In case you have been oblivious to the world of popular culture, and in particular popular music, in the past week – “controversy” now surrounds the career of singer-songwriter Sam Smith.  Smith made his name in 2014 penning the album In The Lonely Hour about his doomed adoration and unrequited love for an unavailable, married man.  Nicknamed a male Adele given the torch song genre and massive sales, Smith was then merely famous for his voice and his song writing.  Even then he was openly gay and made no secret that subject of his album was another man.  By rights, this could have made waves if not for the likes of George Michael’s profoundly personal outpourings concerning his grief for his lover Anselmo Feleppa lost to AIDS on his record Older in 1996 or the trail of other openly gay male singers making no secret of their losses in love from Will Young to Rufus Wainwright.  So, perhaps we were already used to that.

What set Michael (and now Smith) apart was not gayness but sex itself.  The homosexual has long been tolerated, if not even accepted, when devoid of the sexual activity that defines it – not so much the love that dare not speak its name as the sex.  The paradoxical proof of the pudding came in 1984 when Frankie Goes To Hollywood were banned for both releasing a song about ejaculation (Relax, interestingly also a Michael favourite) and a video set in an underground gay club where a “mock Nero” urinates over a “bound to a wheel of sexual fortune” Holly Johnson.  Of course, the apparent “paradox” at the time was this had the effect of sending Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s record sales stratospheric.  Oscar Wilde’s other proverb – there’s no such thing as bad publicity – was clearly invoked.  Cue near forty years later and a far milder reference to golden showers still sends the moral majority spewing their hypocritical bile all over social media – Piers Morgan cashes in (again) and the likes of Candace Owens in a podcast that drags on for well over ten minutes brands Smith “pornographic”, “diabolical” and “disgusting”.  Yet the real paradox here, as Louis Chilton in the Independent, columnist Owen Jones, and others have noted, is that the video for Smith’s I’m Not Here To Make Friends is, quite simply, not very racy – the apparent “pee” is equally champagne and this is no underground dungeon rather a camp castle of fun that draws on the Les Liaisons Dangereuses (dir. Frears, 1998) era in the way that Madonna did with her MTV live performance of Vogue.  In fact, the video in many ways is more pastiche than anything else – a series of nods to the world of Madonna (including the corsetry and tits) and Kylie (the troupe of cute dancing guys) as well as a direct homage to the successes of Ru Paul with a stream of “sashay to stay” poses in outrageously camp outfits.  And to finalise all that, Smith then drives off atop the car bonnet in a style not dissimilar to that “heel on the bus” routine used in Priscilla Queen of the Desert (dir. Elliot, 1994).  It is very queer yes, awash with gender and sexual ambiguity for both sexes, and very body positive as various dancers and Smith himself are to – put it politely – plus size.  Indeed, Daisy Jones in Vogue asserts that the furore is indeed centred more on fat phobia than anything else.  Similarly, the video for Smith’s Unholy operates like some kind of updated super spun version of the peep show of Open Your Heart (Madonna) complete with gender scrambled revenge on the double standards of the suited/married businessman.   Enormous visual fun, yes – radical confrontation, no.  Except for one thing – the blink and you miss it because it is so obvious you cannot see it factor – that Sam Smith whilst identifying as non-binary remains recognisably and biologically male.  What Madonna, Kylie, Christina and all the rest can do, he can’t – and, whilst campy female pop videos are two a penny, campy and raunchy (even when it is only implied) homosexual (and male) expressions of sexuality remain as rare, outrageous – and delicious – as ever.

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The recent success of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ due to its incorporation in the hit Netflix show Stranger Things, returning to top the charts 37 years after it was first released, perhaps illustrates rather more than a resurgence of interest in a great song.  The song was originally a major, if not monster, hit for Bush in 1985 as the lead single from her “soon-to-become-a-classic” album Hounds of Love.  At that time, you heard it on the radio or saw the video (Kate and Michael Hervieu dancing, dressed in Japanese hakamas and directed by David Garfath with vertiginous camera work) and, if you liked it, you had to trot off to your local record shop and buy a 7- or 12-inch vinyl pressing of the song.  The 12-inch incorporated an extended version as well as the piano based b-side “Under The Ivy”.  Despite becoming a million seller in the UK alone and charting worldwide at number one for multiple weeks in 2022, it was never re-released.  You’ll also have a tough job getting a vinyl or any other hard copy of it barring buying the Hounds of Love album on vinyl or CD, remastered or otherwise, or ordering the vinyl compilation that accompanies the show*.  Its current success is entirely due to its digitisation – downloads and streaming.  Indeed, when Kate Bush re-recorded it and indeed re-mixed it for the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic games you could only get it on download then, and it went top ten all over again.

My point is that within 40, let alone 50, years the consumption of music, and popular music in particular, has been transformed.  And this is not just a matter of formats.  Like many aged over fifty, I was introduced to music via a mix of my parents’ vinyl record collection (my mother was a fan of the folk music of the 1960s and 1970s as well as obsessed with Neil Diamond), the radio (BBC Radio One was known to play the chart topping hits), and the TV – Top of the Pops particularly was a staple on Thursday evenings giving a run-down of the top 20 or later top 40.  Artists would perform live in the rather tiny studio or, as time went on, videos for their hits were shown.  Vinyl had its appeal, those lovely big arty covers and often lyrics to read, but also its drawbacks.  It wore out, got grimy and scratchy and if only a single or the like you were perpetually turning the thing over to play the other side.  The record players themselves developed in sophistication from cranky all-in-one boxes created to look like furniture to stereo systems of separates housed in much bigger boxes.  But the almighty problem of portability remained.  Hence, when cassettes and, more to the point, portable cassette recorders and players came in during the 1970s, one spent endless hours compiling copies and playlists to use elsewhere.  Whilst headphone sockets were common, the private listening experience did not fully take off until the invention of the Sony Walkman in 1979 that would then dominate the music consumption of an entire generation as youth stuck ear buds in their ears or headphones on their heads to listen to their favourites everywhere they went.  Cassette tapes had an annoying hiss, however, and were liable to stretch and break.  Reducing this via Dolby helped but then you lost the upper treble range as well.

Yet these shifts were minor compared to the one that was to come only a few years later with the rise of the compact disc or CD.  This offered portability, near indestructability, clear – if sometimes rather harsh – sound, and the ability to skip/programme and generally jiggle the tracks.  The packaging was a tad tacky – a lot of plastic and squinty pictures yet CDs disguised a more dramatic development – digitisation.  Although many were recorded from the original analogue studio tapes, they would increasingly be based directly on studio recordings that became digitised themselves.  The technology of the studio itself was gaining apace and this was, on top of all else, the era of electronic music was now moving on from the pioneering influence of Kraftwerk to the disco-pop of Madonna.  This would appear to then set up parallel longevity to vinyl that, despite its limits, had persisted since the pre-war era.  Yet, not so, as once digitised recordings the became free-floating.  With the rise of the high speed access to the internet en masse in the 21^st century and the replacement of Sony’s Walkman by Apple’s iPod the music consumer was then enabled one to download literally thousands of songs or entire albums onto one tiny music playing device.  Convenience ruled – you could carry all your music literally anywhere from home to office and from train to gym.

The unknown consequences were indeed less known – the so-called compression or loudness wars would take over as audiophiles complained that the music was quite literally audio-dynamically flattened into one loud note that had neither range from treble to bass nor spatial sound stage as everything just boomed from the middle due to the literal shrinking of file size and musical information.  Radios, smart speakers, and much commercial music recording itself can often play into this shrinking the range, so it is, quite simply, louder.  The mechanics of listening to music here shifted significantly.  The clumsy boxes – whether wooden or metal – that dominated living rooms from the mid-twentieth century became compacted into mini “hi fi” systems, and later smart speakers.  The days of rummaging through someone’s album collection to find what they were into are largely gone along with much of the more social aspect of music consumption though this is a complex point to which I will return.

The key shift here was less formats than the development of digital over analogue.  Analog worked through recording sounds from the studio as an entire room full of instruments and gizmos onto high quality tape.  Indeed, on early CDs and the like you can still hear the hiss of the master tape.  Digital music, like computers themselves, created sound that exists as electronic files.  Thus, whilst often suitable for chart banging disco, those who liked their complex prog rock and classical complained quality was lost.  The solution, temporarily, came in the form of downloading so-called “high resolution lossless” audio files that took up far more computer space yet could outperform even top-quality CD and vinyl pressings in terms of sound quality.  They came at a (relative) price however and many a lay listener claimed they could hardly hear the difference.  Yet the death of the download does not lie here rather in two other linked developments.  First, the commercial problem posed by the ease of copying and sharing digital formats, even “high res” ones; and second, the commercial solution to this posed by streaming even in high quality playback forms.  For a monthly fee, as with Sky or Netflix on TV, you could now access tracks by the thousand or even million.  Spotify, initially set up as a free entry service in 2006, now offers various tiers of ad free service and exclusives – for a price.  Similarly, tech giant Apple got in on the act in 2015 guzzling up the music market of its already iPhone owning consumers.  “Hi-res” only specialists such as the US HD Tracks and French Qobuz offer increasingly complex mixes of content that you stream or can, at a price, download and keep.  Yet this was supplanted once again as speakers and computer chips in everything from laptops to cars now allowed one not only to play digital content but rather, with now vastly and speedily increased internet connection, stream it not only on music devices yet rather anything capable of transmitting sound.  Music wars these days are not between mods and rockers, rather between the money-spinning commercial music subscription services that provide it.  It appears a music consumer’s dream – access to everything (well, almost) for next to nothing (well, not really – even ten bucks (let alone premiums) a month is 120 bucks a year, by the zillion, let alone all that advertising…) – music is dead or maybe long live music.  Despite the covid crisis, live music is booming and far more profitable than any format whilst – perhaps – the sheer accessibility of it all is the key to its future longevity.

This potted history is well-known and of no surprise to anyone informed enough or old enough to remember it.  What is in question is the way this reshapes the entire consumption of music per se.  Prior to this it is perhaps worth making a comparison.  For the only matter to parallel popular music’s rapid shifts in its mode of consumption is (ahem) pornography.  In 1970 if you wanted pornography, you were, by and large, limited to the top shelf of the newsagent or perhaps a private screening of a movie if you were lucky enough.  By the 1980s, video tapes (and with them video camcorders) were nearly as ubiquitous as cassette tapes.  A home grown industry grew to both film and then sell films of sexual activity.  Given an influx of money circa the immense demand for sexual gratification, studios were born that could then deliver both higher quality recording and offer distribution, for a price.  Thus, one could then nip off to the, frankly limited, top shelf of one’s local video store or find the means of purchasing pornographic films via advertising in the back of magazines and then struggle with import restrictions.  Video to video copying was rife yet, like vinyl records, was surpassed by the superior and lasting quality of the DVD that like the CD would then dominate until the internet, once again, took over.  For producers, popular performers were turned into porn stars and a few directors made names for themselves in the erotic arena, for a time.  The limit initially came from illegalities and regulations in trying to physically distribute graphic content internationally.  Such content is now commonly digitised and recycled as nostalgia.   For pornography, like popular music, is now primarily consumed via websites that offer endless streaming services of some kind.  There are a couple of difficulties, however.  First, pornography – despite its apparent internet popularity – is not distributed with the same ubiquity as pop music for it is not watched by everyone – let alone the issues of legalities and laws surrounding it.  Women now constitute a growth market as the consumers and not just the objects of pornography, yet one should not overestimate the sheer “maleness” of consuming sex as a visual medium of masturbation.  Pornography may not be entirely for men by men and about men’s desires, but it is heavily skewed that way.  Second, whilst studios can continue to attempt to cash in on the digital world, the advent of high-quality recording facilities even on humble mobile phones, allows everyone – and anyone – to get in on the act.  Consequently, homegrown bedroom fodder finds another home on the internet, but it can hardly keep up with sheer tidal wave of titillation offered by an app like snapchat.  Yet the process remains remarkably similar to music, driven by markedly related developments in technology that again clearly re-shape consumption.

It is to the question of the re-shaping of consumption to which I now turn.  In relation to music, the process has been relatively unilinear.  Consumers have become increasingly distanced from a sense of music as a physical commodity and increasingly see it as a floating miasma of sound.  The sheer solidity of vinyl, the weight, the covers, and artwork were reduced in the transition to CDs let alone digital downloads and streaming.  Interestingly of course, vinyl has seen a resurgence in popularity overtaking CDs as the physical format of choice, yet it is still vastly outstripped by downloads and streaming culture not least due to its expense.  The increased popularity of vinyl is also at once a nostalgia trip for those old enough to recollect it the first time and perhaps a form of resistance to the sheer speed and efficacy with which the physical existence of music has come to disappear.   What perhaps adds to this is that music is still seen as leisure and recreation and as something separate from computers which, for some at least, remain too associated with work.

More significantly still, our relationship with music has changed.  Whilst once the plight of many a parent was to put up with the deafening racket from a teenage bedroom it is now far more common for music consumption to take place privately via ear plugs and headphones.  Even linking computers to speakers, amplifiers and other paraphernalia rarely replicates the physical intrusion of the full-on music system or the infamous ghetto blaster.  Many a home now does not own much more than the odd speaker; systems are for enthusiasts only.  More painfully, TOTP is now reduced to some reminiscence event at Christmas.  The sense of communality, at this level, is then lost yet is perhaps reproduced in more virtual terms through the online world of sharing.  Somehow even then there is a sense of the creeping death of the social were it not for the resurgence of touring and playing live.  Companies have successfully commodified much of this with “buy the album and get pre-sale access to tickets”, let alone merchandise and social media promotion, yet the consumer it seems yearns – and pays – for sheer experience of the pub or the stadium whilst televising festivals has only fuelled a greater interest in going.  The music mega-event as in the Superbowl or Glastonbury is now where it, or at least the money, is at.  Spectacle.  There is a curious contradiction going on here then as the consumption of music slithers from isolated worlds of naval gazing with earphones to the collective euphoria of the live event that, whilst cruelly undermined by the response to the covid crisis, simply refuses to lie down.

What does appear near terminal in this process is, in the case of more commercial pop music at least, is the death of the long player.  CDs were very long containing anything up to nudging an hour and a quarter of music whereas the humble LP was best suited to forty-five minutes or less (and less still if audiophile remastered and played at 45 rpm).  Few had the energy to wade through the length of a CD, and the skip and programme function clearly came in handy.  Yet this paved the way far more radically for the relentless hop skip and jumping of streaming turning everything from heavy metal to disco pop into pick and mix – even contemporary popular classical musicians such as Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi need singles – digital ones as the hard copy of the “45” is long since as good as dead.  Interestingly, the vinyl revival challenges this too as few buy an LP – particularly given the prices – for a track or two.  Well, sort of, as the appeal, sadly, lies less in loving the sense of story a record offers than in the immense marketing of the packaging from pictures and posters to the endless “limited edition” snazzy colours, patterns, decoration and even liquid filling of those circular pieces of wax plastic.  Part of Taylor Swift’s marketing, for example, involves the endless permutations around which her music gets sold with different colours, photos, the one extra track, and so on – thus her dedicated fans tend to end up spending fortunes on acquiring every variation.   Consequently, listeners are increasingly less “sold’ on stories – that sense of narrative that forty-five minutes of music might create – and more on product.  The significant number of those who buy these snazzy packaged albums more as objects of worship than as anything they actually listen to, in that many are not even in possession of a turntable, plays into this.  Part of this depends on the so transparent you miss it factor that music is now sold increasingly multiple formats – the vinyl’s (plural), streaming (subscriptions), downloads (deluxe and non-deluxe versions, lossy and lossless), CDs with variant packets, cassettes in differing colours and so on.  It smacks, somewhat, of children and candy stores, yet more to the point the most fundamental principle of all marketing – diversification.

Given the (il)legalities, pornography was less concerned with commodities rather with access.  The internet has given it this in immeasurable spades and, despite the moves of Islamists, dictators, and some parental campaigns, it remains utterly uncontrollable.  Whilst pornography was never particularly shared as a communal experience beyond the private worlds of couples or swingers it’s now become Alice’s dystopian wonderland of a rabbit hole that individuals go down.  The endless, seamless, searching for kicks is like cake, the second one never tastes as good as the first – it needs to go further, harder, dirtier, raunchier, more extreme.  Or just plain weird.  The world of exhibitionism and voyeurism becomes limitless – furby anyone?  Look it up.  The comparison with the desperate attempt access porn, even as late as the 1990s via the top shelf, your mate’s or your mate’s dad’s collections of mags and movies could not be starker.  Whether this truly causes a world of addiction and unrealistic expectation, let alone violence, is – frankly – too soon to know though the sheer tidal plethora of the stuff has to be impacting something.  What is known is that it opens the door to the amateur creator.  Whilst phones have long served as a useful way to listen to digital music on the go, the relentless advancement of photo and video technology to outstrip, or at least keep up with, most semi-professional photographic equipment has turned near everyone into a potential porn star and sex – virtual now as well as real – as a prime gig economy of the twenty first century.  Rather than music paralleling pornography, the world of porn increasingly apes music – anyone can do it, but can they sell it?  There is some sort of market it seems for anyone from 9 to 90, from kink to kinkier, and from utter vanilla to endless fetish.

The parallel with music also returns then not only at the level of production, rather exploitation.  Not just viewer or viewee, rather the streaming platform provider that pays a pittance whether its music or sex.  There is also something else similar here as whether music or erotica the process of consuming via the internet is equally isolating and without control.  Consequently, parents panic as the deafening racket from the bedroom or the magazines under the bed are replaced by, well what?  Who knows.  Enter attempts to placate parental anxiety and exert control via nanny the state – a series of frankly idiotic laws that do little than just make it harder to produce non “main/male-stream” porn, the opt in not out on adult internet provision that even a child of ten knows how to get around, and those utterly pointless “parental advisory” labels on CDs.  It’s all a rather sorry “state” of affairs.

There is of course a further parallel as music itself is increasingly sold not as sound in any way yet rather as image – from Tiktok clips to the full-on pop video or concert broadcast –  what was once merely visually sold through the picture on the cover or the gyrations on a live stage is now an entire visual arena in itself.  It is hardly surprising then that the pop video comes near the top of the list in examples of the “pornification” of popular culture and sexualisation.  The concern most often raised here is in relation to consumption or rather the impact of all this gawping, particularly upon the young.  The attempts to control at source whilst easily supplanted also miss the issue of who selects what that someone else can see.

Underpinning this is the problem of ownership in both cases.  Both music artists and sexual film makers require equipment and distribution if they are to become more than a minority home produced item.  Whilst recording one’s guitar twanging on a computer or sexual activity in the bedroom via a mobile phone is now more possible than ever for it to profit requires both far more investment and some kind of online platform.  So, performers – whether musical or sexual – struggle to retain or even gain ownership over their own output.  Recent protests and attempted boycotts by a number of well-known recording artists over the pittances paid by online music streaming platforms would appear to echo well-known histories in the battle for artistic control.  From Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley to George Michael and Michael Jackson, there remains an on-going litany of music-related disputes that – given digital copying – increasingly centre on plagiarism hence the recent losses of Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke for the song “Blurred Lines” that was, interestingly, itself also accused of inciting sexual violence in a way similar to pornography.  Such cases are less well known with pornography itself given the morally ambiguous and often anonymous status of the sexual performer – though there are a few infamous and historic cases and historic of models speaking out – yet the potential for exploitation in the world of online performing is vast.  In economic terms, there is ample opportunity yet also vast threat.

There are shifts here also in terms of the power relationships of consumption.   Pop music has a history of fickleness, yet some artists and groups become “household names” that most, if not all, at least know and in some cases follow and like.  Consequently, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Abba, and many big names of the 1980s from Madonna to George Michael were beloved by billions both younger and older whilst major scandal could not rock Michael Jackson’s following.  Yet one struggles these days to draw parallels.  Adele appears semi-retired whilst Ed Sheeran is simply too middle of the road.  The world’s largest contemporary seller by a country mile is Taylor Swift yet few can name many, or any, of her songs.  Swift is illustrative of something far wider, namely the power of social media and the internet plus a frankly terrifying juggernaut of marketing that sees fans queueing for hours to purchase music they already have in another format, with a different cover, or colour, or something.  What is lost in all of this, despite the popularity of live shows, is the collective or communal sense in which music means something when it is endlessly pumped through computers and phones to individuals – radio let alone TV is in fragmentation freefall where only the “mega event” of the likes of Glastonbury can engage many on and offline, on and off media.  Underpinning all of this are shifts not only in technology yet rather the increasing domination of capitalism.  Even well-known stars complain of the lack of money for them in music, the eye watering exploitation of streaming and the immense costs of studios and tours alike.  Yet the ecological critique of the carbon footprint, far from removed by streaming but undermined more by the download and keep model, means that some such as Massive Attack are unlikely to ever tour – or perhaps record – again.  The internet appears to disseminate and certainly facilitates sharing yet “indie” artists such as Wolf Alice, amongst many others, have felt themselves forced to feed the conglomerations to expand their own reach and not collapse.  Others meantime have sought the rights to their own material yet it requires wealth to achieve. 

All in all, there’s something just a teensy bit gloomy in all this.  Even sad.  That the excitement of hurling off to the record shop, even queuing for hours, or that stomach swirling excitement of the first foray into dirty pictures that still left far more to the imagination is just plain lost in a sea of over-mediated, over-commodified, blasé gorge festing on new tunes, new videos, new – well, somehow none of it ever quite is.  The resistance to this comes in the form of indie record stores and “record store day” where music is only – initially that – is released in a physical format you have to visit a shop to get yet this in itself is becoming an increasingly profit driven racket of re-issues and the gig economy of ebay.  Still, you do at least have long chats with other like minds whilst waiting in the queue.

So, running up what hill where?  I am truly delighted that millions have listened to Kate Bush who had never heard of her before let alone see her twirl on the telly, yet somehow still feel they’ll all just end up somewhere else, lost in the sea of it all, not apoplectic with excitement when she releases another years later that you cannot wait for, then play to death, then fondly remember for ever more…  Bush herself is an interesting case in point.  Famously “reclusive” her career has been dominated by her desire to gain control of her output.  She was doing that way before Swift had even heard of it.  Such was the adversity of her reaction to her early “pornographic” typecasting and promotion, since the 1980s she mostly only allows her family photograph her and owns her studio, her record label along and near all rights to her output.  Yet such a reluctance to “play the game” would now stop her ahead of starting had she not achieved the successes she did.  There’s a twist here, though, as her recent success has little to do with her music at all yet rather the media itself that spins unknown futures of its own – namely a hit show on TV.  So, perhaps, it is more apt to end on another tune, Talking Heads, ‘Road to Nowhere’, that actually came out the same year as ‘Running Up That Hill’…

*it was eventually re-released on CD single format, but in the US only

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp43OdtAAkM

‘I’m now and then combined’ (Don’t Shut Me Down)

When Abba announced their comeback album and “abba-tar” tour on September 2^nd, the common response of many of their fans was not to start jumping around joyously but rather to begin blubbing.  Such is the emotional depth of what Abba, not perhaps just four individuals with varied talents, but rather Abba the phenomenon taps into.  For many, myself included, Abba primarily represent childhood as we grew up with them like elder brothers and sisters.  Yet of course Abba’s music has continued to resonate with the generations since, the reason being that that emotional connection lies not just with some machine of promotion or happy syncing with an era but rather within the music itself.

For anyone not old enough to remember (meaning anyone under the age of roughly fifty), Abba were HUGE back then in a way that has only ever been surpassed by Beatlemania who set the precedent.  Measuring their significance is not easily reduced to statistics, staggering though these are (around 150 million record sales, of which Abba Gold alone has sold 30 – and this is all before the impact of the current comeback) – rather assessed in terms of “cultural clout” or presence within the zeitgeist and here none of their competitors at the time nor big hitters since can hold a candle to their sun.  New wave and punk that appeared to topple them at the time have long since died, Blondie on what is now about their fourth comeback have failed to make much of a splash, the Spice Girls were far too short-lived and far too demographically specific in their influence, and not even that juggernaut of self-promotion that is Madonna can have a properly big hit this millennium without sampling them.

Explaining their importance is another matter again.  Cynics, then and now, accuse them of cold commercialism, cashing in, and exploitation.  Such points are sloppily made for in the world of fickle pop whilst hits might be manufactured no-one can control the scale of sales and pointing the finger at the self-writing, self-performing, and self-producing Swedes is frankly daft in a pop world dominated in recent years by reality TV, impresarios, brand makers like Beyonce and Kanye, and manufacturing managers from Simon Cowell and X Factor to Simon Fuller – a collaborator on the Voyage shows but until now absent from their career.  Equally they rarely toured, never really broke North America, preceded the MTV generation, and could by rights have carried on in the studio till God knows when but just fizzled out after a tense TV appearance in 1982.

Which only leaves us with the music.  Characterised by critics as catchy yet schmaltzy candyfloss that sells yet is consumed and forgotten, their sentimentality is in fact key to their longevity.  The legacy and significance of Abba’s music is emotional not commercial, and it is their melding of melody with melancholy that not only makes them resonate, rather elevates them to the level of mythology and fairy tales.  Tragedy, the stone inside the cherry, and the bitter nut inside the sugared almond are not only why we have Abba but rather the legacy of Diana, a royal family, soap operas, and a machine of celebrity.  Thus, the best of their songs has you celebrating and crying all at once such is their joyousness and their pathos.  They don’t write sad songs or happy songs rather songs that do both at once and so the effect is from Fernando to One Of Us is simultaneous, you hardly know whether to wave your arms or cry.  Dancing Queen is quite literally delirious, yet its joyousness is so intense it can drive you to tears whilst The Winner Takes It All is a song that sobs with emotional conviction yet is such a belter it has you tapping along at the same time.  This is emphatically not the stuff of regular pop musicality that divides into disco and slow songs, or bangers and ballads, rather it is some combination where the whole becomes a more than enchanting nearer spell-binding sort of mix.  This continues with their latest releases.  I Still Have Faith In You is a long, drawn out and rather “adult” ballad that still has the rousing chorus and harmonies that characterised the likes of Chiquitita whilst Don’t Shut Me Down has the whumping beat of a banger yet tells the agonised tale of the “dumpee” trying to “reboot” herself in a clever twist on the impending Abba-tar theme.  Yes, it’s schmucky if not schmaltzy yet is wrapped up in so much musicality and emotionality you have to be the stone in the cherry not to fall for it.  Of course, this is traditionally a line mined in the work of singer-songwriters where the confessional story telling hooks you in – it’s rare, if not next to unheard of, in the work of groups with the exception of course the Beatles who had both the melodies and lyrics or the Beach Boys who were their true predecessors in sound.  Interestingly whilst a truck load of singer-songwriters have done it since – melding their melancholy to melody in work as diverse as Joni Mitchell and George Michael – no group has done it since.  In sum, the gap remains so it’s no surprise that only Abba can return to fill it or that records breaking is as predictable as the outpourings of emotion that will accompany them. 

All of which of course brings us to the new album Voyage itself.  The response of critics has been to say the least “mixed” and often negative whilst fans on social media have expressed confusion and disappointment.  This response is perhaps understandable if looked at through the lens of forty years ago – rifling through it trying to find the successor to Dancing Queen or The Winner Takes It All.  Looked at that way it comes up lacking – there are few true bangers and the balladry is so nuanced it’s in an entirely different category.  And then one has the apparent kitsch of a song about Christmas (Little Children) and the plight of the humble bumblebee (Bumblebee) plus some dug out and barely revamped 1970s three chord rocker (Just A Notion).  This leaves us with the true “meat” of the album namely a cluster of songs that are delivered with varying degrees of brutality (the piano ballad I Can Be That Woman, more electronic Keep An Eye On Dan, and No Doubt About It the album’s one true belter).   Throughout there is a visceral level of lyrical honesty for Abba that is frankly plate-dropping.  I Can Be That Woman is emphatically not about a dog but a relationship that is on the rocks where the pet is acting as the conduit whilst Keep An Eye On Dan dashes such hopes in a tale of child custody pre- or is it post-divorce and No Doubt About It sounds like the discoed up frying pan of emotional relationship difficulty it actually is and paradoxically raises doubts in all directions. Abba have not sounded this bitter and twisted since the days of I’m A Marionette and what we have is this vertiginous sense of sliding backwards and forwards in time – simultaneously – Agnetha is still the brittle queen of tragedy and melodrama, Benny still belts out a mean keyboard arrangement, Bjorn is still writing emotionally painful lyrics for his ex-wife to sing whilst the playing is top notch and Frida’s near contralto register still adds warmth and depth to the whole thing – and yet this is not quite what it was somehow, something’s changed.

There is a trick or an illusion going on here, this sounds like the Abba of yore – well almost – is presented like the Abba of yore – well almost – so it must be the Abba of yore – well no, frankly.  For what this album does, unlike any of their others, is add up to far more than the sum of its parts.  The core concern, as most have noticed, is nostalgia and the sense of time passing.  Thus, when the long player is taken as a whole, we get a rollicking rollercoaster of despair and hope and attempts to just get off the merry-go-round.  This oscillating is set in motion with When You Danced With Me a song that typically plays the happy ceilidh whilst clearly still fearing all is lost whilst Little Children and Bumblebee themselves become attempts to live in the moment whilst some loosely outlined female protagonist lurches from hope (Don’t Shut Me Down/Just A Notion/I Can Be That Woman) to despair and the setting in of grim reality (Keep An Eye On Dan and No Doubt About It particularly).  Little Children and Bumblebee are also not easily dismissed as kitsch rather seen as direct musings on the passing of time. Comparisons with their earlier work are difficult to make – Voyage, when fully engaged with, is nearer to some Abba-world version of the yo-yo-ing emotions of Joni Mitchell’s Blue or Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Yet even then things are not so simple and work on more levels.  Just A Notion’s inclusion is interesting here as a self-conscious attempt to dig up a relic when perhaps that’s how they feel about the entire project.  There are near pastiches of earlier songs scattered throughout too if you listen closely enough – Keep An Eye On Dan uses the intro to SOS as its outro whilst When You Danced With Me is clearly a Celtic twist on Arrival territory.  More importantly, then, what is at stake here is not the internal wranglings of the group rather their relationshp to the world. I Still Have Faith In You hovers between doubt and conviction in a clear nod not to personal relationships but of the big one between Abba and their fans whilst the orchestrally driven Ode To Freedom with its not-so-subtle nod to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake both looks backwards to where they have come from yet grapples with something far more difficult and contemporary, reflecting on their own sense of privilege and the price of freedom that comes with it – at once a thanks and an au revoir.

It also may, or may not, be their “swan song”. It is worth remembering that Abba never officially split – rather they wandered off in differing individual directions late in 1982 claiming it wasn’t fun anymore.  Voyage and the accompanying “Abba-tar” tour have been hailed as a comeback, but all four members have dropped large hints in interviews that this is probably it – farewell, goodbye.  The album itself plays with this – is the relationship going on in it truly over or might some light of hope still flicker?  And if it is, what would that mean anyway?   Abba are now into their seventies and reflecting, unavoidably, on where they’ve been and where they want to be when “the end” in all its forms comes.   There is no picture of them on the cover – even the alternative artwork has them presented as “Abba-tars” – just a small black and white postcard inside to remind you that they are just four increasingly elderly individuals recording in a studio.  It’s perhaps a pity as the accompanying publicity shot shows them to be both fit, healthy and presentable and, more to the point, happy as Frida in particular appears to have a fit of the giggles.   But what we actually get on the cover is a sunrise, a sunset or even an eclipse – interpret as you will – maintaining importantly the mystique as well as the hope and despair that has dominated their career, and the lives of their fans, for over fifty years.

Given their megastar status with sales of over 150 million albums, of which their greatest hits Gold itself constitutes one of the best-selling discs of all time; and as the music behind one of the highest grossing musicals on record Mamma Mia – now also the source of two highly commercially successful films – it is perhaps surprising that ABBA produced only eight studio albums (and perhaps one album’s worth of other material) of which, if one is to be slightly harsh, a mere five have serious critical merit.  All of these albums have been remastered and repackaged multiple times and in multiple formats leading to an accusation of cashing in yet, it might equally be said, one can only cash in if cash can be made so this incessant recycling still going strong over forty years on is itself merely another measure of their immense success.

As a relatively reluctant touring group (blonde lead singer Agnetha Faltskog’s loathing of travelling was, and is, well known) that never fully broke the United States market, and as an act not particularly advantaged by media promotion in preceding the MTV generation by some years, the question is raised as to what drives this jaw dropping on-going success.  The answer only partly lies in the quality of the music itself that, whilst sparkling and iridescent, was equally inconsistent.  They are maligned, wrongly, for their particularly poor lyrics (Blondie, the Spice Girls and Wet Wet Wet were all far more guilty of this), mawkish sentimentality (there is some truth in this but it is double edged), and commercialism (markedly untrue given relatively few singles per album and many even number one songs that were either more than commercially long or structurally complex or both, The Name of the Game being a prime example).  They were undoubtedly slow starters, rather poor in honing their true talents, and arguably gave up too easily when the going got tough.

Yes, there was an Abba album before Waterloo bearing in mind that, at the time, they were not called Abba but Bjorn & Benny, Agnetha & Frida.  There is a certain history to the name itself as Abba did not become ABBA with the reversed Bs trademark until the Arrival album and Agnetha for some time was known as “Anna” outside of Sweden given difficulties non-Scandinavians had in pronouncing her name.  It also left fans scratching their heads as to who the Agnetha was that “appears courtesy of CBS records” given that Faltskog was a major solo artist yet largely unknown outside of Sweden and still under contract.  Ring Ring, their first album is also notable for Faltskog’s first – and last – solo writing contribution to an Abba record, the simple and sweet but otherwise unremarkable Disillusion.  The roots of Abba’s music are all too clear across the other tracks – the Scandinavian folk scene and “schlager” music, the singing prowess of the female leads, and the influence of three chord 70s rock on the male writers.  The effects of this are mixed to say the least.  At their best, they produce catchy – if slightly dated – folk rock ballads like Another Town, Another Train or He Is Your Brother; but elsewhere it’s often lumpy and grasping attempts to be commercial when what is all too missing is that harmonious yet melancholic note that would come to dominate later works.  The influence of the Beatles and the Beach Boys alike is clear too, but it is the Bacharach-esque I Am Just A Girl that perhaps points towards their more melodic future.

Their second long-player Waterloo hinted more at this melodic greatness in party pleasers like Dance (While The Music Still Goes On), Hasta Manana, and Honey Honey.  That said, clangers still abound, most notably the ridiculous gorilla driven King Kong Song, the utterly throwaway What About Livingstone, and Watch Out, a truly desperate attempt to sound hard edged.  The challenge remains one of synthesis, not least in finding that all important Abba sound whilst you get no less than two versions of the “three chord rock by numbers” Eurovision winner Waterloo on the vinyl alone.

Self-titled Abba is a marked improvement as well as the point where they start garnering international commercial success.  The syncopated chop sticks of Mamma Mia became their first number one since Waterloo.  That followed SOS, another hit dominated by a belter of choral chorus that would soon become a hallmark of their biggest hits as well as an added bonus for Agnetha on her album Elva Kvinnor I Ett Hus.  Elsewhere Hey Hey Helen is a respectable rock ballad given its guitar hook; whilst Tropical Loveland is a melodic take on reggae.  Bjorn’s words are still an on-going problem though.  Bang A Boomerang’s title alone says it all whilst Man in the Middle doesn’t have the edge it should have either lyrically or musically.  Indeed, the story of Abba’s development is one of Bjorn’s gradual acquiescence into the background of guitarist and writer rather than frontman and fans have long complained about the stubborn persistence of a token “Bjorn song” on almost every album.  Here, it’s Rock Me a particularly heavy-handed attempt at edginess that isn’t really saved by the girls’ impressive harmonies.  Benny’s keyboard abilities, always central to Abba’s melodies, are showcased to better effect on Intermezzo no: 1, one of their few instrumentals, though John Miles or Bohemian Rhapsody it is not.  There are glimmers of the greatest to come, however, in I’ve Been Waiting For You, a big gushy love song with a very fine vocal from Agnetha.  Abba is by far their “rockiest” record when pop is more their forte yet it’s rather as they still can’t quite find their way as the album collapses into the three chord 70s rock of So Long once again.

The release of their first Greatest Hits album largely sifted the successes from the failures in these early records and also proved seminal in more ways than one.  First, it has that cover – the one of the two couples sitting on a park bench – Agnetha stares out longingly at the viewer whilst her husband is more absorbed in reading a magazine than in her and, if you open out the back of the cover, you get Benny and Frida locked in a kiss.  Open it up again and you get all four laughing at the joke they’ve created.  The thirtieth anniversary edition on CD had a different cover, using artwork by Swedish artist Hans Arnold, and there has never been any major reissue rendering the park bench vinyl version a sought-after collector’s item.  Of course it would also prove a sad premonition of things to come a few years later.  Second, it became a major commercial success, selling nearly three million copies in the UK alone, on the back of showcasing the phenomenally successful Fernando.  The track was originally given to Frida for her Swedish solo album Ensam and not included on the original Scandinavian version.  Thus, it was to become the turning point in making Abba major, and international, stars.  As sentimental and nostalgic as the campfire around which the video was set this song was to become the template for much of their future greatness juxtaposing melancholia with the choral euphoria of the choruses.  Finding “the Abba sound” was the key that unlocked the door to an awful lot more and tapped into an emotionality that their lyricism otherwise struggled with.  There are echoes here of not only the Beach Boys, but the Philadelphia sound and Phil Spector and it is this, more than anything, that elevates them above the more throwaway pop of their contemporaries and indeed many since.

Arrival marked not only a quantum leap forward and the perfect pop moment in Abba’s career but rather became the template by popular music could now be judged.  With sales of nearing two million in the UK alone it remains their biggest studio seller primarily on the back of the stratospherically successful lead single Dancing Queen – perhaps one of the few pop tracks to deserve the title of iconic – and later Knowing Me, Knowing You one of their first and finest forays into darker and more adult lyrical territory.  Simple it may be but banal it is not and when combined with a belting chant of a chorus – aha – became raised to more emotional heights.  Indeed, it is this choral harmonising that characterises almost the entire record.  From the moment it kicks in on so wondrously on When I Kissed The Teacher, the famous Abba sound has finally been found.  And there’s still no lack of experimentation either – thus, Money Money Money would not sound out of place in a Weimar music hall, all syncopated piano and drums wrapped up in high camp drama whilst That’s Me is an early foray into something altogether more synth driven.  At a mere thirty-one minutes long, the melodies pile on thick and fast in a blur of slick arrangements and smooth production.  Even the downright silliness of Dum Dum Diddle is irresistible given the sheer joyousness of its bagpipe style belter of a chorus whilst the can-can kicking meets rockabilly of Why Did It Have To Be is undoubtedly the career best of the “Bjorn songs”.  Tiger, a play on the lights of the city night, is perhaps a less well-judged attempt at social observation but the arrangement is just about clever enough to pull it off.  And all that just paves the way for the near madrigal like closer and title track.  It sounds royal because it is royal – this is a band at the peak of their majesty.  Abba were never to match this sense of perfection – from the acoustic opening to the closing strings not one note sounds out of place – yet perhaps what is most important remains that quintessential mixing of melancholy with euphoria.  My Love My Life is one of their lushest, gushiest and even churchiest of songs and yet, at the same time, a total tearjerker.  The foregrounding of Agnetha as the soprano ice queen is key here not only in forming a sound but in providing an embodied image – a beautiful yet vulnerable blonde – that would then get played upon again and again to increasingly devastating effect.  It also crystallised their exoticism and mystery as not only Swedish but rather cinematic.

The cinematic would underpin the release of The Album to coincide with The Movie, effectively the story of their 1977 tour of Australia given a celluloid level of celebrity.  The core motive behind doing the movie was the avoidance of touring given Bjorn and Agnetha were now expecting their second child, Peter Christian, born in December 1977.  Hallestrom’s film was never going to win Oscars but it undoubtedly made Abba stars, shining more brightly and with more dazzle than ever before.  Interestingly it would also hint at the stone in the cherry making no bones about the fact that the adulation of the band, now on a level with Beatlemania, was becoming overwhelming.  Agnetha, as mother of two young children, in particular was not happy and this would feed into their music.  The tour featured a mini-musical entitled – surprise, surprise – The Girl With The Golden Hair.  Whilst both girls in fact wore blond wigs, the reference to Agnetha was unmissable as it told the tale of a simple suburban girl from a “dull little town” (Jonkoping?) hitting the big time with “a wonderful talent, a wonderful thing because everyone listens when I start to sing”.  This is the stuff of fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen and has a similar sense of all that glitters is not gold for our heroine then finds herself caught on a carousel of highs and lows like some out-of-control marionette.  Much to the chagrin of fans, the frenetic Get On The Carousel would never be released, its middle 8 merely reworked and used in Hole In Your Soul, though much of it is heard during The Movie.  The group would strenuously deny any autobiographical connection yet in protesting so much only fuelled the sense of trouble in paradise, a point later emphatically proven in Faltskog’s increasingly outspoken loathing of fame and touring.  What is at stake here is the development of Abba into a near Barthesian myth, as symbols of the pain and suffering behind the stage, as cracks in the mirror, and as expressive of the axiomatic interdependence of euphoria and despair.  Their increasingly camp aesthetic plays into this along with their now recognised status as icons of gay culture for the same dynamic is at work there in the heartache swirling under the disco glitterball.  Abba would sound increasingly triumphant as the years rolled on whilst the lyricism of their songs would tell an altogether darker and more serious story.  The secret of Abba’s success and importance in many ways depends on this as they and their music alike became more and more elevated above and beyond the throwaway world of pop into something more akin to the world of theatre and fairy tale, the mythical and magical.

More musically, having created the perfect pop record in Arrival, The Album marks something of a watershed in Abba’s career.  Not content to attempt to create Arrival two, Abba’s music would now start to veer in an altogether more adult, more experimental, and deeper, direction.  Indeed, Abba The Album barely constitutes a pop record at all.  This is also emblematic of their bravery and creativity – they are emphatically not the hit machine they were sometimes made out to be – and the depth of their appeal that they could get away with this without losing too many fans in the process at the time.  Lead single, The Name of the Game is a case in point at nearly five minutes long and, more significantly, containing a complex three-part chorus that only really develops into full-on “catchy” in the song’s closing minute.  It’s dominated by a combination of bass, rhythm and electric guitar and both Agnetha’s and Frida’s take on lyrics that tell in essence of sexual awakening and emotional insecurity.  Frankly, pop it is not yet at this point Abba were unstoppable and it became a major number one hit.  The only more obviously commercial moment is Take A Chance On Me, the chugging rhythm of which was dreamed up by Bjorn whilst out jogging.  Eagle meanwhile is a near six-minute attempt to evoke the sensations and emotions of flight.  It’s dominated by Janne Schaffer’s electric guitar over a whumping bassline, and is another example of Abba’s increasingly complex musical arrangements; as is One Man One Woman, on the face of it another chant of a chorus yet actually woven around an extraordinary mixing of electric guitar, keyboards, and strings.  Similarly, the vocal harmonies increase in their complexity as none of these songs is dominated by either Agnetha or Frida but rather the combination and highlighting of both.  Frida ruminates on a housewife’s loneliness and ailing marriage to be joined by Agnetha on the melodic chorus.  We are a long, long way from the King Kong Song and Dum Dum Diddle.  Bjorn’s spoken intro on Move On is best forgotten but is then swept away by the song’s soaring oceanic metaphor lyrically and musically.  This leaves Hole In My Soul, a song that doesn’t sound like Abba, more a prog rock band trying to be Abba and it is the album’s one misstep into sounding desperate.  All of that just leaves us back where we started with “three scenes” from the mini musical The Girl With The Golden Hair.  Logically, if this were the Abba we had come to expect, then Thank You For The Music, as emblematic of their crowd pleasing appeal to nine and ninety year olds alike as it got, should be the closer but instead it is the opener as it was when staged on tour.  This is emphatically not a tale of happy endings, rather the horror that lurks behind the façade, cementing their increasingly mythological status as I have already outlined.  Whilst I Wonder (Departure) would be worthy of a place in one of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s saccharine musicals given its pitch perfect vocal from Frida and storytelling musical arrangements, I’m A Marionette is nearer to something from Cabaret and Weimar Germany with its sense of Wagnerian drama and thundering bassline.  Abba kept rather stumm concerning the song, making light of the mini musical’s darker themes yet none of their attempts to dismiss them undermines the sheer fury of the lyrics: “You’re so free, that’s what everybody’s telling me/Yet I feel I’m like an outward bound, pushed around refugee”.  If that was anywhere close at all to their view of fame, fortune and celebrity then one could but worry.  What The Album represents in many ways, then, is the completion of their mythology.  Abba moved from the world of snow shakers and Hans Christian Andersen to become players in a Brothers Grimm story now complete with wolves and wicked witches.  What is more, this oscillating from fairy tale to gothic horror would continue to inform much of their later work.

However, prior to this, we have Voulez-Vous.  If Abba The Album was near devoid of bangers, then Voulez-Vous is near devoid of anything but such is the ferocity of its attempt to recapture the more commercial elements of pop.  If one is critical, it is rather cynical record – as cool and calculated as its nightclub cover – yet this masks the difficulties in its composition not least caused by the divorce of Agnetha and Bjorn who were now trying to form a purely working relationship.  What also underpins it is Abba’s attempt to make their mark in the world of disco.  The stratospheric success of Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees, whilst technically preceding the release of The Album, only truly impacted the writing of Voulez-Vous whilst there were also nods in style to the likes of Donna Summer on the album’s more “adult” moments.  Much was made of this increased emphasis upon sex.  Nevertheless, the record is not so consistent in either content or style.  Lead single Chiquitita, a tale of friendship and reconciliation, harks back to both the group’s earlier schlager musical style and Spanish inflections and was chosen as lead single over the sixties style camp piano riffs of If It Wasn’t For The Nights.  The lead vocals of Agnetha Faltskog and near three-part harmonising on the chorus are eye wateringly euphoric nonetheless and up there with the very finest moments of their career.  The record is, however, rather more dominated by Frida’s sultry mezzo-soprano on songs like the decidedly slinky Lovers Live A Little Longer and the adult story telling of The King Has Lost Its Crown.  The increasing use of synthesisers and string sections on such tracks is effective yet cannot lift the rather leaden chorus on the latter.  Of the rest, the commercialism of songs such as Angel Eyes and Kisses of Fire echoes much earlier records despite the increased standards of the production and arrangements.  This leaves I Have A Dream, a song so cloyingly sentimental in its Nana Mouskouri style Greek twanging and complete with children’s choir, it neither fits nor suits the increasingly adult direction of their career; whilst the Lolita theme of the “Bjorn song” Does Your Mother Know marks a return to the three-chord stomping of their first few albums that is best forgotten.  Given their release as “charity” records, Chiquitita and I Have A Dream alike could have stood alone as singles, and the track listing of Voulez-Vous undercuts its disco status, yet these occasional lapses were to reoccur on later records though and Voulez-Vous still contains the grains of a truly great disco pop record.  Accordingly, if the first-rate standalone disco driven singles Summer Night City and Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) that preceded and followed it respectively had become part of it then indeed it would have been.  The fact that it was not also begins to expose a series of dubious decisions and pressures building on the group both personally and professionally. Bjorn and Agnetha’s divorce stress was compounded by an over-ambitious and arguably ill-timed attempt to break the North American market. Summer Night City had been released as a potential lead single but ended up dropped from the album due to relatively poor sales that were in themselves as much about problems in distribution as any fault in the song. Similarly, the internal pressures to produce a record a year seems, in hindsight, rather unnecessary and rushed Voulez-Vous’ completion. That said, it remains an album that, despite its overly obvious nods to its disco context, has stood the test of time surprisingly well garnering a string of hits (no less than five songs were released as singles) though – oddly – no number ones in the UK.

By contrast Super Trouper garnered two of them and became their most commercially successful album since Arrival largely on the back of lead single The Winner Takes It All.  The story of the song is well-known.  Song-writing was becoming an increasing struggle for both Ulvaeus and Anderson but Ulvaeus came up with a provisional lyric to which Anderson added a descending piano melody and the rest is history or rather her story as Ulvaeus handed the song to his still smarting ex-wife to sing the lead on in act of extreme callousness or genius depending on your point of view. When interviewed, Faltskog said she approached the song theatrically, as if acting out a role, yet it remains her finest vocal performance for the group, and perhaps one of the greatest executions of any pop song ever, precisely due to the conviction with which she sings it – sounding as if near breaking point one minute yet ferocious the next.  The second single, and title track, was also a massive hit due to its schlager stomping catchiness and bittersweet lyrics but it’s ultimately as soggy and sentimental as a snow globe.  Much the same could be said about the waltzing Andante Andante, a song so saccharine and twee it could induce diabetes.   This is in fact a problem that besets much of the album and Super Trouper is perhaps the flip side, or yin to the yang, of Voulez-Vous centring itself emphatically in the MOR territory the group were now famous for and often drowning in nostalgia.  Considerably better is Happy New Year which, whilst equally schmaltzy, still captures the after-party haze with its “sit around the piano” style verses and soaring choruses.  Equally, Our Last Summer is sung with such conviction by Frida and wrapped in a melody so rapturous one is forced to believe in it.  Super Trouper is otherwise near devoid of bangers and at its best on the few occasions where it bites – the sublime Winner Takes It All and the decidedly adult disco seriousness of Lay All Your Love On Me.  The same cannot be said of the daft lyricism of On & On & On or the inexplicable lapse into folksiness of The Piper.  The creation of their own mythology that had worked so well on earlier albums was clearly now both too transparent and too contrived to convince their critics at least.  The album closes on a live recording from their 1979 tour of The Way Old Friends Do as if to say “it’s all still ok” in Abba’s never never land when the world was all too aware that it was anything but with both of the band’s key relationships well known to have come undone.  The fortunes of the group were also by this time changing for the worse.  Whilst they rose to the challenge of disco on Voulez-Vous, the impact of punk and new wave in the late 1970s was now rendering them deeply uncool and the subject of mockery, most notably in the Not The Nine O’clock News parody “Supa Dupa”.  This juxtaposing of a commercially successful attempt at crowd pleasing whilst more publicly unravelling would prove to be their undoing and their next moves would prove as interesting as they were terminal.

The Visitors even more than The Album is Abba in experimental mode.  As many commentators have noted it’s also, like its cover, their darkest work.  Rather maligned at the time for its lack of bangers it is a mixed bag yet remains a container for some of their finest work.  Soldiers with its militaristic beat and foreboding that “if the bugler starts to call, we too must dance” and the title track alike speak to ill-defined yet unsettling political themes; whilst Like An Angel Passing Through My Room, set to the ticking of a metronome, is as wistful and melancholic as they get. Elsewhere Head Over Heels is a triumph of camp style over content and Two For The Price Of One, supposedly inspired by a dating ad seen by Bjorn, is as funny peculiar as it is funny haha.  The only real Abba standard is lead single One Of Us, a tale of regret with the same kind of fluttering Spanish instrumentation and harmonies that dominated Chiquitita years earlier.  It was also to be their last major hit.  The boys’ production and arrangement skills are polished till they shine whilst the lead vocals are amongst the girls’ finest – Agnetha mimicking the schoolgirl she misses on Slipping Through My Fingers whilst Frida develops her operatic skills on I Let The Music Speak, a clear foreshadowing of the musical theatre to follow.  Whilst much of the lyrical content here is emotionally driven, The Visitors never descends into the schmaltz of Super Trouper and towers over it as a far more mature tour de force.  It is perhaps When All Is Said And Done that sums up the album best – on the face of it a near disco style belter (whilst the more obvious dance riff of the title track made it a minor hit on the gay club scene) it is altogether grittier and more adult in its themes than it at first appears, driven it seems by Frida’s recent break up with Benny.  One is left with the feeling that there was life left in them.  And yet it wasn’t to be.  Instead a miscellany of bits and pieces across two singles.  The plate droppingly sublime melancholia of the six-minute Day Before You Came, the plodding beat and storytelling of which was offset by Agnetha’s fragile vocal splendour.  It barely disturbed the charts but has now become recognised as one of their finest, and most quintessentially Scandinavian, moments in turn backed by the rollicking and atmospheric musical themed Cassandra on the B-side.  The double A-side of Under Attack, whose downright odd electronics undermined what was otherwise a well-written song, and You Owe Me One which, put simply, was not.  Neither were hits and the latter barely even sounded like Abba, and with that they quietly disappeared.  The difficulty was not however that there was really any deterioration in the quality of the music, rather an increasing falling out of favour with an audience that seemed to want three-minute foot stompers or nothing.  This is saddening as Abba are by far their most interesting when they are their least commercial.  They could, by rights, have gone on to become more of an albums band but both Benny and Bjorn’s other ambitions and the increasing personal divisions in the group given not just one but two divorces meant otherwise.  When asked to comment on their split, their response was merely to say: “it just wasn’t fun anymore”.

It needs to be said that a number of Abba’s finest moments never made it onto a studio album at all – crowd favourite Fernando was only included on the first greatest hits collection and re-released versions of Arrival, the Donna Summer-esque Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight) on the second. These attempts to produce the ultimate compilation was an award eventually won by Gold though even then The Name Of The Game was unforgivably shortened and The Day Before You Came left off altogether given its running time.  The Bee Gees influenced belter Summer Night City was another casualty whilst some very good B-sides such as Lovelight or Should I Laugh Or Cry weren’t there either.  These mostly ended up on the eclectic More Gold along with the utterly unremarkable I Am The City, one of their final recordings. There is an award waiting for someone who can collect up these oddities into the ninth album that never was – without risking accusations of “cashing in” – a criticism that started with the release of Greatest Hits Vol. 2 after Voulez-Vous. Whilst the first greatest hits was a commercially and critically successful attempt at synthesising their early career, the second was merely a vehicle for promoting Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).  Abba were not album artists in the way many more serious acts were yet neither were they easily reduced to a singles act – an accolade that best befitted their American contemporaries Blondie – as far too much of their greatness, perhaps paradoxically, existed outside of their greatest hits.  Their collected albums somehow both overstretch their prominence and yet don’t quite encapsulate it either – their so bad its good silliness, the sublime pop, the balladry beyond compare, and that indefinable Scandinavian melancholia, are all needed yet can never quite be grasped in a single collection, even of albums.

Kate Bush was recently awarded with a Fellowship of the Ivors Academy.  Whilst arguably overdue, the award recognises Bush as primarily a writer and creator of music rather than as some kind of pop star and my point here is that she is indeed of the most “writerly” of artists.  Her career consists of ten highly original studio albums, a live album, a greatest hits, and two pathbreaking multimedia live shows.  Although perpetuated as “reclusive” across the media, her output is neither as small as some nor as inconsistent as many of her contemporaries, male and female, in the standards it hits.  It seems appropriate, then, to give it the kind of “writerly” review it deserves.

Forty years ago, Kate Bush would become the first woman to have a solo self-penned number one album in the British album charts.  Given the remastering of Kate Bush’s entire back catalogue, it is easily forgotten that 2018 marked the fortieth anniversary of her arrival on the popular music scene cartwheeling around in a white dress on video or swirling in black velvet on Top of the Pops.  Yes, those were the days.  I’m sure I am not alone in remembering the first time the stylus hit the vinyl of The Kick Inside.  Not surprising then perhaps that these were tagged remasters “in vinyl”.  As the whale song gave way to an imploring of “does it really matter as long as you’re not afraid to feel” above piano and plunging bass line, one could but stand there and think (or feel) what the hell was that…   yet soon enough you were plunging like Alice down a hole into Wonderland…  “to be in love, and never get out again” as the woman herself might say.  Move forty odd years forward and listening to those opening bars of “Moving” it is no easier to deconstruct quite what did happen or quite what hell that was.   It’s worth remembering that at the time there were few women in the pop world who were not just front women singers but also songwriters.  Everything about Kate Bush is writerly, she is – and was – from the get-go a writer, a creator of worlds, whether with her music, her lyrics, or to some extent her videos.  This was, and is, art not pop.   And then of course there is that voice.  Love it or hate it, the remastering brings it centre stage from the sometimes-foggy vaults of the earlier mixing.  Her detractors criticised her for sounding too young, but she was young – many of the compositions from not just this but the first three albums were done when she was a teenager and, in some cases, even earlier (the lyrics for The Man With The Child In His Eyes were allegedly first written at eleven on a den wall).  Listening to these recordings now, one is struck not just by the pitch she hits but by the power of her voice, those swirling octave ringing vowel twisting howls and screams, delicate one minute then unleashed to the chandeliers the next.  Wuthering Heights is a case in point.  The voice comes as if from nowhere and pitched solo against a piano then battles full throttle with a band and an orchestral backing.  She is at her most impressive vocally when things get stripped back to her voice, a double bass and the piano on songs like Moving, Feel It, L’Amour Looks Something Like You or indeed The Man With The Child In His Eyes and comes rather unstuck when she attempts to “rock it up a bit”.  James And The Cold Gun remains a horrible attempt at rock ‘n’ roll and others still misfire.  Them Heavy People really needed the live treatment and Kite, whilst funky and full of vocal gymnastics, is resolutely just plain silly.  She would also later complain that her producer Andrew Powell suggested too much fantasy and take on full artistic and production control herself in under five years.  Yet for these occasional failings, The Kick Inside is stuffed full of the compositional craftwork that would make the likes of Andersson and Ulvaeus, whom she toppled from the number one spot or Elton John, whom she worshipped, clap with pride.  Songs like Strange Phenomena are – stripped of their strangeness – just finely made pop songs.  The remastering does some of this credit as the percussiveness and Bush’s own piano playing ability come to fore.  Over forty years on and The Kick Inside remains one of the most startling and arresting, yet also accomplished, debuts of the modern pop era.

Her second long-player Lionheart is well-known not to be one of her favourites, the songstress herself often claiming it to be a rushed job.  Whilst her attempts to get heavier and more percussive are hit and miss, it’s more maligned than it deserves to be and the remastering goes some way to levelling things out – Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake still rolls rather than rocks but loses some its original harshness whilst the gentle Renaissance flutters of the title track are far more distinct, foreshadowing her tribute to her son Bertie on Aerial.  Her song writing is also better than it is often made out to be – Kashka From Baghdad remains a gorgeous eastern influenced paen to outsider love now given even lusher brushstrokes from her brother Paddy’s instrumentation, forerunning the kind of material that would arrive on The Sensual World over ten years later.  The theatrics are a mixed blessing – Coffee Homeground frankly still sounds a bit silly – but her on stage dramas captured in the two lead singles Hammer Horror and Wow enchant as much as they used to whilst that voice is given more of a leading role on most if not all of the album.

Never For Ever would prove to be a first on several fronts – her first number one album and the first number one album in the British charts penned and performed by a woman – but, more importantly, her first attempt at producing and her first go at “serious artistic credibility”.  She had already collaborated with Gabriel on his highly acclaimed third album and his influence becomes clear here, credited directly for “opening the windows”, and she now co-produces.  It’s a curiously mixed bag overflowing with good ideas, not all of which come to fruition, and Janus-headed.  In the middle, we have Blow Away – a piano based homage to engineer Bill Duffield who tragically fell and died on her Tour of Life. Half of the album looks back to her earlier attempts at melodrama and half of it looks forward to the greatness that would come to be.  At its best, and closing, stages this album is up there with her very finest.  Army Dreamers makes ingenious use of the Fairlight synthesiser to mix the cocking of a rifle into the lilt of its funeral march whilst Breathing remains a five and half minute epic, and self-proclaimed “mini-symphony”, upon the theme of nuclear war told from the point of view of an unborn baby.  By this time, Bush’s ability to not only go down rabbit holes but conjure up entire new worlds was coming into full view and would only be matched in its bravura by the best of Hounds of Love and Aerial much later.  The early parts of the album fare well here – clearer vocals, more space in the instrumentation (at least in the 24-bit version), and a toning down in the harshness.   Babooshka is super crisp while Delius chugs away with delicacy yet it’s on the wobbly melodramas in the middle and later bits that the remastering really starts to matter.  The theatrical percussion of The Wedding List really pops and the song starts to sounds less like Tarantino and more like the theatre she might have intended it to whilst Violin similarly benefits from mastering that seems to strip it back to a more “live” sound though there is still no escaping that it’s madder than a box of frogs.  Bush has long been awfully good at pent-up bodice rippers of which The Infant Kiss is a case in point tingling with the sexual tension of The Innocents film version of the Henry James novel that inspired it.  Egypt was always over-ambitious – an attempt to produce an audio commentary on the extreme contrasts of a country – yet it does sound less forced here.  Breathing however remains her first true masterpiece of layering, production and rhythm – a lilting piano and bass mimicking a hospital ventilator overlaid with something that sounds altogether more like the act of creation itself before the unborn foetus starts bawling its head off for its Pink Floyd rock opus moment.

The Dreaming remains the album that separates the real Kate Bush fans from the merely wannabes.  Starting with the full-frontal drum assault of Sat In Your Lap and ending with a chorus of braying donkeys, what she jokingly calls her “she’s gone mad’ album is seen by some as her truest masterwork whilst others remain completely foxed.  Of interest here is the sense in which the remastering itself regains its capacity to shock for few, if any, accounts of the significance of this record recognise equally both its bravery, its claustrophobia, and its fury.  Bush, who had long been stereotyped as an elfin female fantasist, was now desperate to be taken seriously – thus she studiously avoids any kind of balladry, turns her voice upside down and inside out to put some “balls” into it, and bangs drums – literally, symbolically, and loudly.  Sonically at least, this record is astonishing, and the recent studio tweaking regains its initial glory as the elements – particularly vocally – are separated out more clearly the effect of which, on occasion at least, is all the more scary.  Leave It Open is a case in point as the “weirdness” is indeed let in though a multitude of voices and, whilst her earlier attempts at melodrama were hit and miss affairs, here she finds her feet with jaw-dropping aplomb.  Whilst the likes of Pull Out The Pin gain clarity, the real excitement comes in the second half as “the abo song” aka The Dreaming becomes all the more visceral in its evocation of aboriginal dreamtime spookery – all breathy demons, rumbling didgeridoo, and a farm yard of animal sounds so lifelike you really could be having trouble sleeping in the Australian bush at night –  which then gives way to the imploring yet rollicking ceilidh and dialogue of Night of the Swallow.  The Dreaming is indeed a dark record.  All The Love is an intense a psychodrama of when no-one’s answering the phone as it gets yet she manages to accomplish it with a choirboy and the messages of friends.  As if that were not enough Gothic horror we get Houdini’s relationship with his wife who would “pass the key” then watch on in horror as her husband tried to escape from locked chains in a tank of water and The Shining inspired Get Out Of My House where, rumour has it, she spent six weeks trying to get the drums to sound like slamming doors.   The anthropomorphised “human house” drama created here and elsewhere is, to say the least, intense ratcheting up the painful and the furious to alarming effect.  Again, her vocals come to the fore which makes the whole thing sound less like an eighties production piece and more like the visceral emotions of a singer-songwriter wrestling with her own demons.  Thus, if there is one record in the Kate Bush canon that fans wanted to her re-done, and done like this, it is The Dreaming.

For most, though not all, Hounds of Love still stands as Bush’s masterwork.  It is interesting to question why.  Whilst providing her with her biggest hit since Wuthering Heights in Running Up That Hill along with the more commercial ammunition of side one, it is perhaps side two’s concept piece The Ninth Wave that is core here.  In essence, though, this remains a mystery.  On one level it tells the tale of a girl shipwrecked and left in the water at night not knowing if she will survive to the morning yet it is, as it were, what goes on underneath the surface of the water that intrigues here – seen by some as a story of reincarnation or other religious conversion – or more simply a work of creative imagination as Bush herself has alluded to little more than a fascination with the desperation of the situation she creates.  Altered states of psychological distress dominate much of her work, both early and recent, and none more so than here.  However, the story itself is of less import than the gamut of music gear shifting that gets crammed into less than twenty eight minutes as piano gives way to synthesised ice and then a wake-up call via a multitude of voices into drums overladen with Catholic prayer and witch trials that then suddenly transform into the clunking mechanisms of a clock, the clarion call of an Irish ceilidh, her brother’s poetry, and finally a male voice choir.  Much as The Ninth Wave might represent some kind of unknown spiritual or psychological journey it is its musical journey that really matter and impresses.  It’s freshened up here of both the earlier difficulties in balancing out all the natural elements at one end with the tendency to sound like an eighties experiment in digitised studio trickery on the other.  The instrumentation sounds all the more natural on say Under Ice whilst Waking The Witch is less bass heavy and more percussive yet it is the vocal complexities of Hello Earth that benefit the most as Bush herself sounds as live as the choir she seeks to showcase.  Much of the remastering on her “eighties” work is a triumph of digital clarity juxtaposed with the naturalness of something more analogue.   That leaves the hits of side one to sort out and it is the title track that stands out here.  Whilst The Night of the Demon horror movie inspired tension of the original recording was guilty of a galumphing drum rhythm dominating everything here it fights for centre stage with those wonderful violas.  Equally her uncommonly loud rhythm tracks are ratcheted back a bit, and to better effect, on both Cloudbusting and A Deal With God (to give Running Up That Hill its proper title).  Running Up That Hill would run all the way to the top of the charts thirty seven years later in the wake of its use on the sound track on the US TV series Stranger Things. It remains both a haunting and genius piece of songwriting on the theme of struggling intimate partners trying to “swap places” that appears to speed up through the arrangement and production to somehow “run” when in actuality it does no such thing. Cloudbusting meantime becomes a typical feat of master story telling here centred on Peter Reich’s A Book of Dreams. As many fans have noted, when Bush reissued the album on her own Fish People label a while back, she ditched the album recording of The Big Sky in favour of the single mix.  Whilst it’s arguably a tad more percussive, particularly at the start, it’s difficult to know quite why she favours it and it would have been nice to see the original revisited.  Nevertheless, she would knock Madonna off the top spot and Hounds of Love would prove a hard act to follow.

Whilst The Dreaming and Hounds of Love had showcased Kate’s increasingly dramatic and indeed cinematic talents, The Sensual World would set out to do something different.  This in itself is a credit to her intelligence and, moreover, diligence as the easier option would have been to try and knock out Hounds of Love two.  In an interview to accompany The Sensual World’s video single releases she discusses wanting to find a more “feminine” energy and the album is somehow her most “female”. It is noteworthy that she has rarely worked with female artists with the notable exception of here.  Soon after receiving my copy, I played it to a Turkish friend of mine who did not know her music so well yet was entranced.  For what defines this “female-ness” is something approaching an eastern, or even oriental, reverie on the sensual and emotional. This is symbolised in her use of the Bulgarian female singers The Trio Bulgarka whose traditional choral harmonising is blended with Bush’s own vocals to devastating effect on occasions.  Whilst Yanka Rupkhina is, in one particularly bold move, given license to battle it out for supremacy with an electric guitar (Dave Gilmour’s no less) on Rocket’s Tail (the title a play on fireworks and her cat) it is on Never Be Mine that this vocal enmeshing reaches its true crescendo, a lush tremulous song exploring the pleasures and pains of human emotional and sexual intimacy.  Indeed, much of this record explores “the thrill and the hurting” encapsulated in what is overall a very touchy feely set of songs.  Whilst the rhythmic backing of Love and Anger or the dark disco of Heads We’re Dancing echo earlier styles, almost all of the songs here strive for less drama and more sensitivity.  The title track is a case in point.  Despite a multi-layered backing of drums, bass, bouzouki, uilleann pipes and whips (!) the overriding effect is of Bush’s quivering vocalising of “yes” in mimickry of Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated stream of consciousness at the end of Ulysses.  Her frustration with not having permission to use the original words in Joyce’s novel would lead to her re-recording the song on Director’s Cut over twenty years later when the rights were finally hers.  Curiously, she would also strip out the song’s lush layering and completely rework and rewrite another of the record’s highlights This Woman’s Work.  Here it remains the short yet searing and poignant tale of a husband’s regrets whilst waiting outside his wife’s delivery room, originally written for the John Hughes film “She’s Having A Baby”.  Other parts of the album are no less vulnerable yet visceral in their explorations of childhood.  The Fog in a watery allegory on emotional “letting go” evokes the fear of “the day I learned to swim” replete with her father’s voice over; whilst Reaching Out evokes an even more infantile sense of touch.  Whist it’s true some of the production in its more upbeat places still sounds a little stuck in the 1980s, all of these songs benefit from a dusting down to highlight their brilliance and The Sensual World remains one of her most underrated records.  No, it was not Hounds of Love two – but that was precisely the point.

Bush’s problems, both personal and professional, with The Red Shoes album are well-known.  To begin with, this vinyl release is the third time she has attempted to improve it as seven out of the twelve tracks here were substantially reworked for her Director’s Cut and the original album was remastered once already from the analogue tapes.  The mastering here is unquestionably the best of the bunch adding clarity and space to the instrumentation and vocals but sadly the problem remains the album itself.  It is often overlooked that most of Kate’s work, even when it sounds intensely personal and emotional, is written from the point of view of a persona, or an idea, around which she creates an entire world.  In addition, these worlds are often coordinated into some kind of thematic vision that then constitutes an album.  The problem here is that neither of these things really happens.  Also, as anyone who was at her fan convention in 1990 knows, there was a loose intention post-The Sensual World to tour again given the increasingly long periods of gestation spent in the recording studio.  Whilst the tour would not happen and time would be spent on a creating the mini-movie of music videos The Line The Cross and The Curve instead, best described as “a load of bollocks” (that’s her words not mine), this does account for one dimension of The Red Shoes namely is its attempt to sound more straightforwardly like a pop record. Indeed its miscellany of bangers endears it to some of her fans. The lead single Rubberband Girl is a prime example of this tendency as is the near 80s disco of Constellation Of The Heart and the soul funk collaboration with Prince on Why Should I Love You?  Radio One at once stage started playing this particular song as part of its own playlist – yes, it really is that bad. The difficulty is that none of these songs really work as, whilst Kate has demonstrated an ear for a melody and a hook or two over the years, commercial she emphatically is not.  A second dimension is a continuation of The Sensual World’s eastern and this time Madagascan influenced musical styles in such numbers as Eat The Music or The Song Of Solomon.  This is more effective, particularly on Lily and the title track, inspired by the Powell and Pressburger film, yet the differing if not clashing styles reveal a lack of any clear focus or direction.  Underlying the entire record however is a third, more lyric-centred dimension. This is her most personal record and, more to the point, she sounds in emotional pain for much of it.  When not trying to observe relationships from further afar, the overriding tone is one of melancholy which informs the fan favourite Moments of Pleasure as well as And So Is Love and the closer, the Procol Harum influenced You’re The One.  Whilst exact details remain unknown, it is no secret that she split up with long-time partner and bassist Del Palmer and that her mother Hannah died during the making of the record.  In addition, it is far and away her most religious record invoking the biblical Song of Solomon, literally, and Lily, a prayer invoked/dedicated to spiritual healer Lily Cornford; as well as what can only be called mysticism on the Gabriel-esque Big Stripey Lie where she alludes to names being called by “sacred things that are not addressed or listened to”. Such personal losses clearly present particular difficulties for a form of music making such as Kate’s which is centred on deep emotional exploration and working – quite literally – in the confines of a close home and family network.  However, one ultimately has to forgive the misfires here and allow her the space to recover, though perhaps no one could anticipate that would take twelve years…

On its release, Kate would jokingly refer to Aerial as a “Great Danes of Love” given its parallel in structure to the earlier Hounds of Love.  Whilst the former was essentially one record split into two halves the latter would turn into a complete double album.  A problematic often missed here is that the two halves of Hounds of Love have fundamentally little connection yet on Aerial the two records act as linked reflectors of each other – a sea of honey and a sky of honey echoing (and this is again often overlooked) the emotions of the sea and the feelings associated with the air and sky respectively.  The first is altogether more driven by grief – itself an emotion experienced as oceanic in its capacity to overwhelm and drown – whilst the latter altogether is more uplifting, in every sense, and life-affirming, and uniting each and the whole is the sense of temporal, of time passing – and of losing a mother and becoming a mother.  During the first disc, A Sea of Honey, the feeling of contingency – of the temporary – predominates in a series of meditations upon loss across a variety of forms.  The lead single King of the Mountain, a top five hit in the UK, with its reggae and guitar hook riffs is rather misleading indicating something nearer to the pop songs of her yore yet the lyric – a bemused reflection on the spirit of Elvis Presley on one level at least – opens up a concern with what happens after death that dominates all seven songs.  Even Bertie, a tribute to her new born son, is set against a Renaissance arrangement that jigs along like a young child playing yet more deeply points towards the universality of mothering as an experience shared across centuries.  This sense of domesticity informs Mrs Bartolozzi – an extraordinary piano based ballad that effectively tumbles like its protagonist into a washing machine of memories and grief.  Few songs here have drama, let alone commercial appeal, yet this belies both Bush’s bravura and bravery as few, if any, could pull off a chorus of wails of “washing machine” that somehow nearly move one to tears.  The other dimension here is of magic – and the great unknown – so Pi reflects on mathematics in song through the incantation-like singing of numbers whilst How To Be Invisible weaves an inverse spell of disappearance over a bass disco riff provided by Mick Karn, the nerd if you like to the celebrity that dominates Joanni an equally mysterious rock elegy to Joan of Arc – or so it seems.  The record ends with A Coral Room, a second – yet more complex – piano piece that injects a more personal and direct connection to A Sea of Honey’s overall themes.  It is at once a quite beautiful meditation on time passing, given the mixed allegory of a lost world under the sea and the story of the folk song/poem Little Brown Jug, with an exploration of grief at the loss of her mother.  As a suite of songs, A Sea of Honey is not immediate but rather imbued with a sense of mystery, space and rumination echoed in often deceptively sparse arrangements.  The remastering, if anything, adds even more spatial awareness here.  On Aerial’s release, more attention was often paid to the second disc, yet it pays dividends to listen again here and scratch at its layers.

The second record A Sky of Honey still stands as some of the most beautiful music within the popular and contemporary canon let alone Bush’s own legacy.  A concept piece, not unlike The Ninth Wave yet here it records the passing of an afternoon into an evening and night and morning again symbolised by bird song (the dawn and evening chorus) that operates – as in reality – in some strange and unexplained symbiosis with the sun and the passage of time.  The motivation here is clear and fascinates Bush who then manages to weld this to her own elation at becoming a mother.  Bertie figures larger in remastered version than he did before as Rolf Harris is written out and her son is written in, as he did on her 2014 tour, to become the painter and his role in The Architect’s Dream and The Painter’s Link is itself slightly extended.  Indeed, the former is lifted from the Before the Dawn recordings.  Interestingly, this adds further temporal layers to both the album and to Bertie himself who now exists as both the giggling infant and grown teenager on the same record. The effect of the remastering is perhaps at its most dramatic here for whilst the original suite had a slightly hazy analogue softness the current version has, on occasion, an ear-popping clarity that separates and redraws rather than smudges the arrangements.  It’s a moot point as to whether this improves it and ardent fans may well wish to hang onto their originals as well.  Thus, it opens with an altogether clearer cooing of “you’re full of beauty” that does undeniably sound like the birds are saying words.  Whilst the Prologue nods its head towards the light of Italian Renaissance paintings, Kate’s influences are closer to home – Vaughan Williams to who she directly pays homage in her evocation of the lark ascending.  Similarly, it is Delius (previously celebrated on Never for Ever of course) that informs her Song of Summer at intermittent points here, particularly on Sunset.  Bush’s own bravura remains in evidence – who else would think to squawk in mimicry of a black bird and pull it off (on Aerial Tal) or write a verb twisting line like “we stand in the Atlantic and we become panoramic” (on Nocturn).  As many noted before, the Pink Floyd-esque latter stages of A Sky of Honey are its perhaps its most impressive – or at any rate remind us that she is no stranger to seduction, drama, or indeed laughter – as she giggles uncontrollably alongside husband Danny’s guitar, itself finally unleashed in a near Ibiza club-like celebration of the coming dawn.  Aerial is an album best listened with seriousness and attention, and preferably as a whole, to bring out its benefits – it is neither commercial nor immediate yet pays rewards in spades.

Over five years later, Kate would surprise fans with the release of what she called a new album that was in fact more accurately a major reworking of parts of two of her earlier releases – The Sensual World and The Red Shoes – to become her audio version of a Director’s Cut.  It is a curious affair and appears sparked at least through finally attaining the rights to “overwrite” her own lyrics to use a passage from Molly Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness that closes James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Thus, The Sensual World becomes Flower of the Mountain.  Her other main motivation seems to have been a growing dissatisfaction with the digital recording techniques she was using in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Director’s Cut is, perhaps more than anything else, driven by a desire to recreate an analogue sound.  Seven tracks from The Red Shoes and four from The Sensual World are given this treatment including very radical re-workings of several fan favourites includes Moments of Pleasure and This Woman’s Work.  The former is stripped of its chorus entirely in favour of something approaching a humming interlude whilst the latter is slowed down and stretched out in space to become something nearer to an elegiac if not existential reflection on chances lost.  These two long tracks form the core of an album which, by and large, injects intimacy and reflection where once there was studio invention.  Moreover, there appears to be something of a desire to re-write her treatise on love from the vantage point of middle age, and perhaps marriage, rather than youth. It’s a moot point, though, whether this really improvesthings.  Whilst the Trio Bulgarka flooded The Sensual World album with a kind of Eastern delight here they are kept to the side-lines in order to observe more closely the rest of the songs of which they became such a part.  Flower of the Mountain in its analogue fug and bass rhythm heavy form has little of the sensuality of the original and This Woman’s Work, whilst admirable and altogether more raw, is arguably no better than what was already a very fine song.  Worse still, Deeper Understanding uses Bertie’s vocoder-ed voice to laughable effect where once the Trio Bulgarka brought the computer to life, although the Gabriel-esqe rhythm section at the end does lend it something.  The only true saving grace from The Sensual World here is the altogether sparser version of Never Be Mine which sees husband Danny’s guitar providing the emotional edge and adding to the growing sense of nostalgia that figures large on the record.  Tracks from The Red Shoes fare rather better – Lily gets a more rhythm-based feel combined with a ballsier vocal to sound more like a lead single it should have been whilst The Song of Solomon sounds more direct and altogether more adult.  That said, nothing much changes on some of the other tracks besides, for example, a lyric swap of “sweet” for “sad” on And So Is Love – it seems at least Kate herself is happier now.  Which leaves what can only be called the “doing an impression of Mick Jagger stoned in the bath version” of Rubberband Girl to close the album.  The harmonica is new and when interviewed she explained she put it on the end for “fun” yet one is left with the feeling that, in the act of clearing out her closets, Director’s Cut is the curate’s egg of her collection and remains the album which Kate needed to make for herself rather than anyone else.

The surprises of 2011 were not over for, later that year, she released an album of new material for winter entitled 50 Words for Snow.  What stood, and still stands, out here more than anything else is her return to more piano driven song writing.  Taking its cue from the likes of Mrs Bartolozzi this is predominantly a record of two defined, yet nonetheless pretty sparse, halves.  The first comprises a suite of long, classically inflected songs culminating in the near fourteen-minute reverie of Misty, an astonishingly sexualised tale of a tryst with a snowman.  Prior to this Snowflake evokes the hush of the first fall of heavy snow via a duet with her son who is neither the infant nor the teenager as before on Aerial but the pre-pubertal here.  Bertie’s voice is chorister boy high but caught, consciously, before it breaks.  Thus, it is not only an ode to the magic and strangeness of snow but a deeply affecting homage to her son’s, and indeed all men that were once boys’, voices.  The more straightforward of the trinity is Lake Tahoe, evocative of freezing cold and Victorian ghost stories, telling the tale of a long since departed woman and her dog.  The three songs together form a remarkable demonstration of Bush’s skill in evoking atmosphere and mystery as well as the extent to which she has moved away from the three-minute pop song in favour of something altogether more classical in style. The gears shift to up the pace for the second half starting with Wild Man – also abridged into seven-inch single format – at once an evocation of a humdinger of a snow storm in the mountains and a tribute to the yeti or myth of the abominable snowman, call him what you will, in the Himalayas.  Bush’s changes in singing are signalled here – and elsewhere – as her voice drops into a lower, and altogether more hushed, register making her forays towards the chandeliers even more astounding on the likes of Misty and Among Angels.  The latter was performed live a few years later and the power of her voice now has to be heard to be fully believed – as she might say herself, she has finally found some balls in it – and sounds, quite simply, magnificent.  Whilst the key of it was lowered for large parts of Director’s Cut, and her theme song Lyra for 2007 film The Golden Compass, dropped a large hint at what was happening, it is here that that her new voice truly comes into its own. What also marks out this album is both its wintry complementarity to Aerial which, for all its references to grief, is a record full of summer and sunshine and, likewise, its embeddedness in observations of nature – snow and winter are evoked in a variety of forms from the silence they create (Snowflake) to blizzards and sense of hazard (Snowed In At Wheeler Street) and from the transformative (Misty) to the downright glassy and mystical (Among Angels). It’s all flagrantly uncommercial and teeters on sheer “anti-pop” in its long, drawn out and intensely – some would say overly – measured pacing yet remains true to Kate’s strengths in invoking mystery from ghosts and yetis to guardian angels.

Her Before The Dawn shows of 2014 that took place solely in Hammersmith, London stand as one of the most major surprises of her career and, moreover, recent music history in its entirety.  Quite literally, no one saw them coming, quietly expecting another long wait for another long player.  Nor were the long shows a reprisal of her earlier career, rather a theatrical and cinematic reworking of her two concept pieces The Ninth Wave and a Sky Of Honey.  Eighteen months in the making and, as with the Tour Of Life thirty five years earlier, the effects were overwhelming – a combination of video backdrops, live playing, singing and a theatrical acting out of song story lines that one struggled to take in during one viewing.  There was little dancing, yet she sounded amazing.  Reviewers and audiences alike were enraptured and in awe, tickets sold out in minutes, and phones were turned off in reverence.  As yet at least, no visual record exists, rather a live album attributed to the “KT Fellowship” in honour of those involved and to leave it to the audience’s imagination.  Or so she said.  More understandably, it’s also not been remastered.

As fans have noted, remastered part four or “the non-album tracks revisited” is not exhaustive.  The list is, to say the least, selective.  Whilst everything here is brushed up and shiny like new coins, what is more interesting is the juggling of the order which is not chronological rather centred on genre and typology.  Particularly savagely, none of The Red Shoes remixes makes the cut at all, though they were not particularly successful either commercially or critically.  In fact, only five of the remixes are here – namely those from the Hounds of Love era and Experiment IV.  Of these, the Cloudbusting Organon remix fares the best, now sounding like the marching band it was probably intended to; whilst The Big Sky Meteorological Mix has always whipped up a bit of a thunderstorm.  Whether the viola driven reworking of Hounds of Love is an improvement is a matter of taste and Running Up That Hill still sounds like it always did – an attempt at turning it into an 80s disco hit.  Particularly irritating is the lack of the Army Dreamers single version and there are a mere twenty of her B-sides here.  Whilst some such as the bizarre Ken (Livingstone) are perhaps best left behind, other gems like the early piano based balled The Empty Bullring are sorely missed as is the On Stage EP of early live work that was a sizeable hit.  Bizarrely, early takes Ran Tan Waltz and Passing Through Air do make the cut as do other B-sides from the Hounds of Love and The Sensual World eras but not the perfectly decent Not This Time (flipside of The Big Sky).  Why these selections have been made is anyone’s guess and the omissions are, for any ardent fan at least, glaring.  There is of course one new song – or rather the release of a very old one – namely Humming from the pre-Kick Inside sessions where she sounds very young indeed.  The standard is generally high, particularly when writing in simpler story telling mode of which Under The Ivy and Walk Straight Down The Middle (complete with peacock shriek) are particularly outstanding.  Keen listeners will also note that we get the extended video version of Experiment IV too (though not the same for Cloudbusting).  The seasonal hit of December Will Be Magic Again is here though the more percussive mix used on the B-side of Moments of Pleasure would have been preferable.  Home For Christmas is best seen as part of the bad decision making that dominated The Red Shoes period and we still get her dodgy French accent on the percussive Ne T’enfuis Pas and unnecessary Un Baiser D’Enfant.  Ordering and decision making are also key to understanding the final selection of cover versions.  Publishing rights aside, another disc could have been made up of her very fine duets and backing vocal sessions with the likes of Peter Gabriel, Roy Harper, and Midge Ure.  There’s a strong Celtic theme to what is here – she is half Irish after all – and this may excuse her ill-advised rendition of Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing complete with ceilidh, a legacy from her Red Shoes era, though the same reggae-meets-Eire combination works well on Elton John’s Rocket Man.  It is interesting to note that all her covers are all of work by men not women thus sticking with her tendency to override gender ever since she invoked Peter Pan on Lionheart.  It’s a pity Kate has not recorded more acapella as the results are without exception exquisite (My Lagan Love, The Handsome Cabin Boy) which leaves us with her choral reworking of Candle In The Wind.  It’s tempting to read something more into her final refrain of “goodbye Norma Jean” that also happens to follow a sensual cover of Donovan’s “swan song” Lord of the Reedy River to close this inclusive, if not exhaustive, collection of her work.  She is rather clever after all.  

After well over forty years, ten for the most part exceptional solo albums, plus another one or two LPs worth of bits and pieces, a couple of quite remarkable tours and some “yet to be done anything with” video work one can but hope that this is not the final chapter.  Yet final chapter it may possibly be.  With no sniff of any new music since 2011, it’s easy to feel “Kate Bush remastered 2018” is to, put it politely, the definitive stamp on her career.  A book of lyrics entitled How To Be Invisible (ever the joker) and introduced by David Mitchell adds to this sense of someone wrapping up.  Her decisions of recent years have, however, emphatically proved that she is the mistress of surprises.  As ever, we wait.

American Gigolo (dir. Schrader, 1980) turns 40 this year.  The film is generally understood in terms of its significance in making actor Richard Gere and fashion designer Giorgio Armani household names.  Its director Paul Schrader, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and female star Lauren Hutton were already Hollywood stars in the ascendancy.  My point here is that the film has a wider cultural importance in setting up a new template for the male sex object set within a shifting terrain of sexual mores, attitudes towards gender, and visual culture.

It is also important to compare it with Looking for Mr Goodbar (dir. Brooks, 1977), based on Judith Rossner’s best-selling novel of the same name, itself founded on the true life murder of school teacher Roseann Quinn who was stabbed to death by a man she met in a bar.  Both films also precede Michael Douglas’s unholy trinity of movies encapsulating the mores and sexuality of the 1980s, epitomised by Fatal Attraction (dir. Lyne, 1987).  What they share in common is their plotlines that, put simply, state that sex – or particularly pleasure-seeking promiscuity – leads to serious problems and, more likely than not in the case of women, death.  Thus, Theresa Dunn leads a “double life” as schoolteacher and near sex “addict”, Julian Kaye (intriguingly called Julie) is a male escort, sex worker or “gigolo”, and Dan Gallagher is a successful married lawyer who “strays” with high profile editor Alex(andra).  Dunn is murdered whilst Kaye ends up framed for murder.  Interestingly, Gallagher is not “promiscuous” as such yet his breaking of the rules of monogamy at the height of the AIDS pandemic is sufficient to turn a simple affair murderous.

The first two films are the more interesting to compare for what also unites them is Gere, a gigolo in the second and – more implicitly – a hustler in the first.  In both cases he is cast as a “good time boy” with the styled looks of an Adonis and an intense dislike of anything that ties him down.  That particularly includes relationships and Theresa Dunn and Julian Kaye, whilst of opposite genders, are cast as equally psychologically “unhealthy” in their avoidance of emotional intimacy.  Julian is eventually saved by the love of a good woman; Theresa is beyond recovery.  The interplay of gender and morality is therefore critical as whilst Julian is disreputable as a gigolo, he can be redeemed by love and monogamy whereas Theresa is so morally aberrant her murder only becomes interesting precisely because of the sexuality that precedes it.

The moral boundary making of hustler and gigolo movies themselves has precedent, most markedly in Midnight Cowboy(dir. Schlesinger, 1969).  Part buddy movie and part unprecedented expose of the seedier side of life in New York City life, the film politically and morally underlines the idea that nothing good comes from prostitution.  The sex scenes are either comedic or violent rather than erotic whilst wannabe male prostitute Joe Buck (Jon Voight) is presented as inept and confused as much as he is sexually attractive.  Emblematic here is his rather outdated cowboy outfit which he discards at the end of the movie symbolising his break with his “aberrant” past and his embracing of emotional support for his ailing buddy “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) but it is all too late as Rizzo dies on the bus.

There are further layers here relating to questions of sexuality.  First, as is the case with Midnight Cowboy, each of these films is liberally littered with negative views of male homosexuality.  They both contain various storylines set within the gay scene and involve gay or bi-sexually identified characters that are key in the “downfall” of their straight counterparts.  Thus, Dunn is killed by a repressed homosexual whilst Kaye is framed by an openly gay pimp.  The casting of gay or lesbian characters as morally dubious murderers and “psychos” is notorious within Hollywood movies past and present from Cruising (dir. Friedkin, 1980) to Sharon Stone (cue the Douglas trilogy) as a bisexual/lesbian serial killer in Basic Instinct (dir. Verhoeven, 1992) and the ambiguous serial killer at the centre of The Silence of the Lambs (dir. Demme, 1988), a trope that goes all the way back to Hitchcock’s Rope (1948).

More ambivalently, each of these movies also relies heavily on their sexually infused disco soundtracks.  Whilst American Gigolo is famous for its flavour of the moment pop band Blondie’s hit “Call Me”, it is also dominated by music of Giorgio Moroder whose work also underpins some of the sounds of Looking For Mr Goodbar, itself otherwise punctuated throughout by the likes of Diana Ross and Donna Summer.  Moroder is famous for his collaboration with Summer – themselves icons not only of disco rather, more to the point, gay disco.  What we have here is a curious mixing of messages as audiences are encouraged to empathically engage with characters and experiences through the disco-infused soundtracks whilst simultaneously they are warned of the dire consequences that will ensue if they are too seduced by them via the plotlines.

Whilst the moral boundary reinforcing role of all of this is not in doubt and well documented by the likes of Richard Dyer, the question in the newer American Gigolo becomes its relationship to the homoerotic Gere.  Although little ambiguity surrounds the actor himself, his roles at the time are profoundly sexually abstruse.  Tony, the hustler of Looking For Mr Goodbar is heterosexually promiscuous yet when presented doing press-ups in a jockstrap is equally coded for a far more homosexual appeal whilst his exercise and fashion regimes in American Gigolo register him as stereotypically gay.  Thus, the famous scene of him laying out his endless clothes and coordinating shirts, ties and jackets is not only crucial in promoting the reputation of Giorgio Armani rather it assimilates Julian within a far “gayer” aesthetic.  Yet the most crucial factor here is Gere himself.  Whilst soon to be famous for his “looks so good in uniform he could turn a straight man gay” scenes in An Officer and a Gentleman (dir. Hackford, 1982), given the increasingly homosexual associations of uniforms themselves at the time (cue The Village People), it’s actually Gere’s body that becomes critical.  Gere is shown exercising next to naked and fundamentally accords to an increasingly dominant aesthetic of tall, broad shouldered muscularity and athleticism.

Although Looking for Mr Goodbar and American Gigolo were moderate box office successes, they were too left field, too morally ambiguous, to go mainstream in their defence of disco.  The game changer, and important point of comparison, here is Saturday Night Fever (dir. Badham, 1977) – a film so successful, particularly in terms of its soundtrack, it broke records as well as made them.  It also made John Travolta a household name.  Its success comparative to the others mentioned here is worthy of some questioning in itself.  Of key significance is the fact that Tony Manero, unlike Julian Kaye, is neither sexually ambivalent nor making money from it.  Saturday Night Fever, for all its disco hedonism, is in essence a and a tale of aspiration and hope whilst in poverty.  Manero like Kaye is, however, both consumerist and embodied.  His white suit is now more famous than he is; whilst his hair combing and bum wiggling sexually objectifies him.  Travolta’s body, though occasionally seen in briefs, is primarily sexualised through the clothes – the tight trousers, white suit, satin shirt, etc. – and Manero, unlike Kaye, has an almighty Italian American back story of warring generations and religion to match.  Julian by contrast is not only so sexually ambiguous he becomes Julie; he floats like a tabula rasa of character less mystery throughout the film.  One cannot identify with him or even really aspire to be him as one does not know him to begin with.  Thus, the desire the audience has for him is primarily consumerist rather than character driven.  The same can hardly be said of dead-end hardware shop working and family battling Tony Manero.  It is this characterisation process and working classness that neutralises the sexual ambiguity into something wider audiences can aspire to and idolise.

Although only three years apart, the styling of the two films seems almost worlds away.  This is partly due to geography as both Saturday Night Fever and Looking For Mr Goodbar are set in New York City whereas American Gigolo is located in Los Angeles yet more widely relates to a shift in visual culture and aesthetics.  Whilst the former two films mostly work within a field of realism – Dunn’s dirty and messy apartment or the crass posters of Manero’s late teenage bedroom – the latter sets up a far more aspirational, stylised and consumerist landscape set around the lighting of Kaye’s apartment filtered through louvered blinds, his Mercedes coupe on coastal roads, and the sun loungers and swimming pools of the rich and famous.  This comes across as far more contemporary in its magazine like aesthetics than either of the other two films that bathe in a nostalgia for smoke and whirling disco balls.  But within this again it is Gere that is key as an entirely different kind of sex object from Travolta – naked yet dressy, ambiguous yet characterless – in postmodern terms, a far more free-floating signifier of consumer desire.

Sexual objectification of men within film is of course as old as film itself.  Thus, whilst Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart were all cast as leading men that could make a woman swoon, they primarily kept their kit on.  The rise of a more rugged masculinity in John Wayne and the western genre was equally for the most part clothed.  Similarly, the likes of Redford and Newman in films like the number one hit Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (dir. Hill, 1969) or The Sting (dir. Hill, 1973) are barely seen with anything less than their collars undone.  Even Travolta’s later hip wiggling dancing in the stratospherically successful Grease (dir. Kleiser, 1978), although revealing, is not exactly naked.  Gere by contrast gets his kit off entirely to the point of doing full frontals.  Whilst not entirely “ripped” to contemporary standards, his athleticism and looks echo a Greco-Roman ideal down to the cut of his rather lush hair.  This is not just fashion, though that is a factor, it is the shifting of Gere into the increasingly ambiguous double or dual marketing of the male body to appeal to a gay and straight audience alike.

By the mid-1980s this was dominant in the selling of everything from Levi’s jeans to Calvin Klein underwear and from music to film.  Thus, Gere’s successor was the diminutive but equally athletic and similarly styled Tom Cruise in “the more than a bit sexually ambiguous” Top Gun (dir. Scott, 1986), cue more locker rooms and more uniforms.  What informs the importance of American Gigolo forty years on, then, is not the spectre of sexual pleasure in male, or even female, form – something still unresolved in the utter horrors of 50 Shades of Grey (dir. Taylor-Johnson, 2015) – rather it is the male form itself and the requirement that any actor in any role should now look good with his shirt off, a factor now so overwhelming that actors have to put their shirts back on to be taken seriously.  So Chris Evans – an actor with a torso so aesthetically perfect it could make Michelangelo weep – in an attempt to move out of a stereotyped rut has started putting his clothes back on, whilst never a lightweight to begin with Daniel Craig quit being Bond having had to become the one that has to emerge from the waves in his swimming costume.  Whilst there are other turning points along the way – Pitt’s “obliques” in Fight Club (dir. Fincher, 1999) – it was Gere’s shift towards an Adonis driven body beautiful that remains the key driver in this.

The passenger sitting alongside this, however, is commodification.  Such physiques require training that in turn depends upon product and gym membership yet, more importantly, they are set and displayed within contexts of high conspicuous consumption so that scene of Julian coordinating his clothes requires a naked torso to dress AND an apartment full of highly aspirational clothes and props.  Moreover, within a mere twenty years, Julian Kaye’s laying of clothes would become the penthouse glass, narcissistic and commodified grooming ritual of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (dir. Harron, 2000) or the controlled, steel grey apartment meets porn set of Brandon Sullivan in Shame(dir. McQueen, 2011) – or, in short, the point where body meets mirror in the guise of a now well-trained consumerist gaze.

Of course, the other, and final, so-obvious-you-almost-miss-it, difference here is that Kaye, Bateman and Sullivan alike are not just naked and consumerist objects of desire but men who are alone.  There is an interesting gear shift here not only forwards rather in reverse to the figure of the gun-slinging cowboy who rides into town, causes all sorts of commotion, and then rides out again – the plotline of countless westerns.  Yet the shift forward is towards something far more middle-class, consumerist and aspirational – two factors that were then blended, to overextend the metaphor, in the aptly named Drive (dir. Winding Refn, 2011) the story of a stunt driver turned hero dressed in the most well-cut jeans you have ever seen.  Whilst Gosling’s nuanced ambiguity would continue American Gigolo’s legacy, Gere’s own Hollywood stardom was set to decline into debates about Buddhism and Tibetan politics.  Prior to this, he had one last hurrah as sexual hero of the hour when he inverted his gigolo status to become the trick that hired a prostitute and lost all his sexual ambiguity along with the pigment of his hair in Pretty Woman (dir. Marshall, 1990).   There are two factors of note here.  One, that Gere had become older, and sexual ambiguous naked male bodies have to be younger; and two, that the plotline of Pretty Woman plays into an altogether earlier and more traditional male trope namely that of the Hollywood idol, one that a certain Mr Clooney then took over for himself.  So, what we have here is a crossing of lines and travels of several differing idealised forms of masculinity in film, driven forward and combined in various ways; yet it was Gere’s quixotic shifting of desirable masculinity into a newer, barer and more consumerist ideal that remains axiomatic in cinematic history.