FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Seven: A Blue Symphony: Inside an Underrated Album

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Seven

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the Lionheart cover shoot in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

A Blue Symphony: Inside an Underrated Album

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IT is hard to passionately…

write about an album when even its creator is kind of cold towards it. Not that Kate Bush has dismissed it altogether. She sort of said she was not happy with her first three albums. Not entirely, anyway. That would be 1978’s The Kick Inside, Lionheart (1978) and 1980’s Never for Ever. Perhaps her growing and not completely in control of the sound of those albums. I do think that Lionheart has been overlooked by almost everyone. Even though 1979’s The Tour of Life was also called the Lionheart Tour, she did perform its ten tracks on the road. Promoting this album and also playing most of the songs from The Kick Inside. She promoted Lionheart and talked fondly of it when it came out in 1978. As it turns forty-seven on 10th November, I wanted to spend more time with it. In the first anniversary feature recently, I dropped in some promotional interviews. Here, I will highlight some of the more under-discussed songs from Lionheart. However, this is one of Kate Bush’s albums that is very underrated. In terms of any retrospection. Whereas other albums have been written about and there is this retrospective interest, there is virtually none for Lionheart! That is a real pity. It is an album that, whilst not her very best, contains some phenomenal songs. One of the biggest factors working against Lionheart was how EMI rushed her into recording. Recorded between July and September 1978, it was recorded out of Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes, France. It was the one and only time Bush recorded an album outside of England. In terms of the impressions she had on the album through the years:

“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.
(Pulse!, April 1984)

“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.”
(promo cassette, EMI Canada, 1978)

“I only wrote three new songs - ‘ Symphony in Blue’, ‘Fullhouse’’ and ‘Coffee Homeground’’ - and if you know that, then you can tell the difference in style.
Basically, this album could have been a lot better.”
(1984, Women of Rock)”.

After promoting The Kick Inside extensively, it was incredible that she put an album together at all! Back from Japan and the end of a lengthy run of interviews and performances, Bush was summoned into making a new album. She would not have had time to record all new songs and record an album by the end of the year. As she says, the three songs that she wrote new are very different in terms of style and tone. I will come to Coffee Homeground soon. Symphony in Blue is one of the best things she ever wrote, so it is curious to think what would have come out if she was given a few more months to work on tracks! In any case, Lionheart hangs together and mixes in better-known tracks like Wow (the second single from the album) and rarer songs like Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake and In the Warm Room.

It is inevitable that Bush felt it easy to write a lot of the album, as she was basically reworking and retouching songs already written. Rather than given the seven older tracks a radical reworking, they were probably not changed too much. People thinking Lionheart is a weaker version of The Kick Inside. What was Kate Bush meant to do?! I have already written about Symphony in Blue, Wow, Hammer Horror and Kashka from Baghdad quite a bit. Now, to show the strength of Lionheart, I am coming to In Search of Peter Pan, In the Warm Room and Coffee Homeground. I think that In the Warm Room is one of those songs that gets dismissed as The Kick inside-lite. It would have easily fitted on the second side of that album and might have been considered. However, I do think that it features one of Kate Bush’s most arresting vocal performances. This is a song that never had a televised appearance. It was going to be performed for Michael Aspel in 1978. However, it was felt to be too sexually explicit, so instead she was allowed to perform Kashka from Baghdad – which is about two homosexual men in a secret relationship! It is one of these songs you will never hear live, through it is a gem. This is what Kate Bush said about In the Warm Room:

“I’m always getting accused of being a feminist. Really I do write a lot of my songs for men, actually. In fact, ‘In The Warm Room’ is written for men because there are so many songs for women about wonderful men that come up and chat you up when you’re in the disco and I thought it would be nice to write a song for men about this amazing female. And I think that I am probably female-oriented with my songs because I’m a female and have very female emotions but I do try to aim a lot of the psychology, if you like, at men.

Personal Call, BBC Radio 1, 1979”.

It is interesting that Bush almost butted up against the idea of being a feminist. Maybe feeling that she had to be more male-orientated to be heard. Or that most of her favourite music was by men; that is where she wrote from. However, I do love the images that Kate Bush brings into her lyrics: “In the warm room/She prepares to go to bed/She’ll let you watch her undress/Go places where/Your fingers long to linger/In the warm room/You’ll fall into her like a pillow/Her thighs are soft as marshmallows/Say hello/To the soft musk of her hollows”. One of many terrific songs from Kate Bush’s second studio album, Lionheart.

In Search of Peter Pan is another one of those tracks you will very rarely hear played on the radio. One thing I have observed about Kate Bush’s albums is that she writes almost every single thing on them. In terms of the lyrics. In Search of Peter Pan is an example of someone else’s words being quoted. She ends the song by singing from When You Wish Upon a Star (which was written by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington for the 1940 Disney film, Pinocchio). I want to quote from a feature by Dreams of Orgonon that has some fascinating insights. First, this is what Kate Bush said about the background to the second song on Lionheart:

“There’s a song on [Lionheart] called ‘In Search Of Peter Pan’ and it’s sorta about childhood. And the book itself is an absolutely amazing observation on paternal attitudes and the relationships between the parents – how it’s reflected on the children. And I think it’s a really heavy subject, you know, how a young innocence mind can be just controlled, manipulated, and they don’t necessarily want it to happen that way. And it’s really just a song about that.

Lionheart promo cassette, EMI Canada, 1978”.

In a feature that contains more words written about In Search of Peter Pan that what everyone else combined has ever said about it I feel (except for me), there is the depth and detail that this song deserves. In 2019, Dreams of Orgonon shared their opinion about a shining example of why you cannot write off or diminish the brilliance of Lionheart. It is an album that should get love ahead of its forty-seventh anniversary:

“Of course we have to talk about the song’s titular character. Peter Pan is effectively popular culture’s favorite anthropomorphization of adolescence. As he will never grow up, he embodies childhood as an endless state which actively revolts against growing up. Given that Bush had been writing fairly adolescent songs not too far back, it’s clear to see why she’d use Pan as a touchstone. Yet her path differs from Pan’s: in the chorus, she declares her desire to grow up and “find Peter Pan” (perhaps as some kind of star sailor) and escape from the trap of adult life. The departure from Peter Pan is that Bush states that she will become an adult instead of just flying to Neverland. Part of being an adult to Bush is being able to enjoy childlike things. More pertinently, as a child you believe you will hold onto childish things forever, and as an adult she holds onto this belief. The culture of children is an important part of Bush’s ethos — it presents an alternative to the tedium of adulthood. She’s never let go of childhood as an ideal, letting it play a role in her work as late as Aerial.

Bush’s quotation of Disney in the outro is an extension of this. The quote she knabs is the most famous part of Pinocchio: “when you wish upon a star/makes no difference who you are/when you wish upon a star/your dreams come true.” This is the Disney theme song, the saccharine aphorism on which their brand is constructed. Bush is quoting the most fantastical idea of childhood possible. Yet she takes this overused quote and turns it into the song’s most interesting musical moment. She sings the quote in a minor key, slowly descending as she does it. It’s not a straight quote; Bush outright warps the song. As Bush won’t pretend childhood is without pain, depictions of it must reflect some kind of wrongness and pain.

“In Search of Peter Pan” has no shortage of adolescent agony. At the start of the song, Bush has given up and declared that she “no longer see[s]” a future. Throughout the song she sings about a child whose life has been derailed by adult interference, taking the game right out of it. Modes of escape are flights of fancy, whether it be the singer’s friend Dennis who fancies himself beautiful (a queer part of the song) or flying away to be Peter Pan. Fantasy is a refuge for Bush: when in doubt, remember your inner fantasist”.

I will wrap up after I take a look at one more of my favourites from Lionheart. Coffee Homeground, alongside Fullhouse and Symphony in Blue, is a tantalising glimpse into a direction Kate Bush could have taken. Not wanting to repeat herself, I guess you can look at this as a step between where she was and where she would head on Never for Ever, Although, there is very little on Never for Ever that sounds like Coffee Homeground! A song that mentions a controversial character, I do especially love the lyrics on Coffee Homeground. This is what Kate Bush said about writing the song:

“[‘Coffee Homeground’] was in fact inspired directly from a cab driver that I met who was in fact a bit nutty. And it’s just a song about someone who thinks they’re being poisoned by another person, they think that there’s Belladonna in their tea and that whenever they offer them something to eat, it’s got poisen in it. And it’s just a humorous aspect of paranoia really and we sort of done it in a Brechtian style, the old sort of German [vibe] to try and bring across the humour side of it.

Lionheart Promo Cassette, EMI Canada, 1978”.

This is a song that I would love to have seen a music video for. I have talked about Coffee Homeground before, but it is worth exploring as much as possible. Coming back to Dreams of Orgonon and what they say about a track, that is so compelling and odd. In the most brilliant and Kate Bush way! One I have loved for so long:

“This is a stridently different approach than the one Kate Bush has to characters, which is to empathize with them and use their plights to encapsulate fraught human experiences. Even the paranoid character presented in “Coffee Homeground” is allowed the subjectivity of their perception of events. Yet there’s still a sense that Bush is an unreliable narrator. “Homeground” is the story of their paranoia that their host is trying poison them. Bush speaks at length about all the different toxins she might be killed with, from bitter almonds to hemlock to arsenic. She’s in some sort of decrepit house with “torn wallpaper” and “pictures of Crippin/lipstick-smeared,” (likely referring to the allegedly uxoricidal Hawley Harvey Crippen). The song takes the form of a screed, with Bush declaring all the ways she won’t be caught (“in the pot of TEA!”), with verses taking an epiphoral structure in which nearly all of them end with the phrase “coffee homeground.” It’s an extravagant piece of songwriting, extremely conscious of form and rife with tension as it leaves all pretense of believability behind. Bush said the song was inspired by a paranoid cabbie she met, and that’s the sort of character she’s written here. Despite the song being entirely theirs, there’s a degree of separation from the audience, that the singer can’t be trusted. Bush is entirely operating on theatrics and leaving emotional realism at the door”.

Yet there’s an element of Epic Theater which Bush neglects altogether: its strident anti-capitalism. Brecht was a Marxist who used the theater to shatter an audience’s preconceptions of how a capitalist society works. Bush has never been very interested in subverting the established social order. Even when she’s an actively subversive songwriter, she’s still essentially being one in the position of a well-to-do middle-class heterosexual white woman. This lack of political intent makes “Coffee Homeground” feel like it’s missing a key ingredient (and I’m not talking about hemlock). It’s not clear why this song has to be a Brechtian homage — it makes the song more striking, but it’s not clear what Bush is trying to say.

Resultingly, Bush’s engagement with Epic Theater is a purely audible one. “Homeground” owes more to Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya than it does to Brecht, as it’s their sound Bush pillages. Bush’s trill becomes a half-spoken warble as she strives to sound like Lenya for a track. It’s not a bad impression — sure, it sounds nothing like Lenya’s voice, but Bush doesn’t do the worst job of imitating her speech patterns. Musically, the strongest resemblance to Brecht and Weill’s work here is the morbid subject matter applied to carnivalesque scoring. The melody contains huge leaps and never sounds quite the same, as the intro and bridge repeat essentially the same phrase in a different key every time they appear. There are little discordant details such as the use of the non existent #VII chord of B flat (A), which doesn’t appear in B flat major or B flat minor. The pre-chorus will make a play at being in A before transforming into some mode of B (possibly mixolydian, or anything with a flattened seventh). Even if “Homeground” lacks conceptual clarity, it’s far from banal”.

I think the last time I featured this track on its own was last year. The Kate Bush fanzine, HomeGround, got its name from this song. Coffee Homeground’s lyrics send the imagination in all sorts of directions: “Where are the plumbers/Who went a-missing here on Monday?/There was a tall man/With his companion/And I bet you gave them coffee homeground/Maybe you’re lonely/And only want a little company/But keep your recipes/For the rats to eat/And may they rest in peace with coffee homeground/Well, you won’t get me with your Belladonna – in the coffee,/And you won’t get me with your aresenic – in the pot of tea/And you won’t put me in a six-foot plot – with your hemlock/On the rocks”.

I am not sure whether anyone will write about Lionheart on 10th November. It has so many truly great songs on it. I have expanded on a few of them. Even if I am not too hot on tracks like Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake, I recognise that it is far stronger than it is given credit for. This assumption that Lionheart is a rushed failure and poor attempt. It places low when people rank her albums, as you can see here, here, here and here. It usually placed bottom (out of ten) or second-bottom. Even if Rough Trade deemed it her worst album, insanely, ahead of 50 Words for Snow (no sane human would see that album as Kate Bush’s worst!), they did note this:

“Nevertheless, there is still beauty and bedazzlement within. Hammer Horror is camp and theatrical Kate, and is one of many examples of her strong love of all things celluloid. Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake gives a good account of how The KT Band may have sounded back when they were rocking the shit out of South London pubs before Kate launched her solo career. The emotional cry of Wow is about the cynical, finickity side of show business (is there any other side?!) This is Kate’s attempt to “write a Pink Floyd song - something spacey”, but it’s the Vaudeville meets Brecht Coffee Homeground, which is the true hidden gem here. Mad as a box of frogs”.

I am going to finish off. I hope people reinspect Lionheart and appreciate it. Despite the fact Kate Bush might not be a fan and sees it as not up to her standard, it is an album that I really love. Wonderfully rich and diverse, there is a mix of the old and the new. On 10th November, forty-seven years after it came out, go and show Lionheart…

AS much love as possible.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Rocket Man (Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

Rocket Man (Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin)

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I was keen to step…

away from Kate Bush’s albums for this Something Like a Song. She has done a few covers through the years. Some have appeared on compilation albums. One such example is Bush’s interpretation of Elton John’s Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time). Bush shortened it to Rocket Man for the single. That appeared on the 1991 tribute album, Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin. The original was released on Elton John’s 1972 album, Honky Château, and was the lead single. When that single came out, Bush was thirteen. Writing songs of her own at this stage, she was inspired hugely by artists like Elton John and David Bowie. In fact, these artists had a bit of a set-to or disagreement because David Bowie released Starman in April 1972 – a matter of days after Elton John’s single came out. That was the lead single from Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Elton John and David Bowie having this space race in 1972! However, David Bowie released Space Oddity in 1969. So he was sort of there first! I am not sure if Kate Bush has or would ever be tempted to cover a David Bowie song if there was another tribute album to him. It would be interesting. However, she and Elton John are friends – and Bush attended his wedding to David Furnish in 2014. Bush attended the civil partnership in 2005 too. Elton John appeared on her 2011 album, 50 Words for Snow, and the two have been close for decades. However, I want to shift to Kate Bush and her version of Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time). Simultaneously hailed as a classic cover or something that is not a patch on the original, I really love the song! It is covered with affection but done very differently.

This song was included on Kate Bush’s The Best of the Other Sides. Even though critics were a little divided, Bush holds love for this song. She directed the music video for the single and gave the track this sort of Reggae tinge. More laidback and groovy than Elton John’s original. Released as a single on 25th November, 1991, the song was recorded back in 1989. I am going to get to some of the reviews for Kate Bush’s take on Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time). It was released as a 7″ single in a poster sleeve, a 12″ single in a poster sleeve, a cassette single and a C.D.-single. All formats feature the reverse of Candle in the Wind (another Elton John song). St Etienne were especially savage towards Kate Bush’s version. Intimating it made them want to vomit. Luckily, Billboard were a little kinder. Melody Maker tore it apart! However, in years since, Bush’s version of Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) has been seen in a kinder light. It was just typical of the press and artists of the time showing their sexism and misogyny. Not a lot to do with the music itself. Kate Bush always being criticised for doing something different! Reaching twelve in the U.K. and two in Australia, I think that there will be new people discovering this cover, as it appears on The Best of the Other Sides. I am going to turn to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, and some interview archive, where Bush spoke about Elton John and a song dear to her:

“From the age of 11, Elton John was my biggest hero. I loved his music, had all his albums and I hoped one day I’d play the piano like him (I still do). When I asked to be involved in this project and was given the choice of a track it was like being asked ‘would you like to fulfill a dream? would you like to be Rocket Man?’… yes, I would.

Two Rooms liner notes, 1991

I was really knocked out to be asked to be involved with this project, because I was such a big fan of Elton’s when I was little. I really loved his stuff. It’s like he’s my biggest hero, really. And when I was just starting to write songs, he was the only songwriter I knew of that played the piano and sang and wrote songs. So he was very much my idol, and one of my favourite songs of his was ‘Rocket Man’. Now, if I had known then that I would have been asked to be involved in this project, I would have just died… They basically said, ‘Would we like to be involved?’ I could choose which track I wanted… ‘Rocket Man’ was my favourite. And I hoped it hadn’t gone, actually – I hoped no one else was going to do it… I actually haven’t heard the original for a very long time. ‘A long, long time’ (laughs). It was just that I wanted to do it differently. I do think that if you cover records, you should try and make them different. It’s like remaking movies: you’ve got to try and give it something that makes it worth re-releasing. And the reggae treatment just seemed to happen, really. I just tried to put the chords together on the piano, and it just seemed to want to take off in the choruses. So we gave it the reggae treatment. It’s even more extraordinary (that the song was a hit) because we actually recorded the track over two years ago. Probably just after my last telly appearance. We were quite astounded when they wanted to release it as a single just recently.

BBC Radio 1 interview, 14 December 1991”.

I think I might actually wrap up in a minute instead. The musicians on the song are Davy Spillane – uilleann pipes, Del Palmer – bass, Alistair Anderson – concertina, Charlie Morgan – drums and Alan Murphy – guitar. I will end with something from Gaffaweb, and observations about Rocket Man:

“Dan King is of the opinion that Kate's recording of "Rocket Man" is "danceable", "light" and "fun", and that the cover photo of Kate is therefore inappropriate because she looks "old" and "sad". This opinion is remarkable to IED because it is in complete contrast to his own.

In IED's view Kate's version of "Rocket Man", in large part because of its lilting (but sporadic) reggae-cum-Celtic folk sections and Kate's final, wordless minute of vocals, seemed (at first listen as much as at the tenth) extraordinarily poignant and sad--an extremely sophisticated and eloquent expression of the song's tragic subject.

By contrast, in IED's opinion, the photograph of Kate which Mercury Records put on the single's cover was a bit too cheerful for the tone of Kate's "Rocket Man"--let alone the even more starkly haunting "Candle in the Wind". Still, even there IED agrees with Richard Caley that the shots (there are actually two) are wonderful--they certainly don't make Kate appear "old" to this fan.

IED suspects that they were given to Mercury by Kate and John Carder Bush simply as portrait photographs to be used inside the liner notes of the "Two Rooms" album. (The photo session took place more than two years ago, and the shots are already very familiar to fans.) Then, when Mercury decided to release the song as a single, they opted (perhaps because Kate would or could not provide further artwork on short notice?) simply to blow up the only photos of Kate that they had been given rights to, and use them as the cover art.

Has anyone else noticed that the typographical error (of "Villean" for "Uillean" pipes) in the credits for "Rocket Man" has been corrected--without doubt at Kate's request--on the outer, poster-sleeve of the seven-inch single? The error remains on the single's normal inside sleeve, which we may assume was printed earlier. Does this correction after the fact not suggest that Mercury probably did not invite Kate to review the cover art before the design went to the presses; but that they made the correction after Kate herself saw it in the first pressings that went on sale last month? If this is true, perhaps Mercury did not invite Kate to suggest a cover design, either?

-- Andrew Marvick”.

A magnificent cover version of a song that was meaningful to Kate Bush. As such a huge fan of Elton John, her contribution to Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin must have been a hard choice. I am not sure whether she considered any other Elton John songs. I do think that this song should be given more love. A beautiful vocal from Kate Bush and this video that was lost for a long time. NME reported in 2019 how this video now came to light. Bush spoke to them about it and the song:

“One of Bush’s favourite songs of all time, her rendition of Elton’s space-faring staple reached Number 12 in the charts back when it was released in December 1991. Now, she has given the high-quality, self-directed music video its first ever official release.

“I remember buying this when it came out as a single by Elton John,” Bush told NME. “I couldn’t stop playing it – I loved it so much. Most artists in the mid seventies played guitar but Elton played piano and I dreamed of being able to play like him.”

“Years later, in 1989, Elton and Bernie Taupin were putting together an album called ‘Two Rooms’, which was a collection of cover versions of their songs, each featuring a different singer. To my delight they asked me to be involved and I chose ‘Rocket Man’. They gave me complete creative control and although it was a bit daunting to be let loose on one of my favourite tracks ever, it was really exciting. I wanted to make it different from the original and thought it could be fun to turn it into a reggae version. It meant a great deal to me that they chose it to be the first single release from the album.”

She continued: “That meant I also had the chance to direct the video which I loved doing – making it a performance video, shot on black and white film, featuring all the musicians and… the Moon!”

“Alan Murphy played guitars on the track. He was a truly special musician and a very dear friend. Tragically, he died just before we made the video so he wasn’t able to be there with us but you’ll see his guitar was placed on an empty chair to show he was there in spirit”.

Go and listen to Kate Bush’s stunning and enduring Rocket Man. It is one of the best covers she ever did, and it shows her genuine and lifelong affection and respect for Elton John and Bernie Taupin. I really love what she did with it. A wonderful song that still sounds exciting and different…

ALMOST thirty-four years later.

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

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The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Thirty-Five in 2026

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THERE are few years…

in music that are as significant as 1991. Maybe 1994, 1989 and 1967 can get some credit for various reasons. In terms of the number of all-time great albums, it is hard to beat 1991! I was a child then and was amazed at all the incredible music around. It was a real revelation. In a formative time in my life, I was exposed to so many innovative artists at their very peak. I am marking albums that turn thirty-five next year. Included are genius works from Nirvana, Pearl Jam, A Tribe Called Quest, R.E.M., and Saint Etienne. So many of these albums have endured and influenced to this day. I am someone who tries not to get as nostalgic as I used to but, whilst writing this series, it has been hard resisting! 1991 undoubtably must go down as one of the most important and finest years…

IN music history.

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

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The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Forty in 2026

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DEEP into this run…

of features focusing on albums that have big anniversaries coming up next year, and it takes me now to 1986. The fortieth is quite a significant anniversary, so it has been interesting seeing which albums of 1986 are going to turn forty in 2026. We have classics from Janet Jackson, Peter Gabriel, Madonna, and Paul Simon among them. I was a few years old by the end of 1986, so I don’t really remember a lot of the music from then. However, I feel like it had an impact on me. The earliest memories of my life. In fact, I get hazy memories of hearing bits of albums from 1986. In any regard, it is a time to celebrate a colossal year in music. One of the very best, in fact! I am sure that you will find much to love…

FROM this mixtape.

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

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The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Forty-Five in 2026

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THE next part…

of this series sees me marking albums that turn forty-five next year. Marking that anniversary, I am including songs from the very best of 1981 in this mixtape. I was born in 1983, though I would have grown up listening to a lot of the albums these songs are from. An underrated year in music, 1981 gave us some wonderful albums from the likes of The Human League, Kraftwerk, Grace Jones, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I am sure that most of you are familiar with a lot of the albums I am including at the end. Those that are turning forty-five in 2016. Maybe we will see reissues or new editions of some of these albums. I hope so. In the meantime, take a listen to this mixtape and take yourself back…

TO 1981.

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

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The Digital Mixtape

Songs from Albums Turning Fifty in 2026

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THIS series…

is about me marking albums that have big anniversaries next year. I started out by looking at the best of 1966 and those albums that turn sixty. Now, I have made my way to 1976. A fabulous year for music, among those albums in the mixtape at the end are Eagles’ Hotel California, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, and ABBA’s Arrival. Whilst perhaps not as steeped and packed with quality as 1975 and 1977, 1976 was still a really interesting year for music. Some true classics released that year. I am bringing many of them together now. Celebrating fantastic L.P.s turning fifty next year. Even if you do not recognise some of these albums, I hope that you enjoy the songs that are included…

IN this mixtape.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Brandy & Monica - The Boy Is Mine

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Groovelines

Brandy & Monica - The Boy Is Mine

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EVEN though…

IN THIS PHOTO: Brandy and Monica at the 1999 GRAMMY Awards/PHOTO CREDIT: Dan Callister/Getty Images

this is not tied to an anniversary, there is a reason why I wanted to spotlight Brandy and Monica’s The Boy Is Mine. One of the best collaborations ever, the U.S. artists are embarking on their The Boy Is Mine tour this month. The co-headline tour starts on 16th October in Cincinnati and ends on Jacksonville on 14th December. Because of that, it is worth investigating one of the biggest songs of the 1990s. One wondered why there were not more songs and gigs from the duo. It seems like they had a very brief partnership in the '90s. This article from The Los Angeles Times sources a Variety announcement/interview, where Brandy and Monica discussed coming back together after all of these years:

“This really is a full-circle moment,” Brandy said in a statement to Variety. “Monica and I coming together again isn’t just about the music — it’s about honoring where we came from and how far we’ve both come. ‘The Boy Is Mine’ was a defining chapter in R&B, and to share the stage all these years later is bigger than a reunion — it’s a celebration of growth, sisterhood, and the love our fans have given us from day one.”

She added that she recognized the love “The Boy Is Mine” still received, saying that the song “means everything to me.”

Upon its release, the song spent 13 weeks at No. 1. That was 27 years ago, and though the pair have been on “different journeys” since, they’ve come back together to give “the people what they’ve been asking for.”

“God’s timing perfectly aligned us,” Brandy said.

Presale for the tour begins June 26, with general tickets going on sale June 27. The run currently includes one Los Angeles-area show Nov. 9 at the Kia Forum.

Brandy and Monica had a widely publicized fallout in 1998. Monica is said to have punched Brandy in the face just before they took the stage at that year’s MTV Video Music Awards to perform their hit single.

The duo was seen as a monumental combination of ‘90s talent, with both Brandy and Monica being lauded for their debut records. Brandy had already achieved RIAA platinum status with her self-titled album released in 1994 when she was just 15. “The Boy Is Mine” was an instant hit when it was released four years later, but the VMAs incident seemed to spawn acrimony.

Though both would remain in the music industry, Brandy would also pursue an acting career. Her nickname “Vocal Bible” took off following her role as the first African American actor to play Cinderella in a film in 1997. More recently, she starred as a rapper in the ABC drama series “Queens” in 2021.

Monica’s 1995 debut, “Miss Thang,” went platinum when she was 14, but the singer largely remained out of the spotlight following the release of “Code Red” in 2015. She teased a pivot into the country music genre in 2022 with “Open Roads,” which she says was produced entirely by 11-time Grammy winner Brandi Carlile. Though she confirmed its completion in 2023, it has yet to be released.

After the kerfuffle in 1998, it wouldn’t be until 2012 that the two collaborated again on “It All Belongs to Me” and 11 years more before they worked on a remix of “The Boy Is Mine” for Ariana Grande. In 2021, Brandy and Monica appeared on “Verzuz,” a popular webcast series made by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland where two artists pit their best hits against each other.

The affair went down smoothly until about 30 minutes in, when Monica spoke of how she had come a long way from “kicking in doors” and “smacking chicks,” a (seemingly autobiographical) line from her hit song “So Gone.”

“You sure was,” Brandy replied. “I was one of the ones.”

But Monica refuted the quip, claiming, “People think I’m abusive. That’s not what happened.”

After a little back and forth, Brandy conceded, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that … I didn’t mean no shade by that.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” Monica replied before moving on, as both singers seemed to have done with the announcement of the upcoming tour”.

The Boy Is Mine was not this standalone single. It was the title track from Monica’s second studio album. It was released by Arista Records on 14th July, 1998. The title track with Brandy was the biggest-selling single in the U.S. in 1998. I am going to come to some other features. I am moving to a 2023 feature from Hollywood Reporter, where Monica discussed twenty-five years of her sophomore album:

“What comes to mind when you think of The Boy Is Mine turning 25?

MONICA It’s a blessing to still be acknowledged and feel appreciated and feel loved. I’ve always said that I was a bit of an underdog, but it was a place that I never said I didn’t want to be because I didn’t see it in a negative light. I was very much a product of my environment at that time. I was still working on myself. I recorded the album at the age most people are focused on learning to drive, and I graduated high school during that time, and there was a lot happening for me and I lived out loud in front of the public. So there were a lot of different things happening both personally and professionally, so when I look at all of those things collectively, I don’t just think of the music.

How did you get involved with “The Boy Is Mine”?

MONICA I was discovered by Kevin Wells and Dallas Austin, and Dallas became a father figure in my life because at the time, my relationship with my biological father was extremely strained. It’s beautiful now, but it wasn’t that at the time. And he and I would talk about what my ultimate goals were, and he always promised to love and protect me throughout the process of me learning the industry. So the way I heard any song that you would hear me on during that time frame was through Dallas, and Dallas sat me down and he played the song for me. And my initial response was, “Well, why would we make a song like this?” Because I would never fight over a boy, not like this, and we laughed. And it was very lighthearted and said in a joking manner because I was thinking to myself, “Would I actually do that?”

And in this particular form, I’m like, “I don’t think so.” And he said, “Monica, you are a force to be reckoned with; Brandy is a force to be reckoned with; you all coming together is going to be incredible.” And with the level of trust and respect that I had for him, it was definitely a no-brainer. With the level of respect that I had for Brandy and her artistry, it was a no-brainer at that point. So I actually recorded it in L.A. It was my first time meeting Rodney Jerkins and Fred Jerkins and LaShawn Daniels. They were all such a major part of it all, and she and I just started working on the vocals there.

You and Brandy won a Grammy for “The Boy Is Mine” — where did you put your Grammy?

MONICA I gifted my mother my Grammy for Mother’s Day the following Mother’s Day. Because there is no me without her — the moral compass that I have, the voice. My mother also sings, but she only sings at church sometimes after my papa preaches. She’s not the type that wants to sing in the public’s eye, she always just sings for the glory of God. But I get all of these important things from her, all of the teachings that people respect about me from her. I felt like the greatest way to honor her was to say, “Listen, I wouldn’t be here without you.” We had it encased and given to her, and she always loved it because it lights up and she could click it on when people came over. It was a focal point”.

I am going to come to a really interesting feature from Stereogum next. However, VICE examined The Boy Is Mine in 2018 on its twentieth anniversary. They stated how the song is about choosing friendship over drama. Not too many songs of the 1990s focused on that. The chemistry between Brandy and Monica on the song is clear and enduring:

“It was a pleasant surprise to learn about “The Boy Is Mine” in the first place—how could a rivalry be real if the singers chose to work together? Originally written as a solo track by Brandy and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins in the fall of 1997, the two decided the song would work better as a duet and were inspired by Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s “The Girl Is Mine.” Brandy asked her label to approach Monica as a gesture of goodwill to combat rumors of a rivalry. With her label’s permission, Monica jumped on board and the single was released in the spring of 1998, quickly dominating the airwaves and climbing to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

That success, unfortunately, didn’t translate to love for each other in real life. Although tabloids blew their rivalry out of proportion, years later, the singers admitted there was tension between them. In a 2012 radio interview, Monica said, “We were young. We could barely stay in the room with each other. By no means was it jealousy or envy. She and I are polar opposites, and instead of embracing that, we used our differences as reasons not to be amongst each other.”

Still, the way pop culture infiltrates our minds is such that we interpret things the way we want them to be, and not the way they are. And so, Brandy and Monica may have been “polar opposites,” but for me, a young Black girl subconsciously yearning for heroines to call my own, I clung to their mutual presence. It didn’t matter what was real or imagined—what mattered was that they existed on a record together, and were made stronger for it. It was a quick, satisfying hit of representation.

What I loved most was the song’s music video, directed by the talented and prolific Joseph Kahn. Dark, mysterious, and more visually sophisticated than I anticipated, “The Boy Is Mine” was a quietly radical declaration of female solidarity.

There is something beautiful, too, about the way the music video unfurls: first confusion, then confrontation, and in its final moments, solidarity. Brandy and Monica relax in their apartments, changing the channel to their favorite television programs (an episode of The Jerry Springer Show for Brandy, a black and white movie for Monica), but each girl’s remote controls the television of the other. Brandy can’t watch her show without disrupting Monica’s viewing and vice versa. As symbolism, it proves both women are in this situation (the action of the music video and the content of the song) together, whether they like it or not.

Later, they realize their beau (actor Mekhi Phifer) is two-timing them. As he visits Brandy, she partially opens the door with a smile on her face, only to open the door wider and reveal that Monica is there, too. It’s a cute and knowing moment. Why are we fighting over this man? What good has he given us?

Women are pressured to conform to contrasting ideas: We’re supposed to be the “gentler” sex, yet we’re taught to hate ourselves and each other, creating a toxic competitive atmosphere where one woman’s livelihood is a threat to another’s. In this manufactured climate of scarcity, Black women are left battling for more because we were never given our proper share in the first place. In “The Boy Is Mine,” I learned a valuable lesson about what it means to be a friend and what it means to find comfort in the friendship of other women—even women I did not know or possibly saw as my competition. Now, I know that the most significant solidarity is that between women who want each other to succeed”.

In 2022, Stereogum spent time showing some love for The Boy Is Mine. I remember when it came out in 1998. I still listen to the track today, and it fills me with nostalgia. This song that has lasted for twenty-seven years and still sounds so fresh and strong. I do wonder whether any live videos will be released from the upcoming The Boy Is Mine tour from Brandy and Monica:

“Originally, “The Boy Is Mine,” the first single from Never Say Never, was going to be a solo song for Brandy. You can hear that in the track. “The Boy Is Mine” doesn’t exactly offer two differing perspectives. It’s two different women singing the same thing, more or less, to each other. Brandy was one of five credited writers on “The Boy Is Mine.” She worked with Rodney Jerkins, his brother Fred Jerkins III, and fellow professionals LaShawn Daniels and Japhe Tejeda. But when she heard her solo version of the song, Brandy thought something was missing. She knew that “The Boy Is Mine” needed Monica.

Monica Denise Arnold grew up in the Atlanta neighborhood of College Park, and her family was not a show-business family. (When Monica was born, the #1 single in America was Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust.”) Polow Da Don, a producer whose work will eventually appear in this column, is one of her cousins, but Monica’s parents both worked at the airport — her father as a mechanic, her mother as a customer service rep. Monica grew up singing in churches with her mother, and she won talent shows around Atlanta as a kid. When she was 10, Monica became the youngest singer in a touring gospel choir. When she was 12, Dallas Austin, producer of hits like TLC’s “Creep,” heard Monica singing a Whitney Houston song a talent show and signed her to his Arista imprint Rowdy.

Monica was 14 years old when she released her 1995 debut album Miss Thang. Like Brandy, Monica was entirely comfortable singing over rap beats. Unlike Brandy, Monica had serious levels of gospel grit in her voice even at a young age. She sounded tougher than Brandy, more seasoned. She didn’t sound anything like a little kid. The sound of Miss Thang is rich and assured, and it’s wild that a 14-year-old singer was able to sound that much like what Mary J. Blige was doing at the time. Monica blew up even quicker than Brandy did. Her debut single “Don’t Take It Personal (Just One Of Dem Days)” reached #2. (It’s an 8.) Two more singles from Miss Thang went top-10, and the album went triple platinum.

Much like Brandy, Monica followed her debut album with a big soundtrack hit. For her contribution to the 1997 motion picture Space Jam, Monica went full adult-contempo, singing the Diane Warren-written ballad “For You I Will,” which reached #4. (It’s a 5.) Compared to what Monica was doing on Miss Thang, “For You I Will” was severely lacking in swagger, but it showed that Monica could do more than what she’d done on her debut. She wasn’t a TV star like Brandy, but Monica had a bright future. When Brandy put in the call for Monica to appear on “The Boy Is Mine,” the timing was great. Monica, like Brandy, was gearing up to release her second LP.

“The Boy Is Mine” wasn’t written about a real-life scenario, but it did riff on the public perception that Brandy and Monica were rivals. In the Bronson book, Monica says that this was intentional: “We took the song and brought humor to a situation that people had tried to make so serious. We thought it would be really funny to show us feuding in the video and then come together at the end because we wanted people to let go of the idea of us not liking each other — but of course, they haven’t.” We sure haven’t. Decades later, the idea of Brandy and Monica not liking each other remains a big topic of conversation in both singers’ careers.

Brandy and Monica tried recording “The Boy Is Mine” together, in the same room, but it didn’t work. Their voices clashed, and some of the people who worked on the song have said that they didn’t like being in the same room together. So they tried something else. Brandy recorded her part in California with Rodney Jerkins, and Dallas Austin recorded Monica’s parts in Atlanta, tweaking the arrangement in the process and earning himself a co-producer credit. (The other two credited producers are Rodney Jerkins and Brandy.) The song went through multiple mixes until everyone was satisfied that nobody upstaged anyone else. In the Bronson book, Austin says, “I had to make Monica Monica on it. I didn’t want it to turn into something where Monica’s full character wasn’t on it. It had to have their attitudes on it and not just be them singing a song.” It took multiple mixes before they came up with a version of “The Boy Is Mine” before all parties agreed that neither singer upstaged the other.

To its great credit, “The Boy Is Mine” does showcase the attitudes of both singers. The producers might’ve had to put the song together piecemeal, but there’s a real chemistry at work on it. The contrast between the two voices is subtle, but it’s there. Brandy is softer, and Monica is harder. The argument on the track is pretty much an “is not”/”is too” thing, and it never reaches a resolution, but that probably makes it more fun. It’s structured almost like a rap battle, with both Brandy and Monica getting chances to flex on each other. Brandy: “There’s no way that you could mistake him for your man, are you insane?” Monica: “You see, I know that you may be just a little bit jealous of me.” On the chorus, the two of them sing the same thing at each other. The line “I’m sorry that you seem to be confused” is a truly great piece of faux-nice shit-talk”.

I am ending with this article from Billboard. Brandy and Monica appeared on the cover of Essence to discuss the tour. I think there has been a lot of misconception about the lyrical content of The Boy Is Mine. I hope that the new tour dates from Brandy and Monica not only ignite interest in the 1998 single. We also need to discuss the album it came from. A wonderful work from Monica. I do also hope that she and Brandy record together again. It would be nice to hear a new chapter from them:

“I think that even though the lyrical content and some of what started to play out created more division than it did togetherness, we’ve taken control of that, and we’re making what the legacy of this song would be totally different for the next generation. And that’s what I’m most proud of, when I look at what is happening now with ‘The Boy Is Mine,'” Monica tells the publication.

While their timeless duet about fighting over a boy spent 13 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned both women a Grammy for best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocal, the success of the record couldn’t always sweeten the unsavory parts of Brandy and Monica’s relationship. The two allegedly got into an altercation during rehearsal for their performance at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, which caused a years-long rift. When they went head-to-head for a Verzuz battle in 2020, they openly discussed their feud, and Brandy revealed in a later interview on Ebro In The Morning that she had apologized to Monica behind the scenes.

IN THIS PHOTO: Brandy and Monica during an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday, 25th June, 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images

When Ariana Grande reimagined “The Boy Is Mine” on her 2024 album Eternal Sunshine — and tapped Brandy and Monica for the official remix that scored a Grammy nod for best pop duo/group performance — Monica adds, “it was that subtle reminder for us of how special that moment was,” adds Monica. “And what I love so much about it was that we were young, living in the moment and creating. We were creating without critics. We were creating without anything outside of ourselves. And that was the part that I think made it so great and made it so timeless.”

“I see it as so much bigger than just a hit record. At the time, it was two young women coming together, bringing our voices and our stories into one moment — and the world connected with it in a way we couldn’t have imagined. To see how that song connected with people all over the world — and still does — is such a blessing,” says Brandy. “For me, it represented sisterhood and the power of collaboration. Now, all these years later, it feels like a landmark in R&B history, but also a reminder of how far we’ve come as women and as artists. It’s humbling to know that a song can stand the test of time like that, and it inspires me to keep creating music that resonates across generations.”

In a couple of weeks, Brandy and Monica will bring “The Boy Is Mine” to U.S. arenas for The Boy Is Mine Tour, which kicks off on Oct. 16 at Cincinnati’s Heritage Bank Center in Cincinnati and goes through major cities including Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York before wrapping up on Dec. 7 at Houston’s Toyota Center.

Brandy also tells Essence that making the setlist was “definitely one of the hardest parts, because so many songs hold a special place in our hearts and in the fans’ hearts. We thought about what records shaped the culture, what moments people connect with most, and how to create a flow that takes the audience on a journey. Of course, the classics are there, but we also wanted surprises — songs people might not expect to hear live, and even some new touches, to make the music feel fresh again. I might even throw in some unreleased music!”.

I will wrap up now. It has been great revisiting one of my favourite songs of the 1990s. Brandy and Monica are about to head on tour. Fans who experienced their The Boy Is Mine duet in 1998 will be there. New fans too. It is a co-headline tour, so both artists get a chance to showcase their material, though that demand to hear Brandy and Monica sing is going to be very strong. No wonder. A massive single in 1998, twenty-seven years later, The Boy Is Mine has lost…

NONE of its power.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Paul Simon - 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

 Paul Simon - 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

__________

BECAUSE one…

of Paul Simon’s best albums turns fifty very soon, for this Groovelines, I am including one of its standout cuts. Still Crazy After All These Years is the fourth solo album from Simon. It was released on 17th October, 1975. Its title track is phenomenal and one of Paul Simon’s best songs. However, I am going to focus on 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. I first heard it when I was a child and the criticism around it was that, in the song, Simon does not list fifty ways to leave your lover! The song or Simon never purports to stick rigidly to the title and name fifty different ways someone can leave their lover. What is more important is Simon’s lyrics and the inventiveness of the song. The third single from Still Crazy After All These Years, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover was the third single released from the album. It was a chart success and critically acclaimed. I am going to go a little deeper with this song. There are quite a few excellent features about 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. I am going to start with a bit of a jokey feature. One that points out how there are, indeed, not fifty ways to leave your lover listed in the song:

“My issue is that the song promises fifty ways to leave your lover, and by my count there are only five. That’s no small discrepancy! It’s a great pet peeve of mine to be promised something (whether it’s in a song, a movie trailer, a commercial, or otherwise) and be given something totally different or insufficient. For instance, the movie Trainspotting; they’re not looking for trains, they’re trying to get drugs! Or when I got that Ginsu knife because I saw it could cut through shoes, and then it didn’t make it halfway through mine.

I may not be as celebrated a songwriter as you, but I can tell you this: My songs make good on their titles. “Rufus the Dog” is not some misleading title to get you to listen to a song about a cat or a llama or something ridiculous like that. It’s about a dog. What he eats, where he sleeps, all kinds of things. Or my song “Three Little Words.” Guess what; those words are “I” and “Love” and “You.” I don’t stop with just two of them and I don’t barrel on to four or five. It’s just those three, exactly what I promised.

But you say fifty right in the title—not to mention in the song itself (six times by my count)—and then proceed to only give us five. Now just to be fair, because maybe I miscounted or something, let’s go through the five I see.

1. Slip out the back, Jack
2. Make a new plan, Stan
3. Don’t need to be coy, Roy

And then there’s the “listen to me” part, which isn’t a way to leave your lover. (Honestly, “Don’t need to be coy, Roy” isn’t really a way to leave your lover, but I’ll accept it. Poetic license and all that.) Then there’s:

4. Hop on the bus, Gus (“don’t need to discuss much” is, I assume, still directed at Gus)
5. Drop off the key, Lee

And “get yourself free” is for Lee, I’m assuming”.

I am going to move to a couple of features that look at the story behind the song. On the face of it, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover might seem like fantasy and Paul Simon coming up with the seeds of an idea and building on it. However, there might be more of the personal in it. Rather than cast himself as the protagonist and coming from a first-person perspective, instead, Simon might be embodying himself in the characters. This is the first feature I want to drop in:

“On the face of it, this song would imply that the protagonist is getting advice from a new lover about how to get rid of the old one. Maybe he’s been deceiving her, but the only thing that stands out as being deceiving is the title. You read the title and think that’s a lot of ways but in reality, only list’s five. So, what happened to the other 45? Maybe he didn’t need them!

Simon and his vocal partner, Art Garfunkel, who began their career under the name Tom and Jerry, had major success between 1966 and 1970 and really hit the big time right at the end when Bridge Over Troubled Water – the album and single – topped all charts and sold by the bucket load, but it caused tensions and by 1973 the pair had gone their own ways and launched successful solo careers. Who was the most successful? It’s hard to say because although Paul Simon had more hits he never reached number one in the UK, but he did write all his own songs whereas Art didn’t write any of his hits, but did have two ‘eyes’ chart toppers in the shape of I Only Have Eyes for You in 1975 and Bright Eyes in 1979, the latter becoming the best-selling single of that year.

Paul’s solo career began in 1972 with Mother and Child Reunion which reached number five. He followed it with Me and Julio Down by The Schoolyard, Take Me to The Mardi Gras, Love Me Like A Rock and then after a two-and-a-half-year gap he returned in 1976 with 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. In essence Paul really did write this after leaving his lover. He had been married to Peggy Harper since 1969 and divorced in 1975. On his 1983 album Hearts and Bones Paul reflected on his married life in the song Train in the Distance. He then began a relationship with the actress Carrie Fisher.

So how did that song come about? Well Simon, in an interview with Rock Lives: Profiles and Interviews, explained how it started, “I woke up one morning in my apartment on Central Park and the opening words just popped into my mind: ‘The problem is all inside your head, she said to me…’ That was the first thing I thought of. So, I just started building on that line. It was the last song I wrote for the album, and I wrote it with a Rhythm Ace, one of those electronic drum machines so maybe that’s how it got that sing-song ‘make a new plan Stan, don’t need to be coy Roy’ quality. It’s basically a nonsense song.” He’s been quite reserved regarding the song’s subject, except to say that it wasn’t about his wife”.

I am going to finish up with a feature from Stereogum. As part of their The Number Ones series, they spent some time with a Paul Simon masterpiece. One of my favourite songs of his, because the album it is from, Still Crazy After All These Years, turns fifty on 17th October, it was important to dive inside this song. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover is a track that has been with me for decades and still provokes emotion. The memories I have tied to it. More than that, the sheer quality of the songwriting and everyone on the record:

“Simon started to write “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” as a sort of kids’ game. Earlier in 1975, the 33-year-old Simon and his first wife Peggy Harper had split up after six years of marriage. One day, Simon had their three-year-old son Harper at his apartment, and he was trying to teach Harper how to rhyme. That’s how he came up with the chorus, with all its rattled-off names: “You just slip out the back, Jack / Make a new plan, Stan.” (Harper is now doing just fine for himself as a singer-songwriter, so the lesson must’ve worked.) In a 1975 interview, Simon admitted that “50 Ways” is “basically a nonsense song.”

He’s wrong, of course. “50 Ways” is actually a dazzling little piece of storytelling. A man is having an affair, but he’s dithering about ending his main relationship. He wants out, but he doesn’t know how to go through with it. The other woman wants him to hurry up and get the fuck out, and she tells him that he needs to do it. But she never comes out and says that. Instead, she frames it as helpful advice: “She said, ‘It grieves me so, to see you in such pain / I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again.'” And then she tells him to just do it — to act, to be decisive, to do any of the 50 things you can do to become single again.

Simon presents the whole thing as a dialog, almost a scene from a movie. He never offers any details on his own narrator or on the woman who’s helping him in his struggle to be free. Simon doesn’t even say if he’s cheating with this other woman; it’s just heavily implied. In that simple stretch of dialogue, we can infer the entire situation that this man has made for himself. And we can see the light slowly dawning on him. He can do it. He can leave. It’ll be fine. Simon said that he didn’t write “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” about his ex-wife. But when you come out with a song like that a few months after your first divorce, you’re telling us something.

In any case, “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” remains one of the few divorce songs that isn’t mired in reflection or self-pity. Instead, it’s a sly exultation, a wink at the whole idea that there can be freedom after marriage. The divorce rate was skyrocketing by the mid-’70s, so maybe that had something to do with the song’s popularity. A whole lot of the baby boomers who’d gotten married straight out of college — as well as those who, like Simon, were slightly older than the boomers — were starting to figure out that they didn’t have to stay with the same person for their entire lives. Heard from a certain perspective, “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” works as a celebration of that ability to get yourself free, and of the loss of stigma around it. (All those boomer divorces, it’s probably worth noting, did a real number on my generation of kids. But my parents are still together, and it’s not like I’m any less fucked up than my peers, so maybe all that freedom was ultimately a good thing.)

Simon wrote “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” to the beat of a drum machine. (I’ve now learned that a lot of ’70s songwriters did this, and I find that delightful.) When Simon recorded the song, the great studio drummer Steve Gadd came up with an intricate marching patter-riff. Simon, wanting to keep the song simple, arranged the entire track around those drums, which was a smart thing to do. “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” is a casually funky track, one that keeps bubbling throughout. The chorus doesn’t explode; it effortlessly slides right in. And when the chorus subsides, everything comes back to that drum riff again. That beat is the reason that “50 Ways” has been sampled dozens of times. (See below.) It’s also probably what keeps “50 Ways” from ever sounding vicious or callous, even though it’s really both.

Incidentally, all three of the backup singers on “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” — Valerie Simpson, Patti Austin, and Phoebe Snow — were prominent musicians in their own right. Valerie Simpson was the Simpson of Ashford & Simpson, who had already written “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and produced the 1970 Diana Ross version, which had been Ross’ first solo #1 hit. Simpson had also released a couple of solo albums on Motown; later on, Ashford & Simpson, as artists, would peak at #12 with 1984’s “Solid.” The singer-songwriter Phoebe Snow, who’d been touring with Simon all year, had already peaked at #5 with 1975’s “Poetry Man.” (It’s a 6.) And Patti Austin will eventually show up in this column, Simpson, Snow, and Austin don’t really get a whole lot of opportunity to show off on “50 Ways,” but that’s still a whole lot of talent in one room”.

There is a lot more to say about this classic. However, on 17th October, people will talk about Still Crazy After All These Years will get some new attention. I hope people talk about the songs. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover is one of Paul Simon’s finest achievements. In terms of the lyrics and the chorus. The composition. Everything beautifully sits together. A song that is still startling brilliant…

AFTER all these years.

FEATURE: Elegie: Patti Smith’s Horses at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

Elegie

Patti Smith’s Horses at Fifty

__________

TURNING fifty…

IN THIS PHOTO: Patti Smith in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith

on 10th November, Patti Smith’s Horses is one of the defining albums of the 1970s. I want to spend some time with it ahead of its fiftieth anniversary. I am writing this feature nine days before the release of an anniversary edition. Not only for Patti Smith fans and those who love the 1975 album, this is a release I think everyone should get. One of the greatest albums of all time. Horses is a singular and spectacular vision from one of music’s greats. An undeniable masterpiece that is influencing artists today:

“New York, NY – August 22, 2025 – Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, announced today a vinyl and CD release in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Patti Smith’s Horses. The album, originally released in 1975, will be released as a 2-LP and 2-CD on October 10. Pre-order is available now here.

This release will feature the iconic original album remastered direct from the original 1/4” master tapes, as well as previously unreleased outtakes and rarities, including Patti Smith’s 1975 RCA audition tape.

The release of Horses (50th Anniversary) will feature eight never-before-released songs, such as “Snowball” and “Birdland (Alternate Take)”, along with RCA demos. “Snowball” (here) will be the first single available on all streaming platforms today.

“The poet may stand alone, but in merging with a band, surrenders to the wonder of teamwork. Thus joined, we birthed Horses together.” – Patti Smith, Bread of Angels

On November 4, Patti Smith will publish her long-awaited memoir, Bread of Angels, via Random House Publishing. In Smith’s most intimate and visionary work, she describes her post-World War II childhood in working class Philadelphia and South Jersey, her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold, her rise as punk rock icon to her retreat from public life when she meets her one true love and starts a family on the shores of Lake Saint Clair, Michigan. As Smith suffers profound losses, she also returns to writing, the one constant on a lifelong path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination.

Bread of Angels Pre-Order: LINK
Order and Listen Link: https://PattiSmith.lnk.to/Horses50

Even though it was not a huge commercial success, Patti Smith’s Horses has this enormous and vital legacy. It is one of the most spectacular debut albums ever. Not only igniting Rock music but also fuelling and igniting Punk and New Wave. This is what critics have observed retrospectively. You can hear bands of today like The Last Dinner Party that nod to Patti Smith. Her music definitely has this impact and resonance. Horses is widely considered to be her best album. I am starting out with a 2015 article from Chris Charlesworth, and his recollections of his 1975 interview with Patti Smith for Melody Maker:

“Her band has been increasing in size over the years. Four years back it was just Patti and her guitarist Lenny Kaye, an occasional rock journalist and walking encyclopaedia on the last two decades of pop in America. Kaye, who three years ago, incidentally, compiled the Nuggets album of relatively obscure US singles for the Elektra label, might be described as a free-form guitarist, as he plays random notes at will according to the prompting of Patti’s dialogue. They understand one another and, as such, it’s doubtful whether any orthodox guitar player would fit.

Pianist Richard Sohl is a similar performer. Like Kaye, nothing he plays can be predicted beforehand. Recently two other musicians have been added: a second guitarist, Ivan Kral, who, like Patti, bears a striking resemblance to Keith Richards, and drummer Jay Dougherty. There is no bass player — Patti feels a drummer is ample rhythm.

John Cale was brought in to produce her first Arista album, Horses, which is released this month. It was on this topic that we began what turned out to be a very lengthy conversation last week. “It’s a live album,” she informs me, squatting on the floor. “There’s hardly any overdubbing at all. We just went in and did the songs straight away.

“In the studio we went through hell. I asked John to do it for me, I begged him to, and we had nothing but friction, but it was a love-hate relationship and it worked. At first I wanted an engineer producer, somebody like Tom Dowd, but Atlantic wouldn’t let him go, so I figured I’d get a top artist producer who would act as a mirror.

“The whole thing in the studio was us proving to John that we could do it the way we wanted, so we fought a lot but it was fighting on a very intimate level.”

The result is an album that’s actually far more melodic than the half dozen or so occasions I’ve watched Patti perform in various places in New York. The inclusion of a drummer – Dougherty was brought in immediately before the sessions began – tightens up Patti’s style no end. Before, it was often shapeless and lacked discipline of any kind. Now you can even dance to Patti Smith, or at least some of the tracks.

Even words were improvised in the studio, she says. “I’m not into writing songs. I find that real boring. All our things started out initially as improvisation, but doing them over and over again got them into a formula. I can’t play anything at all, so Lenny and I work out tunes as they go along. I have words and know how I think they should go, so we just pull it out and pull it out further until we get somewhere.”

She and Kaye first got together in 1971. This followed a period of Patti’s life when she lived at the Chelsea Hotel, writing poetry and spending time with rock musicians in what she describes as a “tequila split life”. Before that she was at art school, which followed work in a factory in New Jersey, where she was brought up. It was Dylan cohort Bobby Neuwirth who introduced her to the changing musical inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel. (Neuwirth is currently playing on Dylan’s tour of New England with Joan Baez.)

“Neuwirth recognised my poetry and immediately introduced me to everybody he knew in rock and roll and kept pumping me to work at it. I studied Rimbaud, too, but being surrounded by these rock and roll rhythms the two moved simultaneously.”

It wasn’t until 1972 that Patti started making regular appearances in New York.

In 1973 Lenny Kaye appeared following a reading Patti gave on the anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death, and from then on things accelerated. Pianist Richard Sohl joined the ranks and gigs followed at anywhere manager Jane Friedman could book them.

Which just about brings us up to where we began: the ‘Hey Joe’ single recorded at Electric Ladyland. It was a deliberate choice of studio, for Patti strongly allies herself with Hendrix, another artist who took his art beyond contemporary strictures.

“We had three hours of studio time, but I just did it like we were on stage. Eventually we had ten minutes left and no ‘B’ side, so I recited this poem and the musicians just joined in and we had it done”.

Patti Smith is currently performing some Horses anniversary dates across Europe and the U.S. I am going to finish up on a couple of other reviews. I want to start out with The Observer and their 2015 celebration of Horses. Forty years after its release, they heralded its staggering genius:

“The word “punk” would later be attached to everything CBGB-related, but Horses is more punk in its attitude than in its sound. It takes a cabaret approach to rock, and by cabaret I mean Brecht/Weill, not the Sweeney Sisters. Richard Sohl’s graceful keyboard work drives the arrangements more than Lenny Kaye’s scratchy guitar, and although the band can work up a good head of steam, it tends to do so in a knowingly theatrical way. This music has a deeper affinity to Van Morrison lapsing into animal noises on “Listen to the Lion” than to the primal power of the Ramones.

While we’re on the subject of animal noises, it must be acknowledged that Horses is not always a pleasant listening experience. Smith didn’t intend it to be. Over the course of its 44 minutes, she bleats like a goat, yelps like a cat whose tail has been stepped on, howls like an abandoned toddler and pounds her chest while she sings to give her voice a guttural gulp. All for what? Like a shaman (a word and a concept she loves), she’s always reaching for the transcendent, trying to slip past the borders of her own self, enter the spirits of others, and meld with the mysterious force that binds us all together. She doesn’t always attain this transcendence, but she knows where she can find it: in rock and roll.

That is the abiding message of “Gloria” and “Land,” the garage-recitative suites that are Horses’ two centerpieces. The message is conveyed more through the music’s overall mood, the swells and surges of the band, and the sound of Smith’s voice—harsh edge, yearning center—than it is through her words (which, truth be told, verge on gibberish at times, especially during “Land”). And that message further confirms that this album could only have been made by people who were young and starstruck in the ’60s.

It’s true, you don’t have to be familiar with “Gloria” as rendered by Them (or any number of others) or “Land of 1,000 Dances” as rendered by Wilson Pickett (ditto) to appreciate what’s going on here. But it sure helps a lot if you are, and if you subscribe to the notion that three chords and the truth are really all that matters. To quote David Bowie, “Till there was rock, you only had God.”

These holy orgiastic moments are necessary to counterbalance the rest of the disc, much of which—“Redondo Beach,” “Birdland,” “Break It Up,” “Elegie”—is fixated on death. One curious irony about Horses is that an album so closely associated with the beginning of something (punk) is itself so concerned with endings. Its celebrated opening line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” now seems far less significant than its closing ones: “I think it’s sad, it’s much too bad, that our friends can’t be with us today.”

All of which is a long way of saying that the kind of pretentiousness and self-indulgence on display in Horses is the kind everyone needs from time to time. It’s a positive thing to be reminded of Smith’s wild-eyed belief in the power of rock to provide catharsis, to soothe, to heal, to transform. Unlike many of her generation, she’s never given up that belief. She was still proclaiming it loud last Sunday through her very presence on stage with U2 in Paris. Would the world be a healthier place if more of us shared her faith? It could be worth a try”.

I am heading to 2011, and this NPR article from Charlie Kaplan. Highlighting how Horses is this towering achievement, though it is an album with some difficult and some sometimes dark subject matter. I think I first heard Horses a decade or so ago. Quite late in life, it will be interesting seeing how journalists mark its fiftieth anniversary on 10th November:

“The album's opening intonation, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" would feel like a stale trope or pose coming from someone else, but feels radical and terrifying when Smith says it. Part of what's so gripping about Horses' first track, "Gloria — In Exelcis Deo — Gloria" (an interpolation of Them's "Gloria") is how changeable and unpredictable Smith makes every element in the song. Nothing takes a single shape for long: not the tempo, the instrumentation, her accent, or the song's idea of gender. Smith sings from the perspective of a male narrator, all lupine lip-licking, but even his personality is in chaotic flux, distorting grotesquely as his libidinal advances intensify. Smith's narrator isn't rejecting atonement in his opening statement — he is relishing the depravity of what he can't wait to do, acts Jesus probably wouldn't have bit the big one to atone for, if he could take it back. And all this is coming from a woman, narrating as a man, preying on a woman. It really makes you rethink Van Morrison's early material.

The album then gets increasingly demanding and confrontational, and focuses on themes untouched in rock music preceding it. Disfigurement and escapism — surrealistic and almost one and the same here — emerge as prevalent themes. On "Break It Up," both the narrator and the boy she fixates on tear their skin off, turn into angels, and fly away from their hellish, earthly existence. On "Birdland," Smith's voice vacillates between beat poetry, Sprechstimme, and rock vocals as a boy realizes that his late father is, in fact, not dead but an alien, right before he is mutilated by a flock of birds, abducted by said aliens, and transported to another dimension. "We love birdland," she concludes.

Suicide also recurs as a theme. On "Redondo Beach," Smith settles into a stylistic form — peppy, jerky reggae — to sing about her narrator's girlfriend committing suicide. Suffice it to say, this juxtaposition is dissonant, dark, and left me feeling a little sick; in other words, it was effective. In the album's incredibly powerful and upsetting centerpiece "Land/Horses," — which reminded me of the band Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop," which would come out two years later — a boy named Johnny is raped, gets addicted to cocaine, and commits suicide. Smith's poetry is affecting here; Johnny's emotional collapse is a herd of horses, "white shining silver studs with their nose in flames," his ultimate act "a butterfly flapping in his throat."

"Land/Horses" also reprises lyrical themes from "Gloria — In Excelsis Deo — Gloria," again conflating rock references — particularly to dance — with sexual predators and assault. Close to the end of the song, Smith repeats a line from "Gloria," "humping on the parking meter, leaning on the parking meter," now transformed from an image of sexual appetite into a motif of victimization. This perspective and reinterpretation of the optimism and sexual liberation of the '60s is, to me, the central idea behind Horses. An outsider to that moment in time, Smith sees the injustice obscured by the pop patrimony.

Horses was hard to enjoy, but I think that was the point. Having been squired by Rolling Stone, whose '60s-centric sensibility was much of what Smith took aim at, I probably had a similar initial reaction to this album that critics swaddled in the Beatles and Stones did. Going back to the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time," for the first time I picked up on the obvious bias of the list; it was compiled, the issue's introduction proudly proclaims, by "An eclectic and stellar panel of experts — including the Rolling Stone editors, Fats Domino, Flea and Britney Spears," who "voted on the following albums, by everyone from Abba to ZZ Top, from Robert Johnson to the White Stripes." After listening to Horses, the Hands-Across-America diversity represented by "Flea and Britney Spears" and the faith-restoring ecumenism that somehow managed to place Robert Johnson and the White Stripes on the same list doesn't sound quite as impressive to me as maybe it did to Rolling Stone when they wrote it”.

I am ending with a review from Punk News. There are so many positive reviews for Horses. This is an album that received nothing less than effusive and ecstatic love and reaction. An album too potent and important to be half-hearted about! Fifty years later and its creator is touring songs from it. It is wonderful to see:

“Patti Smith had an equal love for poetry and 60's garage rock. She drew from both, showcased in her amazing lyrics (the best of any artist from the early punk days; compared to Bob Dylan's) and teamed them up with a three-chord rock and roll backing. The music shows the most dynamic range of the newborn genre, from songs with lengthy quiet sections with expressive spoken word vocals, to pounding rock and roll with Smith snarling, jabbering and yelping overtop. Smith shows intelligence and raw energy throughout, a deserving inspiration to generations of female rockers through her songwriting, performance, and by remaining androgynous, never relying on her gender to gain appeal (shown by the cover photo, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe). She was the first person to write a punk song with movements (no it wasn't Green Day) and the first female rocker- I believe- to fall off a stage while rocking out (no it wasn't Karen O).

Every track is great and it's inevitable that this review will be long, but I'll try my best. "Gloria" the opener pulls the chorus from the song of the same name made popular by Them, an early band of Van Morrison, and the rest is by Smith. It starts with the incredible opening line, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine". "Redondo Beach" is a song mourning a girl who committed suicide, masked by the happy reggae tune supporting it. "Free Money" would be one of my favorites for being one of the most catchy and straight-forward rockers on the album. It starts with a quiet intro of twinkling piano with gentle bass and vocals, which soon takes off into a toe-tapper with a great ending full of back-up vocals and the title repeated rapid-fire.

"Land" is the focus of the album for sure, a 9 1/2 minute song with three connected movements. It starts with a powerful beat poetry section about a boy being attacked who, in terror, imagines as if he's surrounded by horses, and "Horses" also being the name of this first movement. The tempo builds up steam and then bursts into the second movement, another nod to Smith's love for old rock and roll with her take on "Land of a Thousand Dances." It seems like an odd transition, but it just seems to make sense here moving from chants of "Horses! Horses! Horses! Horses!" to "Do ya know how to pony like Bony Maroni? Do you know how to twist? Well it goes like this, it goes like this." By this mood change the song is in full swing and you will stomp your foot and sing along every time. The song winds down and returns to a possibly violated Johnny ("his sperm coffin") in the final movement "La Mer (De)" with dances reappearing occasionally ("Do the Watusi!").

The original album ends with the subdued piano-based "Elegie", but this release adds one more track. No it's not a waste-of-space demo version of a song on the album like on so many re-released classics, it's a worthy track. The Patti Smith group live in Cleveland in 1976. They perform a punk-as-hell version of The Who's "My Generation" complete with added profanity by Smith (rather than "Things they do look awful cold, Hope I die before I get old", she screams "I don't need that fuckin' shit, Hope I die because of it!" It ends with Smith chanting over top of the feedback, "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young!" which later reappears as a lyric from "Privilege" on 1978's Easter. Also, it seems that John Cale from VU (also the producer of this album) is playing with them, because she yells "John Cale!" right before the bass solo. The song is a worthy addition and also works well to end the disc. As far as the album as a whole in reissued form, it looks great and sounds great so I have no complaints other than I wish the lyrics were included since they're so fantastic. Lyrics can be found easily online however”.

On 10th November, Patti Smith’s groundbreaking debut turns fifty. The word ‘masterpiece’ is perhaps the most commonly-used when it comes to Horses. Artists such as Viv Albertine of The Slits, Michael Stipe, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love and Johnny Marr have shared their appreciation for the album. How it has impacted them. Fifty years on, and Horses is touching a new generation. Musicians who will incorporate the sound of this 1975 album and influence those coming through. If you have not heard Horses in a while then spend some time with it now. Horses is one of the most important albums…

IN music history.

FEATURE: The Reasons Why This Album Is a Masterpiece: Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Reasons Why This Album Is a Masterpiece

Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty

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I will write one or two…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

more anniversary features for Kate Bush’s Aerial. As it turns twenty on 7th November, it is important to discuss one of her best works. Arguably her greatest album. In the first feature, I sourced some interviews and reviews. What Kate Bush was saying in 2005 and what critics were too. The second feature was about A Sky of Honey, Aerial’s second disc, and its visual possibilities. 1993 was when she released The Red Shoes. Most did not know whether Bush would released an eighth studio album. It seemed like she might retire. However, there were signs and encouraging words. When she attended the Q Awards in 2001, where she collected the Classic Songwriter award. She mentioned how she was working on a new album. That it was taking a bit of time. Eight years after The Red Shoes came out, glimmers of hope for Kate Bush fans! Despite the fact it would be another four years until an album materialised, what we actually got was a double album. So, to be fair, she only left six-and-a-half years between albums! Now, we have waited almost fourteen years for an eleventh studio album. I don’t think Bush will grace us with another double album – though you never know! For this features, I am going to write why Aerial is so affecting. Why it means so much to me. For a start, it has similarities with 1985’s Hounds of Love. They are different in many ways, though both have conceptual second sides/albums. The ambition for Bush to go back to the idea of a conceptual suite. A Sky of Honey arguably surpasses The Ninth Wave. In terms of its scope and sonic blends, it is this dizzying and beguiling forty-two minutes of genius. If The Ninth Wave seems like a concept with short stories woven together, A Sky of Honey very much is this continuous suite. That is how Kate Bush wanted people to experience it. I have written how we need to see something visual. A new film or immersive experience that brings A Sky of Honey to life.

I might go into more detail regarding A Sky of Honey. An Endless Sky of Honey. As you can see from her website, Aerial is an album “full of birdsong - from wood pigeons on a lovely afternoon to the human turned-blackbird at the break of dawn”. As Kate Bush said: “I wanted to explore the idea of birdsong as a language and the idea that light is a trigger for their extraordinary song. Why do they all start to sing at dawn? Why do they sing so strongly as the sun starts to set?”. Aerial has been reissued a few times. In 2010, when Aerial was released to iTunes for the first time, its A Sky of Honey title was changed to An Endless Sky of Honey. How Bush wanted it all along. And it is this magnificent and accomplished work. An album in itself, very few artists ever have released an album consisting of a continuous suite. Kate Bush breaking ground decades after she recoded her first song! You could have A Sky of Honey on its own as an album, and it would be a masterpiece loved by critics. However, A Sea of Honey is the first disc. It contains many of Bush’s greatest songs. If she was worn out and dealing with a lot when The Red Shoes was released in 1993, time away to focus on herself and family not only rejuvenated her. It was a lifeline and new lease of life. She gave birth to her son, Albert, in 1998. There is a blend of family new and old on that first disc. A Sky of Honey I feel mixes fantasy with Bush embracing the joys of an English garden through a summer’s day. There is also her taking the listener to a foreign beach and shifting the scenery. From wood pigeons and blackbirds, through to a painter musing, to the sands of an exotic beach as it goes dark, it is this incredible and sumptuous cocktail consisting of so many different colours, tones, flavours and scents. An extraordinary musical bouquet.

A Sea of Honey is more conventional. However, one can also make connections between Hounds of Love’s focus on family and their importance and Aerial. That will be the last comparison to her 1985 album. However, as that is regarded as her masterpiece and one of the best albums ever, Aerial does not fall that far short of its impeccable standards. Bertie is this joyous ode to her new son. A mother’s pure joy. A Coral Room mentions Bush’s late mother. Mrs. Bartolozzi, I think, is also partly about her mother. Or Bush as a new mother. The imagery and magic through these songs is staggering! Bush’s voice has picked up new layers, age and depth. In her forties, this slightly older artist conveys and projects new wisdom and weight. I think Aerial is her most impactful album. In terms of the emotions she conveys, there is so much openness and love. However, Bush also takes us back and reminds us of some of her most eccentric and delightfully odd moments. Pi is her reciting a series of numbers. King of the Mountain, though autobiographical in the sense of Bush casting herself as this mysterious and reclusive figure in the wild, is about Elvis Presley. A jewel of a song “about the extreme pressures of fame, specifically using Elvis Presley as a focal point to explore the idea of his possible continued existence and the unbearable nature of his celebrity. The song draws parallels between Presley's isolated life and the themes of Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane, particularly the search for lost happiness or innocence, symbolized by Kane's sled "Rosebud". Bush questions if such intense public adoration can truly sustain a human being, suggesting that the weight of constant fame is ultimately too much for anyone to bear”. King of the Mountain is the opening track on Aerial and its only official single. I think Aerial contains one of the best run of four songs on any Kate Bush album. We have Mrs. Bartolozzi, How to Be Invisible, Joanni and A Coral Room ending the first disc. Joanni is one of the few songs that does not reference Kate Bush’s family. Instead, it is a song about Joan or Arc. How to Be Invisible contains some of Kate Bush’s most powerful and indelible images: “You stand in front of a million doors/And each one holds a million more/Corridors that lead to the world/Of the invisible/Corridors that twist and turn/Corridors that blister and burn”.

A gorgeous, wide-reaching and endlessly listenable double album. After twelve years, it could have been underwhelming. Self-indulgent or misdirected. Instead, not only did Kate Bush release something new and vastly different to 1993’s The Red Shoes. Her production was at its very peak. Aerial is an album that constantly reveals new things. Put it on today and listen the whole way through. A Sea of Honey will take you in different directions and evoke different reactions. I think it contains all of Kate Bush’s best assets and facets. Her voice is so rich and stunning. A Sky of Honey, or An Endless Sky of Honey as it should be, is this almost cinematic experience. You close your eyes and are immersed in this cycle of a summer’s day. The details Bush puts into the songs. How she can summon the intimacy and beauty of an English garden one moment, and then take us into the sky and to the sea. Something Balearic and euphoric towards the closing moments. All of the songs perfectly unite to tell this larger story. Understandably, critics raved about Aerial! It was this artistic work of genius that confirmed Kate Bush is one of the greatest artists and producers ever. I remember when it came out in 2005. I will explore various other sides of Aerial for the remaining one or two anniversary features. I do hope others celebrate the album near to 7th November. Aerial sounds as sense-altering and emotion-provoking now as it did…

TWENTY years ago.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Geese

FEATURE:

 

Spotlight

Geese

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BUSY at the moment…

PHOTO CREDIT: Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone

touring and promoting their acclaimed new album, Getting Killed, many new faces are discovering the magnificent Geese. I am quite new to them. They have been in the business a little while, though now really is a time when they are getting a lot of attention and love. I am going to get to some interviews with the Brooklyn band of Max Bassin, Emily Green, Dominic DiGesu, and Cameron Winter. Even though they are four albums deep, especially in this country, they are appearing on the radar of some big music websites. I would say they are still a new band. Definitely one that deserves to be spotlighted. Before getting to some interviews, a brief bit of biography from Partisan Records:

“New York City’s Geese return with their highly anticipated 3rd studio album, ‘Getting Killed’. After being approached by Kenneth Blume at a music festival, Geese tracked the album in his LA studio over the course of ten fast-paced days.

With scant time for overdubbing, the finished project emerges as something of a chaotic comedy, shambolic in structure but passionately performed, informed by an exacting vision. Garage riffs are layered upon Ukrainian choir samples; hissing drum machines pulse softly behind screeching guitars; strange, lullaby-esque songs are interspersed with furious, repetitive experiments. With ‘Getting Killed,’ Geese balances a disarming new tenderness with an intensified anger, seemingly trading their love of classic rock for a disdain for music itself”.

I am going to start out with an expansive and detailed interview from GQ. They spend five days with Geese. They note how these friends, five years ago, were on the verge of breaking up; “But between the solo debut of singer Cameron Winter and their stunning new album, Getting Killed, Geese have quickly become a band on a potentially historic run”. It is a very long interview, so I have taken parts that are of particular interest. Though I would recommend that you read the entire thing:

“But what, I want to know on this Sunday morning, about their own past? During the last five years, since they signed a record deal at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a few repeated narrative threads have converged for Geese. They are upper-middle-class New York kids who started a band in high school and were about to break up when Covid cancelled their college plans. They are quiet, weird, and funny—or, as Bassin puts it with a smile, “All super fucking undiagnosed autistic, terrible hangs.” They are not to be confused with Goose, because one bird can only entertain you for so long.

Geese have managed their story so successfully, in part, because Winter can be so guarded in interviews. When asked something, he pauses for so long it’s tempting to interrupt the silence and ask something else. In our five hours of conversation, I spend at least thirty cumulative minutes waiting him out. (He and his mom think this stems from a concussion he got while playing hockey in eighth grade, though his dad insists it’s simply his nature.) When he answers, the response is very often a very good joke or even a lie, like a trap carefully set in chess. He has insisted he made Heavy Metal in various Guitar Centre stores around New York (not true) and once told The New York Times that Geese employed a little elfin helper named Ezekiel (I have yet to meet him).

Only two minutes after we sit down outside, Winter tries one of his trademark quips. When I ask about the first time he met Kenny Beats, the burly and gregarious producer who made Getting Killed and will meet Geese back in his studio in two hours, Winter tells me how Beats—who has since changed his professional name to Kenny Blume—stormed into the band’s backstage tent during Austin City Limits last year and demanded they work together. He compares Blume to Godzilla. “So we pepper-sprayed him,” Winter deadpans.

No one in Geese quite knew what to make of Kenny Beats, back before Winter convinced him once and for all just to be Kenny Blume.

In the summer of 2024, Blume had gone to see his old friends in King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard for two nights at Forest Hills Stadium. He missed the opening act, but he admired the gumption of their merchandise—namely, a T-shirt that read Geese inside the Oasis logo, above a picture of the Beatles. Was that even legal? He asked a friend about Geese’s deal. “They’re just these smartass kids from Brooklyn,” he said.

The smartass beatmaker from Connecticut was intrigued enough to see them on night two, then to download 3D Country, then to fall steadily for the record’s busted Ween-meets-Queen outlandishness. When he saw Geese in Los Angeles a few weeks later, he spied other hotshot producers in the room and decided the time probably wasn’t right to court them. He couldn’t help himself. “I don’t know what came over me,” he tells me. “But I knew I couldn’t work with anybody but these guys. I just had to make music with these kids.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Jeremy Liebman

Blume emailed managers, labels, and friends, trying to set up a meeting with Geese. He heard they already had time booked in January with a famous peer, but he didn’t care. So in October, when they were both playing Austin City Limits on the same day, he barged into their tent, took a deep bong rip, and did something he does very, very well: started talking. The bong belonged to Bassin and DiGesu, so they paid attention. Green was more circumspect, sizing him up from across the tent. Winter, meanwhile, sat with his feet on a chair, his head tucked so far between his knees that he never made eye contact.

“I don’t know why I was confident enough to say the word ‘horny,’ but I said, ‘I’m horny for mistakes,’” Blume says, flashing his infectious smile. “And then Cameron looked at me, through me, like I said the fucking secret code word to a speakeasy.”

Winter liked the idea of capturing his imperfect band and his odd voice with someone who was also horny for mistakes. “Astral Weeks is a good example. Van Morrison hates that album, partially because he’s a dick and he’s stupid,” Winter says with a little glint in his eyes. “But also because he only hears the mistakes, you know? He doesn’t have it in his brain to hear that the mistakes are the best thing he ever did.”

In their rush of albums and in their dazzlingly fast rise from a good band to, on Getting Killed, an astounding one, it can get lost just how young the members of Geese remain. They were the only kids in their elite high schools to forego college, opting to get their education this way, at least for now. They are growing up, on stage and on tape. They are not only becoming a band but adults in their early 20s, too.

When I ask Sam Revaz, Geese’s touring keyboardist, about this evolution late one night, he grins and sighs. Revaz is 28, five years older than the other members of Geese. He finished his jazz piano performance degree at New York University the year before Geese had a record deal. Yes, they’ve encountered transphobia and racism in certain recesses of the country (Bassin's mom is Chinese), but he says they’ve rolled over it like a speed bump, a piece of someone else’s past with which they needn’t be concerned in the present.

“With Emily transitioning, we were all a little scared at first, given the state of the country,” Revaz says. “But it’s been really clear to me from the jump that they’re not insecure about what other people think of them. And also, we have each other to lean on”.

Before getting a review of Getting Killed from NME, I want to bring in some of Rolling Stone’s interview with a hugely innovative and young Rock band. It is clear that the Rock scene is as healthy and diverse as it has ever been. Getting Killed is one of many standout Rock albums from this year. Although a lot of the interview – and many from this year – talk about Cameron Winter’s 2024 solo album, Heavy Metal (which provides important context but does hog too much of the conversation time), Getting Killed is very much the focus. An exciting new Geese album:

“Getting Killed, out Sept. 26, is Geese’s most formidable album yet. DiGesu and Bassin cut deeper, craggier grooves. Green swings her guitar between halcyon and haywire, and Winter sings — he just flat-out sings, a nimble and mighty vocal contortionist with one of the most distinct voices in music.

“They’ve been put in this jam-band space. They’ve been put in this ‘smart kids in New York who play instruments good’ space,” Blume says. “They’ve been branded in all of these different ways. And they really wanted to say something different with this music.”

But as self-assured as this record often sounds, the empty toiling of hand-clap day shows just how different everything was when Geese flew to Los Angeles in early January to record with Blume, who’s produced several rock records but is still best known for his work with rappers like Vince Staples, Denzel Curry, and Rico Nasty. The band arrived in his studio with about 20 demos, but few resembled full songs. Blume says he could hear in them a “huge shift in texture, ambiance, and purpose,” but it was far from clear how they could actualize it all. For a group driven by a creative restlessness, a desire to distinguish themselves from both predecessor and peer, Geese felt woefully underprepared. Completely directionless. Also, Los Angeles was on fire.

“As stressed as they were about making a great record,” Blume says, “add this on top of it, it wasn’t easy.”

For a full month, Geese trekked back and forth between their shared home in Mid City and Blume’s studio near the University of Southern California. There was little to do but work. They weren’t particularly close to the fires, but smoke choked the skies and the open-air atrium Blume had built into the studio was covered in dust and ash.

True New Yorkers, no one in Geese has a driver’s license. And L.A. isn’t exactly a walkable city, as many stranded East Coasters have learned before.

“The amount of steps I got daily was atrocious,” Green deadpans.

“Oh, buddy, it was great,” Bassin says. “I love Uber.”

Making Getting Killed wasn’t easy, Winter admits. “I was unhappy until the last possible moment,” he says. “Maybe even still. The whole process — maybe this is just how we make albums — but it’s all kind of a waking nightmare until it’s mastered.”

“It does feel like a brute-force effort until the very end,” Green adds.

And then a few minutes later, Winter’s joking about how, if they ever want to make a triumphant comeback album, they have to start “making dogshit quick.” He adds: “We just do it for the ‘critical reception’ part of the Wikipedia article.”

“That and the fucking snacks, dude,” Bassin says.

ROCK & ROLL HAS been around for so long, endured so many deaths, that even its most striking revivals can resemble grave robberies. The risks of tumbling into that pit — a literal nostalgia trap — are high. Geese have garnered comparisons to Television and Zeppelin, the Strokes and the Stones, Deep Purple and Gang of Four, just to name a few. But like rock’s best crooks, they are beginning to excel at leaving a trail of tantalizing clues while always getting away with the heist.

“For a band that reminds people of so many acts they were really trying to combat nostalgia in certain ways, without having to say that,” Blume tells me.

Loren Humphrey, a close studio collaborator of Geese who co-produced Winter’s solo album, echoes the sentiment. “They’re really passionate about trying to do something different,” he says. “A lot of the artists that I’ve worked with, or even just sessions that I’ve been around, all of the production seems so referential. Like, ‘Let’s make the drum sound exactly like this.’ It was cool to see these kids coming and it’s the opposite. They don’t want to reference anything.”

Blume, too, mentions Geese’s aversion to nostalgia while discussing the way they incorporated samples on Getting Killed, like the auxiliary production clattering off Bassin’s drums in “Taxes” and the chopped loop of a Ukrainian choir ululating over crunchy guitar riffs on “Getting Killed” (though not, sadly, handclaps).

Geese have been playing music together for nearly 10 years now. They know how to navigate disagreements and spend two months in a van together. They’ve also spread out over the city. DiGesu still resides on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where he grew up; Winter has landed in Bed-Stuy; and Bassin and Green have found homes in Ridgewood, Queens. They see each other at shows, and at practice of course, but the hangs are less frequent than they used to be.

“There’s so many parts in my life that fulfill requirements that can’t be met by these three people,” Green says.

“Exactly,” Bassin adds. “It helps that we remain close, but it certainly feels like a work and play separation”.

Getting Killed has scored a run of five-star reviews. It is such a thrilling album. One that will be talked about for many years to come. I want to include NME’s review. The band are coming to the U.K. in March. We have a bit of a long wait to see them. I have never seen them live so, when they come this way, I will try and see if I can grab a ticket. It will be electric hearing Getting Killed’s songs played on the stage:

“Since putting out their debut album ‘Projector’ in 2021, Geese have become one of the most respected bands of their generation. The former NME Cover stars have built a fierce reputation for making consistently interesting, experimental indie–rock that makes you believe original ideas still exist, even as they reference acts who’ve come before them. Their growth has been a word-of-mouth sensation, chatter around that first LP – a solid slice of post-punk thrills – getting increasingly louder with 2023’s country-tinged rock’n’roll record ‘3D Country’ and frontman Cameron Winter’s acclaimed solo debut ‘Heavy Metal’ last year.

Now, with their third album ‘Getting Killed’, Geese feel on the verge of proper cult superstardom. That’s in part thanks to ‘Heavy Metal’ carving out more space for Winter as a magnetic presence – the kind of artist where you don’t know if his interview answers are real or bullshit, and whose stream-of-consciousness seems to produce work that feels both profound and impenetrable. It’s also thanks, though, to the whole band’s commitment to keeping their fans guessing, trying out new things and not being afraid to get a little weird.

That approach remains intact on ‘Getting Killed’, obvious from its opening – ‘Trinidad’’s noodling guitars and Winter wailing, “There’s a bomb in my car” over blasts of discordant noise. Sonically, this album feels like a natural stepping stone from both ‘3D Country’ and ‘Heavy Metal’, losing more of the Americana feel of the former in favour of warm but unconventional rock’n’roll collages. The title track centres around a bluesy guitar riff and a cut-up loop of a Ukrainian choir layered over it, while ‘Taxes’ grows from syncopated percussion to a chiming guitar topline that could have been pulled from a Stone Roses record.

There’s a lingering feeling of something spiritual happening on ‘Getting Killed’. Sometimes that comes through in Winter’s delivery, which often feels like a rambling but engaging preacher delivering his teachings to a rapt congregation. At others, it’s the imagery he uses in the lyrics, like in ‘Taxes’ when he sighs, “I should burn in hell / But I don’t deserve this”, and later warns: “If you want me to pay my taxes / You better come over with a crucifix / You’re gonna have to nail me down”.

In the lead up to ‘Getting Killed’’s release, Geese told Rolling Stone they had spent one day in the recording process so focused on choosing a handclap sample that they’d forgotten “to make the song”. There’s so much going on in this album that it feels like it would have been easy for the five-piece to lose sight of the bigger picture, yet for all its abrupt shifts and intricate details, ‘Getting Killed’ somehow doesn’t ever feel like there’s too much at play or like its creators aren’t in complete control. Instead, this is a band living up to their reputation as exhilaratingly free-spirited, not so much proving they deserve all the accolades and fervent fanaticism bubbling around them but demanding it”.

I hope what I have included in this features tempts anyone who does not know about Geese to check them out. I am relatively new to them, so I am not especially aware of their earliest days and their story. However, whilst researching for this feature and listening to Getting Killed, it has instilled this respect. A band who are repurposing, revitalising and reviving this Rock spirit. In their own way. Even if this is their fourth album and they are pretty much established, I would say that Geese are…

ONLY just getting started.

__________

Follow Geese

PHOTO CREDIT: Lewis Evans

Official:

https://geeseband.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/geesebandnyc/

Twitter:

https://x.com/geese_band/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@geese.band

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY1iN9fT5gG7sG3oAAkkQtQ

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/geesebandnyc

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0WCo84qtCKfbyIf1lqQWB4?si=JhNOk5cGQSGnJcJO3r9HLg

FEATURE: National Album Day 2025: The Importance and Power of the Album

FEATURE:

 

 

National Album Day 2025

IN THIS PHOTO: Wolf Alice, who released the Mercury-nominated The Clearing earlier this year, are among the Album Champions for this year’s National Album Day on 18th October/PHOTO CREDIT: Oscar Lindqvist for Rolling Stone UK 

The Importance and Power of the Album

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I have found it impossible…

IN THIS PHOTO: Jacob Alon released their debut album, In Limerence, in May/PHOTO CREDIT: Island Records

to put together a list of the best albums this year, as there are too many to choose from! I know I will forget quite a few and have to revise it. However, I will give it a go. I keep forgetting about new acts like VLURE and Geese. Maybe not new bands, but those I might otherwise have overlooked. Albums from Olivia Dean, Jacob Alon and SPRINTS. I think that you can’t really get a proper and wholesome impression of an artist from a single or E.P. An E.P. can be this amazing project between singles. Maybe if an artist has not got a full album yet. It means fans can have something quite long but the artist is not rushed to making an album. E.P.s are getting more and more common. Singles are all well and good, but I think you cannot beat an album in terms of what it offers. It is this single piece that you should listen to in full. I know we are in a culture where we pick songs and often skip through stuff. We are encouraged to rush and everything is made to go faster. Vinyl sales rising suggests people want to spend time with that format and enjoy an album but, in a digital, smartphone and streaming era, we are often listening to playlists and not necessarily committing to albums. It is a worry. A recent interview from NME caught my attention. Wolf Alice have been named as Album Champions for National Album Day. That takes place on 18th October. This year’s theme is Rock. A genre always evolving and being written off at the same time, Architects, Nova Twins and Iron Maiden join Wolf Alice in championing albums. There is no doubt Wolf Alice love albums and make theirs as strong as possible.

Their fourth, The Clearing, has been nominated for a Mercury. The fourth time the band has been nominated….which makes them the most nominated ever. There is no doubting the credentials of Wolf Alice when it comes to the album! Their drummer, Joel Amey, spoke with NME about Wolf Alice’s ambassadorial role for National Albums Day, and why the album is such an essential and beautiful format:

“A good album is a world you can jump into. How would you describe the world of ‘The Clearing’? Did that reveal itself as you were making it?

“We had more conversations about it than we’d ever done before. It felt like an experiment to me because we chose to write differently to how we’d done in the past. Our previous records are all quite different, but it’s quite ‘Wolf Alice’ to go away, everyone writes, then we pull together what we think is exciting. That has really benefitted the band before. But with your fourth album, you ask, ‘What’s going to be exciting for us?’ It was this idea of making a cohesive body of work where the songs come together more coherently than before. That was a challenge for us. It really made us focus on our songwriting and every single chord change. ‘Do we need to stack 85 guitar tracks to get the same point and emotion across? Joff [Oddie] is an incredible guitar player, why don’t we just challenge him to do that?’

“We wanted all the parts to be chosen and more bespoke to the song. It was about honing in on what was important. It was a really fun thing, but we evolved out of our limitations. ‘The Clearing’ is our most experimental album in that sense, because we’ve never made one like it.”

As you said, albums are a capsule of a time and a very important mode of expression. That becomes a more important vehicle when the world is on fire. Wolf Alice have been vocal supporters of Palestine and said that doing so should allow others to feel less afraid and alone. Do you feel like the backlash is lessening through so much artist solidarity, and that the focus is shifting from the culture war to the atrocities themselves?

“I don’t know, because I’ve seen certain people use their platform and gone to see what kind of response they’ve had, and it can be volatile and violent. There are artists who screenshot DMs they’ve received just for speaking out. I don’t know. I just know that I’ve learned a lot from seeing people use their platform. It doesn’t mean that you have to agree exactly with what they say, but it’s about having a conversation. That conversation matters. We need to remind ourselves that it’s OK to have a conversation with someone with different opinions to yours. It’s OK to use your platform if you feel comfortable to do that and you see a moral cause. You learn that privilege as an artist.

“I applaud anyone who’s using their platform in today’s day and age to try and get a resolution to what people are experiencing.”

Wolf Alice have also been staunch in fighting for artist rights and the grassroots. Do you feel as if some good may come about now that the industry seems more open to that conversation?

“It will only get better with action. Everything seems to fall on the responsibility of the artist sometimes, which can be quite overwhelming. It’s got to pan out on so many different levels: from labels to government to music being taught in schools more, so people can find a love and respect for it. We’re gonna do our bit, I hope more people do theirs, and that’s where the hope comes from.”

What advice would you give to a young artist who might think that ever making an album is a pipe dream?

“You can make an album, fine! Don’t wait for the world to give you the thumbs up to be creative. Don’t wait for the world to give you the green light to do what is inside you. I applaud anyone who has time to make something any way they can. What is a conventional method these days? They’ve all been completely chewed up and spat out and rightly so. Good art always finds a way. Just have fun with it. Make a band with your friend. Make art on your own. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. I used to sit in my teenage bedroom and dream about what I’m doing now”.

Not enough is written about the album format. We celebrate the best albums of the year, though it is rare to find articles extolling the virtues of the album. A format that has existed for many decades, are we in danger of losing the connection to the album as more people stream their music? Even if many people are seeking out physical formats, that is not to say they will necessarily listen to entire albums. So many modern artists release a string of singles before an album comes out. I wonder if that takes away from the impact and purpose of an album. If you give too much away before it is released, will people explore the entire body of that album or skip the singles and listen to the rest? Or listen to those singles and ignore the remainder? A cohesive and full work where the artist can tell a story and engage the listener in a way they cannot get through singles and E.P.s. Albums can be a tricky thing. In terms of engaging people from start to finish. Getting them to invest that time into a work. Also, albums are more expensive than streaming singles. In 2023, Forbes ran an article about the importance of singles and albums in the music industry:

“Instead of releasing content quickly to keep audiences engaged, you can use this to show a specific sound or masterpiece you have perfected. Albums allow for a deeper dive into a specific set of melodies, feelings, and artistic sentiments. There are a lot of listeners who crave a more profound connection to a musician's work, and an album is where the creations come to life.

From a marketing perspective, albums can also be a substantial event in an artist's career because of how costly and draining they can be to create. They present marketing agencies with the opportunity for a comprehensive marketing campaign, creating anticipation and buzz around the release. How you present an album can build you a long-lasting fan base that can eventually cause fans to check out the older releases you already have. An album launch can also be a significant occasion that creates a more effective artist-to-listener relationship, driving both new and existing fans to engage with the artist in some sort of way”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

It is rare for artists to release albums early on. In that they will put out quite a few singles and maybe an E.P first. Maybe it is the way the industry works now. It is harder to get a foothold and leverage unless you have put out quite a few singles. Demand for an album comes a bit later than they’d like. Maybe the sheer cost of making an album is putting many off. Also, people streaming albums does not make much for artists. These are all drawbacks. However, the vitalness and wonder of an album cannot be overstated. National Album Day is not only going to highlight Rock and put that centre. It is a day when we can very much centre the album. Its relevance and purpose. Those artists who have albums in mind and look at the long term and whole picture rather than pumping out singles and collating them into an album will always endure and stand out more. There are too many disposable artists who pump out singles and you might not hear an album for years. And when it comes, it can be a disappointment. Or you have already heard most of it. The album is a magnificent thing. It is interesting what Wolf Alice’s Joel Amey observed when he said how the band make each album different. A new palette and canvas where they can think about what they want to say. That is why The Clearing is such a beautiful thing. The album still has a lot of power today. In fact, this year has been one of the…

STRONGEST years in recent memories.

FEATURE: Spotlight: VLURE

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

VLURE

__________

THIS band…

are not fresh off the block but, with so many of my Spotlight features, the idea is to shine a light on an artist or group who is hitting a stride or are starting out. In the case of VLURE, this is a group who have just released one of the best albums of the year with Escalate. This is very much their moment! Before coming to some recent interviews with them, Sony Music provide some background to this incredible band:

“Since their debut single ‘Shattered Faith’ in 2021, VLURE have built themselves a reputation as one of the most vital and culturally significant bands around. Their performances at The Great Escape and Pitchfork Paris were raved about, their set at Shangri-La was talked about across all of Glastonbury and they were nominated as BBC Introducing Scotland’s Artist of the Year in 2023. To add to this, they also won Best Live Act at the Scottish Alternative Music Awards in 2023 and Electronic & Dance Live Artist of the Year at the 2024 Scottish Live Music Awards.

In 2025, the five piece – Hamish Hutcheson, Alex Pearson, Conor Goldie. Niall Goldie and Carlo Kriekaard – released their first new music in over a year, in the form of ‘Better Days’, now revealed to be the first taste of their long-awaited debut album. ‘Escalate’ is a 13-track collection that is the proudly, loudly, avowedly now sound of VLURE’s hometown, with the thrills and spills of Glasgow – its daylight, its nightlife, and its afterparties – providing the pulse and heartbeat of Escalate”.

This is a busy time for VLURE. They are on tour and have a string of European dates ahead. Escalate is a magnificent debut album. Perhaps the finest of this year so far. And that is up against some tough competition! I am moving to an interview from late last year from Bring the Noise. They spoke with the recipients of the Scottish Alternative Music Award for Best Live Act 2023. If you have not connected with VLURE yet, then make sure you do. This band are primed for worldwide domination:

“Can you start by introducing the band and telling us about your music background?

Conor: Me and Niall are brothers so I guess it came from that, we have played in different bands and we did this to start something for ourselves. A few years ago we met Alex and Hamish at a gig and decided to start a band together.

Niall: We have been together now for six years and played our first festival five years ago at Truck Festival. We actually played there again last weekend. We released our first song three years ago.

How did your music style develop, can we get away with calling it trance-punk?

Conor: We were into punk at that time, during COVID we decided to create something for ourselves. We were also into dance music so decided to try to combine both of those.

N: Myself and Carlo were into the production side of things and we think that has helped our music develop.

We find that people from Glasgow are always a hard crowd to win over for up and coming bands, why do you think that is?

N: Glasgow is a no bullshit city and the people can be very self-deprecating and very harsh, but once you are established they take to you quite easily. This is the case in all walks of life in Glasgow, not just in music.

Carlo: We supported Bob Vylan recently at The Garage in Glasgow. The first half of the set people were wondering who we were, but by the end of our set they were saying that’s quite good actually. It was an amazing experience supporting Vylan.

Have you had any support from any fellow Glasgow bands?

Conor: There is such a concentrated network of people creating art in Glasgow, we share a studio space with bands from around the area.

Carlo: We are lucky enough to know so many people working in music, be that DJ’s, producers etc. and we take inspiration from each other”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Brennan Bucannan

I am moving to a great 2025 interview from The Line of Best Fit. Raw emotion, energy and ambition goes into every note of their music. VLURE’s debut album is one of the most complete I have heard in a while. An instant classic, Escalate should be heard by everyone. As The Line of Best Fit say in the header of their interview regarding VLURE: “their true aim is bigger than the beat: to reframe euphoria as a collective act of defiance”:

“Like their music, VLURE’s aims are big and sincere – a far cry away from the usual detached pessimism Glasgow can get oversimplified with as a city. And this band adores their city. After a few years of touring, and shows across Europe as their star rises, their debut Escalate is a love letter to growing up here.

The five-piece get this across musically with a high-chasing dance and industrial hybrid sound, live guitar and drums mixed with brutish breaks and peak time synth lines, all presided over by Hamish Hutcheson’s urgent spoken word. There are pieces of Arab Strap in Hutcheson’s poetry, and more than a touch of For Those I Love, but the group are just as indebted to the current openness of the scene in Glasgow.

“I used to promo a wee DIY label,” says Goldie. “At that point, in your late teens or early twenties, you’re paying the venue fee and just bringing your mates, having a party, and finding spaces that can accommodate. Then people have your back throughout that.

“That crosses genre scenes. Glasgow’s got an amazing club scene where everyone’s got each other’s back. There’s the rap scene which doesn’t get enough attention. The community here is amazing, and everyone shares ideas”

PHOTO CREDIT: Brennan Bucannan 

VLURE have quickly moved to larger venues, supporting their heroes Primal Scream on tour as well as slots at TRNSMT and Glastonbury, but they are just at home in places like McChuills, which they played back in 2021 with The Murder Capital.

“You can play some massive show, and it’ll be amazing, but I’m lucky when I play smaller venues,” Goldie says. “Playing a 200-cap venue in Glasgow with everyone here who’s on the same wavelength, screaming in their face, and they’re right in front of you. It’s just chaos. We need more of that.”

“So much of that is struggling in the UK. We did the Music Venue Trust tour a couple of years ago, and it was amazing. Independent venues are the lifeline, to any access to making music, for young people to have the opportunity to go to spaces and get involved.

“You’re also left with all the people who are really up against it and really give a shit, so you start to find common ground in that. The techno guys and the rappers and the visual artists, we’re all in the same shit here.”

Despite finding joy and comfort in their home city, starting any new project can be met with scepticism here. “We actively stuck it out,” Hutcheson says. “People are just not arsed. Our aim was to go around other countries, do lots of stuff, and when we come back people will be like ‘you are class, actually.’”

“A lot of young people, and especially artists and musicians, feel like they need to leave Glasgow to get to that stage, whether that’s going to London or another major city,” Conor agrees. “That’s something that we’ve been conscious of trying at any opportunity, that you can be Glaswegian, be in Glasgow and have a music career.”

“Glasgow itself, even though it can be pessimistic, hedonistic, crazy – people have each other’s back.” says Hutcheson”.

A true love letter to Glasgow, Escalate is going to connect with those beyond the borders of the Scottish city. This is an album that is hitting people around the world. And, as one of the most astonishing and memorable live acts around, they are getting a lot of love and growing their fanbase. DORK spoke with VLURE recently. Their debut album, as they note, “maps the territory of youth itself”:

“‘Escalate’ emerges as a narrative journey through youth itself, mapping the territory between weekend revelry and Monday morning reality. As Conor explains: “Lyrically ‘Escalate’ discusses themes of coming of age, finding yourself, love, partying and youthful abandon, but also the heavier side of that; grief, nostalgia, addiction, recklessness and knowing when to hold your mates close. We wanted this record to be equal parts euphoric and reflective but overall positive and fulfilling; its aim is to find power in the whole process of becoming who you are, with a night out in Glasgow’s clubs, pubs, parks, flats and afters as the backdrop.”

The album’s sonic palette reflects this ambitious scope, drawing from a variety of influences while maintaining its own distinct identity. Working with renowned electronic producer Manni Dee, VLURE have crafted something that defies easy categorisation. “We wanted this to be a crossover record in every sense and not to be pigeonholed by the perception of us as a ‘band’,” Conor notes. “There are moments that are full post-punk band chaos, but there are also moments that certainly live in the clubs; Manni being one of the UK’s most forward-thinking electronic producers, as well as his former techno life helped us hone in on this.”

The recording process itself became a testament to their DIY spirit and determination, combining home studio ingenuity with professional expertise. “We recorded the synths and programming in our home studios on Logic and Ableton. The live instruments were recorded in the live room together as a solid performance at 45 A-Side Studios in Glasgow. For the vocals, we recorded those at Hamish’s gaff in Ballieston,” Conor shares, adding with characteristic enthusiasm, “We loved every single minute of it.”

The technical challenges were real – “Just my MacBook’s RAM capacity, to be honest,” Conor jokes – but the bigger challenge lay in merging their electronic and live elements. Enter mixing engineer James Rand, who Conor praises as “an incredibly talented engineer” who “understood exactly what we were trying to do.” This collaboration proved crucial in realising VLURE’s vision of a record that could live comfortably in both live venues and late-night headphones.

When asked about the best possible compliment for the album, their answer reveals much about VLURE’s artistic integrity: “Hopefully, that it doesn’t sound like anything else around at the moment. This was something we discussed in depth, just retaining focus on doing what felt right to us and not trying to overly reference things. To go and move relentlessly with the feeling and our immediate responses!”

For VLURE, a great debut album comes down to “emotional integrity.” It’s an apt description for ‘Escalate’, which captures the raw essence of nights that blur into mornings, of friendships forged in dark clubs and tested in bright daylight.

As for where they hope this album takes them? “That’s not entirely something we’ve considered or something we like to think about,” they admit. “We hope there’s something in this record for everyone and that the people it reaches are able to find some of themselves in it, connect with it and are able to make some mad memories with their mates shouting the words with us at the live shows. It’s all for the memories”.

In spite of the fact VLURE have been on the scene a while now, they have just put out their debut, so it is a good time to put them in my Spotlight series. Many still see them as rising, even though they have been playing and releasing music for a long time now. I am staying with DORK for the final inclusion. Their five-out-of-five review of Escalate:

“When they first burst onto the scene, VLURE were lumped in with post-punk, often sharing festival stages with dour bands who wouldn’t crack a smile if their label deal depended on it.

In the years since then, the band have proved time and time again that they suit a 1am club spot far more than a mid-afternoon in the back of a pub function room. ‘Escalate’ is the final clarion call for what VLURE are really about – and it sure isn’t post-punk.

Opener ‘I Want It Euphoric’ is a mission statement, its window-rattling bass overlaid with a pounding synth line as lead singer Hamish intones ‘Take it or leave it / I want it euphoric’. What follows hammers that message home at every opportunity. ‘Let It Escalate’ owes as much to Goldie as it does to anyone else, a rattling rhythm soundtracking Hamish’s rapidfire lyrics.

Elsewhere, gothic synths underpin ‘Tha Gaol Agam Ort’ and ‘Just Breathe’ goes further afield than the band have ever been before, enlisting French singer Gaïa to mark out an oasis of calm in an otherwise relentlessly uptempo tracklist.

Old favourites are sprinkled throughout, too, each reworked to give them even more heft. ‘Heartbeat’ was always an absolute banger, but here it feels like a revelation – the kind of track that you hear blasting through the walls of a nightclub at 3am.

Debut albums can be tricky to get right, especially when you’ve been a going concern for as long as VLURE have. On ‘Escalate’, they’ve turned up, absolutely flattened any expectations and proceeded to throw a party in the wreckage. Forget post-punk, VLURE are here to proclaim the rise of pill-punk”.

I am not sure how much focus is put on Glasgow. In terms of a music city. We need to spend more time there, as VLURE are one of many incredible artists emerging from the city. Right now, the band are looking ahead to some European dates. Their music translates and extends far and wide. Songs that have connected with so many people. On their upward trajectory, I think we will see them headline festivals. Major ones. With Escalate surely sitting alongside the best albums of this year, there is no stopping…

THIS Glasgow quintet.

__________

Follow VLURE

Official:

https://www.vlureofficial.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/vlure.gla/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0Ev1tqYsfzq2eF5qqXhkYm?si=fvfQ319BTJ2lSt1lNq_83Q

FEATURE: Groovelines: Eve (ft. Gwen Stefani) - Let Me Blow Ya Mind

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Eve (ft. Gwen Stefani) - Let Me Blow Ya Mind

__________

THIS feature…

explores a song that arrived in 2001. A collaboration with Gwen Stefani, Let Me Blow Ya Mind featured on Eve’s second studio album, Scorpio. The second and final single from the album, Let Me Blow Ya Mind was a huge success around the world. I remember when it came out. I was in sixth form college and would play it quite a lot. One of the best tracks of the early-2000s, I am going to go deeper for this Groovelines. Before that, if you are an Eve fan and have not checked out her memoir, written with Kathy Iandoli, then I would advise picking it up. The New Yorker published a piece on the Who’s That Girl? when it was released last year. You can pick it up here:

“The definitive autobiography from Eve, the multiplatinum, Grammy Award®–winning, Emmy®-nominated rapper, singer-songwriter, actor, mother, philanthropist, and entrepreneur.

In 1999, Eve Jihan Cooper made history with her solo debut album, Let There Be Eve…Ruff Ryders’ First Lady, reaching number one on the Billboard 200, marking her as the third female rapper to ever obtain that position. She later made history again as the first recipient ever of the Grammy Award® for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration for her platinum single “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” with Gwen Stefani. Following up with three chart-topping albums that made unrivaled waves in the world of hip-hop and music, as well as trailblazing moments in TV/film and fashion, Eve now looks back on her groundbreaking career.

West Philadelphia was not for the faint of heart—Eve knows that better than anyone. However, she navigated those Philly streets (and later the rest of the world) seamlessly, though it was not without strength and resilience. She incorporates that unbridled ambition into every bar that she writes and every stage/set that she stands on. With a gritty realness that speaks to her style, she shares her experiences going from the Mill Creek Projects to Hollywood.

In this memoir, Eve reveals:

• Her experience working both in hip-hop and Hollywood simultaneously

• Dealing with a male-constructed industry that directly affects female rappers

• The internal mental health struggles that come from fame

• Her journey through fertility issues and motherhood

• Working on an entertaining yet controversial talk show

• Finding her balance as a wife, mother, and international superstar

Eve also unveils the war stories she’s endured throughout her career, from her entrance as “Eve of Destruction” into a male-dominated hip-hop industry, to the deeper story behind Scorpion that was never told until now, to the internal battle with her music, her label, and herself after Lip Lock.

This fearless, empowering, and inspirational memoir from hip-hop sensation Eve explores her rise to stardom as a female MC, her lasting legacy on pop culture and music, and her incredible yet enduring struggle balancing her personal life with her professional one”.

I am going to move to a feature from That Grape Juice from 2015. A decade ago, they saluted a stunning pairing. I would love to see Eve and Gwen Stefani perform this song again. Whilst Eve has appeared on singles over the past few years, she has not released an album since 2013. It is a shame that such an incredible talent is not recording at the moment. Even so, we have albums like Scorpio that demonstrate why she is such an important and influential artist. A rapper that has inspired so many other women. One of the best of all time:

“An extraordinary song that was rightly lauded by critics, Let Me Blow Ya Mind brings together this incredible Rap talent, Eve, and the lead of No Doubt, Gwen Stefani. A lot of collaborations don’t work and, in the modern age, people throw artists together for the hell of it. In the case of Let Me Blow Ya Mind, the pairing was perfect. The interplay and chemistry is exceptional. I am going to get to some contemporary analysis and reviews of Let Me Blow Ya Mind.

“Long before Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX made the masses move with their infectious Hip-Pop collabo ‘Fancy’, a fierce duo were already bridging the gap between the Urban and and mainstream arena.

This week’s From The Vault is ‘Let Me Blow Yo Mind’ by rapstress Eve and Gwen Stefani.

‘Mind’ was the second single released from E.V.E.’s second offering ‘Scorpion.’. Unleashed in 2001, it was the first of two songs produced by Dr. Dre for the duo – with the second coming a few years later in the form of ‘Rich Girl.’

The single was a chart hit reaching #2 in the United States and peaking inside the Top 5 in the United Kingdom. It was ranked the 7th biggest song of the year 01 on Billboard.

The track’s visual sported “party crasher” theme with Stefani and Jeffers inviting themselves to a chic soirée before transforming it into a titanic “turn-up.” Humorously, producer Dr. Dre makes a cameo and bails out the girls (who are arrested for their antics) from their cell.

Helmed by Phillip G. Atwell, the clip won a MTV Video Music Awards in the ‘Best Female Video’ category in 2001.

It’s pairings like these which make us root for “cross-genre” ventures. Indeed, with most of today’s collabos reeking of “convenient”, it’s refreshing to see two artists, completely different from one another, bring the best of their distinctive worlds together to make sweet music.

Eve and Gwen, we salute you!”.

In 2018, Rap Analysis dissected Let Me Blow Ya Mind. Produced by Dr. Dre and Scott Storch, even if the feature notes how Eve’s rhythms are quite simple, the way she delivered them is hypnotic. One of the most underrated rappers ever. I have chosen sections of the feature that caught my eye (and I hope it hangs together). I have heard Let Me Blow Ya Mind so many times but never tire of it:

“I recently made a rap song where I took dozens and dozens of bars from 100 different songs by 50 different artists, and freestyled through all of them by means of categories that grouped their flows together based on rhythmic similarities. Some rhythms were syncopated, some were on-beat, some were really complicated, etc. Obviously Kendrick was in there, as was André 3000, Notorious B.I.G., Lauryn Hill, Talib Kweli, Nas, and Lil Wayne…no surprises so far. But at the end of the list, who did I find but—Eve! I expected those other rappers with technical reputations to show up, but not her. What did her inclusion among such a legendary group teach me about her rap?

It showed me that Eve’s rap taps into some really fundamental facts about rap that many people gloss over, or ignore completely, when discussing the rhythmic elements of rap. The undeniable reality is that most of rap’s rhythms will always sound extremely similar to each other (in theory, at least). This is because there just aren’t that many different rhythms that rappers can pull off while still meeting all of rap’s innate requirements. These requirements include the fact that the song’s tempo must be quick/slow enough to talk over, and that the rapper must take breaths every so often. Even within a single beat with four 16th notes, there are only 12 possibilities for separate rhythms. When we expand this to a full bar and its own 4 beats, we are still left with only 240 possibilities. This might sound like a lot—and, certainly, there are more than 240 rhythms in rap’s history—but this quick-and-dirty estimation is still very small when compared to the number of different possible rhythms in instrumental musics like jazz. Trumpets, basses, drums, and saxophones obviously aren’t constricted by rap’s strict requirements around both communication and breathing.

So if there aren’t really that many possible rhythms in rap, then how come we never get bored of it?

The answer is found in the amazingly diverse world of rappers’ vocal timbres, as well as rappers’ varying amount of rhythmic swing. And, unsurprisingly, Eve brings both of those things in abundance on “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.”

As a second example, take Eve’s offbeat flow:

“EAsy come,

EAsy go,

EVie gon’ be

LAS-tin'”

Here, Eve positively explodes off the beat on the syllables “ea-“, “ev-“, and “last,” as she says them more loudly, and says them right on top of the beat. This is her hard-hitting Philly flow coming through full force.

We’ve now gotten to the heart of the matter. Eve’s style is so catchy because she takes rhythms that we’ve been hearing all our lives, and then restyles them into something completely new and super sticky with her swing and with her delivery. I’ve tried to use this big comparison in order to draw close attention to those defining features of her style. Such features aren’t complicated rhythms, like Talib Kweli’s signature style, or a super unique voice, like Aesop Rock. Instead, her legendary status rests on her ability to take really simple rhythms, and make them stick in your ear like glue…and pulling off a trick like that just goes to show that Eve really has blown our minds with this song”.

GLAMOUR spoke with Eve in 2021. Discovering the story behind five of her songs, we learn a bit more about Let Me Blow Ya Mind. Eve was told the song would not work. She made it anyway! The fact that it won a GRAMMY in 2002 for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration proves that it was a major success. Nobody should have doubted the song’s credentials:

“She dropped her debut album, Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders' First Lady, in 1999. It charted number one on the Billboard 200, making the Philly native the third female rapper to achieve the accolade. What followed was a career that places Eve as an undeniable icon in the rap game. “Who’s That Girl,” the first single from her 2001 album, Scorpion, was listed number 97 on VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of Hip-Hop; in that same year she won the BET award for best female hip-hop artist. Eve also took home a Grammy in 2002 for her song featuring Gwen Stefani, “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” for best rap/sung collaboration.

It's the one song that I wrote fully—like, literally every single thing, every word. I write my own stuff, but usually I get lazy after I write verses. I don't want to write the chords, and Dre was like, “You're not leaving the studio until this song is done.” I hated him that day, but I'm so happy he made me stay.

The other thing with the song is that not only did Dre do the beat, I got a Philly native, Scott Stauch, who I've known since I was 15 years old, on the keys and then Gwen Stefani, who I was a huge fan of because of No Doubt. And I got told that that was never going to work. I got told that that song would not work, that people would be like, “Why are these two chicks together?” I was like, “Look, let's try it. If it sucks, no one ever has to hear it.” But of course it didn't. I knew it wouldn't. Thank God. And you know, I won a Grammy. That was my first Grammy”.

I am going to wrap up an interview from Billboard. In August, Eve discusses some of her best-known songs. She revealed how Let Me Blow Ya Mind is still her favourite record to perform live. It is a track that I will never tire of. I think it was the first Eve song that I heard. I might have heard Who’s That Girl? after Let Me Blow Ya Mind. She remains one of the greatest and most original rappers ever:

“Eve sat down with Billboard for a trip down memory l ane, as the Philly native recalled some of the stories behind the hits in her decorated career.

The Gwen Stefani-assisted “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” is still Eve’s “favorite record to perform” to this day after peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. “That is probably my favorite record,” she shares. “Obviously, Dre did the beat, Scott Storch on the keys. I’ve known Scott Storch since I was 14 in Philly.”

Eve knew it was Gwen Stefani or bust as a feature. “I did not want anyone else. I felt it had to be her because I could hear her voice on it,” she adds of the singer.

With Dr. Dre involved, Eve explains that he’s the ultimate producer who can take tracks to another level with his musical prowess. “As I was writing, it’s not so much that he jumps in to say this or that, but it’s how you say or deliver certain things and that makes a difference,” she says.

Eve returned the favor and scored another top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with Stefani when the duo reunited for “Rich Girl” in 2004. “This was the first time I’d gone into the studio with a woman, especially in a different genre, to watch a different writing style,” she adds of working with the No Doubt singer”.

An award-winning song from the heavyweight queens Eve and Gwen Stefani, I wanted to look inside Let Me Blow Ya Mind. I have not read Eve’s Who’s That Girl? memoir, though I will pick it up at some point. I have fond memories of Let Me Blow Ya Mind. Released when I was seventeen, I was hooked as soon as I heard it. Twenty-four years after its release and it still sounds amazing, Taken from Eve’s Scorpio, this incredible song will endure for years more. It is one of the best…

COLLABORATIONS of all time.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Soundgarden

FEATURE:

The Great American Songbook

IN THIS PHOTO: Soundgarden photographed in 1992 (Kim Thayil, Chris Cornell, Ben Shepherd, and Matt Cameron)/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Natkin/WireImage

Soundgarden

__________

I have been bonding again with…

one of my favourite albums of all time. Soundgarden’s Superunknown was released in 1994. I first encountered that album, and Soundgarden, through the video for Black Hole Sun. That video still stays with me to this day! Released in 1994, Superunknown is not only one of the best albums of its decade. It ranks alongside the greatest albums ever. The entire band is terrific, though Chris Cornell’s vocals give every song such power, depth and vulnerability. He wrote the lyrics for the majority of the song and wrote most of the music too. More diverse and deep than 1991’s Badmotorfinger, Superunknown was the moment when Soundgarden reached a peak. It is an album that still sounds so captivating to this day. It has not aged or lost any of its electricity! We sadly lost Christ Cornell in 2017. However, his enormous influence will live on. I am featuring Soundgarden in this The Great American Songbook. Ending with a twenty-song mix that takes us right through their career. Many of the songs will come from Superunknown, though there is a nice spread. Before getting to that, I  want to come to AllMusic and their biography of Soundgarden:

“Soundgarden carved out a place for heavy metal in alternative rock. They were not the first band to draw upon the heavy, sludgy sounds of the '70s; the group picked up a thread left hanging by fellow Seattle rockers Green River, grunge pioneers who favored the scuzzy rock of the Stooges, and they shared Jane's Addiction's love of grandiose heavy rock. Nevertheless, Soundgarden popularized metal within alternative rock, even obliterated the line separating the two subcultures. Melding the slow grind of Black Sabbath and cinematic scope of Led Zeppelin with the D.I.Y. aesthetics of punk, Soundgarden played with an intelligence and ironic sense of humor that was indebted to the American underground of the mid-'80s. Their music contained a similar sense of adventure, often taking detours into psychedelia, unconventional guitar tunings, and complicated time signatures. Vocalist Chris Cornell and guitarist Kim Thayil were excellent foils, with Cornell's powerful wail pushing against Thayil's winding riffs, a chemistry that gave the band a distinctive character that belonged neither to the mainstream nor the underground. This chemistry was evident from the band's start, when Soundgarden was one of the first groups to release a recording on Seattle's pioneering Sub Pop label. Those early records built a considerable buzz, suggesting Soundgarden would be the band that broke down the commercial doors for alternative rock. That didn't turn out to be the case. They were eclipsed by the meteoric success of Nirvana, fellow Sub Pop alumni whose Nevermind became a blockbuster while Soundgarden was working on Badmotorfinger in the fall of 1991. As it turns out, Soundgarden received a boost from grunge exploding in the mainstream. Superunknown, their 1994 album, became an international smash, with its hit single "Black Hole Sun" becoming a standard of its era. The group didn't weather success well, disbanding after 1996's Down on the Upside, but their catalog endured, leading the band to reunite in 2010. Over the next few years, the group toured regularly, releasing a new album called King Animal in 2012, before Cornell died tragically in 2017.

For a band so heavily identified with the Seattle scene, it's ironic that two of its founding members were from the Midwest. Kim Thayil (guitar), Hiro Yamamoto (bass), and Bruce Pavitt were all friends in Illinois who decided to head to Olympia, Washington, to attend college in 1981. Though none of them completed college, all of them became involved in the Washington underground music scene. Pavitt was the only one who didn't play -- he founded a fanzine that later became the Sub Pop record label. Yamamoto played in several cover bands before forming a band in 1984 with his roommate Chris Cornell (vocals), a Seattle native who had previously played drums in several bands. Thayil soon joined the duo and the group named itself Soundgarden after a local Seattle sculpture. Scott Sundquist was originally the band's drummer, but he was replaced by Matt Cameron in 1986. Over the next two years, Soundgarden gradually built up a devoted cult following through their club performances.

Pavitt signed Soundgarden to his fledgling Sub Pop label in the summer of 1987, releasing the single "Hunted Down" before the EP Screaming Life appeared later in the year. Screaming Life and the group's second EP, 1988's FOPP, became underground hits and earned the attention of several major labels. The band decided to sign to SST instead of a major, releasing Ultramega OK by the end of 1988. Ultramega OK received strong reviews among alternative and metal publications, and the group decided to make the leap to a major for its next album, 1989's Louder Than Love. Released on A&M Records, Louder Than Love became a word-of-mouth hit, earning positive reviews from mainstream publications, peaking at 108 on the charts, and earning a Grammy nomination. Following the album's fall 1989 release, Yamamoto left the band to return to school. Jason Everman, a former guitarist for Nirvana, briefly played with the band before Ben Shepherd joined in early 1990.

Soundgarden's third album, 1991's Badmotorfinger, was heavily anticipated by many industry observers as a potential breakout hit. Though it was a significant hit, reaching number 39 on the album charts, its success was overshadowed by the surprise success of Nirvana's Nevermind, which was released the same month as Badmotorfinger. Prior to Nevermind, Soundgarden had been marketed by A&M as a metal band, and the group had agreed to support Guns N' Roses on the fall 1991 Use Your Illusion tour. While the tour did help sales, Soundgarden benefited primarily from the grunge explosion, whose media attention helped turn the band into stars. They were also helped by the Top Ten success of Temple of the Dog, a tribute to deceased Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood that Cornell and Cameron recorded with members of Pearl Jam.

By the spring release of 1994's Superunknown, Soundgarden's following had grown considerably, which meant that the album debuted at number one upon its release. (A year before its release, Shepherd and Cameron released an eponymous album by their side project, Hater.) Superunknown became one of the most popular records of 1994, generating a genuine crossover hit with "Black Hole Sun," selling over three million copies and earning two Grammys. Soundgarden returned in 1996 with Down on the Upside, which entered the charts at number two. Despite the record's strong initial sales, it failed to generate a big hit, and was hurt by grunge's fading popularity. Soundgarden retained a sizable audience -- the album did go platinum, and they were co-headliners on the sixth Lollapalooza -- but they didn't replicate the blockbuster success of Superunknown. After completing an American tour following Lollapalooza that was plagued by rumors of internal fighting, Soundgarden announced that they were breaking up in April 1997 to pursue other interests.

Dring the late '90s and 2000s, each member kept very busy. Cornell released three solo albums, also recording and touring as Audioslave with former members of Rage Against the Machine. Cameron toured his Wellwater Conspiracy project, and played and recorded with Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam. Thayil collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Cameron, Dave Grohl, Steve Fisk, and Boris. Meanwhile, Shepherd helped out with Wellwater Conspiracy, and also played and recorded with Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees. Finally, in 2010, the band announced a reunion with a few live shows during the summer (including that year's edition of Lollapalooza) which preceded a compilation, Telephantasm, in the fall. Telephantasm was initially available as a double-disc set on September 28, with a single-disc version appearing a week later (the single-disc was also included in Guitar Hero on September 28). In 2011, Soundgarden released their first live album, Live on I-5, which featured material recorded during the band's supporting tour for Down on the Upside. All of this activity would be the prelude to Soundgarden's full-on return in 2012, when they released their sixth album, King Animal, in the fall of that year.

King Animal debuted at five on the Billboard Top 200 upon its November 2012 release and the band supported it throughout the next year with a tour. Matt Cameron took a hiatus from the band in November 2013 due to commitments with Pearl Jam; former Pearl Jam drummer Matt Chamberlain replaced him for live dates in 2014. That year, Soundgarden celebrated the 25th anniversary of Superunknown with the release of two deluxe editions of the 1991 album: a double-disc set and a seven-disc Super Deluxe box set. During 2015, Chris Cornell mentioned that Soundgarden had started working on material for a new studio set and the band made it official in 2016, announcing that they were beginning to record an album. In the meantime, the band released a deluxe reissue of Ultramega OK in March 2017 and began an American tour that April. On May 17, following the band's concert at Detroit's Fox Theater, Cornell was found dead in his hotel room; he had taken his own life at the age of 52.

In the wake of Cornell's death, the surviving members of Soundgarden took time to regroup. In an October 2018 interview, Thayil suggested that the remaining trio would retire the Soundgarden name but perhaps work together in some capacity. The three did perform at a Chris Cornell tribute concert in January 2019, a show where vocals were handled by several singers, including Brandi Carlile, Taylor Momsen, and Taylor Hawkins. In July 2019, the band released their first posthumous record, the double album Live from the Artists Den, which captured a concert from 2013”.

An amazing band who we all very much miss, the mixtape at the bottom of this feature showcases the brilliance of Soundgarden. Many people might not know too much of the band, so I hope the songs push you towards investigating them. I have been a fan since I was a child, and it has been a pleasure to listen again to Superunknown. It is a golden album from…

A mighty band.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty-Two: Three Prime Cuts from an Underrated Album

FEATURE:

 

Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty-Two

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed at the piano whilst filming The Line, the Cross and the Curve in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Three Prime Cuts from an Underrated Album

__________

IN the second and final…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart

anniversary feature for Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes, I am concentrating on three tracks that are particular standouts. I have talked about Moments of Pleasure before, so I am not going to repeat myself. However, there are a trio of extraordinary songs that show the range and brilliance of The Red Shoes. An album that always gets a hard time and is never really given love, it turns thirty-two on 1st November. I am going to look at Eat the Music, Lily and The Red Shoes. Even though Rubberband Girl is my favourite song on the album, I have written about that enough. I was going to look at Big Stripey Lie, as this is a track where Kate Bush played electric guitar. However, the three songs I am concentrating on are remarkable. Before getting there, I actually want to drop in parts of a promotional interview for The Red Shoes from 1993. Vox spoke with Kate Bush for their chat that was published in November 1993:

“Qualities such as ambition and competitiveness are, supposedly, traditionally male ones, but do you possess either?

"I hate both words intensely I suppose that's because, in a lot of ways, they represent to me an incredibly driven male energy that offends my feminine energy. But I do think I'm driven, and I don't know about this thing of ambition. I don't know because I think my ambition is creative I don't think I'm ambitious to conquer the world, but I am ambitious to try out ideas and push things, to see if you can make it better. I'm certainly very driven in my work. I do think that for a lot of women, their creativity is quite masculinely driven--it's quite a masculine trait to speed forward, I suppose."

How much time have you spent working on The Red Shoes?

"Well, 1 haven't spent that long. It went on over a long period of time-about two years of solid work amongst three-and-a-half to four years."

Each album seems to take you longer to make than the last Is this because you are a true perfectionist?

"I think 'perfect' is... I have used that word in the past, and used it wrongly because, in a way, what you are trying to do is make something that is basically imperfect as best as you can in the time you've got with the knowledge you have".

You don't normally release material unless you're totally satisfied...

"That's right. That doesn't necessarily mean 'perfect', but it's to the best of my ability. I've tried to say what needed to be said through the songs, the right structure, the shape, the sounds, the vocal performance--that is, the best I could do at the time."

When you've worked hard for something, you obviously don't want somebody interfering with it. In your cuttings, you've been described as the shyest megalomaniac on the planet, so how do yout work out the balance between that and being an incredibly quiet, private person?

"I think it's quite true that most people are extreme contradictions. It's like this paradox that exists, and I think that on a lot of levels, I'm quiet and shy, and a quiet soul.

I like simple things in my life...I like gardening and things like that, but when it comes to my work, I am a creative megalomaniac again. I'm not after money or power but the creative power. I just love playing with ideas and watching them come together, or what you learn from something not coming together.

I'm fascinated by the whole creative process--I think you could probably say I was obsessed I'm not as bad as I used to be, I'm a little more balanced now."

What's calmed you down?

"Just life, I think... Life gets to you, doesn't it? I also think there's a part of me that's got fed up with working. I've worked so much that I'm starting to feel... I felt I needed to rebalance, which I think I did a bit, just to get a little bit more emphasis on me and my life."

Where did you get the idea of 'Rubberband Girl"?

"Well, it's playing with the idea of how putting up resistance... um... doesn't do any good, really. The whole thing is to sort of go with the flow."

What about the sexual content--'He can be a woman at heart, and not only women bleed?

"It's not really sexual, it's more to do with the whole idea of opening people up - not sexually, just revealing themselves. It's taking a man who is on the outside, very macho, and you open him up and he has this beautiful feminine heart."

Have you found many of those?

"I think I've seen a lot of them, yeah. I think there are a lot of men who are fantastically sensitive and gentle, and I think they are really scared to show it."

A father image often comes out in your work. Is that because you're particularly close to your father or does it merely represent somebody or something you respect?

"I think they're very archetypal images: the parents, the mother and the father... it's immediately symbolic of so many things. I'm very lucky to have had an extremely positive, loving and encouraging relationship with both my parents. And you know I feel very grateful... I feel very honoured, actually."

Who is the Douglas Fairbanks character in 'Moments Of Pleasure '?

'Ah... In a lot of ways that song, er.. well it's going back to that thing of paying homage to people who aren't with us any more. I was very lucky to get to meet Michael (Powell, the film-maker who directed the original The Red Shoes) in New York before he died, and he and his wife were extreme;y kind. I'd had few conversations with him and I'd been dying to meet him. As we came out of the lift, he was standing outside with his walking stick and he was pretending to be someone like Douglas Fairbanks. He was completely adorable and just the most beautiful spirit, and it was a very profound experience for me. It had quite an inspirational effect on a couple of the songs.

"There's a song called 'The Red Shoes'. It's not really to do with his film but rather the story from which he took his film. You have these red shoes that just want to dance and don't want to stop, and the story that I'm aware of is that there's this girl who goes to sleep in the fairy story and they can't work out why she's so tired. Every morning, she's more pale and tired, so they follow her one night and what's happening is these shoes... she's putting these shoes on at night before she goes to bed and they whisk her off to dance with the fairies”.

There are a few reasons why I want to spend time with these three songs. Eat the Music is a very special one. It got mixed reception when it was released as a single in 1993. It is a joyous and hypnotic track where Kate Bush goes deep. In terms of emotions, though also with the imagery. “Split me open/With devotion/You put your hands in/And rip my heart out/Eat the music/Does he conceal/What he really feels?/He’s a woman at heart/And I love him for that/Let’s split him open”. Before quoting more of the lyrics, I want to come to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and some information from them about Eat the Music:

“‘Eat The Music’ is a song written by Kate Bush. It was originally released as the lead single for The Red Shoes in the USA on 7 September 1993, while everywhere else in the world Rubberband Girl was released. In the UK, a small handful of extremely rare 7″ and promotional CD-singles were produced, but were recalled by EMI Records at the last minute. A commercial release followed in the Summer of 1994 in the Netherlands and Australia, along with a handful of other countries. The song’s lyrics are about opening up in relationships to reveal who we really are inside.

Del Palmer about ‘Eat The Music’

It uses a small guitar called a ‘caboss‘ which is one of the instruments Paddy (Bush, Kate’s brother) discovered and brought back with him. He’s very into ethnic music of all kinds and has always contributed a lot of ideas to the albums – he helped bring in some authentic players and the track started off with bass guitar which was then replaced by an acoustic bass – but that sounded a bit too Latin. The horn section’s real, of course.

Future Music, November 1993”.

I do love the fruit imagery. This banquet of goodies that makes the erotic with the everyday. It is the staple of Kate Bush’s music. “Take a papaya/You like a guava?/Grab a banana/And a sultana/Rip them to pieces/With sticky fingers/Split the banana/Crush the sultana”. It is an original and colourful song where all these scents and smells come to the fore! One of the issues with The Red Shoes is the sequencing. In terms of the dynamics and balance. Rubberband Girl opens with spirit and twang. Then things down right down with And So Is Love, before coming to a peak with Eat the Music and then back down again with Moments of Pleasure. I always think Eat the Music should have come right after Rubberband Girl, or else come in the final third, as that is the weakest I feel. There is that imbalance. However, Eat the Music is a gem of a song that is often dismissed.

Lily is another song from The Red Shoes that should have been a single. I think that about The Red Shoes too. Lily is the song that opened proceedings for Kate Bush’s 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. It is this solemn prayer and almost sacred reading. A song that is tender but powerful. Another one of these brilliant numbers that is not talked about. I was trying to find anything on Lily, like a review of feature, but there is precious little! Lily is the song from The Red Shoes that has the most incarnations I feel. Maybe Top of the City too, as both of these songs appeared in Before the Dawn but also featured on her 2011 album, Director’s Cut. The live version is terrific, though I love the version on The Red Shoes. Again, I am going to come to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for a little bit more context:

“‘Lily’ is a song written by Kate Bush. It was originally released on her seventh album The Red Shoes. The song is devoted to Lily Cornford, a noted spiritual healer in London with whom Bush became close friends in the 1990s.

“She was one of those very rare people who are intelligent, intuitive and kind,” Kate has said of Cornford, who believed in mental colour healing—a process whereby patients would be restored to health by seeing various hues. “I was really moved by Lily and impressed with her strength and knowledge, so it led to a song – which she thought was hilarious”.

I wish more was written about Lily. It is one of Kate Bush’s absolute best tracks. It does not appear in lists of her best songs. I know there is only so much room on those things, though something as wonderful as Lily warrants a place there! It is a reason why The Red Shoes is criminally overlooked. I agree that the sequencing is wrong and the album lags from the end of the second third. However, there are some amazing Kate Bush tracks on the album. Lily is among the best of the bunch.

Also, The Red Shoes is one of the best. This song was released as a single. It reached number twenty-one in the U.K. Like Eat the Music and Lily, this track was part of Kate Bush’s short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Arguably the first visual album ever released. Now, they are quite commonplace. Before getting to some critical feedback for The Red Shoes, it is to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for a final visit:

“‘The Red Shoes’ was released in the UK as a 7″ single, a cassette single and two different CD-singles. The 7″ single and cassette single feature the B-side track You Want Alchemy. CD-single 1 added ‘Cloudbusting (Video Mix)’ and This Woman’s Work, and CD-single 2, released one week after the other formats, features Shoedance (see below), together with the single remix of The Big Sky and the 12″ version of Running Up That Hill”.

The Red Shoes was an album that did get some negative press. Critics not that kind towards its singles. As magnificent as the title track is, there was still those poking at it. Making fun of Kate Bush and writing her off. Among the more muted feedback was a bit of love for The Red Shoes. However, even some of the compliments were not as effusive and explicit as they should have been:

“Chris Roberts from Melody Maker said, "'The Red Shoes' meets its jigging ambition and sticks a flag on top, making her dance till her legs fall off." Another Melody Maker editor, Peter Paphides, commented, "Only as a grown-up will I be able to fully apprehend the texture and allegorical resonance of the themes dealt with in 'The Red Shoes'. Until then, I'll content myself with Tori Amos and Edie Brickell.” Alan Jones from Music Week gave it a score of four out of five, adding, "The third single from the album of the same name is not one of Bush's more commercial 45s. Although both rhythmic and literate, it is not the stuff of which Top 10 singles are made."  Parry Gettelman from Orlando Sentinel wrote, "The mandola, the whistles and various curious instruments on the driving title track really recall the fever-dream quality of the 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes, the album's namesake." Mark Sutherland from Smash Hits gave it two out of five, adding that "loads of spooky 'ethnic' noises and tribal beats make for a very weird single, but not a very good one”.

I am going to finish there. On 1st November, The Red Shoes turns thirty-two. In spite of the fact it has not received a lot of respect and  positivity through the years, I think that it warrants a salute. Kate Bush did revisited a few of the tracks for Director’s Cut. Maybe not overly happy with her production in 1993. I wanted to highlight three exceptional songs from the album. That can stand alongside Moments of Pleasure and Rubberband Girl as prime Kate Bush. In spite of a few missteps, The Red Shoes still has…

PLENTY of glitter and shine.

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

FEATURE:

 

 

Fullhouse

Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Seven

__________

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

__________

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

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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

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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 dismiss award 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.