georgia in 1932, we lost the legend in 2020. I think the first song of his I heard was 1955’s Tutti Frutti. So exciting to me! I can understand why so many musicians have taken his music to heart. Little Richard was such an exhilarating performer. An architecture for the Rock and Roll movement, few artists in music history are as important as Little Richard. I am going to get to a twenty-song mix that combines some of his best songs. A great starting point if you are not familiar with him. I want to first bring in a feature from The New Yorker that was published the day Little Richard died (9th May, 2020). A postscript that paid tribute to someone who helped transform music and paved the way for giants who, in turn, have inspired generations of artists and fans:

“The core of Little Richard’s career was brief—he recorded an incandescent string of hits in the mid-fifties and then went off to rediscover his faith. In the years that followed, he’d dip in and out of show business, and there were some inspired moments, but he was a comet, not a planet. The trail of light that he left behind was, and is, everywhere. Try to imagine Muhammad Ali without Little Richard’s winking persona, his swing and swagger (“I am the King!”). Try to imagine James Brown, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Prince without his electrical charge. Little Richard was an original, and he did not hesitate to remind his students of their debt. He once looked into a television camera and, with affection, told Prince, “I was wearing purple before you was wearing it!”

Rather than watch the news–––it can wait––go to YouTube and watch Little Richard’s performances of “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” “She’s Got It,” “Lucille,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “The Girl Can’t Help It,” “Good Golly Miss Molly.” Banging boogie-woogie time with his right hand and singing miles beyond anyone’s idea of a “register,” he is a human thrill ride. There is more voltage in one of those three-minute performances than there is in a municipal power station.

One of the underrated books in the pop music library is “The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock,” an authorized biography/oral biography, by Charles White. Calling on multiple voices, it tells a revolutionary, ecstatic, sometimes heartbreaking story. Richard Penniman was born in 1932 into a large, poor Christian family, in Macon, Georgia. His father was a brick mason and a bootlegger. One of Richard’s legs was shorter than the other, making him a source of mockery among other children. “They thought I was trying to twist and walk feminine,” he once told Rolling Stone. “The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak.”

As a boy, Richard was raised in the Pentecostal Church and sang gospel on Sundays with a family group called the Penniman Singers and another group called the Tiny Tots Quartet. His earliest musical influences included Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Brother Joe May, the “Thunderbolt of the Middle West.” Even as a child singer, Richard was known for his high range and incredible volume. But, in his father’s eyes, he was unbearably effeminate and not to be tolerated. When Richard was a teen-ager, he was thrown out of the house and went to live with Ann and Johnny Johnson, a white couple who ran a local venue, the Tick Tock Club.

Richard was a poor student but, musically, he was a fast learner. He first learned to play the piano in church, but after hearing Ike Turner’s recording “Rocket 88,” and studying the style of S. Q. Reeder, Jr., better known as Esquerita, he adopted a pounding, mesmeric style. Throughout his teens, he was in and out of outfits like Buster Brown’s Orchestra (where he got the name Little Richard) and the Tidy Jolly Steppers. He sang, sometimes wearing a red evening gown, under the name Princess Lavonne, in Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show. He was serving his musical apprenticeship in the last days of these minstrel shows; he also inhabited a world of strippers and drag queens and brash comedians. He studied the flashy showmanship of Atlanta-based performers like Roy Brown, who had a hit with “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and he adopted the pompadour and pancake makeup of the jump-blues singer Billy Wright. He played the Dew Drop Inn, in New Orleans, where the m.c. was a famous female impersonator and performer named Patsy Vidalia.

Little Richard signed with RCA Victor in the early fifties, but his career didn’t quite ignite. He was still washing dishes in a Greyhound bus station to make a living. Things changed in 1955, when Art Rupe of Specialty Records put him together with some stellar New Orleans players, including the drummer Earl Palmer and the saxophonist Lee Allen. On September 14th of that year, they recorded “Tutti Frutti,” a bawdy boogie-woogie that Little Richard had been performing in countless drag bars. It included lewd verses such as “Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don’t fit, don’t force it / You can grease it, make it easy.” At the instruction of the producer Robert (Bumps) Blackwell, a songwriter named Dorothy LaBostrie worked with Little Richard to tone down the lyrics. But it wasn’t so much the lyrics as the beat and the ecstatic yowl—“A wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom!”—that made the song a hit. The record sold widely to blacks and whites. (And it did even bigger business among white listeners when Pat Boone recorded it.) For the next couple of years, Little Richard was a star at the highest level of the new art of rock and roll.

In the late fifties, while touring Australia, Little Richard said that he saw a powerful vision in the sky that caused him to give up rock and roll, come home, and enroll in Oakwood Bible College, in Huntsville, Alabama. In the years to come, he made forays back into music, secular and religious, but he was always torn. When Little Richard played the Star Club, in Hamburg, the Beatles were his opening act. “He used to read from the Bible backstage, and just to hear him talk we’d sit around and listen,” John Lennon told an interviewer.

Despite Little Richard’s own ambivalence about rock and roll, his influence spread quickly, and it ran deep. In the Iron Range town of Hibbing, Minnesota, a high-school kid named Robert Zimmerman listened all night to faraway radio stations playing country music, blues music, and the first rock-and-rollers: Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Bill Haley, and, the one he loved the most, Little Richard. In his high-school yearbook, he wrote that his ambition was “to join ‘Little Richard.’ ” His high-school band, the Golden Chords, played Little Richard covers. At a talent show in Hibbing High’s unaccountably ornate auditorium, the principal yanked the curtain shut on the Golden Chords and their cover of a Little Richard tune. Zimmerman wore his hair in a high, poufy pompadour, just like his idol. “I was trying to look like Little Richard, my version of Little Richard,” he told an interviewer years later. “I wanted wild hair, I wanted to be recognized.” He left town and became a star in Greenwich Village with a new name: Bob Dylan.

It seemed evident that Little Richard both thrived on his sexuality but suffered terribly from the time that he had been cast out of his own home as a boy. Despite the flamboyance of his performances and his carriage, he never quite settled, publicly, on a sexual identity. Sometimes, he would say he was gay, sometimes bisexual, sometimes “omnisexual”; there were moments, feeling the weight of his religious background, when he even denounced homosexuality. As recently as 2017, in an interview with a Christian broadcaster, he talked about “unnatural affection.”

Chuck Berry, in his autobiography, recalls performing on the same bill as Little Richard at a school in Connecticut in the sixties. Little Richard, according to Berry’s account, asked Berry to come to his hotel room to “party.” Berry asked him if that meant just the two of them.

“Chuck, I’ve always wanted to perform with you since the first time I saw you on television and have thought about it ever since.”

To make love? Berry asked.

“You’d love it; it’s like no other performance in the world,” Little Richard replied.

Berry recalled, “I tried to match his smile, and then I suddenly excused myself in a rush to get ready for the show, but he bade me farewell in a contented voice, and that was that.”

In the seventies, Little Richard struggled mightily with a consuming cocaine habit. By the eighties, he was starting to suffer from a variety of health problems. Sometimes he would show up to receive an award, sometimes not. He turned down interview requests, played rarely onstage, and gradually faded from public view. But the recordings, the legacy, is there to pick you up, even in the hardest times. “You can’t keep still when you hear the great Little Richard,” as Buddy Holly put it. “He’s the wildest act in rock and roll.”

Or, as Little Richard himself described his effect on body and spirit, “My music made your liver quiver, your bladder splatter, your knees freeze—and your big toe shoot right up in your boot!”.

This run of features travels through the years and honours modern and legacy American artists whose songbook is among the richest and most notable in music. I am going to feature a modern contemporary artist for the next visit. However, I could not overlook Little Richard. Someone I and so many other people first heard during childhood. Recognising the astronomical impact he has made to music. I don’t think we will ever see another musician and songwriter…

AS influential as him again.

FEATURE: Humble Mumble: Outkast's Stankonia at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Humble Mumble

Outkast's Stankonia at Twenty-Five

__________

IN terms of deciding…

IN THIS PHOTO: Outkast’s Big Boi (Antwan Patton) and André 3000 (André Benjamin) in 2000/PHOTO CREDIT: GRIP Magazine

which album is the first real classic and work of genius of the twenty-first century, you could argue that Outkast’s Stankonia takes that honour. Released on 31st October, 2000, it is the fourth studio album from of Big Boi and André 3000. I think it is their best album. One of the best of all time, in fact. Because it turns twenty-five soon, I am exploring some features about the album. Notable and standout songs from Stankonia include Ms. Jackson, Humble Mumble, B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad), and So Fresh, So Clean. Following 1998’s Aquemini, Outkast incorporated a broad array of styles into their next album, which included Funk, Rave, Gospel, and Rock within a Dirty South-oriented Hip-Hop context. This could have been a risk for a duo whose fans expected perhaps a certain sound. However, Stankonia was a massive success with fans and critics. Reaching number ten in the U.K. and two in their native U.S., many publications have included Stankonia in their best of lists. Also, this was an album that acknowledged Rave culture. Hip-Hop prior to 2000 was largely about slower beats. Outkast added something new and spliced the previously detached worlds of Rave and Hip-Hop. The songwriting throughout is commanding, fascinating and masterful. I want to start out by quoting a bit of FADER’s 2000 interview with Big Boi and André 3000:

“Stankonia is where they got they funk from.

But first, are you experienced? Uh, have you ever been... experienced? You, with your conscious rappers and Black Augusts? You, with your headwrap, and you, with your backpack? You, with your getting-it, and you with your 360 degrees of hip-hop? Have you ever been knock-kneed, mind-blown, zooted and looted, all funked up and no place to go?

The thing about Big Boi's house is that inside it he has a Boom Boom Room, and the thing about the Boom Boom Room is that there's a stage in the corner. The stage isn't big, maybe three feet by three feet, but the surface is mirrored and there's a pole in the middle that reaches to the ceiling.

In fact, the stage is so small that you really don’t notice it's there until one of the women gets off the couch and starts to dance around the pole. Except that it's not really dancing, just a repetitive slow-mo gyration suggesting ennui. No one's really watching her and she’s not dancing for anybody else, a caged bird needing no listener to sing its song.

On the other side of the Boom Boom Room, several more women languish on low-slung couches. They all have names in which Ys replace Is— Chyna and Kym. At the bar, more of OutKast's Earthtone crew— Slimm, C-Bone, DJ and Nathaniel are making headway on a gallon of Hennessy and more than a couple of blunts. Unmastered tracks from OutKast's upcoming album blast from the stereo system.

A lot of shit is talked in the Boom Boom Room, but most of the conversation remains unspoken. lt's like any foreign land in that way, men and women acting out roles that are diffcult to understand when observed from the straight world. The only thing to do is keep up, keep your eyes open, and try not to pass out in that chair in the kitchen.

Downstairs in the garage the photographer is still shooting in a race against sunrise.

"I do this all the time," says Big Boi, leaning up against his mint Cadillac. Shutter clicks. The car is a pale cheddar with purple iridescence, and there is pride in his voice when he calls it his Paddymelt. "Really, this what we doing tonight? I love this type of shit. Little get-togethers at the crib, with the fellas and some hoes. It's just fun, you know?"

PHOTO CREDIT: Jonathan Mannion

At 4:37am a few of the women come down from the Boom Boom Room. In various stages of undress, they pose in and on the Paddymelt. "This is how we made the album," continues Big Boi. "While we were working on this album we would do this three or four nights a week. Every time we finished at the studio, we‘d head to the house. From four in the morning ’til two the next afternoon, just kickin‘ it."

Twelve hours earlier everything was understandable: OutKast, a new album, a photo shoot, an interview. In and out; no one gets hurt. But now the moment has taken on a timelessness, a surrealism that threatens to steal it all away to a land of no return.

Andre has fallen silent, leading only Big Boi holding the lifeline. "Stankonia is whatever's the funkiest shit ever," he explains, lucid. ’It could be that purple, or that funky-ass music."

And the photographer clicks away.

A RAINY NIGHT IN GEORGIA

It’s been storming for hours.

Andre is driving. But even as he watches the road and directs his Land Rover or whatever towards Big Boi's house in the woods, his eyes have turned inward and his mind has moved in another direction, past the other side of the game. This is when he conjures most the man from Electric Ladyland. More than the headband or the mixed metaphors of his clothing, its the occasional sad, faraway look in his eyes that reminds you of Hendrix, a sense of being young and world-weary at the same time.

"The funk is basically freedom," he says, not real heavy on it, just kind of think-ing aloud. "The funk is not a certain sound or a certain way you dress or a certain look. Something can sound funky or look funky, but my opinion of the funk is a certain freedom that started way back in Africa. But we don‘t want to make it no big racial issue or no shit like that."

That's because the Promised Land of Funk is an uncharted expanse of electro-magnetic technicolor modulations, and being Afrocentric alone might not qualify you for the trip. This probably explains why the roadside of such a pilgrimage is littered with DAT cassettes, gold records and backup bands with shallow pockets. Rhyming—or writing—about the funk without ever having gone there is pointless, like feeling the heat without complaining about the humidity.

"I guess we’re talking about an individual freedom," he says”.

I will end, like I have for several recent features, with a review from Pitchfork. I think their depth and analysis is particularly strong and interesting. However, first, this CLASH feature from 2020 marked twenty years of the masterpiece that is Stankonia. It was an album that won over people who were not fans of Hip-Hop. A varied album that still has not aged and throws up surprises, I remember it coming out in 2000. It was a big moment:

“The album was named after the recording studio that the duo bought in 1998. ‘Stankonia’ was a word that Andre created himself, and he explained that ‘Stankonia’ “is this place I imagined where you can open yourself up and be free to express anything”.

The album cover shows Andre standing shirtless facing forward, arms stretched outward and chin held high, along with Big Boi rocking a baggy t-shirt and big necklace. Both are placed in front of a huge drooped black and white American flag. The image is simple yet iconic, but gives little away as to how colourful the 24 track album really is.

The leading single 'B.O.B' exemplifies the album; it never sits still, unapologetically getting in your face with constant surprises. Bombs Over Baghdad remains calm for a maximum of five seconds, before a countdown from Andre 3000 sets off the fireworks. Both loud and lively, the song makes commentary of life in the ghetto, whilst referring to political turmoil in Iraq at around the same time. The duo's influence on the 90s rave culture can be heard through drum 'n' bass beats. The track is constantly switching, adding other layers.

With most OutKast songs, it's easy to tell who has had the most influence creating the track. Big Boi firmly stands at the front for 'We Luv Deez Hoez'. The sarcastic pimping song is both catchy and straight up gangster. Whilst ‘Stankonia (Stanklove)’ is all Andre 3000, he sings the hook, stretches his voice during the verses. The song is all harmony, with no rapping, providing more of an insight into what you would hear more of on their following album ‘Speakerboxx / The Love Below’.

The duo were now grown ups, and the subsequent problems they faced are referenced on the album. Standout track ‘Ms. Jackson’ is a prime example of this. Both radio friendly and catchy, the track pushed them into stardom, winning a Grammy and being the first of three songs to reach No.1 on the Billboard charts. If you hadn’t heard of OutKast before, you certainly would’ve by now.

Influenced by Andre and his relationship with Erykah Badu, ‘Ms. Jackson’ is the story of ruined relationships, and promises that weren’t kept. A storm is centred as the central theme through the music video and track, a metaphor for 'stormy' relationships, as Andre states: "Hope that we feel this, feel this way forever/You can plan a pretty picnic, but you can't predict the weather, Ms. Jackson".

‘Stankonia’ is a journey through sounds of funk and hip-hop, 'So Fresh, So Clean' is a straight up anthem, both catchy in the hook and beat. Then, there’s the turbulent ‘Toilet Tisha’, a vivid story from the hood of a 14-year old girl struggling with the idea of having a baby. 'Spaghetti-Junction' shows the duo's chemistry at its fullest. Each raps a verse before coming together on the last back-to-back, with their flows blending into each other. The opener ‘Gasoline Dreams’ has guitar strings that hit you like a truck and ‘Gangster Sh*t’ is an aggressive head bopper. In-between songs, skits lead onto tracks or are used for comedic effect in heavy Atlantian slang”.

There is another interesting article that I found from 2020. NPR. A fascinating interview and conversation between Dr. Regina Bradley (an award-winning writer and researcher of the Black American South), Gavin Godfrey (a freelance writer and editor from Atlanta, he’s written for CNN, Rolling Stone, Vice, FADER and COMPLEX) and Christina Lee (an award-winning storyteller whose writing, commentary, and production work appears in iHeartMedia, NPR, and more). They chatted about an album that “was a curation of not only OutKast's investment in the future, but a blueprint for what was to come later with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: a look at the group's evolution as men and as artists, solidly and firmly centered in a stronghold of how the South could sound”:

“When OutKast released its fourth studio album Stankonia, the pioneering duo out of Atlanta, Ga., was not new to this, but they remained true to the hip-hop thing. Released on Halloween 2000, months after the initial Y2K scare that left people terrified of being throttled back into a period of darkness and technological paranoia, Stankonia took full advantage of the new millennium. They stayed true to what they did best and created something powerful on the fringes of mainstream pop culture's expectations of them as southerners and as rappers.

Breaking new ground cleared from the debris of nostalgia, burned with their Chonkyfire, Stankonia challenged listeners to reconsider what it meant to be OutKasted in the wilderness of an unknown new world. Never ones to shy away from the stank of imagined and social-historical realities, Stankonia is a demonstration of André Benjamin and Big Boi evolving their sound, their identities, and their art. Benjamin was blasting centuries ahead with his latest moniker, André 3000, an Afrofuturist prediction that the future was Black and dope as hell, and Big Boi was growing increasingly experimental in not only his lyrical delivery but his fashion sense, paralleling Benjamin's own eccentric flair for fashion.

Stankonia was a curation of not only OutKast's investment in the future, but a blueprint for what was to come later with Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: a look at the group's evolution as men and as artists, solidly and firmly centered in a stronghold of how the South could sound. Earthtone III — consisting of Benjamin, Big Boi, and DJ David "Mr. DJ" Sheats — are on full display for the majority of the album. Stankonia showcases influences from multiple genres, eras, feelings, and experiences, including EDM on the much celebrated and canonized "B.O.B."

Dr. Regina Bradley: I feel like I'm back in high school, junior year — shout out to Westover High School — running to lunch, listening to Stankonia. I'm really in my feelings. Chris, Gavin, what are your immediate reactions to listening to Stankonia 20 years later?

Gavin Godfrey: Man, it still sounds super fresh 20 years later. To me, not much has changed other than time. They still sound as fresh as they did 20 years ago.

Christina Lee: I mean, listening to this album kind of feels crazy. I sometimes forget just how vibrant this album is, how ambitious this album is, but that's what immediately strikes me. It's amazing how OutKast is able to really just branch off at this point, especially when you compare it to their previous discography.

What do you think it is about the Stankonia album that really made folks sit up and pay attention to what they were doing and why they couldn't just be considered Southern hip-hop after all?

Lee: I think what's really interesting about this album is that it is absolutely Southern hip-hop, but there is a part that is very conscious of the world around them. You're seeing these dichotomies play out, the sort of balance between mainstream hip-hop and the conscious hip-hop era. We have to remember that, at this particular time, those two genres are starting to branch off. And the thing is, Stankonia encompasses all that.

Godfrey: I think they built a world with this album. I'm gonna nerd out real hard real quick, but OutKast, for me, is almost like George Lucas when Star Wars was good. He was known for building whole worlds, but he literally was just telling stories about everyday occurrences. But he made you see it through this lens. OutKast is still very much rooted in Atlanta. Through the lyrics, through the sounds, they're not only thinking globally, but universally; these boys are thinking about the cosmos.

When I talk to DJ and Big Boi about this, the name Stankonia comes from Dre just always referring to everything they did as funky. They want everything to be funky, funky, funky and go back to the crazy lack of limitations that came from Parliament Funkadelic before them. I think it all stemmed from them being comfortable in their world, but also trying to step outside of their comfort zone and bring everybody along with them.

We're not just going to gush on Stankonia, you know, I got to ask you: What do you think has aged well about the album and what do you think hasn't aged so well?

Godfrey: In the culture now, I don't know how "Snappin' & Trappin'" would have been received, how much folks would have responded to what Killer Mike was saying in there. Back then, maybe lyrically, you could get away with a lot more because there wasn't the proliferation of social media, a constant influx of information to call out every single lyric, every little thing somebody did.

Listen to Stankonia now and it's wild, you know, because, man, these dudes knew. It's like they knew everything that was going to happen today. But they were talking about it 20 years ago and it's still so, so relevant. So, I mean, a lot has aged well for me in terms of I think it sounds even better now than it did then.

Lee: I mean, I echo absolutely everything that Gavin said. I think the thing with OutKast is that the perspective is always coming from, like, "Here we're going to give you some food for thought." And I think in this particular age, giving food for thought isn't clear cut enough for listeners. I think listeners expect groups to kind of take on a very particular stance. And maybe this is because I'm reading a book called The Butterfly Effect; it's the first biography of Kendrick Lamar by Marcus J. Moore. But in listening to some of Kendrick's discography and comparing it to Stankonia, I think I'm most struck by how, at this particular time, there's a lot of hip-hop acts that are turning to rock past and Black music past and understanding that even though we're operating within the space of hip-hop, we have the entire musical gamut to pull inspiration from”.

will move to Albumism and their twentieth anniversary feature about Outkast’s Stankonia. Each feature provides new details and focus. I really love this album twenty years later. One that is still influencing artists. An undeniable work of genius from a duo who are among the legends of Hip-Hop:

“Still, Stankonia is at its best when OutKast comes at the audience from unexpected angles. The quirky “I’ll Call Before I Come” is often an overlooked entry on the album, and one of my personal favorites. For a song about fucking, both members of the group are pretty gentlemanly, as André declares his preference for “old school, regular draws” and Big Boi states that a woman’s sexual satisfaction is of paramount importance. With Eco and Gangsta Boo appearing to detail their fantasies and desires, the song is also equal opportunity in its freakiness. I also love the instrumentation for the track, which sounds like it could have been lifted from a late era Sly Stone song or some late ’70s funk.

“Humble Mumble,” bizarre in its own right, is anchored by upbeat Caribbean-influenced grooves and unexpected beat shifts. In terms of subject matter, the track is all over the place, but still feels coherent. While Big Boi addresses coping with adversity in the pursuit of one’s goals, André ponders the complexities and contradictory nature of everything from hip-hop music to life itself. The song also features the vocal talents of Badu, who apparently was on good enough terms with André to contribute both the chorus and a melodic final verse to the song.

OutKast reach deep into their bag of way-out funk tracks as Stankonia draws to a close. First is “Toliet Tisha,” the sorrowful ballad of the late 14-year-old Tisha. Damn, we miss her. Musically, the song sounds lifted from a mid-1990s Prince album. Amongst layers of watery synths and guitars, André sings through heavy vocal distortion, voice nearly unrecognizable, and Big Boi delivers a harrowing spoken-word verse. Together, they narrate a tale of an unwanted teenage pregnancy, and the heartrending outcome. The song is legitimately sad but doesn’t wallow in tragedy for its own sake.

“Slum Beautiful” is another personal favorite on the album, a psychedelic dedication to their female companions. The song oozes cool, as André, Big Boi, and Goodie Mob’s Cee-Lo wax philosophic about the effects that the objects of their affection have on their mentalities. Back then, Cee-Lo could still be considered one of the best emcees around, and his vivid and awestruck verse is a highlight. The musical backdrop is a mix of Jimi Hendrix and Graham Central Station, as backward-masked guitars mix with a resonant bassline and complex percussion.

The album ends with the funk-drenched title track a.k.a. “Stank Love.” Clearly inspired by late ’70s/early ’80s P-Funk ballads, André and Sleepy Brown channel George Clinton and Garry Shider, inviting the objections of their affection to release their inhibitions and soar with the kites in the sky through their freaky love. The song is mostly instrumental, rattling with gurgling bass and keyboards, and ghostly voices wail. Big Rube delivers an appropriately way-out spoken word piece, speaking of an act of love so profound that it’s “engulfing, encompassing like a cataclysmic shockwave of an impact so deep, but not one of destruction, but of creation.” The song doesn’t so much as end as it fades out into the ether, remaining with the listeners as it echoes through the speakers.

In some ways, Stankonia is the “final” OutKast album, as the group followed it up with the Speakerboxxx/The Love Below project (2003), a combination of solo albums for each of the duo. They effectively broke up afterwards, only reuniting to release the 2006 Idlewild soundtrack, which was largely phoned in. Suffice to say that OutKast went out as a group on a high note here, having travelled just about everywhere there was to go, and treating their followers to a hell of a journey. People still clamor for another OutKast album, but I personally feel like they went out on top. Always leave them wanting more”.

I will wrap things up with Pitchfork’s 2018 review. They heralded Stankonia and how it is this “transcendental funk fantasia, an unequivocal commercial and artistic triumph”. I am curious how journalists will cover Stankonia on its twenty-five anniversary on 31st October. How it still changes and evolves Hip-Hop. How it broke barriers and was revolutionary:

“There is so much going across Stankonia—the coordinated confetti of noises on “Gangsta Shit,” the uneasy meditation of teen pregnancy that is “Toilet Tisha,” the playful lasciviousness of “I’ll Call Before I Come,” the melodic menace of “Red Velvet,” the skits that spoke in metaphors to the subconscious via hood tongues, the arrangements and progressions that felt capricious, but totally natural. The backing tracks weren’t soundscapes as much as they are aural murals graffitied on the cosmic underpasses where abandoned tricked-out space shuttles rest, stripped of their Brougham rims. It was music that was tangential to crunk, a predecessor to trap, indebted to hip-hop, electro, funk, rock, and anything alternative—the type of music that usually succeeds on intellectual levels and rewards nerds, but not readily equating to an album that would sell more than 4 million copies. Yet OutKast is probably best defined by defying parameters and expectations.

Stankonia is easily the group’s most expansive and abrasive effort. It’s more accomplished than their biggest seller, the double-disc Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which lacks the tension and dichotomy of André and Big Boi locked in a studio, warring with each other and themselves to the extent that created numbers like “Humble Mumble,” Stankonia’s breakbeat-ish, Caribbean-tinged track where Big Boi admonishes a simp with “Sloppy slippin’ in your pimpin’, nigga/You either pistol whip the nigga or you choke the trigger,” before André recalls speaking with a rap critic: “She said she thought hip-hop was only guns and alcohol/I said ‘Oh, hell naw!’/But, yet, it's that too.”

OutKast had always consisted of a politically conscious pimp and a spiritual gangsta, but on Stankonia, those identities came to the fore with a greater distinction that paradoxically allowed them to sound closer together than they had since their inception—even as André sat out songs like “Snappin’ & Trappin’” and “We Luv Deez Hoez.” On Stankonia’s first proper song, “Gasoline Dreams” Big Boi raps about their clout and the limits thereof—“Officer, get off us, sir/Don’t make me call [my label boss] L.A. [Reid], he’ll having you walking, sir/A couple of months ago they gave OutKast the key to city/But I still gotta pay my taxes and they give us no pity”—while André throttles out a brainy hook: “Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline?/Well burn, motherfucker, burn American dreams.”

Stankonia is an album about many things and full of epigrams; so ahead of the curve that one of its many double entendres—“I got a stick and want your automatic”—is now a bona fide triple entendre. It’s about sounds as smells and music as sex, but mostly it’s about two black kids from Southwest Atlanta, boogieing with chips on their shoulders, making Molotov cocktails of songs that sound like a revolution’s afterparty. It’s peppered with personal narratives and small slips of autobiography, and it tackles big ideas both directly and obliquely. But, ultimately, it sounds like two artists going pop on their own terms while trying to make sense of, and change, the world around them. Closing in on two decades after its release, Stankonia remains loud as bombs over Baghdad and humble as a mumble in the jungle”.

Without doubt one of my favourite albums ever, I think back fondly to 2000 and the release of Stankonia. Big Boi and André 3000 were in perfect harmony on this album! Rather than repeating what they had done before, they pushed their vision and sound out. Bringing in different genres and directions, it all blended perfectly into this masterpiece. One that continues to stun me. It is an album hard to top…

AFTER quarter of a century.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Adele - Hello

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

PHOTO CREDIT: Alasdair McLellan

Adele - Hello

__________

THERE is a lot to be said…

of Adele’s Hello. It was released on 23rd October, 2015 and was the lead single from her album, 25. Written with the song’s producer, Greg Kurstin, Hello was a huge global success, topping the records charts in a record-setting thirty-six countries, including in the United Kingdom. To mark a decade of this globe-conquering song from one of music’s biggest names and most incredible talents, I wanted to bring in some interviews and reviews. A lot though we get a lot of hype today about Pop artists and new albums coming out, there was something more natural in terms of the excitement and anticipation that greeted Adele’s Hello. I am going to start off with an interview from Rolling Stone from November 2015. Adele opened up about her private life, runaway fame and long-awaited new album, 25:

“As Adele steers through a South London high street in her four-door Mini Cooper, with her toddler's vacant car seat in back and the remains of a kale, cucumber and almond-milk concoction in the cup holder, a question occurs to her. "What's been going on in the world of music?" she asks, in all sincerity. "I feel out of the loop!"

The only possible response is way too easy: Well, there's this one album the entire industry is waiting for...

"Oh, fuck off!" Adele says, giving me a gentle shove and letting loose the charmingly untamed laugh — an ascending cascade of forceful, cartoonish "ha's" — that inspired a YouTube supercut called "The Adele Cackle."

"Oh, my God, imagine," she continues, green eyes widening. "I wish! I feel like I might be a year too late." It's as if her last album, 2011's 21, hadn't sold a miraculous 31 million copies worldwide in an era when no one buys music, as if it hadn't sparked the adoration of peers from Beyoncé to Aretha, as if it hadn't won every conceivable award short of a Nobel Peace Prize.

"But genuinely," she says, "I've lost touch with music. Not, like, all music" — she's a fan of FKA Twigs, loves Alabama Shakes, snuck into the crowd at Glastonbury to see Kanye — "but I feel like I don't know what's going on in the charts and in popular culture." She laughs again. "I've not lost touch with, like, reality. Just with what's current." Her Cockney accent is softening lately, but she still pronounces "with" like it ends with a "v."

She's driving under a sky that is gray and dismal even by the standards of early October London afternoons. Rain is coming, threatening Adele's plans to take her three-year-old son, Angelo, to the zoo later. No one in the passing vehicles recognizes her. They never do, not in this car. "Maybe if I went out in full, done-up, hair-and-makeup drag," she says. "Which it is: borderline drag! I'm not brave enough to do it." Instead, she's dressed like a grad student who barely got up in time for class, in a drapey blue-black sweater made of some hemplike fabric — it could almost be from Kanye's dystopian fashion collection — over black leggings and white low-top Converse. Her golden hair is gathered in a loose bun, and she's wearing twin hoop earrings in each ear. Her makeup is minimal, and though she claims to be developing a wrinkle or two, she looks strikingly young, with a clotted-cream complexion worthy of the cosmetics endorsements she's turned down.

Adele is fresh from a rehearsal with her backing band, where she perched on a chair facing the musicians and sang her first-ever live version of "Hello," the melancholy, surging first single from her third album, 25, due November 20th. (She turned 27 in May, but named the album after the age when she began work on it: "I'm going to get so much fucking grief: 'Why is it called 25 when you're not 25?'") "Hello, it's me," she sings at the beginning of the single, as if there could be any doubt. When she finally puts the song out a couple of weeks later, it will rack up a record-setting 50 million YouTube views in its first 48 hours.

With a young child to raise, Adele took an unhurried approach to making the album. A full six months passed between writing the verses of "Hello" and nailing the chorus. "We had half a song written," says producer/co-writer Greg Kurstin, who didn't know if Adele was ever going to come back and finish it. "I just had to be very patient."

The lyrics sound like she's addressing some long-lost ex, but she says it isn't about any one person — and that she's moved on from the heartbreaker who inspired 21. "If I were still writing about him, that'd be terrible," she says. "'Hello' is as much about regrouping with myself, reconnecting with myself." As for the line "hello from the other side": "It sounds a bit morbid, like I'm dead," she says. "But it's actually just from the other side of becoming an adult, making it out alive from your late teens, early twenties."

Adele still hasn't decided whether she'll do a full-scale tour behind 25 — right now, the rehearsals are for TV performances. Her band has a few new members, and she's especially excited to have a percussionist for the first time, an addition inspired by her childhood idols: "The Spice Girls had a mad percussionist," she says”.

I am going to move on to an interview from The New York Times. At such a crucial and exciting time in her career, Adele also reflected on a certain sense of pressure on her shoulders. As someone who released a massive album (21) and was releasing new work, it must have been nerve-wracking and anxiety-inducing trying to create an album that could match it. Arguably, 25 is Adele’s standout album:

“The question that loomed over Adele in her four years between albums was how — or if — she could follow her blockbuster with something equally striking. “There is no beating or redoing ‘21,’” said Ryan Tedder, another producer and songwriting collaborator for both “21” and “25.” “You’re lucky if at one point in your life you stumble across a unicorn in the woods. The odds that you find a second unicorn are extremely remote, and she’s aware of that. I think that ‘25’ will be enormous, regardless of anything. But that wasn’t the goal. She wanted to put out the best thing that was the most honest.”

At this rehearsal, with a journalist in the room, Adele was a musician above all. She moved decisively through new songs and old ones in preparation for TV appearances and a Radio City Music Hall concert (and NBC TV taping) on Tuesday, Nov. 17, three days before the worldwide release of “25” (XL/Columbia). And she sang in full-throated glory, capturing the vengeful bite of past hits like “Rolling in the Deep” and the hushed suspense and pealing chorus of her new one, “Hello.” Her stage arrangements echo her albums; she wants the songs familiar enough for fans to sing along.

Adele had largely maintained public silence while recording “25.” Her reticent re-emergence was a brief, anonymous television advertisement, first shown on Oct. 18 during “The X Factor” in Britain. It was the beginning of “Hello”: just somber piano chords, Adele’s voice and the lyrics — “Hello, it’s me/I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet” — with no other information.

Unlike most other pop hitmakers her age, Adele barely uses social media. It’s one of the many charmingly old-fashioned aspects of her career. But she does have a Twitter account, and she couldn’t resist looking online to see if her voice had been recognized. When she did, she saw only three tweets.

She panicked. “I was like, ‘Oh, no, I’ve missed my window,’” Adele said over a cup of tea a few days after the ad. “‘Oh, no, it’s too late. The comeback’s gone. No one cares.’”

But then, she recalled, her boyfriend, Simon Konecki, joined her at the computer and showed her that thousands of other tweets were pouring in. Once “Hello” was released on Oct. 23, more than 1.1 million people bought the song as a download in its first week in the United States alone, and tens of millions streamed the audio and watched the video clip.

“Hello” doesn’t just introduce “25”; in many ways, it sums up the album. On “25,” the rage and heartache of “21” are replaced by longing: for connection, for youth, for reconciliation and for lifelong bonds. Like other songs on the album, “Hello” is filled with thoughts of distance and the irrevocable passage of time, of apologies and coming to terms with the past. Musically, “Hello” has verses with just voice and piano followed by huge, ringing choruses; similarly, the album as a whole switches between organic, unplugged ballads and booming modern pop”.

As you can imagine, a decade ago, there was a lot of critical excitement and intrigue around Hello. Perhaps you would not quite get the same sort of press intensity for a new song from Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter. Maybe you would, though you did not get as much of that in 2015. Hello was an event rather than a single release. The Guardian shared their view on the lead single from 25:

“Rumours have been circulating about Adele’s third album for months now: at one stage, the erroneous belief that 25 was due to be released in mid-September apparently led a selection of record labels to frantically change the release dates of their own forthcoming big albums lest they ended up trying to compete with it in the charts. But perhaps the most striking thing about the gossip is the sheer eclecticism of the supporting cast reported to be involved in the follow-up to the biggest-selling album of the 21st century. You might expect it to feature her longstanding producer Paul Epworth and blue-chip songwriters-for-hire Max Martin and Ryan Tedder – the latter co-wrote 21’s Turning Tables and Rumour Has It – but further down the list, things got more intriguing: Pharrell Williams, producer Danger Mouse, acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr, Damon Albarn and, most improbably, Phil Collins were all reputed to have been involved. Understandably, this provoked a degree of speculation about what an album that somehow finds room for all of them might sound like, particularly given that the artist at its centre clearly has carte blanche to do what she likes: who’s going to argue with someone whose last album sold 30m copies?

Albarn was recently roundly criticized as churlish for suggesting that, far from a radical departure, 25 was going to be “very middle-of-the-road”. On the evidence of Hello, he had a point. It’s the sound of someone understandably declining to fix something that wasn’t broken: Hello could have been on 21, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about its sound and its quality. It’s precisely the kind of lovelorn epic ballad that made Adele one of the biggest stars in the world. It even comes complete with a video that features that classic signifier of grandiose musical heartbreak, the singer belting it out while being tousled by a wind machine.

Anyone disappointed that Adele hasn’t returned bearing an Albarn collaboration featuring Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, his old mates from the Chinese opera and the Yacouba Sissoko Band can console themselves a little with the thought that Hello is a superior example of type, built to stand out from the vast tranches of similarly-minded stuff on Radios 1 and 2. Adele sounds great: she sells the song without over-singing it, leaving the melismatic vocal fireworks to the inevitable spate of X Factor cover versions. The opening is striking – it’s quite witty to open your first album for five years with the words “Hello, it’s me” – and the chorus sticks after one listen”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Theo Wenner

There is another interview that I am including. This one came from DIY. I can remember the buzz and wave of positivity for Adele in 2015. Sure, not everyone was on board and was that kind, though I think Hello signalled the arrival of another incredible album. One that confirmed her position as a remarkable British talent with few peers:

“After disappearing entirely from the public eye for three years, Adele returned with three words. “Hello, it’s me” - in an X Factor ad break, of all places. It was enough to send everything into a frenzy, and no surprise. It’s a very amusing, and a very ‘Adele,’ way to return. Lets remember that we’re talking about a woman who successfully rhymed “skyfall” with “crumble,” here, not to mention that an estimated 1 in 6 households in the UK apparently have a copy of her last album ’21’ resting by the stereo. Yet, here she is. No fanfares, no pomp, just a brief greeting.

A ‘Hello’ is all that’s needed to cement her return. Picking up four years later, the reluctant well-wishing coursing through ‘Someone Like You’ and the angered regret of ‘Rolling in the Deep,‘ are both replaced by more reflective, retrospective sadness. “After all these years,” Adele’s asking nobody in particular if there’s any way she can say she’s sorry, move on and put the whole thing to bed. All she wants is closure, but the phone line’s gone dead.

Typically, Adele doesn’t faff about with lyrical flouncing or overblown poetic statements. She’s not offering to raise mountains, walk halfway across the world, or summon thousands of shooting stars for anybody. Instead, it’s all very confiding, and straight-forward in a way that makes the emotional clout all the more pronounced. The heart and soul that comes from her voice - painstakingly controlled but flipping out into acrobatics like she’s sitting right on the edgeof composure - is there, still, as we always knew it would be, and blimey o’reily, can she still write a heartwrencher. Hello, Adele. It’s good to have you back”.

I will wrap things up with a feature from Houston Press. They asked why Hello was a hit. What was it about this song that meant it ticked all the boxes and was a number one single in so many countries. It couldn’t just be that this was Adele and there was that loyal fanbase already there. Hello connected with new fans and followers. The album that followed, 25, also was purchased by those who were not previously fans of Adele:

“Because Adele’s Songs Are One-to-One

Adele’s songs adeptly set aside the trappings of modern life to home in on the triumphs and tragedies of two people in a world of billions. Her songs contain an intimacy that many of us have traded in for following friends’ and strangers’ exploits on Facebook and Instagram. How many times have you tuned out your own partner’s words to read a rambling post about politics, sports or why Adele’s new song is a stunning success? She’s got anthemic, empowering stuff like “Rolling In the Deep,” but maybe we crave the interpersonal closeness of songs like “Hello” and “Melt My Heart to Stone” so much that we’re drawn in like lovers’ lips when she returns with new, one-to-one material.

Because Adele Is Not What Passes for Pop Music Today

Go to Spotify’s new-releases page and allow the player to shuffle through the latest and greatest. I did this over the weekend, and at least two-thirds of what scrolled up was someone rapping over or cooing to electronic beats. I’m not averse to this sort of music, just as I’m not averse to a good zombie movie. It’s just that when there are so many out there, it’s hard to differentiate between one walking dead and the next. And, as we all know, the classic that was Night of the Living Dead sadly spawned Zombie Strippers and Zombeavers. It’s the law of diminishing returns, people. Thankfully, we occasionally can still hear and appreciate the far less common instances of Auto-Tuneless singing set to piano.

Because Adele Doesn’t Believe Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word

I watched the Vevo with my wife, and she believes the song has gained traction because it’s about asking for forgiveness. This is a common theme in music but not in real life, she reminded me. How many people do you know who love each other and share history (think family relationships for best results) who have some wedge between them presently, some wall that is keeping them apart and further wasting the valuable and finite minutes we’re allotted? Maybe the song is a brilliant reminder that, difficult as it might seem, there’s a single word that can put all these wayward relationships back on track, one as simple as “Hello”.

Actually, I am not quite done. The final thing to include is an article from The Guardian. Perhaps inevitably, Hello became the fastest-selling single of 2015. A decade later, and there are few singles that gathered the same sense of occasion and majesty. This was a huge moment in modern music history. Now, with Adele stepping away from the stage and her latest album being 2021’s 30, there is no telling when and if she will release another album:

“Adele’s Hello is set to become the fastest selling single of 2015.

The British soul singer’s comeback became a viral smash when it was released online on Friday 23 October. The video has already clocked up 107m YouTube plays, 27m of which occurred on its first day of release, breaking all existing records.

At the halfway point in the week, the lead single from Adele’s new album 25 is way ahead of its nearest rival – Justin Bieber’s Sorry – with combined sales and streams of 165,000. This figure includes 156,000 downloads. The current record for first week’s sales this year is held by Ellie Goulding’s Love Me Like You Do, but that figure of 173,000 is likely to be eclipsed by Adele’s sales.

Martin Talbot, managing director of the Official Charts Company, said: “It is a huge challenge for any artist returning after such a huge last record – as 21 and its singles were. But Adele has smashed it right out of the park with a fantastic single, which has connected with British music fans comprehensively. She already looks set to be the queen of quarter four.”

Adele has also been giving interviews to promote 25. She told i-D that motherhood was far tougher than she expected: “It’s fucking hard. I thought it would be easy. ‘Everyone fucking does it, how hard can it be?’ Ohhhhh ... I had no idea. It is hard but it’s phenomenal. It’s the greatest thing I ever did”.

On 23rd October, 2015, Adele’s Hello came out into the world. I wanted to look back at a decade at this big moment in music. One of Adele’s very best songs, I do hope that we hear more from her in the future. Go and listen to Hello and check out its video. Even if you cannot remember a decade ago and everything that happened around the release of Hello, you will be able to appreciate the strength and quality of the song. Hello is a song that will stay nestled…

IN the mind and heart.

FEATURE: A Sixth Sense: Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Six

FEATURE:

A Sixth Sense

Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at Thirty-Six

__________

THE sixth album…

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

from Kate Bush, The Sensual World, turns thirty-six on 16th October. Even though it is not a big anniversary, I didn’t want to let the occasion pass by. I am going to bring in a promotional interview from 1989. I might repeat some information used in previous anniversary features. I want to start out by bringing in the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and a bit of background about the 1989 album. One that followed the huge commercial success, Hounds of Love. It was a very different album to that. Many do not rate The Sensual World as highly, though I feel like it deserves more acclaim and scrutiny:

“As with Hounds of Love, the album was recorded mainly in Kate’s home studio, after it was upgraded, adding an SSL console. Kate said she felt “overwhelmed by the amount of equipment aroud me. It was quite stifling, and I made a conscious effort to move away from that, and treat the song as the song.”

Del Palmer was her principal engineer, and they often worked together on the new album, with Haydn Bertall appearing now and again. Three tracks on the album feature backing vocals by the Trio Bulgarka. The title track was inspired by James Joyce’s book Ulysses, specifically the closing passage of the novel by Molly Bloom. When the estate refused the use of that text, Kate wrote her own which echos the original passage, but adds a dimension: ‘Stepping out of the page / into the sensual world‘”.

Other people have said to me that they think this album is very dark, although for me I think it’s my happiest album really. I find some of the tracks quite funny where other people say they find them scary. Although I have a dark sense of humour, maybe it is a subconscious thing that just goes into my music, because I think when I was writing this album that was perhaps something I was feeling a little – a sense of being a bit scared. Maybe it comes out in the music. I do think it’s a very big self- therapy thing now – the more I work on an album the more I think it’s almost a process for me to try and heal myself, have a look at myself. Do you know what I mean? Actually a very selfish thing in a way, but I think art is. I do think what artistic people are trying to do is work through their problems through their art – look at themselves, confront all these things. (…) It’s not that the album is written about me, not that it is autobiographical, but it is the most direct process I’ve used for an album.

It’s in my own studio and I had a lot of time so as not to be under pressure by outside forces. I’ve recorded the whole album with Del so it’s just myself and Del in a very close relationship working together very intensely and it was hard for me to write this album. To actually write the songs was very difficult, and for the first time really, I went through a patch where I just couldn’t write – I didn’t know what I wanted to say. (…) Everything seemed like rubbish – you know? It seemed to have no meaning whatsoever. Somehow I managed to get a sense of some meaningfulness, and that’s why (…) to me now, albums are perhaps a way of helping myself, but maybe helping other people too. To work through my problems maybe will help other people too. To work through my problems maybe will help other people to work through their problems. Maybe the meaningfulness of art is that once you’ve got over your selfish work within it, you can give it to other people and hopefully it might at least make them smile or something.

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

I think this album for me, unlike the last album, say, Hounds of Love, where I saw that as two sides – one side being conceptual – this album is very much like short stories for me. Ten short stories that are just saying something different in each one and it was a bit like trying to paint the pictures accordingly. Each song has a different personality and so they each a need little bit of something here, a little bit of that there – just like people, you know, some people you can’t walk up to because you know they’re a bit edgy first thing in the morning. So you have to come up sideways to them, you know, and it’s kind of like how the songs are too. They have their own little personalities, and if it doesn’t want you to do it, it won’t let you.

The VH-1 interview, January 1990”.

Before getting to a couple of features, I want to bring in a large portion of this Melody Maker interview that Kate Bush had with Steve Sutherland that was published on 21st October, 1989. Perhaps Bush didn’t give as many interviews as she did for Hounds of Love, though there were quite a few in 1989. It was a busy time for her. Following this album, Bush would leave it four years before releasing her seventh studio album – the brilliant The Red Shoes:

“The Sensual World is completely self-absorbed in its own erogenous pleasure, while This Woman's Work, plaintively, over stark acoustic piano, reviews the man's side of the relationship and, really, pities him.

"John Hughes, the American director, was doing a film called She's Having a Baby --a great film, very nice and comic. And he had this scene which he wanted me to write a song for where it gets very heavy. The film's about this guy who gets married and he likes being a kid, really--very much up in the clouds--and she gets pregnant and they go into hospital, and she's rushed off becuase the baby's in the breach position.

"And suddenly there he is, just left in the waiting room by himself. It's probably the first time in his life he's had to grow up. It's a lovely piece of film, where he's looking back on their times together--there are scenes where they're decorating their flat, going for walks and things--and it was very much just a matter of telling the story in words--how, at times like that, you tend to go into something akin to guilt mode and you think of all the things you should have done and you just didn't."

I think men are bigger babies than women. I don't think we grow up so fast.

"Maybe men can avoid more situations than women in terms of facing things. I guess there are things for women that are different and they tend to deal with life situations rather than perhaps the business world or whatever. God, this sounds so sexist..."

Not at all. Women give birth, they are physically part of the creative process. It's as if their orgasm grows and bears fruit, whereas men fuck and that's it--it's a release, something we get rid of rather than something we gain. Then it all builds up again, and we can't handle it. I think women are far stronger emotionally. Men can't cope with emotions. We get frustrated and aggressive and destructive because we can't express ourselves, whereas women seem to embody their feelings better. Something positive grows from them..

"Yes, I think you're right. It's very hard on all of us but, yet, through the process of giving birth, I'm sure women are much stronger than men, and it's incredibly hard on them that they should not be able to show their emotions when actually it's okay to be weak."

We men are confused. The trouble with the invention of the notion of sexism and the paranoia surrounding it is that the only way we can deal with it is based on a fallacy. We think that, just because women should quite rightly have equal rights and equal opportunities, the sexes are the same. But we're not--women are aliens to us, we don't understand you at all. You speak a different language altogether. We're different creatures entirely.

"Absolutely, I'm with you 100 per cent. I couldn't agree more. I think it's awful what's happening to people's sense of their own sexuality. Women are made to feel awkward about expressing themselves as women in a man's world, so, subconsciously, a lot of the time, they're behaving like men because they don't know how strong they're supposed to be. Then again, women's lib has left men in a lot of areas where they don't know how to behave in case they get called sexist, a pig, or whatever.

"We are different, and we should be helping each other. Unfortunately there was such a lot of shit to get through that it was a battle, but I don't think it need be."

The album seems to be saying, "If you find yourself in a tricky situation, follow your instincts--just behave the way if feels right and at least you're being true to yourself, irrespective of the outcome."

"Yes, absolutely...And what an incredibly difficult thing to apply to life. I think there are some very good things going on to help us through. I must say, for me, the comdy in this country has been really educational. You know, Ben Elton and The Comic Strip--all those people you can't really call alternative comedians anymore because they've become mainstream. I think they've really done a lot to stop it being fashionable to be humorous with sexist overtones.

"It used to be very hip to make fun of women. Old comedy was all about treating women as a threat and, therefore, making fun of them. And I think they've really changed a lot of that. They've done so much for men and women because now, in most circles, among people our age, if you make a sexist joke, it's really considered tasteless. I think that's a fantastic step forward. And to see people like Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders out there doing comedy being women as women is brilliant.

Do you listen to much pop music?

"Not much when I'm making albums. In the evenings I probably watch a film or comedies or something visual to take me away from my ears. But, in between albums, yeah--there's some great stuff. Johnny Lydon's new album is just great, and I heard some tracks off the new Jeff Beck album and they were great, too. I think there's been some good, good music out there. Everyone in the music industry's been wearing black for, what, the last four years? Well, I think everyone's in mourning for good music. It's a show of mourning--'Look, here we are, where's the music?' And there's little snatches now, and that's exciting."

Are you hypersensitive to music? I mean, just because you make music that moves other people, that doesn't necessarily mean that music moves you, does it?

"God, I'd love to think that my music could move people, because it doesn't happen to me often, but, when it has, it's a lovely experience. The Bulgarians did it to me, and Nigel Kennedy (the young classical violinist who also plays on the album) sometimes makes me cry."

There are so many musical cliches, and you're breaking them down. Using Davey Spillane's Uillean pipes and Dave Gilmour's guitar and the Trio, you've succeeded in creating a new, uncategorisable sort of music which isn't anything, it's just music. I think that's important, because it makes people open their ears to stuff. It enriches their lives.

"Well, that's lovely. What a really nice thing to say. Um...I think everything seems too easy to categorise, and...I think that's just such a lovely thing to say..."

It's like what you were saying about relationships--you've done it with music. You've given it time to grow, to see if it's compatible. And it sounds natural, not cosmetic.

"Well, I think that's fantastic...that's just such a nice thing to say, that's really great...wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Because I think this is really what music is--a continual process of people experimenting, taking this and that and putting them together: all these experimental marriages. And when they work, I think that's such an important step, because then they've created a new music of a sort which then goes on to evolve.

"And, if it doesn't work, that's absolutely fine, too, because that shows you what doesn't work. So, if you feel this is a natural union, that's really good. I suppose I'd like to think that, as long as I really care about making music, there will always be people out there who want to hear music that is cared for."

The hour's up and Kate thanks me for saying such lovely things about her album. I thank her for making such a great album, and she thanks me for thanking her, and says I have a lovely energy, and...shucks...We blush a bit and shake hands, and I shuffle out of the room, out of her life, elated and embarrassed”.

I think I will end with a positive review but get to a feature first. I wanted to include a spread of information that is both insightful, personal and you might not have read. I am trying not to repeat what I have published before. Things changed between Hounds of Love and The Sensual World. Kate Bush turned thirty and there was a shift in musical tone and palette. The Quietus when they wrote about The Sensual World for its thirtieth anniversary in 2019, explored how it is an autumnal album. In terms of the sensations, sonics and songs. Maybe a slightly darker or gentler album than Hounds of Love with all its bursts of summer:

“The Sensual World, then, with its poetic allusions to Bonfire Night and the harvest, is her autumnal album. If Hounds Of Love, with its percussive and effect-heavy arrangements, is a budding fruit, The Sensual World is its ripened, fully mature successor. Where the drums were booming they are now accentual, where the synths were pulsating and fulsome with Fairlight wizardry they are now ambient and warmly textured. The rich instrumentation reflects the mood; Kate had flirted with Celtic arrangements on songs like ‘Night Of The Swallow’ from 1982’s The Dreaming and parts of Hounds Of Love (most notably ‘Jig Of Life’), but the Uilleann pipes of Davey Spillane and the various Celtic instruments played by her brother Paddy and by Alan Stivell (arranged by Bill Whelan) are woven into the very fabric of The Sensual World.

Meanwhile, the titanic, full-throated vocals of the Trio Bulgarka (an inspired choice of personnel) add a wise spirit to the music. The palette of bells and pipes, the imagery of setting fire to cornfields, synths that are somehow removed yet oddly comforting – it all adds up to a striking sound world perfectly evocative of this particular time of year.


Everything about The Sensual World exudes autumnal beauty – from the elegant arrangements to its dusky, monochromatic cover portrait of a wide-eyed Kate Bush; from the album title’s rusty-leaf text to the bells that fade in like a tender alarm call on a crisp morning. Her voice, an instrument that bloomed on The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, is exquisite throughout, alternately keening and soft, throaty and forceful.

Gone is the light joy of summer, and the freshness of spring, but in its stead something more mature, more realised – perhaps still bristling with internal conflict, but with a newly-attained level of perspective. It is an album that suggests both the ending of childhood and the beginning of adulthood ("let’s face it, you’ve got to start growing up when you’re 30") and the bizarre hinterland between the two – the tension between cutting cords ("just put your feet down child, cos you’re all grown up now") and yearning for parental security ("reaching out for mama"), not to mention the prospect of parenthood of your own ("now starts the craft of the father").

‘The Sensual World’ itself sets out the album’s autumnal stall immediately – soft, pealing bells give way to an arrangement that incorporates pipes, warm synth washes, and an insistent drum pattern; its accompanying video, following the singer through a forest of crimson leaves, is as seamless a supplement as could be. She told International Musician in 1989 how she had "had this idea for about two years to use the words from Molly Bloom’s speech at the end of [James Joyce’s] Ulysses, which I think is the most superb piece of writing ever, to a piece of music. So Del [Palmer] had done a Fairlight pattern, and I’d done a DX riff over the top of it, and I was listening to it at home, and the words fitted absolutely perfectly. I thought, ‘God this is just ridiculous, just how well it’s come together.’"

The Sensual World is like an orchard, each song a ripened fruit. It has an insular atmosphere in keeping with her home studio set-up, and the music perfectly matches the mood evoked in the lyrics. It is the sound of Kate Bush more comfortable in her own skin, facing the complications of life. It looks forward while somehow looking back. It may be an album that personifies Molly Bloom and references Hitler, but it is also a deeply personal, sensual utopia. "This is definitely my most personal, honest album," she told Q. "And I think it’s my most feminine album, in that I feel maybe I’m not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man’s world… On The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, particularly from a production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power, which I felt was a very male attitude. In some cases it worked very well, but… perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying to do the things that men do in music”.

For anyone who does not own The Sensual World, I would urge you to buy a copy. Such a remarkable album, I want to come back to it ahead of its thirty-sixth anniversary on 16th October. I am going to end by sourcing from a Pitchfork review that was published in 2019. I am going to round up in a minute. However, Pitchfork note how Kate Bush is completely in control for her sixth studio album. Rather than the songs being fanciful or like fairytales, they are more like stories or vignettes:

“But she’d never sounded more grounded than she did on these 10 songs, most of which are about regular people in regular messes, not disturbed governesses, paranoid Russian wives or terrified fetuses. It was, she said, her most honest, personal album, and its stories play out like intimate vignettes rather than fantastical fairy tales. Unlike the otherworldly synth-pop-prog she pioneered on 1985’s Hounds of Love, she used her beloved Fairlight CMI to produce lusher, mellow textures, complemented by the warm, earthy thrum of Irish folk instruments and the pretty violins and violas of England’s classical bad boy, Nigel Kennedy. Even the album’s artwork depicted a less playful, more serious Bush than the one who’d fondled Harry Houdini on 1982’s The Dreaming and cuddled dogs on Hounds of Love.

There’s no Hounds-style grand narrative thread on The Sensual World. Bush likened it to a volume of short stories, with its subjects frequently wrestling with who they were, who they are, and who they want to be. She was able to pour some of her own frustrations into these knotty tussles: She found it more difficult than ever to write songs, couldn’t work out what she wanted them to say, and hit roadblock after roadblock. The 12 months she spent pestering Joyce’s grandson were surpassed by the maddening two years she spent on “Love and Anger,” which, fittingly, finds her tormented by an old trauma she can’t bring herself to talk about. But by the end, she banishes the evil spirits by leading her band in something that sounds like a raucous exorcism, chanting, “Don’t ever think you can’t change the past and the future” over squalling guitars.

Even its most surreal songs are rooted in self-examination. “Heads We’re Dancing” seems like a dark joke—a young girl is charmed on to the dancefloor by a man she later learns is Adolf Hitler—but poses a troubling question: What does it say about you, if you couldn’t see through the devil’s disguise? Its discordant, skronky rhythms make it feel like a formal ball taking place in a fever dream, and Bush’s voice grows increasingly panicky as she realizes how badly she’s been duped. As far-fetched as its premise was, its inspiration lay close to home: A family friend had told Bush how shaken they’d been after they’d taken a shine to a dashing stranger at a dinner party, only to find out they’d been chatting to Robert Oppenheimer.

It’s more fanciful than most of The Sensual World’s little secrets. To hear someone recall formative childhood truths (the lush grandeur of “Reaching Out”) and lingering romantic pipedreams (the longing of “Never Be Mine”) is like being given a reel of their memory tapes and discovering what makes them tick. On “The Fog,” she’s paralyzed by fear until she remembers the childhood swimming lessons her father gave her, his voice cutting through the misty harps like an old ghost. Relationships on the album can be sticky and thorny. “Between a Man and a Woman” is half-dangerous and half-sultry, its snaking rhythms mirroring the round-in-circles squabbling of a couple. When a third party tries to interfere, they’re told to back off. This time, unlike on “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” there’s no point wishing for a helping hand from God.

But if there are no miracles, there are at least songs that sound like them. For “Rocket’s Tail,” Bush enlisted the help of Trio Bulgarka, who she fell in love with after hearing them on a tape Paddy gave her. The three Bulgarian women didn’t speak English and had no idea what they were singing about, but it didn’t matter. They sound more like mystics during its a capella first half, and when it eventually blows up into a glammy stomper with Dave Gilmour’s electric guitar caterwauling like a Catherine wheel, their vocals still come out on top: cackling like gleeful witches, whooping like they’re watching sparks explode in the night sky. Its weird, wonderful magic offered a simple message: Life is short, so enjoy moments of pleasure before they fizzle out”.

On 16th October, it will be thirty-six years since Kate Bush released The Sensual World. Many fans and critics would have wanted or expected an album closer in feel to Hounds of Love. However, Kate Bush delivered something much more interesting and original. The late-1980s was defined by a rise in golden Hip-Hop and artists like Janet Jackson, Pixies, Soul II Soul and The Stone Roses. Nothing quite like Kate Bush! Very few female artists making the sounds we hear on The Sensual World. As a result, it took some critics a while to adjust, though there was a lot of love and positivity. In rankings, The Sensual World does well. This 2023 ranking put it in third (out of ten). This 2019 feature also placed it third. This 2022 list put The Sensual World fourth. So it is revered and seen as one of Kate Bush’s best albums! That said, many people do not talk about The Sensual World and go deep with it. I hope that changes. This brilliant album, turning thirty-six on 16th October, is an…

AUTUMNAL masterpiece.

FEATURE: Let Me in Your Window: Will Kate Bush Ever Be Represented in T.V. and Film?

FEATURE:

 

 

Let Me in Your Window

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing in Paris on the French T.V. show, Formule 1, on 16th March, 1983/PHOTO CREDIT: Jean-Jacques Bernier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Will Kate Bush Ever Be Represented in T.V. and Film?

__________

IN the past…

IN THIS PHOTO: Julia Garner photographed in New York in 2020/PHOTO CREDIT: JJ Reddington/BuzzFeed News/Re​dux

I have mused why there has not been a Kate Bush biopic and why need to see more of her on the screen. Kate Bush’s music has been brought to the screen. A few examples over the past five or six years. From The Bear and films such as Palm Springs to, of course, Stranger Things, we have heard her voice on the small and big screens. Bush starred in plenty of music videos and appeared in her own short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. That was back in the 1990s. She has done the odd bit here and there but, when it comes to her being represented in films and T.V., perhaps her name has been mentioned and we have seen and heard her albums. Perhaps there are not that many women who looks like Kate Bush to portray her. Mary Steenburgen could play a modern Kate Bush. I will park that thought and return to it. I am revising this topic because there is always activity when it comes to music biopics. There are some interesting biopics coming up. Apart from The Beatles’ ones from Sam Mendes in 2028, Zendaya will star as Ronnie Spector, the iconic lead singer of '60s girl group, The Ronettes, in the long-awaited biopic, Be My Baby, for A24. I think that there are some fantastic opportunities to fulfil. It was recently announced that Julia Garner will play Madonna in a biopic. Not too long ago, it seemed like that film had been scrapped. However, this work in progress is still on the cards. She has this uncanny resemblance to Madonna, especially her 1986 era when she released True Blue. I cannot wait for this biopic to be made and on the screen!

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the photoshoot for Hounds of Love’s second side, The Ninth Wave/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

I do think that there are reasons why we may never see a Kate Bush biopic. I have written about this for other features, though it is worth reviving at a time when female icons of music are being brought to the screen. Some may say that Bush’s life and career is not dramatic enough to make into a film. That there has not been enough drama perhaps. Bush is very private too, so she would not greenlight such a thing. However, with a new generation aware of her music, there is this question about whether we will see her likeness on the screen. It does not have to be a biopic or film/show entirely about Kate Bush. What angle would that take anyway? What time period would we look at? I do think that there are opportunities to include her in some form. I have written features asking whether we will ever see The Ninth Wave made into a film. That is the second side of her fifth studio album, Hounds of Love (which turned forty on 16th September). I think that it would an incredible film or T.V. show. Obviously, Kate Bush would not take the lead. I did speculate that n actor like Saoirse Ronan could play the lead. That suite is about a woman being swept overboard a ship and longing for help and hope. All the feelings and emotions that enter her head and the way that she dreams of being with friends and family but is overcome with delusions, fatigue and paranoia. I do hope it gets made one day. Whilst Bush did bring it to the stage in 2014 for Before the Dawn, the vast majority of her fans did not see it, and there are limitations with a staged production in terms of time, scope and scale.

IN THIS PHOTO: Margaret Qualley/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Higbee for Wonderland

It is great that Kate Bush’s music has appeared on the screen. It provokes conversations and means that there is this important and prominent placement. Her songs brought to life in different ways. Scoring scenes in unique ways. A biopic will never get made. Kate Bush would never allow this. I think that there is possibility that there could be something in terms of Bush’s likeness being used in a show or film. There are Kate Bush tribute acts. However, this would be something different. What I love is how there has been this absence. So many artists brought to life on the screen, though Kate Bush has not. As far as I know. I have been thinking about a drama or comedy that is set at a particular time and either we briefly see Kate Bush or it includes her music. In terms of modern actors who look like her, I have been thinking of Margaret Qualley. Maybe playing Bush during her Hounds of Love period or slightly before, if there was a music show or something that showed some of the biggest artists of the day, then it would be great to see Kate Bush portrayed. What I love is how there are so many possibilities when it comes to Kate Bush. Perhaps seeing her as a teenager when recording The Kick Inside or Wuthering Heights. Or a scene of her performing it on Top of the Pops and an actor playing her. I also like the idea of Kate Bush and Del Palmer (he played on many of her albums and was her engineer for several albums. He sadly died in 2024) seen together, either as a couple or in the studio. People would say Kate Bush would veto any idea like this. However, as she has reissued her albums and her music has appeared in T.V. shows and films, would she instantly take against any visual likeness of her if it was done affectionately? I come back to that Madonna biopic and the fact she was portrayed (by Evan Rachel Wood) in 2022’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

If not a chance to see an actor play Kate Bush either in a larger speaking role or just a brief visual flash, I do still think that her music could take a bigger role than it has to this point. There are shows that are soundtracked by a particular artist. They soundtrack things. It would be incredible if there were characters bonded by their love of Kate Bush or her music is at the centre of this powerful and memorable production. I have said how Kate Bush wants to remain private. Perhaps this would be too exposing. However, there are these incredible music biopics coming up, so it made me think of Kate Bush. Such an iconic artist that I have never seen portrayed in a film or T.V. series. The recent fortieth anniversary of Hounds of Love put a new spotlight on her genius. I hope that something happens in terms of either her likeness coming to her screen or her music used more widely than it has been on shows like Stranger Things. An arc built around tracks or characters that reference Kate Bush or share their connection to and love of her. I can’t be the only one who would intrigued by those possibilities. I do sort of miss the excitement that there was around Stranger Things in 2022. Of course, there will be another burst if Kate Bush releases another album. However, there would be something wonderful about having Kate Bush played by an actor or her music being used in a film similar to Blinded by the Light (the film tells the coming-of-age story of Javed, a British-Pakistani Muslim teenager whose life is changed after he discovers the music of Bruce Springsteen). I have pitched this before, and I still think that it could work. Fans might have their own views. Kate Bush would need to sign off and that could kill any potential. She might feel that anything like this would mean she’ll…

LOSE her purity, privacy and a sense of mystery.

FEATURE: I Hope I Die Before I Get Old: The Who’s My Generation at Sixty

FEATURE:

 

 

I Hope I Die Before I Get Old

IN THIS PHOTO: The Who in 1965/PHOTO CREDIT: GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images 

The Who’s My Generation at Sixty

__________

THE album of the same name…

turns sixty on 3rd December. On 29th October, its first single was released. Perhaps the most loved and popular track from The Who. A song that seemed to capture a distinct feeling and rebellion in 1965, The Who’s My Generation has endured and is still relevant I think. Written by the band’s guitarist and primary songwriter, Pete Townshend, in 2012, Paste placed My Generation at number six on their list of the twenty best The Who songs. it was placed number eleven by Rolling Stone on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time In 2004 and 2010; re-ranked number 232 in the 2021 edition. I am taking this information from the Wikipedia article about the song. Reaching number two in the U.K. upon its release, My Generation is notable as it features one of the first bass solos in Rock history. Also, Roger Daltrey’s stuttered delivery of some of the lyrics meant that the song was almost banned for a long period by the BBC through fear it would offend people living with a stutter. However, once My Generation became a hit and was successful, the BBC decided to play the song. I am going to come to some features about the sensational My Generation. I cannot imagine how thrilling it was hearing this song in 1965! Especially for teens. In a year when there was little like this around in terms of the song’s energy and punch, it would have been a revelation! The first song from The Who’s debut album, this was a spellbinding and astonishing introduction from the band! A track that stirred something in a generation that heard it back in 1965. It has not aged or lost its edge sixty years later.

American Songwriter featured My Generation in 2023. Writing how this was a rallying cry for those who feel like they did not fit in and were alienated by society, The Who could not have predicted how it would impact and drive the counterculture for decades to come! Even though it was not their debut single - I Can't Explain was released earlier in 1965 -, it was their most powerful one to that point. It is interesting looking at the meaning behind the song and its background:

“The pervasive story of why Townshend wrote “My Generation” involves The Queen Mother removing his Packard hearse from in front of his house – which happened to be near Buckingham Palace.

“It turned out that [the Queen Mother] had it moved because her husband had been buried in a similar vehicle and it reminded her of him,” Townshend once said. “When I went to collect it, they wanted two hundred and fifty quid. I’d only paid thirty for it in the first place.”

While that moment might have been a point of contention for Townshend, the actual motive behind “My Generation” came from a much larger problem for the guitarist: his struggle to find his place in society.

“‘My Generation’ was very much about trying to find a place,” Townshend once told Rolling Stone in 1987 (per Songfacts). “I was very, very lost. The band was young then.”

In 2019, Townshend provided a little more color to the song’s inspiration. “‘My Generation’ was inspired by the fact that I felt as artists we had to draw a line between all those people who had been involved in the second world war and all those people who were born right at the end of the war,” he said.

“Those people had sacrificed so much for us, but they weren’t able to give us anything,” he continued. “No guidance, no inspiration. Nothing really. We weren’t allowed to join the army, we weren’t allowed to speak, we were expected to shut up and enjoy the peace… And we decided not to do that.”

With “My Generation,” The Who took a side in the ever-growing culture clash between an older generation of Brits and a younger one that strived to break free of norms.

People try to put us d-down (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (talkin’ ’bout my generation)

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby”.

Candice Littlejon wrote this fascinating feature about a timeless song. Transcending the 1960s, My Generation defined youth culture and rebellion for decades after its release. I wonder whether this song invented Punk or was one of the forbearers. It definitely influenced a lot of Punk acts that would arrive in the 1970s:

“At first glance, analyzing the lyrics to one of the Who’s most popular songs seems like a simple task; after all, the phrase “my generation” is repeated more than 40 times during the song’s duration of a little over three minutes. True to the nature and beauty of rock ‘n’ roll, the song wasn’t written to camouflage its message behind flowery metaphors; it was written simplistically which is where most of its magic lives.

The song was never assumed to become a generational anthem but acted more as a telling diary entry of what it meant to be young and misunderstood. However, since the song’s 1965 debut, youthful misunderstood generations have been blasting “My Generation” on their records, 8-tracks, CDs, iPods, and playlists ever since.

The angst chant touts a possessiveness of its generation; its repeated line of “my generation” could more accurately be heard as, “mine, not yours.”  Distinguishing between two groups, as the song so rigidly does, magnifies differences, conflict, and contrast. It isn’t just knowing one generation is different from the next, but being proud of the difference: most noted in the line “I hope I die before I get old.” The song also dismisses its opposition (referred to only a few times as “people” and “you”) for their inability to understand the Who’s generation, figuratively patting them on their naive heads for even trying.

A great bit of trivia and a wonderful addition to the discussion of this classic track is that the quintessential stutter that Roger Daltrey took on was unintentionally intentional. Having had a minor struggle with a stutter, Daltrey accidentally stuttered while recording the track, but when attempting to re-record was suggested to keep it and add it in on multiple other lines. The artistic choice’s main objective was for Daltrey to sound hopped up on drugs, a judgmental factor many of the older generations commonly accredited to London youth (although it may have often been based on fact).

The creative choice took the song to a whole new level and is now one of the most famous rock songs cited for its stuttering. Of course, many others over the years have utilized this phonetic utilization (“Changes” by David Bowie, “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys, and “Bennie and the Jets” by Elton John, just to name a few) but choice for a stutter is intentional in these cases, usually chosen by the artist or band as a way to add interest or syllables to a word or phrase. (The only other notable rock song that a stutter was chosen on accident was with American rock band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”, in which the lead singer didn’t intend to release the song that way, but only to poke fun at his brother’s stuttering problem).

My Generation” is a simple rock track, made up of some of the most classic, simplistic elements of rock music, particularly in its time of the 1960s: two verses that are repeated interchangeably, a hook that listeners can easily chant along to, and back-up vocals that mimic the popular “call back” method of many blues, soul and Motown songs of the time. It’s in its simplicity that the song My Generation finds a brilliant legacy. Both timeless and timely, the clear message of the song – our generations are different and we like it that way – resonates with Millennials today as much as it did with mods in the ’60s.

The differences between the young and old will always exist; each generation witnesses different disasters, overcomes obstacles unique to their decade, and therefore comes to care about different social and political agendas. Generations X, Y, and Z create a fascinating spectrum to look through, in which priorities, hopes, politics and structures of thought vary and change as we all navigate time. The one thing that may never change is how powerful music can be and how we utilize it to express ourselves.

Many older generations write off Millennials, labeling them as a generation that cares more about likes on their Instagram account than what’s going on in the world around them. Whether or not this is true from individual to individual, unpredictable elements of everyday life – such as social media or cell phones – have come to not only define a generation but consequently pigeonhole it. (Just as the Vespas and exquisitely greased hairstyles of the mods had them labeled as apathetic and pompous.)

My Generation was a favorite of our teenage-aged grandparents and then our teenage-aged parents, today it expresses the same message but to a different set of ears. We may change and mature, but classic songs, such as My Generation are comfortingly always the same”.

There are a couple of other features I want to cover off before wrapping up. Gold Radio looked at the meaning behind the lyrics of My Generation. I think the standout elements are the stuttered words. Something that was very unusual in Rock music. Also, that idea of a young Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and John Entwistle playing a song that is all about youth. The horror of growing old! The Who have performed live recently but may have performed their final gigs together. Even though half of the original line-up are no longer with us, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are still together and going strong:

“Roger Daltrey's stuttered delivery of 'My Generation' was one of the reasons why it became so iconic, mainly because it hinted at other ill-mannered words he'd wished he'd spurted out but couldn't.

A stutter in a song was certainly unusual, and was requested by the band's manager Kit Lambert after Daltrey had already recorded two vocal takes.

Talking to Uncut magazine in 2001, Daltrey recalled: "I have got a stutter. I control it much better now but not in those days."

"When we were in the studio doing 'My Generation', Kit Lambert came up to me and said 'STUTTER!' I said 'What?' He said 'Stutter the words – it makes it sound like you're pilled', and I said, 'Oh… like I am!'"

"And that's how it happened. It was always in there, it was always suggested with the 'f-f-fade' but the rest of it was improvised."

Producer Shel Talmy offered a different take saying it was "one of those happy accidents" after Daltrey struggled to fit the lyrics to the music during recording, as he hadn't rehearsed beforehand and couldn't hear his voice in the monitors.

IN THIS PHOTO: Roger Daltrey/PHOTO CREDIT: GAB Archive/Redferns/Getty Images

There’s a hint of irony about 'My Generation' these days

"I hope I die before I get old" is the lyric which continue to resonate to this day with new generations discovering 'My Generation'.

But it's also become a bit of an albatross for members of The Who in the years since it was first released, because they got old.

The Who's legendary and hell-raising drummer Keith Moon did commit to the mantra, tragically dying of a drug overdose at the age of just 32.

In 1965, Roger Daltrey insisted he'd stand by the lyric and claimed he would kill himself before the age of 30 as he didn't want to get old.

Understandably, his naive stance changed as he got older, but had to answer the inevitable questions about his pledge.

Daltrey claimed when asked that the line is about an attitude, not a physical age, whilst Townshend responded by saying for him when he wrote the lyrics that'"old" meant "very rich".

Produce Like a Pro ran their feature in 2021. They celebrate a song that defined Rock’s defiant and raw spirit. I don’t think we have heard a song quite as thrilling and generation-defining by Rock bands since. My Generation has been covered by, among other artists, Oasis, Patti Smith, and Green Day:

“My Generation” was released by Brunswick on October 29, 1965 as a single, peaking at number 2 in the UK — their highest charting single of their career in the UK. The single only peaked at 74 in the US, which may be due to the fact that Brunskwick’s US side (Decca) didn’t quite know what to do with the recording. Many of the record label’s executives even thought that they had received a bad tape — because of all of the feedback on the record. Despite their hesitancy, the song has enjoyed over a half-century of fame in the US as one of rock history’s most influential tracks. Rolling Stone named the song number 11 on their “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named it in their list of “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll”. It was even inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for “historical, artistic, and significant” value.

“My Generation” remains a critical piece of rock history because of how it shaped music and even rock’s identity. It defined rock by its attitude. Perhaps one of the most iconic moments in the song occurs in the first verse when Daltrey cries out “I hope I die before I get old”. In a song all about generational conflict, this declaration asserted the youth culture as the true leaders of the future.  And as the post-war generation aged, the song remained an anthem of their identity- one which constantly redefined their conception of aging. As the decades progressed, they declared that rock’s spirit would transcend age. In 2006, Pete Townshend explained what the line meant to him, as he performed the song in his sixties:

” ‘I hope I die before I get old.’ This time I am not being ironic. I am 61. I hope I die before I get old. I hope I die while I still feel this alive, this young, this healthy, this happy, and this fulfilled. But that may not happen. I may get creaky, cranky, and get cancer, and die in some hospice with a massive resentment against everyone I leave behind. That’s being old, for some people, and probably none of us who don’t die accidentally can escape being exposed to it. But I am not old yet. If getting older means I continue to cherish the lessons every passing day brings, more and more, then whatever happens, I think I’ll be happy to die before I get old, or after I get old, or any time in between.”

With “My Generation” The Who created an anthem that would not only define their generation but also transform rock history.  A song of power, identity, attitude and the epitome of rock’s spirit, it has lived on for over a half a century, teaching new generations what it means to rock ‘n roll”.

Turning sixty on 29th October, My Generation is one of the most important songs in Rock history. In terms of the impact it had on people. The young generation. The song was a blueprint for genres such as Garage Rock, Punk, and Heavy Metal, influencing numerous artists and establishing The Who’s legacy. Recognised influential and genius by Rolling Stone, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Grammy Hall of Fame, this is a song that will be cherished and saluted for generations more. Could The Who ever have guessed the impact My Generation would have…

WHEN they released it in 1965?!

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Erykah Badu - Mama's Gun

__________

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

__________

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

__________

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?

__________

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:

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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

Official:

https://www.madisonmcferrin.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/madmcferrin/

Twitter:

https://x.com/madmcferrin/

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/02zPEtdzUWnPToEVLRiQ7e?si=d4S93hf_QmCSyh3UbT4Z_g

Facebook:

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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

__________

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

__________

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

__________

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.

___________

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.