FEATURE: Fullhouse: Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Seven

FEATURE:

 

 

Fullhouse

Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Seven

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I can pretty much guarantee…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris

nobody else is going to write about Lionheart ahead of its forty-seventh anniversary on 10th November! This was Kate Bush’s second studio album. Released nine months after her debut, The Kick Inside, many see it as the ultimate sophomore slump. No blame should be placed on Kate Bush. The idea of being able to put out an album so quickly after her debut whilst she was promoting that album was insane! I have said before how EMI were too demanding and pushy. Even though Lionheart reached number six in the U.K., maybe a lot of that commercial success was down to people expecting something similar to The Kick Inside. There are some comparisons between the albums. However, you can hear more sonic flexibility on Lionheart. Coffee Homeground being this more eccentric and almost carnival-like song. I always think that was inspired by The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. Fullhouse another standout that was actually one of the new songs written for the album. This, Coffee Homeground and Symphony in Blue were the new tracks. You can feel that. Kate Bush heading in a new direction. The Kick Inside is largely composed of songs written quite a while before they were recorded. Wuthering Heights was a late inclusion. For Lionheart, she did not have time to write a whole album of new tracks. She had to dip back in the archives for songs. Knowing that this was not an entirely fresh album from someone who would have wanted to write new material and have time do that must have been gutting for Kate Bush! She did say at the time how she preferred Lionheart to The Kick Inside. However, you can feel that her debut is better. Less feeling of it being rushed or a compromise.

If some do not like the production sound of Andrew Powell, you cannot argue that Kate Bush’s innate and staggering talent lifted Lionheart above nearly everything around it in 1978. When critics rank her albums, Lionheart places very low. Seen as this inferior album, I think it contains some of her best moments. Wow is one. Symphony in Blue. Kashka from Baghdad. Hammer Horror. Fullhouse. Extraordinary and distinct songs that she performed multiple times during The Tour of Life in 1979. In this anniversary feature, I am going to come to a couple of promotional interviews, as it is important to get a sense of what Kate Bush was saying – and what was being asked. I am going to start out with one of the very few positive reviews for it. This website makes some excellent points about Lionheart. Why it’s far superior than it is given credit for:

“Lionheart is not a perfect album yet its still a staggering achievement.  Had  it been the opening missive in Kate’s discography,  jaws would have still dropped just as far. This record is a potent example of the complexity of Kate Bush and her audacious voice, charisma and songs.  Had it been her debut, it may not have conferred upon her the instant mantle of “Icon” (as ‘Kick’ did), but that might have been a good thing.

Sure, Lionheart could have benefitted from more time in the bottle or… maybe not.  Kate had all the time in the world to worry over The Dreaming.  Was it a better record? I’ll let you know when I get around to listening to it as many times as I have Lionheart.  Lionheart is a grower that is unique in her canon. Every track on Lionheart earns and rewards repeated visitations.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. The song “Wow” is a wonderful confection of fantasy/pop.  Equal parts torch ballad and bubblegum, it was a smart and successful single that could turn the heads of tabloid writers and music critics alike.  And “England, My Lionheart”, is quite simply one of the most beautiful and  unique melodies ever written.  Usually in pop song craft you can hear echoes of the familiar; even if the artist is stealing from him/herself.  This song exists on a different plane.  That the lyrics are penned by a teenage girl is stupefying and magical.  Why this song hasn’t been declared Britain’s national anthem is beyond me.  It still might someday.

The epic “Hammer Horror” could be the subject of an entire review unto itself. By 1978, the term “Rock Opera” had become devalued currency.  “Hammer Horror”  is definitely a rock opera (albeit a tightly compressed and edited version of the form).  Kate whispers, wails, moans and rumbles like both a siren and natural woman.  She’s got some burr in her saddle in the form of a stalker, ex-boyfriend, ghost, or some unholy permutation of the three.  Whatever happened, it’s now an ever-present nightmare of the soul.  The tinkling piano ending turns the neat trick of being pretty and dissonant at the same time. The delayed reaction gong crash signals a melodramatic end to a brilliant and melodramatic record, and the cover art will rock your world.

Elsewhere, things get more eclectic and esoteric. “Coffee Homeground” courts Cabaret and Broadway and elevates both forms.  Lead track, “Symphony In Blue” evokes a heavenly cocktail mix of Carol King on ecstasy and helium.  On this album, even more than The Kick Inside, Kate takes her voice to its full, death defying limits.  Many argue it takes listeners to their limits as well.  Like Dylan, Kate’s voice is her signature, money maker, and albatross all rolled into one.  One must come to the party prepared to marvel at her athleticism and then dig deep into the music itself.  The rewards are there.  Kate Bush is not a passive listen. We’ve got Sade for that.  No, Lionheart is a three ring circus of emotion, estrogen and technique.  And you know what?  EMI put it out at just the right time.  I’m glad we got two albums documenting Kate’s eloquent, teen dream genius.  Soon our little girl would all grow up to be a woman. Lionheart didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just a matter of the paint on her masterpiece hadn’t quite dried yet”.

I might have sourced these interviews a few times when talking about Lionheart. However, it is important to come back to them. Marking this album forty-seven years after its release. Melody Maker spoke with Kate Bush in an interview published in November 1978. The year must have been head-spinning! How far she travelled and how many times she was interviewed. Even if many critics were a bit cold on Lionheart, Bush reflected on its more adventurous and ambitious spirit:

“Overall, Bush was concerned that the new album should differ quite radically from her first. Maybe I'm a bit too close to it at the moment, but I find it much more adventurous than the last one. I'm much happier with the songs and the arrangements and the backing tracks.

"I was getting a bit worried about labels from that last album: everything being soft, airy-fairy. That was great for the time, but it's not really what I want to do now, or what I want to do, say, in the next year. I guess I want to get basically heavier in the sound sense...and I think that's on the way, which makes me really happy.

"I don't really think that there are any songs on the album that are as close to .bf ital Wuthering Heights .pf as there were on the last one. I mean, there's lots of songs people could draw comparison with. I want the first single that comes out from this album to be reasonably up-tempo. <The first single was Hammer Horror .> That's the first thing I'm concerned with, because I want to break away from what has previously gone. I'm not pleased with being associated with such soft, romantic vibes, not for the first single anyway. If that happens again, that's what I will be to everyone."

She is acutely aware of the danger of being pigeon-holed, and is actively engaged in discouraging that.

"If you can get away with it and keep changing, great. I think it should be done because in that way you'll always have people chasing after you trying to find out what you're doing. And, anyway, if you know what's coming next, what's the point? If I really wanted to, I guess I could write a song that would be so similar to Wuthering Heights . But I don't. What's the point? I'd rather write a song that was really different, that I liked, although it might not get anywhere."

Have you heard her new single, Hammer Horror ? Now that's really different.

The major changes in the preparation for Lionheart was undoubtedly that Kate, over-burdened with promotional schemes for the first album, was for the first time left with the unsavoury prospect of meeting deadlines and (perhaps) having to rush her writing to do that. It was a problem she was having trouble coming to terms with at our last meeting, when she spoke in obvious admiration of bands like Queen--who came up with the goods on time every year, and still found time to conduct world tours.

But Kate insisted that she wasn't going to be rushed, and eventually the songs came along. In all, it took ten weeks to record the twelve tracks (ten are on the album), an indication of the meticulousness shown by Bush herself in exercising as much control as possible over every facet of the work. "I'm not always right, and I know I'm not," she says, "but it's important to know what's going on, even if I'm not controlling it."

I'll be interested to read the reviews of Lionheart . It'll be sad, I think, if the album is greeted with the same sort of insulting indifference that The Kick Inside met, when Kate Bush was pathetically underrated.

Lionheart is, as the artist desired, a heavier album than its predecessor, with Bush setting some pretty exacting tests for the listener. Kate's songwriting is that much more mature, and her vocal performance has an even more vigorous sense of drama.

Musically, the tracks on Lionheart are more carefully structured than before. There is, for instance, a distinct absence of straight songs, like the first album's Moving, Saxophone Song, The Man With the Child in His Eyes and The Kick Inside . Here, only Oh England, My Lionheart makes an immediate impression and I'm not sure that the move away from soft ballads (be it to secure a separate image) is such a wise one. As Bush proved on those songs on The Kick Inside, simplicity can also have its own sources of complication.

There is much about this album that is therapeutic, and often Kate Bush is the subject of her own course. Fullhouse is the most blatant example of that. <There is no evidence that this song is autobiographical.> On of the album's three unspectacular tracks musically (along with, in my opinion, In the Warm Room and Kashka From Baghdad ), it is still lyrically a fine example of ridding the brain of dangerous paranoias. The stabbing verse of "Imagination sets in,/Then all the voices begin,/Telling you things that aren't happening/(But the nig and they nag, 'til they're under your skin)" is set against the soothing chorus: "You've really got to/Remember yourself,/You've got a fullhouse in your head tonight,/Remember yourself,/Stand back and see emotion getting you uptight."

Even Fullhouse is mild, though, when compared to tracks like Symphony in Blue, In the Warm Room and Kashka From Baghdad, which exude an unashamed sensuality. Symphony in Blue, the opening track, is a hypnotic ballad with the same sort of explicit sexual uninhibitiveness as Feel It from the first album. "The more I think about sex,/The better it gets,/Here we have a purpose in life,/Good for the blood circulation,/Good for releasing the tension./The root of our reincarnation," sings Kate happily.

In Search of Peter Pan, Wow (running together on the first side) and Hammer Horror are are examples of Kate's strange ability to let the subconscious mind run amok in the studio. Wow is tantalisingly powerful and Hammer Horror (the single) is most impressive for the way it seems to tie in so many of the finer points of the first album and project them through one epic song.

That leaves three tracks, Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake, Oh England, My Lionheart, and Coffee Homeground . All of them with totally contrasting identities but all succeeding in areas that many might have considered outside the scope of Kate Bush.

A few months ago, in the paper, Kate said how one of her musical ambitions was to write a real rousing rock'n'roll song and how difficult she found that task. James and the Cold Gun was her effort on The Kick Inside, and with Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake she has tackled the art of writing a roasting rocker on her own terms. Heartbrake (another piece of emotional therapy) might not be considered a rocker in the traditional sense of racing from start to finish but it's still one of the most vicious pieces of rock I've stumbled across in some time. The chorus is slow, pedestrianly slow. The pace is deceiving. It slides into the chorus. Bush moves into a jog. Then the second part of the chorus. It's complete havoc, and when it comes to repeating that second part in the run-up to the end, Kate wrenches from her slight frame a screaming line of unbelievably consummate rock'n'roll power that astounded me. A rather unnerving turn to Kate's music, I think.

Then there's Coffee Homeground, influenced by Bertold Brecht and inspired by a journey with a taxi driver who was convinced that somebody was out to poison him.

For Oh England, My Lionheart, from which the album title is derived, Kate is expecting a barrage of criticism because of the blatant soppiness of the lyric.

Kate's reasons for writing the song are simple enough. She had always liked Jerusalem, and thought that a contemporary song proclaiming the romantic beauty of England should be written.

"A lot of people could easily say that the song is sloppy. It's very classically done. It's only got acoustic instruments on it and it's done...almost madrigally, you know. I daresay a lot of people will think that it's just a load of old slush, but it's just an area that I think it's good to cover. Everything I do is very English, and I think that's one reason I've broken through to a lot of countries. The English vibe is very appealing”.

I will round off in a minute. There were not that many print interviews with Kate Bush Lionheart. Most were for U.K. publications. That is a shame. Lionheart, in so many ways, did not get its dues. Kate Bush revisited The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993) for 2011’s Director’s Cut. I wonder if she would ever return to Lionheart and reapproach that album. That would be fascinating! Giving a fresh take to tracks like Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake and In Search of Peter Pan. Newcastle Evening Chronicle interviewed Kate Bush ahead of the release of Lionheart:

“Indeed, although Kate Bush has eased herself into public consciousness through a combination of eerie mysterious songs and a frail, delicate appearance, in person she comes across as much more like the traditional girl-next-door.

She does not go to discotheques or enjoy parties. Work is her only obsession. "lf I get time off I'd rather spend it at home," she says.

"I'm rather a down-to-earth domesticated person when I'm left to my own devices. I really do find things like cleaning and all that rubbish very therapeutic.

"If I get home with all these thoughts in my head about what's coming up over the next few days. I find that a bit of cleaning or washing up makes them go away."

She has also tried to keep in touch with her old friends, although she admits her sudden change of lifestyle over the last nine months could make a point of contact difficult.

Kate goes on: "My best friend is a girl I used to know at school. She is a telephonist.

"Whenever I'm free, I'll call up and she'll come over with her husband. I don't sit there and say 'Oh I've just got back from Tokyo and you should have seen all the money around,' and so on. Why should she wantant to know about that?

"I do have a boyfriend at the moment, but the trouble with this business is that you can't really have a strong, emotional relationship on a continuous level because you're not in one place for long.

"It's what you could call on uninvolved relationship. He's not in the music business and sometimes I'll call him up and we'll go out somewhere.

''I do occasionally miss not being able to have a close relationship, but I can't complain really. I'm just so lucky to be m this position of having so much work."

Towards the end of this month Kate Bush's second album, Lionheart, will be released in Britain. The initial demonstration tapes were recorded in her brother Paddy's studio at her parent's home and the album was completed earlier this month in Nice. Paddy, 25, will also be part of her backing band when she goes on tour.

As for the album, Kate explains that it willill consist of a mixture of rock 'n'roll and ballads.

''After the success of 'Wuthering Heights', I was worried that people would just think I was simply a squeaky voice. That single was quite bizarre in a way and I was afraid people just liked it for the novelty value rather than for the music.

"I think the last record, 'Tile `.ian . with the Child in his Eves' did a lit al to get away from that because it was in a lower key for a start.

"It would have been terrible if I'd had to spend the rest of my life squeaking and very sore on the tonsils, I should think”.

I am going to end with a few reactions from Kate Bush. Interviews where she spoke about Lionheart. I will start with some critical reactions. As you can see from the reviews below, Kate Bush was having to fight off sexism and misogyny. Those critics who were attacking her in addition to the music! Even though Bush admits it was a rushed album and did not turn out how she would have wanted, she does say how good it is. A fact that was lost on the music press in 1978! They should have shown a lot more respect for an album far more interesting than a lot of the Punk drivel and repetitiveness that was popular:

“‘Mature’ lyrics sung in that twee irritating schoolgirl-siren voice… Actually most of the time she’s nearer a vague British lineage – Barbara Dickson to Lynsey de Paul – than a Joni/Janis wonderland.

Ian Penman, NME, 25 November 1978

A product which is at best moderate, lacking and often severely irritating… The feel is often bland and soulless. Strictly MOR with a clever tinge. This is flat conceived silliness. I simply dislike it.

Chris Westwood, Record Mirror, 25 November 1978

I love her and I hate her and you all feel exactly the same way only you’re too unreal to confess the terrible crime. You have to take her seriously in spite of all the flying sneers and jeers. The songs themselves aren’t individually strong at all. It’s more the aura she creates.

Dave McCullough, Sounds, 25 November 1978

“It was a difficult situation because there was very little time around and I felt very squashed in by the lack of time and that’s what I don’t like, especially if it’s concerning something as important for me as my songs are, they’re really important to me. But it all seemed to come together and it was really nicely guided by something, it just happened great. And there were quite a few old songs that I managed to get the time to re-write. It’s a much lighter level of work when you re-write a song because the basic inspiration is there, you just perfect upon it and that’s great. And they’re about four new songs so they all came together, it was great. In fact, we ended up with more then we needed again, which is fantastic.

Lionheart Promo Cassette, EMI Canada, 1978

I had only a week after we got back from Japan to prepare for the album. I was lucky to get it together so quickly. But the songs seem to me, now, to be somewhat overproduced. I didn’t put enough time into them.

Richard Laermer, Kate Bush Touches the U.S. At Last, Pulse!, 1984

It was rushed and that was responsible for me taking as much time as possible over albums. Considering how quickly we made it, it’s a bloody good album but I’m not really happy with it.

John Aizlewood, Love, Trust and Hitler. Sounds (UK), November 1989”.

You can pick up Lionheart here. Turning forty-seven on 10th November, I wanted to show some love for it. I don’t think anyone is going to bother to revisit it. Diehard Kate Bush fans will show their love on the day, yet most people have not heard Lionheart or know just how incredible it is! Ten varied and wonderful tracks from an artist who was only twenty when it was released, Bush would make big changes. In 1979, she went on tour and designed everything in her own image. She was tiring of working with another producer. 1980’s Never for Ever was produced with Jon Kelly, yet that was the final time she would share that role. I wonder how Bush sees Lionheart now.  It is a wonderful album she should be proud of. Despite it not being as complete and impactful as The Kick Inside or Never for Ever, that is not to say it is a failure or sophomore slump. Instead, it was a hugely impressive release given the constraints placed on her by EMI. Far from being a bad album, Lionheart is…

SO close to being a masterpiece.

FEATURE: Blank Pages: A Book That Celebrates the Music Queens of Today

FEATURE:

 

 

Blank Pages

IN THIS PHOTO: Florence + The Machine’s Florence Welch/PHOTO CREDIT: Linda Brownlee/The Guardian

A Book That Celebrates the Music Queens of Today

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THERE have been a lot of…

IN THIS PHOTO: St. Vincent performing for the BBC Proms on 3rd September, 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Paradise/BBC

thoughts on my mind regarding women in music. Not just legacy artists and legends. Though they are important. When it comes to women in music today, we recognise their work and there are album and gig reviews. There are news stories about them but, aside from that, what in the way of spotlighting and celebration? Maybe a book would not be the right format, as it would be always updated. However, there are so many women in music today who are inspiring and deserve something permanent. Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine is truly one of the modern greats. I want to come to a recent interview with The Guardian and some takeaways. Florence + The Machine release Everybody Scream on 31st October. Their lead has been speaking about the album, how she suffered an ectopic pregnancy and almost died. Such a brave and strong woman, she inspires and gives strength to so many others:

“After Florence Welch came close to death, she felt strongly that, more than people, she wanted to be with plants and animals. “It was a real need to be around things that couldn’t speak, but had a life force or energy to them. I found that the most healing,” she says. Since then, cats have kept coming to visit her garden. Not her cats – it is hard for her to have pets, what with all the touring – but neighbourhood cats, treating the place as if they live there. “I’m not saying anything, but more and more started coming, and foxes,” she says. She sees patterns and prescience in many things, now. “I don’t know. Or maybe I just noticed them more, because that’s what I needed to be around.”

In August 2023, Welch had a miscarriage. Days later, she learned that the pregnancy had been ectopic, meaning that the fertilised egg had implanted in a fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. The fallopian tube then ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she says. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”

After Florence Welch came close to death, she felt strongly that, more than people, she wanted to be with plants and animals. “It was a real need to be around things that couldn’t speak, but had a life force or energy to them. I found that the most healing,” she says. Since then, cats have kept coming to visit her garden. Not her cats – it is hard for her to have pets, what with all the touring – but neighbourhood cats, treating the place as if they live there. “I’m not saying anything, but more and more started coming, and foxes,” she says. She sees patterns and prescience in many things, now. “I don’t know. Or maybe I just noticed them more, because that’s what I needed to be around.”

In August 2023, Welch had a miscarriage. Days later, she learned that the pregnancy had been ectopic, meaning that the fertilised egg had implanted in a fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. The fallopian tube then ruptured, causing massive internal bleeding. “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she says. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”

We are in her summer house, at the end of her lush garden in south London, still blooming, late in the season, in tasteful shades of pastels and white. She sits on the sofa, wearing a long, pale-green gown, wrapped in a shawl. She shifts and reclines, stands up and sits back down. The door is open. The air is brisk. There is a pile of blankets in the corner, she says, in case I get cold. We talk for almost two hours about what happened to her, and how the catastrophe of it all became her extraordinary, excoriating new album, Everybody Scream. The record is as strange, uncompromising and brutal as she has ever been. It will be released on Halloween, and no wonder. It is full of witchcraft and fury.

PHOTO CREDIT: Linda Brownlee/The Guardian

Welch has long been such a fixture of the British music scene that it can be easy to understate how massive she is. When the first Florence + the Machine album, Lungs, came out, she was 22. (We are meeting on the day after her 39th birthday.) She had No 1 singles and albums at home, and she conquered the US, topping the Billboard charts with her third record. When Foo Fighters had to pull out of Glastonbury in 2015, she was bumped up the bill to headliner, a feat so rare for a British woman that, since the turn of the century, only Adele, Dua Lipa and Florence have managed it. Her performance that night made it clear that she was already a headline act.

In 2022, she released a single called King. It was a conversation with herself about whether to have children, or to continue life as a performer. Could the two coexist? It contains the line “I never knew my killer would be coming from within”, and it was the opening track on her fifth album, Dance Fever, which was also partly inspired by a 16th-century phenomenon in which women danced themselves to death. She thought, then, that she had made her horror record. “I really did,” she says, and sighs. “With that naivety … ”

At the end of the summer of 2023, Welch cancelled a handful of festival shows, posting a note to Instagram explaining that she’d had to have emergency surgery, that it had saved her life, but that she didn’t feel strong enough to go into the reasons for it, yet. “Suffice to say I wish the songs were less accurate in their predictions,” she wrote, at the time.

“Having that line in King was a strange thing,” she says, today, her lip beginning to tremble. “Because I had an ectopic pregnancy, on stage.” She talks through what happened, slowly and steadily. Two years ago, she and her boyfriend – a British guitarist in an indie band, whom she prefers not to name, as she is protective of his privacy, but who she has been with, on and off, since 2011 – decided that they would try to have a baby. “It was my first experience of even trying to get pregnant, and I thought, there’s no way, because I’m ancient,” she laughs. She was about to turn 37. She got pregnant the first time they tried. “It was a big shock. But it felt magical, as well. I felt I had followed a bodily instinct, in that animal sense, and it had happened.”

The miscarriage occurred early in the pregnancy, so early that they hadn’t yet told anyone about it. “I think, because it was my first time being pregnant, and it was my first miscarriage, I was like, OK, I’ve heard this is part of it. I spoke to my doctor, and they are not generally dangerous. Devastating, but not dangerous,” she says. She was due to headline a festival in Cornwall a week later, and made the decision to continue with the performance. “Emotionally, I was sad and scared, but I think, also, I was coping.” This sense of pushing through is not unfamiliar to her. A few years ago, she broke her foot on stage, bled everywhere, and still finished the gig before seeking help. (She notes, wryly, that the performance got a 4/5 review.) “With physical stuff, I have a strange, otherworldly strength,” she says. “Emotionally, I’m an absolute nightmare. Literally, will crumble,” she laughs. “But broken bone? Fine. Internal bleeding? Let’s go.”

Everybody Scream is the antithesis of small talk. On it, Welch is grappling with a lot. There’s her new song One of the Greats, which she calls her “lunatic, enormous, poem-rant-joke thing”, and offers seething indictment of sexist double standards. In the video, she sits in the back of a limo, at night, in sunglasses and a suit, a rock star waving a cigar (she doesn’t smoke; it’s a liquorice stick). “It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can,” she sings.

That’s a cheeky line, I say. “Yeah,” she laughs. “It’s all quite tongue-in-cheek.” That one is about effort, and how much is required of women, as opposed to men. “You [male performers] get to be up there and be hot in a T-shirt, and everyone’s like, it’s amazing!” With women, it’s different. “Your body is the show, the clothes are the show.” Many of her male peers have three children and continue to tour, “because they have a partner with the kids at home. What I’m sacrificing to keep going is more apparent, and bigger, as you get older.” It is understandable that this is at the front of her mind, though once again the song was prescient: she wrote it before the pregnancy. “I will get those things, hopefully. I will get to have a family, but I haven’t had both. Or so far I haven’t, and then when I tried, I was sort of violently rebuffed,” she sighs.

I don’t want to assume that it’s all autobiography, I say, but … how much of the lyrics are true? What happens, she says, is that she turns the real into the unreal, in order to cope with it. “I’ve shared parts of my life with [fans] that I haven’t been able to say to my closest friends,” she admits. “Addiction, and eating disorders, and whatever the fuck this one’s about.” After the trauma of the ectopic pregnancy and the emergency surgery, she thought that she wanted to put it all away. “But working again helped me. It was like little lanterns in a fog. I could just pick my way through. And I was so angry! There was a fury at how unsupported I felt by my industry, how clear it was, that it wasn’t built for me”.

I was recently watching St. Vincent at the BBC Proms. That was on BBC Four on 26th September. Another truly incredible artist, hearing her perform alongside Jules Buckley’s Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall was spine-tingling! A truly staggering talent who I think remains underrated, she is another music queen who I feel deserves pages written about her. Her performance, which was the last date in her All Born Screaming tour (the screaming connection between St. Vincent and Florence + The Machine!), was majestic. Rolling Stone UK awarded it a five-star review:

“Picture it: Jules Buckley and his orchestra navigating the ever-increasingly eclectic discography of the Grammy-winning St. Vincent (real name Annie Clark). Pair that with the singer-songwriter herself and you’ve got one hell of an evening at the legendary Royal Albert Hall.

In this iconic setting, you can fully appreciate the poetry of Clark’s writing. Songs like ‘Black Rainbow’ and ‘Live in the Dream’ feel almost technicolour – painted with fresh new colours. Speaking to Rolling Stone UK last year, Clark shared her desire to write a Bond theme, and the orchestral version of fan favourite ‘Digital Witness’ shared here feels like the perfect candidate.

It’s thrilling to see an artist on a stage just jamming out on an electric guitar with an orchestra that Clark very clearly not only appreciates, but respects immensely. Moments where Clark is guitar-less on stage felt like a peak behind the elusive St. Vincent curtain. Performances like this are what make the BBC Proms so special – taking a contemporary artist and placing them in an environment that they wouldn’t usually be in and the excitement of the unknown that comes with that.

Perhaps the most surprising part of the evening, besides when Clark entered the crowd during the iconic ‘New York’, is a rather subdued and pared back version of ‘Los Ageless’, from her 2017 album MASSEDUCTION. It backs up what conductor, arranger and orchestrator Buckley shared about the event before the show.

He said: “The concept here is not just to slap an orchestral wallpaper behind an artist, we’ve worked together to find a new interpretation of St. Vincent’s sound.” Clark puts it best herself at the top of the show, telling the crowd of the process of re-imagining her music like this: “It’s been glorious”.

In terms of modern music, women are very much dominating. So many contemporary icons that I feel should be joined together in a book. Whether it is the sensational CMAT or the Charli xcx, it is not only the music itself that warrants words of praise. It is what these women say in interviews and how they are not only reshaping the music scene but also culture too. I was affected by Florence Welch and what she said in that interview. What she has had to endure and how she still performs and writes. So many other women not only making incredible music, but they are also handling challenging experiences with incredible strength and resilience. It is not to dismiss men at all. I feel that the most compelling music is being made by women. These role models do get noticed in the music press, though we don’t go beyond that. Whether there were a documentary or other projects, it would be overdue seeing something dedicated to music’s women. The odd book here and there pops up, though there has not been anything published that highlights the finest female artists of today. I am not sure whether it would include legends and legacy artists. I just realised how there are scores of newer artists who are transforming music. In a scene still sexist and set up for men, they are hitting back. The best albums of the year have come from women. Whatever it is work from Little Simz, Blondshell, FKA twigs or Lady Gaga, this year has been another defined by brilliant women. I find their lives and words much more compelling than men’s. Maybe men are less open or seem more guarded. I am finding so much more strength and inspiration from music’s queens. I have named a few names, yet there are countless women in music today that deserve to be united in a book. It is long overdue that we spend time writing about phenomenal women in music and fill these…

BLANK pages.

FEATURE: Real Gone Kid: A Deacon Blue Playlist

FEATURE:

 

 

Real Gone Kid

A Deacon Blue Playlist

__________

CURRENTLY touring…

IN THIS PHOTO: Ricky Ross captured performing with Deacon Blue at Brighton Centre on 20th September, 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Carter

as part of their The Great Western Road Trip tour, if Deacon Blue are playing near you, then go and get a ticket. I have been listening to the Scottish band’s music since I was a child. Their debut album, Raintown, came out in 1987. It was not long after that when I discovered Deacon Blue. Because they are touring their recent album, The Great Western Road, I wanted to use the opportunity salute this band. Led by Ricky Ross, alongside Lorraine McIntosh, Dougie Vipond, Gregor Philp and Lewis Gordon (we lost James Prime earlier in the year), their eleventh studio album has a mix of looking back and forward. You can buy the album here:

“2025 marks 40 years since Ricky Ross met Dougie Vipond and they started to form Deacon Blue, the songs on ‘The Great Western Road’ reflect the journey the band has taken and remain honest to the age and experience they all share. Ricky Ross: “It’s just the next part of the adventure and it’s as exciting now as it was back in 1988”.

The album will be preceded by the single ‘Late 88’ on 29 November 2024 which fondly remembers the care-free excitement of those early days. ‘The Great Western Road’, recorded at the legendary Rockfield Studios, sees Ricky Ross and (Deacon Blue guitarist and long term collaborator) Gregor Philp return to production duties, having last produced the bands’ Top 5 charting and their last full length album, 2020’s ‘City Of Love’. This album was recorded by Matt Butler, who last worked with the band on their debut, ‘Raintown’”.

Before moving to a playlist, it is worth dropping in parts of a review by The Guardian, who caught Deacon Blue playing the Brighton Centre recently. Perhaps not as appreciated and played as they should be, this is a band who have been a very important part of my life. No denying just how ingrained these songs are in my mind. Their craft with a chorus, melody and lyrics that range from poignant to funny to uplifting, they are one of my favourite groups:

“Their latter-day resurgence might rest on the fact that Ross has minted a songwriting style that, while musically indistinguishable from the band’s purple patch – and thus matching his and McIntosh’s voices, pretty much as they were in the questionable millinery years – lyrically seems intent on growing old with their audience. The Great Western Road’s title track and Mid Century Modern affectingly ruminate on time’s passing, their melancholy flecked with the-best-is-yet-to-come optimism.

There’s also some politics, which comes as a surprise, but probably shouldn’t: beneath the glossy production, Raintown’s hard-bitten stories of Glasgow life carried an implicit critique of Thatcherism’s impact on the city. Tonight, Ross talks about the world being in “deep shit” and offers a glancing reference to welcoming migrants to the UK, while the brooding Your Town, from 1993’s coolly received attempt at post-Achtung Baby reinvention Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, plays out with the faces of Trump, Farage and Putin glowering from the screens.

There’s something heartening about the audience cheering this stuff, but they’re really here for the hits: Chocolate Girl, When Will You (Make My Telephone Ring), Dignity. You can occasionally pick out the influence of Prefab Sprout on Deacon Blue’s sound – and on Raintown’s title track, the Blue Nile’s drizzly urban angst – but refitted for broader appeal, made brawnier and more unashamedly poppy. It was too crowd-pleasing in approach to be critically acclaimed, but nearly 40 years on, even a dedicated naysayer might be forced to concede it worked: as Real Gone Kid hits the pop bullseye dead-on, those crowds are very much still being pleased”.

I am going to finish up there. The supreme Deacon Blue continue to thrill fans after all of these years. Forty years since their inception, there are very few bands who not only last that long but continue to put out material of such high quality! It is testament to their bond and brilliance! Below is a mixtape that properly salutes…

A simply magnificent band.

FEATURE: Back on Location… Spotlighting Three Very Special Kate Bush Spots

FEATURE:

 

 

Back on Location…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Nigel Kennedy at the BPI (BRIT) Awards at Grosvenor House Hotel in London on 9th February, 1987/PHOTO CREDIT: Duncan Raban/Popperfoto via Getty Images

Spotlighting Three Very Special Kate Bush Spots

__________

I am returning to a book…

that I spotlighted a little while ago. It is Max Cookney’s Kate Bush: On Location. It is a book that compiles and dissects important locations from throughout Kate Bush’s career: “From recording studios to concert venues, television centres to outdoor filming locations, record company offices to vinyl record pressing plants – this fan-written book will take you on a virtual tour across the UK and the rest of the world to experience the real-life locations that have shaped Kate's music and career”. I did mention a few choice locations featured throughout the book. I am going to hone down to my favourite three Kate Bush locations. Having read through the book, these are the ones that caught my eye and have stayed with me. Cookney’s brilliant and descriptive writing takes us inside these spaces and places. One that I am repeating from last time is the Hammersmith Odeon. Located on 45 Queen Caroline Street, this is a venue that Kate Bush first played in 1979 as part of The Tour of Life. So special and iconic, she housed her 2014 Before the Dawn residency there. It is one of the most important locations when we think of Kate Bush’s career:

“The Hammersmith Odeon – or Eventim Apollo, as it’s currently known – should be no stranger to the Kate Bush fandom. More recently, it’s where Kate performed her twenty-two-night Before the Dawn shows in the autumn of 2014, and where, some thirty-five years before that, she performed her final three Lionheart tour dates (including the benefit gig on the 12th of May in aid of Bill Duffield). But Kate had visited the Hammersmith Odeon before that. Twice, in fact (that we know of). The first visit is believed to have been as early as 1973, when it is thought a tearful fourteen-year-old Cathy Bush cried out loud with the rest of the audience upon hearing David Bowie’s shock announcement of his decision to kill off Ziggy Stardust. Of course, Bowie did make a return to the Hammersmith Odeon (about ten years later), as did Kate, but a few years earlier than that, in February, 1979. As part of the planning process, the Lionheart tour manager, Richard Ames, took Kate to the Odeon for a very specific reason. He’d taken her there on the 6th of February – the day after a gig by the hard rock band Review copy for Sam Liddicott 58 Nazareth – so he could let her hear what he described at the time as the “top-notch ML Executives PA system” the band had been using the night before (a system owned and used by The Who and ultimately chosen for Kate’s tour).

It was also where Kate was first introduced to a chap called Gordon “Gungi” Paterson, who would soon become the sound engineer for her tour as well as the noted inventor of Kate’s revolutionary microphone headset (alongside the Scottish sound engineer Cameron Crosby, who was tasked with getting to grips with the new wireless technology and trying his best to avoid picking up radio interference from any local taxicab passing by.) The Eventim Apollo continues to be one of London’s major live entertainment venues. It’s one of the UK’s largest and best-preserved original theatres, first opening on 28 March 1932 as the Gaumont Palace cinema. Designed in the Art Deco style, the cinema originally included 3,487 seats, a thirty-five-foot-deep stage, no less than twenty dressing rooms, and a Compton 4-manual (the number of keyboards) 15-rank (the number of pipe sets) theatre organ. The venue has had many a name change, the first being in 1962, when it was renamed the Hammersmith Odeon, playing host to many legendary acts of the day, including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Marley. In 1992, the Grade II listed theatre was closed for refurbishment and reopened as the Labatt’s Apollo following a sponsorship deal with the Labatt Brewing Company. In 2002, by the same token, it became known as the Carling Apollo. In 2003, major alterations enabled the stalls seating to be removed, allowing for both standing and fully seated events. In 2006, the venue’s name changed again to the Hammersmith Apollo, but this was only until Review copy for Sam Liddicott 59 2009, when it became known as the HMV Apollo. In 2013, a mutimillion-pound investment saw a huge visual transformation of the venue when it was returned to its iconic 1932 Art Deco design. It reopened as the Eventim Apollo on 7 September 2013, all in good time for Kate’s surprise return the following year. Did you know the last feature film to be shown at the Hammersmith Odeon was Blue Thunder? Starring Roy “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” Scheider, the film was screened on the 8th of August, 1984. It was directed by John Badham, who had also directed the 1979 gothic horror, Dracula, which happens to have been shot on location at Black Park and at Shepperton Studios – a place with its own connection to the Lionheart tour”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured during her Before the Dawn residency at the Evetim Apollo, Hammersmith in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Gavin Bush/Rex

I work near to where Covent Garden’s The Dance Centre used to be based. I think this location opened up Kate Bush’s career in hugely important ways. In terms of her learning dance and movement. Disciplines that not only impacted her physically, it also affected her writing and creativity. One of the earliest locations in Bush’s career, it is a shame that it no longer exists in its original form:

“The Dance Centre was founded by Valerie Tomalin in 1964. In a rundown street full of old fruit and vegetable warehouses, the Dance Centre at 12 Floral Street was a space that could be hired by dance tutors and dance companies. It was here that Kate continued to attend Lindsay Kemp’s mime lessons and later, those with the American mime artist, dancer, and choreographer, Adam Darius, and the modern dance instructor Robin Kovac, who would later help Kate with her dance routine for Wuthering Heights. Formerly a parish school, the building at 12 Floral Street – built in 1838 and largely refronted in 1860 – was listed by Historic England as a building with special architectural interest as early as 1973, quite some time before Kate walked through its doors. But in 1977, the Dance Centre was forced to close and make way for the iconic Sanctuary Spa, which remained there until its closure in 2014. An alternative space for users of the Dance Centre was quickly established by a dancer called Debbie Moore, who’d been attending a class at Floral Street run by former Strictly Come Dancing judge and Hot Gossip founder (Dame) Arlene Phillips. Debbie had found an ideal spot Review copy for Sam Liddicott 164 for a dance studio just a short walk away on Langley Street. It was another derelict fruit warehouse, for pineapples. And so it was in June 1979 that Debbie opened the doors to the world-famous Pineapple Dance Studios, which continues to inspire a new generation of dancers in the very same spot forty-six years on. Debbie remains very good friends with Dame Arlene Phillips, who, incidentally, played the role of Ernestine in Flowers when it played at the Regent Theatre (replacing the dancer Annie Balfour). Given Dame Arlene’s connection with the Dance Centre, it should come as no surprise to you that Kate spent some time there with her. The site at Floral Street was redeveloped in 2017 and now houses the European headquarters of Peloton”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1977/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Maybe not ‘important’ as such, I think one of the most notable is the Grosvenor House Hotel. Situated on 86-90 Park Lane in London, it is where Kate Bush picked up several awards. Someone who I think valued awards – some artists dismissed aware ceremonies -, the Grosvenor House Hotel has this significance. I never really thought about it before but, when we consider Kate Bush collected some prestigious awards at this special spot, it should be talked about more. The final location from Max Cookney’s book that I want to highlight:

“Okay. Is it time to dig out another cocktail dress? Kate’s been a guest at the Grosvenor House Hotel on London’s prestigious Park Lane on no less than five occasions. The first, on the 4th of March, 1979, was to pick up the award for Best British Newcomer and Best British Female Artist at the Capital Radio Annual Awards. She was invited back to the same event the following year, on the 3rd of March, once again receiving the award for Best British Female Vocalist. On the 10th of February, 1986, Kate attended the sixth edition of the BPI Awards (the British Phonographic Industry, also known as the Brits), where she performed her soon-to-be-released single, Hounds of Love. Kate received three nominations that night, including Best British Album (Hounds of Love), Best Single (Running Up That Hill), and Best Female Solo Artist, although she left that night with none. Despite losing out in ’86, Kate returned to the Grosvenor the following year for the 1987 Brit Awards and collected the award for Best Female Solo Artist. She was also asked to present the award for the Best British Solo Male Artist, which was won by Peter Gabriel”.

Finally, Kate was invited back to the Grosvenor on the 23rd of May, 2002, to accept an honour at the Ivor Novello Awards for her ‘Outstanding Contribution to British Music.’ In 2020, the Ivors Academy went one further and bestowed the highest honour upon Kate when they made her a Fellow of the Academy. The Grosvenor’s ‘Great Room,’ in which Kate performed Hounds of Love, was originally built as an ice rink, which was used as such until its conversion into a banqueting hall in 1935. It’s been said that the late Queen Elizabeth II was taken to the rink as a child, where she was taught how to skate. It is believed the original refrigeration machinery remains in situ underneath the current floor”.

If you have not purchased Max Cookney’s brilliant and must-read Kate Bush: On Location, then I can highly recommend it. I wanted to return to it because I have been re-reading it and a particular few locations stood out. Realising how pivotal they are. For any Kate Bush lover that does not have it already, make sure that Kate Bush: On Location is…

ADDED to your bookshelf.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Wednesday

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Graham Tolbert

Wednesday

__________

IF you are in North America…

and can see the band perform, I would suggest you catch Wednesday. Their new album, Bleeds, must go down as one of the best of the year. I am a little late to the band, like I am with so many, as I know they have a large fanbase that has been growing for years. The North Carolina band consists of Karly Hartzman (vocals, guitar), MJ Lenderman (guitar, backing vocals), Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel), Alan Miller (drums) and Ethan Baechtold (bass). I am going to end with a review of Bleeds. There are a few interviews from this year that I am including first. In June, The Guardian spoke with Wednesday’s lead, Karly Hartzman. A band known for songs “full of arson, sex shops and outcasts”, the North Carolina-based lead discussed life in the band and revealed a bit about Bleeds:

“Although Pitchfork declared Wednesday “one of the best indie-rock bands around”, Hartzman keeps a low profile in her home town, the small North Carolina city of Greensboro. She recently moved back from nearby Asheville, where she lived on a bucolic property known as Haw Creek that was home to various local musicians. In person, Hartzman is thoughtful, expressive and more reserved than you might expect from her riotous performances.

As we drive around Greensboro, she points out her teenage haunts, such as the cafe she used to frequent when she skipped school. As a kid, she resented being told what to do, but never let that get in the way of an education. “I was very methodical,” she says about cutting class. “I was writing and reading and doing work – I was doing my own school, on my terms.”

She credits her taste in music to a few crucial sources: her parents, who played Counting Crows and the singer-songwriter Edwin McCain around the house; her older sister, who got her into Warped tour punk (Paramore were an early favourite); and a longtime friend who introduced her to shoegaze and post-hardcore bands such as My Bloody Valentine and Unwound.

When she started college, Hartzman admired her friends who played in bands, but she wasn’t interested in taking music lessons. Then she saw the band Palberta – a playful indie-rock trio whose members traded instruments every few songs – and felt inspired by the messy, uncomplicated style of playing the three women shared. “They were doing something that sounded awesome and very easy,” she says. “After that show, I bought my friend’s guitar off him.”

Hartzman’s earliest recordings were solo; she got a formal band together only when her sister asked her to perform at her birthday party. From there, Wednesday rotated through a few members before settling into a stable lineup: Xandy Chelmis on steel guitar, Ethan Baechtold on bass and piano, Alan Miller on drums and MJ Lenderman on guitar. They started playing house shows and tiny spots with friends’ bands and folks they met in local DIY scenes.

Wednesday’s shows could be raucous, rowdy affairs, but their home lives centred around the quietude of Haw Creek, surrounded by streams and open fields – the kind of place where they could go fishing in the morning, then practice in the living room later on. “We lived on acres of land,” she says. “Nothing will ever beat that.”

Hartzman lived at Haw Creek with Lenderman who, alongside his work in Wednesday, found meteoric success last year for his fourth solo album, Manning Fireworks. He and Hartzman started dating before Lenderman joined Wednesday – Hartzman was a fan of his music, playing it over the speakers at the coffee shop where she worked before they met.

After six years together, they broke up amicably in 2024. Hartzman chalks it up to the usual big-picture differences that emerge in adulthood. In your early 20s, she says: “You’re just like: ‘Oh, I like this person, I’ll date them.’ But then, when you’re 28, you have to be like: ‘Does this person have the same intentions in life?’” Hartzman was interested in marriage and kids; Lenderman was not quite on the same page, she says. But, from the beginning, “I’ve known, even if we’re not romantic for ever, we’re creative collaborators for ever”. Lenderman will be on future records; while he won’t perform on their next tour, Hartzman insists it’s nothing personal; between Wednesday and his solo career, his touring schedule has been relentless and “he needs a break”.

The songs on Bleeds were written before the breakup, although some of them hint at the deteriorating relationship. The Way Love Goes started as an apology for not being fully present. “When I wrote it, I was like: ‘But I’m gonna fight for this,’” she says. “Of course, by the time we recorded it, that was not the situation.” Wasp, meanwhile, describes the bitter self-recrimination she felt towards the relationship’s end. “My body just kind of gave up on me,” she says. “I was really dissociated because I didn’t want to break up, but I was having to accept that we needed to”.

I am going to move to another interview with Karly Hartzman. PASTE published their interview last month. Ahead of the release of Bleeds, we got an insight into its creation and growth. It is an illuminating and amazing interview that gives more insight into one of the standouts of the year. If you have not heard Wednesday, then you really need to check them out:

“THE BLEEDS ALBUM CYCLE began in May with “Elderberry Wine,” a much quieter, more melodic choice compared to what kicked off the Rat Saw God momentum, “Bull Believer.” The decision got people talking online, some hoping the new record would still yield some heavy shit. “Elderberry Wine” (not an Elton John reference, sadly) was picked first because, aside from it being Hartzman’s parents’ favorite song on the album, it was a “slight” attempt to transition from Lenderman’s last solo release, the breakout indie hit Manning Fireworks. “People really resonated with [that record], and, strategically, we were trying to capitalize on that,” Hartzman says. “That’s not the most artistic answer but, realistically, with each new MJ or Wednesday album that comes out, we work in tandem and share an audience.” Haltingly, she reveals the obvious: “Plus, I wanted that song to be out for the majority of the summer, for people to bump.” Fans would get their wish eventually, as the stormy, overdriven “Wound Up Here (By Holdin’ On)” and the atonal, Dinosaur Jr.-craving “Pick Up That Knife” were released back-to-back.

“Pick Up That Knife,” like “Bitter Everyday,” “Phish Pepsi,” “Elderberry Wine,” and “Townies,” displays Bleeds’ not-so-secret-anymore weapon: Xandy fucking Chelmis. Some of his pedal steel phrases on this album are just unbelievable, and I tell Hartzman as much. “Bro,” she deadpans, “everything he does is fucking insane. Jake is irreplaceable as a guitarist, but, literally, if Xandy was not in this band, Wednesday is over.” She clarifies, “I would write other songs, but they would not be Wednesday songs, because so much of our identity is his playing and what he does with his instrument.” The blast of hissing, pissing, sludgy solos from Hartzman and Lenderman, the lead-footed percussion thwacks from Alan Miller, and Ethan Baechtold’s threaded bass notes in “Wound Up Here” were Chelmis’ idea. “He just threw that out casually,” Hartzman remembers.

“It’s infuriating. Like, how do you just know to go off like this? At first, you’re like, ‘This sounds fucking crazy, insane, stupid.’ And then he does it, and you’re like, ‘You motherfucker.’”

Chelmis doesn’t like “Bitter Everyday,” Hartzman reveals, because he doesn’t “feel like he got his part really right.” She listened to the song and, verbatim, told him, “You did the perfect thing, you little bitch.” Considering that Twin Plagues was Chelmis’ first honest pursuit of his instrument, the idioms he’s chasing on Bleeds are firmly at the mountaintop—lines that wince like the second-coming of Pete Drake, or something. “I think he’s going to be in high demand forever and ever, too, [for session work],” Hartzman gushes, before melting into a whisper. “But the thing is, people are going to know his playing and be like, ‘Is it a good song, or is Xandy just on it?’ Stylistically, his playing has so much personality. It’s so him. I think he’s going to be in history books for the tonal shit.”

But the genius of Wednesday is showcased best by its greatest contrasts, the two-minute ballad “The Way Love Goes” and the even shorter sheet-metal-blasted, hardcore blast of “Wasp.” Hartzman wrote the former while fighting for her deteriorating relationship with Lenderman. “By the time I recorded it, we were broken up,” she says. “And by the time we’re releasing it, my life will be completely different. I don’t really see Jake that often. I’m in a completely different place.” The song, which features an interpolation of a sorta-same-named Johnny Rodriguez tune, carries with it the best lyric on Bleeds, when Hartzman sings, “I’m scared to death there’s women less spoiled by your knowing.” I ask her about that line, to which she responds by saying, “As I’m getting older,” before chuckling and clarifying that she’s twenty-eight years old. “As a woman in an industry where you’re being seen as you age, your stock goes further and further down for a lot of people. I’m going to be starting to confront that a lot. But that’s crazy for me to say before I’m thirty. But it’s a reality! It’s always been therapeutic though. I’d be writing regardless of where my career was, whether it was sustaining me or not, just because of how much I need it”.

The final interview I am including is from Billboard. Published in August, Karly Hartzman spoke about how Wednesday nearly burned out. The fact that there was a relationship breakup and dislocation in the band before they hit the studio to record Bleeds. Wednesday were in trouble during the Rat Saw God period when they were touring. Things are looking more positive in their camp. Currently in tour, they are bringing these incredible tracks from Bleeds to fans cross North America:

“However, Bleeds is not a relationship tell-all: Hartzman wrote most of the record before Wednesday hit the studio — before she and Lenderman split — and in any event, many of its vignettes date back years. “Usually, there’s a story that I want to tell at some point in my career,” Hartzman says. “For example, maybe Xandy throwing up in the pit at the Death Grips show at Primavera in 2023. So I’ll try to organize in my mind anything that fits tonally with that story. … I’m just making sure the stuff I want to archive makes it in there, and then I build the rest of it out so it can actually be a song.” (Chelmis’ wayward Death Grips experience is documented on Bleeds single “Pick Up That Knife.”)

In the case of “Phish Pepsi,” a rerecorded version of a song Hartzman and Lenderman released on their collaborative 2021 EP, Guttering, she reached back even further to share a particularly harrowing experience. “My friend who was, like, my most chaotic friend in middle school sat me down as a seventh grader to watch back-to-back [the 2009 body horror film] Human Centipede and then a three-hour Phish concert in an air-conditioned room, super stoned,” she recounts. “I was just like, ‘Why is my friend torturing me?’ ” (Other than that day, “I’ve actually never sat down and listened to Phish,” she adds with a chuckle.)

Now, as the group prepares to hit the road, Hartzman says she and the band are in a better place than during the throes of the Rat Saw God period. She has had time to digest both her breakup and Wednesday’s rapid rise — “We didn’t have a second to process everything going on,” she says — and after a year off the road is “fresh as could be.” (As he focuses on his solo career, Lenderman won’t tour with the group going forward; Spyder Pugh is its new touring guitarist.) She has also instructed the band’s booking agent, Wasserman’s Andrew Morgan, to incorporate regular two-week breaks into its road calendar to mitigate exhaustion — which will prove important, considering the heavy touring the act has planned for Bleeds.

“We like to do not necessarily just ‘A’ and ‘B’ markets,” Hartzman says, citing her own experience living in Greensboro. “You can affect a lot of people when you play smaller markets — but that does result in a lot more touring than a normal band that’s maybe just playing New York or L.A.”

That means even more Wednesday fans will get to exorcise their demons alongside Hartzman and the group. “Anything I get to scream feels so good to me, and I’ve missed it so much,” she says. “I put screams in almost every song now, just because it is so therapeutic”.

I want to end by quoting a sizeable chunk of NPR’s review. Bleeds has received positive reviews across the board. I have started listening to Wednesday this year, so I have a lot of catching up to do. I think that Wednesday will continue to put out music for years to come. Such an exciting find:

“Bleeds starts with the most intimate encounter a Southern girl can have — pulling the ticks off someone's body — and follows up that image with the confounding but relatable line, "If you need me I'll call you." This rubber-band tension between a visceral and potentially embarrassing physical experience (in other songs it's a mosh pit or accidentally getting hit in the face with a baseball bat) and a distancing comment (something a mother might say at the end of an argument, or an ex trying to tamp a wound) defines the position Hartzman's made for herself within Wednesday's music. She feels everything hard, but she also stands apart, which is why she survives when those around her fall and can sort out their messes in these songs.

Tension accumulates musically throughout Bleeds as the band (all members are credited as writers on each track) leans all the way in one direction and then another, tangling up source material that includes hard honky-tonk, Southern boogie, Pacific Northwest grunge, cosmic country and outsider folk rock to create a sound that's very specific but never subordinate to its influences. The band's studio guitarist MJ Lenderman (who's no longer touring with the band since he and Hartzman disentangled themselves romantically as he began his own rise toward indie stardom after releasing 2024's critics' poll-topping Manning Fireworks) and slide guitarist/multi-instrumentalists Xandy Chelmis are crucial foils, intuiting when Hartzman's stories require a little sugar or a squall; the rhythm section of Ethan Baechtold and Alan Miller provide inexhaustible momentum while also knowing when to reduce the pull on the elastic so that, no matter what extreme the band's exploring, the songs' structures never break.

Wednesday wouldn't be itself without these dynamics, but it's Hartzman's singing that clinches the band's sound. Wednesday's outstanding 2022 covers album Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling 'em Up revealed much about how she developed her voice; she's taken lessons from forebears who went to extremes while hanging on to a fundamental beauty and control, from honky-tonker Gary Stewart to psychedelic romantic Chris Bell to confrontational troubadour Vic Chesnutt. On Bleeds she's both more rageful and more heartbroken than ever as she accounts for the destruction generated by drugs, neglect and the hopelessness that festers when people feel truly unseen. "Wasp" is a full-on screamo tirade, one minute and 26 seconds of emetically released frustration (and interestingly, a rare case of Hartzman turning her observational skills wholly inward, though its most haunting image, of herself as a spiderweb in a window, maintains her status as a barely-noticed presence in the pathway of others' doomed trajectories).

That song stands in contrast to the gently heartrending "Carolina Murder Suicide," inspired by a podcast but made as tangible as driveway dirt by Hartzman's careful writing. It's a ballad that echoes college rock classics like R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain (I'm Sorry)," songs that work against pop sentimentality by using pretty music to confront something horrific. Hartzman goes farther than most songwriters would by crafting a child narrator straight out of a Carson McCullers story, her innocence damaged by the carnage next door. She's left contemplating the meaninglessness of lives forgotten even after such a spectacular end: The house collapsed / But the fire kept on burning at the scraps / and I wondered if grief could break you in half / when the gossip died / and the ruins rotted away in the rain / and the fruit flies went to sleep in the rain. Insects as the only ones left to testify.

Making prettiness gleam like a weapon is one trick Wednesday has perfected in service of Hartzman's determination to resist anything too maudlin or too sweet. In "Townies," one of the most directly told stories on Bleeds, she recalls the lost companions of her juvenile delinquency; fragmented recollections of sexual assault and a frenemy's early death are thrown off-kilter by the power-pop sunniness of the chorus. Humor is another key tool for Hartzman. Writing the way normal people talk or think instead of like a lyricist, she cultivates the laughs that make pain bearable — that candy bar break at one funeral, the distortion of a livestreamed image at another. The absurdity of life on the margins reaches an apogée on the album's final track, "Gary's II," which re-introduces listeners to Hartzman's longtime landlord, a decrepit youngish guy whose dentures are finally explained as a casualty of a truly random bar fight. Heartbreak, Hartzman's stories make clear, may not exactly be accidental — the choices people make, mixed up with circumstances they don't create themselves, add up to the moment where the Louisville Slugger hits the lip.

It's a sign of Hartzman's maturity as a writer (and, dare I say, a person) that she applies this same compassion to her own misfortune. Followers of Wednesday will likely search for clues about that breakup with Lenderman, and though this album was made during that unraveling, they do appear, wrapped in affecting melancholy. "Elderberry Wine," the countrified weeper that's become Wednesday's biggest hit so far, juxtaposes snapshots of their relationship's fadeout with notes on the weirdness of fame. "The champagne tastes like elderberry wine" sounds like a homey reference to a homespun libation, a way of staying grounded in the face of growing fame, but it has a darky humorous punchline — elderberry, as Hartzman told podcaster Dylan Tupper Rupert on her show Music Person, is poisonous in large amounts.

Addressing the situation directly and briefly in the Lefty Frizzell rewrite "The Way Love Goes," she maintains her wit and her equilibrium. Her introversion broke up the couple, Hartzman told Rupert; kind to a fault, she said that Lenderman deserves a partner who enjoys the perks of the renown his own breakthrough brought, instead of one who retreats to the bedroom with a migraine. She says as much in this song — but with an edge: "There's women less spoiled by your knowing," she croons, pulling on the word "less" like taffy just to torture him before delivering that ambiguous predicate. Does "spoiled" mean "treated especially well"? Or "ruined"? That's between them, she offers, eyebrow arched.

Maybe Hartzman will get around to her version of Joni Mitchell's Blue at a later date. For now, she's focused on the reality that one person's pain always resonates within a much larger world of sorrow, and that wider view is what makes Bleeds so essential right now. Plenty of bad stuff is happening in 2025, that, to many, feels unprecedented. It's important, however, to always remember that for many people — for those edge walkers who have been cast out of society's embrace for reasons that are often beyond their control — disaster is a daily possibility. That lived reality is one thing that's brought us all into such a perilous position. All Karly Hartzman wants, she makes clear on Bleeds, is for people to remember that. To really feel it. Because the edge is never really that far away”.

Go and follow the brilliant Wednesday. Although not a new band, I think a lot of people in the U.K. especially are unaware of their music. I hope they get to spend some time in this country soon. Bleeds is one of the standout albums of the year. This is a band that…

EVERY music lover should follow.

__________

Follow Wednesday

PHOTO CREDIT: Graham Tolbert

Official:

https://www.wednesday.band/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/wednesday_gurl/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/discover/wednesday-band

Twitter:

https://x.com/wednesday_band_

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https://open.spotify.com/artist/4j7DrazfBZLLD0OrVoAtEe?si=Me0EMFrbQt6u5jlRO_CQAw

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FEATURE: We’ve Got Alchemy: Impressions on Kate Bush’s Best of the Other Sides

FEATURE:

 

 

We’ve Got Alchemy

 

Impressions on Kate Bush’s Best of the Other Sides

__________

I am excited…

to get the vinyl of Kate Bush’s Best of the Other Sides on 31st October. The digital version is out now. There are not many huge surprises in terms of what is included. However, the original is one that was popular with fans when it came out in 2019 but since went out of print. Or the album wasn’t being pressed or available on streaming services. I think most of the tracks are available on YouTube, though there is demand for that original album, The Other Sides. It is good that we have a reduced version. An eleven-track release that takes the best tracks from the first album. It is wonderful that we get these songs on streaming services. I want to provide some impressions on the tracks. The tracklisting is as below:

1. Experiment IV (remastered 2025)
2. You Want Alchemy (remastered 2025)
3. Rocket Man
4. Walk Straight Down the Middle (remastered 2025)
5. The Big Sky (Meteorological 12" Mix)
6. The Man I Love
7. Under the Ivy
8. Mná Na Héireann
9. Lyra
10. Brazil (Sam Lowry's First Dream)
11. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) 12" Mix

This is album like a studio album in itself. One that sits alone and has its own weight. The track order is key too. I love how the songs are balanced. Experiment IV appeared on Kate Bush’s greatest hits album, The Whole Story. The only single from that album is one of a few tracks from a particular time period. That was 1986. Under the Ivy is the B-side from 1985’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). That was the first single from Hounds of Love. There is also a 12” mix of Running Up That Hill. Rather than placing those tracks together, they are separated. I think it works well. Opening with Experiment IV, we have this driving and percussive song. One that has a darkness and punch, it is a track many Kate Bush fans would not have heard. One of her most underrated singles, I have covered this track before.

There are a few selections from the album that I want to cover. Songs that I was not expecting to be on the Best of the Other Sides. There are a few great and classic Kate Bush covers. The Man I Love from 1994. Rocket Man from 1991. Mná Na Héireann from 1996. These are interesting. The Man I Love is a rare gem that shows Bush’s voice in smoky and seductive mood. A style and sound that sadly was not explored more. Appearing on a tribute album Originally released in 1924, it was written by George Gershwin and lyrics by his brother Ira Gershwin. Kate Bush’s version appeared on a tribute album for the Gershwins. Covers of their songs. Larry Adler played harmonica. It is a classic example of Bush’s interpretive genius and, placed between The Big Sky (Meteorological 12" Mix) and Under the Ivy, it is a 1990s track between some 1980s cuts. I am going to get to that mix of The Big Sky. However, the other covers are great. Her version of Rocket Man appeared on another tribute album. One for Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Elton John is a hero of Bush’s, so it was maybe a risk covering an Elton John song. Or a daunting task. Giving Rocket Man a different take, it is a bit Reggae and Celtic Folk. Mná Na Héireann is one of the standouts. I will highlight three other tracks, You Want Alchemy?, The Big Sky (Meteorological 12" Mix) and Brazil (Sam Lowry's First Dream).

Although the Kate Bush originals are brilliant, her cover versions are amazing. Mná Na Héireann is an amazing song that most people have not heard. Now available on streaming services and part of this incredible album, it is one of the highlights. This article from the Kate Bush Encyclopedia gives us more details. Included is some brief reaction from Kate Bush:

“Kate Bush recorded her rendition in 1995 for the 1996 compilation album Common Ground – Voices of Modern Irish Music. According to Donal Lunny, who contacted her for this contribution, ‘She was very excited with the idea of singing the Irish in a way that Irish speakers would understand, and of conveying the meaning of the song through the sounds of the words. I helped as much as I could. She had Seán Ó Sé’s recording of ‘Mná na hÉireann’ as reference. She was as faithful to the pronunciations as she could possibly be. It was with characteristic care and attention that she approached it. She did not stint one bit. Of course you’ll get people saying, `Oh, you’d know she doesn’t talk Irish straight off’. You wouldn’t know it straight off. I would defend her efforts as being totally sincere. No matter how perfect she gets it, she’s not an Irish speaker. This may rankle with some people.’

The track was reviewed as ‘impressive’ by Hot Press, saying that Kate’s ‘fiery interpretation….may well prove to be among the most controversial cuts on Common Ground’. Indeed the Irish Times review of Common Ground singled out Kate as ‘fumbling her way through’ the song. NME was more positive about the track: “Since Lunny made a significant mark on her ‘Sensual World’ album, she repays him with a swooning version of ‘Mná na hÉireann’ (Women Of Ireland) that’s as good as anything she’s done this decade.”
Kate about ‘Mná na hÉireann’

It was fun and very challenging …..I will eagerly await comments from all Irish-speaking listeners in particular. I’m sure Ma gave me a helping hand!

Kate Bush Club Newsletter, December 1995

Donal Lunny about ‘Mná na hÉirann’

Not being an Irish speaker, she had to learn the words phonetically and took enormous pains over that. We exchanged, at the time I think it was faxes, of phonetic versions of it and spoke over the phone, went over the pronunciations, and eventually she got it pretty well.

Kate Bush sings as Gaeilge – Donal Lunny on working with a legend, RTÉ Radio 1 (Ireland), 4 September 2020”.

I am surprised Lyra is among the eleven from Best of the Other Sides. Included on the soundtrack for the 2007 film, The Golden Compass, it is not considered one of her best songs. Although it a song that appears on a film soundtrack and was released in the 2000s, perhaps fans would have preferred something different from The Other Sides. I love how Walk Straight Down the Middle is included. The B-side from The Sensual World’s title track, that song was also included as a bonus track on the tape and C.D. versions of the album. That was released in 1989. It is a curious song that Bush was not a huge fan of. Perhaps seeing it as more throwaway, she said in a 1989 interview: “It’s a bit less worked on than the other tracks. It’s about try not to get caught up in extremes. My mother was down the garden when the funny bits at the end were being played. She rushed in and said she’d heard some peacocks in the garden! How sweet! I can’t take the song seriously now”. You Want Alchemy? is another one of those Kate Bush songs that many fans do not know. It was written and recorded after the completion of 1993’s The Red Shoes and the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Kate Bush provided some new commentary on the song on her website when promoting The Best of the Other Sides. In the lyrics, Bush references Hound of Love’s Cloudbusting and The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour. Here is some more detail about You Want Alchemy?:

“Kate sings about meeting a beekeeper, who launches into his awe, his reverence, his love for bees, which she first responds to with ‘Is he some kind of nut, or what?’ She doesn’t get it, this fascination with bees. She seems to take a tender step into this man’s private world, to open herself and feel and respect this lonely man’s joys. She approaches with sympathy, and for a brief moment, she can share his vision, and see the alchemy. The music includes quotations of Debussy’s ‘Clair de lune’ from his ‘Suite bergamasque’.

‘You Want Alchemy?’ was meant to be one of the tracks on The Red Shoes album, but because there was already so much material, it ended up as a B Side.
I love Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangement in this song. It really takes us to that lovely afternoon, up in the hills with the mad beekeeper.” (Kate Bush website, retrieved 22 September 2025)”

Two more tracks to discuss before moving on. The Big Sky (Meteorological 12" Mix) is my fans’ favourite. Longer than the single version, perhaps this is the superior version. This is one of the tracks that we need to preserve and have on an album. Brilliant that it is included on streaming services. It means that fans can access this wonderful mix time and time again. I do not have a lot to say about it, other than the fact that it is a great song that adds depth and layers to the original. A single released from Hounds of Love. Perhaps my favourite selection from Best of the Other Sides is Brazil (Sam Lowry's First Dream). A song I have not heard in years, I am glad that it gets an outing here. Again, this is a song from a film soundtrack. Bush, as a huge film fan, was probably offered a lot of chances to contribute to film soundtracks. This Woman’s Work, from 1989’s The Sensual World, first featured in 1988’s She’s Having a Baby. Brazil (Sam Lowry's First Dream) is rare because it was only included on a repressing of the Brazil soundtrack. It features a magnificent Kate Bush vocal and reminds me a bit of The Man I Love. In terms of the sound and vocal. Kate Bush’s recordings of the 1990s is fascinating. The Red Shoes’ production is a little tinny and lacks huge depth. However, when she was recording other projects in the 1990s, we get new sides to her voice. Brazil (Sam Lowry's First Dream) is a tremendous song:

“‘Brazil’ is the title song from the 1985 British film directed by Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam, Charles McKeown and Tom Stoppard. Ary Barroso’s 1939 song ‘Aquarela Do Brasil’ (‘Watercolor Of Brazil’, often simply ‘Brazil’) in a version specifically performed by Geoff Muldaur is the leitmotif of the movie, although other background music is also used. Michael Kamen, who scored the film, originally recorded ‘Brazil’ with vocals by Kate Bush. This recording was not included in the actual film or the original soundtrack release; however, it has been subsequently released on re-pressings of the soundtrack.

There are actually two versions of ‘Brazil’: one was included on a 1992/1993 CD release of the soundtrack from the movie ‘Brazil’. A new version, with different vocals by Kate, was released in 1998 on the album ‘Michael Kamen’s Opus’”.

Fans will have their own views as to the best tracks and the sequencing on Best of the Other Sides. I think that the eleven choices, maybe aside from Lyra, are wonderful. A perfectly blend combination of songs that spans different sides of Kate Bush’s recording career. Some great covers and Under the Ivy. Her best B-side. I know there will be a lot of demand and excitement when the vinyl and C.D. versions are released…

ON 31st October.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Maude Latour

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

Maude Latour

__________

THE incredible…

Maude Latour is finishing off a run of tour dates at the moment. Her debut album, Sugar Water, was released last year. I covered Latour for Spotlight back in 2022. I am going to get to some interviews published with her since 2022. Some more recent ones. You may not know this artist, but I hope that the interviews I am bringing in will give you inspiration to check out her music. I am going to start out with an article from Ones to Watch. They spoke with Maude Latour about Sugar Water. I will return to Ones to Watch and a second chat, where they spoke with Maude Latour about her Sugar Water tour. However, this first interview is one I want to lead with:

“Pop prophet Maude Latour has been training for most of her life. Having built an intricate world for her music from the start of her career, today’s debut studio album, Sugar Water is the fully realized version of years of soul searching through song. But don’t worry, Latour is not done searching and will never be.

“My debut album is about growing up and learning how to lose things, people, and love— all parts of getting older," shares Latour. This album is an attempt at trying to hold onto the sweetness of this short life while it is still happening. It’s my most existential, deepest thoughts coated in pop music. I hope it takes you on the journey of a lifetime.”

The story begins with “Officially Mine” a track that brings high energy and blissful optimism front and center. It’s the peak of Latour’s signature electro-pop flair and engaging flow, possessing the bubbling electricity of a budding crush. The following tracks are two out of three previously released singles, leaving the rest of the album in completely uncharted territory. Latour wields this power by immersing listeners in a maze of love, loss, and reflection on her upbringing and the future she’s paving for herself.

“Whirlpool” and the title track are a one-two punch of Latour’s more experimental side, emphasizing the curious nature of Sugar Water. She experiences the unstable effects of growing up while remaining at ease, knowing it’s all part of the plan. In the emotional “Comedown” an epic ode to first loves and a standout moment on the album, Latour’s forced to stare at her past self and understand how it’s led her here. After “Comedown,” the focus shifts from nostalgia to moving forward. “Summer of Love,” which Latour revealed was a strong contender to be the album’s opening track, signifies this redirection. It’s a sweet confidence boost, bringing back the contagious energy of earlier tracks. Latour sings of a whirlwind summer romance, one that feels like a rebirth without the pressure of permanence.

In the ethereal “Save Me”, a Dido-inspired album highlight, Latour lets down her defenses in a way she rarely has before. The music of Latour has always been about everyone’s own ability to let the magic of the world push them forward, even in the toughest times. In “Save Me,” our heroine is so in love that she’s able to admit she might need a little help picking herself up from time to time. It’s a beautiful moment, one that doesn’t only stand out on the album but amongst Latour’s entire discography”

Whether it's because of her meticulous attention to detail or her pure ability to captivate through song, listening to Sugar Water feels like a front-row seat to your own life, described through Maude Latour’s eyes. Whether you’re a first-time listener or a long-time fan, the palpable connection Latour has with her audience and her music is undeniable. To say this is an impressive debut would be an understatement and we look forward to witnessing the path this rising star is paving for herself”.

There are a couple of other interviews I want to come to before rounding things up. Boston University’s WTBU Radio spoke with Maude Latour about her incredible record; “the creative process, and what it’s like being a young musician in the digital age”. If you have not followed and heard Maude Latour, then you do need to check her out. I have been listening to her music for a few years now and it is amazing to see her grow and get this attention. A phenomenal talent that deserves massive and long-lasting success. This is someone who is going to have a very long career:

“Tabitha Curry (TC): I wanted to ask about the sound of the record—how did it come together and what were you drawing on?

Maude Latour (ML): Totally. Well, “Cosmic” was the first song that I wrote for the album [Sugar Water]. I wanted this album to reference all the different musical influences that I have – moments of rock, trippy distorted guitar, 2012 recession pop, electronic music, club music, trippy psychedelic music, hyper-pop. I wanted to blur all these genres and make something that was a kaleidoscope of me and all the music that I love.

TC: Do you find that all of your songs come from this metaphysical place where you feel almost bestowed upon an idea? Are there things that trigger the feeling of needing to write a song about it, or is it totally outside of you?

ML: I think there’s different categories of how things can initiate. Maybe if I was not doing this professionally, I would just wait for those moments to happen. When you want to dive in deeply and make anything a practice, you have to practice opening this channel and letting things just stream through and not judging them. Just getting the bad songs out, getting everything that’s not the song out and learning how to listen instead of having it come from you. But, there’s definitely songs that I’ve kickstarted— maybe those aren’t as good or as pure. Every song has a moment of “Oh, wait, this part and then this part – wait and then together they make a new idea”. There’s no way that that divine synchronicity comes from me. That’s totally something else in the works.

PHOTO CREDIT: Anna Koblish

TC: On the idea of being an artist and having to produce a product—how does that feel in this time where social media runs becoming “relevant?” What’s that like for you?

ML: Hitting the nail on the head. I think this is all a humbling journey to remember to practice not comparing yourself and to practice being detatched from numbers and results and posting. I think it’s a mindfulness, a challenge of do you love your art so much that who cares about the results – can it be that pure? I think that’s how I’ve approached the promotion of it over a long period of time—I’ve been putting out music for eight years. It is such an important part of it, it’s allowed the most exciting moments of growth in my career and it’s how everyone knows my music at all—it’s only through social media. It’s through word of mouth sometimes, like with your roommates. But, it’s a love-hate relationship and we all have it. We all compare ourselves, but it’s a perfect obstacle to have to wake up in the morning and be like “the numbers don’t matter, they can’t matter.”

TC: Okay, what’s new about this tour? Obviously, you’re headlining versus opening—which you did for Fletcher, right? What’s different about being at the center of it?

ML: I am very excited, I’ve toured a lot of times and I want this to be a very new experience. I’ve never toured an album before, so there are twelve new songs that I haven’t sung to the people who know my music. I feel it will be a very different experience, but also pulling from all the things that have made my shows uniquely mine in the past. I’m really taking people on the journey of this album and I want to bring it to life. I want to make it make sense for people in person. I am most looking forward to getting a totally new meaning from the songs when I hear other people experiencing them. This album has been a question mark of if people have listened to it and if they like it. To see what it means to them so that I fill this empty hole in my heart that I feel when I’m away from everyone. It will be so fun. Are you going to be at the show? What show are you going to be at?”.

I am going to end with another interview from Ones to Watch. In the interview, Maude Latour reflected on the Sugar Water tour. Interviewed some time after her album was released, this is someone who was changing lives and captivating fans. As we read in the opening of the interview, Ones to Watch spoke with Latour at the Regent Theater in L.A. They write how you could “feel the block buzzing with excitement from the line of jittery fans decked out in Sugar Water blue, sparkly makeup, hair tinsel, and merch dedicated to the artist on the sold out marquee - the glittery pop prophet that is Maude Latour”:

“OnesToWatch: I was listening to the last time we chatted, which was a few weeks before the album came out, and I remember you saying it was one of the first times you ever talked about Sugar Water in-depth. You were fascinated by what your listeners were going to make of it. Now that you’ve toured this album, what have you noticed? How are you feeling?

Maude Latour: You know that my live show is the core of what makes this special. I'm surprised at how much the songs make so much more sense in the room. “Sugar Water”, the title track, was meant to be in this room. It's such a weird song, so I was nervous to see if people fucked with it or not and these shows made it all make sense. It’s the existential rave that I wanted it to be. “Bloom” hits so hard, which is one of my favorites on the album. I can't believe how much people understand it and feel it. It’s exactly what it's supposed to be and I feel like I'm relearning the meaning of Sugar Water. It feels like I'm ending a chapter, saying goodbye to these feelings and entering a new part of my life. I'm starting to make new music and now I really live here [Los Angeles], I’ve moved fully and have no plans to go back to New York.

I was going to ask, last night of tour in LA - does it feel like home?

This is the first time I feel like I’m coming home, for sure. I'm singing “taste it all like sugar water” to myself every night and I've learned what it means on a new level, wishing for this tour to never end and making peace with the fact that it is going to end. It’s ending right now. That's exactly what the album's about, trying to be as present as possible and knowing it's going to end but still taking in the full moment. So, I feel like I'm relearning the meaning of the album.

When we last talked, we were saying how it was going to be underrated and I've seen the love for it grow throughout the album being out and the tour.

I'm so glad, I agree. It's taken on a whole new life form. It's been so important to me, in my years of writing music, that I help the listener feel like the main character when they put their headphones on. They're the powerful ones in the story that I'm telling. I never make the lyrics self-deprecating, I want my music to have confidence building effects on people. “Save Me” is the first time that I've ever asked for help in a song. I was nervous to make a song like that, because it’s not what I think of my music being for, but that's what this album is about. This new part of life where you’re mourning things in the past for the first time, the beautiful parts of life and losses in life. It's my first time opening my heart in that way. With “Save Me," I ask the crowd to talk to strangers. It’s been such a powerful moment. That is my core, truest mission: making strangers feel like they can look in each other's eyes and see each other totally. This tour feels aligned with those little missions, like the secret box that I'm having at the merch stand and that moment with the crowd during “Save Me." The point is to feel that every night and it feels like my own little holy space, this belief in people.

What are the biggest lessons the Sugar Water tour and album have taught you?

The feeling of being self-assured and confident…it's growing in me. Everyone has a vision in their heart of their truth, their life, and their plan. You can trust your instincts and you can trust your vision, and no one can make those decisions for you. You know the world inside your head. The people in the audience waited for me to make this album. They have supported me for five, six years at this point…and they're still here. It makes me feel like I’m beginning a new version of myself, a new chapter of my life.

I trust myself. There are new feelings in these rooms. There are moments of total love and explosive joy, and then there's sadness. Every night people scream the lyric, “Why am I still so broken-hearted?” with complex pain. They’re people who are grieving, people who are changing. This is a room for all of these things. I'm mourning my own things right now and this tour has helped me do that, reminding me every night “Open your eyes, this is happening right now. This is gonna end.” That’s why this album exists, to learn to love those losses because they make everything bloom. Every night when “Bloom” hits, I think of people that have inspired me and people who aren’t with me anymore…the past versions of myself. They’re all with me in the room.

I know we want to savor the moment so we don’t have to look too far into the future, but what’s next for Maude Latour?

It's important to me that the next thing I write is scary. When I was writing Sugar Water, I was looking at the past, at all the things I was saying goodbye to. I don’t know what the future holds, it's a blank slate again. I don't know who this older version of me is, at all, and I want to write songs that are honest. I want…no I need to need the songs I write. I want to learn something about myself through the next music and I need it to teach me how I feel. I don't know who I would be without my songs, they've taught me so much. They are questions that I put into the world and then the music comes back and tells me what I need to know for the next chapter. I'm curious what it'll tell me, but I'm so excited”.

I am going to leave things there. That is just an introduction to Maude Latour. I would advise people to do some more reading and listen to all of her stuff. Her latest single, TikTokBoom, was released last month. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next for her. Having first spotlighted her in 2022, I was keen to revisit. A successful and wonderful debut album and a fantastic tour, she is going to be winding down soon before the end of the year. It is a perfect time to discover this artist who is bound for Pop greatness. An original and intensely captivating voice in modern music, make sure you go and check out…

THE stunning Maude Latour.

___________

Follow Maude Latour

PHOTO CREDIT: Devin Kasparian 

Official:

https://www.maudelatour.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/maudelstatus

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FEATURE: The Best of the Other Sides Compilation: The Last of Kate Bush Dipping into the Archive?

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best of the Other Sides Compilation

The Last of Kate Bush Dipping into the Archive?

__________

THERE are a mix of emotions…

when Kate Bush announces that she is reissuing an album or bringing out something. It is not brand new music, though the latest announcement is a chance for fans to own a follow-up to an album released in 2018. We will get the Best of the Other Sides  soon. The digital release is available from 26th September, and the vinyl and C.D. release is out on 31st October. You can pre-order here. Featuring remixes and B-sides, I wonder if the new album will offer anything new on top of the 2018 release. That was discontinued. It was great to have those incredible B-sides in one place. It is also sometimes a tease for fans. Bush has said that she is issuing this album for those who did not get a chance to own the 2018 box-set. She has mentioned several tracks and provided some commentary/background, which I am guessing will appear among the album’s tracks. We get highlighted Experiment IV and Rocket Man. I want to highlight the text relating to The Man I Love and Under the Ivy:

“This romantic song was written by George and Ira Gershwin and when Larry Adler put an album together of their songs, called The Glory of Gershwin, he asked me to sing this beautiful song. The album was produced by George Martin. I was very fond of George - such a special talent and creative spirit, a really gentle man, very kind and incredibly interesting. It was a great honour to work with him and Larry. George and Larry were very different personalities (Larry was a real character), but they made a great creative combination.

It was released as a single and Kevin Godley directed the video. I loved working with Kevin - so imaginative and great fun. I’d worked with him and Lol Creme when they directed the video for Peter Gabriel’s song, Don’t Give Up. Kevin chose to present the video in a very traditional way which suited the song extremely well. Godley and Creme are huge talents who left their mark not just in the music industry with their intelligence and wit in the band 10CC but also in the visual world with their groundbreaking videos, working with an impressive list of diverse artists."

"I needed a track to put on the B-Side of the single Running Up That Hill so I wrote this song really quickly. As it was just a simple piano/vocal, it was easy to record.

I performed a version of the song that was filmed at Abbey Rd Studios for a TV show which was popular at the time, called The Tube. It was hosted by Jools Holland and Paula Yates. I find Paula’s introduction to the song very touching.

It was filmed in Studio One at Abbey Rd. An enormous room used for recording large orchestras, choirs, film scores, etc. It has a vertiginously high ceiling and sometimes when I was working in Studio Two,  a technician, who was a good friend, would take me up above the ceiling of Studio One. We had to climb through a hatch onto the catwalk where we would then crawl across and watch the orchestras working away, completely unaware of the couple of devils hovering in the clouds, way above their heads!  I used to love doing this - the acoustics were heavenly at that scary height. We used to toy with the idea of bungee jumping from the hatch."

Her studio albums have been remastered and there has been a lot of retrospection the past six of seven years. However, it is activity from Kate Bush, so one cannot complain! Also, the more retrospection or reissuing we get, it raises the question as to whether this will be Bush ready to start on new work. Kate Bush News were among those who reported on a big and interesting announcement yesterday:

“From her official site announcement:

Fish People are delighted to announce the release of Best of The Other Sides. Digital Release 26th September. Coloured vinyl (Lothlorien colour) release and also CD are available from 31st October. The Other Sides was a collection of all the B-sides and other songs that didn’t exist on any album. It was part of the Remastered Box Set that was released in 2018. That set is no longer available. Three of the tracks have been slightly reworked for the release.

Best of The Other Sides has been designed for people who didn’t have access to that original box set. The title is self-explanatory.

Kate writes: “We have remastered ‘Experiment IV’ and ‘ You Want Alchemy?’ and both include a small edit. I felt ‘ Experiment IV’ would benefit from a longer intro featuring Alan Murphy’s magnificent guitar. ‘You Want Alchemy?’ also has a small edit that tightens up the outro and we’ve re-eq’d the track. ‘Walk Straight Down the Middle’ has also benefitted from being re-eq’d. Hope you enjoy the tweaks!”

The remaining material from The Other Sides will be re released digitally at a later date.”.

It looks like a slimmed version of The Other Sides. It is a pity that we do not get the original reissued. Whatever, it looks like we are going to get more soon enough. I am looking forward the remastered Experiment IV, Walk Straight Down the Middle and You Want Alchemy. The former was a single so had a music video made, though the other two tracks never did. I would love to see Bush releasing a promotional video for one or more of the songs. I hope there is something in the way of a music video. It will not feature Bush, though there would be a lot of interested if she put something out to coincide with the album release. I am sure the physical versions of The Best of the Other Sides will be amazing. The vinyl will be especially impressive. Bush has said how, when it comes to the vinyl release, “all of these are mixed colour vinyl, so each one is individual”. Many fans are embracing a chance to own something not available at the moment. However, many have speculated this is the final bit of looking back before Kate Bush announces a new album. She has spent a lot of time with her older material in recent years. After 2014’s Before the Dawn residency, maybe that adulation and the generations coming together inspired her to focus on her previous work. I don’t think she would have considered this decades ago. The Whole Story, her only greatest hits album, was released in 1986. Kate Bush was hesitant back then of releasing a greatest hits. Always about new music and looking ahead. However, at a certain point in a career, an artist does look back and wants fans old and new to experience their older work in a new way. I think Kate Bush has probably exhausted most avenues.

I do think that there is more in the archives. In terms of unheard material or demos. Maybe Bush does not want to release anything that is incomplete or she is not completely happy with. I do think it would be nice if we got one final album of music that perhaps has never seen the light of the day. Maybe a new greatest hits album that updates The Whole Story. Would fans object to one last repackage and reissue? Technically, a new greatest hits would not be a reissue but an expansion. I do think that Bush is keen to see some of her lesser-heard songs and B-sides put on Spotify and on physical formats. So that it can reach new people. We will learn more very soon about what the tracklisting will be and there might be a post from Kate Bush herself. I wonder whether this is the final time Kate Bush will reissue an album or look back? You have to wonder what else there is. Aerial turns twenty in November, so possibly something relating to that? Will Kate Bush reissue that album or maybe just its second album/disc, A Sky of Honey? I do think that she has probably exhausted the retrospective side. She may not want to spend more time either with reissuing a studio album or remastering B-sides and looking at that side of things. This does all bring to mind whether new music is coming next. I don’t think that we will see an announcement until next year now. However, this unexpected bit of news yesterday has excited people. It is a great release that I am interested in. I am intrigued to hear the remastered Experiment IV particularly. If The Man I Love is in the mix. A 1994 song that shows a different side to her voice. Smokier than pretty much anything she has released. What comes next is anyone’s guess. It is clear Bush is still connected to her past work. She wants to make sure fans have access to it and in physical formats. 

Not to say Bush should never reissue an album or dip into the archives. I did wonder if she would release anything around Hounds of Love turning forty (which turned forty on 16th September). Maybe some B-sides or something special. She did not even post to her website, so I wonder why she overlooked one of her favourite albums! It is good that we are hearing from her now. Something that fans can own that was discontinued. A new album…albeit one with older material. But these rare gems. I do feel like this is the end of the archive period. Nowhere really to go in that respect. It could be the case that Kate Bush is now going to spend all of her energy looking to new material. I have written in a feature that is coming out in the future what a new album might sound like and what it will be motivated by in terms of its themes and lyrics. For the moment, it is great that Kate Bush has graced us with this amazing news and a great album with Best of the Other Sides. The vinyl is one you will want to snap up. I might grab the C.D. version. We will get more detail soon in terms of the album appearing digitally and whether there will be another additional release. Even if a few of the songs have had some minor tweaks, I think that it will add new light and depth to these songs. It will be a must-own edition for existing fans, but also a real treat for new fans. Many of whom would not have heard these songs. If some bemoan Kate Bush bringing out existing material and charging for it, I do think we are closer to new material. In my view, this is the last of the archiving releases. We wait to see what comes next. Kate Bush is engaging with fans and is connected with her older music. This is a really positive thing, and we should all be…

THANKFUL for that!

FEATURE: “Mother, Where Are the Angels?” Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa at Forty-Three

FEATURE:

 

 

“Mother, Where Are the Angels?”

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with her mother, Hannah, in the video for Suspended in Gaffa (a single taken from Kate Bush’s 1982 studio album, The Dreaming)

Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa at Forty-Three

__________

WHEN I normally…

mark the anniversary of this Kate Bush song, I also write about There Goes a Tenner. Both singles were released on 2nd November, 1982. They were included on her fourth studio album, The Dreaming. There Goes a Tenner was released in the U.K. and Ireland only. Another single, Night of the Swallow, was a later release that only came out in Ireland. The Dreaming had an odd single release schedule. I agree that maybe four or five should have been released, though considering she could have put out Houdini and Get Out of My House, you wonder whether it was the wisest decision to release The Dreaming and There Goes a Tenner as singles. I love both of these songs, though I feel the music videos of Houdini and Get Out of My House would have been more powerful and could have resulted in top twenty placings for both songs. The first single, The Dreaming, got into the top twenty – that was as good as it got. One of the poorest-selling singles albums, it was hard to market in that way. Bush was not looking to write singles, so it was not surprising that the chart positions were quite low. This was not the only time that Kate Bush released two singles on the same day…or close to it. For The Red Shoes, Eat the Music and Rubberband Girl came out within a day of each other in 1993. The former was released in the U.S., whilst Rubberband Girl was released everywhere else in the world. Circling back to The Dreaming and its second single that came out on 2nd November, 1982. Suspended in Gaffa was only released in continental Europe and Australia. I am not sure why it was released there. You would think The Dreaming and its Australian connections would be released only there. Suspended in Gaffa warranted a more widespread release! It reached the top fifty in a few European countries – including number thirty-three in France -, but was a very minor success.

It is a shame, as this is one of Kate Bush’s best songs. Many highlight Night of the Swallow as one of these gems that is rarely talked about. But it is a masterpiece. The same could be said of Suspended in Gaffa. In an album with quite a few intense and darker songs, Suspended in Gaffa has this spright and energetic bounce that is at odds with more propulsive and heavier songs such as Pull Out the Pin and Get Out of My House. I want to start off by coming back to a source I included in my most recent feature of Suspended in Gaffa (and There Goes a Tenner). It is interesting that Suspended in Gaffa has been covered quite a few times; by pretty obscure artists for the most part. It was also performed three time for T.V. Kate Bush mimed each time. She performed it live in October 1982 for Houba Houba (France); 2nd November, 1982 for Bananas (Germany), and 30th  December, 1982 on Champs Elysées (France). The inspiration behind the song is interesting, as we see in this Kate Bush Encyclopedia feature:

“Suspended In Gaffa’ is, I suppose, similar in some ways to ‘Sat In Your Lap’ – the idea of someone seeking something, wanting something. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and had the imagery of purgatory and of the idea that when you were taken there that you would be given a glimpse of God and then you wouldn’t see him again until you were let into heaven. And we were told that in Hell it was even worse because you got to see God but then you knew that you would never see him again. And it’s sorta using that as the parallel. And the idea of seeing something incredibly beautiful, having a religious experience as such, but not being able to get back there. And it was playing musically with the idea of the verses being sorta real time and someone happily jumping through life [Makes happy motion with head] and then you hit the chorus and it like everything sorta goes into slow mo and they’re reaching [Makes slow reaching motion with arm] for that thing that they want and they can’t get there. [Laughs]

Interview for MTV, November 1985”.

I am going to concentrate on the lyrics of the song to end. However, to start out, I am coming back to a Dreams of Orgonon article for Suspended in Gaffa and highlight a few observations and insights that they make about the track. I think this is one of the most underrated songs of Kate Bush’s career. A single that deserved wider distribution and more love on the charts:

“It has the same expansive and consumptive obsessions as its sister songs — youthful aporia, an obsession with an unreachable god, a desire to unite with the subconscious. Yet it filters this through a childlike, somewhat Carrollian filter, with a surfeit of internal rhymes, abstract nouns, and ambiguous pronouns like “out in the garden/there’s half of a heaven/and we’re only bluffing,” “I try to get nearer/but as it gets clearer/there’s something appears in the way,” “I pull out the plank and say/thankee for yanking me back/to the fact that there’s always something to distract.”

The lyric is an endless series of prevarications, often relating to knowledge, or the unattainability of it (see “Sat in Your Lap”). The refrain’s “not till I’m ready for you,” “can I have it all now?/we can’t have it all,” “but they’ve told us/unless we can prove that we’re doing it/we can’t have it all” speak to an “all or nothing” approach, not identifying exactly what’s at stake so much as its urgency. Desire gets codified as an end in itself, often for a god (“I caught a glimpse of a god/all shining and bright”) — “until I’m ready for you” gives away the game (constructive spiritual union with a deity is impossible if one is unready to consent). “The idea of the song is that of being given a glimpse of ‘God’ — something that we dearly want — but being told that unless we work for it, we will never see it again, and even then, we might not be worthy of it,” Bush explained to her fan club. Tapping into the subconscious is a difficulty — when one has a glimpse of something wondrous, there’s a desperation to retrieve the feelings associated with it. “Everything or nothing” can be a neurodivergent impulse, but it’s also how a taste of the sublime works.

The nature of aporia in “Suspended in Gaffa” is cinematic. There’s the title, obviously, referring to the line “am I suspended in gaffa?,” itself a reference to gaffer (or “gaffa”) tape, which is commonly used in film and stage productions. The laboriousness of cinema is inferred a few times (“it all goes slo-mo”), as reflections and manipulation, staples of cinema, get pulled into the mix. Bush even goes quasi-Lacanian at one point; nudging herself with “that girl in the mirror/between you and me/she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere at all,” a moment of amusing self-deprecation.

The music video, while counterintuitively simple in its setup of Bush dancing on her own in a barn, is similarly weird. Bush’s hair is made up to twice the height of her head as she dances in a purple jumpsuit, slowly jogging in place and thrashing her arms on the floor like an adolescent Job on her rural ash pile. In a pleasantly domestic turn, Bush’s mother Hannah appears (shockingly) as Bush’s mother. The resulting video is both tender and discordant, the ethos of “Suspended in Gaffa” in microcosm.

Bush’s fight with aporia moves forward. She mixes religious metaphors like a hermeneuticist in a Westminster pub (“it’s a plank in me eye,” taken from Matthew 7:5, is adjuncted by “a camel/who’s trying to get through it,” a quiet subversion of the Talmudic “eye of a needle” axiom, cited by Christ in the Synoptic Gospels and additionally by the Qu’ran 7:40), grasping fragments of faiths, mediums, and metaphors in their simplest form. The results are crucially inchoate, as the perspective of a child so often is. Yet through that rudimentary perspective comes a different understanding of emotional truths than one usually finds from an adult point-of-view. Fragments and naïveté are by no means inherently less scholarly than a more mature perspective; sometimes, they’re the most efficacious tools a person has for exploring the ridiculous and sublime”.

I am going to return to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and what Kate Bush said about filming its music video. One that features a brief appearance from her mother, Hannah. She hugs her daughter in a really lovely and powerful moment! I think that the video, whilst simple, is one of the best she released. Directed by Brian Wiseman, it is a visual that stays in the head:

“Kate wrote about the filming of this music video: “The video of ‘Suspended in Gaffa’ was to be done as simply and quickly as possible; as always with very little time to complete it in, the simpler the better. I saw it as being the return to simplicity, a light-hearted dance routine, no extras, no complicated special effects. As we were all so pleased with the previous sets – put together under the supervision of a very clever man, Steve Hopkins – we asked him to build another, this time an old barn with large gaps in the walls where we could allow the light to streak through. We used a combination of natural and artificial light, and everyone was thrilled with the sense of realism that the set achieved. Steve brought in huge branches of trees that were behind the gaps in the set, and a dedicated helper called ‘Podge’ sat up on a piece of scaffolding for six hours and enthusiastically shook a piece of tree to make the light move and dance as if motivated by a furtive wind. The video did remain uncomplicated – just a few effects and just one extra: but a very special. one”.

I think that Suspended in Gaffa is one of the most tattoo-worthy songs in her cannon. In terms of the lyrics and how you should have them on your skin. Prime examples include “Out in the garden/There’s half of a heaven”, “I caught a glimpse of a god, all shining and bright”, and “That girl in the mirror/Between you and me/She don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere at all”. On 1st November, this amazing single turns forty-three. In a wider sense, it is the fourth track on The Dreaming. It is sandwiched between two quite haunting and intense songs: Pull Out the Pin and Leave It Open. The tracks are quite hypnotic in their own way. I think Suspended in Gaffa offers some levity and reflection. It is a deep and fascinating song that breaks up two slightly more dense and layered numbers. A freedom and comparative looseness to Suspended in Gaffa. It is a masterful Kate Bush song I have rarely heard played on the radio. There is not too much written about it. That brilliant video and those compelling lyrics. It is peak Kate Bush! I am aware there are some fans of Bush who might not know about this song at all. It is a work of incredible brilliance that…

YOU really need to hear.

FEATURE: A Design for Life: The Pleasure and Joy of a Music Book…and Why These Books Deserve More Attention

FEATURE:

 

A Design for Life

PHOTO CREDIT: Orion Publishing Co

The Pleasure and Joy of a Music Book…and Why These Books Deserve More Attention

__________

IT is pretty blissful…

IN THIS PHOTO: BBC Radio 3 broadcaster Elizabeth Alker is the author of the incredible new book, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop

when you get to own a hardback music book! I have nothing against a paperback, though nothing beats the feel of a hardback! The toughness and solidity. It is this bulky and weighty book that is a pleasure to own and read. Maybe it is just me, though I don’t think we discuss music books enough. I have spoken about this before. How we review albums and singles, and yet music books are not really included alongside them. They may appear in the ‘Books’ section of a website, though that it is often reserved for non-music books. Fiction. I do feel that there are some amazing works relatively under-discussed because they are not albums. Works from authors not as important as those from artists. I am going to move to look at two recent music books that explore the songs of two decades-running but very different artists. I am starting out with 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure: A History of Manic Street Preachers by Keith Cameron. Published on 11th September, I did not know about this book. I am a Manic Street Preachers fan, so this sounds really interesting. Also, at 560 pages, it is one of the most voluminous and detailed music books of the year! A true tome that should be read by Manics fans and those who maybe do not know that much about the band:

“The story of Manic Street Preachers is unique in pop. Raging out of the stricken mining communities of south Wales in the late 80s, they were bonded by friendships, family ties and a self-styled 'geometry of contempt', whereby James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore would orchestrate the daring intellectual broadsides written by Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire. Seemingly condemned to mere cult status by a cruel juncture of artistic triumph, commercial failure and personal despair, the story took an agonising twist when the tragedy of Edwards' 1995 disappearance was followed by a remarkable rebirth built upon 'A Design For Life's hymn to the band's working-class roots, and then the award-winning, multi-million-selling album Everything Must Go, a majestic soundtrack to history and loss.

Less than five years later, Manic Street Preachers played to 60,000 at the national stadium of Wales and had their second UK Number 1 single. Subsequent output has confirmed the band as both a wellspring of restless creativity and a barometer of the cultural conversation.

Because it was music that saved them, it's through the prism of their music that Keith Cameron tells the definitive history of Manic Street Preachers, drawing on many hours of new interviews to dive deep into 168 songs, from 1988's debut single 'Suicide Alley' to the late day peaks of 2025's album Critical Thinking. Writing with the band's full co-operation, his book charts the dynamic evolution of a universe in which Karl Marx and Kylie Minogue happily co-exist, that accords Rush and The Clash equal favour, and where Morrissey & Marr meet Torvill & Dean via Nietzsche and New Order in a single four-minute pop song - all in the name of what Nicky Wire himself calls 'the fabulous disaster' of Manic Street Preachers”.

 I am going to quote from a five-star review MOJO awarded 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure: A History of Manic Street Preachers recently. Truly, you have to admire the passion and work that has gone into this book. Also, at only thirty pounds, it is remarkably good value considering how much information you get! I don’t think that we talk about the importance and relevance of music books. I am going to focus on a couple that document the songs of great artists. However, there are so many different approaches and directions music books can take. From the more hagiographic to something with a unique direction:

“In his brisk introduction to this 550-page triumph, the MOJO writer Keith Cameron perfectly summarises a 37-year career: “Manic Street Preachers built their own reality, then rebuilt it multiple times.”

They arrived from their native south Wales as a neo-punk quartet with a year-zero interview technique. Now, three decades after the disappearance of Richey Edwards, they manage to combine the damaged wisdom of middle age with the restlessness that has always defined them. Which is to say, the Manics remain a completely singular presence, with reference points that no other rock group has ever got near, from Albert Camus to the Skids. That means, of course, that they are a dream subject for the right kind of author, and ideally suited to a Revolution In The Head-esque telling of their story via forensic exploration of their compositions and recordings, and everything that has been poured into them.

 

In between lies a narrative full of wonderful detail. 1993’s From Despair To Where was based on a brilliantly madcap quest to somehow combine Joy Division’s From Safety To Where with Rod Stewart’s True Blue, and momentarily convinced the Manics’ late manager and mentor Philip Hall that it was “gonna be our transatlantic Number 1, like Maggie May.” On Underdogs, a limited-edition single that trailed 2007’s Send Away The Tigers, Bradfield ruefully admits that he was far too in thrall to Metallica: “I was completely fucking Hetfielded out of my mind. It was too big, too proto-metal, too legs astride.” On a doomed European tour in 1994, Wire survived on “personal stocks of Crunchy Nut cornflakes, which he kept under his bunk on the tourbus.”

The over-arching plot is driven by the aforementioned creative rebuilding – tales of how this most self-aware of bands have consistently transformed what they do, which Wire and Bradfield tell with both insight and bathetic humour. But as well as their contributions, what really clinches the book’s excellence is Cameron’s incisive prose. Nicky Wire’s vocal on 2009’s William’s Last Words, he writes, was “nervous but resolute, like watery early morning sunlight”. The Masses Against The Classes, the ferocious single that reached Number 1 in January 2000, is nailed as “a self-directed booby trap of rage at what the Manics had become”.

His most vivid observation of all is that whatever the crises and fireworks scattered through this book, what really matters is the art: “Songs made the Manics, offered them a means to escape, to transcend and to celebrate themselves, and songs saved them and sustain them still.” This is the story told here, so consummately that it feels completely definitive”.

There is another song-by-song book that has come out recently that, again, pairs music passion and depth into this beautiful hardback. Whilst quite a few books about Beyoncé have been written, I don’t think there has been enough focus on this iconic and hugely important artist. One of the most influential of her generation. Annie Zaleski’s Beyoncé: The Stories Behind the Songs: Every single track, explored and explained is a book that interests me greatly – as a big Beyoncé fan. Here are some details:

“Discover the full story behind every single song Beyoncé has ever released.

From Destiny's Child to Cowboy Carter, this is the definitive guide to one of music's greatest ever talents, covering hundreds of songs including:

- hit singles
- hidden gems
- soundtracks
- cover versions
- deep cuts

...and much more besides.

Award-winning music writer Annie Zaleski (Rolling Stone, Billboard, the Guardian) explores and explains the fascinating details of every song, from early group hit 'Say My Name' to solo work such as 'Crazy In Love' and 'Run The World (Girls)' - and including the all-conquering Cowboy Carter.

A journey through pop, hip-hop, R&B, gospel and even country, this is Beyoncé's story told through her incredible music”.

Fans will know about this book no doubt. Anyone who follows Annie Zaleski on social media. However, I cannot find any reviews for this book. No interviews with her either. It is amazing that we do not really spend much time with music books or give them even a fraction of the time we do on albums in terms of promotion and inspection.

PHOTO CREDIT: Headline Publishing Group

These two books are about specific artists. There have been some brilliant recent music books published recently. I published a feature about Elizabeth Alker’s Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop. Fortunately there was a bit more in the way of spotlighting and investigation. However, even then, I don’t think enough websites and music sites put this amazing book on their pages! I am going to quote from the start and end of a review from The Arts Desk for one of this year’s best music books:

“Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.

In the 20th century that changed radically. New technologies offered almost unlimited increase in the sounds that could be conjured up on stage or in the studio. And conceptually, the range of sounds some considered musical expanded just as much, abolishing the boundary between music and noise, and even – thanks to John Cage – permitting the composer to propose no sounds at all.

Elizabeth Alker dives into this history with great verve. Her chapters generally pair a well-known track from a pop hit-maker with one or more pioneers of composition or technology, often linking to a scene or scenes where new sounds were mixed, and remixed, by experimentally-minded artists.

Alker’s openness to new sounds and the range of her enthusiasms is admirable, if slightly dazzling. Each chapter deals with a different acoustic world, and, like all good music books, her writing invites pausing to listen to new things, or revisit old ones with a different appreciation. It’s a book to keep on the shelf to cue new exploration when the stuff you have been listening to feels a little too predictable.

The description fits another excellent recent title from the same publisher, one that prompts a final acknowledgment for one of the conditions of this book’s excellence. Alker’s day job is as a presenter for BBC Radio 3, after stints with Radio 6 Music. It’s hard to imagine anywhere better for an ace communicator who is at home with a vast range of contemporary composition as well as the full gamut of pop genres to develop their work. Her book comes just a few years after fellow Radio 3 person Kate Molleson’s Sound Within Sound, which concerns 20th-century composers who deserve a wider hearing. The books go together very well, and it seems fair to take both as added benefits of the licence fee. Lisa Nandy, please note”.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Elizabeth Alker (@elizabethalker)

There is precious little in the way of websites that document the music books that have been released this year. The Guardian is a rare exception when it comes to archiving the music books that have come out this year. However, these are only a small percentage of what has been released. I am not sure if there is a website that is dedicated to music books. It is a pity that they are not regarded as highly as albums. However, the main point of this feature was to wax lyrical about the beautiful feel of a music book in hardback. I have provided details of three. However, there has been a whole host this year that could easily sit on any music lover’s bookshelf! To me, there are few finer experiences than buying a music book and getting lost in its pages. Ranging from two-hundred to over five-hundred, you can spend days and weeks pouring through them! Whether it relates to a band like Manic Street Preachers and a selection of their important songs, or is a broader look at the link between Classical and Pop music in the twentieth-century. The authors work so hard researching for these books and putting them out. They can take a lot longer than albums. The authors do not have the same opportunities as artists when it comes to touring to earn revenue. Sure, they profit from a slice of the books sales, yet we often put them in a quiet corner of the room, whilst artists are given much more prominence and time. I don’t think that is fair! We do need to properly respect and value these amazing people. Those whose books will delight people for years to come. The very real and tangible pleasure of putting a chunky hardback on the shelf alongside a selection of other music books! Maybe this is specific to me, though I don’t think that it is! Dedicate more column inches to music books and their worth. Talk to these authors more and publish reviews frequently. Change the script and…

TURN the page.

FEATURE: A Dangerous Silence: Can Any Artist Afford to Remain Neutral Regarding Gaza?

FEATURE:

 

 

A Dangerous Silence

IN THIS PHOTO: Nadine Shah

Can Any Artist Afford to Remain Neutral Regarding Gaza?

__________

I guess this applies to…

IN THIS PHOTO: Billie Eilish performs at Avicii Arena on 23rd April, 2025 in Stockholm, Sweden/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

issues beyond genocide in Gaza. Palestine is current being ravaged and, slow to act and get involved, the world’s leaders are not exactly leading when it comes to anger, moral and action! Almost complicit and pacifistic, I have said how the music industry seems a lot more vocal than the political world. A whole host of artists have spoken out against what is being perpetrated by Israel. Including Nadine Shah, Kneecap, Damon Albarn, Dua Lipa and Billie Eilish, they have shown their support to Palestine and condemned genocide that is almost being allowed to happen. I know it carries a risk speaking out if you are an artist. There are so many issues that need to be addressed and spoken about. The fascism of Donald Trump and what is happening in the U.S. I don’t think artists can pick and choose and what causes they support or remain silent. It seems like complicity if they do not say anything. Florence Pugh has said that those who say nothing are complicit. It is a time when those with a platform need to activate and unite. Brian Eno, who recently curated the Together for Palestine concert, has said how we are living through this massive moment of crisis. It is one of the most disturbing and horrifying acts of violence in social history. One that needs to be met with the greatest coming together of people in human history. That said, more and more artists are becoming involved and discussing the genocide in Gaza. Recently, Brian Eno and Malak Mattar, key figures in the Together for Palestine concert, explained “why artists are putting fears of a backlash aside and uniting in the call for action”:

“Being open to learning about the reality of the situation seems crucial for the shift that is now happening. Eno happily admits that his own views on Gaza changed after visiting the West Bank six years ago. There he saw firsthand what he calls “the relentless humiliation … which is the nastiest weapon in a way … continually demeaning, continually shilly-shallying, pretending there’s a peace process when there’s no intention whatsoever to achieve peace on any kind of terms that the Palestinians could possibly accept.”

When he tried to explain this to people, Eno says, he was always being forced to go through the entire history of the conflict. People were either bamboozled by the conflicting accounts, or looking for an easy way to avoid getting involved. “Israel has always, in my opinion, depended on calling on the complexity of the situation,” says Eno. “To sort of say, ‘Well, of course you don’t really understand it, it’s far more complex than you can imagine.’ But people are no longer asking me to do this, because everyone knows we shouldn’t be in the place we are now.”

PinkPantheress says that having so many fellow artists on the bill supporting the message has made it easier to speak out – and hopefully will make it easier for others to join them in future. “One voice can get ignored,” she says, “but when it’s a chorus it’s way harder. Seeing artists from totally different backgrounds come together proves this isn’t just a political issue but a human one”.

I am going to come to another article from The Guardian, as it follows on and connects to what I have just sourced. Should every artist be expected to speak out against the genocide happening? I think they should. It is not a political decision or choice. It is a humanitarian one! Anyone who does not voice their disgust, in a way, is either not that concerned or thinks their career is more important than highlighting an atrocity that is claiming the lives of thousands of people in Palestine. There are artists whose statements and views on the genocide and Israel’s violence have either been neutral or seemed to skew in favour of Israel. Artists like Nick Cave. Thom Yorke released a statement that was very wishy-washy and neutral. It is so watered down. His Radiohead bandmate, Jonny Greenwood, recently played a concert in Tel Aviv. Radiohead have a history of neutrality and not speaking about Palestine. Whilst we have great artists such as Pillow Queens supporting Palestine, massive bands are very much on the wrong side. Coldplay were recently criticised. Not only because they seemed to suggest we should show love for family of the murdered Charlie Kirk – which seemed to suggest we should show sympathy for him -, but they also have not said anything condemning the genocide in Gaza. The Guardian reacted to Coldplay’s recent Wembley shows and Chris Matlin asking the audience to send out love. He did mention Palestine, though it was very vague and apolitical. Not calling out Israel and showing any anger against those causing the genocide. The 1975 have also actively swerved politics in favour of a more apathetic show or love and support:

“Similarly, on Friday at Wembley, the closing night of the tour, Martin exhorted the crowd to “send love anywhere you wanna send it in the world”. He went on: “You can send it to Charlie Kirk’s family. You can send it to anybody’s family. You can send it to people you disagree with but you send them love anyway.” It is this lack of a definitive statement, along with the barely there acknowledgment of how genuinely divisive these issues and events are, that rendered his warm-fuzzy sentiments hollow even by stadium-rock standards, like a Christian music concert with zero mention of God.

IN THIS PHOTO: Coldplay’s Chris Martin at Wembley Stadium on 22nd August 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Sipa USA/Alamy 

Perhaps this really is as deep as his engagement goes: you don’t get to 10 studio albums and more than 20 years of world-dominating success by being a firebrand. And, maybe controversially, I don’t believe artists are obliged to speak out about politics: it’s generally neither edifying nor productive for the cause when they weigh in half-heartedly with word salad.

When the 1975’s Matty Healy paused their otherwise brilliant headline set at Glastonbury to elaborate banally on their “conscious decision” to eschew politics in favour of “love and friendship”, it struck a bum note for me in the crowd. No fan of the 1975 needs or expects Healy’s hazy expansions – why stop the show to say nothing?

Many artists, notably young women, do consistently address the conflict in Palestine and other struggles – Chappell Roan, Renée Rapp, Jade Thirlwall among them. Whether this reflects the higher standards placed on women in the public eye, the pressures of their politically engaged young fans or the fact that they are genuinely invested is up for debate; their frequent eloquence, and fearless references to genocide, suggests the last. But their powers of influence are limited: girls and young women are a formidable economic force, but less influential politically”.

This is a time when no artist can really stand back and say nothing. Or say something and say the wrong thing. Sending love out to afflicted nations and besieged people is not the same as rallying against Israel and the genocide they are committing. We do not need artists thinking this is a Summer of Love era. We need Punk anger and snarl! Coldplay, The 1975 and anyone passive and neutral needs to take guidance from those who are risking a lot by speaking out. I know it can be divisive and a commercial risk. Look at some of the most popular artists in the world and how they are not saying enough. Sending a bad message to their fans. As I started by saying, this is not a political decision that can be seen as influencing or controversial. This is people dying and a nation hell bent on destroying Gaza. They should not be thinking about profit and followers over Palestine and doing the right thing. Those who avoid talking about what is happening might think they are doing the right thing. They are not. At one of the most frightening and violent times in human history, they all need to…

DO a lot better!

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

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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

FEATURE:

 

 

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 ands 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 standout 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.

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Follow Emma Jean Thackray

PHOTO CREDIT: Brownswood Recordings

Official:

https://www.emmajeanthackray.com/

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

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

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