FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Fifty-Five in 2026

FEATURE:

 

The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Fifty-Five in 2026

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CARRYING on this…

series where I collect together songs from albums that celebrate big anniversaries next year, it takes me to 1971. This was a huge year for music and there were some all-time best albums released that year. I am going to join the greatest albums of that year. Albums that celebrate fifty-five years in 2026. Many of you would not have been around in 1971, but you will know most of these albums. I am a big fan of many of the albums released in 1971. Including Hunky Dory from David Bowie, The Who’s Who’s Next, Carole King’s Tapestry, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, this was a sensational year! Enjoy the mixtape below, which is a spotlight on the wonder of 1971. It is clearly one of the most astonishing years…

IN music history.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Sixty in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Sixty in 2026

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THIS is the first…

in a twelve-part run collating songs from albums with big anniversaries next year. The first takes us back to 1966 and albums turning sixty next year. It was a great year for music when we had career-best albums from the likes of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. Although we will get more notable and consistent years further down this run of features, 1966 was still a really interesting and fertile year for music. To prove that, I have compiled a selection of tracks from the golden albums of 1966. Tracks you or your parents might have grown up listening to, I will move to the prime of 1971 but, for now, these are songs from the very best albums of '66. A classic year that produced more than its fair share…

OF wonderful albums.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty: The Visual Possibilities of A Sky of Honey

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing during her Before the Dawn residency in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features

The Visual Possibilities of A Sky of Honey

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IN the final couple…

of features marking twenty years of Kate Bush’s Aerial, I might come to some song investigation and look deeper into the album as a whole. One thing that entrances me about Aerial is its second disc, A Sky of Honey. It is sort of a companion piece to The Ninth Wave on Hounds of Love from 1985. The first side of that album is Hounds of Love; the second is The Ninth Wave. If that suite is about Kate Bush stranded at sea and trying to survive against the odds, A Sky of Honey is more restful but no less immersive and dramatic. Instead, we get to chart the course of a complete summer’s day. From the earliest hours through the night until we get back to the breaking of the light. In terms of the narrative and visions, we are not reserved to an English country garden. The track, Aerial, that ends the album seems to take us to a Balearic island and each maybe. In terms of the music on that suite, it brings in so many influences and nationalities. There is Balearic and Dance alongside Folk. Kate Bush mimicking and duetting with a blackbird. Her giddy laughter. There is also narration and spoken word. On the original, it was the disgraced Rolf Harris who provided vocals as The Painter for An Architect's Dream and The Painter's Link. Bush’s son, Bertie, thankfully replaced those vocals when Aerial was reissued in 2018. I like to think that Bertie was always part of the album. In a way, it is fitting. He was a young child in 2005 when Aerial was released. Bertie is about him. He is very much at the core. Him as a grown man providing vocals over a decade later for songs on the album’s second disc is appropriate. Whereas A Sky of Honey is about the charting of a summer’s day, we get to see the growth and maturation of Bertie on the 2005 release and the 2018 one. Full name Albert McIntosh, he got to perform alongside his mum at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith in 2014 for Before the Dawn. The only visualisation of that epic suite.

So many people could not attend any of the Before the Dawn concerts in 2014. There were two firsts in terms of suites. The Ninth Wave receiving its stage debut. That has never been brought to film. I have said how it would be amazing to see a film version of The Ninth Wave. Building a story around it and fleshing it out more. Although I have pitched this before, there is more to add to this notion that A Sky of Honey deserves more. I wrote a feature recently where I said how Kate Bush’s music could be visualised at Frameless in London. This is an immersive art exhibition where paintings come to life and are shown paranormally. It is a truly terrific experience. I would love to see A Sky of Honey visualised and projected at a space like this. Kate Bush could oversee the videos and visuals. I do also think that it would make a wonderful short film. At forty-two minutes, you would not necessarily need to have a wider story. It could be this dazzling short where we start out with Prelude and its beauty. How the suite grows and we end with the rush and headiness of Aerial at the end. The penultimate track, Nocturn, has this Balearic brilliance. This sense of swing and hypnotic bliss. Whether the visuals would be animated or actors would play the roles of Kate Bush and Bertie, I am not so sure. However, twenty years after its release, we have not seen anything in the way of videos. Same with Hounds of Love. They remain as audio pieces and there is very little in the way of the visual. Only And Dream of Sheep for Hounds of Love. I think there are fan videos for A Sky of Honey’s songs, though nothing official from Kate Bush. That strikes me as a missed opportunity.

I would love to see some new videos brought out. Kate Bush wants people to listen to A Sky of Honey in full. It is this single experience. The music itself is so varied and beautiful. However, it is the images that we all have in our heads. It could be this sensational short film or immersive experience. It is worth thinking about the reception to The Ninth Wave. This is what The Guardian noted in 2005:

“Disc two, subtitled 'A Sky of Honey', is a suite of nine tracks which, among other things, charts the passage of light from afternoon ('Prologue') to evening ('An Architect's Dream', 'The Painter's Link') and through the night until dawn. Things get a little hairier here.

The theme of birdsong is soon wearing, and the extended metaphor of painting is laboured. But it's all worth it for the double-whammy to the solar plexus dealt by 'Nocturn' and the final, title track. In 'Nocturn', the air is pushed out of your lungs as you cower helplessly before the crescendo. 'Aerial', meanwhile, is a totally unexpected ecstatic disco meltdown that could teach both Madonna and Alison Goldfrapp lessons in dancefloor abandon”.

Although Pitchfork did not rave about Aerial in their review, they did make some interesting observations about A Sky of Honey. In the same way The Ninth Wave is the best half of Hounds of Love, A Sky of Honey is the best half of Aerial. Masterpieces from the two Kate Bush albums she loved the most. Both featuring exceptional production from Bush. Showing her immense talent in both cases. A Sky of Honey might be her true peak in terms of production:

“The second disc (A Sky of Honey) seems a bit more adventurous, which is fitting given that it's a song-cycle on the natural ebb and flow of life and the seasons. Beginning with a "Prelude" and "Prologue", Bush eases into her most subtly symphonic music on record, backing herself with only piano and soft, modulating synth pulse. Her teasing lines, "it's gonna be so good," referring to the passing of summer into fall, are both poetic and playful, and fit perfectly the sense of effortless euphoria throughout the disc. Still, I might have wished for a bit more spark: "An Architect's Dream", "Sunset", and "Nocturn", despite maintaining the narrative of her concept, are a bit too steeped in uber-light adult contemporary sheen for my tastes. By the time of the closing title track, my ears are lightly glazed over, and its frail "rock" section does little justice to lines like "I want to be up on the roof, I feel I gotta get up on the roof!" At one point, Bush trades cackles with a bird's song, suggesting she's quite happy with her simple life as a mother and artist. Far be it from me to criticize happy endings, but in musical terms, a comfortable, even-keeled existence sometimes comes out as isolated and ordinary art”.

Maybe it could be called An Endless Sky of Honey. As per Wikipedia “In mid-May 2010, Aerial was released for the first time on iTunes. The second disc, A Sky of Honey, plays as one track, and its title was changed to An Endless Sky of Honey. Each track title is merged altogether on the sleeve. In August 2010, the CD version was reissued by Sony Legacy in the United States”. Even if A Sky of Honey does not have the same sense of progression and plot as The Ninth Wave, I think its strengths come from the visual possibilities. What Bush summons up with her lyrics, music and production. As we celebrate twenty years of Aerial on 7th November, I do think about its stunning second disc. How it was brought to the stage for Before the Dawn and it was majestic. However, it will never be shared with those who did not attend those gigs. Also, there are limitations with the stage in terms of sets, scenes and scope. You can achieve more and realise that suite better if you bring it to film or commit it to animation or some immersive experience. Maybe Kate Bush would not want a retread or reversion of what she conceptualised and brought to life in 2024. However, so potent and awe-inspiring are the songs on A Sky of Honey, I cannot help but think about it coming to life in a new way. It would be a popular short film or incredible visitor exhibition. If nothing happens, it is worth shining a light on the visual power of A Sky of Honey. How it is so filmic and cinematic. Despite no particular plot, we are journeying through a summer’s day and feeling the light change and nature come to life and then settle down as we go to the ocean. A Sky of Honey the gem of Aerial that…

OVERWHELMS the senses.

FEATURE: Humanity in Everything She Does: Kate Bush’s Present and Future

FEATURE:

 

 

Humanity in Everything She Does

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards at the London Palladium on 30th November, 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: David M. Benett/Getty Images

Kate Bush’s Present and Future

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ON 17th September…

PHOTO CREDIT: Samir Hussein/WireImage for ABA

Kate Bush’s stunning animated short film, Little Shrew (Snowflake), was screened at the close of the  Together for Palestine concert at Wembley Arena. As Kate Bush News write, “Kate’s simple plea  over the end titles says it all...”. That plea is: “Please stop the killing and starvation of children in Gaza”. Whilst she obviously cares about all people affected in Gaza, she is thinking of the most vulnerable. At a time where genocide is affecting Palestine and very little is being done about it, it was great that we had a concert. Artists speaking about what is happening. The night of speeches and addresses from doctors and journalists working in Gaza saw Benedict Cumberbatch, Damon Albarn, Neneh Cherry, Jameela Jamil and others take to the stage. Brian Eno curated an event that raised over £1.5 million. The most moving moments came from Palestinian voices. It seemed like a powerful and vital evening that was the biggest show of unity for those who are being starved and murdered. We know that elected leaders are really not treating the genocide with the gravity is deserves. The music industry especially is speaking up and getting involved. Although Kate Bush was not in attendance, the fact that her Little Shrew (Snowflake) short film closed Together for Palestine at Wembley Arena was an incredibly beautiful moment. It just goes to show that Kate Bush is always trying to help those in need. I have written about this recently. However, as Little Shrew (Snowflake) did make a valuable contribution to Together for Palestine, it brings to mind how humanitarian concerns and charity are always dear to her heart. I am not going to repeat what I wrote recently.

Instead, I am thinking about how she is making this impact without releasing music. Her most recent output and publicity – if those are the right words?! – concerns Little Shew (Snowflake) and War Child. Helping to raise money for those affected by conflict and violence. Posting those simple and direct words at the end of the video that was shown recently shows that she is one of the most conscientious artists in the world. Not only when it comes to people caught up in genocide and war. Kate Bush has protested against the rise of A.I. and how that will negatively impact artists ad their rights. Wanting to protect their work and voices. It is typical of her to protect and speak for others. She has been doing that her whole career! It makes me think of her future. Of course, a new album is what everyone is hoping for. I do think that, whenever this arrives, humanity will be very much at the heart. I don’t think Kate Bush will release an album that is necessarily political. However, I feel that she cannot help but reflect what is happening right now. Her narrative will change. 2011’s 50 Words for Snow is fantastical and wintery. More about the impersonal and fictional, there are some real-life figures. However, it is an album that explores the rivers, cold, snow, mountains and wild. 2005’s Aerial was more personal in terms of family and her being a new mother. The second disc, A Sky of Honey, was about this summer’s day as we head through the night. This spiritual, escapist, sublime and cinematic suite. I do think a new album will have a different approach. It is going to more about those experiencing starvation and violence. The way the world is changing. Maybe not discussing it in a cold and tragic way, there will be beauty and hope.

The same goes for A.I. and what artists are facing. How there is this situation where artists can have their music and rights taken off of them. Bush will very much focus on subjects like this. Of course, there could well be her inimitable and distinct blend of inventiveness and imagination. That noted, I get the feeling the modern world and things she has spoken about will go into her music. This interesting article states how women in music are taking a bigger stand against the genocide in Palestine than male artists. Aside from the likes of Kneecap and Bob Vylan, it is women who are speaking out more. From Chappell Roan, CMAT, JADE and Renée Rapp, these artists are speaking up not only about genocide affecting so many Palestinians, but conflicts around the world. Including the ongoing massacre in Ukraine. Will Kate Bush add her voice to that? I don’t think explicitly, though I do feel there will be songs about devastation and conflict. I do always love when Kate Bush puts together a concept or takes a panoramic look at the world. It is hard to say what an eleventh studio album will contain. Given that Kate Bush is keen to put out messages against genocide and war and raise money for charities like War Child, that naturally will transition and translate into her music. I will write more about this later in the year. We are nearing the end of 2025. What do we have to look forward to? The twentieth anniversary of Aerial in November. Kate Bush’s Christmas message in December. It is unlikely we will get any new music news. Despite that, I feel 2026 will be the year when she announces an album, as it would have been over fourteen years at that point. Kate Bush has always been about love and humanity. However, the past year or so has seen her really getting involved and doing all that she can. This will continue into next year. It proves once and for all that, when it comes to Kate Bush, she truly is…

AN amazing and inspiring human being.

FEATURE: Let Me Be Myself: Halsey, The Great Impersonator and Label Restrictions

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Let Me Be Myself

PHOTO CREDIT: Guel Sener

Halsey, The Great Impersonator and Label Restrictions

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I will not write a lot…

about this, but a piece of music news caught my eye and shocked me. One of the best albums of last year came from Halsey. The Great Impersonator is a remarkable album. Ahead of its release, Halsey posted on Instagram her impersonating a different icon every day and teasing a snippet of the song they inspired. It was a case of incredible artists such as Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Cher and Aaliyah being paid tribute to. Halsey written songs, not so much in their voice. Though there was definitely influence. However, one would think that this album and the praise it received would lead to a quick follow up. As we discover from NME, the label, Columbia, has held Halsey back from making a new album:

“Halsey has claimed she is “not allowed” to make a new album yet, because ‘The Great Impersonator’ didn’t perform as well commercially as her label had hoped.

The singer-songwriter released her fifth studio effort last October, earning her a glowing five-star review from NME and being named one of our best albums of 2024. It peaked at Number 19 in the UK albums chart, and Number Two in the US Billboard 200.

During a new interview with Apple Music 1, Halsey reflected on the expectations of success from the industry, and being compared to major pop acts like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande.

“I can’t make an album right now,” she told host Zane Lowe. “I’m not allowed to. I can’t make an album right now.”

She went on to discuss “the reality” of her current situation, after “‘The Great Impersonator’ didn’t perform the way [her label, Columbia] thought it was going to”.

Halsey added: “And if I’m being honest with you, the album sold a hundred thousand fucking copies first week. That’s a pretty big first week, especially for an artist who hasn’t had a hit in a long time. The tour is the highest-selling tour of my entire career.”

The artist then claimed that her team “want ‘Manic’ numbers from me”, referring to her 2020 third record – which shifted 239,000 units in its first week. “Everyone wants ‘Manic’ numbers from me,” she said. “I can’t do that every single time. It should be good enough that I do it once in a while, but it’s not.”

Halsey told Lowe that selling 100,000 copies in the first week was seen as “a failure in the context of the kind of success that I’ve had previously”, but said it “would be considered a success for most artists”.

She continued: “And that’s the hardest part, I think, of having been a pop star once. Because I’m not one anymore, but I’m being compared to numbers and to other people that I don’t consider lateral to me. You know what I mean?”.

It makes me think that artists, especially women, are discouraged from making albums that are not seen as mainstream or Pop-heavy. If you are a major artist like Halsey and put every ounce of yourself into an album, the reward should be that you are given freedom to do whatever you want. It is ironic that some of the artists Halsey was impersonating on her 2024 faced similar blowback from labels. Kate Bush released The Dreaming in 1982 and there were reservations from EMI. Experimental and unconventional, Halsey told Zane Lowe that she is almost expected to write Taylor Swift numbers. Write music like she used to or what is seen as popular now: “If you actually compared me to the other types of artists who are making the type of music that I am making, I’m fucking killing it. But that’s not what I’m up against. And because of that, I’m at the bottom of a category that I’m not in anymore, when I should be at the top of a category that I’m in now. And it’s hard”. This might be something affecting women more. If they start out making Pop and then do something more personal and less commercial, there is that pressure to go back to the centre. Labels are still about albums making money and units. Regardless of whether The Great Impersonator sold well and was a chart success, it was not as massive as albums by artists like Taylor Swift. Halsey almost killed herself with The Great Impersonator and it was this amazing concept album that was so different and more interesting than anything around it.

It is so discouraging and insulting to artists that do release music that is not deemed purely mainstream or profitable. Halsey has been releasing music for over a decade. She has released incredible music and has this enormous fanbase. The Great Impersonator is her fifth studio album and I think that it is her best. Something that Halsey was very keen to do and pushed herself to the limits to make it as good as she could, it is almost seen as tokenism. Doing that one album that is not purely Pop. An artist getting something off of their chest and then coming back to where they should be. It raises questions about how labels view their talent. Whether what Halsey has experienced is common to others. Instead of giving her carte blanche after putting out an album as original and incredible as The Great Impersonator, there is this financial motivation. Looking at major Pop artists and what they are doing and guiding Halsey in that direction. It did really annoy me. More than that, it opens up discussions around women in music. How there are these limitations placed on them. Maybe an expectation to be a certain thing. Halsey releases this amazing album that took her in a new direction. Rather than it being this huge new chapter where she is allowed to do what she feels fit, she is being held back. It does call into question that she does next. How long it takes for a new album. An irony with the success of The Great Impersonator is that Columbia are not allowing the iconic Halsey to…

BE herself.

FEATURE: A Much Needed Offering from the Queen of Pop… Madonna and a Confessions on a Dance Floor Sequel

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A Much Needed Offering from the Queen of Pop…

PHOTO CREDIT: Madonna

Madonna and a Confessions on a Dance Floor Sequel

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I am going to include…

some features about Confessions on a Dance Floor. That Madonna album was released on 9th November, 2005. The tenth studio album from the Queen of Pop, it was a huge success. Following 2003’s American Life, which received mixed reviews, this was a change of direction. Less political and agitated, for Confessions on a Dance Floor, Madonna took guidance from 1970s Disco and 1980s Electropop, as well as 2000s Club music. Artists like ABBA and Bee Gees at the heart of the music. A number one success in multiple countries around the world, it was one of Madonna’s most successful albums. It won acclaim from critics. It was not a rare sound from Madonna. Her 1983 eponymous debut album contained Dance influences. Ray of Light (1998) had its moments of Club and Dance influences too. Since 2005, Madonna has released a string of albums. Nothing really like Confessions on a Dance Floor. Other artists have come and gone regarding putting out amazing Dance albums with the same mix of inspiration. Kylie Minogue remains. Albums from het in 2000, 2001 and 2023 very much have Disco and Dance at the core. Although there has been a rise in albums that have been influenced by Disco and Dance, the announcement of Madonna planning to follow up on the 2005 album has delighted fans. Confessions on a Dance Floor part two will arrive next year. It is a perfect time for this album announcement. With the world in a horrendous state of affairs, I think many artists are reacting with music that is uplifting.

Not that it is on their shoulders to counteract the gloom and violence that we are seeing. However, artists like Madonna declaring that they are going to follow an album like Confessions on a Dance Floor is a major high. People will be curious whether it sticks to the template of the 2005 album in terms of the influences or goes in a different direction. I am going to spend some time with Confessions on a Dance Floor. As it turns twenty on 14th November, there will be a lot of affection for Confessions on a Dance Floor then. Albumism marked fifteen years of a modern classic in 2020:

“Smashing through the ‘80s and ‘90s with hit after hit, Madonna ended the 20th century with the incredibly beautiful and introspective Ray of Light (1998) and saw in the new millennium with yet another career defining moment in Music (2000). It wasn’t until the highly controversial and somewhat provocative American Life (2003) that Madonna faced critical backlash, something that she had faced before, but this felt different. Politically driven, but ultimately missing its mark, American Life needed a successor, one that eventually came in the form of Confessions on a Dance Floor in late 2005.

Madonna’s knack for reinvention is beyond compare and on Confessions, her tenth studio album, she again didn’t fail to disappoint. The album’s heavy disco feel, a genre that her music was almost born out of, allowed Madonna to lose the seriousness of her previous album and get playful again, both with fashion and her music. Remembering the misogynistic conversations surrounding her appearance and that leotard for “Hung Up,” the then 47-year-old Madonna was again showing why she was (and is) a force to be reckoned with: she has never been restricted by boundaries that prevent others from achieving what essentially she sets out to achieve. No matter what the reaction may be.

As the album’s lead single “Hung Up” danced through the airwaves with its impeccable sampling of ABBA’s 1979 single “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight),” with the introduction of Madonna’s new co-producer Stuart Price giving the singer a freedom and unabashed moment at disco glory, and she was reveling in it. The album’s following three singles—“Sorry,” “Get Together” and “Jump” —continue Price’s foray into disco pop territory and whilst they may not be groundbreaking, Madonna brings her updated version of disco into the 2000s and it works, ensuring that all four singles charted in the top ten somewhere around the world.

Whilst “Future Lovers” continues the dance vibe that borders on a religious exercise in clubbing, this quickly fades with the cringe-worthy “I Love New York.” With lines like “I don’t like cities but I like New York / Other cities make me feel like a dork,” the listener is left wondering if the latter part of the album can regain its momentum. It kind of does. Moving into “Let It Will Be” where she speaks about fame and herself, the uptempo beat is what keeps the quasi spiritual song interesting. In fact, it’s this “spiritual” awakening that seems to take over the rest of the album.

Spiritual exploration and Madonna have been as intertwined as any other aspect of the singer, but it is on “Isaac” that Madonna’s foray into Kabbalah is brought to the forefront. The song was accused of blasphemy, but as Yitzhak Sinwani (one of Madonna’s early spiritual “Kabbalah” guides) sings in Aramaic, the words, when translated into English, are more a symbol of heaven and angels rather than an ode to Kabbalah. “I toyed with the idea of calling the song “Fear of Flying,” because it’s about letting go and people who are afraid to fly obviously have control issues,” Madonna explained to Billboard in 2005. “We all have fears in many areas of our lives. Some people can’t commit to relationships. The song is about tackling all of that. ‘Will you sacrifice your comfort? Make your way in a foreign land?’ In other words, will you go outside of your comfort zone?”.

Even though Classic Pop were not entirely full of praise for Confessions on a Dance Floor, I did want to select some sections from their review. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for this masterful album. They wrote how “It’s feel-good fun, but sonically, it’s one of Madonna’s most reserved, conservative and safe records. Beyond the four massive hit singles and some other choice cuts, Confessions… does feel rather padded out in the middle third”:

“Unlike her recent offerings up to that point, Confessions… eschews the profound artistic statements, preferring (mostly) to let the music do the talking.

At no point does it attempt to reinvent the wheel; it simply replaces the wheel with a glistening mirrorball, sets the tempo to 120bpm and boogies until the lights come up.

The perennial queen of reinvention, Madge remains adamant never to repeat herself. Each new record is a reaction against the last, and this was very much the case with Confessions On A Dance Floor.

Its predecessor, 2003’s American Life, was an abrasive, political diatribe on the state of the nation, set to an electroclash/folktronica soundscape.

Born in the post-911 landscape, it was intentionally confrontational, to an extent weighed down by its own sense of importance and overly fussy production.

But one thing we’ve all since learned from lockdown is that when the world is crumbling around you, sales of chocolate bars soar ten-fold.

In other words, we don’t always need reminding of the doom and gloom; sometimes you just need to bring a little joy into your life.

While you can hardly call a multi-million selling, Grammy-nominated worldwide No.1 album a flop (a Madonna misfire still causes an avalanche), the message of American Life didn’t quite resonate with the mood of the time in the way she might have expected.

In stark contrast, Confessions… is an upbeat and uplifting breath of fresh air, a notably lighter and more care-free collection, more concerned with making you dance than making you think.

This shift is apparent in how Madonna self-censors herself on I Love New York proclaiming “You can eff off!” – in comparison to the uncensored and repeated “Fuck it!” that opens American Life.

Unlike her recent offerings up to that point, Confessions… eschews the profound artistic statements, preferring (mostly) to let the music do the talking.

At no point does it attempt to reinvent the wheel; it simply replaces the wheel with a glistening mirrorball, sets the tempo to 120bpm and boogies until the lights come up.

The perennial queen of reinvention, Madge remains adamant never to repeat herself. Each new record is a reaction against the last, and this was very much the case with Confessions On A Dance Floor.

Its predecessor, 2003’s American Life, was an abrasive, political diatribe on the state of the nation, set to an electroclash/folktronica soundscape.

Born in the post-911 landscape, it was intentionally confrontational, to an extent weighed down by its own sense of importance and overly fussy production.

But one thing we’ve all since learned from lockdown is that when the world is crumbling around you, sales of chocolate bars soar ten-fold.

In other words, we don’t always need reminding of the doom and gloom; sometimes you just need to bring a little joy into your life.

While you can hardly call a multi-million selling, Grammy-nominated worldwide No.1 album a flop (a Madonna misfire still causes an avalanche), the message of American Life didn’t quite resonate with the mood of the time in the way she might have expected.

In stark contrast, Confessions… is an upbeat and uplifting breath of fresh air, a notably lighter and more care-free collection, more concerned with making you dance than making you think.

This shift is apparent in how Madonna self-censors herself on I Love New York proclaiming “You can eff off!” – in comparison to the uncensored and repeated “Fuck it!” that opens American Life”.

I am going to finish with a review from The Guardian. They awarded Confessions on a Dance Floor four stars. There were many who felt like Madonna had a point to prove in 2005. American Life did not get great reviews and was seen as an unwise move. Confessions on a Dance Floor was very much a statement of intent. A reinvention that she is following up next year:

“The booklet that accompanies Madonna's 11th album features a handful of lyrics, apparently written in the singer's own hand. They come from a song called Let It Will Be. The clunking title sounds like something Noel Gallagher might proffer on a bad day, the arrangement features strings that recall Papa Don't Preach. Divorced from the music, one scrawled line stands out: "I'm at the point of no return."

It certainly fits with the thought-provoking yoga position Mrs Ritchie adopts in the photograph - ankles miles above her head, a mirrorball between her feet - but those of an analytical bent might read it as a comment on her recent career. Her last album, 2003's American Life, was her worst-selling: confused music, solipsistic lyrics, an unintentionally comic cover, featuring Madonna clad in the kind of Che chic that for Britons of a certain age invariably invokes not the guerrillero heroico of the Cuban revolution, but Citizen Smith of the Tooting Popular Front. It still sold millions - for the world's most famous woman, failure is relative - but damaged her reputation enough to warrant a little sticker on its follow-up's case, alerting punters to its contents: NON-STOP ALL-DANCE TOUR-DE-FORCE.

It's a long time since Madonna has needed a circus barker to drum up business. Confessions on a Dancefloor began life as the soundtrack to a film script she was working on. There's a Pavlovian response: it's impossible to see "film script" and "Madonna" in the same sentence without feeling your spirits plunge. And whenever Madonna gets mixed up with soundtracks, the results are usually unforgettable - and not in a good way: her disco version of Don't Cry for Me Argentina, her catastrophic Dick Tracy-inspired forays into swing. Nevertheless, Confessions on a Dancefloor is the result of ruthless stock-taking.

Producer Mirwais's chief collaborator role has been downsized: he may have only escaped le sac altogether by coming up with Future Lovers, a corrosive homage to Donna Summer's I Feel Love. His replacement is an inspired appointment. The album's title, sticker and format - each track segueing breathlessly into the next as if mixed by a DJ - suggest Madonna's desire to reconnect with her past as an early-1980s club diva and her devoted gay fanbase.

Has she ever come to the right place. If Stuart Price's obsession with the 1980s were any more pronounced, he'd be travelling to gigs in a Sinclair C5; suffice to say that Darkdancer, his 1999 album as Les Rhythmes Digitales, featured Nik Kershaw. More curiously, he may be Britain's most metrosexual producer. As Pour Homme, he released Born This Way, which sampled Carl Bean's out-and-proud disco anthem ("I'm happy! I'm carefree! I'm gay!"). His remixes have made the Scissor Sisters sound even more gay, a remarkable feat. Advance notice of what he could do with Madonna was served by the joyous, Abba-sampling Hung Up, a single that could theoretically have been more camp, but only with the addition of Liza Minnelli on backing vocals and lyrics about Larry Grayson's friend Everard.

If Price can't stop Madonna writing songs that tell you fame isn't all it's cracked up to be in a way that suggests she thinks she's the first person to work this out, he can summon up more than enough sonic trickery to distract you. There are hulking basslines, fizzing synthesisers, rolling tablas on Push and an unlikely combination of frantic double-bass riffing, Goldfrapp-ish glam stomp and acoustic guitar filigree on the closing Like It or Not, a collaboration with Swedish pop songwriters Bloodshy and Avant. Isaac falls flat, its lyrics about Kabbalah teacher Isaac Freidin married to global-village trance makes you think of Australian backpackers dancing badly at beach parties in Goa - but elsewhere, the songwriting sparkles. The choruses of Get Together and Sorry are triumphant. I Love New York may be the most agreeably ridiculous thing Madonna has ever released: timpani, a riff stolen from the Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog and a Lou Reed deadpan.

It may be a return to core values, but there's still a bravery about Confessions on a Dancefloor. It revels in the delights of wilfully plastic dance pop in an era when lesser dance-pop artists - from Rachel Stevens to Price's protege Juliet - are having a desperately thin time of it. It homages the DJ mix album, a format long devalued by computer-generated cash-in compilations. It flies in fashion's face with a swaggering hint of only-I-can-do-this: "If you don't like my attitude," she suggests on I Love New York, "then you can eff-off." Dancing queens of every variety should be delighted”.

It is good that we get to hear a follow-up to Confessions on a Dance Floor. Whether it is going to have another title or there will be this further evolution. Fans have reacted with a lot of love to Madonna preparing to release a sequel. Since 2005, many queens of music have offered incredible albums with Disco, Dance and Club music at the heart of things. However, Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor is this incredibly special album that inspired so many other artists. At an especially bleak time in history, her announcement has provided some positivity and joy. We will wait to see what comes from her…

NEXT year.

FEATURE: Pulp’s Different Class at Thirty: Inside the Sublime Disco 2000

FEATURE:

 

 

Pulp’s Different Class at Thirty

Inside the Sublime Disco 2000

__________

I have written a feature…

about Pulp’s Different Class, as it turns thirty on 30th October. The band’s fifth studio album is considered their very best. Instead of doing another general feature, instead I am going to focus on my favourite song from the album. Disco 2000 was the third single from Different Class, released on 27th November, 1995. I can celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the album and the single. A huge song that was a big part of my childhood. I was twelve when the track came out, so I can remember listening to it at high school. To mark this song and the approaching thirtieth anniversary of Different Class, I am going to get to some features. A single that reached number seven in the U.K., Disco 2000 is frequently ranked alongside the best songs of the 1990s. Jarvis Cocker, Russell Senior, Mark Webber, Candida Doyle, Steve Mackey and Nick Banks created a masterpiece. One of many from Different Class. I am going to come some critical perspectives of Disco 2000. An obvious single that is sometimes overshadowed by the might and genius of the lead single, Common People, I have a particular fondness for Disco 2000. I think it was the song that drew me to Common People. One that I can listen to over and over again. I am going to start out with this article from Cult Following, as we get to discover the meaning behind a Pulp classic. Fans probably know the story. However, for those who do not, the below provides some insight and revelation:

“The song is one of Pulp’s best-known releases and sits alongside Common People, Sorted for E’s & Wizz, and Something Changed on their monumental Different Class. Though many are still trying to figure out the mystery figure mentioned in the anthemic Common People, the origins of Disco 2000 proved to be as interesting. Cocker shared all in an interview with Daniel Rachel, which featured in their book, The Art of Noise. The Pulp frontman confirmed it was the “futuristic,” far-off feel of the year 2000 which inspired the song and that the song itself is based on a true story.

The Deborah mentioned in the hit song was Deborah Bone, the mental health nurse who was honoured in the 2015 New Year’s Honours. She died on December 30, 2014, the day her MBE was announced.

Cocker said of the song: “The phrase Disco 2000 I liked. We’d done a party when I was at art college and I’d done some slides on very early computer technology that said Disco 2000 on them. That idea when I was a kid, the year 2000 seemed the most futuristic thing ever. The year 2000 was looming and it had seemed mind-blowing to me as a kid that I’d be alive in the year 2000 and we would be in space and I’d be there and wasn’t that incredible.

“It was very naive to think that now. It was 1995 and the millennium was only five years away and I thought, ‘This is a very upfront song: what subject could go with that?’ It seemed to me that a lot of people of my generation had that feeling and maybe you would have that thing of saying when you left school, ‘We’ll never forget each other and we’ll all meet up in the year 2000.’

“I guess a lot of people made pacts and it never happened. In the case of the fountain that I wrote about in that song, Sheffield Council didn’t help by actually removing it in 1998. So it physically couldn’t happen even if people had remembered to do it.

“Then it was memories of a true story of a girl who was born at the same time as me, and my mum was in the same maternity ward as hers, and we ended up going to the same school.”

The legendary frontman has since discussed the origins of the song’s message, saying he “fancied” Deborah “for ages”. He said: “There was a girl called Deborah—she was born in the same hospital as me. Not within an hour—I think it was like three hours—but you can’t fit three hours into the song without having to really rush the singing!

“But basically you know the whole thing was the same—I fancied her for ages and then she started to become a woman and her breasts began to sprout so then all the boys fancied her then. I didn’t stand a ‘cat-in-hell’s chance’. But then I did use to sometimes hang around outside her house and stuff like that”.

I am going to get to another feature from Cult Following soon. In fact, a review of the song. Before getting to that, it is worth bringing in some other reviews. Just a sprinkling of what critics think of the immense Disco 2000. Nostalgic for those like me who were around in 1995 as children and discovered the song fresh. As Pulp are touring and recently released an album, More, there is this opportunity for younger fans to hear this song on the stage:

“Disco 2000" has seen critical acclaim and has been labeled by many as one of Pulp's greatest songs. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic praised its "glitzy, gaudy stomp." James Masterton for Dotmusic said it "is easily the best track from the Different Class album, the closest they have ever come to an out-and-out pop stormer and certainly a floor-filler at office parties this holiday with its chorus of 'Let's all meet up in the year 2000/Won't it be strange when we're all fully grown.'" A reviewer from Music Week rated it three out of five, adding, "A bouncing disco beat, based on the riff from Laura Branigan's 'Gloria,' sees a pumped-up Pulp and Jarvis doing his usual talking bit. But it may disappoint fans of their recent epics." Simon Price from Melody Maker named it Single of the Week, writing, "But 'Disco 2000', like 'Pink Glove' before it, shows that what fuels his vindictive bitterness is actually a deep romanticism”.

I actually found this review from The Refined Cowboy. For so many people, Disco 2000 has deep personal connections and significance. Though it is part of the larger picture that is Different Class, there is this singular, distinct and powerful energy from the song that connects on a deeper level. Such a thrill that the band who created this track over thirty years ago are still together and can play Disco 2000 is a gift:

“At the time of its release it reached a respectable number 7 in the charts, but was bit of a second fiddle to its more popular number 2 achieving sibling Common People. Of course like most chart followers, it was Common People that introduced me to the band, seeing them for the first time ever on Channel 4’s morning zoo show The Big Breakfast. Not only was the song one of the best catchy numbers of the decade, but the video had me mesmerised – simultaneously dealing with themes of class and dating with a twinge of sadness from Jarvis Cocker’s voice, it all also seemed like so much fun as he explored the aisles of a hyper-colourful supermarket worthy of an LSD version of Repo Man. It told us that we could continue being 90s cynical youths, but from now on we could do it AND have some fun.

While Common People may have enjoyed more of the glory back then, it is easily Disco 2000 that trumps my personal chart today. Its sad, sentimental tone contradicts its fun, upbeat music, encouraging some serious (okay, maybe not that serious) social and existential thoughts while on the dance floor. Often concerned with matters of class in British society, with Disco 2000 Pulp channels the same sort of feelings and applies them to your awkward teen years, which is essentially the class struggle for kids.
​While Common People may have enjoyed more of the glory back then, it is easily Disco 2000 that trumps my personal chart today. Its sad, sentimental tone contradicts its fun, upbeat music, encouraging some serious (okay, maybe not that serious) social and existential thoughts while on the dance floor. Often concerned with matters of class in British society, with Disco 2000 Pulp channels the same sort of feelings and applies them to your awkward teen years, which is essentially the class struggle for kids.

For me however, connection with the tragic narrative aside, it mostly brings back memories of Saturday afternoons in town. The entire music video is framed, which really made it stand out at the time (and maybe even still today?), and I can’t help but recall weekend trips to the record store in Bangor, where I’d always see the Pulp VHS collection of videos on display, the cover opting for the same design as the Disco 2000 music video, which has one of the best titles of all time - Sorted for films and vids, a play on their controversial song Sorted for E’s and Wizz.

What would my future bring? Would I be poor? Alone? A social outcast? For a teenager in 1995 the year 2000 was impossibly far away, another lifetime almost, and often felt like it would never really come. As anticipation for the turn of the millennium grew, hopes, expectations and opportunities moved on, and Disco 2000 became nothing but a dance we once went to ‘on that damp and lonely Thursday years ago’. 

I will end with that review from Cult Following. A lot of people will be writing about Different Class ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 30th October. A startling album that still sounds incredible relevant and powerful to this day, everyone has their own favourite song from Different Class. For me, it will always be the towering and captivating Disco 2000:

“Listeners to the seminal classic Disco 2000 will all have their very own fountain down the road. Whether it is that literal waterworks or a town centre their dad put the streetlights in, it matters not. Pulp crafted an anthem for the ages – one of the finest tracks put to tape – and their recent tour is surplus to the argument of its genius. The classic Different Class single has found a form of its own in recent years, an essential club and pub track which filters through on gloomy days as a shining light in an otherwise feeble disaster of a day. It is the lust and love featured within from the out-of-the-loop protagonist Jarvis Cocker writes himself into which marks Disco 2000 as a world-beating track of defiance meeting distress.

From a guitar riff recognised around the globe to a desire to recall the glory days from Cocker’s exceptional lyrics of longing for a woman who moved on far sooner than his protagonist did, Disco 2000 is a lightning-in-a-bottle moment. Brief spats of repetition, the cavalcade of usual Pulp stylings and the sexed-up presentation of all those years ago through the glittering eye of nostalgia – the hopeful claims they were on the verge of big plans decades before, it comes together wonderfully.

Life comes at you fast and for the lyrics Cocker puts out here, from being a mess at school to being friends but never more, Disco 2000 hits through not just as a track for the left-field losers painted as Pulp fans but for the generations after it. An anthemic classic in every sense of the word for its easy-to-access hooks, and its booming chorus which charms and writhes in the guilt and fear of meeting up with old pals. Collect those memories, the oohs and aahs of how everyone around you has grown – not that it’s any of your business anyway. Disco 2000 is a song which survives on its own, far away from the album of course but it lives on as a perfect example of Pulp quality.

Cocker was right all along. It is strange now we’re all fully grown. You aren’t the same as you are in your youth. Disco 2000 is an essential piece of work not just for the Pulp discography, not just for the 1990s indie spectrum of work but for the shift in tone a genre can take. To turn it on its head as Pulp did with this is beyond the pale. A gift of a track – and Pulp has plenty of those”.

I am going to wrap things up here. It is sad that the inspiration behind Disco 2000, Deborah Bone, died in 2015. However, she is part of music history. A song that is among the standouts of Different Class. On 30th October, it turns thirty. I recall when it came out in 1995. Maybe one of my very earliest experiences of Pulp. I loved Disco 2000 back in 1995 and now, three decades on, it remains in my head and heart! I wanted to show affection for…

A true classic.

FEATURE: Swap Our Places: The Exploration and Examination of Gender Roles in Kate Bush’s Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Swap Our Places

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

The Exploration and Examination of Gender Roles in Kate Bush’s Music

__________

THAT might sound like…

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

a vague and ambiguous title for a feature. We have not long ended the celebration of Hounds of Love. That was released on 16th September, 1985, so we marked forty years of a masterpiece. It was great seeing all of the posts and features about the album. I am going to come to it in a minute. Not only because one of its very best singles turns forty very soon. Also, in terms of how Bush discusses gender and the role it plays is hugely important. I wanted to start out with A.I.-generated information when I searched for ‘the role of gender in Kate Bush’s music’:

“Kate Bush's work explores gender roles and femininity through narrative perspectives, exploring universal experiences like the desire for mutual understanding in "Running Up That Hill" and the fear of female power in "Wuthering Heights". Her music often features metamorphoses and explorations of the monstrous or esoteric, challenging traditional notions of the self and creating space for polymorphous feminine identity. Additionally, her career itself—achieved through fiercely independent production and a focus on her artistic vision—served as an inspiration for other women in the male-dominated music industry to be strong and follow their own paths”.

There are so many different angles to explore. There have been some interesting and thought-provoking articles written about gender in Kate Bush’s music. It is complex and fascinating. How Bush is a writer who is empathetic. Sympathetic and compassionate, she definitely has this adoration for and curiosity of men. Listen to songs on The Kick of Life, her 1978 debut, and you can find examples of sympathy and longing. Wuthering Heights casting Cathy as this frightening and strange ghostly figure. Maybe showing sympathy with Heathcliff in the song. The Man with the Child in His Eyes is about the child-like quality men possess, even in later life. Bush never coming at things like a conventional Pop artist. Not only did she have this respect and admiration for men, when many female artists were talking about heartbreak and the pains of romance, Bush was coming from a different angle.

Bush never would call herself a feminist, though she always wrote from an empowering position. Positive and strong, she was also vulnerable and open. Inspiring to so many female artists because of the extraordinary way she broke barriers and was groundbreaking. She used female voice and narratives to explore various identities and tell stories in ways that were radical for the time. Bush had this very positive view of men. It did not only extend to writing about them in a very fair and compassionate way. This was rare for any artist. Writing about the opposite sex without any anger or insult. Some might say this is naïve or lacks balance, though it is Bush’s ability to empathise and put herself in their position that stands out. Bush took this further by exploring gender roles and lowering her voice. Songs on Hounds of Love where her voice was pitched down to give this male tone. Hounds of Love a very masculine and percussion-driven album. Whilst most albums employs cymbals, Hounds of Love is about the beats and depth of percussion. The Dreaming is too. I think that her guttural and lower vocals were not affectation. More, they were Bush giving herself a more masculine tone. Think of a song like Ran Tan Waltz. That was the B-side of 1980’s Army Dreamers (from Never for Ever). The live performance for her 1979 Christmas special is the only live outing for the song, it sees Bush dressed as a male chimney sweep. This is what Dreams of Orgonon observed about Ran Tan Waltz:

“She often writes about issues concerning women from a man’s point of view, a subgenre of Bush songs which is going to culminate in Never for Ever’s most famous single. It’s a strange pathology of hers, one that sets her as a rare woman in a tradition of masculine songwriting, but it often allows for interestingly fractured views of gender. In the case of “Mr. Mom: Kurt Weill Edition,” Bush destroys the nuclear family. The mother is a playgirl while the father stays home and takes care of the baby. This is Bush’s model of desire-from-a-distant played through a Feydeau farce: everything becomes dirty and obscene, even romantic relationships”.

In the video for Army Dreamers, from Never for Ever, Bush casts herself as a young solider in the battlefield. Maybe imagining herself as a teenager fighting in a war they are not prepared for. Was this Kate Bush being maternal? However, it was a case of Bush putting herself in a young man’s shoes. The lure of war, but also the futility. When other women might have attacked war and the men in power, Bush seems to swap places and comes at it from the viewpoint of the young men who lose their lives. There are multiple examples of Bush exploring gender roles and relationships through Hounds of Love. Moments where she does pitch her voice down. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) explores gender swapping in order to foster empathy, as she imagined a couple exchanging roles to understand each other's perspectives better. The track is about how men and women could better understand one another if they swapped places. This was very uncommon for a female Pop artist in the 1980s. Or a male artist. That idea of rather than conflict and dividing genders, bringing them together and switching positions to explore empathy, understanding and compassion.

Bush was raised in a house with two older brothers. Her father was a very important figure. Maybe that influence was why she was fascinated with the male perspective and her adopting a masculine vocal or guise at various points. Perhaps an artist like David Bowie and his transformations influenced her too. How he blurred gender lines and how he was challenging and normalising gender nonconformity and expression outside traditional binaries. Look at the video for Cloudbusting. The video sees Kate Bush star alongside Donald Sutherland. She casts herself as Peter, the young son of Wilhelm Reich. Rather than cast an actor to play that role, she cast herself. Again, Bush maybe going against the grain. When women were expected to be feminine and sexy and dress in a certain way, playing a male role in a video would have opened eyes and shocked people! Maybe a slight diversion, I want to bring sections of this article from Leah Kardos. Her recent book for 33 1/3 of Hounds of Love is a compelling read:

“In particular, it was the commercial triumph of Hounds Of Love that cleared a path for future would-be innovators who now had less to fear from being labelled ‘eccentric’ or ‘hysterical’ by the misogynistic rock press. British songwriter and producer Imogen Heap cited Bush as being one of the reasons labels took her work seriously, saying, ‘Kate produced some truly outstanding music in an era dominated by men and gave us gals a licence to not just be “a bird who could sing and write a bit”, which was the attitude of most execs.’

Bush’s music also broke ground in the way that it created space for polymorphous feminine imagination. The gender transgression of ‘Running Up That Hill’, the animal metamorphoses in ‘Get Out of My House’ and ‘Aerial’, empathy for the monstrous in ‘Wild Man’, the esotericism of ‘Lily’ and the metaphysical ‘Jig of Life’ suggested the possibility of extending and transcending one’s experience. Author and music critic Ann Powers wrote about how Bush’s imagistic songwriting pushed the limits of what was possible to feel and be:

‘[In Kate Bush’s music] I’d discovered what every teenager immersed in music craves: a voice that spoke from what felt like the inside of my own head, but with total self-confidence … And what she sang about! Demon lovers. Spiritual raptures. Ghosts at the window. Her songs were deeply feminine high nerdery made into loud, obnoxious art rock. And the best part was, like me, she didn't want to stay in her body’”.

Cloudbusting turns forty on 14th October, so it got me thinking more about gender in Kate Bush’s music. How she played a boy in the video. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) sees Bush and her dance partner, Michael Hervieu, almost dressed the same. Hervieu underwent gender reassignment surgery and is now called Micha. This adds new weight and perspective to the song and its messages. Think too about This Woman’s Work that appears on 1989’s The Sensual World. Originally included in the film, She’s Having a Baby, in 1988, this iconic track “explores the gendered burdens of responsibility, particularly through the male perspective of a father witnessing his wife's life-threatening labor, highlighting the woman's resilience and the traditional societal confinement of "women's work”. This is what Kate Bush said in a 1989 interview about the male in This Woman’s Work: “He has no choice. There he is, he’s not a kid any more; you can see he’s in a very grown-up situation. And he starts, in his head, going back to the times they were together”. Kate Bush tackling gender roles and traditional narratives. Casting herself in male roles, feet and bodies. Maybe in a male-dominated industry, some might say this was Kate Bush trying to stand out or be heard. Others saying it is un-feminist. Bush grew up around very strong male figures. Even if Bush expresses a more feminine perspective and charge on The Sensual World, that is not to say she abandoned her ideals and sympathy (and empathy) for men. She stated in interviews how she identified more with male artists. Writing about them with respect and understanding, rather than antagonism, she also explored gender through her lyrics and videos. I may not have done full justice regarding this subject, and there might be a book or thesis in this. So fascinating and interesting exploring men, the male voice and the importance of swapping places and sharing experiences. More and more reason to love…

THIS woman’s world and work.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Emma-Jean Thackray

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Lewis Vorn

Emma-Jean Thackray

__________

THE incredible…

and super talented Emma-Jean Thackray has a run of dates coming up that takes her around the world. Her new album, Weirdo, has been nominated for a Mercury Prize this year and most be among the frontrunners. I am going to end with a review for an album which has earned acclaimed across the board. If you do not know about Thackray, then I would first suggest checking out Grounding with Emma-Jean Thackray and her experiences with ADHD, OCD and autism and how this has affected her world of intrusive thoughts and also shaped her next album. Thackray is a giant of London's Jazz scene, a BBC Jazz FM award-winning artist for her debut album, Yellow, and she also runs her own label, Movementt. She has collaborated with major artists and institutions, including the London Symphony Orchestra. In terms of pedigree and talented, there are few as respected and reputable as the great Emma-Jean Thackray. I am revisiting her after I spotlighted her back in 2020. Five years is a long time, so there are a few more recent interviews I want to get to. I am going to concentrate on interviews from this year. A more up-to-date look at Emma-Jean Thackray. I will start out with Fifteen Questions and their interview. There are some interesting observations and answers that I wanted to highlight:

“When did you first consciously start getting interested in singing? What was your first performance as a singer on stage or in the studio and what was the experience like?

I sang as a small child. I was always walking around singing little songs that I made up, and my parents would get very annoyed, constantly telling me to be quiet.

I actually don’t remember my first time singing on stage or in the studio; I feel like it’s just something I’ve always done.

What were some of the main challenges in your development as a singer/vocalist? Which practices, exercises, or teachers were most helpful in reaching your goals – were there also “harmful” ones?

I think the hardest thing to have control of is your intonation. I think a lot of singers can focus too much on the ‘emotional’ side of performance (in pop / rock etc) and forget that you should have complete control of your voice as an instrument.

I think it’s great to transcribe other singers and match them exactly - every syllable, every phrase, and blend with them perfectly.

What are the things you hear in a voice when listening to a vocalist? What moves you in the voices of other singers?

I’m listening for their technique, their intonation, how they’re using vibrato, how they’re leaning into different syllables for different effects. I’m listening to their mouth / tongue position and how that changes the sound. I’m listening to all the minutia of what goes into a performance; that’s how you convey emotion and capture the listener.

What moves me is a singer who has total control of their voice, and therefore total control of the listener.

As a singer, it is possible to whisper at the audience, scream at the audience, reveal deep secrets or confront them with uncomfortable truths. Tell me about the sense of freedom that singing allows you to express yourself and how you perceive and build the relation with the audience.

I’d be terrified to scream and damage my voice, but I do like to play with dynamics to tell a story.

I’m definitely revealing deep secrets and singing about uncomfortable truths. I think that’s why my music resonates with people, especially the new album Weirdo, because I’m being so honest.

I’m singing lyrics that most people would only write in their diaries and not say out loud.

I'd love to know more about the vocal performances for Weirdo, please, and the qualities of your voice that you wanted to bring to the fore.  

My music draws upon lots of different genres, and my vocal performances are doing that, too. There’s more controlled, intricate, jazz like moments (eg “Let Me Sleep”), as well as more full, soulful moments (eg “Save Me”), and there’s a lot of grunge / rock in there too, so my voice has to have a bit more power and grit in those moments (“Weirdo” / “Stay”).

There’s also moments of being a bit more playful and being influenced by P-funk ("Black Hole").

For recording engineers, the human voice remains a tricky element to capture. What are some of the favourite recordings of your own voice so far and what makes voices sound great on record and in a live setting?

I’m really happy with the vocal recording across the whole of the Weirdo album. I wanted to capture my vocals as organically as possible, so I’m focussing on the performance, rather than thinking of how to tweak or hone things in post-production.

I used a large-diaphragm tube microphone for some drive and saturation, and not much else, just a bit of compression at the end of the chain.

For me, you should do as little to the vocals as possible; let your performance shine. That’s when vocals sound the best, in my opinion”.

I am going to move to The Line of Best Fit. Weirdo is an album that helped Emma-Jean Thackray find her way back from incredible grief. She is at her most open and moving on Weirdo. No wonder that it is award-nominated and won incredible praise from critics and fans! Someone who everyone needs to follow. I have been a fan for years and have seen her grow and evolve into this incredibly special talent whose music and words no doubt are helping so many others who live with and have experiences with grief and neurodivergence:

“Exerting total control over an album is something Thackray has done before – though, as she admits, she has always downplayed it in public. With Weirdo, however, a proudly solipsistic approach was the only one that made sense. “Because of the nature of what I’ve been writing about, I needed to put myself at the centre of everything, whereas before I’ve not really centred myself,” she says. “It’s just been about the music, and I just happened to be here, like some sort of vessel. But because this is such a personal record, in terms of content, I had to be like, ‘I’m in the middle of this. This is my inner world.’"

Doing so was a form of therapy for Thackray. “It was just about trying to follow my own needs for the first time in so, so long, only thinking about myself. And it was really important to do that,” she says. Without considerations such as which string players to hire or how to direct a percussionist, Thackray had the space to slowly rebuild her days. “I just had to think about myself, like, ‘Ok, I’m gonna wake up. What do I feel like doing? Do I feel like playing some guitar? Do I feel like going for a walk?’ It was just getting back in touch with myself and what I was feeling.

“I think it was all part of the process for me,” she adds, “just processing what happened and trying to heal.”

Bare-faced lyrics are certainly a hallmark of the album. “Wanna Die” does what it says on the tin – “I don’t wanna die / Except for all the times I do” – while on “Maybe Nowhere” there’s a perversely sober sense of reason: “Maybe I’ll join you / In the beyond / Why should I stay? / Just paying some guy’s mortgage anyway.”

It’s undoubtedly weighty stuff, but Thackray sees a dark comedy in the album’s contrasts. “Wanna Die”, for instance, sets those gloomy words against an unexpectedly peppy, jazz-punk backdrop. Same goes for the album cover, which, aside from the toaster, also stars a tiny rubber duck. “That’s the kind of sense of humour I have,” she says, “trying to bring both sides of life to something: the bleak and the silly."

There’s a sly absurdity in the tracklisting, too. The songs “Tofu” and “Fried Rice” sit next to each other; the former repeats the word “tofu” over a tangling beat, while the latter sees Thackray simply stating she’d rather eat rice than go outside. The next track, “Where’d You Go”, however, deals with the existential unknown of what happens when someone dies. It illuminates one of the weirdest parts of grief: how it forces us to grapple with the commonplace and the unfathomable as if they were equals.

“I just really wanted to show people every part of what was going on,” Thackray says. “It wasn’t just me questioning everything and being super cerebral.” And so, when for three months rice was the only thing she wanted to cook for herself, “every single day,” Thackray wrote a song about it. What might seem like a symptom of malaise actually “became a routine that was really nourishing.” “It was a way that I was taking care of myself, without fully understanding that,” she explains”.

There are two more interviews to get to before a review. However, I would also adviser you check out this Wonderland interview from the start of the year. It is such a busy time for Emma-Jean Thackray. With a busy diary and fascinating literary ahead, she is going to be bringing Weirdo to fans all around the world. I want to include these particular sections from a recent interview from The Guardian, as we get to learn some background to Weirdo. However, Emma-Jean Thackray does hate being put in a box or easily and lazily defined:

“The West Yorkshire-born bandleader, 35, is often boxed in as “London-based trumpet player Emma-Jean Thackray,” she says with gentle defiance. “That annoys the fuck out of me, it feels reductive.” In actuality, she’s inspired as much by Madlib as she is Miles Davis; she’s a producer and musical polymath who uses the “jazz language” as a basis for her eclectic multiverse of broken beat, P-funk, spiritual jazz, hip-hop and beyond. Her 2016 debut EP, Walrus, signalled her unique grasp of groove, its rhythms intricately constructed from layers of brass and percussion. By the time she released her debut album Yellow in 2021, she had refined her complex arrangements into a cosmic jazz-funk sound that was ambitious yet jocular – referencing, as Sun Ra did, spiritual transcendence along with astronomy and weed.

Growing up, “I was a complete outsider. When I was a child, I didn’t know that I was neurodiverse.” She’s not spoken about it much until recently, but Thackray is autistic and has ADHD. “I was constantly confused, thinking that everyone had been given a rulebook that I hadn’t been given,” she continues. “I’ve had the word ‘weirdo’ thrust upon me, as an insult. So I’ve tried to reclaim it now and to be proud; it makes my art different from anyone else’s.”

Thackray started writing second album Weirdo in 2022 as an exploration of her neurodivergence, and a way of “embracing difficult mental health” after tour burnout. But its themes took a devastating turn the following year when, she says, “my life fell apart”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Brownswood Recordings

In January 2023, Thackray’s partner of 12 years died suddenly of natural causes. She details the desperate lows she reached with piercing directness on songs like Save Me (“I’m not whole any more / Broken pieces on the floor”), and, more playfully, the George Clinton-channelling Black Hole, featuring the comedian-musician Reggie Watts (“I’m in a black hole of despair / Only the beat can pull me out”). The songs are like a grief diary, she says. “I felt so lost. I didn’t know who I was any more.”

Thackray had previously believed “that there was no life and death”. She’s been a student of the east Asian philosophy of Tao since her teens – her 2020 EP Um Yang 음 양 referenced the Taoist concept of duality and harmony and she has Tao symbols tattooed on her thumbs. “For me, energy is never destroyed, it’s only transferred through people; they live on and are always a part of you. And then you’re confronted with [loss], and the anger stops the philosophising. I thought: the universe is just this cruel, horrible thing. There’s no balance, only pain.”

After “six months of doing nothing except playing Zelda and staring at the wall,” she summoned the strength to sing again, knowing that making music would be the way to “get back to myself”, to find “renewed trust in the purpose that I always had”. Weirdo was about the shift “from really not wanting to be here, and then finding my way back to music,” she says. “I’m not saying I don’t have really bad days, or weeks, months, whatever. But throughout it all, there was the want to make music. That’s the only way I can feel emotionally regulated.”

She credits her neurodiversity for her multi-instrumentalism and voracious stylistic approach. On Weirdo, there’s scarcely any trumpet. “Having had this sort of a death and rebirth, I feel like a completely different person to before,” she says, “so picking up the trumpet feels slightly alien now.” Instead, she’s singing far more and going heavy on guitar, too. The distortion and grunge sonics echo a childhood obsession with Kurt Cobain, her “special interest for a while before Miles Davis”, as well as Radiohead”.

The final interview I am including is from NME. The Leeds artist discussed her neurodivergence and how celebrating that were the seeds of Weirdo. This is an album that has connected to so many people. Even if it is personal, the words and music definitely speak to people. One of the most powerful and important records of 2025. I hope that it does win loads of awards, as this is such a standout year for Emma-Jean Thackray. Go and follow her on social media:

“I’m dead stoked for everyone,” she said of the 12 artists honoured. “It’s so nice to be amongst so many fantastic records. There are a couple on there that I thought would be shortlisted, a couple that were surprises to me. A good mate from college on there as well [Joe Webb].”

‘Weirdo’, featuring cameo appearances by Reggie Watts and Kassa Overall, sees Thackray making sense of her life as an artist and young woman with ADHD and autism, while also grappling with grief.

“I’m just a little weirdo,” she admitted. “I’ve always been a weirdo, my entire life. The seed of the record was about accepting and celebrating my neurodiversity. Then of course, it became about something else and evolved, but he very first seed of it was about me being a little weirdo.”

Asked for advice for anyone who may be worried about entering or navigating the music industry with neurodiversity, Thackray replied: “Be yourself. Throw yourself into the music – that’s the most important thing – and the music will take care of you”.

I am going to end with a review for Weirdo. The Quietus stated how Weirdo has not only saved Emma-Jean Thackray’s life: it will save so many others too. That is why I was compelled to spotlight her once more. The Quietus started by saying how the “genre-busting iconoclast makes a fearless leap forward”:

“In interviews ahead of the release of this second full-length LP, Emma-Jean Thackray has spoken more than once of how making it saved her life. That anyone could craft work so head-spinningly euphoric, so joyous and life-affirming, as a deliberate response to the unmooring felt following the death of their partner and amid an ongoing war with their own mental health, is a kind of miracle. But that’s just the start of what’s marvellous about this magnificent record.

In many ways its sound and style – typified by a questing musical omnivorousness, so an absence of any specific approach rather than the adoption of any single one – is a logical progression from Yellow, Thackray’s first LP proper, released in 2021. But Weirdo still feels like a stylistic surprise. In part this is the result of her decision to go back to an earlier mode of working, playing everything herself and recording at home, which was how she made her first EP, Ley Lines. Because her own talents are broad-based and numerous, and because she knows, understands and loves far more musics than those that easily fall within the jazz bracket she’s usually seen as operating in, Weirdo emerges as both an expected next step for Thackray, and at the same time the career equivalent of a high-speed handbrake turn.

You can’t pigeonhole it easily. For starters, Thackray uses her signature instrument – the trumpet – only sparingly. This feels a very consequential decision, the clean, strident, soaring sound almost entirely held back until towards the end, adding a sense of emergence and survival when at last she allows us to share its sonic uplift. It isn’t just her playing every instrument in the 1960s-TV-show-pastiche video for ‘Wanna Die’ that puts you in mind of OutKast circa Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: few artists have managed to inhabit as many genres at once, not just on a single album but within individual songs. If you wanted to give Weirdo a category, you’d have to make a new one up. Let’s call it a disco and P-Funk-inflected pop singer-songwriter album, then: but because it’s been made by a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist who’s grown up in British jazz’s emergent egalitarian improvisational tradition and has been surrounded and supported by what will surely be seen in due course as some of the greatest and most free-thinking musicians of all time, the results are therefore both expected and surprising, and never less than wonderful.

An unwavering commitment to excellence in musicianship and a lightness of compositional touch combine on every piece here to always exhilarating effect. Even the most complicated arrangements take flight with apparent effortlessness, in large part because they are fused with lyric-writing that prizes directness of communication over self-conscious poetics. Again and again Thackray hits hard and heavy through her startling and disarming economy of style. “I’m not whole any more, broken pieces on the floor,” she sings in the chorus of ‘Save Me’, a made-for-the-dancefloor belter which starts out like Afrobeat and ends up in Philly soul territory; the chorus of the helter-skelter, falling-over-itself ‘Wanna Die’ stacks words of only one or two syllables until they teeter into near collapse in an enjambed ending that disrupts what Stewart Lee would identify as the rhythm of the joke (“I am doing fine / I’m not gonna cry / I don’t wanna die / Except for all the times / I do”), simultaneously making it even funnier and even more of a punch to the guts.

Simply reading the track listing is enough to tell this perfectly executed concept album’s consistent, involving and ultimately empowering story. Some of the songs were written before her partner’s death and before Weirdo’s narrative existed: but it’s impossible to tell which ones without having them pointed out, testament to the thoroughness of the work completed here, and vindication of Thackray’s decision at the outset to tell Gilles Peterson and the rest of the Brownswood staff that they would have to leave her alone to get on with it and content themselves with hearing it when she’d finished the whole thing.

The individual songs are widescreen epics in their own right – even the ones where, if you judged them by their durations, you’d expect them to be interludes or skits. The record’s slightest moment – ‘Tofu’, two minutes and thirteen seconds of cyclical keyboards and snare rattle framing a descending vocal containing only the beancurd of the title and the occasional “oh” – works perfectly in its context, ahead of the even shorter ‘Fried Rice’ (“I wanna make fried rice / I don’t wanna go outside … Maybe then I’ll be alright”), comfort eating as shorthand for, and potential way out of, the depths of solitary depression. ‘What Is The Point’ lists things that you have to do but which don’t seem worth the effort when the person you normally do them with has gone, and stops abruptly in the middle of a purposefully directionless Minimoog solo, still short of two minutes.

Throughout, the writing and the execution are peerless, and not without considerable risk. ‘Where’d You Go’ – a full-length song, comprised of a series of questions not so much rhetorical as obvious, drives right up to the edge of banality until, just before halfway through, one final devastating query turns the thing on its head; the second half consists of a multi-tracked mantra (“I’m chasing shadows / Don’t know where you’ve gone”) underpinned by a superbly understated trumpet solo, deliberately buried a couple of floors down from the top of the skyscraper of a mix. ‘Maybe Nowhere’ – the result of Thackray “wondering what it sounds like to die” – starts out a loping beast built from moderately overdriven bass grumble, glittering guitar and room-shaking drums, and ends in a cascading overlap of instrumental layers that retain precision and clarity even as volume and intensity build to a final shuddering disintegration. ‘Remedy’ achieves its penultimate-track intention of signposting a way out of grief’s clutches by first adopting then subverting the cliches of self-help, standing transcendent on solid bass guitar bedrock as it shimmers into a sunlit coda that sets the spirit into a lark-like ascent.

She deals throughout in uplift and empowerment, both lyrics and music shining blazing floodlights into the darkest corners of her most despairing moments, showing us the routes she used to climb her way out and allowing us to follow her when we want or need to. It will not only be Thackray’s life that this superb LP will save”.

This is an artist I really admire and know is going to be making music for decades more. Go and check out her Grounding episodes and pick up a copy of Weirdo if you can. Such a stunning album and remarkable artist that we should all salute, embrace and celebrate. If she is not there already, then make sure that you…

GET her into your life.

___________

Follow Emma Jean Thackray

PHOTO CREDIT: Brownswood Recordings

Official:

https://www.emmajeanthackray.com/

TikTok:

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

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/ejthackray/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3UgcksTtuB1Jnn8BrisEiC

YouTube:

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

FEATURE: Spotlight: Night Tapes

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie-Lee Culver

Night Tapes

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I will include a couple of…

2024 interviews with Night Tapes before getting to some newer chats. First, I want to feature The Honey Pop and their interview from last June. I am quite new to Night Tapes, so it is helpful looking back at previous interviews and seeing where they have come from. You can tell the London-based trio of Max Doohan, Sam Richards and Iiris Vesik. If you have not yet discovered the trio then I would thoroughly recommend them:

“Your previous EP, Perfect Kindness, is something we can never get enough of. We’re obsessed with the ethereal energy in both the instrumentals and vocals. Each track is its own perfect vibe/journey. Can you tell us a bit about the creation process of the Perfect Kindness EP?

Ah, that’s nice. It took quite a long time and meticulous crafting of the whole EP. We had time to make 20 versions of everything. For example, there were like 20 versions of ‘Inigo’ before its final form.

Perfect Kindness came together more as a collage. Some of these songs like ‘Selene’ and ‘Humans’ were made after Richie heard them in his dreams. Silent Song was a process from 2016-2022 – it started as a piano song and then re-emerged when Max found a loop that we all had jammed on with drums, synths, and flute. The topline just fit and suddenly everything made sense.

We used to all live together in a house back then and flitter between each other’s rooms when anyone had a cool idea going. We used to have lots of random jams together and recorded them onto tape in our bedroom studios. We still have hundreds of little demos from that time and occasionally we’ll go through them for textures and vibes.

Speaking of creating an EP, how would you compare the process of creating Perfect Kindness to the creation of your new EP, assisted memories?

Both were created in our living quarters. Perfect Kindness was made in bedrooms while assisted memories were made mostly in living rooms and corridors.

Perfect Kindness took a long time to create and assisted memories came together quite fast. We really had years to reopen the projects on Perfect Kindness whilst with assisted memories we had a deadline for the first time.

For me the 2 EP’s have quite a yin & yang energy going on. Perfect Kindness is definitely yin: nighttime listening, wandering and experimenting.  assisted memories is quite yang: it’s more directional and punchy, the songs feel to me like crystallized snowflakes.

In terms of making assisted memories, everything that we had learned whilst making perfect kindness we could refine and put into (fast) practice with assisted memories. I’m also really proud to see how the songs that Max and Richie mixed turned out. We are so happy that for both of these EPs for specific songs we got to work with the mix wizard Nathan Boddy, he really elevated the tracks he worked on.

The EPs are going to be on double vinyl together when the new assisted memories comes out.

The genre of “dream pop” is so fitting for your sound, in our opinion! What are some of the influences/genres/artists that helped bring you to the sound you have today?

Ah! That’s nice to hear, yeah we love dreamy ethereal stuff but our backgrounds are actually more electronic. We hadn’t really listened to Cocteau Twins before people started to reference them in comparison to us. We do love Tame Impala and Deerhunter, but I wouldn’t say that we listen to dream pop usually.

I have always been a Björk, Bowie, Kate Bush Holy Trinity fangirl & at the moment I’m actually listening to a lot of dance music, future breakbeat & I’ve been discovering UK jungle & garage gems. I was the one to bring the boys over to the dark side and now they also love pop music. But they’re probably not as into Charlie Puth as I am. I always try to keep an open mind about new music, I’m always on the prowl for some.

Richie probably is the most indie of us all, loves Bon Iver and Big Thief. But when I met him then he was making more electronic dance music and house music.  He is big into his chord sequences and he has a jazz guitar degree.

Max has always been an ambient music lover – Brian Eno, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Lone, and such. When I met him, he was making ambient-infused electronic dance music.  He is big into drones. He also plays drums in a post-rock/electronic indie band and he is sessioning top-level R&B bass at the moment”.

I am going to move on to UNCLEAR and their interview with Night Tapes. Speaking with the three-piece around assisted memories and its success, it was a big step for them. This year has seen incredible singles such as helix and storm. This is a group with a massive future ahead. Although I have not known about them for too long, I can see there is a lot of excitement around them:

“What is your writing/production process typically like? Did you try any new methods or styles within this process recently?

Night Tapes: “Our writing process is pretty erratic. We all make tracks individually and we can write together. The annoying, correct answer to this question is ‘every time is different’ ([laughs] I used to absolutely loathe these kinds of answers, but it’s so true). I think it’s good to keep on exploring, there is a saying that applies to art quite well: ‘if you think you know what you’re doing, you’ve killed it.’  Throughout the years we have learned to just make songs happen faster, but switching up approaches like writing with a new instrument or writing to visuals seems to work for us.”

If you each had to choose a favorite track from this EP, which would it be and why?

Night Tapes: “At the moment my fave is ‘easy time to be alive.’ It’s built on this one spontaneous dictaphone recording we did one morning with Max. We found the recording randomly at a session and built everything around it as we couldn’t change anything about it. It turned out everything was there, we just needed to trust the first recording and the first feeling it had.”

This fall, you’ll be on your debut US tour including shows in NYC and LA! Which part of this tour are you most excited for?

Night Tapes: “We are so excited to see all the new cities we’ve never been to before (Chicago and San Francisco). We are also very excited to see the people who have been championing us online.”

What do you want to tell your future, end-of-this-year self? What do you hope you’ve accomplished individually and as a group by December 31st?

Night Tapes: “I would like to tell my future end-of-this-year self that creativity needs order and chaos and I hope she will go to a sunny place this winter to rest, regroup and adventure. I would like to accomplish inner freedom, thank you”.

I am going to move to this year. On 26th September, Night Tapes release their debut album, portals//polarities. After a series of E.P.s and singles, this is the first definitive and full work from Night Tapes. I am writing this on 15th September, so I am not sure what the reviews are like for the album. We will soon find out. The Line of Best Fit spoke with the trio in August. It is a fascinating interview. Starly Lou Riggs spent time with a trio who are creating their own sound and niche. The Line of Best Fit say that “Instead of heading to bed after performing, Night Tapes wrote an entirely new album on their last tour. Born in hotel rooms on the road, it finds Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan, and Sam “Richie” Richards cracking the code on how to capture a moment in time with sound”:

“Night Tapes are all about vibes. More specifically, they’re about organic feeling and expression. Each of these tracks tells the story of a time and place, serving as a diverse array of sounds and mapping the band’s sonic dreamscape – from sun-laced dance hits about a screen-obsessed world (“television”) to more seedy city grit (“leave it all behind, Mike”), the album feels like riding a virtual wave of both soft and heavy currents.

Sitting atop Doohan and Richards’ hypnotic instrumentals, Vesik’s whispered vocals act as a teleportation device. Amid twisting tones that feel weightless, tracks like “tokyo sway” and “masterplan” feel like a journey to another dimension – one entwined in VHS-tape ribbon and a blue crackling screen. The heavy-hitting punchy beats of delicate trip-hop track “babygirl (like n01 else)” juxtapose with Vesik’s syrupy vocals. From “enter” to “wayfarer”, Night Tapes invite nostalgia without going backwards in time. Instead, they’re bridging the gap, bringing together both inner and outer worlds.

In general, electronic music has an air of being “perfected.” When polished and tuned, live instrumental tracking sometimes disappears. Night Tapes, however, bend these expectations by tracking with both messy and masterly methods. “When we capture the recordings – the raw recordings – that’s not precise,” Doohan clarifies. “But then we [go] through everything with a fine-toothed comb and apply that electronic production mindset to these imperfect things.” The resulting sound is something a bit in between, capturing the human behind the computerboard.

PHOTO CREDIT: Marii Kiisk

To simply call the band “electronic” does them a disservice. Their work feels more like a lucid dream, breathing new life into the familiar sounds of shoegaze, synth-pop, and trip-hop, gripping a ‘90s backdrop while looking into the future. On top of it all, they write everything improvisationally. Whether at home or abroad, the process is so wonderfully collaborative that they sometimes forget who wrote which line. Doohan laughs, “There are some bass lines that I’ll play the first half of and then Richie will play the second half, maybe slightly overlaying each other, so they’re actually kind of impossible to play!” Later, they have to relearn each track to play live as a band, pulling from recordings and fitting them together again like puzzle pieces.

They’ve been so successfully locked in with conceptual EPs, it’s landed them tours across the globe and over 18 million streams. While a lot of their inspiration still stems from London, the group got a fresh wave of inspiration out on the road post-pandemic lockdown. In the end, Vesik explains, “We tried writing at home for quite a long time before, and it all just came together on tour.”

Lit by a new match, Vesik, Doohan, and Richards were able to find new inspiration in the very places they dreamt of visiting. After kicking off the dust of pandemic restlessness, Richards notices that “the songs were a way of escaping the mundanity of being in London and being inside. We were lucky we could be together to write that, but a lot of the time, it’s as if we’re somewhere else.” They had hoped to visit Mexico, even writing “pacifico” about the city of San José del Pacifico before ever setting foot in the country. The track serves instead as a daydream, depicting a place their friend had visited and told them about”.

I am going to end in a minute. The final interview is from NME. Transporting and deep Pop, Night Tapes put their feelings very much first when it comes to their music. NME observed how the trio infuse and pack their songs with “vitality, emotion and the spirit of their travels”. The brilliant and anticipated portals//polarities is one of the most essential, important debut albums of this year. I recently published a mixtape with songs from incredible debut albums. That was before portals//polarities came out. I think that this album will get an honourable mention:

“While ‘Portals // Polarities’ continues their knack for gliding melodies and synths that practically glow, it also pivots towards trip hop, breakbeat and acid house – in part, thanks to Doohan’s more recent interest in dance music. “Because we’re always trying to react to each other, somebody might bring something which is really far outside that direction,” Richards explains when NME meets the band in more familiar territory – dialling in from their south London house-share, not long after wrapping up their Cover photoshoot. “Then, we always try to understand what makes it sound like Night Tapes and catch it.”

But for a band whose work remains so intimate and spectral, ‘Portals // Polarities’ is “probably the most extroverted work we’ve done”. “The beginning of Night Tapes was more introverted and slower, but our lives were also slower,” Vesik admits. “Everything’s going so fast now. It’s like, whirr! It’s interesting to capture the snapshots.”

London seemed like an endless font of inspiration when Night Tapes began. It was a change of pace from the band’s backgrounds: Doohan and Richards hail from rural towns around the New Forest, while Vesik is from Tallinn, Estonia, and moved to London a decade ago to pursue music. “I guess I was always quite expressive – the usual!” she cackles, bold red lipstick marks streaked across her cheeks from the photoshoot. “We have a certain stereotype of Estonians,” she adds, referencing the country’s aloof image, “which I believe is not true. We have a very rich inner life – we might not always share it…”

PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Waters for NME

Doohan and Vesik met at university and started living together, with Richards joining them later in 2016. Initially, all three pursued their own musical projects, but soon began jamming together at night. When they eventually recorded their 2019 debut EP ‘Dream Forever In Glorious Stereo’, they did so at hushed volumes, so as not to disturb their neighbours. “There’s a lot of collective consciousness – there’s so many dreams and thoughts in London,” Doohan says. “It’s a very powerful, buzzing energy. It’s very inspiring because of that – if you can tap into it and not go crazy…”

Though Night Tapes’ sound is mired in escapism and fantasy, there’s an unusually strong duty to truth on multiple levels. Across the album, you’ll hear a multitude of samples recorded during their tours from November 2024 to January 2025. Most of their vocals were recorded in situ straight into an iPhone, and the band would later craft songs around specific samples, exploring juxtaposing textures and soundscapes to build their worlds.

‘Enter’, for instance, evokes an eerie, surreal limbo, pairing a dampened digital drum kit with strummed acoustic guitars recorded in an Estonian swamp. Meanwhile, those LA helicopters turn ‘Leave It All Behind, Mike’ into a dystopian high-stakes escapade, despite its dreamy ’80s instrumentals: “If the world is ending / Would you share with me our last strawberry?”

“You can have a very simple song, but if you put the sound of a cityscape over the top of it, it completely recontextualises it,” Doohan explains. “You can frame the song differently depending on what kind of foley you use behind it”.

This is a very important time for Night Tapes. With a debut album about to come out (though it will be out by the time this feature is shared), there are some great dates coming up. The trio head to North America for a string of dates. They have so many fans around the world. That will only build and expand as portals//polarities comes out and gets all this love. For those who are unaware of Night Tapes, make sure you add them to your collection. A trio who make music…

THAT is truly unforgettable.

____________

Follow Night Tapes

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/nighttapesmusic/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCioo1pJKTjeou1VBEXc_bPQ

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5APEQlUaQ5K70LgPqAdTuU?si=2RayNHfTT82i_2CxqYVl3Q

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/nighttapesband/

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Incredible Debut Albums of 2025

FEATURE:

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Heartworms/PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Waters for NME

Songs from Incredible Debut Albums of 2025

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I may do another…

IN THIS PHOTO: JADE/PHOTO CREDIT: Thom Kerr for Wonderland

feature where I name the best ten debut albums of this year. Before then, I have compiled a mixtape featuring songs from incredible debut albums of 2025. I will have forgotten some but, what is my hope, most have been included. The debut album is such a hard thing to pull off. There is a sense of expectation and pressure. This is often the first statement from an artist. I don’t think that many artists hit their peaks on their debut albums. However, there is something special about that first album. This year has seen some extraordinary and eclectic debut albums. I have compiled some tracks from simply amazing introductory albums. These are examples where artists have very much hit…

IN THIS PHOTO: Maruja

THE ground running.

FEATURE: A Passion and Not a Distraction: The Stage Careers of Beloved Artists

FEATURE:

A Passion and Not a Distraction

IN THIS PHOTO: Lucy Rebecca Taylor (Self Esteem) will appear in David Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles in London next year/ PHOTO CREDIT: Jono White

The Stage Careers of Beloved Artists

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THERE is this interesting crossover…

PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Lazo/Pexels

and interaction in film and music where we see artists gracing the big screen and turning in wonderful performances. Actors who portray musicians in biopics. There is a whole list of artists who you know would have made incredible actors but never got the chance or decided not to embark on that career. Gwen Stefani leaps to mind. Today, heavyweight artists such as Dua Lipa and Lady Gaga appear in films. Lady Gaga has been for years. Charli xcx is starting out her acting career. Taylor Swift has been in films. Little Simz is a phenomenal actor. There does seem to be this natural relationship between film and music. Most musicians make music videos and there is something about an actor performance from a live gig. A lot of the discipline and personality traits needed to perform an epic gig ties into acting. We will see a lot of great artists go into film and T.V. I am not sure whether the reverse is true and actors can make natural musicians. History says it is s mixed bag! However, if film and music seem to interact, do we talk about musicians appearing on the stage? Some might say that this is a very similar transfer. However, theatre, musical or straight, and film are very different. Film and T.V. relies on multiple takes. Theatre is this single performance where you have to nail it. Musical theatre is so demanding. I don’t think it is as easy to go from music to theatre. Even though a lot of artists have that stamina and stagecraft to deliver a great acting performance, there are dynamics and aspects of an acting performance that are not imbued in music and live performances. Different skills that you have to pick up. It can be hard to detach from the musical arena and step into this different world.

PHOTO CREDIT: Rosaline Shahnavaz/The Guardian

I mention it as there is news that Rebecca Lucy Taylor (a.k.a. Self Esteem) will appear in a new revival that will hit the West End from next March. The Guardian shared a feature about this development. Someone I can see appearing in quite a few films, it seems that Rebecca Lucy Taylor has a natural and burgeoning career in theatre. As she recently staged a theatrical presentation of her latest album, A Complicated Woman, it seems that Taylor is naturally drawn to the stage:

“Self Esteem to star as raging rock star in revival of David Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles

Rebecca Lucy Taylor will play Maggie, a role originated by Helen Mirren, in a ‘landmark’ 50th anniversary production in London in March

Fifty years after Helen Mirren originated the role, Rebecca Lucy Taylor AKA Self Esteem is to play a raging rock star in a West End revival of Teeth ’n’ Smiles by David Hare.

It will take Taylor back to the Duke of York’s theatre, where she performed a four-night “theatrical presentation” of her third album, A Complicated Woman, in April. In Hare’s 1975 play she takes the lead role of a singer, Maggie, in an imploding band who put on a concert for a Cambridge University May ball at the end of the 1960s. The mood is summed up by the band’s closing number, Last Orders on the Titanic. Taylor will contribute additional music and lyrics to original song by the brothers Nick and Tony Bicât respectively.

Daniel Raggett will direct the production, which opens in March and runs for 12 weeks. Tickets will go on sale in October. “I’m deeply honoured to be bringing Teeth ’n’ Smiles back for its 50th anniversary,” said Taylor. “I love to challenge myself in new forms and I can’t wait to slap you round the face with Maggie. I am a huge fan of Daniel and David’s work, and the chance to collaborate with them on such a landmark production is something I am insanely excited about.”

Taylor spent a decade in the indie duo Slow Club and released her solo debut album as Self Esteem, Compliments Please, in 2019. It was followed by Prioritise Pleasure, named the best album of 2021 by Guardian music critics. Taylor made her theatrical debut as Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Playhouse in London in 2023. Next month marks the publication of her first book, A Complicated Woman, billed as “a cathartic scream … that gets to the heart of being a woman in the world today”.

I can’t think of anything more exciting than watching Rebecca Lucy Taylor and Daniel Raggett strip the varnish off my old play,” Hare said. “It’s a perfect moment to see if a new generation responds to that 70s mix of hope, drugs, music, sex and despair.”

Teeth ’n’ Smiles was first staged at the Royal Court in 1975, with a cast including Antony Sher, and transferred to the West End the following year. The role of Maggie was compared to Janis Joplin, and the Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote that Hare “captures precisely that moment in a culture when a dream explodes. Like John Osborne in The Entertainer, he realises there is poetry and pathos in the spectacle of decline”.

It is not strange for artists to step onto the stage. Will Young, Beverley Knight, Emma Bunton and Melanie C are among those who have appeared in theatrical productions. I think most are musical theatre productions. The rebel play, Teeth 'n' Smiles, has musical moments, though it is not a technically a musical. It is rare for artists to step outside of musical theatre when we think of stage performances. One of the most notable transitions of the past few years is when Cheryl appeared in 2:22: A Ghost Story in 2023. Playing a new mother, Jenny, in Danny Robins’s supernatural story, this was a role previously played by Lily Allen. I am not sure if there are doubts and cynicism when artists step onto the stage. There are theatre snobs and critics who feel it is maybe stunt casting or someone stepping outside of their arena. Although Cheryl’s performance was acclaimed, I guess a lot of it falls on the quality of the production and the other actors. One downside might be too much focus and pressure being on this high-profile musician appearing on the stage. Maybe that takes away from the ensemble and the play’s direction and writing. However, I do think that it is hugely impressive when artists go into theatre. Maybe a lot more daunting and harder to do a performance that is not musical and is dark or quite heavy-hitting, I wonder how many others from music will transfer to the stage. Rebecca Lucy Taylor is someone who has this relationship with the stage. She also composed the score for the Jodie Comer-starring Prima Facie. The Suzie Miller play won Comer an Olivier, and there is a national tour of the production next year.

Perhaps it is more common in the U.S., but a host of American artist have appeared in acclaimed productions there. From Brandy Norwood to Sting to Josh Groban to Michelle Williams, again, a lot of these performance are musical theatre. I guess Teeth ‘n’ Smiles is close to musical theatre. About a failing Rock band, fronted by the Janis Joplin-like Maggie Frisby, performing at Jesus College's May Ball in 1969, things descends into chaos as the clash between the band and the academics highlights the end of the optimistic 1960s counter-culture. Rather than it being musical theatre, I see it closer in town to a new production like Stereophonic: The play follows a fictional rock band (very much based around Fleetwood Mac and their Rumours period) on the cusp of superstardom as they struggle through recording their new album set from 1976 to 1977. It is just a subject I am curious about. Also, what skills and attributes can Rebecca Lucy Taylor take from these theatrical experiences into her music? Does she have this extra edge and level because of what she has picked up from these productions? Perhaps so? Also, did she take a lot of her natural and years-long talents and instincts and ably and phenomenally triumph on the stage? Again, I think so. I think that Rebecca Lucy Taylor will be simply electric when she appears in Teeth ‘n’ Smiles. It will be an accomplished and extraordinary performance from…

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A tremendous talent.

FEATURE: The Reggae Kite: The Artists and Influences in Kate Bush’s Music

FEATURE:

 

 

The Reggae Kite

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

The Artists and Influences in Kate Bush’s Music

__________

A slightly short feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush circa 1980

I have been thinking about characters in Kate Bush’s work. This is research ahead of a possible book. To see if there is enough to write about. There are plenty of people mentioned in her songs. Named or anonymous, Bush is very much influenced by people. That is what drives and fascinates her. It is not only the characters she includes in her songs. There are artists who she loves or listened to that goes into the songs. That might have shifted later in life. I think up to and including Aerial in 2005, there were touches of other artists. Definitely up to The Red Shoes in 1993. Even though Bush brought in other musicians to albums after The Red Shoes in 1993 or Aerial in 2005, could you listen to songs from those albums, and 2011’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow, and say they are influenced by other artists? Maybe this is Kate Bush paying tribute to another artist? It is debatable. Definitely, earlier in her career, Bush was driven by other artists. Kate Bush got compared to artists like Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell. Even though she was compared to those artists, I don’t think that she really was channelling them. You can listen to The Kick Inside and Lionheart and hear shades of those artists. It is only natural for artists, over their early career, to include nods to other artists. Either those who they love or feel add something to the mix. In the case of Kate Bush, as I have explored in previous features, she grew up around a lot of different music. From Roy Harper and English Folk to Irish music, Roxy Music, Elton John, Captain Beefheart and Pink Floyd, you can hear some of this in Kate Bush’s music. I have talked about some songs on The Kick Inside and Never for Ever, where Pink Floyd’s influence can be heard. The Saxophone Song on The Kick Inside and Breathing on Never for Ever. Not a pastiche or heavily leaning on them, you can tell that this band were in her mind when she was writing these tracks. The spritely piano riff on James and the Cold Gun from The Kick Inside, I feel, was Bush’s nod to Steely Dan. That entire track has a Dan quality to it. The band also inspired other moments in Kate Bush’s cannon. A slight hint of Steely Dan on Never for Ever’s Blow Away (for Bill). If not in the lyrics then parts of the compositions, as MOJO suggested.

It is interesting looking at various tracks and noticing spots of other artists. If not in the sound then maybe the title. I have just been writing about The Red Shoes and the lead track, Rubberband Girl, obviously takes its title from The Spinners’ 1976 hit, The Rubberband Man. There are cases where Kate Bush has written songs inspired by distinct artists that people have not picked up on. I want to bring in this article, where Kate Bush discusses Wow (from 1978’s Lionheart) and the inspiration behind the song. Even though she says it was her first go at writing a Pink Floyd song, listen to the end of The Saxophone Song and you can tell this was influenced by Pink Floyd. That cosmic outro definitely channels them! Even so, as she explains, other tracks with distinct artists at their core passed a lot of people by:

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

Kate Bush Club newsletter, Summer 1979”.

I did know about Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake and Kite. The former is from Lionheart. I didn’t peg Kate Bush for a Patti Smith fan! However, you listen to the song and you can hear her influence come through. I love to imagine Kate Bush listening to Bob Marley! As a teenager in her bedroom spinning a record by Bob Marley & The Wailers! Bush experiment with Reggae at other times in her career. Kite is from The Kick Inside. Another track on that album, Them Heavy People, has a touch of Reggae to it. Maybe not Bob Marley per se, but one of his contemporaries. Beyond obvious musicians that she loved and guided her, such as David Bowie and Elton John, there are more obscure or less obvious ones that she was touched by. I listen to Them Heavy People and actually hear a bit of Ska or Two Tone. Maybe The Specials or Madness woven in. Bush is a singular and original artist, though within this comes some distinct guidance from other artists. Critics who did not pick up on the references to Patti Smith and Bob Marley in 1978 also missed the Pink Floyd inspiration on Wow. Did this continue later in her career? Delve into The Dreaming and that world. Kate Bush has said how a lot of the percussion sound on that album was motivated by Peter Gabriel and the work he was doing at Townhouse Studios. There are bits of Lodger-era David Bowie in Sat in Your Lap. A Bowie-esque track, I feel! Get Out of My House, the final track on The Dreaming, could be a mix of various influences. There is something Punk about it. Raw and visceral, one feels that Bush was channelling a combination of Punk artists like Sex Pistols with a bit of her own version of that genre. Definitely, one can hear Captain Beefheart and the more avant-garde side of her record collection through other tracks on that album. Perhaps more delicate and less obvious than earlier references, other sounds and artists played a role throughout.

Kate Bush said how the first single from The Dreaming, Sat in Your Lap, was inspired by Stevie Wonder during a concert she saw in London. A case of another artist having an impact on a song. We rightly commend and salute Kate Bush as this innovator and artists who has influenced so many others. Even if Kate Bush said in her later career that she does not listen to other people’s music when writing albums, I guess you can listen back to some of her albums and detect the importance of other artists. Whether consciously trying to write a song in their style or a subconscious I have been thinking about the split between, say The Kick Inside up to The Dreaming and Hounds of Love to the present day. Whether musical influences were more on the fringes for those later albums and more at the core for the earlier ones? Is that natural for every artist. Legends and newcomers alike operate this way I think. However, if we dig into her work in the 2000s and 2010s, I am sure there will be a song here and there where we can see the colours of another artist. It got me thinking when looking at that article for Wow and how this was Kate Bush channelling Pink Floyd. How Bob Marley and Patti Smith were referenced in other songs. I have suggested a bit of Steely Dan in one song. Billie Holiday is an artist Bush admired and I can even feel her touch in some of the vocal performance on Aerial and 50 Words for Snow.

Folk-influenced songs earlier in her career have a suggestion of Simon & Garfunkel. Kate Bush was a huge fan of The Beatles and actually said how much she admired their underrated 1967 E.P./soundtrack, Magical Mystery Tour. You can hear the kaleidoscopic and psychedelic tones of that work in some of her tracks. Lionheart’s Coffee Homeground comes to mind. In a recent feature from Far Out Magazine, it is clear that The Beatles influenced Kate Bush on every level: “It’s one thing to have a bit of musical influence from The Beatles, but Hounds of Love is the most obvious example of Bush using the Fab mentality. Much like Abbey Road’s second side is constructed like a medley of different tunes, The Ninth Wave, on the flipside of Bush’s magnum opus, takes that mentality one step further by crafting a storyline of a woman lost at sea after her boat crashes”. Maybe people will have their own theories and suggestions. This does sound like I am trying to reduce Kate Bush’s work to the point of parody or copycatting. Quite the opposite! Every single artist has influence and nothing is completely free of other artists’ work. Those Kate Bush admired borrowed from others and were influenced by them. Kate Bush motivated to write songs because of other artists. It is wonderful to hear. I have probably missed some examples so, if you notice any, please let me know. Shades and tones of other wonderful artists flying and flowing in…

THAT diamond kite.

FEATURE: I’m Gonna Dance the Dream: Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty-Two

FEATURE:

 

 

I’m Gonna Dance the Dream

Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty-Two

__________

THIS is the sole feature I will write…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993

about the upcoming thirty-second anniversary of Kate Bush’s seventh studio album, The Red Shoes. Fans will be aware of the background. Released on 1st November, 1993, The Red Shoes followed 1989’s The Sensual World. Think about her trajectory and changes from 1985’s Hounds of Love to 1993’s The Red Shoes. Hounds of Love being this incredibly ambitious and phenomenal album that was both of the 1980s but ahead of its time. The Sensual World was not to repeat that. Coming at the end of the decade, instead, this was Kate Bush composing music that was more feminine. Hounds of Love had a lot of primal and masculine energy. So too did 1982’s The Dreaming. The Sensual World is more autumnal and sensuous. Not as percussive or epic as Hounds of Love. Perhaps more personal and coming from the perspective of a woman entering her thirties – Bush turned thirty in 1988, the year before The Sensual World was released -, her only album of the 1990s perhaps struggled to find its feet (no pun intended!). The production could not quite be how it was on previous albums. Trying to fit into the times and also be distinctly Kate Bush, there were questions about its sound and quality. Whether Bush’s heart and head were committed. Even though she experienced loss and separation just before the album came out and around the time, when writing most of the songs, these events had not happened. Even so, taking on a lot at a time when she could feel strains and tragedy looming or at least showing their first signs, The Red Shoes is not viewed as one of Kate Bush’s best albums. Regardless, I still think it is a lot better than people give it credit for. There is a lot to love about it. This was the first album where Kate Bush did not appear – she has not since appeared on an album cover –, and we only see a pair of feet. Granted, they are Bush’s feet. In a photograph taken by her brother, John Carder Bush, that slight sense of mystery or disappearing out of frame was a sign of what was to come.

After The Red Shoes was released in 1993, Bush started to retreat from the public eye. I often feel, as The Red Shoes is inspired by the film of the 1948 same name, that the album cover was like a film poster. Honing in on the focal point of the title. Also, having been exposed and very much on a promotional treadmill since 1978, Bush did not necessarily want to be at the centre of things. The cover is great. The sequencing is a letdown and means that we have an album that is top and middle-heavy. In terms of the tracks, a few of her very best numbers are on The Red Shoes. Including the title track, Lily, Moments of Pleasure and Eat the Music, there are very few weak cuts. Also, despite the fact The Red Shoes does not sound like anything else released in 1993 and it does not try to fit in, I think that works in its favour. Kate Bush did strip down and rework some of the songs from The Red Shoes for 2011’s Director’s Cut. I would like to see The Red Shoes’ songs in their original state, though with a different sound. Maybe stripped down and remixed, just so that these incredible songs are not as compressed, tinny…and a product of 1990s production. That would be interesting. There are precious few features or retrospectives concerning The Red Shoes! Given the somewhat muted and lacklustre reaction in 1993 from critics, maybe that is not a shock. The Red Shoes did reach number two in the U.K. and an impressive twenty-eight in the U.S. In April 2024, Eat the Music was re-released on a 10" vinyl record for Record Store Day, featuring B-sides Lily and Big Stripey Lie from the original album. The Red Shoes has perhaps the broadest and most eclectic collection of featured guests. From Lenny Henry, Prince, the Trio Bulgarka, Lily Cornford, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Nigel Kennedy, it is clear that it is a lot more crowded than most of her albums. Perhaps a few too many featured artists and contributors. Does Kate Bush’s voice and singularity shine through enough?!

I want to go to a couple of promotional interviews from 1993. In a decade of lad and ladette culture, and with Britpop starting to show shoots in that year, how did they react to an artist like Kate Bush? A mainstay who started making music in the 1970s, I still don’t think she was afforded the sort of respect that she had earned at this point. Rock Compact Disc spoke with Kate Bush in 1993:

“Del's enthusiasm for his musical partner's work is infectious. In contrast, Bush herself is reserved when it comes to anything except her music. Ask her about the technicalities of recording using her Fairlight computer system and she'll tell you exactly about how her songs come about. When it comes to explaining the stories behind the songs, however, or talking about Kate Bush, the person, she is uniquely retiring. But when it comes to her music, Bush has spent many years developing a skill for getting what she wants - a skill that she's developed into a fine art. She speaks gently and slowly, picking her words carefully, looking almost frail and innocent as her expressive wide eyes stare in wonderment. But her delicate looks and tiny frame belie her drive and power - not many artists of any stature get to be so creatively in control as Kate Bush. For her, though, it is and always has been the number one priority. 'I think creative control is so incredibly important,' she says. 'If you don't have that control your work will be interfered with until it's gone out of your hands. I was always aware that things wouldn't be how I wanted them unless I was willing to fight.

Kate's involvement in what was known as the KT Bush Band was always going to be shortlived, as Del and his other musical collaborators realised, but they were happy to support her until that moment EMI were ready to whisk her off to fame and fortune. 'Right at the end of that period of playing the pub gigs in that band, we did a session for EMI at the White Elephant on the River,' he recalls, 'which was her first major showcase for the whole record company. It was quite nerve-racking for the rest of us, but Kate just breezed on and sang it. She breezed through the whole thing - it was really quite amazing.

'She always had this total self-belief in what she was going to do - there was never going to be any problem for her, from her own point of view. It was like an obsessive passion that she just had to go through. And in a lot of ways she's still like it now.' Of course, after that it was never quite the same for the KT Bush band without Katy Bush, and Del and Co were left stranded in temporary musical limbo while Kate was studio-bound. At that stage, Kate was too young and inexperienced to insist they play on her debut - 'she had to toe the party line a little,' says Del - so the producer bought his own players in to provide the necessary backing. However, even then Bush knew what she wanted and how to get it across. He may not have played on her debut LP, but Kate made sure Del got to design the artwork for the back of the sleeve, and that LP number two would have his name somewhere on the playing credits. 'She really wanted us to play on that album, but politically it wasn't right/he says. 'But when the second album came along in '78, we were able to do a few tracks - she really stuck out for us. I'm really grateful for that she's given me, personally, so many breaks.'

Bush is reluctant to go into details on her relationship with her uniquely understanding record comapany. Although obviously appreciative of the artistic freedom she's gained over the years she also observes: 'You have to fight for everything you want. Struggle is important. It's how you grow and how you change.'

Caught up in the first flush of success, Kate's early days were a flurry of activity and creative release. In 1978, both The Kick Inside and Lionheart albums were released, and in 1979 she embarked on her first and only, and now fairly legendary, live tour. 'As I remember it, it was very hard work,' says Del of the tour. 'I've never worked so hard as a musician before. We rehearsed for six months. In the morning she was coming up to town for dance lessons and learning dance routines, then in the afternoon we'd rehearse the band for six hours, then in the evening we were going back for production meetings. And she's still doing that kind of thing now with this film she's doing. She's a complete workaholic and a fanatic where her music's concerned.' Did she enjoy the tour? 'She really enjoyed it. It's a common fallacy that she didn't and that it was a bad experience for her, but she really enjoyed doing it. But I think what happened was, it took so much out of her, that it also took a little bit of her self-confidence. She then got into the studio immediately after that tour ended, in late '79, to start the third album, and she then got into producing. She co-produced it with the engineer she was working with at the time, and got completely into it. She thought, this is it, I really need to work in the studio for a few years and develop my own production techniques and music as a studio musician.' And Kate realised too that she'd have to distance herself from outside pressures to achieve what she wanted to achieve.

'I've always been tenacious when it comes to my work,' she says. 'And I became quickly aware of the outside pressures of being famous affecting my work. It seemed ironic that I was expected to do interviews and television work which took me away from the thing that had put me into that situation. It was no longer relevant that I wrote songs. I could see my work becoming something that had no thought in it, becoming a personality, which is never what I wanted. All I wanted was the creative process.' 'She's the most unlikely star,' adds Del. 'She does not like being famous, she really does not like it. She wants to be an ordinary person, but she wants to make music. She likes the idea of people getting something from what she does, but she doesn't want the fame aspect. She's not the sort of person who will ever go out clubbing. She just works, stays at home, goes to the theatre, goes to see films, and when she can she goes off on holiday. But that's very rare.'

It's hard to imagine Kate Bush padding around the house with her slippers on, but even superstars have to recharge their batteries. 'She really just lets herself go. I don't mean she puts on 30 stone. It's like "I'm not working any more, so I'm not going to let any of this stuff get into my head". She potters in the garden - she does gardening now - she watches TV, goes to the theatre, eats... And takes in a little music too... 'She doesn't like to listen to anything when she's working, but when she's resting she listens to lots of stuff. At the moment, she's really into Talk Talk - she finds a real affinity with them. And we had a whole period of getting into this Bulgarian music, and in the early days it was Irish music. Generally, there's not many modern bands she's into, though she likes the Utah Saints. They did a track with a piece of her vocal in it: they were really good about it, went through all the proper channels, asked if they could use it, gave her a royalty, and she thought it was great. She thought it was absolutely fantastic the way they'd actually used it. In fact, one time she thought it would be great to do something with them. It never came to pass, though...'

What did happen was the extended period of inactivity that lead to a four year gap between the last album 'The Sensual World, and the release of The Red Shoes. Beset by personal tragedy - the loss of many friends, the death of her mother and the breakdown of her personal, if not professional, relationship with Del- the creative process simply stopped. 'I just couldn't work,' she says. 'Singng is such a deeply personal thing to do, I couldn't manage it.' 'There's been a lot of upset,' adds Del, 'When her mother died, she really couldn't work for the best part of a year. But she soon got the urge to get back in there again. She has to work.' And when Bush works, she really works. Not content with producing just another LP, she's timed its release with the simultaneous release of an accompanying 50-minute film 'We've taken six tracks from the album and made a story line up from the title track.'

'It's about how Kate's a dancer and gets tricked into wearing a pair of red shoes, which are possessed and can't stop dancing,' adds Del, 'it's a bit like the old film, 'The Red Shoes (the 1948 British classic about a young ballerina torn between two lovers - one a struggling composer the other an autocratic dance impresario). It's her own interpretation of the idea. There's lots of dialogue, and Miranda Richardson and Lindsay Kemp are in it too. Kate's been busy writing the storyline and getting it organised.'

'It's something like Magical Mystery Tour,' Kate adds, 'But it's not like it at all. It's not finished I hate talking about anything until it's there. like talking to you about the album if you haven't heard the tracks. Completely ridiculous.'

Never one to explain herself when a well-turned musical phrase will do, Kate Bush remains something of an enigma; intensely private, guarded to the point of introversion, but always fantastically unique”.

There are horrendous interviews like this from Chrissie Iley from The Sunday London Times, which shows you what Kate Bush had to face! It is no wonder she waited twelve more years to follow The Red Shoes given the sort of promotion she had to endure! People who didn’t really listen to the music or were completely uninterested and insulting. The second interview I want to include, again, shows the kind of inane and rather insulting questions and lines of query. Nick Coleman chatted with Kate Bush for Time Out:

“The Red Shoes' is a ballet film made by Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1948, telling the story of a dancer who is torn between the demands of a great impresario, who can help her to become an artist of destiny, and those of her composer/husband, who can bring her happiness. The story elides an old fairy tale and a take on the power struggle that raged between the dancer Nijinsky and Diaghilev, first director of the Ballet Russe. Bush says the song evolved out of a feeling she had one day at the piano of music running away with itself. The image in her mind 'was like horses galloping and running away, with the horses turned into running feet, and then shoes galloping away with themselves'. Which corresponded, conveniently enough, with the key fairy-tale element in the Powell film: the red pumps worn by the tragic ballerina, which are imbued with a magic that carries their wearer off in a terrible outpouring of expressiveness.

Bush contacted Powell shortly before he died, 'to see whether he'd be interested in working with me. He was the most charming man, so charming. He wanted to hear my music, so I sent him some cassettes and we exchanged letters occasionally, and I got a chance to meet him not so long before he died. He left a really strong impression on me, as much as a person as for his work. He was just one of those very special spirits, almost magical in a way. Left me with a big influence.'

Which makes some kind of sense. Powell's super-rich three-strip Technicolor, his English-ness, his 'expressiveness', his interest in the shadows cast by daylight; even, you could argue, his thematic preoccupation with islands, solitary souls and the unconfined spirit; these are some of Bush's favourite things.

'His work is just so... so beautiful,' says Kate, in her tiniest voice.

Meaning what, exactly?

'Well, there's such heart in his films. The way he portrayed women... that was particularly good and very interesting. His women are strong and they're treated as people...'

That's one kind of beauty.

'The heart, I think, is the main beauty. This human quality he has. Although there's clever shots in his films, they're not really used for effect, to be clever. They're used for an emotional effect. I'd call that a human quality. Like vulnerability. Also, I like the emotional qualities of the characters. I suppose in one way they're very English ...'

To combine her interest in Powell with her lust for new directions, and perhaps to solve one or two promotional problems, Bush has directed a 40-minute film interpreting six songs from the excellent 'Red Shoes' album. It will be premiered at the London Film Festival.

'I'll be very interested to see what people make of it. To see whether they regard it as a long promo video or as a short film,' she says.

Where do your stories come from?

'Oh, all kinds of sources but generally they come down to people. People's ideas or works. Films, books, they all lead back to someone else's ideas, which in turn lead back to someone's else's ideas...'

I've always assumed you must be a bit of an Angela Carter fan.

'Um, no. I don't think I know her stuff.'

She wrote 'Company Of Wolves' and was big, I believe, on pomegranates, the predatory nature of nature, the heat of female sexuality; that sort of thing.

'Oh, yes.' Bush smiles, and her dimple disappears.

Other post addressed to Kate Bush arrived which went unopened. Then one day a letter came for the attention of Catherine Earnshaw. This being ambiguous, Catherine opened it just to make sure. Inside was a note from a Harley Street doctor indicating that Catherine was fit as a fiddle. This was good news. Unfortunately, Catherine had not been to see a Harley Street doctor. She hastily sent the letter on to Bush's record company, blushing at her daftness in not remembering immediately that Catherine Earnshaw is the name of the storm-tossed tragic heroine of 'Wuthering Heights '.

You're 35 and you've been doing this since you were a teenager. How have you changed?

'I think I've changed quite a lot. Essentially I'm still the same person but I suppose I've grown up a lot, and learned a lot.'

What's made you grow up the most?

'You get lots of disappointments. I'm not sure that they make you grow up but they make you question intentions.' She pauses. 'But life is what makes you grow up.'

That's a fantastically evasive answer.

'It is quite evasive but I think it's true.' Still no dimple. 'It's hard to say... when I was young I was very idealistic, and I don't really think I am any more. I think I'm more... realistic. I think it's good to change. I think I'd be unhappy if I didn't change. It would mean I hadn't learnt anything.'

Do you ever get curious about living another way?

'I do. But so far I'm extremely lucky to be doing what I'm doing. I feel extremely lucky to have the opportunity to do it.’”.

I would advise any Kate Bush fan to buy The Red Shoes. It is an album that does not get the love it deserves! In 2018, Ben Hewitt wrote a feature for The Quietus marking twenty-five years of The Red Shoes. Often maligned and discussed, this album, as he writes, has so much to recommend. Some incredible music that needs to be reassessed and addressed. A fascinating chapter in Kate Bush’s career:

“The most powerful moments on The Red Shoes are its most intimate and personal. ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ starts with piano so soft and gentle it feels like it might vanish if you breathe too hard, before it’s swept up in Michael Kamen’s elegantly soul-stirring orchestral arrangement. Bush’s voice goes through a similar transformation, too, growing from a gentle flutter to something stronger, which makes her heartfelt cry on the chorus sound like a defiant refusal to be swallowed by grief: “Just being alive/ It can really hurt/ And these moments/ Are a gift from time.” Its outro remembers some of Bush’s lost friends – including guitarist Alan Murphy, producer John Barrett and lighting director Bill Duffield – and plays out like the closing credits of an old-fashioned weepy. Even more devastating is an old conversation she recalls with her mother, Hannah, who was ill while Bush was writing the song and who passed away before the album was released. “I can hear my mother saying ‘Every old sock needs an old shoe,’” remembers Bush warmly. “Isn’t that a great saying?” It is, even if it sticks a tennis ball-sized lump in your throat.

There’s emotional heft on ‘Top Of The City’, too, which takes a similar premise to ‘And So Is Love’ but adds higher stakes: Bush sits up in the skies, looking down at the lonely city below and hoping to find an answer. “I don’t know if I’m closer to Heaven, but it looks like Hell down there,” she declares, caught between exhilaration, melancholy and desperation: the moments of quiet calm are both beautiful and unsettling, with eerie pockets of silence hanging between delicate piano notes, until there’s a big, dramatic burst of violins and celestial backing vocals. “I don’t know if you’ll love me for it,” she yells wildly, forcing the moment to its crisis. “But I don’t think we should suffer for this/ There’s just one thing we can do about it.”

Hearing her equate emotional intimacy with scoffing mangoes and plums might suggest that The Red Shoes still has plenty of idiosyncrasies. There’s certainly something quintessentially Bushian about some of its songs, including the title cut, which soundtracks the fate of a girl who puts on a pair of red leather ballet shoes and dances a frantic Irish jig: it combines her fondness for Celtic sounds, old stories and classic film (The Red Shoes was written by Hans Christian Andersen and later adapted into a 1948 film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the former of whom Bush salutes on ‘Moments Of Pleasure’), and her shrill, possessed vocal makes it sound like a feverish fairytale. The steamy ‘The Song Of Solomon’, meanwhile, mixes a literary text and desire in the same way that ‘The Sensual World’ let Ulysses’ Molly Boom step off the page and experience physical pleasure. This time, there was no-one stopping Bush lifting lines from her chosen book, the Hebrew Bible, although the erotic charge of the chorus is all hers: “Don’t want your bullshit, yeah/ Just want your sexuality.”

That’s then followed by the absurdity of ‘Why Should I Love You?’ Bush had originally asked Prince to record backing vocals for the track, but he decided to take it apart and add guitars, keyboards and brass, too. Conventional wisdom is that great collaborations are the result of a shared vision, but ‘Why Should I Love You?’ is great even though there’s absolutely no shared vision whatsoever: for the first 60-odd seconds it’s built around Bush’s hushed vocal, until Prince’s huge rush of ecstatic, kaleidoscopic sound steamrolls everything in its path. It’s less the meeting of two minds and more the smashing together of two completely different styles, the most special of cut-and-shunt hybrids. (And somewhere, among all the hullabaloo, you’ll also hear backing vocals from Lenny Henry).

There’s another cameo on the closing song, the fantastically histrionic breakup ballad ‘You’re The One’, on which Jeff Beck’s dizzying, drawn-out guitar solo pushes Bush to an exhausting catharsis. Like so much of The Red Shoes, it finds her preparing to leave a lover to save herself, although this time she’s less bullish, more prone to tying herself in knots. “I’m going to stay with my friend/ Mmm, yes, he’s very good-looking,” she admits. “The only trouble is, he’s not you.” By the song’s end, she’s so frazzled by frustration and anguish that she lets rip a larynx-tearing shriek: “Just forget it, alright!” Bush, who had spoken of feeling emotionally burnt-out years before the album was released, was ready to withdraw, too: she vanished for 12 years until Aerial, and then went on hiatus for another six before returning with Director’s Cut. “I think there’s always a long, lingering dissatisfaction with everything I’ve done,” she said in 2011, glad to have the chance to right some of the wrongs that had been bothering her for 20-odd years. For me, though, the original album has always been enough: it might have its flaws, and there might be a handsome alternative, but just like Bush on ‘You’re The One’, I still want to keep going back”.

On 1st November, it will be thirty-two years since The Red Shoes was released. I have a lot of time for the album and love so many of the tracks. I doubt it will have anything written about it until maybe 2028, when it turns thirty-five. That is a pity. It is an album that I can come back to…

TIME and time again.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Hammer Horror (Lionheart)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

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

Hammer Horror (Lionheart)

__________

I am tying this in with…

the anniversary of the first track from Kate Bush’s second studio album, Lionheart. I am going to do an anniversary feature about the album ahead of 10th November. On 3rd November, it will be forty-seven years since Hammer Horror was released. As I have stated in previous features about the song, it might have seemed like an unusual choice as lead single. With Wow as one of the options – that was the second single released -, Bush and EMI went in with something perhaps a little less commercial. However, it only reached forty-four in the U.K. Perhaps the public were expecting something similar to the singles from her 1978 debut, The Kick Inside. An adjustment was required. This temporary chart blip was corrected when Wow was released and reached fourteen in the U.K. Lionheart was an album that reached six in the U.K. It gained mostly mixed reviews. After releasing The Kick Incise in February, most artists would have needed a year or so to work on new material and perhaps tour the album before rather than create a new one. EMI felt that a quick follow-up to The Kick Inside was best. Bush would tour both of those albums in 1979 for The Tour of Life. That said, in  spite of its rushed nature, Lionheart has many gems. Hammer Horror among them. It is a shame reviews for Hammer Horror were lukewarm. Kate Bush Encyclopedia provide some resources:

“Radio 1’s Round Table on October 27, 1978 the single was reviewed by DJ’s John Peel (“I didn’t like the album at all and I’m not too enthused with this either”) and Paul Gambaccini (“It doesn’t grab me immediately as The Man With The Child In His Eyes“).

“Kate keeps up the formula and doesn’t upset the fans… sounds like Joni Mitchell popping tabs with the LSO. Offbeat, quirky and all that stuff…

Ronnie Gurr, Record Mirror, 11 November 1978

Ominous post ELO orchestration with the unrequited lust of a broken affair viewed as living dead love-bites-back as in classic 50’s British celluloid, a real nail biter, hypnotic and disconcerting.

Tony Parsons, NME, 11 November 1978”.

I am going to repeat something I brought in for previous features about Hammer Horror. It is important to provide context for this song. A hugely important moment. The first single after The Kick Inside was released. It is back to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for some interview archive:

“The song is not about, as many think, Hammer Horror films. It is about an actor and his friend. His friend is playing the lead in a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a part he’s been reading all his life, waiting for the chance to play it. He’s finally got the big break he’s always wanted, and he is the star. After many rehearsals he dies accidentally, and the friend is asked to take the role over, which, because his own career is at stake, he does. The dead man comes back to haunt him because he doesn’t want him to have the part, believing he’s taken away the only chance he ever wanted in life. And the actor is saying, “Leave me alone, because it wasn’t my fault – I have to take this part, but I’m wondering if it’s the right thing to do because the ghost is not going to leave me alone and is really freaking me out. Every time I look round a corner he’s there, he never disappears.”
The song was inspired by seeing James Cagney playing the part of Lon Chaney playing the hunchback – he was an actor in an actor in an actor, rather like Chinese boxes, and that’s what I was trying to create.

Kate Bush Club Newsletter, November 1979”.

It is interesting that both Hammer Horror and Wow refer to acting. Stagecraft and different sides of acting. Well, it is about the music industry as well. How people try to cut you down and rip you off. But there is also the magic. I do love the lyrics for Hammer Horror. So vivid and original: “You stood in the belltower/But now you’re gone/So who knows all the sights/Of Notre Dame?/They’ve got the stars for the gallant hearts/I’m the replacement for your part/But all I want to do is forget/You, friend”. It is amazing that not much has been written about Hammer Horror. People do not really explore the singles.

I am going to come to a Dreams of Orgonon feature that I have included parts of before. I want to highlight what they say about the campness and Gothic nature of the song. How this is quite different to anything on The Kick Inside, yet Hammer Horror was demoed in 1976. This is a song that is fascinating to unpack. In terms of what Bush says with the lyrics and the role she plays in the song. The vocal range of the track. There is so much depth and detail in Hammer Horror. A shame, then, that it was written off by many when it came out. Those who wanted a repeat of what she wrote for The Kick Inside:

“There’s also an element of musical gender play at work in “Hammer Horror.” Bush chooses a male story with a masculine narrator and tells it through a feminine perspective with dashes of camp. This is where her “actor in an actor” fascination comes in. She’s telling someone’s story and embellishing it in radical ways. If Mick Jagger sang this track, it’d be him spitting autobiographically at Keith Richards, who would reply with some vicious chords in open D. Bush plays the actor as a frightened damsel, terrified of the stranger in the dark. She begins the song with a trembling “yooooouuu stoooood,” moving down her vocal range for a more playful “they’ve got the stars for the gallant hearts” (the most innocent confession of pissing oneself ever put on record), howl-belting out “HAMMER HOR-ROR” for the chorus, and lapsing into a more classically Bushian “are we really sure about this” in the post-chorus. It’s the most daring Bush vocal we’ve heard on this blog so far. No male artist would go this far in 1978.

What else do those vocals point to? I don’t know, umm, how about the fact that this is the most camp thing ever? Bush maintains some reverence for her Gothic source material, but not without a tongue-in-cheek performance. Her vocal for “Hammer Horror” is full-blown melodrama, containing, as Goth scholar Andi Harriman puts it, the Goth subculture’s commitment to dramaticism, or “transforming yourself into a different form of beauty.” Bush’s vocal range swerves up and down, covering C#6, Bb5, and descending to the lows of F#5 and F5. The song is absurdly eclectic and committed to its shtick, containing a licking guitar and a full-blown string section tensely opening the song and carrying the chorus. Musically, it’s full-blown hedonism. Visually, it’s another story altogether.

I mean, look at that music video. Bush is dressed in black while dancing with a man (presumably dancer Stewart Avon-Arnold) and expressing nearly every note of the song with obsessive literalism. When she sings about a hand reaching out from the dark to grab her, sure enough she gurns at a mysterious hand. Indeed she gurns at everything in the music video — Bush will remain a world class gurner until she develops a more understated relationship with the camera (and thus many great GIFs were lost to the world). Until then, this is the standard for camp Bush videos. It is utterly absurd and completely delightful.

Now we’re discussing camp, we might as well discuss the real ghost haunting this essay: Goth rock. It’s uncontroversial to say that Kate Bush is not Goth. She’s too separate from the Goth subculture in terms of aesthetic, class, and musicality to claim to membership. However Bush is, as we noted earlier, not averse to engaging with the Gothic. She launched her career on it. Naturally there’s going to be some overlap with Goth rock.

 One of the most surprising things about Bush is how she’ll often stumble on an aesthetic before anyone else and perform it in a way that sounds nothing like its more famous iterations. “Hammer Horror” was demoed in 1976 and released in 1978, when the Goth scene was beginning to cohere as a subculture. When it was released as a single in October, Joy Division had recently put out an EP, Siouxsie and the Banshees had cracked the Top Ten with “Hong Kong Garden,” The Cure had recorded but not yet released “Killing an Arab,” (yes much orientalism) and early iterations of Bauhaus were playing Northampton clubs. Goth wasn’t a salient cultural movement, but it was beginning to look like a separate scene from punk and even standard forms of post-punk (e.g. Gang of Four, Magazine). While this was going on, Bush had charted multiple times with three singles and two albums. She existed in a different sphere from Siouxsie and Peter Murphy. So why comment on the similarities at all?

There’s also of course the visual similarity between Bush and the Gothic, with dark clothing and dark make-up cast against white faces (Bush and Goth both have complex relationships with race). But the two paths leads to different conclusions. Goth rock artists were interested in abjection, descending into the gutter. Bush, for all her winking at the camera, imitates her Gothic subject in a way that preserves reverence for it. These approaches aren’t diametrically opposed — they form an intersection instead of a metro running over a motorway. Bush just stumbled on some fresh cultural ideas at the same time as some other dramatically minded young musicians. She navigates her way out of the Gothic avenue into another street altogether — she resolves the tension of influence and anxiety by doing something weirder.

Demoed at 44 Wickham Road, Brockley in 1976. Recorded at Super Bear Studios in Berres-les-Alpes, France between July and September 1978. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano, production. Andrew Powell — production, harmonium. Jon Kelly — engineering. Stuart Elliot — drums, percussion. Del Palmer — bass. Ian Bairnson — electric and acoustic guitar. Duncan Mackay — synthesizer. David Katz — orchestra contractor. Performed live on the Tour of Life in 1979. Images: from the cover of Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje’s Some Wear Leather Some Wear Laces; Lon Chaney and Patsy Ruth Miller in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923, dir. Wallace Worsley); The Gurning Queen; Siouxsie and the Banshees”.

With Coffee Homeground as its B-side, Hammer Horror is one of Bush’s strongest singles I think. On 3rd November, it will be forty-seven years since the song was released. I have a lot of love for it. Although not my favourite Kate Bush single, I do feel that Hammer Horror is underrated. Releasing the final track from Lionheart as the first single was unorthodox. Perhaps not the obvious first single, as I mentioned. Between the live performances and that amazing video, Hammer Horror made an impression. It is a song that is far too good…

TO be forgotten.

FEATURE: Points of Authority: Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Points of Authority

Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory at Twenty-Five

__________

THIS album…

PHOTO CREDIT: Mick Hutson/Getty Images

is one that I remember listening to a lot when I was in college. I was aware of Linkin Park in 2000, yet Hybrid Theory was their debut. I think there was some buzz around the band before the album came out, but it was only when Hybrid Theory came out that I connected with them. That immense debut turns twenty-five on 24th October. I want to spend time with it. I will end with a review of the album. However, before getting there, it is worth bringing in some features. It is s shame that Linkin Park’s former lead, Chester Bennington, does not get to see people react to twenty-five years of Hybrid Theory. He died in 2017. Hybrid Theory’s lyrics address Bennington’s experiences during his adolescence, including drug abuse and the constant fighting and eventual divorce of his parents. Because Linkin Park were another Nu Metal band joining the scene, there was mocking and ridicule. It was a scene that had its detractors. Limp Bizkit were already around. It was not until In the End was released, which came out on 9th October, 2001, that a lot of opinion changed. However, Hybrid Theory is an incredible album from a distinct band. One that were serous and stood apart from those around them. In 2020, Stereogum marked twenty years of Hybrid Theory:

“They had a plan.” That was the late Chester Bennington, just before his 2017 death, reflecting on the first time he met his Linkin Park bandmates. That plan is what attracted Bennington to the band. At the time, Bennington was just past 20, but he was already done with the music business. Bennington had spent five years in Grey Daze, an Arizona grunge band. Grey Daze had self-released two albums, and they had a local following, but they never went anywhere outside the Phoenix area. Bennington was looking for stability. He married young, and he got a job at a digital services firm. He wasn’t going to be a rock star. But then Jeff Blue, a music exec who knew Bennington a little bit, told him about a Los Angeles rap-rock band who needed a singer. If you were a young man looking for stability, then you could see why joining Linkin Park was a pretty good bet.

Linkin Park were, and are, professionals. They were always businessmen, never hedonists. In a nu-metal world full of party-hard jokers and outsized personalities, Linkin Park were practically monks. They didn’t engage in rock-star hijinks. They wrote lyrics so broad and relatable that they could fit just about any dark-night-of-the-soul context. Their music only barely scanned as metal, and they took more, both lyrically and aesthetically, from Depeche Mode and Echo And The Bunnymen than from Helmet or Pantera. They attacked their soul-wracking self-exorcisms with a businesslike precision. They didn’t even cuss on records. And they eclipsed all of their peers.

Linkin Park showed up in the waning days of the nu-metal boom. Korn and Limp Bizkit were still huge, but they’d already peaked. Kid Rock was already in the early stages of his Southern-rock transition. Slipknot and Static-X and Coal Chamber and most of the other big rap-metal bands had already released their biggest albums. (P.O.D. were still ascendant, but they had the Christian thing going for them, so they could afford to be late.) A week before the release of Hybrid Theory, Limp Bizkit had dropped their third album Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water — a huge hit, but one that couldn’t match the sales of 1999’s Significant Other.

Originally, Linkin Park had planned to call themselves Hybrid Theory, but the existence of the British dance group Hybrid made that a no-go. So they kept Hybrid Theory for the album title and picked a new band name. They’d considered calling themselves Lincoln Park, after the Santa Monica enclave, but they changed the spelling because the LinkinPark.com domain name was still available. As far back as 1999, Mike Shinoda was thinking about search-engine optimization — the mark of a true professional.

Listening to Hybrid Theory now, a few things are striking. There’s the clear debt that Linkin Park owe to Nine Inch Nails, whose big programmed beats and ultra-processed guitars were the clearest possible antecedent. There’s the lack of specificity in the lyrics — the way “I” and “you” and maybe “time” are the only characters on the LP. There’s the force of personality that Bennington brings — the guy clearly knew his way around a big hook and understood how to invest his screams with stadium-sized catharsis. And there’s how sad the whole fucking thing is.

Hybrid Theory is, on some level, a fundamentally teenage album, an album about feeling like the world doesn’t understand you and like you just want everyone to get out of your room right now. That teenage quality is the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Hybrid Theory. The album is repetitive and one-note. The singles often sound huge and overwhelming, but the album tracks usually just wear me out. I don’t think it’s a great record, but then, I’d just gotten done with being a teenager when it came out. If I’d been maybe four years younger, that shit could’ve just kicked me right in the soul”.

I want to next bring in an interview from Metal Hammer published in 2001. They sat down with Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda to discuss Linkin Park’s stellar rise. We get to discover the background of the band and how they overcame rejection asnd haters. Hybrid Theory was a mighty statement that changed Metal forever:

“The very earliest incarnations of the songs from Hybrid Theory were written at my parents’ house when I had just finished high school,” recalls rapper, keyboardist and creative mastermind Mike Shinoda. “A Place For My Head was one of those first songs, but I wasn’t thinking of writing an album – I was barely considering starting a band!”

The young Shinoda’s ‘studio’ was, at best, rudimentary. “I had a four-track recorder, a guitar that we plugged directly into a tiny little amp, and a vocal mic,” he laughs. “The whole set-up was maybe worth $300. We actually sent out a bunch of tapes of those recordings, including to a guy who we knew had signed Incubus and Korn. Amazingly, he called us back! When I told him about my set-up, he was like, ‘That doesn’t make any sense – these songs sound really good!’ And even though he was never in the position to sign us, that was really the start of it.”

With his ambitious creativity and Spartan work practises already earning praise, Shinoda began to form the nucleus of what would become Linkin Park. A merry-go-round of endless demoing ensued, but something was missing from the fledgling line-up. The answer, it turned out, would be found in the form of a flame-haired vocalist from Arizona.

“I had basically decided to retire from music,” says Chester Bennington, reflecting on his frustrating early years trying to make it in a band. “I’d got a job in real estate and thought that while I would probably still make tunes for fun, I would need to find something else to do full-time.”

That’s a fairly remarkable statement for someone who had only just turned 21 at the time, but Bennington, it turned out, was not a man to do things by halves.

“A dude who had been working with my old band gave me a call, going, ‘I’ve got these guys and they’re writing this great music but they really need a singer.’ I immediately was asking all sorts of questions, like, ‘How old are they? How long have they been doing this?’ because I didn’t want to waste my fucking time. He said, ‘Well, I’ll just send you this demo,’ which turned out to have two tracks on one side and instrumentals on the other. I listened to the instrumental side first and immediately I was like, ‘This is it, these are the ones.’ The next thing I know, I’d flown to California and was sat outside Zomba Music Publishing, opposite Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Strip.”

Such quick movement, though, meant that at this stage, Chester hadn’t even set eyes upon the men who would become his new bandmates. “When I finally met the guys, I remember that they seemed very nice, very smart, very serious and, most importantly, they had a plan, which was pretty refreshing.”

If meeting your singer through A&R teams and label suits seems a little – or maybe even a lot – businesslike to you, then you’re not alone in your thinking. When Hybrid Theory did eventually blow up in spectacular fashion, the band had to fend off the accusations of being corporate puppets from all quarters.

“We did get a reputation for being a business rather than a band,” admits Shinoda. “But that was because we were so focused on getting our stuff done. It wasn’t in the name of business – it was in the name of building up this thing we had worked so hard to create. We were prepared to do everything in our power to be successful on all levels.”

The proof of Shinoda, Bennington and co.’s unwavering, singular dedication? Consider the unshakeable faith they had to display as they tried to score the record deal that would turn Hybrid Theory into a reality. “We showcased for every fucking label there was,” sighs Shinoda, “and they all turned us down.”

Shinoda has his own view on the way his band were perceived. “I think that the difference between us and someone like Korn or Limp Bizkit is that, to me, a lot of that music was made for a frat party, a drunken brawl, slutty dudes taking their tops off and feeding off their own testosterone. What we didn’t connect with in that scene was that there wasn’t a lot of room for more introspective emotion. People would ask us, ‘Well, Jonathan Davis practically grew up in a morgue and was molested and all these horrible things. What gives you the right to be angry?’ But you don’t have to have gone through the worst things in the world to be sad. I think that’s something that ultimately really connected with our fans: that you don’t have to be an outcast and a fuck-up to take something from this music on an emotional level. If that makes us dull, then fine.”

It must be said, though, that while their debut album was breaking records for sales and at the same time converting a generation of kids to rock music, Linkin Park weren’t exactly indulging in the rock-star fantasies you might imagine. Even as they were handed the keys to the castle as the biggest band in the world, it was still a case of ‘work hard’ rather than ‘party hard’.

“I guess by most standards we were pretty reserved. We were doing so much that it didn’t leave too much time to get crazy,” jokes Shinoda. “I mean, there was this one time in Minnesota that by the end of the night we had thrown a beer keg through a hotel window and had a snowball fight in the lobby, so we weren’t totally fucking boring, but we were so focused on achieving the next goal.”

Do they wish they had been a bit crazier at the time of their peak? “We did it our way and I wouldn’t change a single thing,” reasons Bennington. “Not a thing.”

All the graft, indisputably, paid off. Hybrid Theory remains the biggest-selling debut album of the 21st century and Linkin Park’s influence can palpably be felt across a whole new wave of emerging acts. A little over 10 years down the line, how do the band reflect on the record that changed their lives irrevocably?

“I’m still enormously proud of that album,” beams Bennington. “Every now and then I will listen back to everything that we’ve done and I still enjoy that record”.

It was a myopic injustice that Hybrid Theory was compared to other Nu Metal albums. Ones that were meat-headed and macho. Instead, this is an album of sensitivity and depth. I am going to come to a feature from NME. They looked at Hybrid Theory on its twentieth anniversary. The anniversary reissue of the album was out then. Packed with demos and unheard material, it was a real treat fans. You can purchase it here. Chester Bennington, Rob Bourdon, Brad Delson, Joe Hahn, Mike Shinoda and Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell (he was credited but did not play) created one of the albums of the decade with 2000’s Hybrid Theory. NME spoke with famous fans of Hybrid Theory. The album inspired the likes of Billie Eilish, BROCKHAMPTON, Twenty One Pilots, Bring Me the Horizon and YUNGBLUD:

“The likes of the elegiac ‘In The End’, the serrated ‘Crawlin’ and the ferocious ‘One Step Closer’ dominated music television and gave confused, emotional teenagers a voice. Meanwhile, the record earned the band a Grammy (‘Crawlin’’ took Best Hard Rock Performance) and became the best-selling album of the year. To this day, it remains one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time, having shifted more than 27 million copies, making it, commercially, the biggest rock record of the 21st Century.

“They only seem like big songs in retrospect,” Shinoda says. “In the studio, there was a lot of anxiety to get it right.” Those worries didn’t stop when they finally released the album they’d been dreaming about for years. “The expectations of us as a band were growing so quickly. We were just kids being expected to headline big festivals with 40 minutes of music. The pressure was immense.”

They played over 300 shows to promote the album (says Hahn: “It felt like we had to prove ourselves every time we went onstage”) and pushed against the nu-metal label that was ascribed to them by the media. With the release of their hip-hop heavy remix album ‘Reanimation’ in 2002, the band continued to do things their own way. Everything from the record’s Banksy-inspired street art artwork to what the band stood for felt like a protest.

“All the music we liked was rebellious,” Hahn says. “Hip-hop felt like a neo punk rock in some way and as far as subject matter, we were definitely all about fighting against the system and lifting up a big middle finger.“

ybrid Theory’ was released in the midst of nu-metal’s assault on the mainstream. Korn were riding high after two back-to-back Number One albums (1998’s ‘Issues’ and 1999’s ‘Follow The Leader’) and it was impossible to avoid Limp Bizkit’s 2000 album ‘Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavoured Water’. Musically, ‘Hybrid Theory’ fit into a scene that combined heavy metal with hip-hop, but there was much more to them then wallet-chains and red caps.

“We can laugh at it now but we were put on a pedestal as the trophy boys of nu-metal,” says Linkin Park’s Joe Hahn. “We didn’t love it all and because our album combined so many styles, it felt like a much bigger approach. We didn’t call it ‘Nu-Metal Theory’; it was ‘Hybrid Theory’ because we wanted to make something different.“

Nu-metal was a macho scene, but, says Jordan Fish, “Linkin Park weren’t really a macho band, were they? It was rebellious, but they still had universal songs like ‘In The End’ that your mum could enjoy on the radio. A lot of songs from that era were straight-up ‘Fuck everyone!’ bro anger, but Linkin Park were a lot more emo and introspective. They didn’t have that silly aggression that a lot of nu metal bands had; they were talking about depression.”

Linkin Park’s ‘Hybrid Theory’ accelerated genre-less listening habits, exposed a generation of kids to what else was out there and turned six music nerds into the biggest thing in rock. Their message of believing in yourself – even when no one else will –  continues to resonate with a global audience, as does their insistence that it’s healthy to embrace your flaws.

As the band’s Joe Hahn puts it: “Seeing the impact that album had on people as individuals, and how that echoed through different places in the world, holds a very special place to us. It let us know that what we do has an impact on people, and that’s not something to take lightly”.

I am going to finish with a review of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Hybrid Theory. KERRANG! awarded the release five stars. Even if there are some fillers when you look at all the extra tracks, they note how Hybrid Theory still sounds so urgent and important. An album that has inspired so many other artists. Twenty-five years on from its release, and you can hear it in the blood of some of modern music’s best artists:

“It’s not hyperbolic to say that Hybrid Theory is one of the most important rock albums of all time. It was that perfect gateway drug for millions of teens around the globe to discover alternative music through its monumental hooks, bouncing beats and the unstoppable, never-bettered vocal interplay between Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda. Merging the worlds of hip-hop and electronica (previously seen as enemies) with rock and metal, this ‘hybrid’ felt fresh, energising and the perfect sound to usher in a new millennium. Building on the foundations of their peers in Deftones and Korn, Linkin Park’s debut had the accessibility turned up to 11, with shimmering production and lyrics so infectious you’d need gloves to handle them.

And, to mark two whole decades since its release, Linkin Park have opened their vault to bring us a chonking great six-record box set that follows the embryonic stages of the band – originally known as Xero – to the brain-mangling 2002 remix album Reanimation.

Listening to Hybrid Theory today is just as exhilarating as it was in 2000. From the opening pulses of Papercut, few records strike at the heart of what it means to be cutting edge, the sound of a band determined to shake things up, pulling from influences as diverse as Depeche Mode and DJ Shadow. And while it’s always great to hear the pained wails of Crawling, the simply timeless In The End, and nu-metal aggro of One Step Closer, there’s still so much below the surface. The criminally underrated With You (with Chester’s cathartic, guttural ‘With youuuuuuuuuuuuu’), the joyous ‘Hoo-hah!’ in Forgotten, the electro-wizardry of Cure For The Itch… this is more than an album of four mega-singles.

Away from the record proper, we find ourselves in the midst of its kind-of sister album, Reanimation. Released two years after Hybrid Theory, the band invited some of their DJ and rapper mates to reinvent the record, with varying degrees of success. “They were all people that we really looked up to and wanted to collaborate with,” Joe Hahn told Kerrang! in this week’s Cover Story. Sadly, it isn’t a 100 per cent hit rate: some remixes miss the magic of Linkin Park completely, hacking their way through a capella vocals and riffs until they’re a useless mess. That said, the dubby bass of Frgt/10 with Charli 2na and Pharoahe Monch’s showing on H! Vltg3 elevate the record, while Deftones’ Steph Carpenter’s interpretation of By Myself (titled By_Myslf, naturally) adds even more heaviness and a refreshing, almost-Infected Mushroom beat. None of the songs, however, are an improvement on the originals.

At six records and a whopping 80 tracks, it’s vast undertaking for one listening session. And unlike the lavish box design suggests, this isn’t all gold, but that’s not the point. It’s as much about the journey as the destination, and this is a 20 year celebration and exploration of how Linkin Park worked their way from lo-fi 1998 demos to flame-haired world-conquerers just two years later. In fact, it would have been great to include a visual element – perhaps the band’s 2014 Download set where the played the album in full? Arguably the greatest 38 minutes the festival has ever seen. And 12 songs that we’ll never get tired of listening to, ever”.

Linkin Park are still recording and playing to this day. Now led by Emily Armstrong, they released their eighth studio album, From Zero, last year. Although nobody can replace Chester Bennington, that is not what Linkin Park are trying to do. Armstrong is carrying on his legacy but also offering something new to the band. I don’t think they ever released an album as incredible as their debut. On 24th October, we celebrate twenty-five years of Hybrid Theory. I recall the album fondly. In the End is the standout cut from the album from a band who were simply brilliant…

FROM the beginning.

FEATURE: Digital Witnesses: The Importance of Three New BBC Radio DAB+ Additions

FEATURE:

 

 

Digital Witnesses

 PHOTO CREDIT: Good Housekeeping

The Importance of Three New BBC Radio DAB+ Additions

__________

I am going to start out with a feature…

IMAGE CREDIT: BBC

describing and expanding on a piece of news that I missed initially! It is hugely important. In terms of the way we listen to radio, I think habits are changing. Whilst many still listen through traditional and analogue radios, many are preferring the options and ease of a DAB radio. Although there is some contention and disagreement with the BBC expanding its radio empire and offering three new digital stations, I think that it is a good thing. Let us first come to Music Week and what they write about a development that will draw in new listeners and adds new station to a digital roster last updated back in 2002:

“The BBC is expanding its broadcast radio network with three new music stations – a move described as a “significant milestone” in the history of BBC Radio.

The three new station extensions from BBC Radio 1 and Radio 3 are the first to be added to the BBC’s music portfolio since 2002, when the BBC launched 6 Music, 1Xtra and Asian Network. 

After launching on BBC Sounds as streams last year, they will now be available to listen to on DAB+ radio following Ofcom approval. The new brand extensions will continue to live on BBC Sounds, as well as on DAB+. 

However, the new stations will not go down well with advertiser-funded commercial radio, which has consistently pushed back against BBC expansion. The commercial sector won a partial victory with the blocking of a proposed Radio 2 nostalgia station by Ofcom, which identified a negative impact on direct competitors such as Boom Radio.

While welcoming the decision on the Radio 2 spin-off last year, commercial radio trade body Radiocentre cast doubt on the distinctiveness of the three new stations and questioned their public service role as part of the licence fee-funded broadcaster.

“The fact that the other spin-offs will now go ahead is disappointing, especially given their lack of distinctiveness or news output,” said CEO Matt Payton. “We expect Ofcom to monitor these new BBC services closely and hope it will reconsider the case for insisting on enhanced public value on these stations in future.”

BBC brand extensions into online digital streams, such as its 24-hour BBC Radio 1 dance service, prompted calls for an Ofcom review of BBC Sounds in 2020.

BBC Radio 1 Dance launches on September 15 with a mix of new and archive sets from various DJs among its programming.

Radio 1 Anthems features songs from the 2000s and 2010s, including ‘workout anthems’ and Radio 1’s ‘chillout anthems’.

Aled Haydn-Jones, head of Radio 1, said: “I’m delighted to bring Radio 1 listeners not one, but two incredible new genre-led networks on DAB+. R1 Dance and R1 Anthems provide a strong and confident offer for younger listeners – delivering more choice and music to match every mood. 

“Both stations bring together the very best expert DJs, rising presenting talent, exciting events and the best of British music for our audiences to discover. More than two decades since the launch of 1Xtra, this marks another exciting chapter in Radio 1’s history as the number one radio station for younger listeners.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Aled Haydn-Jones/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC

The new Radio 1 stations present a potential challenge to existing commercial operators including Kiss and Capital Dance, which has been a ratings success since its launch five years ago.

Meanwhile, Radio 3 Unwind aims – launching today (September 12) – aims to broaden the audience for classical music in the UK with a schedule designed for younger listeners (35-54) than other classical stations and is designed for a modern audience.

BBC Radio 3 Unwind features wellbeing content, combining classical music with mindfulness.

Sam Jackson, Radio 3 controller, said: “Radio 3 Unwind has already been positively received as a stream on BBC Sounds and I’m really pleased to now bring it to a wider audience on DAB+. The station offers a wide-ranging selection of calming classical music—perfect for listeners seeking an escape from the demands of daily life. It’s a fresh way to enjoy classical music, designed to be both welcoming and enriching.”

I’m really pleased to now bring Radio 3 Unwind to a wider audience on DAB+

Sam Jackson

When Music Week interviewed Radio 3 controller Sam Jackson last year, he stressed the distinctive nature of the BBC Sounds digital stream of Unwind – now upgraded to a DAB+ station.

“It has to be [distinctive], if it's from the BBC, it absolutely has to be,” he said last year. “That's our job to offer distinctive content that you can't get elsewhere, and we're working really hard to make sure that Radio 3 Unwind gives you exactly that. We really want to focus on recordings from the last 10 years or so to champion the recorded music industry. I think there's more that we could be doing to support labels and artists who are recording really exciting stuff within classical music. Because we're the BBC, we have an opportunity to really broaden the range of music that is heard. It would be all too easy simply to play the ‘hits’ on a station like this, to play the very well known classical repertoire. We're not here to do that.”

BBC ‘commitment to new music and British artists’

The BBC has said the new stations reinforce its “commitment to championing new music and supporting British artists”.

Radio 1 Dance showcases the BBC’s investment in dance music, reflecting all sub-genres, from chart hits to house and drum & bass. The schedule reflects the full range of electronic music and dance trends across the UK and globally.

British artists make up a third of Radio 1 Anthems’ airplay, with a quarter of the tracks unlikely to get regular play on key commercial stations. 

The new extension plays a broader range of music than any comparable station, according to the BBC, with a music policy developed by collaborating with the Student Radio Association and designed to resonate with younger listeners.

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Radio 3 Unwind broadcasts exclusive recordings from the BBC’s own orchestras and choirs. Living composers feature throughout the schedule, with a particular focus on both established and emerging homegrown British talent.

The station also reflects under-represented composers, including women and ethnically diverse composers. The dedicated new music programme Soundwaves, presented by Afrodeutsche, provides a platform for contemporary voices including BBC Introducing artists.

Digital listening habits

The BBC’s decision to launch three stations on DAB+ underscores the evolution of the audio landscape over the past decades, with 75% of the population now listening to the radio digitally (DAB/DAB+ and online).

It also marks the first DAB+ music stations launched by the BBC. Existing networks use the older DAB technology, though recent digital radios should be able to access both.

The BBC cited research showing that music streaming dominates among under-35s, who spend just 27% of their audio time with live radio compared to 49% with streaming services. 

Despite this shift, radio still reaches 13.6 million under-35s each week and remains a key source of music discovery across all age groups.

The rise of new stations on DAB/DAB+ reflects where the majority of live radio listening is projected to take place by 2030.

DAB/DAB+ covers 97% of the UK population and 87% of major roads.  It is also available in 100% of all new cars. 68% of households claim to have a DAB/DAB+ radio”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Afrodeutsche presents Soundwaves on BBC Radio 3 Unwind/PHOTO CREDIT: Kasia Zacharko

These new stations are important for so many reasons. For one, this is a reaction to changing trends. How people are listening to radio now. I don’t think that it is an attack on commercial radio. The BBC is allowed to expand and offer choices. To reach new audiences. Commercial radio will still exist but, at a time when we want to focus more on the content and people have less patience for commercials and any interruptions, we need to accept the fact that this is not going to disappear. I avoid commercial radio for that very reason. I know these stations need this advertising revenue but, when you are bombarded by cheesy and grating commercials between every few songs, it can be hugely off-putting. I do not want to listen to them so, every so often, you have to turn the volume down and wait for them to finish! Instead, with the BBC, you get more time dedicated to actual music and content. This is what people tune in for. However, I can appreciate that stations like Boom Radio are hugely important. Appealing to older listeners, their voice and opinions are hugely valid. They need a station that speaks to them. It is difficult. I don’t think the BBC should have its own equivalent, as that would take market share and focus from Boom Radio. However, these three new digital stations are going to easily and naturally fit into the BBC radio portfolio. Sitting alongside BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 1 Xtra, I think it will attract more people to digital radio. There is also a progressiveness as well. BBC Radio 3 Unwind is a station I am especially looking forward to. I have been trying to listen to BBC Radio 3 more as I love Classical music and a lot of contemporary composers.

IMAGE CREDIT: Boom Radio

I am a huge BBC Radio 6 Music fan so find myself listening more to that. However, as BBC Radio 3 Unwind also shines a light on under-represented composers  - and an overdue acknowledgement of women in that arena -, then I think I will spend some time with it. The Anthems stations is going to be great. A blast of nostalgia but also some chillout anthems, it is going to provide respite and uplift for listeners! The stations also provide a platform for new music and artists. Perhaps they would struggle to feature on other BBC stations, so this is a positive move towards including more new artists. I love BBC Radio 3 Unwind and Cinematic Soundtracks. That sounds right up my street! There are so many fascinating shows and presenters. A chance to chill and unwind. Some incredible anthems. This great chance for digital radio to welcome these exciting BBC stations. I guess the flip side is that it maybe damage some commercial stations or take attention from them. And local radio. Local radio is declining and that is a sad thing to see. We need to recognise their importance and place. Stations that maybe struggle to grow and exist and need as big an audience as possible. I do sympathise. However, it is good that the BBC I reacting to future predictions. That digital radio is going to grow and listening habits are changing. There is a lot to look forward to. BBC Radio 1 Dance will tempt more teenagers to digital radio. Giving them choice that they might not otherwise have had. There was a lot of interest when BBC Radio 6 Music launched in 2002. Rather than them having rivals and worrying, they have stablemates. It is going to be a big week next week when we get these new stations all open for business together. Radio 3 Unwind launched on Thursday. Going forward, we will see those who otherwise would spend time streaming music go to digital radio. I think this is positive. In terms of the benefits. It is a new venture but one which will provide much more good than bad. A lot of listeners who might have felt unheard or struggle to find their place now have a home. Radio programmes that are beneficial for mental and physical health. Educational, progressive and escapist, it is what we all need! For that reason alone, this trio of BBC Radio DAB+ stations should be welcomed…

WITH open arms.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Tour of Life: What Would Be the Ultimate Project to Honour the Icon?

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Tour of Life

What Would Be the Ultimate Project to Honour the Icon?

__________

THIS is very much a personal thing…

as everyone would have their own opinions about what the best Kate Bush-related project would be. This year, there have been magazine articles and features. There recently has been a Hounds of Love book from Leah Kardos. Looking ahead to next year, I wonder what might come. As we have marked forty years of Hounds of Love and Aerial turns twenty in November, I wonder if that will lead to any special projects or books. I have said how there should be a book dedicated to Aerial. Her eighth studio album released in 2005, there is a 33 1/3 book in it. There has been a bit written about Aerial, though nothing in the form of a book. It seems a shame that this has not happened yet. I have written features about what projects could come and what gaps there are to fill. I have said how it would be great to have photobooks with unseen photos or maybe an exhibition where we get to see Kate Bush photos, memorabilia and artefacts. David Bowie has this V&A archive. In fact, it is a permanent David Bowie Centre. Even though Kate Bush would not get something as prestigious, I think that she is deserving of something very special. Maybe she would feel this is too exposing. However, I am not sure whether she has been approached about anything like this. There is so much that could happen. However, you wonder what Kate Bush would allow and whether she would want herself exposed in such a way. It is a hard balance. For that reason, I don’t think there will be any documentaries about her. There have been in the past. However, I think we might get audio documentaries but nothing filmed.

I have always thought what I can do. I have written a lot of Kate Bush features, though it is all digital and could disappear at some point. I get people reading my stuff, though I wonder whether it is quite disposable. I am not sure whether I will do a podcast anytime soon. I would love to be a guest on a Kate Bush podcast but, for me, I am not going to do a long-running one. For a regular podcast, I would need to do something in a studio or space that was quiet. I do not have access to that. Even though I have never written a book, I wonder whether it is something that I could do. I do not consider myself to be a great writer. However, with enough research and guidance. I might be able to write something good. In terms of Kate Bush books, there have been ones about some of her albums. There have been some great biographies, including Graeme Thomson’s definitive, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Maybe there is not a lot to offer in terms of a new biography. However, I could always combine some of my features into a book. I have suggested that there could be a Kate Bush Encyclopedia book. There is a website of that name. Maybe a book that combined all her albums, some interviews and graphs. Pictorial representation of facts and figures. I would love to have this opportunity to pay tribute to Kate Bush. Something that is permanent and would be something you could hold. A couple of ideas I have narrowed down to is an equivalent of the book, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, written by Alex Pappademas with artwork by Joan LeMay. This book looks at the characters in Steely Dan’s music. Rather than it being a traditional biography, this looks at the people in the songs. Building worlds and images around that. It is a brilliant book.

There are plenty of characters in Kate Bush’s music where something similar could be created. It is very tempting. There would need to be an original angle. Not repeating what has gone before. Whether it is a book about Kate Bush as a producer or something else, I have been considering something larger. I would love to be specific and write a book about The Kick Inside. A new book, Kate Bush: On Location takes us inside some of the crucial and interesting spots of notes. Where music videos were filmed, various studio and locations important to Kate Bush’s career and story. It is wonderful. I do love that idea of creating a beautiful hardback book with some great illustrations and wonderful insights. That character book like Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. Rather than it being a straight Kate Bush biography, a chance to talk about her career and work but focusing on the characters. I think there are at least forty characters, named or otherwise, that could be included. The Kick Inside and Lionheart might not have that many but, from Never for Ever onwards, we do get quite a few. If there was not enough ammunition to match Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, I still want to show my love for Kate Bush and how important she truly is. Rather than repeat that existing book, I would build out and look at those who worked with Kate Bush and the artists who inspired her. Maybe more of a film cast or this look at the people in her music and those who influenced it. I want to do something by 2028. That is when Kate Bush turns seventy. It is also when her debut, The Kick Inside, turns fifty. It is going to be a big year. I think something published is the best way to properly salute her, though I would love to be involved in an audio production or podcast. A book about her career through her characters would be new and fertile with possibility. Maybe expand and bring in influences for Kate Bush including literary and film. Artists thar she admired and mentioned. I am very determined to do something wonderful for…

THIS music queen.

FEATURE: The First Sign of Snow: Kate Bush’s Wild Man and the Taste of a Very Special Album

FEATURE:

 

 

The First Sign of Snow

Kate Bush’s Wild Man and the Taste of a Very Special Album

__________

I have written about…

Wild Man before, so I shall try not to repeat myself too much regarding that. This was the first taste of new material. After Kate Bush released Director’s Cut in May, there was no real feeling that she would follow it up so quickly. In terms of sound, 50 Words for Snow is very different to any other album from Kate Bush. Although it does not do great when album rankings come out, it is this incredible work. So atmospheric and grand. Maybe a little sparse compared to other Kate Bush albums in terms of instruments, there is so much beauty and space. In terms of the standouts, Wild Man is right up there. It was perhaps an obvious single as it is the second-shortest track on the album. The shortest, Among Angels, would have also been a great single. Even so, Wild Man is over seven minutes, so it did need a radio edit. Typical of Kate Bush, there were not a lot of obvious singles of 50 Words for Snow. I think this was deliberate. When she released Aerial in 2005, there was this feeling she was releasing a complete body of work and was not considering singles and what could be played on the radio. Even so, there were a few songs that had that single potential. Nothing really like this with Wild Man. Regardless, this was the official single that was released. I am going to mark fourteen years of 50 Words for Snow closer to its anniversary on 21st November. On 11th October, it will be fourteen years since Wild Man was released (I am writing this feature prior to 11th October). It was an exciting day. I remember. Kate Bush did say in interviews for Director’s Cut how there was an album coming. However, we did not get an idea or suggestion what it could be. I think 50 Words for Snow took us by surprise. In terms of just how evocative it is. If people associate her work with something lighter and more energetic, perhaps an album that was closer to Chamber Jazz or was a lot slower and more expansive took them aback. I will bring in a critical review soon.

Unlike Aerial or Hounds of Love, 50 Words for Snow is an album that also got rave reviews but does not score high on ranking lists like those other albums. Perhaps seen as inessential. However, Kate Bush’s latest album is tremendous. Wild Man is a song that could only come from her. I am going to reference some information I have include in features before. Let’s start out with stuff you have probably already read. Though it is good to get the reminder and context. Some words from Kate Bush about Wild Man:

“Kate about ‘Wild Man’

Well, the first verse of the song is just quickly going through some of the terms that the Yeti is known by and one of those names is the Kangchenjunga Demon. He’s also known as Wild Man and Abominable Snowman. (…) I don’t refer to the Yeti as a man in the song. But it is meant to be an empathetic view of a creature of great mystery really. And I suppose it’s the idea really that mankind wants to grab hold of something [like the Yeti] and stick it in a cage or a box and make money out of it. And to go back to your question, I think we’re very arrogant in our separation from the animal kingdom and generally as a species we are enormously arrogant and aggressive. Look at the way we treat the planet and animals and it’s pretty terrible isn’t it?

John Doran, ‘A Demon In The Drift: Kate Bush Interviewed’. The Quietus, 2011

I guess in some ways, you could say that it’s the most immediate song on the album… It’s really a song entity for the Yeti – this mysterious creature that no one is sure whether or not it exists. It’s about how precious that mystery is, you know? We have such little mystery in our lives, generally, because of how we live now. I mean, of course, mystery is all around us, but the way we live our lives now, we’re too busy to be bothered with it.

Joe Tiller, ”50 Words For Snow’: How Kate Bush Made A Wintry Wonder Of An Album. Dig! Website, 11 DECEMBER 2022

Stephen W. Taylor about ‘Wild Man (with remastered shimmer)’

It was something I worked on with Rupert [Hine]. I added layers of sound to it, but they’re almost inaudible, which was done with Kate’s approval. In fact, fans were pissed off because they felt it wasn’t any different to the original version. In fact, it’s completely different. It has a very different sonic approach. We asked Kate to name it and she said it should be “With Remastered Shimmer” so that’s what it was called. (Anil Prasad, Stephen W Tayler – Experiential evocation. Innerviews, 2020)”.

That last interview relates to a version of Wild Man that appeared on the album The Art of Peace: Songs for Tibet II in 2015. I would love to hear different version of Wild Man. It is this song that could benefit from remixes and new versions. I don’t know if anyone has covered the song before. The musicianship on Wild Man are extraordinary. Steve Gadd is on percussion. He adds something magical to the song. His beats and drive gives Wild Man this mystery, energy and wonder. The late John Giblin provides bass. The late Del Palmer on bells. These two much missed musicians absolutely phenomenal. Dan McIntosh (Kate Bush’s partner) on guitars, with Andy Fairweather Low providing vocals with Kate Bush, who is on keyboards. The first taste of a new album, how did the press react to Wild Man in 2011? With no huge idea of what the other six tracks on 50 Words for Snow would sound like, it was a gamble. Wild Man sits beautiful in the centre of the album. After the epic Misty and Kate Bush’s duet with Elton John, Snowed in at Wheeler Street, Wild Man perfectly bridges the two halves. I would have thought that Bush would also release Among Angels as a single. I kind of thought an edited version of Misty would have come out at Christmas. It is about a snowman, so I would have thought Misty would be a popular, if unconventional, single. NME provided one of the most positive reviews for Wild Man:

“For those of us who have been secretly longing for a return to the unflinchingly bizarre and Bush’s ability to conjure up strange new worlds, ‘Wild Man’ is a deep joy.

Lyrically we’re in a literal wilderness, where the ‘Wild Man’ of the title is a revealed to be a Yeti-type figure roaming the wiles of the Himalayas. Bush’s whispered vocal delivery of the lyrics (which are full of geographical intrigue and century old myth) is full of the right balance of fear, intrigue and empathy towards the plight of the shadowy figure (“I can hear your cry/Echoing around the mountain side/You sound lonely,” she sings).

As for the the chorus, it bursts forth mid-eruption; a choir of strange voices; echoing the ‘Wild Man”s own explosion out of habitation into civilization in the narrative of the song. Bush tackles this by a multiple layering of voices, creating several personas and the atmosphere of a village set adrift by the sudden intrusion. It’s a style which recalls some of her most classic work.

Musically, we’ve moved on subtly from the pared down production of ‘Director’s Cut’, and on ‘Wild Man’ a guitar riff-plays pan-Asian and ponderous, but there’s also a layering of sounds in the chorus (tinkling percussion, a bedrock of organs), which suggests her 80s heyday.

Multiple listens on, the references just keep coming; there’s ‘Scary Monsters And Super Creeps’ era Bowie and some of the ‘Tusk’ era Fleetwood Mac and her own ‘Sensual World’ and ‘The Dreaming’.

After the domestic bliss of ‘Aerial’, it’s a deep joy to have Kate roam the narrative wiles of her imagination. The result is her strongest single for decades”.

Billboard were definitely intrigued by Wild Man. In their review, this is what they had to say about a song that I think ranks alongside Kate Bush’s very best. They felt, as the first truly original single since King of the Mountain in 2005 (Director’s Cut’s Deeper Understanding is a re-recorded version of the song that appears on 1989’s The Sensual World), it was a slight surprise:

“The weird and whimsical “Wild Man” serves as the first new single from British art-rock craftswoman Kate Bush in a whopping six years (not including the re-tooled tracks from this year’s “Director’s Cut”). A word of advice to first-time listeners: be sure to have an atlas and thesaurus handy. “From the Sherpas of Annapurna to the Rinpoche of Qinghai / Shepherds from Mount Kailash to Himachal Pradesh,” sings Bush in her breathy lisp, somehow sounding erotic while randomly referencing Indian provinces and Buddhist principles. For all of its impenetrable wordplay,”Wild Man” makes for a wicked headphone atmosphere, with Dan McIntosh’s expressionistic digital guitar curlicues wandering around a crisp Steve Gadd kit and John Giblin bass. As an announcement of Bush’s return, “Wild Man” is a tad off-kilter. But then again, when has the ever-singular Bush been anything but?”.

There were not that many reviews for Wild Man. That is understandable. Not a conventional or young Pop artist, there is less attention towards those who are older and are not considered to be ‘current’ or near the mainstream. Even so, The Needle Drop were impressed with a track that could only have been generated by the genius of Kate Bush:

“Wild Man” is the first track to drop from the album, and I’m loving the wintery feel of this song. Yeah, maybe I get that because of the vibe implied by the title of this album, but I really feel like playing this song is making the room I’m in colder. I think I can see my own breath.

But honestly, the icy grooves on this track are pretty pleasant. Kate’s voice guides the track through some quiet verses, and the chorus explodes with the beauty of a 60s psych pop tune. Can’t wait to review the LP tonight”.

This was the first taste of snow. The initial glimpse into Kate Bush’s tenth studio album. 50 Words for Snow is this underrated masterpiece. Wild Man a typically brilliant track that reveals new layers with each listen. I will include some interviews with Kate Bush when I do an anniversary feature for 50 Words for Snow nearer 21st November. However, as Kate Bush News wrote in  a feature from 2011, Kate Bush was pleased with how 50 Words for Snow came out and the guests who appear on it. I do wonder if an eleventh studio album will have guests on it:

“Kate says she doesn’t want anyone to mistake this for a “Christmas” album: “That is one concern I had when people heard the title and when they got to see the artwork on the cover . . . that they would think it was a Christmas album…people don’t seem to be saying that, which is great because it isn’t. If they did think that they’d be disappointed.”

Kate is thrilled by her guests on the album. On Stephen Fry, who features on the album’s title track, she tells The Australian: “What I was trying to do was find someone who had a great voice of authority. The idea of the song was that we would start off with straightforward words and then come up with completely ridiculous ones. That really tickles me because it’s meant to be fun.”

Kate also talks about Elton John’s performance on ‘Snowed in at Wheeler Street’: “I love his performance. He has a fantastic voice. If he had said no I don’t know who I would have asked, but luckily he said yes. I was really lucky that everyone I asked to be on the album agreed to do it”.

On 11th October, it will be fourteen years since Wild Man was released. On 10th October, 2011, the 7:16-minute version was first played on The Ken Bruce Show, and the 4:16-minute ‘radio edit’ was made available for streaming on Kate Bush's official YouTube channel after the radio premiere. It is interesting, as 50 Words for Snow was released on Fish People. That is Kate Bush’s label. Newly-created so that she could take more control of the music, Wild Man was released through Noble & Brite. That is Kate Bush’s business. It used to be called Novercia Ltd. Even though it is not a major anniversary, I wanted to shine a light on Wild Man. I have not even delved into the lyrics of the song. My favourite lines end the song: “While crossing the Lhakpa-La/Something jumped down from the rocks/In the remote Garo Hills by Dipu Marak/We found footprints in the snow”. I really love Wild Man. I think that 50 Words for Snow should get more respect and love. It is an album from Kate Bush that ranks alongside…

HER greatest moments.

FEATURE: A Smarter Choice: Is the Comeback of the MP3 Player a Sign of Things to Come?

FEATURE:

A Smarter Choice

 PHOTO CREDIT: Jean Marc Bonnel/Pexels

Is the Comeback of the MP3 Player a Sign of Things to Come?

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THE slight turn away…

PHOTO CREDIT: Astell & Kern

from digital music is happening. Not that streaming will ever be replaced by physical music. It is convenient and affordable for many of us. I don’t think that it is a bad thing to listen to music digitally. I do it a lot. However, there is this demand for physical music and formats. When it comes to the way we listen to music, though we want to buy vinyl, it is not always the most convenient of methods. You have to be stationery and it is about sitting down and listening to an album. People do want to experience music on the go. I was born in the 1980s, and most of my best days listening to music were about C.D.s and cassettes. I would listen on a Sony Walkman or Discman. Those technologies still have a place today, though they were discontinued. They were replaced by other technologies such as the iPod and MP3 players. The MiniDisc (MD) was discontinued in 2013. When digital music and streaming came in, these physical devices were sort of phased out. Assumed to be irrelevant. Smartphones were seen as the natural successor. Although they are convincement and provide portability, the truth is that smartphones do not have the same quality as other devices. For people who want to listen to music on the go but want an actual music device, it seems that MP3s are experiencing a revival. Earlier this year, What Hi-Fi? provided a guide to the best portable music players. It is true that Smartphones do not provide good quality when it comes to music playing:

“We're sorry to break it to you, but for all of its communication cleverness and photography prowess, your phone is a pretty poor music-playing device.

For all their multi-tasking, modern-day mastery, smartphones simply do not sound good – not out of their built-in speakers, headphone output or over Bluetooth. And that's where dedicated portable music players (or 'DAPs': digital audio players) come in.

In contrast, they are designed first and foremost to store music and play it back in the best quality possible. Not only do even the best budget models sound miles better than the most premium phones – to the point that they can justifiably feed high-end headphones or even a hi-fi system – but they can also hold thousands of albums of the highest recording quality.

In a bid to remain relevant in this feature-competitive world, most now offer wi-fi and built-in access to music streaming service apps like Tidal and Spotify”.

For The Guardian, Alan Martin tested the best MP3 players. Maybe this isn’t the sign that all portable physical devices are coming back. However, it is notable that MP3 players are back in the spotlight at a time when many are turning away from listening to music on their phones. Even if the music being played is digital, the fact that people want to buy a device and spend that money is encouraging:

“An MP3 player? In 2025? Am I going to be covering Betamax and MiniDisc players next?

No, this isn’t a retro piece from the Filter. You may be reading this at least three years after Apple decided the iPod business was too niche to be worth bothering with, but MP3 players – or digital audio players, as they should more accurately be called – are seeing a small resurgence, despite the domination of Spotify, Apple Music and the like.

“In the past few years, since Covid, we’ve seen way more people looking to get a new MP3 player,” says Chris Laidler, office manager of Advanced MP3 Players, an Edinburgh store specialising in audio equipment.

The reasons are, essentially, threefold. First, there’s the pleasure of using something tangible: a nostalgia for devices with a single purpose, devoid of notifications and apps. More importantly, though, there’s a desire to have a music collection again – something led by the music-loving algorithm in your brain, rather than one outsourced to technology. “It’s their collection, rather than a playlist they’ve subscribed to,” says Laidler, and they own the music and aren’t simply “leasing it from Spotify”.

I sourced 15 modern MP3 players from the likes of Sony, Agptek, Majority, Shanling, iBasso and FiiO – which may not all sound that familiar, such is the niche we’re dealing with. While players can go for more than £1,000, I was keen to test mainstream devices, with the highest priced at £649 and the lowest at £30.

I supplemented this with two old Apple models via Backmarket, where preowned tech can get a second life rather than becoming e-waste. Neither made the list, however, for reasons I’ll get to later.

I listened to a lot of music in different environments. I became familiar with my old collection (out and about, and while connected directly to my Cambridge Audio AXA25 hifi). To get the most out of the high-end players, I borrowed a couple of high-end FiiO headsets from Advanced MP3 Players: the FH75 wired in-ear monitors, and the over-ear FT7 headphones. These offered a considerable improvement over my own somewhat tired headphones.

IN THIS PHOTO: The Activo P1/PHOTO CREDIT: Alan Martin/The Guardian

All the while, I diligently made mental notes about the look, feel, battery life and usability of each device, relative to its cost. File quality is also a factor, of course, and to that end, I not only played MP3s, but lossless Flac versions of the same track.

If you’ve done enough reading on the topic of digital audio players, you’ll have undoubtedly come across the Astell & Kern brand … and then possibly realised its products are out of your price range. Enter Activo: a sub-brand from the company, which promises to deliver a lot of what audiophiles want for considerably less cost.

Why we love it
While £399 represents a significant outlay, it’s nowhere near as pricey as some models and still offers a lot of bang for your buck. The dual-DAC structure provides high-resolution audio, aided by its Digital Audio Remaster upsampling tech, plenty of pre-programmed filters and a built-in EQ to modify 20 frequencies to your tastes.

File support is strong, and it has 3.5mm and 4.4mm balanced audio ports for wired connections, along with Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless playback. It can even work as an external DAC for your computer if you like.

It comes with 64GB of internal storage, and you can expand it with microSD cards of up to 1.5TB. It uses Android – which I always worry detracts from the point of a dedicated MP3 player – but it’s a highly pared-back version focused on music. The Google Play Store is here, but it’s really only present to allow you to install Spotify, Tidal or whatever your streaming poison is. It’s intuitive, smooth enough, and not trying to mimic your phone: you won’t find yourself distracted by social media nonsense.

It’s a shame that … it doesn’t have more dedicated physical playback buttons. That and its chunky size almost made me give the cheaper £346.80 Sony NW-A306 the nod, but Activo’s smoother, pared-back version of Android and additional 4.4mm output gave it the edge”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Dalila Dalprat/Pexels

This isn’t an isolated thing. Many younger people are ditching their smartphones for something more basic. Going back to older phones. Buying digital cameras and relying less on their phones. That is a positive move. Part of this is the resurgence of the MP3 player. This feature highlights how the reliance on smartphones is like an addition. This move back to the physical, or at least older devices and technology, is a healthy thing. Maybe a sign of things to come:

“Why isn’t ‘Do Not Disturb’ enough?

The addictive nature of both social media and the phones we use to access social media is real. “Smartphones have the same chemical reaction in the brain as drugs and alcohol,” Melissa DiMartino, associate professor of psychology at New York Institute of Technology, tells Yahoo Life. “Getting ‘likes,’ messages and notifications from your phone releases dopamine, which makes us feel good. And, in turn, we want to repeat these feel-good behaviors.”

Looking at your phone to feel better becomes an addictive cycle that ultimately leads people to feel depressed and lonely when they aren’t getting those alerts, explains DiMartino. Increased anxiety and stress can also result from the continuous stream of updates and constant connectivity.

Once you open that phone, it’s like you just opened up Pandora’s box.

Ari Lightman, digital media and marketing professor

Interacting with a phone’s more standard operations, like calls and messages, is just a part of the sequence. “Once you open that phone, it’s like you just opened up Pandora’s box,” says Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. He tells Yahoo Life that just checking the weather can entice a person to click on the app that sits right next to it, whether it is LinkedIn or Instagram. “Then there’s a sort of cascading series of actions that basically snap up all your time, even in ‘Do Not Disturb,’” he says.

Deleting apps is not a solution, because “there’s always a replacement,” says Lightman.

What do MP3 players and digital cameras have to do with it?

The use of dumb phones has ushered in the need for other legacy technology. Caleb’s Nokia flip phone, for example, is limited to playing FM radio, which influenced his decision to use a separate MP3 player to access his personal collection of music.

Some others, like 32-year-old Alex Biniaz-Harris, haven’t made the switch to dumb phones but use other technologies for listening to music or taking pictures, so that they can avoid getting sucked into more screen time. Biniaz-Harris tells Yahoo Life that he opts to bring his iPod on drives, while leaving his phone behind, so he can listen to music without the added distractions of his iPhone. Having more limited options than Spotify makes the experience more intentional and even nostalgic, he says.

IMAGE CREDIT: Yahoo News (photos from Getty Images)

Using a device with limited functionality ... can be a welcome escape from the pressures of constant connectivity.

Riani Kenyon, anthropologist and behavioral analyst

Nostalgia plays a key role in the switch to legacy technology among young people, says Riani Kenyon, an anthropologist and behavioral analyst at the consumer insights agency Canvas8. “Despite not having firsthand experience of the 1990s or early 2000s, Gen Z expresses a strong affinity for the era’s tangible, straightforward technology,” she tells Yahoo Life. “For many, using a device with limited functionality, one that prioritizes calls and texts over endless notifications, can be a welcome escape from the pressures of constant connectivity.”

The deliberate use of these tools for specific purposes enables “greater levels of concentration and autonomy of thought,” says Lightman, whereas an iPhone tends to require attention on everything at once.

Digital minimalism is a lifestyle choice

While taking time away from your smartphone might not seem like a big deal, committing to a life where you use your device either more intentionally or not at all is difficult in today’s interconnected world. “The convenience of modern smartphones, which consolidate navigation, communication and entertainment into a single device, is difficult to replicate with older technology,” says Kenyon”.

Cost is an issue when it comes to devices. You have to invest in something additional to your smartphone. For music listening, it is clear that MP3 players off a benefit of being digital and also physical. Excellent playback quality and plenty of options – if you shop around and do your research -, is this going to be a movement that sees people buy C.D. playing devices and something to play cassettes in? There are modern-day equivalents of the Walkman, and I have covered this before. Whilst that will not be as notable as the rise of the MP3 player, it is clear that many do not want to rely on their phone and want to detach. Play music without being sucked into their smartphones. In addition to the quality of what we hear, MP3 players and other devices allow us to focus on music and not be distracted by other functions on the phone.  Rather than being drenched in nostalgia, it is a way of being able to listen to music portably and get that quality but also not have to do everything on a smartphone. Something that can be additive and damaging. For that reason, the new surge in interest in MP3 players is good…

PHOTO CREDIT: Karolina Grabowska

FOR all of us.