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- Kate Bush: why I can't wait for her return
Director's Cut is the new album from the Wuthering Heights singer – but it's not what anyone expected
So the rumours are true. Kind of. We'll have to wait patiently – is there any other way to wait for a Kate Bush record? – for an album of new material, but the news that Bush will release Director's Cut on 16 May, an album of new versions of songs originally included on The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993), provides plenty to ponder.
Director's Cut is a typically atypical Bush curveball: risky and potentially exciting, but most of all surprising, because she has rarely spent much time raking over her past moves. There has been only one rather cursory greatest hits album in 33 years, reluctantly released in 1986 to capitalise on her commercial triumph, Hounds of Love. Deluxe editions of her albums, freshly scrubbed and featuring bonus discs of outtakes and rarities, have been notable by their absence.
For an artist as fully in control of her career as Bush, these are conscious creative choices. She once said: "I can't possibly think of old songs of mine because they're past now. And quite honestly I don't like them any more."
The Director's Cut might well suggest a softening in this attitude, but it's telling that in finally looking back she has chosen not to disinter but to reinvent; to build something new on the skeletons of her old songs.
Rather than The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, we might have expected Bush to revisit her earliest records. On her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart, she wasn't in control of the production process and the results often felt to her like a compromised, overly polite version of the sound she heard in her head.
However, since 1980's Never for Ever, and certainly by The Dreaming in 1982, she had been a driven, obsessive, autonomous presence in the studio, spending months and later years building self-contained musical worlds entirely to her own exacting specifications. Her back catalogue is generally agreed to be one of the finest and most carefully cultivated in pop, but it's not flawless, and the fact that of all her records she has chosen to revisit The Sensual World and The Red Shoes makes sense: the former has some fabulous songs but in places sounds oddly flat, while The Red Shoes is her most predictable album, recorded at a time of personal upheaval and which too often fails to soar. Bush has been critical of both.
Director's Cut will keep elements from some of the original recordings from these records while introducing new ones, though I have yet to see a tracklist. It will be fascinating to hear what she has chosen to change and add, and whether these will be radically revised interpretations or mere tweaks. Her voice, deeper and more resonant these days, will certainly be one point of difference, while production techniques have developed significantly since these albums were made.
Should we worry that this news is evidence of a songwriter in decline? I don't think so. Bush's last album Aerial, released a little more than five years ago, was evidence of a muse in rude if unhurried health, while we are told she is working on new material that will be released before too long.
If Director's Cut is perhaps anti-climactic for those waiting for new songs, here's one final thought that falls somewhere between sobering and thrilling: this release may be the closest we ever get to hearing Bush do something that most artists regard as routine, which is to reinvent and reappraise their songs by performing them onstage. She may have no desire to play live or be the dazzling visual presence she once was, but this is the first time since her tour in 1979 that Bush has made an effort to reinterpret and recontextualise her back catalogue. Not a tour of life, perhaps, but a significant reimagining nonetheless. Unusual, unexpected, a little bit strange, Director's Cut is a classic Bush move. I can't wait to hear it.
Graeme Thomson is author of Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush (Omnibus Press)
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Music Weekly: Scritti Politti's Green Gartside
Green Gartside of Scritti Politti talks to Alexis Petridis and looks back at his music career as a new album 'Absolute - The Best of' is released. It's an up and down career with Gartside achieving success in America in the mid-80s, but giving it all up for several years to go and play darts in a pub in Wales whilst getting over stage fright and depression.
Alexis is joined by Jude Rogers and Pete Paphides, and inspired by the interview, spark of a discussion about academic thought in pop and rock.
The team also review three new tracks: one from Lykke Li, one from Solar Bears and one from The Gentle Good.
Leave your reviews of those tracks and any other comments below, or on our Facebook page or by talking to us on Twittter.
Переслать - New music exclusive: DELS - GOB (David Andrew Sitek remix)
British rapper DELS gets a makeover courtesy of TV On the Radio main man on this genre-splicing Guardian exclusive
British rapper DELS, aka Kieren Dickins, is connected. His last two singles – Shapeshift and Trumpalump – were collaborations with Joe Goddard from Hot Chip, while his forthcoming debut album features production work from Kwes (there's also a team-up with Micachu and the Shapes on the cards too). The attention seems justified – not least for the ridiculous Shapeshifting video – with Dickins's languorous flow riding beats that merge genres like they're going out of style. GOB, his new single, has been remixed by TV On the Radio's David Andrew Sitek, who was apparently "super passionate" about the song and spent weeks getting the mix just right. Listen to the results – a Guardian exclusive – below.
GOB is out on 2 May with the album of the same name due on 9 May through Big Dada.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Can: the ultimate film soundtrack band?
The use of Can's music in Norwegian Wood confirms the krautrock pioneers have always made sounds fit for cinema
He hardly needs to give up his day job, but Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood seems to have a pretty good alternative career lined up as a film composer. After his dissonant, overpowering strings on There Will Be Blood, he does sterling work on this week's excellent Norwegian Wood, adding to the Japanese teen gloom with sheets of orchestral noise and tender acoustic guitar melodies. But what caught my attention on the soundtrack was the welcome reappearance of Can, whose music not only fits the late-60s setting, but also reminds us how much Radiohead are indebted to the trailblazing krautrockers. They've made no secret of it, even covering Can's The Thief, but listening to The King of Limbs' precision clattering, jazzy guitars, slightly slurred vocals and unorthodox song structures, the spirit of Can still courses through them.
Another reason Can complement Norwegian Wood is the band's Japanese frontman, Damo Suzuki, who sounds like he is singing in his native tongue even when performing in English. The band famously recruited Suzuki off a Munich street in 1970 to play a gig that same night – where his incendiary improvised performance turned away all but the most hardcore, including, bizarrely, actor David Niven, who stayed till the end.
Two of the Can songs in Norwegian Wood are already from existing soundtracks, hence their inclusion on the 1970 album, er, Can Soundtracks: Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone (bet Radiohead wish they'd thought of that title), Suzuki's first recording with the band, which sounds like a stoned art-students' jam (someone's done a homemade video here); and She Brings the Rain, a mellow, bassy, jazzy melody that doesn't really sound like Can at all (it was performed by their original singer, Malcolm Mooney, shortly before he had a breakdown and left the band). The version in Norwegian Wood, however, sounds like a cover.
Back in my student days – when I should have been listening to Radiohead or studying – Can Soundtracks was a favourite on the electric gramophone. But before imdb, Amazon, iTunes or, in fact, the internet, it was difficult tracking down the films the songs were originally made for. And it still is. They all seem to be obscure German B-movies from the late 60s. Don't Turn the Light On…, for example, is from a film called Cream – Schwabing-Report, on which the only light imdb can shed is the salacious tagline: "What a bored child bride did until she got caught!" That's probably enough information. She Brings the Rain, meanwhile, was from a film called Ein Großer Graublauer Vogel (A Big Grey-Blue Bird). Apparently it's about scientists who invent a computer that solves the mysteries of the universe, but then forget they've done so. Has anyone ever seen this film? Does it really exist?
Fortunately Can's music has been used in edgier but more accessible movies ever since. Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt went on to produce scores of scores, including Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities. Wenders used She Brings the Rain in Lisbon Story, as did Oskar Roehler in his 2000 film No Place to Go. And the band reunited to do a track for Wenders's Until the End of the World. There's also a lot of Can in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar (the book was dedicated to bassist Holger Czukay), and their funky Vitamin C cropped up in Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces. Apparently Can's biggest earner, though, was the track Spoon, which was adopted by hit German TV cop show Das Messer. I thought I heard them recently in another fine and gloomy Japanese youth movie, Confessions, but it turned out to beBoris. Coincidentally, Confessions' soundtrack also features Radiohead.
The good news is that the best of those "lost" movies featuring music from Can Soundtracks is to become available for the first time. This is Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, which the BFI is re-releasing in May. A teen drama set in a swimming baths at the end of Swinging London, it features the most legendary song on Can Soundtracks: Mother Sky, which plays as the hero trawls through sleazy Soho, steals a cardboard cut-out, makes the acquaintance of a prostitute with a broken leg and buys a hotdog from Burt Kwouk. Mother Sky is quintessential Can: a mighty 15-minute psychedelic wig-out with crazy screeching guitar, minimalist bassline, clockwork drumming and indecipherable Damo Suzuki chanting. It's garage punk with a longer attention span, math rock with a human soul, and prog without the self-indulgence. Nobody could get away with that now, not even Radiohead.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - The Strokes' Angles: has making an album ever sounded more depressing?
Guitarist Nick Valensi claims that recording the new Strokes album was an 'awful' experience. So how are we supposed to enjoy a record we know the band hated making so much?
If I was to start this blog by declaring that it was a really annoying writing experience, the copy filing system I used was playing up, the bloke behind me wouldn't shut up about some fishing trip he took at the weekend and I really couldn't think of a decent intro other than this load of toss … well, you're probably about to click away already, right?
And yet that seems to be the tactic the Strokes are employing – on an alarmingly regular basis – to promote their fourth album, Angles. Just this week, Nick Valensi told Pitchfork: "I won't do the next album like this. No way. It was awful – just awful. Working in a fractured way, not having a singer there."
Fun times! But statements like these are no anomaly. In fact, only a couple of months ago Valensi was back on the campaign trail with MySpace Music, providing Strokes fans with words they've longed to hear: "There are still undertones of hostility and resentment in the band." When asked why Angles was coming out now he said: "Maybe everyone needed money or something. We gotta pay our mortgage so may as well get this going again."
Tongue in cheek? Possibly, but that doesn't mean it's not true. The sessions themselves, after all, have been so unpleasant that singer Julian Casablancas didn't turn up for most of them, arriving to add his vocals and then buggering off, no doubt to get well away from those undertones of hostility and resentment.
In 2009, I interviewed Casablancas about his retro-futurist solo album Phrazes for the Young. During our discussion (a rather torturous experience in itself) Casablancas made the Angles sessions sound like a living hell, having to appease everyone's creative urges for the sake of inter-band harmony rather than a decent finished product.
"I want Thin Lizzy-style, kung-fu rock with cool 80s melodies," he said, before extinguishing this enthusiasm. "But there's only a 20% chance it'll end up being that."
You might applaud the Strokes for at least being honest, rather than making out all is fine and dandy when they actually detest each other. On the other hand, how is a fan supposed to feel knowing that sessions for their favourite band's new album was such a depressing experience for all involved? All this bickering and moaning hardly fits in with the image of the Strokes as effortlessly cool and elegantly wasted NYC rockers. It also does the band an injustice as the album sounds far better to these ears than they've made it sound – certainly an improvement on First Impressions Of Earth.
Artists have slated their own material plenty of times in the past, of course – earlier this month Lupe Fiasco told the Guardian he hated his third album, Lasers: "When I look at it I don't see the songs, I see the fight." Often, though, these kind of comments – see also the Las – only serve to bolster the myth.
But that's the thing. It's not that the Strokes sessions sound like they were bad (in the sense of fist fights, drug habits and exploding drummers) – just depressing and tedious. Not that we should be too worried, though, as Valensi promises: "I feel like we have a better album in us, and it's going to come out soon."
Can't wait! So what do you think – does the making of the Strokes' Angles sound like the recording session from hell? Or are there other similarly tedious sessions that crawl slowly to mind?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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