caleb 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

IVY P6 Cosy

TV SHOW THE QUEENS GAMBIT COUPLE: BENNY X READER RATING: SWEET AF!

I had grown rather used to having my little audience. Y/n came over almost everyday for at least an hour just to sit and watch me play chess making all her little notes and working on ivy as she slowly brought her equipment over every time she visited so I know had half a computer in my living room. But today honestly I wasn't expecting her there was a horrible storm over new york.

The subway has been down for days, no taxis working, barely a car could get thought, my poor little beatle is burried under the snow, my apartment as cold as ice as the heating was now working but not working all that well, at least I had hot water now, the windows blocked completely by snow and where one slightly leaks it has frozen shut with icicles on the inside as the water leaking in had frozen on the way in, I could hear the wind rushing through, the news reports I was getting on my tiny tv weren't good so I turned it off trying not to think about the cold.

I had two pairs of socks on, fluffy socks. My jeans on with a blanket over my legs, my black t shirt, then my black turtleneck shirt, then my green button down then my jacket and I still had to wrap a blanket around my shoulders to stop me shivering. I jumped as I heard the phone I begrudgingly got up from my chair and went to answer it trying not to loose a blanket on the way I picked it up trying not to shiver in my voice

"Hello?"

"Hi Benny" I heard her familiar voice but she had called me before from her dorm but it sounded different

"Hey y/n, what's up?"

"Quick question do you have heating?"

"Well yes. It's not very good but yes. Why?"

"Uhhh could you maybe put it on full. And also put the kettle on"

".... Ohh my god you crazy girl are you actually coming?'

"Yes"

"I thought we'd work from your from today on the phones and all"

"I was going too but most everyone else has gone home for the holidays and the dorms are so so cold."

"Where are you?"

"Uhh the payphone about a block down the street from yours"

"You're walking! Y/n you must be frozen half to death get off the phone get here as quick as you can I'll get the kettle on" I told her quickly hanging up I didn't want her on the phone any longer then she had to be I got up going to the kitchen to put the kettle on hell I'll have a hot drink as I'n turning it on and soon enough I heard fast shaking little taps, I rushed over and quickly pulled the door open having to fight against the ice around it but I got it open and she stood there on my doorstep covered in an inch of snow shivering in her usual purple coat "oohh get in here you silly girl you'll freeze" I laughed quickly letting her in and shutting the door behind us to keep the cold out

"Benny I can't feel my toes"

"I imagine you can't. Those boots don't look like snow boots?"

"There not I didn't have snow boots so I just put my thermal boots and some extra socks"

"Here let me get your coat off" I smiled helping her with her coat knocking all the snow off her revealing how cute she looked she had a little purple hat under her hood, and a long purple scarf wrapped around her about four times and had a long knee length knitted purple dress with pockets, she had little black mittens and what looked like four or five layers of thermal tights and these little boots I helped her get her boots off as somehow she had gotten snow inside her boots and she had three pairs of socks on top of her tights she slipped her mittens off and her scarf sitting them with her coat

"May I steal a blanket?" She asks noticing I had two

"You may" I laughed giving her one of my blankets

"You wanna mini hot water bottle?" She smiled pulling a pocket sized hot water bottle out of her pocket I took it curiously and it was hot I held it close feeling how warm it was

"Uuummm I will sell you my car for this tiny hand sized hot water bottle"

"It's okay Benny you can borrow it while I'm borrowing your blanket" she smiled we went over to the sofa having a sit together trying not to be too far apart as we where both warm, I feched her a tea and a I had my usual coffee "clink" she giggled tapping my mug with her own

"Clink" I laughed "fuck it's cold. Sorry I made you walk all this way"

"It's okay I wanted to come"

"I'm really not in the mood for chess today. Which sounds nuts but I'm just way too cold. Sorry for making you walk all this way for nothing"

"Not nothing, I got to see you" she smiled "and steal your blanket"

"I guess so. Guess it's kinda nice to have someone to wait out the storm with"

"Yeah someone to wait the storm out with" she smiled "why don't you get the duvet?"

"The duvet!" I jumped dashing to my bedroom and getting my duvet we both readjusted our blankets and then I threw the duvet over us both I smiled looking at her wrapped up so well against the sofa with the blanket around her shoulders and my duvet tucked up to her sipping the tea that she held so close "I like your scarf. And your little hat"

"Aww thank you" she blushed "I knitted them myself"

"You did? that's impressive. Can you make me a scarf?"

"Yeah, actually. I did bring my stuff with me" she laughed grabbing her bag getting some large needles "I have… black and white wool?"

"Can you make me a chess scarf?"

"Uhhh I don't see why not" she smiled sitting her tea on the side

"I'm going to get a book, want anything as I'm leaving the warm corner?"

"No thanks benny, Im cosy" she smiled

"Alright" I smiled back giving her temple a little kiss before leaving the duvet I already hated it I'm so cold out here, I grabbed a book or three before I remembered I jumped in my wardrobe and I saw it "ohh my god! I forgot about you!"

"About what?" Y/n giggled

"My long hot water bottle" I laughed showing her the thing i bought it years ago before going to Moscow on the assumption moscow would be cold and I ended up leaving it here it took a while to fill up as it was almost a meter long but I did it up and put the fluffy cover over it and came back beside her getting under the duvet and in the blankets laying the bottle across both our laps between the duvet and us I smiled as I sat getting cosy watching her slowly knit

"Why was your dorm so cold?' I asked her

"Most of them have gone home for the holidays, cheap place only keeps the heat on if more then two people are there and it was just me" she says "I tried to get on the bus to come see you but I had to walk"

"Why didn't you go home? For the holidays?"

"Not really much if a home to go to?"

"What do you mean?"

"My mother died in childbirth. My dad looked after me alone for most of my life. He passed away a few years ago now." She explained

"Ohh y/n. I'm so sorry, his did he die?"

She smiled slightly "he was working at nasa. In the space race and all, he was an engineer so they sent him onna test flight but… they never came back" she explained

"Must have been an amazingly smart man. I see where you get it from"

"Thank you, what about you? Why aren't you flying off somewhere to see your family?"

"Don't really have a family. Never really did. My dad died before I was even born, my mum like yours died in childbirth so my uncle took care of me he was a single guy no kids or anything but he had a heart attack when I was ten, been on my own since"

"I'm so sorry Benny"

"Its okay. Life goes on you know. Of course I miss them but… me sitting here bawling isn't gonna bring them back, lifes going to go on weather I sit here crying or weather I get on with it. So I better just get on with it"

"Yeah I see what you mean" she says "how about we play a game" she smiled

"Sure" I laughed

"Truth or dare"

"Damn it okay truth"

"Do you really love chess?'

"Not as much as I did once. I do really love chess but there is bullshit too it, the traveling sucks, there's alot of snobbery around it, I think I adored it once but… I still love it just not as much as I did" I explain "truth or dare?"

"Truth"

"... Do you really think ivy will work?'

"I'm sure of it. I know it. More then anything else in this world" she smiled "your turn"

"Okay truth again"

"What's the last thing you cried at?"

"Cried? Uhhh ohh god ugh lord of the rings"

"What?'

'the ending makes me cry okay"

"Awww that's so sweet. Yeah I cried when I read it too"

"I think everyone does. If you don't cry your kinda a dick" I laughed "your turn"

"Uhhh dare"

"Oooohhh uuuuuuughhh…. I dare you to," I began before I spotted an empty note pad so I grabbed the page and crumpled it up "eat a page"

"Why?"

"Because I dared you"

"Fine" she sighed taking it ripping it up small and slowly swallowing it "oww. That was mean"

"To be fair I really didn't have a dare set. Uuhh and I pick truth"

"You have to pick dare at some point Benny"

'ill pick dare next turn"

"Fine." She smiled "... Did you love beth?"

"What? How do you know about me and beth?"

"It's not a secret. I read about it in chess review"

"No. Honestly I don't know how I feel about beth. I don't think I love her. She's ignoring me at the moment anyway, I don't know. No. I think. I care about her but I get the feeling she doesn't care about me all that much"

"You shouldn't be with someone who doesn't care about you benny. Your better then that your worth so much more then that. You deserve a girl who adores you."

"Aww thanks y/n" I smiled "your turn"

".. truth"

"Do you…. Have a crush on someone?"

"What is this Benny a girl's sleepover?'

'come on I'm curious?"

"No"

"No you don't or no you don't wanna answer the question?"

"The second one"

"If you don't wanna answer it means you do"

"I never said that"

"Who is he? Some boy in your science class? Some cute boy who lives in your dorm?"

"No" she giggled "your turn"

"No you never answered my question"

"I do but I'm not telling you"

"Why not?" I laughed but I saw how red she was "y/n… do you"

"It's not your turn to ask questions Benny" she says hurrying her head in her knitting

"Fine. Dare"

"I dare you. To… not ask anymore questions"

"Why not?"

"That's a question"

"No, that's not how the game works. A proper dare"

"Fine I dare you go up there an stick your dick in the snow"

"Ahhhhh nooooo I don't wanna do that"

"I didn't wanna eat paper"

"NOOOO"

"Go or no questions"

"Fine" I sighed getting up already too cold without the duvet around me maybe I can just go up and climb I did it but she put her knitting down and got up too wrapping her scarf around her and getting her gloves and hat on as well as her coat keeping her hood down this time as she slipped on her boots I put some shoes on and begrudgingly unlocked my door the snow was now building up badly down my stairs so much it was up to my knees each time I took a step y/n using my holes in the snow to walk through till we got to the street it really was a blizzard I could barely see anything, my car burried the lights not even working on that streets

"Go on" she says

"No looking" I warn her undoing my jeans she looked away already turning red my whole brain screaming at me every self preservation element in my brain going nuts why am I getting my dick out in a Blizzard! I did it and by God I had never been colder in my life I of course screamed making her giggle like crazy I quickly did my jeans up in an attempted to get warm again shw tried to run inside from the cold but I grabbed her "ohh no you don't if I had to go in the snow your going in too!" I told her pushing her in the snow

"Ahhhhh!! Benny" she squealed "this. Means. War" she glared grabbing some snow and throwing it at me luckily she missed

"Ha you-" I began but she got another and got me right in the face before I even finished "fine. You wanna play this game. Fine let's play"

"No no no! You can't hit a girl Benny" she giggled

"Ohh no you threw first that rule Is irrelevant" I told her grabbing some snow and throwing it at her and it managed to get her just as she was getting up right on the butt

"AAAHHH! Benny! That went up my dress!" She screamed before she ran at me with a handful of snow and shoved it down the back of my jeans

"Ahhhhh! Y/n!" I complained grabbing as much as I could and filling her hood with it throwing it over her

"Ahhhhh!" She screamed pushing me into the snow so I pulled her down with me and we ended up with her on top of me on the snow "hi"

"Hi, you wanna go back in before we freeze to death?"

"Yes please" she nods happily getting up and helping me up out the snow too we hurried down and locked the apartment up hangout stuff by the door and getting cosy back on the sofa trying to warm up again

"So… I did my dare."

"Yep"

"So, it's your turn"

"Truth" she rolled her eyes as she began to knit again

"Do you have a crush…. On me?"

"Maybe"

"Maybe?"

"Maybe" she blushed

"No come on yes or no answer?"

"Yes" she blushed "I just… I saw you in the tournament a few years back and I just, I kinda did and when we met I couldn't help it"

"That's really sweet" I smiled giving her head a kiss "uhh y/n"

"Yes Benny?"

"The snows got no sign of stopping and I really don't want you walking back to your freezing cold dorm"

"What are you saying?'

"I'm saying. I think you should stay here tonight. Are how the snow looks in the morning."

"Where will I sleep?"

" I'll make the airbed up for you if you want, or… you can come cosy in my bed with me so we keep warm"

"I'd like that Benny" she smiled shuffling closer and resting her head in my chest I smiled wrapping an arm around her

"Y/n?"

"Yes Benny?"

"... I kinda had a crush on you too"

So here goes: Personally I find Paul to be hot with a beard. But it annoys me because there’s always some Paul stan who’s like “he was super depressed during that time you know” anytime someone says how hot he looks with a beard. Like first of all, I don’t think we should go around diagnosing people and assuming how he felt 24/7 just based on a couple of quotes when we don’t know him, and second of all I was just saying he looks good. Also idk why Paul stans want to pretend like Paul is STILL a victim when he’s definitely not. He’s a super successful billionaire musician. He’s fine.

I'm going to assume all four of these were from the same anon; I received another along these same lines that seems to be from someone else:

OKAY. There's a lot here.

As I've said before, I think the concept you are both talking about - that Paul is the favourite, that people will attack you if you criticize him, that people are vilifying John more now - is true, but is also a matter of perspective. I think sometimes we perceive the whole fandom as just the people we're surrounded by; that can be true in smaller fandoms, like for obscure shows or whatever, but for the Beatles, the fandom is so much bigger and more spread out across generations, social media platforms, and works of literature than almost any other fandom. There are literally thousands upon thousands of books either about or tangentially about the Beatles; there are pockets on every platform from tumblr to twitter to podcasts to instagram to facebook etc., and it branches off even more niche within those to like, facebook groups specifically for podcasts about the Beatles, or discord servers, or livejournal threads, or music forums, or fics on ao3. There are fansites with thoughtful speculative articles like heydullblog and blogs specifically reviewing Beatle books like beatlebioreview and sites cataloging every bit of minutiae like the Beatles Bible, all with their own flavor of comment sections. And not only that, the Beatles fandom spans generations and cultures in a way that almost nothing else ever has or ever will.

And this is not even going into the shifting narratives that have been in play over the years surrounding Paul specifically, and the huge, huge difference between the perceptions of him by the authors and the Counterculture People, the perceptions of him by regular ass Wings fans who have only idly flipped through Rolling Stone while waiting in line at the local bodega, and the perceptions of him by everyone in between, who may or may not have been unconsciously influenced by the wider narratives about him.

All that is to make the case that the fandom that you are experiencing on tumblr/twitter is an extremely small fraction of The Fandom at large. For every Paul stan on twitter that yells at people for not believing that Paul literally invented music, there is a John stan in a facebook group going on about John's supposedly tireless peace efforts. For every nuanced, well sourced post on amoralto's blog, there is someone in the Beatles Bible comment section saying that John and Paul hated each other. For every fan who's read the major Beatles bios with a critical eye towards bias, there are plenty more fans who just absorbed them as straight fact. This is not to say that your experiences are not real or valid! They absolutely are! What I am saying is that there are infinite permutations of infinite Beatles fandoms out there, and the people you see who insist that Paul is still treated worse than John, I would imagine, are occupying various permutations of the fandom where that is more true, alongside the one they share with you. It's not for me to say whether the Paul or John people have the upper hand on the whole - truly, I don't think anyone has enough perspective on the whole fandom to make any judgment on that, no matter what general Grand Pronouncements anyone may make about The Fandom.

As I've said before, any overly defensive "stan" behavior, whether it's for John or Paul or George or anyone, is exhausting to me, so I definitely understand where you're coming from re: him being supposedly underrated. He is literally one of the most successful musicians of all time; as of the beginning of this year, he is worth 1.2 billion dollars; and, thanks to his own efforts and the efforts of quite a few fans and writers out there over the decades, he now enjoys an incredibly positive "granddude" reputation. There are ways in which it can be exasperating to read yet another indignant refutation of music reviews for RAM that came out fifty years ago, when his last three albums have hit the top 3 in the charts in both the US and the UK and have gotten great reviews. I have seen people wonder, honestly wonder, how much more money Paul could have made, how much more respected he could have been, if the rock press had been inclined to give RAM good reviews. When I see that, it does start to feel like fans of Paul, at least the defensive ones in the fandom permutations I occupy, are arguing with the author photo of Philip Norman in the book jacket for Shout!. It's not that I think those arguments and discussions are not worth having; I do think they're worth having because I believe that the only way we can continue to grow is if we grapple with the mistakes made in the past. But there is a strange kind of disconnect that happens when you read about someone indignantly defending Wild Life as though the members of Wings are currently, actively having eggs and rotten fruit thrown at them, and then you remember that Paul is currently, and has been for many years now, one of the richest men in the entire world.

As for the misogyny thing, I'll copy and paste a quote from Erin Weber which may explain a little better than I can:

"Where it starts entering into serious discussion for me is when you have professional grown men (Schaffner would be the most glaring example of this, but not the only one) repeatedly using the term “pretty” or “pretty-faced” to refer to another grown man. (Norman does the same). Schaffner doesn’t only do that once or twice, he uses one of those exact words at least fifteen times in his references to McCartney. “Pretty-boy” is also a term that at least one journalist has used to describe Paul, and that’s not a stealth insult: that’s an overt one. (My husband, who hates the Yankees, routinely used the term “pretty-boy” to insult Alex Rodriguez. And it wasn’t meant as a compliment).

My reaction to this is based both on studies that I’m aware of (I’d have to hunt them up, but I’ve seen them referenced before) which argue that the use of feminized language can be a method of stealth insult/diminishment when used by men to describe other men, and my own personal experience. It is difficult to see a situation where a grown man using the term “pretty” or any variation of the word “pretty” to describe another grown man means it as a compliment. Even if its purely meant as a descriptive term, it is a descriptive term that is weighted with significant meaning and is feminizing. And given the rock press’s obsession with masculinity and its insistence, as noted in other studies, of using masculine terms to portray a song as good and feminizing terms to describe them as weak or inferior, I don’t think its a coincidence that a rock press that knew well the power of masculine and feminine language commonly used feminized language, particularly in the 1970s and 80s, to describe McCartney."

I personally see this more as pseudo-homophobic than pseudo-misogynistic (like, when I see a man called "pretty" by another man in an insulting way, I immediately think "oh, that author wanted to say a gay slur but he's too Professional"), but the two things can get muddled together, I suppose.

Anyway, actionable items:

Diversify Your Fan Experience. More perspectives can really help gain a fuller understanding of not just the fandom but the Beatles themselves. Don't be afraid to be wrong, and don't be afraid to be right; always be open to learning new things and hearing new insights.

If All Else Fails, Block 'Em.

Free Music in a Capitalist Society - Iggy Pop's Keynote Speech Transcript

Hi, I'm Iggy Pop. I've held a steady job at BBC 6 Music now for almost a year, which is a long time in my game. I always hated radio and the jerks who pushed that shit music into my tender mind, with rare exceptions. When I was a boy, I used to sit for hours suffering through the entire US radio top 40 waiting for that one song by The Beatles and the other one by The Kinks. Had there been anything like John Peel available in my Midwestern town I would have been thrilled. So it's an honor to be here. I understand that. I appreciate it.

Some months ago when the idea of this talk came up I thought it might be okay to talk about free music in a Capitalist society. So that's what I'm gonna try to talk about. A society in which the Capitalist system dominates all the others, and seeks their destruction when they get in its way. Since then, the shit has really hit the fan on the subject, thanks to U2 and Apple. I worked half of my life for free. I didn't really think about that one way or the other, until the masters of the record industry kept complaining that I wasn't making them any money. To tell you the truth, when it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge one unimportant detail. But, a good LP is a being, it's not a product. It has a life-force, a personality, and a history, just like you and me. It can be your friend. Try explaining that to a weasel.

As I learned when I hit 30 +, and realized I was penniless, and almost unable to get my music released, music had become an industrial art and it was the people who excelled at the industry who got to make the art. I had to sell most of my future rights to keep making records to keep going. And now, thanks to digital advances, we have a very large industry, which is laughably maybe almost entirely pirate so nobody can collect shit. Well, it was to be expected. Everybody made a lot of money reselling all of recorded musical history in CD form back in the 90s, but now the cat is out of the bag and the new electronic devices which estrange people from their morals also make it easier to steal music than to pay for it. So there's gonna be a correction.

When I started The Stooges we were organized as a group of Utopian communists. All the money was held communally and we lived together while we shared the pursuit of a radical ideal. We shared all song writing, publishing and royalty credits equally – didn’t matter who wrote it - because we'd seen it on the back of a Doors album and thought it was cool, at least I did. Yeah. I thought songwriting was about the glory, I didn't know you'd get paid for it. We practiced a total immersion to try to forge a new approach which would be something of our own. Something of lasting value. Something that was going to be revealed and created and was not yet known.

We are now in the age of the schemer and the plan is always big, big, big, but it's the nature of the technology created in the service of the various schemes that the pond, while wide, is very shallow. Nobody cares about anything too deeply expect money. Running out of it, getting it. I never sincerely wanted to be rich. There is a, in the US, we have this guy “Do you sincerely wanna be rich? You can do it!” I didn’t sincerely want to be rich. I never sincerely felt like making anyone else that way. That made me a kind of a wild card in the 60's and 70's. I got into the game because it felt good to play and it felt like being free. I'm still hearing today about how my early works with The Stooges were flops. But they're still in print and they sell 45 years later, they sell. Okay, it took 20 or 25 years for the first royalties to roll in. So sue me.

Some of us who couldn't get anywhere for years kept beating our heads against the same wall to no avail. No one did that better than my friends The Ramones. They kept putting out album after album, frustrated that they weren't getting the hit. They even tried Phil Spector and his handgun. After the first couple of records, which made a big impact, they couldn't sustain the quality, but I noticed that every album had at least one great song and I thought, wow if these guys would just stop and give it a rest, society would for sure catch up to them. And that's what's happening now, but they're not around to enjoy it. I used to run into Johnny at a little rehearsal joint in New York and he'd be in a big room all alone with a Marshall stack just going "dum, dum, dum, dum, dum" all my himself. I asked him why and he said if he didn't practice doing that exactly the way he did it live he'd lose it. He was devoted and obsessive, so were Joey and Deedee. I like that. Johnny asked me one day - Iggy don't you hate Offspring and the way they're so popular with that crap they play. That should be us, they stole it from us. I told him look, some guys are born and raised to be the captain of the football team and some guys are just gonna be James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and that's the way it is. Not everybody is meant to be big. Not everybody big is any good.

I only ever wanted the money because it was symbolic of love and the best thing I ever did was to make a lifetime commitment to continue playing music no matter what, which is what I resolved to do at the age of 18. If who you are is who you are that is really hard to steal, and it can lead you in all sorts of useful directions when the road ahead of you is blocked and it will get blocked. Now I'm older and I need all the dough I can get. So I too am concerned about losing those lovely royalties, now that they've finally arrived, in the maze of the Internet. But I'm also diversifying my income, because a stream will dry up. I'm not here to complain about that, I'm here to survive it.

When I was starting out as a full time musician I was walking down the street one bright afternoon in the seedier part of my Midwestern college town. I passed a dive bar and from it emerged a portly balding pallid middle aged musician in a white tux with a drink in one hand and a guitar in the other. He was blinking in the daylight. I had a strong intuition that this was a fate to be avoided. He seemed cut off from society and resigned to an oblivious obscurity. A bar fly. An accessory to booze. So how do you engage society as an artist and get them to pay you? Well, that's a matter of art. And endurance.

To start with, I cannot stress enough the importance of study. I was lucky to work in a discount record store in Ann Arbor Michigan as a stock boy where I was exposed to a little bit of every form of music imaginable on record at the time. I listened to it all whether I liked it or not. Be curious. And I played in my high school orchestra and I learned the joy of the warm organic instruments working together in the service of a classical piece. That sticks with you forever. If anyone out there can get a chance to put an instrument and some knowledge in some kids hand, you've done a great, great thing.

Comparative information is a key to freedom. I found other people who were smarter than me. To teach me. My first pro band was a blues band called The Prime Movers and the leader Michael Erlewine was a very bright hippy beatnik with a beautifully organized record collection in library form of The Blues. I'd never really heard the Blues. That part of our American heritage was kept off the major media. It was system up, people down. No Big Bill Broonzy on BBC for us. Boy I wish! No money in it. But everything I learned from Michael's beautiful library became the building blocks for anything good I've done since. Guys like this are priceless. If you find one, follow him, or her. Get the knowledge.

Once in secondary school in the 60's some class clowns dressed up the tallest guy in school in a trench coat, shades and a fedora and rushed him in to a school dance with great hubbub proclaiming "Del Shannon is here, Del Shannon is here." And until they got to the stage we all believed them, because nobody knew what Del Shannon looked like. He was just a voice on some great records. He had no social ID. By the early 60's that had really changed with the invasion of The Beatles and The Stones. This time TV was added to the mix and print media too. So you knew who they were, or so you thought anyway. I'm mentioning this because the best way to survive the death or change of an industry is to transcend its form. You're better off with an identity of your own or maybe a few of them. Something special.

It is my own personal view having lived through it that in America The Beatles replaced our assassinated president Kennedy, who represented our hopes for a certain kind of society. Didn’t get there. And The Stones replaced our assassinated folk music which our own leaders suppressed for cultural, racial, and financial reasons. It wasn't okay with everybody to be Kennedy or Muddy Waters, but those messages could be accepted if they came through white entertainers from the parent culture. That's why they’re still around.

Years later I had the impression that Apple, the corporation, had successfully co-opted the good feelings that the average American felt about the culture of the Beatles, by kind of stealing the name of their company so I bought a little stock. Good move. 1992. Woo! But look, everybody is subject to the rip off and has to change affiliations from time to time. Even Superman and Barbie were German before America tempted them to come over. Tough luck, Nietzche.

So who owns what anyway. Or as Bob Dylan said "The relationships of ownership." That’s gates of Eden. Nobody knows for long, especially these days. Apparently when BBC radio was founded, the record companies in England wouldn't allow the BBC to play their master recordings because they thought no one would buy them for their personal use if they could hear them free on the radio. So they were really confused about what they had. They didn’t get it. And how people feel about music. ‘Cause it’s a feel thing, and it resists logic. It’s not binary code. Later when CD's came in, the retail merchants in American all panicked because they were just too damn tiny and they thought that Americans want something that looks big, like a vinyl record. Well they had a point but their solution was a kind of Frankenstein called "The Long Box." It didn't fool anybody because half of it was empty. It had a little CD in the bottom. You’d open it up and it was empty. Now we have people in the Sahara using GPS to bury huge wads of Euros under sand dunes for safe keeping. But GPS was created for military spying from the high ground, not radical banking so any sophisticated system, along with the bounty it brings, is subject to primitive hijacking.

I wanna talk about a type of entrepreneur who functions as a kind of popular music patron of the arts. It’s good to know a patron. I call him El Padron because his relationship to the artist is essentially feudal, though benign. He or she (La Padrona) if you will, is someone, usually the product of successful, enlightened parents, who owns a record company, but has had benefit of a very good education, and can see a bigger picture than a petty business person. If they like an artists’ style and it suits them, they'll support you even if you’re not a big money spinner. I can tell you, some of these powerful guys get so bored that if you are fun in the office, you’ll go places. Their ancestors, the old time record crooks just made it their business to make great, great records, but also to rip off the artist 100%, copyright, publishing, royalty splits, agency fees, you name it. If anyone complained the line was "Pay you? We worship you!" God bless Bo Diddley.

By the time I came along, there was a new brand of Padron. People like this are still around and some can help you. One was named Jack Holzman. Jack had a beautiful label called Elektra Records, they put out Judy Collins, Tim Buckley, the Doors and Love. He'd started working in his family record store, like Brian Epstein. He dressed mod and he treated us very gently. He was a civilized man. He obviously loved the arts, but what he really wanted to do was build his business - and he did. He had his own concerns, and style, and you had to serve them, and of course when he sold out, as all indies do, you were stranded culturally in the hands of a cold clumsy conglomerate. But he put us in the right studios with the right producers and he tried to get us seen in the right venues and it really helped. This is a good example of the industry.

Another good guy I met is Sir Richard Branson. I ended up serving my full term at Virgin Records having been removed from every other label. And he created a superior culture there. People were happier and nicer than the weasels at some other places. The first time he tried to sign me it didn't work out, because I had my sights set on A&M, a company I thought would help make me respectable. After all they had Sting! Richard was secretly starting his own company at the time in the US and he phoned me in my tiny flat with no furniture. He said he'd give me a longer term deal with more dough than the other guys and he was very, very polite and soft spoken. But I had just smoked a joint that day and I couldn't make a decision. So I went with the other guys who soon got sick of me. Virgin picked me up again later on the rebound. And on the cheap. Damn. My own fault.

Another kind of indie legend who is slightly more contemporary is Long Gone John of the label Sympathy for the Record Industry. Good name. John is famous with some artists for his disinterest in paying royalties. He has a very interesting music themed folk art collection – its visible online - which includes my leather jacket. I wish he'd give it back. There are lots of indie people with a gift for organization who just kind of collect freaks and throw them up at the wall to see who sticks. You gotta watch 'em.

When you go a step down creatively from the Padrons who are actually entrepreneurs you get to the executives. You don't wanna know these guys. They usually came over from legal or accounting. They have protégés usually called A&R men to do their dirty work. You can become a favorite with them if your fame or image might reflect limelight on their career. They tend to have no personalities to speak of, which is their strength. Strangely they're never really thinking about the good of their parent company as much as old number one. Avoid them. If you’re an artist, they’ll make you sick or suicidal. The only good thing the conglomerate can do for you – and they’ve done it recently for me - is make you really, really ubiquitous. They do that well. But, when the company is your banker, then you are basically gonna be the Beverly Hill Billies. So it's best not to take their money. Especially when you’re young. These are very tough people, and they can hurt you.

So who are the good guys?! They asked me when they read this thing at BBC 6 Music. Well there are lots of them. If fact, today there are more than ever and they are just about all indies, but first I want to mention Peter Gabriel and WOMAD for everything they've done for what seems like forever to help the greatest musicians in the world, the so called world musicians to gain a foothold and make a living in the modern screwed up cash and carry world. Traditional music was never a for profit enterprise, all the best forms were developed as a kind of you’re job in the community. It was pretty good, it was “Yeah, I’m a musician, I’m gonna skip like doing the dishes or taking the trash out.” It's not surprising that all the greatest singers and players come from parts of the world where everybody is broke and the old ways are getting paved over. So it's crucial for everyone that these treasures not be lost. There are other people of means and intelligence who help others in this way like Philip Glass through Tibet House, David Burn with Luaka Bop, Damon Albarn through Honest John Records. Shout out to Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Almost all the best music is coming out on indies today like XL Matador, Burger, Anti, Epitaph, Mute, Rough Trade, 4 A D, Sub Pop, etc. etc.

But now YouTube is trying to put the squeeze on these people because it's just easier for a power nerd to negotiate with a couple big labels who own the kind of music that people listen to when they're really not that into music, which of course is most people. So they've got the numbers. But the indies kind of have the guns. I've noticed that indies are showing strength at some of the established streaming services like Spotify and Rhapsody – people are choosing that music. And it's also great that some people are starting their own outlets, like Pledge Music, Band Camp or Drip. As the commercial trade swings more into general show biz the indies will be the only place to go for new talent, outside the Mickey Mouse Club, so I think they were right to band together and sign the Fair Digital Deals Declaration.

There are just so many ways to screw an artist that it's unbelievable. In the old vinyl days they would deduct 10% "breakage fees" for records supposedly broken in shipping, whether that happened or not, and now they have unattributed digital revenue, whatever the **** that means. It means money for some guy’s triple bypass. I actually think that what Thom Yorke has done with Bit Torrent is very good. I was gonna say here: “Sure the guy is a pirate at Bit Torrent” but I was warned legally, so I’ll say: “Sure the guy a Bit Torrent is a pirate’s friend” But all pirates want to go legit, just like I wanted to be respectable. It’s normal. After a while people feel like you’re a crook, it’s too hard to do business. So it’s good in this case that Thom Yorke is encouraging a positive change. The music is good. It’s being offered at a low price direct to people who care.

I want to try to define what I am talking about when I say free. For me in the arts or in the media, there are two kinds of free. One kind of free is when the process is something that people just feel for you. You feel a sense of possibility. You feel a lack of constraint. This leads to powerful, energetic, sometimes kind of loony situations.

Vice Media is an interesting case of this because they started as a free handout, using public funds, and they had open, free-wheeling minds. Originally a free handout was called Voice and these kids were like “Just get rid of the old! I don’t wanna be Vice, yeah!” Okay. By taking an immersive approach with no particular preconceptions to their reporting, they've become a huge success, also through corporate advertising, at attracting big, big money investment hundreds of millions of dollars now pumped into Fox Media and a couple of others bigger than that in the US. And they get it because they attract lots of little boy eyeballs. So they brought us Dennis Rodman in North Korea. And it’s kind of a travesty, but it’s kind of spunky. It's interesting that capital investment, for all its posturing, never really leads, it always follows. They follow the action. So if it's money you're after, be the yourself in a consistent way and you might get it. You’ll at least end up getting what you are worth and feel better. Just follow your nose.

The second kind of freedom to me that is important in the media is the idea of giving freely. When you feel or sense that someone that someone is giving you something not out of profit, but out of self-respect, Christian charity, whatever it is. That has a very powerful energy. The Guardian, in my understanding, was founded by an endowment by a successful man with a social conscience who wanted to help create a voice for what I would call the little guy. So they have a kind of moral mission or imperative. This has given them the latitude to try to be interesting, thoughtful, helpful. And they bring Edward Snowden to the world stage. Something that is not pleasant for a lot of people to hear about, but we need to know.

These two approaches couldn't be more different. To justify their new mega bucks Vice will have to expand and expand in capital terms. Presumably they'll have to titillate a dumb, but energetic audience. Of course all capitalist expansions are subject to the big bang – balloon, bust, poof, and you’re gone. As for the Guardian I would imagine that the task involves gaining the trust and support of a more discerning, less definable reader, without spending the principal. There is usually an antipathy between cultural poles, but these two actually have a lot in common in terms of the energy and nuisance to power that they are willing to generate. I wish red and blue could come together somehow.

Sometimes I'd rather read than listen to music. One of my favourite odd books is Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry by Clinton Heylin. I bought the book in the 90's because a couple of my bootlegs were mentioned. I loved my bootlegs. They did a lot for me. I never really thought about the dough much. I liked the titles, like Suck on This, Stow Away DOA or Metalic KO. The packaging was always way more creative and edgy than most of my official stuff. So I just liked being seen and heard, like anybody else. These bootleggers were creative. Here are two quotes from the dust jacket by veteran industry stalwarts on the subject of bootlegs in 1994.

"Bootleg is the thoroughly researched and highly entertaining tale of those colorful brigands, hapless amateurs, and true believers who have done wonders for my record collection. Rock and roll doesn't get more underground than this." – that was David Fricke, the music editor of Rolling Stone "I think that bootlegs keep the flame of the music alive by keeping it out of not only the industry's conception of the artist, but also the artist's conception of the artist." – that was Lenny Kaye from the Patti Smith group, musician, critic and my friend.

Wow!! Sounds heroic and vital!

I wonder what these guys feel about all of this now, because things have changed, haven't they? We are now talking about Megaupload, Kim Dot Com, big money, political power, and varying definitions of theft that are legally way over my head. But I know a con man when I see one. I want to include a rant from an early bootlegger in this discussion because it's so passionate and I just think it's funny.

This is Lou Cohan "If anybody thinks that if I have purchased every single Rolling Stones album in existence, and I have bought all the Rolling Stones albums that have been released in England, France, Japan, Italy, and Brazil that if I have an extra $100 in my pocket instead of buying a Rolling Stones bootleg I am going to buy a John Denver album or a Sinead O'Conner album, they are retarded."

So the guy is trying to say don't try to force me. And don't steal my choice. And the people who don't want the free U2 download are trying to say, don't try to force me. And they've got a point. Part of the process when you buy something from an artist. It’s a kind of anointing, you are giving people love. It’s your choice to give or withhold. You are giving a lot of yourself, besides the money. But in this particular case, without the convention, maybe some people felt like they were robbed of that chance and they have a point. It’s not the only point. These are not bad guys. But now, everybody's a bootlegger, but not as cute, and there are people out there just stealing the stuff and saying don't try to force me to pay. And that act of thieving will become a habit and that’s bad for everything. So we are exchanging the corporate rip off for the public one. Aided by power nerds. Kind of computer Putins. They just wanna get rich and powerful. And now the biggest bands are charging insane ticket prices or giving away music before it can flop, in an effort to stay huge. And there's something in this huge thing that kind of sucks.

Which brings us to Punk. The most punk thing I ever saw in my life was Malcolm McLaren's cardboard box full of dirty old winkle pinkers. It was the first thing I saw walking in the door of Let It Rock in 1972 which was his shop at Worlds End on the Kings Road. It was a huge ugly cardboard bin full of mismatched unpolished dried out winkle pickers without laces at some crazy price like maybe five pounds each. Another 200 yards up the street was Granny Takes a Trip, where they sold proper Rockstar clothes like scarves, velvet jackets, and snake skin platform boy boots. Malcolm's obviously worthless box of shit was like a fire bomb against the status quo because it was saying that these violent shoes have the right idea and they are worth more than your fashion, which serves a false value. This is right out of the French enlightenment.

So is the thieving that big a deal? Ethically, yes, and it destroys people because it's a bad road you take. But I don't think that's the biggest problem for the music biz. I think people are just a little bit bored, and more than a little bit broke. No money. Especially simple working people who have been totally left out, screwed and abandoned. If I had to depend on what I actually get from sales I’d be tending bars between sets. I mean honestly it’s become a patronage system. There’s a lot of corps involved and I don’t fault any of them but it’s not as much fun as playing at the Music Machine in Camden Town in 1977. There is a general atmosphere of resentment, pressure, kind of strange perpetual war, dripping on all the time. And I think that prosecuting some college kid because she shared a file is a lot like sending somebody to Australia 200 years ago for poaching his lordship's rabbit. That's how it must seem to poor people who just want to watch a crappy movie for free after they’ve been working themselves to death all day at Tesco or whatever, you know.

If I wanna make music, at this point in my life I'd rather do what I want, and do it for free, which I do, or cheap, if I can afford to. I can. And fund through alternative means, like a film budget, or a fashion website, both of which I've done. Those seem to be turning out better for me than the official rock n roll company albums I struggle through. Sorry. If I wanna make money, well how about selling car insurance? At least I'm honest. It's an ad and that's all it is. Every free media platform I've ever known has been a front for advertising or propaganda or both. And it always colors the content. In other words, you hear crap on the commercial radio. The licensing of music by films, corps, and TV has become a flood, because these people know they're not a hell of a lot of fun so they throw in some music that is. I'm all for that, because that's the way the door opened for me. I got heard on tv before radio would take a chance. But then I was ok. Good. And others too. I notice there are a lot of people, younger and younger, getting their exposure that way. But it's a personal choice. I think it’s an aesthetic one, not an ethical one.

Now with the Internet people can choose to hear stuff and investigate it in their own way. If they want to see me jump around the Manchester Apollo with a horse tail instead of trying to be a proper Rockstar, they can look. Good. Personally I don't worry too much about how much I get paid for any given thing, because I never expected much in the first place and the whole industry has become bloated in its expectations. Look, Howling Wolf would work for a sandwich. This whole thing started in Honky Tonk bars. It's more important to do something important or just make people feel something and then just trust in God. If you're an entertainer your God is the public. They'll take care of you somehow. I want them to hear my music any old which way. Period. There is an unseen hand that turns the pages of existence in ways no one can predict. But while you’re waiting for God to show up and try to find a good entertainment lawyer.

It's good to remember that this is a dream job, whether you're performing or working in broadcasting, or writing or the biz. So dream. Dream. Be generous, don’t be stingy. Please. I can't help but note that it always seems to be the pursuit of the money that coincides with the great art, but not its arrival. It's just kind of a death agent. It kills everything that fails to reflect its own image, so your home turns into money, your friends turn into money, and your music turns into money. No fun, binary code – zero one, zero one - no risk, no nothing. What you gotta do you gotta do, life's a hurly-burly, so I would say try hard to diversify your skills and interests. Stay away from drugs and talent judges. Get organized. Big or little, that helps a lot.

I'd like you to do better than I did. Keep your dreams out of the stinky business, or you'll go crazy, and the money won't help you. Be careful to maintain a spiritual EXIT. Don't live by this game because it's not worth dying for. Hang onto your hopes. You know what they are. They’re private. Because that's who you really are and if you can hang around long enough you should get paid. I hope it makes you happy. It's the ending that counts, and the best things in life really are free.

fools on a hill [ george harrison x reader ]

summary: From childhood friends to fellow Beatles, George and you seem to have lived your whole lives under this tree. You wouldn’t have it any other way.

Request: hii could u do like, a mini beatle!reader x geo imagine where theyre best friends since they were kids idkk i trust u warnings: time skips

i’m posting this in celebration of our beautiful George’s birthday part one! i suppose tomorrow is part two. we’ll never know. and i am so sorry dear anon, you asked for a mini imagine and my brain just ran with it.

masterlist

There’s a boy sitting under your tree.

Well, it doesn’t belong to you, exactly. But you’ve been eating lunch under it every day since the start of primary school— a big old sycamore tree atop a small hill, the perfect hideaway from your annoying classmates— for a whole week! So you definitely have some claim to it. Yes, you’re going to give him a piece of your mind. And that’s the plan you have in your head as you march up to him, tiny fist clenched around your lunchbox. That is, until he looks up and you see that he’s got something cupped in his hands.

“What's that?” you ask, your curiosity overtaking any anger you might have previously held towards the boy. He looks startled at the fact that you’ve just gone and plopped yourself right next to him with a complete disregard for personal space. His answer is hesitant and quiet, and you lean even closer to hear.

“Some kinda cricket. I think.”

He relaxes his grip just a smidge and sure enough, you can see something small and legged moving around. You nod your head, satisfied, and open your lunch. The two of you sit in silence, comfortable in the way that children are when they owe nothing to each other, you chomping down on the sandwich your mum packed and the boy just staring down at the bug. Sometime after you open your juice box, he opens his hands and lets the cricket hop away.

“What’d you do that for?” you startle. “You’re letting it get away!”

He looks at you from beneath his messy fringe and shrugs. “It doesn’t belong to me,” he says.

You both watch as it pauses some distance away, antenna quivering as though searching for something, before disappearing into the boundless sea of grass.

---

The familiar sight of George leaning against the tree quells your feelings somewhat, but your lip is still trembling by the time you’ve thrown yourself onto the grass next to him. He closes his book and sets it to the side, waiting for you to speak first. You stew in your anger for a little while before it spills out.

“Why are boys so stupid?”

“We’re not stupid,” George says defensively, but you plow on.

“I was trying to draw a picture in class and Tommy Wood kept on pulling on my hair and telling me it looked ugly and I told him to stop but he wouldn’t! and every time Miss Gordie would come around he sat very still and pretended to be working but the moment she left he’d just he’d start pulling on my braids again! He’s so stupid and I hate him.” You punctuate the last sentence with a particularly harsh yank at some blades of grass.

“My mum says boys tease girls if they like them.”

“But you don't tease me, Geo, and we like each other the most.”

He contemplates this for a while, brows furrowed. “I suppose you're right. He’s just an arse then.”

You giggle and sit up, leaning a head on his shoulder “You can't call him that! My mum says it’s a naughty word.”

“Well maybe I'm just a naughty boy,” he says, grinning wickedly. Before you can anticipate whatever evil deed he's planning, he’s already got his hands tickling your sides.

“No, stop it, noooo! Geo— you can’t— stOP!!!”

Your laughter rings across the open field and soon Tommy is all but forgotten, carried away on the summer breeze.

--

“D’you remember when we first met here?”

The tree looks so small. As kids, it seemed like the biggest thing, an enormous leafy umbrella that protected you and George against the world. Now, you have to duck to stand underneath its branches.

“No, actually, you’ll have to remind me,” you tease. He nudges you in the ribs and you dance away, laughing. “‘course I do, Geo. It was the best thing that ever happened to me!”

As you walk around the trunk, trailing your fingers across its familiar notches and grooves, George flops down. When you’ve come full circle, he’s already got his head tilted back against the tree and his eyes closed, basking in the sun. It’s a peaceful scene. He looks like he belongs there, like he hasn’t moved since that day in primary school.

You must’ve stood there for a long time watching him because George slowly opens an eye and smirks up at you all cat-like. Uncrossing his arms, he pats his legs.

“Why don’t you come down here, love? The view is better.”

You snort at his terrible flirting but oblige and settle into his lap, hands coming up naturally to link behind his neck. Your head finds his chest and for a while you allow yourself to relax there. Ear pressed against argyle sweater, the steady beat of his heart lulls you almost to sleep.

“You know, I thought you were a weirdo.”

The moment is shattered and you look up, bewildered. “What?”

“That first day! There I was, sitting by myself at recess and some girl comes along and starts botherin’ me!”

You smack his chest lightly in mock-anger. “I’m the weirdo? You’re the one that sat under my tree-- not to mention you were catching bugs while everyone else was playing on the swings and the like!”

George’s eyes narrow with a playfulness and he catches your wrists before they can thump him again. “Your tree? It didn’t have your name on it.”

“‘S not like you could fucking read.”

“Hm, well, maybe not. But it’s our tree now, isn’t it?”

You don’t know whether you want to smack him or snog him senseless. “You’re so cheesy,” you grumble, and when you close the distance between your lips he’s still smiling. It’s a kiss you’ve had a thousand times, but George still feels the thrill of it spark in his chest.

“Hey hey! Lovebirds goin’ at it, huh? Oh, Paul, hold me. Their love is too much!”

It’s John with his smirky meerkat face trotting up the hill to where the two of you are sat, Paul and Ringo trailing behind at a much more leisurely pace. George sighs and pulls away.

“Can I kill ‘im?”

A tempting thought. “No, we don’t need the fans thinking that two of the Beatles are dead. It’s bad press.”

You two are giggling before you know it, shaking in each other’s arms. John’s standing in front of the tree now, bent down awkwardly to fit under.

“What are you two laughin’ about?” he demands.

“Your nose,” George says. You laugh even harder.

“You’ve got some nerve—”

“Well, now you know what it’s like.”

That’s Ringo, who’s grinning good-naturedly with a hand to his face to block the sun. Paul comes up a few steps behind and restrains John before he can throw a fit. The familiar back and forth of the group fills you with a funny sort of warmth that buzzes ever so slightly in your chest. You turn and slide off of George’s lap to cuddle into his side.

“Should we get back soon?” Paul asks this with an air that suggests he doesn’t really want to. “Eppy will be havin’ an aneurysm when he finds out we’ve ditched another meeting.”

The air is warm and sweet with the smell of summer. It’s lethargic, sinking into everyone’s bones like molasses. No one wants to do anything and you can see it in your bandmates-- how John allows his glasses to almost slide off the slope of his nose before pushing them back up, the way Ringo fidgets restlessly with his rings. George traces lazy, looping patterns into your arm and you shuffle even closer into his embrace.

“I think we deserve a little break,” he says. His voice rumbles in his chest and you can feel the vibration through your spine.

“A few minutes can’t hurt.” And with that, Ringo throws himself onto the grass spread eagle, smiling adorably at his newfound plan. The others follow suit without complaint. What a funny sight you must have been to any passerby— the famous Beatles all sprawled out under a little sycamore tree.

Well, it wasn’t just any tree. It was the tree that had grown up with you, had watched as you ate lunches and told jokes and fell in love under its very branches. It didn’t belong to you or George or anyone else but itself. And for this brief moment on a lazy summer’s day, you two belonged to it.

| Getting Too Familiar |

Live! On Tour series

Part 2, sequel to Game Night.

.....

You hadn’t intended to let him get so familiar.

You hadn’t intended to catch his eye at all, much less spend your time in between shows causally cuddling. Or teaming up to unleash havoc upon your fellow band members.

More importantly, you had never intended to let yourself get so familiar. You knew you were dancing around in dangerous territory. Harry Styles was a fucking rock star, damn it. One you’d admired since his One Direction days, though you’d rather die than tell him that.

You were hardly anybody until Harry took notice in your band and booked you for his opening act. Being influenced by a lot of the same 70s icons, your band’s music complimented Harry’s very well. While only a few of your songs were as hard rock as Harry’s, your softer ones offered a nice Segway into his set.

His admiration and enthusiasm for your music was beyond your wildest dreams. And as you grew more comfortable in his presence, you developed a more intimate sense of trust and began taking what comfort you could in those beautiful, tattooed arms. And who could blame you? Harry laughed at all of your jokes and Sarah says that he talks about you like you hung the moon.

Before you could stop yourself, you had dissolved into a puddle-version of yourself. Your bandmates began complaining about how little they see you in between rehearsals and sets, joking about how the one single member was now acting just as love struck as she’d often scolded them for being.

The shrew had been tamed, the songbird was struck down.

You were on cloud 9 for about 10 minutes until the door shut to your band’s tour bus. Your bandmates, Maria (who had walked in on you in the green room) and Heather were rather upset with the development in yours and Harry’s relationship.

“You’re jeopardizing everything we’ve worked for by fraternizing with the biggest rock star in the world,” Maria has scolded, green eyes blazing. Heather had taken on the role of mediator, but you could see in her jaw how upset she was as well.

In the end, you’d caved, and promised to keep your relationship with Harry purely platonic—only as far as they were concerned, however. What you did and who you did it with in private was none of their fucking business and you weren’t about it to let it stop you.

Tonight was a big night, though, and not one to be preoccupied with falling for a rockstar who would, as sweet as he was, probably fuck you and then leave you at the first opportunity. It probably was better if you just erased the green room fiasco from your mind completely. He had wanted you so badly you worried what you would’ve let him do if Maria hadn’t stormed in.

So tonight, at the giant world tour party literally everyone who was anyone was attending, you would not be thinking of Harry but networking instead. Making the connections your band desperately needed to make your name in the industry.

....

“Go away,” you slurred between sobs. The coolness of the wooden door felt nice against your hot cheek, but company would not. Of that much, you were sure. This is not how you’d expected your night to go. Not by any stretch of imagination.

It had started off well. You’d avoided your bandmates, still a bit annoyed with them for being such relentless cock blocks. You’d smiled, giggled, and drank through the crowds of celebrities like it was a dance, you didn’t stumble until you saw Harry locking lips with Kendall Jenner.

You weren’t stupid, you’d expected to see him at least flirting with other women tonight. But kissing his ex in front of a crowd of people? Ouch. It stung more than your pride would let your admit. You felt your smile drop and your entire demeanor change from then on, grabbing the nearest glass of champagne and walking away from the scene.

As it got later into the night, more bodies joined the dance floor. Even though you were certainly drunk enough to, you refused to dance until one of your favorite songs came blaring through the speakers. You made your way into the crowd as boldly as you could muster on your unsteady legs. Heather spotted you making your way into the crowd and pulled you toward her, giggling. You could put aside your frustration with her long enough to enjoy your favorite song. Your hips moved to the beat and the night suddenly seems a lot less terrible.

After a few songs, you left the crowd of sweaty bodies to get a drink of water. You had hardly made it two steps toward the bar when you felt a hand force you against a wall. You looked into the eyes of a man you had never seen before, a smug grin on his lips and a dangerous gleam in his eye as he looked you up and down.

“Excuse me?” you tried to push him off, “Do I know you?” The drunken man tried to cage your hops in with his own, you could feel something hard digging into your side and your body went rigid.

“Not yet, doll, but we could get to know each other real well back at mine,” his breath reeked of cheap whiskey. One of his hands gripped your jaw roughly, his body towering over you.

No one really knows how the next events unfolded, all Harry can remember is seeing your petite frame caged against a wall by a drunken prick one second and then him writhing in the floor in pain the next. In your hand was a stun gun. You looked startled by our own actions, terrified even.

The man on the ground kept yelling obscenities and saying things like “you went too far! you could’ve just told me to leave you alone!”

As a medical team showed up Harry was already at your side, acting as a shield against any prying eyes. By the time they’d gotten the man out of the venue, Harry noticed you’d fled to your bedroom.

“Y/n, love, you shouldn’t be alone right now.” His voice was calm, steady. A stark contrast to the glass shattering waves rolling through your mind. He was just beyond the door and yet he was everywhere. In your now tangled hair, the breeze coming from the open balcony door, and, even worse, he was under your skin. You weren’t this infatuated with him, you tell yourself, it’s just the alcohol.

“No. Go back to your models and leave the beast be.”

“You’re not a beast, y/n. You know I hate it when you call yourself that,” Harry sighed. You could picture him running those long fingers of his through his hair. Y/N had internalized a lot of trauma from her childhood, though Harry didn’t know the extent of it, he knew she often compared herself to her father in a self-deprecating fashion. The “beast” being one of those nicknames.

“I am, though, Harry,” your voice was now barely above a whisper. The waves of anxiety came crashing down as a sob erupted from your chest. Everything was wrong. You were wrong. Unbearable. Destined to ruin everything you touch. Like father, like daughter.

The door knob turned and through your blurry eyes you could see Harry slipping through.

“Oh no, y/n..” his voice was so soft. So kind. You didn’t deserve his kindness. His softness. His arms pulled you to his chest as he sat beside you on the dirty floor of your hotel room. You couldn’t meet his eyes so you stared down at your hands. “What’re you feeling? How can I help?”

“A lot. I’m feeling a lot. You don’t have to put up with me right now, I want you to enjoy your party,” you sniffled, looking up at him finally. His green eyes are soft and shiny as he looks at you. He’s like the sun, in that way. He sometimes gets hard to look at, he’s so god damn beautiful.

“Can I hold you?” Harry prodded gently, ignoring your desperate attempts to push him away. He’d already decided a long time ago that he wouldn’t let you do that. Not to him, anyway. The way you looked at him crumbled, your eyes filing with tears again, as you nodded softly. His arms pulled you into his chest, his lips immediately finding the top of your head. “We don’t have to talk about it right now, just know that you’re safe with me.”

You let out an audible sob into his chest and clung to him for dear life. There was no way to fight the feeling blossoming in your own, no way to fight him. He’d seen the worst of you, and yet he was still there.

Harry hummed along to the sounds of the party going on below you. Something by the Beatles played below, the studio demo to be specific.

Y/n gasped in recognition. “The studio demo is my favorite.” A wobbly smile making its way onto your tear soaked face.

“I know, I requested it for you earlier, before..,” Harry trailed off. Y/n squeezed him tighter and briefly removed her head from his chest to kiss his cheek before returning it.

Harry let himself run his fingers through your hair, he could feel you drifting off to sleep as he hummed along with the voice of George Harrison.

you’re asking me will my love grow

i don’t know, i don’t know

Brain Drain

Ah yes, hello. It is once again time to drain these brains of mine. A couple of more thoughts on this ‘Morning Pages’ process. Firstly, I’ve decided to take the Artist’s Way wording to heart and think of this as a non-negotiable exercise and, at least for the time being, I am going to do the full 1500 words as a block before I move onto anything else in my day. I’m still going to take the approach of retroactively editing them before I sleep in order to be more formatted, but the main body of text will be done first as, based on yesterday, I think this will focus me far more than spreading the writing out. Secondly, the more I think about it the more experimental I realise this entire process is for me. It’s probably best thought of as a heavily modified and specified version of the ‘Artist’s Way’ approach, as one of the stipulations offered up by Julia Cameron is that these are to be for your eyes and your eyes alone - even then going so far as to suggest that these should be sealed away in an envelope so that even the practitioner does not read them. So in that sense I am both taking a more documentative, methodical approach to the process and I am altering the formula by hosting these in a public forum. I understand that privacy helps to remove any filtering one may do but I also believe that the potential for these to be read comes with its own benefits. To that end this feels like an experiment of being creatively candid in public which is simulatenously exciting and daunting given that it runs so counter to the common approach of creating behind closed doors. I’d love to explore these ideas further as this journal progresses and see how my relationship with creativity changes due to these factors. So, I guess I’ll start by taking the measure of my day, as I am very much enjoying the ‘touching base’ element of these Morning Pages. I definitely feel a lot more blocked than I did yesterday, and it seems as though there’s somewhat of a hump to get over when I do these within the first 500 words or so before I get into a state of flow with it - this was true of yesterday also. Maybe that is one of the possible benefits of this exercise, that 'ramping-up-to-flow’ stage is one I likely experience whenever I sit down to create and the Brain Drain may be a way of me overcoming that before I come to do any of the actual creative work of my day. It seems as though forcing myself to do all 1500 words yesterday put me into the same sort of flow-state I gain from working on a really successful piece of music, and then today I am once again reset back into that familiar place of being 'blocked’, which even now I am slowly working through and unpicking purely by writing these words. Looking back on previous creative work this would seem to make an awful lot of sense. How much more demotivating it is to have to wake up and untease the same blocked feeling each morning on projects that I care deeply about and am heavily invested in than it is to instead get that part of the process out of the way on an off the cuff exercise like Brain Drain each morning. Maybe attempting to ease such a block through the work we care about is where all feelings of 'I’ve lost it’ and 'this project is hard now. Therefore how much better it must be to work through those blocks in a format that we’re not quite so invested in. Even right now there is a part of me that is very much resisting this process. It is an anxiety that masks itself as restlessness and tells me to 'go and watch a film, Aaron. Why put yourself through something so hard?’. As it is the creative enemy I have decided to call this my personal Antagonizer. Other thoughts of the Antagonizer, or the 'me’ that feels uncomfortable and uncreative: - 'Go and make a milkshake Aaron. Don’t do this. It’s 30 degrees outside today. You really need to just cool down.’ - 'Get up and walk around. You really need to release some of this tension that you’re feeling.’ - 'Go and talk to a family member. Telling them about what you want to write would be much easier than simply writing it’. That’s right Antagonizer, I WILL use your criticism in order to help me hit this wordcount. Checkmate. Yesterday has taught me that past this feeling is where enjoyment and flow lie if I can only push through it. I imagine some days will be significantly harder than others, and I imagine that I will even have days where 1500 words won’t begin to scratch the surface of this block, but I would so much rather try to push through this block writing whatever comes to mind over-and-above pushing through this block attempting to create whatever passes for a masterpiece in my world. On to next steps then. I would like to select a new artist to listen to today as I get on with other work. This would also be a good opportunity to show off a little of how I organise my inspiration, despite how embarrassingly over-elaborate it is.

On Spotify I keep a folder of artists who I’m either interest in, inspired by, are important pieces of musical history, examples of current artists who are doing what they do incredibly successfully, or artists that I feel would be generally useful to experience. For each artist, I will create a playlist, and in each playlist, I will save that artist’s entire discography chronologically. I will then slowly work my way through each of the artist’s discographies, deleting what I’ve listened to and categorising songs that jump out to me either in terms of whether I love, like, or dislike them, the emotional qualities that I want to emulate in my own music, or the technical qualities that stand out as exemplary within each song. This allows me to simultaneously build a picture of what my musical tastes are, keep an accurate record of my listening history, and create song palettes for different emotional qualities that I wish to put into my own work.

(Above: the technical qualities of music that I have categorised. This forms up a reference library that I can use to further refine these qualities when I’m working on my own music)Here are the criteria I use to define each of these categories. Idea: the concept behind a piece. Narrative: the story told. Lyrics: how ideas are expressed through words. Mood: the emotionality of a piece. Expression: how ideas are framed and delivered through the articulation of the music. Musicality: the use of harmony, rhythm, and theory to communicate those ideas. Rhythm: the measure, speed, flow, and cadence of a piece. Timbre: the overall texture, tone, and sonic palette of a piece. Structure: the flow of a piece over time. Mix: how the timbre has been arranged as an ensemble. Master: how the piece has been polished. Delivery: the title, artwork, context, presentation, and moving image that contain the piece.

(Above: the emotional qualities of music that I have categorised as a reference library for how artists that I look up to achieve specific emotional qualities in their work). These are decidedly more abstract and are generally more subject to the songs themselves that are being added. For reference, here’s the current list of artists who’s work I want to study, all at various stages of listened to, completed, or not listened to at all: - Labelle - Car Seat Headrest - Snail Mail - Japanese Breakfast - Let’s Eat Grandma - Soccer Mommy - LCD Soundsystem - Big Thief - Have a Nice Life - Beebadoobee - Animanaguchi - 100gecs - Courtney Barnett - Chromonicci - Owsey - Dark Cat - Valentine - SOPHIE - Kamasi Washington - Prince - Aurora - Massive Attack - Haywyre - Maths Time Joy - Counting Crows - Jack Strauber - Blossom Calderone - Goldfrapp - Janelle Monae - Meteorologist - Easyfun - Saint Lewis - Julian Gray - Jade Cicada - Blake Skowron - 92Elm - Maxime - Stereo Cube - Chuck Sutton - Gemi - Queen - Laxcity - Duumu - Oh Wonder - Galamatias - Umru - Underscores - Brockhampton - Fleece - i Monster - Deaton Chris Anthony - Amy Winehouse - The Beatles - Sumthin Sumthin - Radiohead - Flume - Knapsack - Dodie Here are the artists who’s discographies I have completed via this approach: - Sidney Gish - M.I.A - In Love With a Ghost - Bowie - Pink Floyd - Baird - Rudimental - Iglooghost - Madeon - Porter Robinson - 100gecs I use a similar system alongside this over on Pinterest for visual work in order to better inform my visual style and aesthetic sensibilities. Here is how I define my visual observation: Interior & Exterior, the space of dwelling.

Colour, of which idiosyncrasy and primary colours are a main focus.

Tone, subtler than colour. An intangible quality communicated by shifting hues and gradiated layers.

Mood, the way an image feels.

Looks, clothes, & apparel: personal artistic image and identity.

Desolation, a quality not currently present in my own work, but one that I often observe and love within other work, as well as in storytelling and other environments.

Layout, the way things are arranged in relation to one another within a space.

Idea, the concept behind a thing.

Texture, the tactile quality of visual elements.

Form, the shape and bounds of a thing.

Presentation, the context a thing is placed within.

Render, the quality imparted by computer generated imagery.

Type, how words are displayed.

Pattern, the use of repetition.

As you can see, how I define sound and visual art share a fairly common language between them. Anyway, I divert. I’m going to select SOPHIE as the next discography to tear through and I am also going to continue working through the UE4 Beginner learning path, though before either of these I have some university paperwork/admin stuff to finish so I’d best crack on with that. Toodles!

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Strawberry Fields Forever ~ Horoscopes February 25th-March 3rd, 2019

Strawberry Fields Forever ~ Horoscopes February 25th-March 3rd, 2019

Via Aeolianheart

It is the second week of Pisces season, a perfect time to go within and make peace with the past. This is a time of deep reflection, for the Sun’s annual journey through the zodiac ends here.

As the Sun in Pisces submerges its light deeper and deeper into the waters of the abyss, memories bubble and emotions begin to flood.

Amidst the blissful enchantments of remembrance, the pain and sorrow of the past can emerge vividly.

Just breathe in. And let it go. 

Remember that in the oceans of Pisces, even your bitterest tears will find their way home: dissolving back into the waters from whence they were born.

In Pisces, the Sun’s light no longer illuminates your individual story, fueled by the drama of your personal pain. Instead, the Sun illuminates the vastness of the whole human story, the collective unconscious that merges all time and memory together. It is here where your sacrifice of pain becomes resurrected as much deeper compassion for the world.

There is deep wisdom to be gained during Pisces season, but it is not taught through words or elaborate theories. The wisdom of Pisces is transmitted through the most primal level of consciousness, the limitless realm of imagination.

In language, only songs and poetry can begin to capture the essence of this realm. Untainted by the cognitive and rational mind, songwriters and poets are cherished for bringing treasures of wisdom back from the most primal level of consciousness: the swirl of eternal images.

Songs and poetry are the golden threads of enchantment that weave waking and dream life together.

There are innumerable examples to draw inspiration from, such a vast ocean of beauty to behold. But for this week’s meditation on Pisces, feel into the ambiance created by listening to the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever which was released in February of 1967.  

It is an exquisite song. If you knew nothing about its place in the history of psychedelic pop music, you would still fall under its spell as the lyrics begin with��

Let me take you down…

‘Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields

Nothing is real

And nothing to get hung about

Strawberry Fields forever

…it begins like a song of innocence, an idyll from the ancestors of English poetry reaching across the centuries to uplift your heart and soul with the shared imagination of strawberry fields stretching on forever.

But the wisdom of the Sun in Pisces does not only express itself through eternal images of beauty. The Sun in Pisces is also felt when you are drawn to experience the dissolution of self…

Living is easy with eyes closed

Misunderstanding all you see

It’s getting hard to be someone

But it all works out

It doesn’t matter much to me

The Sun in Pisces asks you to remember that even the most heroic of heroes’ journeys must eventually dissolve back into the infinite, its torchlight merging into the glistening sparkle of the whole human story.

No one I think is in my tree

I mean it must be high or low

When interviewed about his songwriting process, John Lennon described Strawberry Fields Forever as being “psycho-analysis set to music”, a meditation upon his visionary sense of the world, that emerged in childhood.

“I always was so psychic or intuitive or poetic or whatever you want to call it, that I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way.”

Reflecting further upon his journey of becoming a poet, John Lennon also shared:

“ Surrealism had a great effect on me, because then I realized that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity…Surrealism to me is reality….Even as a child. When I looked at myself in the mirror…I would find myself seeing hallucinatory images of my face changing and becoming cosmic and complete…”

  ..Strawberry Fields forever…

Monday/Tuesday: It’s Getting Hard

The week begins with a melancholy mood, as the Moon wanes through the last degrees of Scorpio. The last notes of Venus’ recent conjunction with Pluto still linger, giving you a sense of what will arise when she makes a conjunction with the South Node on Monday.

This alignment between Venus and the South Node in Capricorn will offer lessons about what aspects of the past can now be sacrificed. Whatever outworn beliefs that foster any lack of self-esteem can now be discarded.

Let dead leaves fall where they may to nourish the soil for the future.

Wednesday/Thursday: To Be Someone

On Wednesday, the Sun in Pisces sextiles Mars in Taurus giving you the spirit and the motivated energy to get a lot of important work done.

Mars brings extra sensuality to the Sun’s mystical daydream. The world is full of great art, great food, and great sex! With your senses fully awake and alive, you will be reminded of how to appreciate the beauty in your life.

Friday/Saturday/Sunday: But it All Works Out

On Friday, the first day of March, Venus in Capricorn will square Uranus in Aries. This will create a sharp instinct to define what your true values and integrity are built upon. You may suddenly choke on the lies you’ve been believing, turning sharply away from things that are luring you into the traps of conformity. This square will renew your sense of integrity, derived from your own common sense and intuition.

Just as this square perfects, Venus moves into the sign of Aquarius. The many practical worldly concerns that weighed down so heavy during her transit through Capricorn will be lightened up.

In Aquarius, Venus seeks to appease her appetites for beauty upon the edge, sifting through the outpourings of discarded madness in search of the light of genius. It is Venus in Aquarius that recognizes the spark of the divine in what has become outcast, unorthodox and strange.

  Much Love,

Rachel

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On Music as Magic: A Vibrational Transformer

Today, I’d like to talk a little about music and sound as magic. Of all the ways we can change the way we feel, think, express ourselves, and even move our bodies, music is one of the most universally recognizable, practical and accessible. So much so, I think, that we sometimes take it for granted. But let’s think about it for a moment.

Music is, literally, vibration. When we listen to music, our bodies vibrate differently, resonating with what we are hearing. What’s more, what we resonate with has the ability to conjure up emotions and thoughts in us in a way that viscerally and effortlessly bypasses the analytical mind, even when no words are put to the music.  A dissonant chord can instantly conjure up anxiety. An unexpected harmonic change can leave us in cathartic tears. A scintillating harp arpeggio can make us feel fluttery and joyful. A shaman’s steady drumbeat can transform our state of consciousness by literally changing our brainwaves. Listen closely to the effect music has on you. It can awaken, agitate, numb, soothe, heal  or hypnotize. Music is magic, pure and simple. Every melody is a spell.  

The interesting thing about music as an energetic modality is not only how it affects the individual, but how music has evolved in all its forms during different periods of history, in different cultures, mirroring the developments of its physical environment aside other forms of art and literature. Imagine for a moment living in Vienna the 1700s, when the height of entertainment was to sit patiently through a three hour opera, accompanied by a perfectly coordinated orchestra of musicians that had learned to play their instruments since childhood, and studied the intricacies of music theory until they mastered it - without ever having heard the sound of an electric guitar, an airplane, or a firetruck. How different people’s brains must have been! Now, imagine being a sitar player in North India at the same time. What did that world sound like? And now, think about how The Beatles inspired masses of young girls to scream and faint with excitement…and yet how much more wild the world’s ideas of aesthetics and self-expression became after the advent of punk and The Sex Pistols.  Classical music, once the epitome of order and harmony, became much more dissonant after the World Wars. People were finding new ways to express the collective Zeitgeist, and with the music, their emotions found a time-capsule, to be re-expressed and reinforced whenever people hear it. Music, and the mentality it channels, can change the face of the world, if we let it. It can move masses of people to experience things they never even imagined before. How does your favorite music make you feel?

What we let in our ears can affect us energetically as strongly as what we put in our mouths. Sometimes, day to day, it can be hard to control this aspect of our energetic environment, and as psychically sensitive people, it’s important for us to pay attention to what we do have influence over. Personally, as a professional musician, I’ve always been hypersensitive to music, but since my clairaudience became fully active, it’s gotten to the point that I can get severely anxious if I don’t take measures to protect myself from sound pollution or music that doesn’t resonate with my current state of mind. Public spaces that play loud, unpleasant or saccharine music are especially tough and ubiquitous. I highly recommend keeping a pair of earplugs in your pocket, and a pink noise app handy on your phone. See how you feel after a week of actively blocking out music and noise you do not actively choose to hear. (It has been a life-saver for me!) Also, try putting on an album of forest sounds in the background at home, and see how much calmer your house feels. Over time, these adjustments can have a huge impact on the quality of your overall energy.

So, think about how and why you listen to music day to day. Really listen, and pay attention to how it makes you feel in your mind, body and soul. Reflect on the sounds in your environment. What would you change if you could, and how? Juxtapose sound with silence. Then, use music and sound to your best advantage. Use it to transform and refine your energy. Use it to inspire, to heal, to soothe, celebrate and to release - in short, to reinforce whatever you most need to be and express at a given moment. Drink it in, enjoy it, and allow it to work its magic. It is your birthright. Use its power wisely.

Best Songs Lyrics Find Here in lyric-mint.com

Lyric writing is a tricky business. Finding words that convey exactly what the songwriter feels, while fitting into a certain melody and tempo, the sound of the words has to be pleasing to the ear too. Lyrics can be the starting block of a song – the words coming first, suggesting a certain feel or mood, and inspiring a melody. This is the power of words. Great song lyrics have the power to move you – whether it’s a tear of happiness or sadness, this is the songwriter’s gift.

Others are simply catchy – sing-a-long lyrics they stick in your head, even if they’re completely meaningless – naaa na na na-na-na-naaaaaa aren’t exactly the most inspiring lyrics ever, but thanks to The Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ they’re among some of the most-sung in the world!

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The best lyrics read like the finest poetry, and many would argue that the likes of Neil Young and Bob Dylan are indeed poets as well as songwriters. To prove just how tricky and rare it is to craft exquisite lyrics like theirs, it pays to look at the other end of the scale:

“I don’t want to see a ghost/It’s the sight that I fear most/I’d rather have a piece of toast…”

There are plenty more bad lyrical attempts out there than good – and that’s why we cherish those great lyrics all the more. Here are some of the finest ever recorded, and a little explanation about each one. We’d love to hear your favourites too, and what they mean to you, and why.

The Beach Boys – Surf’s Up

“Columnated ruins domino…”

Quite simply one of the most beautiful lyrics ever written – and one of the strangest too. Full of layers of surreal symbolism, it’s the product of the truly unique imagination of the lyrical genius Van Dyke Parks (with the help of some very illegal substances).

Creating image upon image, the words flowing, perfectly fitting Brian Wilson’s incredible ode to the sea. The song’s lyrics were so unusual that they actually caused friction within the band, with Beach Boy Mike Love complaining that they were nonsensical, and would alienate their fans. The song was shelved for a few years as a result, but thankfully couldn’t be hidden away for too long!

Bob Dylan – Masters of War

“I think you will find/When your death takes its toll/All the money you made/Will never buy back your soul…”

The protest song to end all protest songs, Dylan voiced the concerns of a generation when he penned this anti-war lyric. With Vietnam raging, and conscription forcing young Americans to fight in a war they didn’t understand, the lyrics captured all of their rage, fear and disgust perfectly. Sung in the first person, from the point of view of a young man who doesn’t want to be forced to join the army, makes the song all the more personal. The melody here is so simple, and yet this song has been covered by more artists than you can count – it’s all thanks to those incredibly powerful lyrics.

The Beatles – Hey Jude

“Take a sad song, and make it better…”

While John Lennon initially believed that this song was written for him, at the start of his relationship with Yoko Ono, in fact Paul McCartney penned this Beatles classic for Lennon’s son Julian. Originally titled ‘Hey Jules’, the song was written to comfort a young Julian as his parents divorced – and its lyrics have since brought comfort to countless others.

Also written around the time of McCartney’s new relationship with Linda Eastman, it’s a song that offers encouragement, advice, and a strong belief in love – yet another famous lyric about love – it seems we can’t escape it! But Hey Jude is almost as well known for its ending – over four minutes of those famous ‘na na na’s stretch the song out to over seven minutes long, at the time making it the longest single ever to top the UK charts, giving the Beatles their biggest hit in America too.

Johnny Cash – I Still Miss Someone

“There’s someone for me somewhere/And I still miss someone…”

Another simple melody that’s transformed by its painfully heartfelt lyrics, this is one of Johnny Cash’s most famous songs, and one of his most-covered. There have surely been more lyrics written about love than anything else, and the ones that stay with us are often about lost love.

Here, the lyrics hit home because they are so honest and truthful – every one who’s ever lost someone can relate. One of Bob Dylan’s own favourites, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Gram Parson and Stevie Nicks are just some of the artists who have covered this country classic.

 Johnny Mandel and Mike Altman – Suicide is Painless (Theme from M*A*S*H)

“The game of life is hard to play/I’m going to lose it anyway…”

One of the most famous TV and movie themes in history, the theme from M*A*S*H also has one very unexpected lyricist. When director Robert Altman was looking for a song for one of the movie’s characters to sing in one scene he told Songwriter Mandel that it had to be called “Suicide is Painless”, secondly, it had to be the “stupidest song ever written”.

Altman tried to write the lyrics himself, but found that it was too difficult for his 45-year-old brain to write “stupid enough”. Instead he gave the task to his 14-year-old-son, Michael, who quite to the contrary, produced some of the most profound lyrics ever to come out of a 14-year old! The famously morose song is written from the point of view of someone considering suicide. Reflecting the pointlessness of war, and the meaninglessness of life, this theme to the darkly comic story of soldiers facing the hardships of Vietnam is made all the more poignant by that fact that it was written by someone so young.

The Smiths – There Is a Light That Never Goes Out

“Take me out, tonight…”

It’s rare to find a band that are as critically acclaimed for their lyrics as much as their music – but thanks to Morrissey the magical wordsmith, The Smiths have managed just that. An avid reader, a big poetry fan, and a romantic at heart, Morrissey has written some of the most famous lyrics to emerge from the British music scene in the past 30 years. Their song titles alone contain more poetry than most lyric sheets – Shoplifters of the World Unite, Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, There Is a Light That Never Goes Out – they’ve even inspired countless tattoos.

There Is a Light is one of their most-covered songs, with lyrics that were apparently inspired by one of Morrissey’s heroes, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Appealing to teenagers everywhere, the lyrics talk about teenage alienation – a need to run away, experience the first excesses and excitements of life, when you no longer feel at home in the family home.

REM – It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

“That’s great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes…”

REM have written some of the most successful songs of the past few decades, and it’s in no small part thanks to Michael Stipe’s (often misheard) lyrics. Stipe seems to pride himself on writing lyrics that are a little opaque – very symbolic, with meanings hidden. It’s the End of the World is no exception, and as one of their most upbeat and popular songs, it’s crammed with lyrics that test even the biggest REM fans.

Apparently a sort of tribute to Bob Dylan’s famously over-lyrical Subterranean Homesick Blues, you’ll soon get out of breath singing along to this! What does it all mean? As with many REM lyrics, no one really knows for sure. There are many little snippets of stories, some complaining about capitalism, others, and some words included simply because they sound so great when strung together in song: “The ladder starts to clatter with fear fight down height”.

Neil Young – Old Man

“Old man look at my life, I’m a lot like you…”

Often ranked up there with Bob Dylan in terms of his profound lyric writing, Neil has a knack for tugging at those heartstrings. Never afraid to let his emotions show, that is what helps to make his words so powerful – that they are truthful, and from the heart.

Old Man was a song written for the old caretaker who looked after Neil’s Broken Arrow ranch, which he purchased in 1970 and still lives on today. It compares the life of an old man with that of a young man, and finds that they are more alike in their needs than they realize.

Joni Mitchell – Big Yellow Taxi

“They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot…”

One of Neil’s fellow Canadian musicians, and a good friend of his from the folk scene, Joni Mitchell has written her fair share of famous lyrics. Perhaps the best know are the ones she penned for Big Yellow Taxi. Written about her concerns with pollution and the environment, Joni explains: ““I wrote ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart… this blight on paradise.”

The lines “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone” apply to a whole range of circumstances besides the destruction of the earth – helping the song become a universal favourite.

The Muppets – Mah Nà Mah Nà

“Mah Nà Mah Nà…!”

The Muppets are here to prove that lyrics don’t have to about love, heartache, loss or be in any way profound to be popular. Mah Nà Mah Nà is one of The Muppets most famous ditties, beloved around the world, and it means…absolutely nothing.

Actually a song written by Piero Umiliani for an Italian movie, it contains nothing both nonsense words and scat singing. It just goes to show that sometimes successful lyrics simply need to sound good, becoming musical instruments in their own right, rather than holding any special meaning. It’s pretty impossible not to sing along!

Enjoyed that article? We’ve got a whole lot more for you, have a look at our Free English Ebooks.

Evan Rachel Wood and Julie Taymor on Why Across the Universe ‘Scared the Shit Out of People’

The Beatles have always had a cinematic presence, from the 1964 faux-documentary A Hard Day’s Night to the experimental shorts of John and Yoko. But no director has ever used the Beatles’ music as inventively and audaciously as Julie Taymor, whose 2007 film Across the Universe is being rereleased in theaters for three days by Fathom Events. Using 33 Beatles songs and minimal dialogue, Across the Universe tells the story of three young adults in the late 1960s: Lucy (then 17-year-old Evan Rachel Wood), an all-American girl who wants to change the world; her brother Max (Joe Anderson), a rebel who gets dragged into Vietnam; and Jude (Jim Sturgess), a working-class artist from Liverpool who follows his dreams across the ocean. Their stories coalesce in New York City, where they befriend blues musicians, acid heads, radical extremists, a closeted lesbian, and Bono in a ridiculous mustache. Fictional characters become entangled in real events (the Detroit riots, the Columbia student protests), using songs from every Beatles era to express a nation’s political and psychedelic awakening.

Taymor’s film is as visual as it is musical. The magical-realism elements Taymor brought to her Oscar-winning film Frida and her Broadway hit The Lion King are blown to epic proportions in Across the Universe. “I Want You” becomes a nightmare ballet about Max’s recruitment and subsequent dehumanization in Vietnam, ending with an image of soldiers carrying the Statue of Liberty as they crush villages underfoot. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” is a psychedelic circus featuring collage animation and 20-foot puppets. “Because” scores an underwater love-in. Even in more traditionally constructed scenes, the scale is breathtaking; the entire film was shot on location and, according to Taymor, employed 5,000 extras.

Across the Universe also runs well over two hours — not a big deal in this age of bloated superhero adventures, but in 2007, the length of Taymor’s cut alarmed Sony executives. Without her approval, the studio test-screened an alternate cut that eliminated much of the film’s political content and minimized the nonwhite supporting characters. Taymor fought back hard, and while she won final cut, she was smeared in the press (industry publications used words like “ballistic” and “hysteria”) and, she says, torpedoed by Sony’s marketing department. The film polarized critics (Roger Ebert loved it, Ann Hornaday hated it) and opened to limp box office, failing to recoup its budget.

And yet — in the past decade, the audience for Across the Universe has grown, its inevitable cult-classic status realized. At the present moment, the film’s portrayal of ’60s activism and art as weapons against government oppression seems especially resonant. In the lead-up to the Fathom Events release, Vulture had a candid conversation with Taymor and Wood about the unusual process of making the film, the bizarre logistics of Wood’s first nude scene, the ongoing challenges facing female directors, and the potential influence of Across the Universe on millennial activists. (Given the timing of the interview, we also threw in a few Westworld season-finale questions.)

There’s no film quite like Across the Universe, so I’d imagine making it was a unique experience. Evan Rachel Wood: It was one of the best experiences of my life. I was 17. Once I heard Julie was making a Beatles movie, I remember just thinking, “There’s nobody else that can do this. And I won’t let anybody else do it!” It just had to be. And then I got the part and we all spent about seven or eight months in New York together.

Julie Taymor: We rehearsed it like a normal musical in theater … and it bonded everybody. I’ll never forget Evan walking in the hallways with this Bowie T-shirt, because at one point we’d asked David Bowie if he was going to play Mr. Kite. And I think that at the moment Evan was really like, “Bowie, Bowie!”

ERW: Well, yeah, I mean I’m always like, “Bowie, Bowie.” But I was also all about Eddie Izzard.  I was always doing Eddie’s stand-up in the hallway.

JT: One of the things that I remember profoundly — this was during the Iraq War right? And it was really touchy subject. When we did the march down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, the anti-Vietnam War march with the Bread and Puppet Theater puppets — everybody thought they were marching against the Iraq War. Now this is what I wanted to say: When Across the Universe came out ten years ago, it was right before Obama. And maybe this is just my own feeling, but I feel that this movie was very popular amongst young people. And I think people were very inspired by what the youth of America did in the 1960s, how they really made things change.

ERW:  I even remember  that a lot of people in the neighborhood wanted us to leave up the peace signs and protest signs, because it wasrelevant.

I have a vivid memory of going down to the Lower East Side when you were filming and seeing a whole block transformed into a ’60s fantasy of New York City. It was magical, like stepping into a dream. Were there any moments that felt like that to you as you were making it? ERW: Oh my God, all of it. Certainly the scene where we stumble upon the puppets and the blue meanies and Eddie Izzard started coming out and singing. That was when I was really on a different planet.

JT:  We shot that in Garrison, New York, and all of those were papier-mâché handmade puppets, giant puppets. There is almost no CGI in that section. It’s all real.

ERW: I think “I Want You” is one of my favorite numbers in the movie.

JT:  I was walking on a beach in Mexico when I came up with the idea — I’d done the Haggadah at the Public Theater years before, where the slaves are carrying the pyramids across the sands of Egypt. And I got the idea of all the young boys in their underwear and their army boots supporting [the Statue of] Liberty, and the image of Liberty charging through the jungles of the Third World, mashing and stepping and destroying all the trees. You know, the irony of us being this country that says we’re bringing Liberty, at the same time we’re bringing it at the expense of many people.

Evan, what was involved in the scene where you and Jim Sturgess are singing “Because” and making out underwater? ERW:  Speeding up the songs, and then learning how to sing them really fast. So the scenes were like, [sings] “becausetheworldisrounditturnsmeon…” And then she slowed it down so that it looked like it was in real time. So we filmed underwater all day. We would just take a deep breath and dive under and then try to get the song out as quickly as possible.

JT: And she also had to work hard to hide her breasts, right Evan?

ERW:  Oh, I always had to hide my breasts. I could only show one boob because it was PG-13. Two made it an R but one was fine!  And that was my first nude scene.

Julie, you fought the studio to get final cut on this film, when Sony wanted to shorten it. I was reading some of the press from that time, and I was noticing how gendered the language is when they write about you and this movie. There’s a Variety article that says, “She went ballistic to save her child.” JT: Thanks for reminding me. I’d almost forgotten how awful that was.

I’m sorry to bring it up! But I think it’s important to acknowledge that double standard. JT:  You know, for me, I’ve been through it.  Being a successful director on Broadway brings out all kinds of knives and hatred. But the misogyny business is true. And I put blinders on and just tried to do the work. I think every director, male and female, has babies, you know what I mean? It’s not just women. But you’re right. It is sexist dialogue. We loved our movie. And it wasn’t that it wasn’t working. It was working. They just smelled the money and thought if we dumb it down, literally, and get rid of the politics — I saw a cut where they got rid of the Detroit riot. There was no black child who was killed.

ERW:  Prudence wasn’t even gay!

JT: Yeah, they cut “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” so many of the things that I knew young people and everybody would love. Evan had a line — this was one of the first signs of the kind of difficult road that would come. Lucy, who’s 16 or 17, is walking home from school and her best friend says that one of their friends got pregnant. And Lucy says, “I’m never having children. Having children is narcissistic, like putting out carbon copies of yourself.” I remember my best friend, when I was 16, telling me that. I mean, that line came from experience. But the studio said at the time, “Oh, Lucy can’t say that, it will make her so unlikable.” No, will make her likable! Because you have that sign that when she’s a high-school student, that she will become someone like Gloria Steinem or Jane Fonda, that she’s going to become an activist.

The other thing is the poster. The poster that we’re releasing it with now is the underwater poster, the psychedelic poster of them kissing. The one that they put out, the strawberry, everybody who made this film hates. Well, if we’re being honest! [Laughs.] The problem with it is, I think what happens in Hollywood is they think that you can only market to 14-to-15-year-old girls. And we always said this movie, even if it’s PG-13, will appeal from 10-year-olds up through the parents. I mean, the Beatles appeal to all ages. If you watched the karaoke James Corden video with Paul McCartney in Liverpool, all these people in the bars were from 16 years old up to 80. And I’m hoping that with this rerelease this summer, we’ll see the teenagers and the young adults, and also the families.

Evan, you tweeted recently that you’ve been struggling to sell a movie that you will direct with a script written by women. ERW: Oh my goodness, the responses are just breathtaking. I mean, split down the middle: Some people totally get what I’m saying and some people are so angry with me! But the thing is, what I was trying to say was not a sense of entitlement like, “I should have this,” even though I do believe that I could make a really great film. It was just to expose what these rooms are like that you walk into over and over and over again. And until you have the more inclusive pitch rooms with women and people of color and LGBT representation, then you’re not going to see this movie.

And I hear people saying all the time, “Why aren’t there more female directors, why aren’t there more stories about women?” So I wanted to say, “Hey, just so you guys know, I’m really trying. And nada.”  I’m starring in the film, I co-wrote it, I’m directing it, I had an amazing cast, I had amazing DPs, an amazing crew. So everybody that read it was like “absolutely,” but the only people that are wishy about it are financiers, because it is very female-driven. And I do believe that they just don’t understand this film. So that’s what I was trying to say.

You did get a number responses that are just people saying, “ I want to see that film.” ERW: And I did get a lot of inquiries after that tweet. But also lot of people saying my idea is probably not very good, and you’ve never directed anything, and how dare you. I do believe that if I was a man with 25 years’ experience in the industry, who’s worked with some of the greatest directors in the history of film, and who’s lived and breathed it since I was a child — to say that I would have nothing to offer, when I know there are other people with a penis, with less than I have backing me up, that get green-lit, that’s where I’m taking issue. [Laughs.] Because it does seem like there’s an imbalance and it’s unfair. And that’s what I was trying to call out.

Julie, do you have any advice for Evan in this situation? JT: Listen, I’m going through the same thing after 40 years. Evan knows, there’s a movie that I wanted to make with her, a female-driven epic love story. Haven’t been able to do that one. I mean, we still try, and I’m doing [a film adaptation of] Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road that will be extremely female-driven! And we will be making it this fall. But I have a number of films that have not gotten off the ground and things that I’ve wanted to do. And it probably has a lot to do with the ballistic-baby concept. Even if people realize that the press has misogynistic writing or fear of a powerful woman, unless they meet you personally — and then I often get people being so surprised! [Laughs.] But I work with a lot of the same people over and over and over again, so I have a very good team and very good friends and collaborators. Evan and Jim, all of the kids on Across the Universe, we’ve stayed close.

Quite honestly, ten years ago, when women were in big positions, they were not supporting other women. They were terrified of losing their job and they had to support the boys’ films. I don’t need to name names, you can all go look at it, but it wasn’t necessarily better that women were at the top because they were frightened of making a mistake and that they would then be called out for having supported chick flicks or women’s things. It was fear. For me it’s more. I have the scarlet letter of “A” on me — not “adultery,” but “art.” Even though The Lion King is the most successful entertainment in the history of all entertainment. [Ed. note: Broadway’s The Lion King has grossed $8 billion to date, more than all the Star Wars movies combined.]

ERW: And Across the Universe is a masterpiece.

JT: And it’s also been very, very successful without a whole lot of press. I mean, Frida didn’t get press either.

ERW:  We even said that when we were making it: “This is going to be a cult classic, this is going to be something that throughout the years will continue to grow and grow.”

JT: The studio is all new people now, and they love it. And they’re very supportive. But I think it’d be great if they would just rerelease the film completely, because it didn’t go out enough as a movie. But they’re dipping their toe in with Fathom. If it does really well this summer, maybe they will do a real rerelease, which would be amazing because I do feel like it’s time. The success of La La Land — well, that had two very big stars in it, but it really comes on the heels of what Across the Universe did ten years ago.

ERW: I want to add about Julie, that she has such a strong vision and she holds true to her conviction. She’s a real artist. And yes, that does scare the shit out of people, because they don’t understand.

JT: Well, they think I’m not interested in commercial success. You gotta be kidding, of course I am!

ERW: Exactly. They underestimate what people want and how art moves people. I mean fuck, look at the Beatles, they changed the world. But I’ve worked with male directors that are complicated and have the same kind of conviction and they’re kind of hailed for it. But when you’re a woman, and you say, “I’m not going to do that, it’s not right,” they’re like, “Well she’s crazy. She’s difficult.” Julie is not crazy or difficult. She’s an artist. And I’ve worked with male artists that are similar that don’t get any shit for it.

JT: Well, thanks Evan. The thing is that we all knew what the movie was, and we presented it all. Maybe the falling Vietnamese ladiessurprised the producers because that was the first day of shooting. That I can understand, kind of gulping for a moment. But the rest of it, we did what was on paper and what we rehearsed. I didn’t change anything. I just did what I intended to do. I remember Amy Pascal jumping up and down in the first screening at Sony, just going, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.” And the marketing woman was thrilled. Somebody else got in there and just smelled the money. But at any rate, you heard that already. And yes, I have gone through it and I will continue. But there’s enough great people wanting the kind of films that I want to make and the theater that I want to make. So you know, I’m not dying here.

All right, I know I can’t wrap this up without asking some Westworld finale questions. Evan, is that okay with you? ERW: Ha! Of course.

How much time did you and Tessa Thompson spend practicing Dolores together? ERW: That is so funny. You know it’s hilarious because we became really good friends at the beginning of season two, and then we started hanging out, and then all of a sudden we realized that we were gonna be the same person [laughs] and it was very strange! This show is so funny. Because they didn’t tell us anything.

But I thought she did an amazing job. I would send her recordings of myself doing the dialogue, and then she really sold it. I thought it was great. But you know, we weren’t really doing scenes together and I was basically playing a different character this season. So when she found out she had to kind of be me, she came to me and said, “Wait — what have you been doing?” [Laughs.] I’m like, “OH! Oh right! Yeah, I’ve got to do the voice for you and everything!” So I just made recordings and she really made it her own, it was good.

Ed Harris told us he has no idea what’s going on in the showwhile he’s making it. Have you had a similar experience? ERW: I had no idea what was happening in season two. At all. And we shot out of order, so most of the time — I mean, it was insane to be an actor on season two. I don’t know how I feel about it. [Laughs.] But it was a ride. We stopped reading the call sheets. We would show up and Jeffrey and I would ask what episode we were in. It was kind of that level of — we just lived in the moment in whatever scene that we were doing, and that’s how we made it.

Excerpt - Letters From Ernest

I started a new book, y’ll

Here’s chapter 5

Synopsis: Aoife Walsh's parents have raised her and her brother through means that are not the best; convinced that everything can be chalked up to teenage laziness, the two parents run their successful business and hound their children to an unhealthy degree. But when Aoife's brother commits suicide, everything changes and it's up to her to unpack the demons her brother kept inside.

“Aoife what do you mean? We’ve been over this before; it wasn’t your fault. It was nobody’s fault.”

“Stop saying that!” I shouted at Phil and he closed his mouth, sliding his chair away from me. Never before had he seemed so taken aback.

Mr. and Mrs. Cameron had met in college, when they were friends with my parents. After school, they got married just a few months apart and when Phil’s mom got pregnant with his older sister, Penelope, they bought a house and moved a few cities away to Hamish. A house down the street went up for sale a year later and mom and dad bought it. Two years later, Ernest was born, and then within months of each other, Phil and I were brought into the world. We were as close to one another as siblings.

This was the first time in all seventeen years of our lives that I had dared to yell at him.

“I didn’t mean to-.”

“Remember my actual birthday two weeks ago? We couldn’t go out because I had a tournament the next day.”

“Right.”

“Before I left that Saturday, Ernest said he had a birthday present for me that he hadn’t wanted to give me in front of our parents. It was a big box, and he told me to take in on the bus and open it then and I did. Remember what was in it?”

“Of course. It was all of his Clansmen stuff.”

“Right. His signed set list from the one time mom and dad actually let him go and do something, his shirts, his CD’s and their EP record that was the reason for him to buy a record player. He gave me this ring too, remember?” I took the circle of metal off my finger and slammed it on the table. “He gave me something that meant something to him; something that he wanted to go to a good home. He knew then, Phil! He knew that he was going to do something and he wanted to make sure things he cared about ended up in the right hands!”

“What makes you say this?”

“Because he did the same thing with Coach! He gave him back the CD from freshman year with all the music on it. And you know what he told Coach? Ernest said that he realized he ‘shouldn’t need music to feel motivated’. It sounds so much like mom it makes me want to throw up. Coach told me today… he said that he thinks Ernest knew what he was going to do and that he wanted to make sure the CD ended back with its owner. Ernest told him that maybe he could give the CD to another athlete who was worth helping. Why didn’t I see it?” I cried out, attracting the attention of other students. “Why did I open that box and think that my brother - the biggest Clansmen fan I know - giving away all his Clansmen gear was a perfectly natural thing?”

All the while, Phil was throwing our half-eaten lunches into their boxes. As I panted against the panic, he grabbed my arm and my backpack and pulled me out of the lunchroom and into an abandoned classroom.

“What other stuff has he given away to people? What if he left things for mom and dad and they never realized either? Why didn’t I say something to him?” The same explosion of emotion I had seen in Eva in the early hours of the morning finally escaped from my chest days after losing Ernest. “What if I could have saved him?”

Phil said nothing. Instead he stood next to me, hand on my hunched shoulders, backpacks and lunchboxes hanging from his hand, slumped against the floor.

Eventually he dropped them and held his left hand towards me, sticking his pinky in front of my face, the Clansmen ring wrapped around it snuggly. I tugged it off and placed it in my pocket.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he said quietly.

“But there’s no one in the room s-.”

“I meant here. At school. We shouldn’t be here. We need time. Or at least, you need time.”

“Mom’ll never buy it. Can you imagine what she’d say?” A little worry and panic was beginning to fill me up. “And I definitely can’t miss practice. There’s another tournament and-.”

“Aoife, Ernest is dead,” Phil said bluntly. “Not even Superman himself would be able to deal with it without taking some time.”

“Should I call home?”

“I think so, yes.”

Dad answered the phone, which surprised me. I figured after hitting the voicemail, I’d be forced to all one of them at work.

“Hello?”

“Dad?”

“Aoife? Is everything okay?”

“I think I need to come home?”

“Okay. I’ll come pick you up.”

The line went dead and I stared at Phil with surprise.

“Dad’s coming to pick me up. He didn’t make a big deal out of it.”

“I’ll go tell your teachers,” Phil said, turning without a comment on dad’s weird behavior. I wandered down the hallway near the nurses office and the guidance department, reading the postings on the wall to distract myself.

I glanced in one of the rooms and saw Nurse Ellie sitting in front of her computer, filling out a form. My first period had been in sixth grade, when Nurse Ellie was at the middle school. She had helped me.

“Hello?” I knocked on the doorframe. She looked up and immediately her face read of sadness. She rose and pulled me into the office and into her arms.

“I’m so sorry, Aoife,” she said into my hair. “Coach came and told me.”

“He did?”

“He did. We were both a little worried about your brother at one point and talked about it a little.”

“What did he do? Why were you worried?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you,” she hesitated.

“Is there anything you can tell me? I’m trying to figure out what happened.”

Nurse Ellie looked nervously around her room before her eyes seemed to land on something behind me. I turned and came face-to-face with a closet.

“I supposed there’s really no reason for me to have this anymore, is there?” she asked, though it seemed she was talking to the air around us. She reached in the closet and pulled out a piece of clothing. My heart stopped.

Ernest’s jacket.

“Why do you have that?” I choked out as she handed it to me. It still smelled like him.

“He came to give it to me last week. He said he was feeling better and didn’t need it anymore.”

“When was he not feeling good? What did he mean?”

Nurse Ellie smiled at me sadly and pulled a tissue from the box, poking at the corners of her eyes under her glasses.

“I can’t talk about it. Why are you here, Aoife?”

“I’m waiting for dad. He’s coming to take me home.”

“It’s all a little overwhelming, isn’t it?”

From down the hallway I could hear dad’s voice asking for me. Times like these made me thankful that we only lived a few blocks from the high school.

“Yeah.”

The short drive home was silent. I wanted to know why dad was at home. I wanted to know why he hadn’t objected to my request to come home. I wanted to know so many things but as I held Ernest’s jacket in my lap, all I could do was breathe.

We pulled into the garage and I saw the empty space where dad’s ladder lived. As far as I knew, it was still in Ernest’s room. The frayed end of the rope spool hung against the shelf, blown around by the air vent directly to the right. As we walked up the stairs and into the living room, I saw the gray mark across the wall where the ladder had scraped the paint.

The house was silent. Dad’s laptop and work cell phone were on the dining room table. On the large television was a paused image of a tall man in glasses. He was reading from a book.

“What’s that?” I asked at last.

“Just listening to a sermon.”

We hadn’t gone to church in years. Mom and dad wanted one day a week, they had told Ernest and I, of no obligations. They overworked, spending weekdays visiting clients and weekends reviewing floor plans and contracts and colors for their construction and interior design business.

“Why?”

“It’s nice to remember that something is bigger than you. Where did you find that jacket?” dad asked, voice cracking as he sat down.

“School,” I said, avoiding the real location. Until I knew exactly why Nurse Ellie had Ernest’s jacket in her closet, I couldn’t subject dad to the knowledge that Ernest was much more screwed up than any of us thought.

“Do your teachers know that you left?”

“Phil told them.”

“Mom’s at a site and she’ll be out late.”

“Is that why you’re home?”

Dad looked at me with flat, dead eyes.

“I couldn’t work in the office. Have Phil come over here and we’ll have chicken.”

“We have chicken?”

“Pastor Nolan brought some over. He brought three meals and some DVD’s,” he gestured to the television.

“That was nice of him.”

“I know. Make sure Phil comes over. I don’t like the idea of you having to be by yourself. Go listen to some of that band you love so much.” I burst into tears and dad looked up, alarmed. “What?”

“Ernest loved them?” I quasi-asked before leaving the room. I wasn’t sure if I wanted dad to follow me down the hallway or not but when he didn’t, I wasn’t disappointed.

Aoife:

dad says come over after school

moms working late and pastor nolan

brought us dinner

dad says he doesn’t want me to be alone 

Phil:

will do

but i legit have homework that i don’t

know how to do

so will you help me?

Aoife:

of course, nerd

I had hours before Phil would be at our doorstep with our customary once-a-week slurpees and a backpack full of homework so I opened my computer, pulled up the playlist Ernest and I had aptly named clansmen, but slow and sad. It was just that. I wasn’t sure what to listen to while combing through Ernest’s birthday present to me, but it certainly couldn’t be anything happy.

The bands unique cover of Yesterday by The Beatles was sad enough. I stared at the signed set list, all five of the band members names scrawled in various handwriting. There was Sam, the trumpeter who Phil adored, and Martin the saxophonist, Travis and Dillon and Fred, the older of the five, who played guitar and drums and bass. All the big hits and a few new releases. Mom and dad had let him go for his sixteenth birthday, despite knowing the language at their shows. His birthday was February 24th. He had died a week before he was supposed to turn nineteen.

I didn’t want to stain the list with my sadness so I put it away, pulling out the shirts Ernest had bought over the years, or that had been bought for him. Then there were the CD’s and the records. All of it was here. If there was anything else it was in his room and I didn’t dare to enter. Maybe when I was ready, it would be a sign that I was starting to feel better.

A light knock interrupted my dig and it opened a second later. Phil’s face appeared in the crack.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

He entered and sat down next to me,

“I’m sorry about earlier.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t mean to make you upset. It’s just a lot and I don't know how to handle it? Is this the stuff Ernest gave you?”

“It’s okay,” I leaned into him. “What did my teachers say?”

“They all got it. They said that it’s good for you to take some time to be with your family.”

“Dad worked from home today.”

“I know. I saw he took over the dinner table. Is he watching a church service?”

“Pastor Nolan brought some DVD’s over when he brought over the dinners. I think it makes him feel better.”

Dad appeared in the doorway where Phil was moments before and knocked quietly.

“Want some dinner, you two?”

“Sure.”

The dinner was good; chicken with potatoes and green beans. I barely had the energy to chew.

“Aoife?”

“Yes, dad?”

“Do you want to stay home from school for a few days?”

I choked on my food.

“Do I want to do what?”

“Stay home. Your mom and I talked this morning. She wants you to continue your practices and assignments but I can’t help but think it might be best if you stay home for a little while. I went to work today and couldn’t sit still. I needed to be here. I thought maybe we could hang out. You could do your homework while I do my work and then we could just spend some time together.”

“I… yeah,” I breathed out, at least over the shock of my fathers suggestion. “Yeah, that sounds great.”

“You can come over whenever, as long as it’s not during school,” dad said to Phil. “To be honest you’re as much of a child to me as my children are and were. It’s nice to have you around.”

“That’s very nice of you to offer. I know nothing about the math I’m supposed to be learning so I’ll probably come over and beg Aoife to teach me.”

We dissolved into a little forced laughter and continued to eat, the food tasting more like food than bland mush. My phone beeped and I jumped a bit before continuing to eat.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” dad asked.

“But it’s the dinner table.”

“You can read it if you want.”

Phil:

i have THOUGHTS about what is happening rn

“Anything interesting?” dad asked as I looked up.

“Just a spam email,” I mumbled as Phil put his phone back in his pocket and patted my leg.

“Do you all have homework tonight?”

“Yeah. We’ll go do that in a little bit.”

“What were you doing in your room beforehand?”

It was such a weird thing, watching and listening to this new dad in front of me. He had the same curiosity as he and mom always had about what Ernest and I would do, but he was letting me check my phone at the table and encouraging me to take a break and telling me that he loved me. I wasn’t going to complain but still… it was like I had an imposter dad.

“Just listening to Clansmen.”

He nodded and ate, our faces still illuminated by the tall, bespeckled man.

I heard the door open and mom come in right as Phil and I were settling into the basement. Before we got to today’s assignments, we had to talk about dad. Phil was practically bouncing up and down in his seat as I cracked the door so we could snoop on them when the time was right.

“So what are your thoughts?”

“I think he’s realizing that something him and your mom did messed with Ernest.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He’s changing, isn’t he? He’s easing up on you, he’s telling you he loves you… he’s becoming a new dad because he’s afraid if he doesn’t, you might end up like your brother. He’s terrified.”

“You really think so?”

“I do,” Phil flopped around in the old gray bean bag on the floor so he was staring at me upside down. “I don’t think he has any idea of what he’s doing, but I think he’s trying and that’s admirable.”

“What should I do? Is there anything I can do to help him?”

“The next few days, when it’s just the two of you, try and talk to him about life. Talk about things you wouldn’t normally and see what happens. And then report everything back to me.”

“Obviously. The only thing I’m a little worried about is not going around and finding out more from everyone at school.”

“It’s only a few days. You can come back to school next week and resume your detective work. The way you cried after lunch isn’t something that you should keep in. If your mom is going to make it hard for you to grieve, do it when you’re with your dad. Something tells me he won’t make you feel bad for feeling bad.”

“You did what??” we heard from the upstairs and Phil and I immediately clammed up, inching towards the door.

“I told her she could stay home with me for the rest of the week. I’ll make sure all of her work gets done, trust me. She can work while I’m working.”

“I thought we agreed that it’s best if she keeps a normal routine; if we keep a normal routine. I didn’t even know you were home today! What were you doing? Did you cook?”

“Pastor Nolan brought some food by.”

“And tried to make you go back to services, right?”

“No. He brought some DVD’s that I put on as I was finishing my work. Aoife called halfway through the day and asked to be picked up.”

“And you actually did it? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that she hasn’t been given the time to feel sad yet, Mandy! None of us have. It’s just a few days before the weekend and then she’ll go back and see her teachers again. She needs time. This isn’t something that we just put behind us. This is huge.”

“So why is it that I can go back to work but she can’t go back to school?”

“Because she’s seventeen. She’s still learning how to handle things! Hell, I’m fifty and I’m not even sure how to handle this.”

“Well-.”

“Please don’t make this all about you. Please. People process grief in different ways and I don’t think we should force our daughter to go to school when there’s still so much going on and so much to figure out. Are we going to cremate him? Are we having a funeral? Does your family even know? Or are you so ashamed that your son killed himself that you are keeping it all inside. That’s not healthy, Mandy.”

“How dare you assume I’m ashamed of him.”

“How dare I? Really? You’re asking me this after you talked about his future like he was some sort of idiot? You sat around, talking about how you were expecting him to not do well; you sat around talking about how he was a poor representation of your parenting abilities. It’s like I said when we got back from the hospital… this kind of thing doesn’t just happen. There are reasons Ernest felt like he couldn’t go on living. Maybe we need to accept the fact that we didn’t do the best we could. Maybe we need to consider that we didn’t parent him right.”

“And what about Aoife? She’s doing just fine!”

“When has she ever said anything other than she’s fine? Maybe we conditioned her to say that even when she’s not! I’m not going to lose her too!”

The sounds of my mothers heels on the hardwood floor echoed in the basement as I listened to her cross the kitchen and open the fridge.

“I’m not going to deal with this anymore,” she said in that tone that sent chills down my spine every time. “I’m going to shower and go to bed. What you do this week is your own business, I guess. But don’t go thinking that we did a bad job.”

“But we did.”

“We did not. Remember when we first met and we realized that we agreed on parenting style down to a tee? I loved that about us. What’s happened to change you?”

“I no longer have a son. That’s what happened. I just thought maybe you’d change a little too. I thought his life meant more to you than proof you could raise acceptable children. Ernest wasn’t a project; he wasn’t an experiment. He was a human being and we don’t have him anymore.”

I screwed my eyes shut at the sound of my dad’s voice fracturing and my mom’s work shoes ascending the stairs to their room, tears leaking from my eyelids.

“What’s happening?” I whispered.

“Grief,” Phil whispered back.

If You Could Only See Me (Part 1)

(Posted this on ‘Some Small Fics’, but decided to put it on here instead.)

Rating: Mature

Fandom: Based on the Hollies, mentions the Beatles

Finished: Yes!!!

Summary: Niki grew up with a boy named John in Liverpool. Spending much of her life with him and his band, in 1966 she fell in love with the front man of another band.

Or… Did she?

Chapter 1: The Present

The first thing I become aware of is a cut down my bottom lip. I don’t remember when I got it. My lips haven’t been broken, though it’s cold enough to make them all chapped. It doesn’t hurt. I gnaw on it slightly, but nothing. All I feel is the sensation of skin missing, broken in one place. I run my tongue over it, tasting the tender inside flesh.

I don’t recall it bleeding, nor anyone biting it. Aww, that would be hot. I’d run my tongue over it and know exactly who’d done it to me, who’d made me bleed. Alas, things like that haven’t really happened for a while. Allan’s been decidedly vanilla, if he’s been at all interested in that, and I’ve been ok with it. We’re just too tired at the moment. This week has been non-stop. We were on tour. We only got back yesterday in the early hours of the morning and yet we both had to work once we’d gotten a bit of sleep. Today, we’ve nothing to do, and though it might be nice to finally be intimate, since I’ve missed that a lot, I can’t even bring myself to sit up, never mind wake him and make out. Even if I were to wait for him to wake up, I’d probably fall back to sleep and forget. Really, it’s bad at the moment, not between us, just together, we’re hopeless.

That doesn’t stop me from dreaming, however. As I turn onto my stomach, my eyes shut tight, my bones creaking, I think about having him. I ache for it, I do, almost as much as I ache for sleep. I think about him having me, pushing me up against the cold walls of the shower while a hot spray cleans us both, yet I am content in the prospect of being turned on my side, my leg hooked over Allan’s and him lazily fucking me like that. I feel his body over me, a leg up by my butt, an arm over my shoulders, his nose buried in my neck. His warm breath spreads over the base of my skull.

You know what? I’m perfectly happy to just fall back to sleep now, imagining all the wonderful ways Allan could have me. I imagine that he already has and we are drifting off in the wake of a post-climax glow.

Content, I shuffle onto my side, careful not to move Allan too much. He is deep in a well-earned sleep. I would hate to be the one to wake him. I cannot, however, ignore my urge to press a kiss on his cheek. I pry open my sleep-lined eyes to make sure I’m aiming for the right place, and the sight that greets me causes my brain to falter. It’s quite sunny and bright. I must’ve slept for much of the morning. My eyes take a moment to adjust, but even before they have, the blurry, unfocused view presents something very wrong.

Fair hair in place of dark brown. Facial hair where I know there to be none. A mouth like that of a hamster’s and a thin, pointed nose and a long face, all of which I recognise, but not as Allan. No. I find myself in bed, about to kiss the cheek of his best friend. My eyes dart around. I realise I’m not even at home. What the hell!

Groggily, I sit up. My stomach turns. Am I that girl? Am I such an awful person to have unconsciously slept with my boyfriend’s best friend? I am well aware of the fact that I’m not a particularly ‘good’ person. I’ve had my fair share of selfish, rude and generally awful acts, and not all of which I can attribute to the fact that I live in an era now where certain things are more accepted than others- after all, I’ve been surrounded by rock stars all my life, bad behaviour taught or learnt, I’ve always been around it. This, however, I don’t remember at all. I’ve always been loyal and faithful. I’d never sleep with anyone other than Allan (unless he said I could, of course) least of all with Graham fucking Nash. Of all people!

Was I drunk? Was I high? I seriously consider it, though I don’t drink nor take drugs. I don’t even remember being anywhere I could’ve got spiked at. I was at home last night. And Graham hates me as much as I do him. Why would he even try to spike me? Perhaps he didn’t, and the night was just so awful, I blocked it from my memory. But what, what in the world would have persuaded me into Graham Nash’s bed? Why am I even at his house?

Oh, this is all too weird. I feel sick to my stomach with shame and guilt, though I’m sure I didn’t knowingly sleep with Graham. No one is going to look at this situation and see where I am coming from. Everyone will think me a liar.

While I try to think up some way out of this awful circumstance, I consider the big bedroom, the double bed. Actually, I’ve got to say, this doesn’t look anything like Graham’s place. Are we at a hotel? The leaking, built in wardrobes and messy cluttered beside tables tell me no. Are we at a friend’s place? The fact that I see trinkets belonging to Graham, as well as several clothes I’ve seen him wear, I guess that is a no too. Weird. More than weird. The nauseous feeling doubles. Nothing, nothing is right.

On the bedside table closest to me, I’m shocked to find my usual assortment of necklaces and bracelets I hardly ever wear. They’re all presents I keep in the draws of a small mirror jewellery box I’d had since I was a young girl. That sits at the very back of the table. In front, my two slender watches are dumped, one with a gold face that my sister gave me, the other with a grey, leather strap from my dad. They curl around each other like intertwining snakes, the grey one on top, as it was the last one I wore. In front of those are my two current notebooks. One is a hardback with gold polka dots on its cover, while the other is leather bound with engraved silver letters reading ‘notes.’ Both mine, both half full of meaningless scrawls written in my special black and silver fountain pen which sits atop the leather bound one, diagonal with the lid off. My wallet and keys are piled beside a lamp with a pearlescent white shade.

Not everything is mine, though. Attached to my keyring is a key I don’t recognise. It doesn’t open any door I’ve ever had to unlock. And there is a ring on top of my jewellery box. It has a twisted effect on it that makes it look similar to rope. I was never gifted anything even remotely like that, and I’d never buy myself a ring. I don’t wear them.

This is so uncomfortable. So unsettling. Why the hell is all my stuff here? Why would I have brought it? Even if it was just one of these things, why would I have had the impulse to bring it with me?

It gets even worse when cast my gaze to the floor. I had hoped to see a set of clothes I’d taken off last night- because it becomes apparent to me very quickly that I am not actually clad in anything apart from the bedsheets right now- which would make a speedy exit more possible. Unfortunately, I am faced with several day’s worth of my own clothes, dumped on the floor. I may be untidy, but I rarely leave that much lying around. And I certainly don’t leave my things all over someone else’s bloody floor. The clothes that aren’t mine, mixed in all the mess, I know to be Graham’s, about a week’s worth.

My tired, overwhelmed mind asks, ‘did I say here all week?’ I shake that thought away. I know what I’ve been doing all week. The band has been on tour and I went with them. Technically, Graham’s stuff shouldn’t be here either, unless he leaves his stuff all over the floors when he goes away. But that opens up even more questions I don’t have the capacity to even consider.

I have to prevent myself from screaming in confusion as I look up at the wall. A calendar hangs on a single, bent pin pushed into the wall paper. It shows a lovely sunset over some American horizon, as well as telling me that it’s September 1967, the same month, year, even day- since someone has ticked the days past- as when I went to sleep. Just… what?

As I stare helplessly at it, I feel something crawl up my back. The mattress behind me dips and a pair of arms wrap around me, lips brushing the back of my ear.

“You know we don’t have to get up yet, Luv.” Graham’s distinctive voice tells me that this is no dream. It’s as real as it can get. I feel his breath hitting the back of my neck, his words vibrating into my skin. He called me ‘luv.’ I shiver.

“No.” I mutter, “I do.” I go to toss the duvet off my body, when I remember that I’m still naked. No way Graham is going to get to see any more than he has already. I reach down beside and grasp a thick, grey jumper to cover my nakedness. As I put it on, I push Graham’s hands off of me. I see the surprise in his expression, but he still tries to be cool.

“Oh, at least don’t get dressed.” He groans. I shoot him a filthy look as I pull the duvet from me and kick my legs off the bed. Before I stand, I see a mixture of confusion and concern in his eyes. It looks very uncharacteristic for him, really unsettling. It’s like he genuinely doesn’t get why I’m suddenly so angry, like he doesn’t remember who I am, not only to him, but to his best fuckingfriend. Why, why would I ever be so friendly to him the morning after I’d cheated on the man I loved with him?

My legs feel weak as I stumble around the bed in search for a bathroom. Upon getting to my feet, a great pressure as heavy as an elephant weighs down on my bladder. I need to pee, yet have no recollection of where the loo is.

From behind me, Graham pipes up, “What are you…” I hear the swipe of the duvet being dragged off him too. The floor creaks a little as he stands up and his bare footfalls pad across it, heading towards me, “Are you ok?” With him trying to follow, I quicken my search, finally catching glimpse of tiles glinting in the low light feeding in through an ajar door. I push it open and leap in. The lock on it looks ancient and squeaks stiffly as I try to put up a wall between me and him. After putting all my weight behind it, I manage to pull it closed, finally feeling safe.

That is until I flick the light on and turn around. On a shelf on the wall, shower products are lined up. Many are brands I use, including a perfume I (try to) wear every day. My toothbrush stands in a translucent red cup beside the sink, with another one crossing over it.

As much as I need to pee, I also need to have a good scream. I don’t, I just knot my fingers in my hair and pull. I must be going fucking crazy.

But so is Graham. He calls in a half joking, half concerned tone, “Will you open up, Luv? I need to piss!”

“Fucking wait!” I squeal furiously. I cannot believe he’d think I’d ever open the door. Having sex is one thing. Doing your fucking business in front of someone is entirely another, something most people never do. Even angrier, I add, “And stop calling me ‘luv.’”

He falls silent. I pee in peace, though I can feel his bloody presence on the other side of that door. I can practically hear his brain struggling to find something else to say. To calm myself and try to piece together what that fuck is going on here, I recall the day previous.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, Allan and I had gotten home and fell asleep on the sofa. Neither one of us, once the acceptable morning hours came, wanted to wake, yet we heaved each other up with false words of encouragement and kisses. We almost made out when we shared a shower, but once more we were too tired and to concerned about the rest of the day for it to turn too interesting. I went to work dressed in the few clean clothes that awaited me at home after the tour, was hungry as soon as I got there as I’d skipped breakfast and I didn’t end up eating until lunchtime. When I came home, Allan was making dinner. We sat in front of the TV and promised each other we’d do nothing tomorrow, since we really had nothing on. Before conking out once more on the sofa, I persuaded Allan it was best we actually got into bed, so we dragged each other up the stairs, took off some, but not all, of our clothes, and lost consciousness almost as soon as our heads hit the pillows.

I didn’t go out. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Graham, or any of the band, since those early hours of the morning we came back from the tour. I certainly didn’t turn up at his… or whoever’s house, nor did I bring all my stuff with me to throw all over the floor… or set up on the bedside table… or stand on the shelf of the bathroom. This doesn’t make any sense at all.

Ok, if it weren’t for all my shit being here, I could explain this whole situation away, chalk it up to my first experience with sleepwalking or- more likely- an awful lack of any judgement. Even though the implications of that is pretty bad, I’d take having to get down on my knees and beg Allan to take me back despite me having slept with his best friend over… whatever I can call this fucking mess.

I dread heading out of the small, cool room into the oddly cosy bedroom, where Graham stands in wait for me, but I do, without hesitation. I’ve decided, I’ve got to see Allan. I have to explain to him what happened, even if I don’t know myself. I just feel like everything will fall into it’s right place if I see him. He’s always been the sensible one, the shy, sane one out of us two. Even if he’ll kill me, I’ve got to see him.

As I walk passed Graham, he caresses my cheek tenderly. Something else that I don’t get right now is why he’s being so… nice. Has he fallen for me? Poor boy has slept with me once and cares about me now? How sad. I brush him off as I look for a pair of trousers; I won’t bother with underwear. I just want to get the fuck out of here.

“Are you ok?” He asks again, his voice now displaying an undercurrent of frustration. I don’t answer, which doesn’t shut him up as I had hoped, “Bad dream?”

A wash of defensiveness rushes over me. Had I the ability to form coherent sentences I would’ve retorted, asked why the fuck he’d think I’d ever tell him if I’d had a restless night. He should assume as much. I have been in his bed after all.

Then he adds, “You used to get them when you were a kid, didn’t you?”

And I can’t hold myself much longer.

“What?” I spit. He looks wholly bewildered at my reaction, unable himself to think of an answer. I turn back to pulling on a pair of leggings just as he pulls be back into conversation.

“Niki, seriously, are you ok? You’re scaring me.” “I’m scaring you?” I parrot, furiously, then calm a little, “Look, whatever happened last night, can we forget about it. I’ve got to…”

He cuts in, “What happened? Are you sure you didn’t have a bad dream?”

“No, I fucking didn’t!” I cry. I’m getting nowhere! I want to get the fuck out.

Still stunned, he tries to calm me by suggesting, “Look, let’s just get up… have some breakfast, ok? I’ll cook.”

It’s in that moment, I realise he’s not going to get it, he won’t leave me alone. I don’t know what’s got him so clingy, but I have to take a different approach to this. Without saying anything, I nod in agreement and slowly sit on the bed as though I’ve calmed. He then tells me he’s just going to pee, giving me a small kiss before he goes. He doesn’t close the door properly- fucking gross- but he can’t see me, so I dart with nimble, silent movements, picking up a pair of socks off the floor as I make for the corridor outside of the room. I hurry down the stairs so quick I almost trip over my own movements.

Luckily, the front door is right at the bottom of the stairs. Unluckily, I’m stumped once again by what I see. There are two other doors, one leading into a living room, the other into a kitchen. More trinkets, more clothes, more décor meet my eyes. In the space between them, the tiny hallway at the bottom of the stairs, several coats hang on metal hooks. Some I know to be mine, one I wear practically daily, a blue trench coat with deep pockets big enough to hold A5 notebooks, which hangs in front of all the others. I pick that coat up, pull it on, then look despairingly below the others. There is a messy rack of shoes, again, a mixture of Graham’s and mine. I choose a pair of boots I can slip on and walk in without doing them up.

Suddenly, I hear Graham’s footsteps pound down the stairs. I peer over my shoulder, panicked. He stands three steps from the bottom floor, pulling on a flowy beige shirt, decorated with a series of hippy bead applique around the neck line. Other than that, he’s naked. Like a kid- and for the first time in my adult life- I shy away from the sight, instead looking desperately at the door.

“Niki, come on, it’s Sunday. Where the fuck are you going?”

Worked up, panicked and desperate, I clear my tear-clogged throat to reply, “To see Allan,” before swiftly pulling up the latch of the front door and squeezing through the tiny crack I open it to. There are a small set of three steps I almost hurl myself down, but I manage to grasp hold of a banister and safely get down onto the pavement.

Shit. I didn’t quite think this far. I’m faced with a street I don’t know, a set of houses I’ve never seen, no informative street signs and no sense of direction. I don’t even know if I’m in London! I mean, I assume I am. I look around at the other buildings surrounding and… I guess I am. But I’m hopeless. I’ve no idea where I am, I’ve no idea where Allan is, I’ve no idea where my home is. Basically, I’m lost, running from someone I think I’ve slept with. Graham will no doubt be following me out any second, so I have to be gone, but I don’t know where. Fuck!

I thrust my hands into my pockets and speed walk in a direction that looks as though it might lead to a main road. If I can get a taxi, I might be able to try and work out where the hell I am and go from there.

Then, as I’m hurrying along the quiet street, my fingers clasp around something in my pocket. I can feel coins, a tissue, and then something hard, like cardboard, with a dip in the middle. The dip seems to be made up of sections, many, thin section. I recognise it just by its feel. It may only be that old address book I got given a while back, but it feels like a lifesaver. I’m so glad that, not only do I always have it on me, I always have a pen too. I write down the details of all my friends in it, anyone important that I’ve met, anyone I want to stay in contact with. I also have mine and Allan’s home address in there, because I’m awful at remembering it. For once, I’m so glad I can be absentminded and write everything down. I pull the book out and flick through it’s pages.

Allan is there! My god, I could cry. I don’t, because I’m on a mission, but I could. I really could just sit down on the side of the road and bawl my eyes out. To stop myself, I walk a little quicker and glance, every so often, at a different page of my book. There are names in there that I do not know, people I’ve never met before. By Allan’s name, there is a someone called Jen with no address, no number, no last name. On the ‘E’ page, Eric Haydock is written in my handwriting. He was the old bassist for the Hollies before Bern, before I’d met the band. I was never acquainted with him, so why was he in my book, with a number scrawled there too? That’s not too weird, I guess. Of all the things that has happened today, finding a name in a book is hardly even shocking. What is annoying, however, is the feeling that I’m missing people. I can’t think who. It’s like they’ve been wiped from my book, so they’re wiped from my memory too.

It takes me a while to find somewhere I can hail a cab. One pulls up and the driver, a rough-spoken man, seems to know the address as I read it out to him. He knows the street.

“’s not too far from here.” He says and pulls out onto the road. The amount of traffic is minimal. People don’t usually go out on Sundays. I’m thankful, though I also half wish the journey would’ve taken longer. As soon as I’d done my part of speaking, placed my mission in someone else’s hand for the moment, a tear runs down my cheek. Once the first one is out, a whole stream follows. I bawl helplessly into my hands, unable to organise my thoughts, unable to see a clear course of action. It dawns on me, as does everything else, that seeing Allan may solve nothing. I don’t know what could possibly happen.

Mostly, I wish the journey was longer, so I’d have enough time to dry my tears before I go and see Allan. It is, however, not too short so that I don’t get to take in the surroundings. This is London, of course. The black cab gave it away. It’s a part I’m not properly familiar with, but at least I’m somewhere, a city, that I know. That narrows the number of unknowns down. Not too much, still too much to count, but I’ll take anything, anything that makes me feel more comfortable.

We end up down a street that looks pretty much the same as the one I’d escaped from. The driver helps me find which house exactly is Allan’s- I lean over to the front of the cab and show my address book to him, while he points out homes in hope that I can read the number beside the front doors. I then get out and find myself alone, standing on the doorstep of a nice looking home, beside a car in the driveway. I get that feeling, as if it ever left, that something is very wrong, but I’m still full of hope. I knock on the door.

Allan opens it pretty quickly. God, I almost cry when I see him, his dark, curly hair, his narrowed brown eyes adjusting to the light from outside, the half-smile on his lips. Without thinking twice, without even looking at him twice- I don’t need to, he looks so normal, which is such a pleasant change for me- I throw my arms around his neck and bury my face in his chest. I manage not to cry.

“Erm… hey Niki.” He mumbles, awkwardly. Almost instantly, that feeling of normality, the comfort of familiarity fades away. His arms hang loosely around my waist and he parts the embrace really quickly. He has yet to kiss me or even invite me in. “Are you ok?”

“Yes…” I say automatically, before my brain kicks in, “No… I’ve really no idea, Luv. I just need to see you and…” tears threaten again, so I bite my lip.

Allan seems like he doesn’t know what to do. It’s very unsettling. He knows me… or knew me, so well. Unsteadily, he steps aside and gestures, “Come in.”

How can he be as confused as I am? I hate it. As I walk through the dark hallway, I glimpse him to make sure he is my Allan. He’s dressed in a button up shirt he probably slept in and a pair of dark, soft-looking trousers with an elasticated waist that he no doubt pulled on to answer the door. He rarely wears much in bed, or, at least, he never did with me. As he shuts the door, I notice faint lines in his hair, which looks to me like he’s brushed it a little. He must’ve been awake before I turned up, yet it’s early on a Sunday. What reason would he have to be up?

He slips in front of me and guides me into what appears to be the only lit room, a joint kitchen/living space. A low, orange light beats down over in the living area, where two brown sofas are positioned at 90-degree angles from each other. The windows are all covered with brown blackout blinds, but floral curtains are already drawn letting in a little sunlight from outside. The rest of the room is mostly in darkness until Allan stands in the door way and lets me walk in. He flicks on the rest of the lights.

“Sorry.” I hear him say, “Jen’s not up yet.”

Jen? That girl in my address book. That’s why she didn’t have an address or number attached to her name. She lives here? With my Allan? My heart thumps like Bobby Elliot banging his drums on stage of a Hollies concert. Still, I don’t have much time to connect all the dots. Allan continues talking.

“Take a seat. You want something to drink?”

Allan hasn’t sounded this much like he was playing host since that first night he asked me round to his place. That was early 66. He was so stupidly shy, and sweet. So nervous. Probably because he knew I was taken, technically, by John Lennon.

John. The Beatles. That’s who was missing in my address book. That’s who I’d forgotten. My John, my Paul and George and Ringo. The boys I’d grown up with. How could I? How could they be written out of my history? My whole existence, my past, I could feel it slip away and nothing replaced it. I have no idea who I am.

Allan’s voice steals me away from my sudden crisis, “Niki?”

I realise I haven’t answered him.

“Erm, no thanks.” I say, taking a seat on the sofa by the arm. He’s very awkward and cautious and quiet as he perches on the other end, facing me. I try to smile at him. The best he can do back is half grin.

“I… um… just got a call from Graham.” He tells me. He sounds oddly calm about it.

“Oh God,” I groan in embarrassment and shame, “What did he say?”

His eyes dart away from mine, “He said you weren’t feeling yourself. And… you wanted to see me?” He sounds confused about the latter.

“Why would I not?”

“Well, Graham…”

Before he can continue, I roll my eyes in frustration and snap, “I’m sorry, but last time I checked, Graham wasn’t my fucking keeper.” Allan looks taken aback. It must be the first time I’ve ever spoken to him like that. We’ve rarely ever fought, and I’ve rarely ever been so angry. He has, but he hardly ever has taken it out on me. I feel bad. Quietly, I add, “You were,” in an attempt to remind him of us. But he takes a moment to reply.

“I don’t… understand.”

This is all very wrong. I can’t keep my cool much longer. I throw my head into my hands and mutter to myself, “Of course, you don’t, just like Graham suddenly actually cares about me and I fucking…” My voice trails off and my eyes begin to squeeze tears from the corners. I must look insane, but Allan is too polite, too caring to butt in. Calmly and fondly, he shuffles up closer, still a bit uptight, and he places a hand over my own.

“Graham… loves you.” He chuckles, lightly, though warily in case I take it the wrong way. I manage not to explode at him.

“You did.” I insist helplessly.

He doesn’t get it, of course. This whole day is so fucked up, I can’t take it anymore. I cannot stand the way he smiles softly at me, patronisingly as though I’m a kid talking nonsense.

“Of course, I do.” He says, “But in a different way. Come on,” He laughs, “Graham would kill me if I loved you like that!”

“Since when!” I growl.

Still calm, Allan responds, “Since 1950. For, like, 17 years.”

“But…” I feel my whole past being rewritten, “I only met you guys last year. I was… with the… Beatles”

Embarrassment washes over me, pinks my cheeks and laughs at me as Allan, very kindly, explains that I never met the Beatles, not properly. I’d seen them once or twice at the studio, they all had, the whole band. The only one who’d properly talked to them was Graham. That was before the whole ‘If I Needed Someone’ situation. Now the bands refused to talk to each other, and I refused to talk to them too. I didn’t know them, I didn’t have their numbers or addresses, I’d never been withJohn Lennon. Four wonderful men, huge parts of my life, my teenage years, my childhood in Liverpool, the early 60s in Studio 2. All gone, explained away. And Allan had not only summed up my entire new, confusing, alien life in around five minutes, but he isn’t as big a part of it as his best friend is. The man I had practically hated, or at the very least, tolerated on the rare occasion, was now my boyfriend, my partner, had been since we’d been old enough to understand the word.

Meanwhile, Allan was married.

A medium-heighted, wide-smiling girl with dyed blonde hair came padding slowly down the stairs, her steps so soft we hardly heard her. Jen leans prettily in the doorway and waves hello, blowing a kiss at Allan before she sees me.

“Hello Niki!” She cheerily exclaims, “I didn’t know you were coming round.”

I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge her. My eyes darted from her to down to Allan for an explanation. Then I caught sight of a glinting gold band around his ring finger.

My heart stopped beating.

“Is Graham here too?” She innocently asks. I see Allan shake his head furiously, telling her to change the subject, but the damage is already done, I’m already hurt, just by her presence, not even by her words.

“No, just Niki. Will you get some tea?” Allan deflects the question and Jen, smiling, walks over to the kitchen area. While her back is turned, he tries to ask if I want to go into another room, but he can’t even catch my gaze. I’m staring at him, not seeing. Tears burn the back of my throat.

I have to leave.

Without a word, I get up. I wrap my coat around me, hands thrust into the pockets, and I head for the door.

“Niki.” Allan calls after me. I hear Jen turn around and ask what the matter is. Allan doesn’t answer her. He follows me into the hallway. I pull open the door and don’t look back, I can’t stand to, I can’t stand this Allan, this version of him who doesn’t know me as he should. This whole world is fucked. My life is now fucked.

I hop out into the street, turning my coat collars up to hide my tear stained cheeks. I’ve no idea where I am, not only physically, but mentally too.

Why, if this is my life, do I remember another as though it were real? Why, if this is not my life, do others think that it is and why has everything changed overnight? And why, if this is a dream, have I not woken up by now? Why, when I can feel very real pain right now? My chest aches, my lungs burn, my head throbs with all these questions swimming inside it. And what can I do now? I don’t have Allan to talk to. I can’t imagine unloading all this onto Graham. I don’t have the Beatles, nor Bri- Brian Epstein- who I adored. Who, who can I look to for a slice of normality?

I open my address book while standing across the road from a telephone box. I’ve walked a few blocks from Allan’s home and I’ve decided I need someone I can vent all my frustration onto, someone who could also pick me up, perhaps. A friend whose relationship with me could not have changed over the course of this switch. I file through the names in my book. They go back as far as Allan and Graham’s childhood in Salford, most I’d heard in passing conversations, almost always from Allan’s mouth, his friends, even some of his family. Being written in would suggest that I knew them too. Others, I really have no idea who they are. I skip over them. The pages fall to the ‘H’ section and there is scrawled an answer to who I could call.

Tony Hicks.

God, that boy would listen. I’m sure of it. He’ll listen to me, even if only because he is too polite and sweet to tell me to shut up. He’s kind, a good laugh, a good friend, as well as being a fucking epic guitarist. I hurry across the road, dip into my coat pockets to find some money and dial his number as I get into the phone box.

He picks up in a few rings, though it feels like forever between the last number I press and the sound of his voice. I don’t bother with pleasantries, I’m too desperate, too excited.

After he says hello, I ramble into, “Tony, it’s Niki. Do me a favour. I really need to come and talk to you, ok?”

“Ok…” He sceptically replies. He’s quiet. I think he’s been asleep. I feel bad for waking him, if I did.

“Please, if Graham or Allan phone, don’t pick up! They think I’m insane, and I might be, but I have to talk to someone.” I sound so desperate, my tone choked and hurried. I think he picks up on it. He sounds a little more awake when he speaks again, as though the fear in my voice has jogged his brain into gear.

“Are you ok?”

God, if I hear that question one more time! No, I’m not ok, I’m not. I know he’s trying to be nice. I know that everyone is, but it’s a dumb fucking question, because everyone expects you just to say yes, and if you don’t, if you say no, you look like you’re just grasping for attention. Still, maybe I want attention at the moment, just someone to listen.

“No,” I admit, “Just… please. I’ll be over soon.”

“Where are you? I’ll come and get you. That means I won’t be here if the others call.”

I sigh. It’s the first time I’ve felt content since this morning, before I turned around and realised I was locked in a hug with Graham Nash. I could cry from the relief. This may not bring my life back, it may not change anything, but Tony’ll listen to me and help straighten things out, even if he too thinks I’m crazy.

“Ok,” I say, “Ok thank you.” Then I tell him the name of the street, “It’s near Allan’s. I’ll explain once you get here.”

“OK. See you in a minute.”

I’ve no way of telling the time- I didn’t bring either of my watches. I forgot underwear, never mind a watch. It’s cold out. Bracing September air blows past me. Everything seems to hang in it, every uncertainty. I won’t know when Tony shows up; I don’t know which car is his. I don’t know what he’ll look like, who he might be with. God, he could be married for all I know.

I just let time tick by, not thinking of how slow or fast, hardly thinking at all. I watch every car that passes, every person as I stand rigidly against the wall of someone’s home. My arms are crossed over my chest, my legs crossed at the ankles. I find myself rocking to keep me warm, like a madman. A song plays in my head, ‘If I Needed Someone.’ I always liked both versions of the song. I always thought the Hollies did a good job of it, almost as good as the Beatles. I remember when they were recording Rubber Soul, I’d beg the three boys, John, George and Paul, to do the beginning of Nowhere Man for me. It was the first time I’d consciously listened to people do a three-part harmony until I started listening to the Hollies. But none of this happened.

As I say, I’ve no idea how long I stand there. Perhaps half an hour. It’s of no really matter, however, and regardless of everything, a car pulls up to the pavement down the road a bit and, though I’m several yards away, I can tell that the man stepping from it is the young-looking Tony Hicks. I practically run at him, bawling into his shoulder.

“Hey,” He croons, “What’s up?”

“Oh God,” I cry when I manage to make coherent sentences, “I’m no idea, I think I’m going crazy.”

“I highly doubt that.”

This is the sound of dancing architecture “I get to corner Ralf Hütter in a cluttered backwater of EMI house, for a conversational nexus in which we poke theories at each other through the language barrier… Frank Zappa said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” This is the sound of dancing architecture…“ An interview with Ralf Hütter by Andrew Darlington, 1981 (the taped conversation is written up later). Red man. Stop. Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier. Green man. Go. People respond, regulated by the mechanical switch of coloured lights. Crossing the Pelican towards EMI House it’s easy to submerge in a long droning procession of Kraftwerkian images, pavement thick with lumbering showroom dummies reacting to Pavlovian stimuli, parallel lines of thruways, multi-legged ferroconcrete skyways, gloss-front office-blocks waterfalling from heaven, individuality drowned, starved to extinction, etc, etc. This could get boring. This could be cliché. Ideas prompt unbidden, strategies of sending my cassette recorder on alone to talk to the Kraftwerk answering machine. That’s Kraftwerk, isn’t it? I got news for you. It ain’t. Ralf Hütter (electronics and voice) is neat, polite, talks quietly with Teutonic inflection, and totally lacks visible cybernetic attachments. He’s dressed in regulation black — as per stereotype — slightly shorter than me which makes him five-foot-eight-inches, or perhaps nine, hair razored sharp over temples not to allow traces of decadent side-burns. Shoes are black, but sufficiently scuffed to betray endearingly human imperfections. He walks up and down reading review stats thoughtfully provided by EMI’s press division. Seems it’s a good review in The Times? Strong on technical details… yes? "No. The writer says we play exactly as on the records, which is not so.” He is evidently chagrined by this particular line of criticism, which is an interesting reaction. I file it for reference. But then again he’s just got up and come direct from his hotel. He wants breakfast. Coffee and cakes. An hour or so to talk to me, then down to Oxford for the dauntingly exacting Kraftwerk sound check rituals. The other Kraftwerkers — Florian Schneider (voice and electronics), Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür (both electronic percussion) are otherwise occupied. So every vowel must count. I extend a tentative theory. The image Kraftwerk project of modernity, it seems to me, is largely derived from twenties and thirties originals: the Futurist dedication to movement and kinetic energy; the Bauhaus emphasis on clean, strictly functional lines; the Fritz Lang humans-as-social-ciphers thing. Even an album ‘inspired’ by Soviet Constructivist El Lissitzky with all the machine-art connotations that implies. Doesn’t Hütter find this contradictory? “No. In the twenties there was Futurism in Italy, Germany, France. Then in the thirties it stopped, retrograded into Fascism, bourgeois reactionary tendencies, in Germany especially…” And time froze for forty years. Until the Kraftwerk generation merely picked up the discarded threads, carried on where they’d left off. After the war “Germany went through a period with our parents who were so obsessed with getting a little house, a little car, the Volkswagen or Mercedes in front, or both All these very materialistic orientations turning Germany into an American colony, no new idea were really happening. We were like the first generation born after the war, so when we grew up we saw that all around us, and we turned to other things.” Kissing to life a dormant culture asleep four decades? But computers only print out data they’re programmed with, so working on this already grossly over-extended mechanistic principle I aim to penetrate Kraftwerk motivations. The dominant influences on them then were — what? American Rock? “No.” In that case, do Kraftwerk fit into the Rock spectrum? “No. Anti - Rock'n'Roll.” So their music is a separate discipline? “Yes, in a way, even though we play in places like Hammersmith. We are more into environmental music.” So if not Rock, then what? — Berio? Stockhausen? “Yes and no. We listened to that on the radio, it was all around. Especially the older generation of electronic people, the more academic composers — although we are not like that. They seem to be in a category within themselves, and only circulating within their own musical family. They did institutional things — while we are out in the streets. But I think from the sound, yes. From the experimenting with electronics, definitely. The first thing for us was to find a sound of Germany that was of our generation, that was the first records we do. First going into sound, then voices. Then we went further into voices and words, being more and more precise. And for this we were heartily attacked.” He mimics the outrage of his contemporaries — “You can’t do that… Electronics? What are you doing? Kraftwerk? German group — German name? It’s stupid. Music is Anglo-American — it has to be, even when it is in Germany.” The incredulity remains: “Still today, you know. Can you imagine? — German books with English titles, German bands singing English songs. It’s ridiculous!” Of course it is. But didn’t the Beatles do some German-language records at one time? “Sure” shrugs Hütter, friendly beyond all reasonable expectations. “They were even more open than most of the Germans…” I’d anticipated some mutual incomprehensibility interface with his broken English and my David Hockney Yorkshire. You find the phrasing strange? I’ll tell you… when the possibility of doing this interview first cropped up I ransacked my archives and dug out everything on Kraftwerk I could find. Now it occurs to me that each previous press chat-piece, from Creem to Melody Maker, have transposed Herr Hütter’s every utterance into perfect English. Which is not the case. His eloquence is daunting, but it inevitably has very pronounced Germanic cadences. Sometimes he skates around searching for the correct word, other times he uses the right word in the wrong context. When he says “we worked on the next album and the next album, and just so on”, it really emerges as “ve vork on ze next album und ze next, und just zo on”. It might be interesting to write up the whole interview tape with that phonetic accuracy, but it would be difficult to compose and impossible to read. Nevertheless, I’m not going to bland out his individuality by disinfecting his speech peculiarities, or ethnically cleansing his phrases entirely… But now he’s in flight and I’m chasing, trying to nail down details. In my head it’s now turn of the decade — sixties bleeding into the seventies, and this thing is called Krautrock. Oh, wow! Hard metallic grating noises, harder, more metallic, more grating and noisier than Velvet Underground, nihilistic Germanic flirtations with the existential void. Amon Düül II laying down blueprints to be electro-galvanised into a second coming by PiL, Siouxsie & The Banshees and other noise terrorists. Cluster. Faust. Then there is the gratuitous language violence of Can, sound that spreads like virus infection from Floh de Cologne and Neu, and Ash Ra Temple who record an album with acid prophet and genetic outlaw Timothy Leary. Was there a feeling of movement among these bands? A kinship? “No.” One note on the threshold of audibility, shooting down fantasies. “In Germany we have no capital. After the war we don’t have a centre or capital anymore. So instead we have a selection of different regional cultures. We — Kraftwerk — come from industrial Düsseldorf. But Amon Düül II came from Munich, which has a different feeling. Munich is quite relaxed. There’s a lot of landscape around.” Now for me it’s not just some off-the-top-of-the-head peripheral observation, but the corner-stone of my entire musical philosophy that this affable German is effortlessly swotting, and I’m not letting him off lightly. I restate histories carefully. American Rock'n'Roll happened in 1954 — Memphis, Sun Studios. From there it spread in a series of shock waves, reaching and taking on the regional characteristics of each location it hit. By the mid-sixties a distinctive UK variant had come into being, identifiably evolving out of exposure to US vinyl artefacts, but incontrovertibly also home-grown. Surely Krautrock was evidence that Germany had also acquired its own highly individual Rock voice? It seems to me there is a common feeling, a shared voice among these diverse groups. But he’s not buying. You don’t think so? “No. At least not as far as we were concerned.” When they started out they recorded in German-language. „We always record in German” he corrects emphatically. „Then we do — like in films, synchronised versions for English. The original records are all German, but we also do French, and now Japanese versions. We are very into the internationalist part.” Continuing this trans-Europe theme he suddenly suggests „Britain is a very historical society. The Establishment. The hierarchy. We come here and we feel that immediately. On the one hand you have this very modern…” he tails off. Starts again, „it’s a schizophrenic country, a modern people, new music and everything, but on the other hand the… how can I say it, a theatrical establishment.” I retaliate, yes — but surely it could equally be argued that all Europe forms a common cultural unit attempting to survive between the historic power-block forces of the USA and the old Soviet Union? Indeed, to journalist Andy Gill, Kraftwerk’s music is „promoting the virtues of cybernetic cleanliness and European culture against the more sensual, body-orientated nature of most Afro-American derived music” (‘Mojo’s August 1987). Europe shares a common heritage uniting Britain, Germany and France, which are all being subtly subverted by a friendly invasion of American Economic and McCultural influences, movies, records, clothes? Witter himself once said „in Germany, Pop music is a cultural import”. „Yes, I know. Certainly when we came to Birmingham (England) we thought it was similar to Düsseldorf. There’s no question. But in Germany it happens even more though, because here in England at least you notice, you know the language and everything. In Germany they don’t notice, it was just taken over.” I’d always considered the German language to be a defence against foreign influence. It was far easier for mainstream British culture to be accessed, and infiltrated because of a common American-English language. In France, for example, the Government is actively resisting the 'Anglicisation’ of their language through 'Franglaise’, because they rightly see its corruption as the thin end of the wedge. “Maybe. That should be checked. But you, together with the Americans had another situation to start with. After the war, Germany was finished. I’m not saying why or whatever, that’s OK. But when I grew up we used to play around the bomb-fields and the destroyed houses. This was just part of our heritage, part of our software. It was our education and cultural background…” The spectre of Basil Fawlty springs unbidden. Earlier an entirely innocent question about Kraftwerk’s origins had dislodged similar sentiments. He’d spoken of Germany’s Fascist years — “in Germany especially, that’s what I mostly knew about, then all the (artistic / creative) people emigrated, Einstein had to leave, and everybody knows the reasons. And then only after the war — he came back. But I think Germany went through a period, with our parents, who had never had anything. They went through two wars…” Breakfast becomes manifest. Mushroom quiche — no meat — followed by a choice of apricot or apple flan, plus two coffees. I sit opposite him, tape machine on the floor between us picking up air, the windows of EMI House blanding out over the trees of Manchester Square. I’m marshalling scores. So for, not content with winning each verbal exchange hands down, Ralf Hütter has also squashed each of my most cherished illusions about Krautrock. But on the plus side, massive giga-jolts of respect are due here. Long before the world had heard of Bill Gates or William Gibson, when Silicon Valley was still just a valley and mail had yet to acquire its 'e’ pre-fix, Kraftwerk were literally inventing and assembling their own instruments, expanding the technosphere by rewiring the sonic neural net, and defining the luminous futures of what we now know as global electronica. So perhaps it’s time to probe more orthodox histories? It seems to me there are two distinct phases to Kraftwerk’s career. Or perhaps even three. The first five years devoted purely to experimental forays into synchromeshed avant-electronics, producing the batch of albums issued in Britain through Vertigo — Kraftwerk in 1972, Ralf Und Florian the following year, the seminal Autobahn in 1974, and the compilation Exceller 8 in 1975. Then they switch to EMI, settle on a more durable line-up and the subsequent move into more image-conscious material, a zone between song and tactile atmospherics. The third, and current phase, involves a long and lengthening silence.   "No, it wasn’t like that” says Hütter. “It was…” his hand indicates a level plane. 'There was never a break. It was a continual evolution. We had our studios since 1970, so we always worked on the next album, and the next album, and so on. I think Düsseldorf therefore was very good because we brought in other people, painters, poets, so that we associated ourselves with…“ his sometimes faulty English — interfacing with my even more faulty German — breaks down. The words don’t come. So he switches direction. “Also we had some classical training before that [Ralf and Florian met at the Düsseldorf Conservatory], so we were very disciplined.” Others in this original extended family of neo-Expressionist electro-subversives included Conny Plank (who was later to produce stuff for Annie Lennox’ The Tourists, and Ultravox), Thomas Homann and Klaus Dinger (later of Neu), artist Karl Klefisch (responsible for the highly effective Man Machine sleeve), and Emil Schult (who co-composed Trans-Europe Express). In the subsequent personnel file, as well as Hütter, there is Florian Schneider who also operates electronics and sometimes robotic vocals. While across the years of their classic recordings they are set against Karl Bortos and Wolfgang Flür who both manipulate electronic percussion. I ask if they always operate as equal partners. “Everybody has their special function within the group, one which he is good at and likes to do the most.” It was never just Ralf und Florian plus a beatbox rhythm section? “No. It’s just that we started historically all that time ago and worked for four years with about twenty percussionists, and they would never go into electronics, so we had to step over, banging away and things like that. And then Wolfgang came in.” With that sorted out I ask if he enjoyed touring. „Yes, basically, because we don’t do it so often. But we also enjoy working in our studios in Düsseldorf, we shouldn’t tour too much otherwise… we get lost somewhere, maybe! We get too immunised. When you have too much you must shut down because you get too many sounds and visions from that tour. For the first five years we toured always in Germany on the Autobahns — that’s where that album came from. Since 1975 we do other countries as well.” They first toured the USA in March 1975, topping the bill over British Prog-Rockers Greenslade, then — leaving an American Top Thirty hit, they went on to play eight British dates in June set up for them by manager Ira Blacker. How much of that early music was improvised? Was the earlier material 'freer’? Kraftwerk numbered Karl Klaus Roeder on violin and guitar back then, so are the newer compositions more structured? „No. We are going more… now that we play longer, work longer than ten years, we know more and every afternoon when we are in the Concert Hall or somewhere in the studio we just start the machines playing and listen to this and that. Just yesterday we composed new things. Once in Edinburgh we composed a new piece which we even included in that evening’s show. New versions on old ideas. So we are always working because otherwise we should get bored just repeating. And it’s not correct what he (the hostile gig reviewer) was saying — that we play on stage exactly like we sound on the record. That’s complete rubbish. It means people don’t even notice and they don’t listen. They go instead over to the Bar for a drink! We, our music is very basic, the compositions are never complex or never complicated. More sounds — KLINK! KLUNK!! Metallic sound. We go for this sound composition more than music composition. Only now they are thematically more precise than they were before.” After so long within the genre don’t they find electronics restricting? „No, just the opposite.” Words precise with the sharp edge of Teutonic resonance. „We can play anything. The only restrictions we do find are, like in writing, as soon as you have a paper and pen — or a computer or a cassette recorder and a microphone, and you bring ideas, you find the limitation is in what you program rather than what is in the microphone or the cassette. You — as a writer, writing this interview, can’t say that the piece you are writing is not good because the word processor did not pick out the right words for you. It’s the same with us. If we make a bad record it’s because we are not in a good state of mind.” Change of tack. There’s a lot of Kraftwerkian influence around. Much of current electro-Dance seems to be plugged directly into the vaguely 'industrial’ neuro-system that Hütter initially delineated, while dedicated eighties survivalist cults Depeche Mode and Human League also have Kraftwerk DNA in their gene-code. He nods sagely. “There’s a very good feeling in England now. It was all getting so… historical.” Is the same thing happening in Germany now? Is there a good Rock scene there? “No. But New Music (Neu Musik).” Hütter’s opinions on machine technology have been known to inspire hacks of lesser literary integrity to sprees of wild Thesaurus-ransacking adjectival overkill, their vocabularies straining for greater bleakness, more clone-content, 'Bladerunner’ imagery grown bloated and boring through inept repetition. And sure, Kr-art-werk is all geometrical composition, diagonal emphasis, precision honed etc, but their imagery is not entirely without precedent. Deliberately so. Their 'Man-Machine’ album track “Metropolis” obviously references German Fritz Lang’s 1926 proto-SF Expressionist movie. The sleeve also acknowledges the 'inspiration’ of Bauhaus constructivist El Lissitzky. I went on to hazard the connections with German modern classical music bizorro Karlheinz Stockhausen — particularly on Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity album, where they use the 'musique concrete’ technique of surgical-splicing different sounds together from random areas. Radioland uses drop-in short-wave blips, bursts and static twitterings, Transistor has sharp pre-sample edits, alongside the pure found-sound audio-collage The News. A technique that resurfaces as late as Electric Cafe, where The Telephone Song is made up of 'phone bleeps and telecommunication bloopery. He’s familiar with the input. Immediately snaps back the exact location of the ideas — Kurzwellen, from Stockhausen’s back-catalogue. And what about the aural applications of Brion Gysin/William Burroughs’ literary cut-up experiments? Is there any interaction there? “Maybe” he concedes. “'Soft Machine’, contact with machines. But we are more Germanic.” He pauses, then suggests “we take from everywhere. That’s how we find most of our music. Out of what we find in the street. The Pocket Calculator in the Department Stores.” The music is the message — 'the perfect Pop song for the tribes of the global village’ as Hütter once described it. The medium and the form? “If the music can’t speak for itself then why make music? Then we can be writers directly. If I could speak really everything I want with words then I should be working in literature, in words. But I can’t, I never can say anything really, I can’t even hardly talk to the audience. I don’t know what to say. But when we make music, everything keeps going, it’s just the field we are working in, or if we make videos we are more productive there.” I quote back from an interview he did with Q magazine in July 1991 where he suggests that traditional musical skills are becoming increasingly redundant. “With our computers, this is already taken care of,” he explains. “So we can now spend more time structuring the music. I can play faster than Rubenstein with the computer, so it [instrumental virtuosity] is no longer relevant. It’s getting closer to what music is all about: thinking and hearing.” So technology should be interpreted as a potentially liberating force? “Not necessarily. I don’t always find that. Dehumanising things have to be acknowledged. Maybe if you want to become human, first you have to be a showroom dummy, then a robot, and maybe one day…” An expressive wave. “People tend to overestimate themselves. I would never say I am very human. I still have doubts. I can project myself as a semi-god. I can do that. The tools exist for me to achieve that. But I’d rather be more modest about this, about our real function in this society, in these blocks here,” indicating out through the plate glass, across the square, to the city towers of finance and global commerce beyond. “People overestimate themselves. They think they are important. They think they are human.” I’m out of synchronisation again. Surely, if people have to extricate themselves from the machinery they have created, to become human, then it’s due to the imperfections of the technology — not the people. Machines are intended to serve, if they do otherwise, they malfunction. “Not so. They should not be the new slaves. We are going more for friendship and co-operation with machines. Because then, if we treat them nice, then they treat us nice. You know, there are so many people who go in for machines, who when you come to their homes their telephones are falling to pieces, their music centres don’t function, the television set is ruined. But if you take care of your machines then they will live longer. They have a life of their own. They have their own life-span. They have a certain hour of duration. There are certain micro-electronics which work a thousand hours. Then there is a cassette recorder battery which operates ten or twelve hours.” The mentality you oppose, then, is that of conspicuous consumption, planned obsolescence, the psychology of 'a spoilt child’? “The energy crisis, the whole thing is a result of thinking that everything is there, we just have to use it, take this, and — PTOOOOFFF! — throw it away. But make sure that the neighbours see! This whole attitude of disassociating oneself from machines — humans here and machines over there. When you work so much with machines — as we do — then you know that has to change.” Earlier he’d spoken of growing up 'playing around the bomb-fields and destroyed houses’ in the wake of WWII, so this respect for material possessions is perhaps understandable. But he sees beyond this. He sees machines having the potential to free people physically from unnecessary labour, and culturally to create whole new thinking. “I mean — where is my music without the synthesiser? Where is it?” The music, the intelligence, is in your head. Without that the synth is just….“ "Yes, bringing it about! The catalyst. We are partners. We two can together make good music, if we are attuned to each other.” But you could operate another instrument. The vehicle you use is incidental. You could walk out this building, buy a new synth here in London, and play it just as well as your own equipment in Düsseldorf. “Yes. That is because I have this relationship with this type of thing.” I’m reproducing this exactly as it happens, and still I’m not exactly sure what he’s getting at. Perhaps something is lost in the language gap. Like earlier, he’d said “I would never say I am very human” and I’d accepted it first as role playing — until he’d made it obvious that he equates 'becoming human’ with 'achieving freedom’. Humanity is something that has to be earned. You can’t be robot and human. But this is not a natural conversation. This is on interview. A marketing exercise designed to sell Kraftwerk records by projecting certain consumer-friendly imagery. He is playing games, and this cyber-spiel is what journalists expect from Kraftwerk? But to Ralf Hütter there seems to be more to it than that. He believes what he is saying. At least on one level. Some impenetrable levels of ambiguity are at work concerning this alleged relationship to technology. Baffled, I skate around it. What crafty work is afoot for the future? “For me? For Kraftwerk? Well, certain things that I had to remember and memorise and think about are now programmed and stored. So there’s no restriction that we have to rehearse manually. There’s no physical restriction. I can liberate myself and go into other areas. I function more now as software. I’m not so much into hardware. I’m being much more soft now since I have transferred certain thoughts into hardware. That is why we put those two words together Software/Hardware on the album. Because it is like a combination of the two — Man/ Machine — otherwise it would not be happening. We can play anything. Our type of set-up — and group, the studio, the computers and everything. Anything.” So what’s new in electronics, Ralf? “What we find now is like, a revolution in machines. They are bringing back all the garbage now that has been put into them for the last hundred years and we are facing a second, third and fourth Industrial Revolution. Computers. Nano-electronics. Maybe then we come back into Science Fiction? I don’t know.” Then, on inspiration, “there’s another thing coming out. 'Wet-Ware’, and we function also — in a way, as Wet-Ware.” I’m hit by a sudden techno-blur of off-the-wall ideas, imperfectly understood concepts of some electro-erotic wet ’T’-shirt ritual in the pale blue wash of sterile monitors. What is 'Wet-Ware’, Ralf? Spoken with bated breath. And he explains. Like hardware is machines. Software is the data that is fed into them. “Wet-Ware is anything biochemical. The biological element in the machine!” The programmer? I see. Fade into intimations of cybernetic übermensch conspiracies. So with these limitless vistas of techno-tomorrows, Kraftwerk will continue for some time yet? "Yoh. Yes.” Pause, then the laugh opens up, “… until we fall off the stage!” Auf Wiedersehen, Ralf… Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier…

This is the sound of dancing architecture

“I get to corner Ralf Hütter in a cluttered backwater of EMI house, for a conversational nexus in which we poke theories at each other through the language barrier… Frank Zappa said "writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” This is the sound of dancing architecture…“

An interview with Ralf Hütter by Andrew Darlington, 1981 (the taped conversation is written up later).

Red man. Stop. Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier. Green man. Go. People respond, regulated by the mechanical switch of coloured lights. Crossing the Pelican towards EMI House it’s easy to submerge in a long droning procession of Kraftwerkian images, pavement thick with lumbering showroom dummies reacting to Pavlovian stimuli, parallel lines of thruways, multi-legged ferroconcrete skyways, gloss-front office-blocks waterfalling from heaven, individuality drowned, starved to extinction, etc, etc. This could get boring. This could be cliché. Ideas prompt unbidden, strategies of sending my cassette recorder on alone to talk to the Kraftwerk answering machine. That’s Kraftwerk, isn’t it? I got news for you. It ain’t.

Ralf Hütter (electronics and voice) is neat, polite, talks quietly with Teutonic inflection, and totally lacks visible cybernetic attachments. He’s dressed in regulation black — as per stereotype — slightly shorter than me which makes him five-foot-eight-inches, or perhaps nine, hair razored sharp over temples not to allow traces of decadent side-burns. Shoes are black, but sufficiently scuffed to betray endearingly human imperfections. He walks up and down reading review stats thoughtfully provided by EMI’s press division. Seems it’s a good review in The Times? Strong on technical details… yes? "No. The writer says we play exactly as on the records, which is not so.” He is evidently chagrined by this particular line of criticism, which is an interesting reaction. I file it for reference. But then again he’s just got up and come direct from his hotel. He wants breakfast. Coffee and cakes. An hour or so to talk to me, then down to Oxford for the dauntingly exacting Kraftwerk sound check rituals. The other Kraftwerkers — Florian Schneider (voice and electronics), Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür (both electronic percussion) are otherwise occupied. So every vowel must count. I extend a tentative theory. The image Kraftwerk project of modernity, it seems to me, is largely derived from twenties and thirties originals: the Futurist dedication to movement and kinetic energy; the Bauhaus emphasis on clean, strictly functional lines; the Fritz Lang humans-as-social-ciphers thing. Even an album ‘inspired’ by Soviet Constructivist El Lissitzky with all the machine-art connotations that implies. Doesn’t Hütter find this contradictory? “No. In the twenties there was Futurism in Italy, Germany, France. Then in the thirties it stopped, retrograded into Fascism, bourgeois reactionary tendencies, in Germany especially…” And time froze for forty years. Until the Kraftwerk generation merely picked up the discarded threads, carried on where they’d left off. After the war “Germany went through a period with our parents who were so obsessed with getting a little house, a little car, the Volkswagen or Mercedes in front, or both All these very materialistic orientations turning Germany into an American colony, no new idea were really happening. We were like the first generation born after the war, so when we grew up we saw that all around us, and we turned to other things.” Kissing to life a dormant culture asleep four decades?

But computers only print out data they’re programmed with, so working on this already grossly over-extended mechanistic principle I aim to penetrate Kraftwerk motivations. The dominant influences on them then were — what? American Rock? “No.” In that case, do Kraftwerk fit into the Rock spectrum? “No. Anti - Rock'n'Roll.” So their music is a separate discipline? “Yes, in a way, even though we play in places like Hammersmith. We are more into environmental music.”

So if not Rock, then what? — Berio? Stockhausen? “Yes and no. We listened to that on the radio, it was all around. Especially the older generation of electronic people, the more academic composers — although we are not like that. They seem to be in a category within themselves, and only circulating within their own musical family. They did institutional things — while we are out in the streets. But I think from the sound, yes. From the experimenting with electronics, definitely. The first thing for us was to find a sound of Germany that was of our generation, that was the first records we do. First going into sound, then voices. Then we went further into voices and words, being more and more precise. And for this we were heartily attacked.” He mimics the outrage of his contemporaries — “You can’t do that… Electronics? What are you doing? Kraftwerk? German group — German name? It’s stupid. Music is Anglo-American — it has to be, even when it is in Germany.” The incredulity remains: “Still today, you know. Can you imagine? — German books with English titles, German bands singing English songs. It’s ridiculous!”

Of course it is. But didn’t the Beatles do some German-language records at one time? “Sure” shrugs Hütter, friendly beyond all reasonable expectations. “They were even more open than most of the Germans…” I’d anticipated some mutual incomprehensibility interface with his broken English and my David Hockney Yorkshire. You find the phrasing strange? I’ll tell you… when the possibility of doing this interview first cropped up I ransacked my archives and dug out everything on Kraftwerk I could find. Now it occurs to me that each previous press chat-piece, from Creem to Melody Maker, have transposed Herr Hütter’s every utterance into perfect English. Which is not the case. His eloquence is daunting, but it inevitably has very pronounced Germanic cadences. Sometimes he skates around searching for the correct word, other times he uses the right word in the wrong context. When he says “we worked on the next album and the next album, and just so on”, it really emerges as “ve vork on ze next album und ze next, und just zo on”. It might be interesting to write up the whole interview tape with that phonetic accuracy, but it would be difficult to compose and impossible to read. Nevertheless, I’m not going to bland out his individuality by disinfecting his speech peculiarities, or ethnically cleansing his phrases entirely…

But now he’s in flight and I’m chasing, trying to nail down details. In my head it’s now turn of the decade — sixties bleeding into the seventies, and this thing is called Krautrock. Oh, wow! Hard metallic grating noises, harder, more metallic, more grating and noisier than Velvet Underground, nihilistic Germanic flirtations with the existential void. Amon Düül II laying down blueprints to be electro-galvanised into a second coming by PiL, Siouxsie & The Banshees and other noise terrorists. Cluster. Faust. Then there is the gratuitous language violence of Can, sound that spreads like virus infection from Floh de Cologne and Neu, and Ash Ra Temple who record an album with acid prophet and genetic outlaw Timothy Leary. Was there a feeling of movement among these bands? A kinship?

“No.” One note on the threshold of audibility, shooting down fantasies. “In Germany we have no capital. After the war we don’t have a centre or capital anymore. So instead we have a selection of different regional cultures. We — Kraftwerk — come from industrial Düsseldorf. But Amon Düül II came from Munich, which has a different feeling. Munich is quite relaxed. There’s a lot of landscape around.”

Now for me it’s not just some off-the-top-of-the-head peripheral observation, but the corner-stone of my entire musical philosophy that this affable German is effortlessly swotting, and I’m not letting him off lightly. I restate histories carefully. American Rock'n'Roll happened in 1954 — Memphis, Sun Studios. From there it spread in a series of shock waves, reaching and taking on the regional characteristics of each location it hit. By the mid-sixties a distinctive UK variant had come into being, identifiably evolving out of exposure to US vinyl artefacts, but incontrovertibly also home-grown. Surely Krautrock was evidence that Germany had also acquired its own highly individual Rock voice? It seems to me there is a common feeling, a shared voice among these diverse groups. But he’s not buying. You don’t think so? “No. At least not as far as we were concerned.”

When they started out they recorded in German-language. „We always record in German” he corrects emphatically. „Then we do — like in films, synchronised versions for English. The original records are all German, but we also do French, and now Japanese versions. We are very into the internationalist part.” Continuing this trans-Europe theme he suddenly suggests „Britain is a very historical society. The Establishment. The hierarchy. We come here and we feel that immediately. On the one hand you have this very modern…” he tails off. Starts again, „it’s a schizophrenic country, a modern people, new music and everything, but on the other hand the… how can I say it, a theatrical establishment.” I retaliate, yes — but surely it could equally be argued that all Europe forms a common cultural unit attempting to survive between the historic power-block forces of the USA and the old Soviet Union? Indeed, to journalist Andy Gill, Kraftwerk’s music is „promoting the virtues of cybernetic cleanliness and European culture against the more sensual, body-orientated nature of most Afro-American derived music” ('Mojo’s August 1987). Europe shares a common heritage uniting Britain, Germany and France, which are all being subtly subverted by a friendly invasion of American Economic and McCultural influences, movies, records, clothes? Witter himself once said „in Germany, Pop music is a cultural import”. „Yes, I know. Certainly when we came to Birmingham (England) we thought it was similar to Düsseldorf. There’s no question. But in Germany it happens even more though, because here in England at least you notice, you know the language and everything. In Germany they don’t notice, it was just taken over.”

I’d always considered the German language to be a defence against foreign influence. It was far easier for mainstream British culture to be accessed, and infiltrated because of a common American-English language. In France, for example, the Government is actively resisting the 'Anglicisation’ of their language through 'Franglaise’, because they rightly see its corruption as the thin end of the wedge. “Maybe. That should be checked. But you, together with the Americans had another situation to start with. After the war, Germany was finished. I’m not saying why or whatever, that’s OK. But when I grew up we used to play around the bomb-fields and the destroyed houses. This was just part of our heritage, part of our software. It was our education and cultural background…” The spectre of Basil Fawlty springs unbidden. Earlier an entirely innocent question about Kraftwerk’s origins had dislodged similar sentiments. He’d spoken of Germany’s Fascist years — “in Germany especially, that’s what I mostly knew about, then all the (artistic / creative) people emigrated, Einstein had to leave, and everybody knows the reasons. And then only after the war — he came back. But I think Germany went through a period, with our parents, who had never had anything. They went through two wars…”

Breakfast becomes manifest. Mushroom quiche — no meat — followed by a choice of apricot or apple flan, plus two coffees. I sit opposite him, tape machine on the floor between us picking up air, the windows of EMI House blanding out over the trees of Manchester Square. I’m marshalling scores. So for, not content with winning each verbal exchange hands down, Ralf Hütter has also squashed each of my most cherished illusions about Krautrock. But on the plus side, massive giga-jolts of respect are due here. Long before the world had heard of Bill Gates or William Gibson, when Silicon Valley was still just a valley and mail had yet to acquire its 'e’ pre-fix, Kraftwerk were literally inventing and assembling their own instruments, expanding the technosphere by rewiring the sonic neural net, and defining the luminous futures of what we now know as global electronica. So perhaps it’s time to probe more orthodox histories?

It seems to me there are two distinct phases to Kraftwerk’s career. Or perhaps even three. The first five years devoted purely to experimental forays into synchromeshed avant-electronics, producing the batch of albums issued in Britain through Vertigo — Kraftwerk in 1972, Ralf Und Florian the following year, the seminal Autobahn in 1974, and the compilation Exceller 8 in 1975. Then they switch to EMI, settle on a more durable line-up and the subsequent move into more image-conscious material, a zone between song and tactile atmospherics. The third, and current phase, involves a long and lengthening silence.  

"No, it wasn’t like that” says Hütter. “It was…” his hand indicates a level plane. 'There was never a break. It was a continual evolution. We had our studios since 1970, so we always worked on the next album, and the next album, and so on. I think Düsseldorf therefore was very good because we brought in other people, painters, poets, so that we associated ourselves with…“ his sometimes faulty English — interfacing with my even more faulty German — breaks down. The words don’t come. So he switches direction. “Also we had some classical training before that [Ralf and Florian met at the Düsseldorf Conservatory], so we were very disciplined.” Others in this original extended family of neo-Expressionist electro-subversives included Conny Plank (who was later to produce stuff for Annie Lennox’ The Tourists, and Ultravox), Thomas Homann and Klaus Dinger (later of Neu), artist Karl Klefisch (responsible for the highly effective Man Machine sleeve), and Emil Schult (who co-composed Trans-Europe Express). In the subsequent personnel file, as well as Hütter, there is Florian Schneider who also operates electronics and sometimes robotic vocals. While across the years of their classic recordings they are set against Karl Bortos and Wolfgang Flür who both manipulate electronic percussion.

I ask if they always operate as equal partners. “Everybody has their special function within the group, one which he is good at and likes to do the most.” It was never just Ralf und Florian plus a beatbox rhythm section? “No. It’s just that we started historically all that time ago and worked for four years with about twenty percussionists, and they would never go into electronics, so we had to step over, banging away and things like that. And then Wolfgang came in.”

With that sorted out I ask if he enjoyed touring. „Yes, basically, because we don’t do it so often. But we also enjoy working in our studios in Düsseldorf, we shouldn’t tour too much otherwise… we get lost somewhere, maybe! We get too immunised. When you have too much you must shut down because you get too many sounds and visions from that tour. For the first five years we toured always in Germany on the Autobahns — that’s where that album came from. Since 1975 we do other countries as well.” They first toured the USA in March 1975, topping the bill over British Prog-Rockers Greenslade, then — leaving an American Top Thirty hit, they went on to play eight British dates in June set up for them by manager Ira Blacker.

How much of that early music was improvised? Was the earlier material 'freer’? Kraftwerk numbered Karl Klaus Roeder on violin and guitar back then, so are the newer compositions more structured? „No. We are going more… now that we play longer, work longer than ten years, we know more and every afternoon when we are in the Concert Hall or somewhere in the studio we just start the machines playing and listen to this and that. Just yesterday we composed new things. Once in Edinburgh we composed a new piece which we even included in that evening’s show. New versions on old ideas. So we are always working because otherwise we should get bored just repeating. And it’s not correct what he (the hostile gig reviewer) was saying — that we play on stage exactly like we sound on the record. That’s complete rubbish. It means people don’t even notice and they don’t listen. They go instead over to the Bar for a drink! We, our music is very basic, the compositions are never complex or never complicated. More sounds — KLINK! KLUNK!! Metallic sound. We go for this sound composition more than music composition. Only now they are thematically more precise than they were before.”

After so long within the genre don’t they find electronics restricting? „No, just the opposite.” Words precise with the sharp edge of Teutonic resonance. „We can play anything. The only restrictions we do find are, like in writing, as soon as you have a paper and pen — or a computer or a cassette recorder and a microphone, and you bring ideas, you find the limitation is in what you program rather than what is in the microphone or the cassette. You — as a writer, writing this interview, can’t say that the piece you are writing is not good because the word processor did not pick out the right words for you. It’s the same with us. If we make a bad record it’s because we are not in a good state of mind.”

Change of tack. There’s a lot of Kraftwerkian influence around. Much of current electro-Dance seems to be plugged directly into the vaguely 'industrial’ neuro-system that Hütter initially delineated, while dedicated eighties survivalist cults Depeche Mode and Human League also have Kraftwerk DNA in their gene-code. He nods sagely. “There’s a very good feeling in England now. It was all getting so… historical.” Is the same thing happening in Germany now? Is there a good Rock scene there? “No. But New Music (Neu Musik).”

Hütter’s opinions on machine technology have been known to inspire hacks of lesser literary integrity to sprees of wild Thesaurus-ransacking adjectival overkill, their vocabularies straining for greater bleakness, more clone-content, 'Bladerunner’ imagery grown bloated and boring through inept repetition. And sure, Kr-art-werk is all geometrical composition, diagonal emphasis, precision honed etc, but their imagery is not entirely without precedent. Deliberately so. Their 'Man-Machine’ album track “Metropolis” obviously references German Fritz Lang’s 1926 proto-SF Expressionist movie. The sleeve also acknowledges the 'inspiration’ of Bauhaus constructivist El Lissitzky. I went on to hazard the connections with German modern classical music bizorro Karlheinz Stockhausen — particularly on Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity album, where they use the 'musique concrete’ technique of surgical-splicing different sounds together from random areas. Radioland uses drop-in short-wave blips, bursts and static twitterings, Transistor has sharp pre-sample edits, alongside the pure found-sound audio-collage The News. A technique that resurfaces as late as Electric Cafe, where The Telephone Song is made up of 'phone bleeps and telecommunication bloopery. He’s familiar with the input. Immediately snaps back the exact location of the ideas — Kurzwellen, from Stockhausen’s back-catalogue. And what about the aural applications of Brion Gysin/William Burroughs’ literary cut-up experiments? Is there any interaction there? “Maybe” he concedes. “'Soft Machine’, contact with machines. But we are more Germanic.” He pauses, then suggests “we take from everywhere. That’s how we find most of our music. Out of what we find in the street. The Pocket Calculator in the Department Stores.”

The music is the message — 'the perfect Pop song for the tribes of the global village’ as Hütter once described it. The medium and the form? “If the music can’t speak for itself then why make music? Then we can be writers directly. If I could speak really everything I want with words then I should be working in literature, in words. But I can’t, I never can say anything really, I can’t even hardly talk to the audience. I don’t know what to say. But when we make music, everything keeps going, it’s just the field we are working in, or if we make videos we are more productive there.”

I quote back from an interview he did with Q magazine in July 1991 where he suggests that traditional musical skills are becoming increasingly redundant. “With our computers, this is already taken care of,” he explains. “So we can now spend more time structuring the music. I can play faster than Rubenstein with the computer, so it [instrumental virtuosity] is no longer relevant. It’s getting closer to what music is all about: thinking and hearing.”

So technology should be interpreted as a potentially liberating force? “Not necessarily. I don’t always find that. Dehumanising things have to be acknowledged. Maybe if you want to become human, first you have to be a showroom dummy, then a robot, and maybe one day…” An expressive wave. “People tend to overestimate themselves. I would never say I am very human. I still have doubts. I can project myself as a semi-god. I can do that. The tools exist for me to achieve that. But I’d rather be more modest about this, about our real function in this society, in these blocks here,” indicating out through the plate glass, across the square, to the city towers of finance and global commerce beyond. “People overestimate themselves. They think they are important. They think they are human.”

I’m out of synchronisation again. Surely, if people have to extricate themselves from the machinery they have created, to become human, then it’s due to the imperfections of the technology — not the people. Machines are intended to serve, if they do otherwise, they malfunction. “Not so. They should not be the new slaves. We are going more for friendship and co-operation with machines. Because then, if we treat them nice, then they treat us nice. You know, there are so many people who go in for machines, who when you come to their homes their telephones are falling to pieces, their music centres don’t function, the television set is ruined. But if you take care of your machines then they will live longer. They have a life of their own. They have their own life-span. They have a certain hour of duration. There are certain micro-electronics which work a thousand hours. Then there is a cassette recorder battery which operates ten or twelve hours.” The mentality you oppose, then, is that of conspicuous consumption, planned obsolescence, the psychology of 'a spoilt child’?

“The energy crisis, the whole thing is a result of thinking that everything is there, we just have to use it, take this, and — PTOOOOFFF! — throw it away. But make sure that the neighbours see! This whole attitude of disassociating oneself from machines — humans here and machines over there. When you work so much with machines — as we do — then you know that has to change.”

Earlier he’d spoken of growing up 'playing around the bomb-fields and destroyed houses’ in the wake of WWII, so this respect for material possessions is perhaps understandable. But he sees beyond this. He sees machines having the potential to free people physically from unnecessary labour, and culturally to create whole new thinking.

“I mean — where is my music without the synthesiser? Where is it?” The music, the intelligence, is in your head. Without that the synth is just….“

"Yes, bringing it about! The catalyst. We are partners. We two can together make good music, if we are attuned to each other.” But you could operate another instrument. The vehicle you use is incidental. You could walk out this building, buy a new synth here in London, and play it just as well as your own equipment in Düsseldorf. “Yes. That is because I have this relationship with this type of thing.”

I’m reproducing this exactly as it happens, and still I’m not exactly sure what he’s getting at. Perhaps something is lost in the language gap. Like earlier, he’d said “I would never say I am very human” and I’d accepted it first as role playing — until he’d made it obvious that he equates 'becoming human’ with 'achieving freedom’. Humanity is something that has to be earned. You can’t be robot and human. But this is not a natural conversation. This is on interview. A marketing exercise designed to sell Kraftwerk records by projecting certain consumer-friendly imagery. He is playing games, and this cyber-spiel is what journalists expect from Kraftwerk? But to Ralf Hütter there seems to be more to it than that. He believes what he is saying. At least on one level. Some impenetrable levels of ambiguity are at work concerning this alleged relationship to technology.

Baffled, I skate around it. What crafty work is afoot for the future? “For me? For Kraftwerk? Well, certain things that I had to remember and memorise and think about are now programmed and stored. So there’s no restriction that we have to rehearse manually. There’s no physical restriction. I can liberate myself and go into other areas. I function more now as software. I’m not so much into hardware. I’m being much more soft now since I have transferred certain thoughts into hardware. That is why we put those two words together Software/Hardware on the album. Because it is like a combination of the two — Man/ Machine — otherwise it would not be happening. We can play anything. Our type of set-up — and group, the studio, the computers and everything. Anything.”

So what’s new in electronics, Ralf? “What we find now is like, a revolution in machines. They are bringing back all the garbage now that has been put into them for the last hundred years and we are facing a second, third and fourth Industrial Revolution. Computers. Nano-electronics. Maybe then we come back into Science Fiction? I don’t know.” Then, on inspiration, “there’s another thing coming out. 'Wet-Ware’, and we function also — in a way, as Wet-Ware.”

I’m hit by a sudden techno-blur of off-the-wall ideas, imperfectly understood concepts of some electro-erotic wet ’T’-shirt ritual in the pale blue wash of sterile monitors. What is 'Wet-Ware’, Ralf? Spoken with bated breath. And he explains. Like hardware is machines. Software is the data that is fed into them. “Wet-Ware is anything biochemical. The biological element in the machine!” The programmer? I see. Fade into intimations of cybernetic übermensch conspiracies.

So with these limitless vistas of techno-tomorrows, Kraftwerk will continue for some time yet? "Yoh. Yes.” Pause, then the laugh opens up, “… until we fall off the stage!”

Auf Wiedersehen, Ralf…

Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier…

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 05/12/2020

Earlier this week, I finished and released by end-of-year list of the Top 10 Best Hit Songs of 2020, which, for once, was on time, being released on the 1st – or 2nd – of December, depending on your time zone. That means I’ve already spent hours discussing music, and to be honest, I have a pretty bad headache in addition to this, so you know, I’m not really in that chart-reviewing spirit. Thankfully, we have very few songs to review here, and a lot of it should be pretty inoffensive. Now, before that, let’s talk about the actual state of the charts because it is looking ridiculous. Ariana Grande’s “positions” spend its sixth week at #1, and welcome to REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Rundown

Much like last week, it was an absolute bloodbath for any non-Christmas song this week, and this especially affects the hip hop and R&B on the chart. In the UK Top 75, which I cover every week, there’s a drastic difference to the US Billboard Hot 100, and that is the lack of radio. Radio impressions or plays have never been counted on the UK Singles Chart, and whilst in the States, I understand that a lot of Christmas songs rely on the radio, this is not true at all across the pond, because, for whatever reason, Christmas songs are streamed and bought a lot here even 60 years after the song’s original release. This is likely due to a smaller, arguably less diverse population and the immense amount of streaming service-curated playlists, which serve the same purpose as radio and often have the exact same label gimmickry and payola. Regardless, there is a stupid amount of drop-outs and fallers this week, for pretty big tracks as well. Now as I said I only cover the top 75 of the UK Singles Chart because it’s just easier and really, who cares about those last 25 songs? On the UK Singles Chart proper, Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved”, one of the biggest hits of 2019 and 2020, just spent its 100th week on the chart, which is insane, especially for a modern song. I think the song is dreadful but it is one of the biggest songs of all time here on the Isles, and since we’re going by my measures, it just dropped out (after spending seven weeks at #1, mind you). Of course, that’s not the only notable drop-out – and to be notable, you have to have spent five weeks on the chart or peaked in the top 40 – this week. Let’s list them, shall we? We have “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles, which spent 40 weeks on the chart, as well as #1 hit “Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat)” by Jawsh 685 and Jason Derulo, “Giants” by Dermot Kennedy, “Mood Swings” by the late Pop Smoke featuring Lil Tjay, “Lighter” by Nathan Dawe and KSI, “Take You Dancing” by Jason Derulo, “Holiday” by Little Mix, “Tick Tock” by Clean Bandit featuring Mabel and 24kGoldn, “Come Over” by Rudimental featuring Anne-Marie and Tion Wayne, “Lasting Lover” by Sigala and James Arthur, “Holy” by Justin Bieber featuring Chance the Rapper, “One Too Many” by Keith Urban and P!nk, “Papi Chulo” by Octavian and Skepta, “Heat Waves” by Glass Animals, “Deluded” by Tion Wayne and MIST, “Confetti” by Little Mix, “pov” by Ariana Grande (to make way for another one of her songs we’ll get to – also probably the only actually good song that dropped out this week) and finally, “Life Goes On” by BTS off of the debut at #10. On the chart proper, this is one of the biggest free-fall drops of all time, and honestly, who wasn’t expecting this? Speaking of falls, we have a lot of those too. Whilst these are fallers, you should consider how impressive they are for even trying to survive the holiday season, which just can’t be done for a lot of these songs, even the biggest hits of the year, some of which we just mentioned. One of the funniest parts of this to me is that KSI of all people survived the overload of Christmas songs through his Craig David chorus on “Really Love” with Digital Farm Animals down to #17. For a former YouTuber, he has an immense amount of star-power and it’s kind of worrying. Otherwise, our notable fallers include “Paradise” by MEDUZA and Dermot Kennedy at #24, “Train Wreck” by James Arthur at #25 (not a good week for either of these guys – or anyone), “Monster” by Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber at #26 off of the top 10 debut, “Mood” by 24kGoldn featuring iann dior at #27, “Head & Heart” by Joel Corry and MNEK at #29, “Get Out My Head” by Shane Codd stripped of all of its gains at #31 (seriously, whilst most of these songs were fading naturally prior, this is worrying), “Lemonade” by Internet Money and Gunna featuring NAV and Don Toliver at #34, “Lonely” by Justin Bieber and benny blanco at #42 (giving him four songs as a lead artist on the chart – OCC, that’s not how your dumb rules work; be consistent), “See Nobody” by Wes Nelson and Hardy Caprio really having the most intense combination of streaming cuts and Christmas music at #44, “Wonder” by Shawn Mendes flailing at #45 (it will probably rebound next week), “Blinding Lights” by the Weeknd at #46 (same here), “Golden” by Harry Styles at #47, “Loading” by Central Cee at #48, “What You Know Bout Love” by the late Pop Smoke at #49, “i miss u” by Jax Jones and Au/Ra at #50, “Sunflower (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse)” by Post Malone and Swae Lee at #52, “UFO” by D-Block Europe and Aitch at #55, “Plugged in Freestyle” by A92 and Fumez the Engineer at #56, “Princess Cuts” by Headie One featuring Young T & Bugsey at #60 (which happened to play as I was writing this), “Looking for Me” by Paul Woodford, Diplo and Kareen Lomax at #61, “WAP” by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion at #62, “Diamonds” by Sam Smith having the biggest fall to #63, “Ain’t it Different” by Headie One featuring AJ Tracey and Stormzy at #65, “Chingy (It’s Whatever)” by Digga D at #69, “Come Over” by Jorja Smith and Popcaan at #70, “SO DONE” by The Kid LAROI at #71 and finally, “Flavour” by Loski and Stormzy at #74. A YouTube comment on the video version of this chart read, “RIP to hip hop and R&B in the UK, 2020-2020”, and, I mean, it’s a fair assessment. That’s not all though, folks, as we have the returning entries, most of which are very explicitly Christmas songs. Let’s start with “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Sam Smith at #75, and continue up the chart with “Cozy Little Christmas” by Katy Perry at #73, “Christmas Lights” by Coldplay at #72 (always the best song on the entire chart whenever it returns), “A Little Love” by Celeste from the John Lewis advert at #64, “Feliz Navidad” by José Feliciano at #54, “Santa Baby” by Kylie Minogue at #57, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” by the late Dean Martin at #54, “Sleigh Ride” by the Ronettes at #52, “Mistletoe” by Justin Bieber at #43, “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by the late John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band featuring the Harlem Community Choir at #40 (always the worst song on the chart whenever it returns), “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney at #39 (this is an accurate ranking of the Beatles), “Jingle Bell Rock” by the late Bobby Helms at #38, “Holly Jolly Christmas” by Michael Bublé at #37 and “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by the late Andy Williams at #36. Yes, that’s five consecutive Christmas songs returning to the top 40, made all the more ridiculous when you realise it’s topped off by “HOLIDAY” by Lil Nas X... at #41 – and it actually gained this week! Oh, and we don’t stop there either as not only do we have “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande returning to #16 as well, but we also have all of the gains this week. All of our notable gains are in the top 40 and all but one are Christmas songs, so let’s start with “One More Sleep” by Leona Lewis up to #33 (our greatest gain this week) and continue up the chart with “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade at #32, “This Christmas” by Jess Glynne at #28, “I Wish it Could be Christmas Everyday” by Wizzard at #23, “Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea at #22, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Justin Bieber and Brenda Lee at #21 and #19 respectively, “Underneath the Tree” by Kelly Clarkson at #20, “Step into Christmas” by Elton John at #18, “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” by Band Aid at #15 (looking at this chart, I think we ALL know exactly what time it is), “Merry Christmas Everyone” by Shakin’ Stevens at #14, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” by Michael Bublé at #13, “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues featuring the late Kirsty MacColl at #9, “Last Christmas” by Wham! at #3, and finally, “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey at #2. I don’t know if I’ll be happier if a 1994 classic hits #1 for the first time this Christmas, or an Ariana Grande song about sex positions takes the Christmas #1, given, of course, that LadBaby doesn’t pull something out of his ass last minute. Christmas also actually lands on a Friday this week, so there’s potentially two Christmas #1s: the #1 on Christmas Day and the #1 that includes Christmas Day. I mean, there’s this issue every year but since the chart week literally starts and ends on the day this year, I guess we’ll just have to see what the Official Charts Company decides. For now, after not-so-swiftly covering all of that garbage – and there’s three weeks more of it to come, folks – let’s discuss some of our new arrivals, none of which I imagine will be all that interesting but, hey, at least they’re not Christmas songs. In fact...

NEW ARRIVALS

#68 – “Body” – Megan Thee Stallion

Produced by LilJuMadeThatBeat

...It’s the antithesis of what it means to be wholesome, commercial and festive. You all know and love Megan Thee Stallion by now, and whilst I didn’t listen to that debut record yet – it is 17 songs after all – I have heard pretty positive reception so I will check out Good News at some point. Rico Nasty did release a record that’s only one less track and 13 full minutes shorter, so to be honest, I’m a lot more excited to check out that album, even if it won’t have any impact here. I did laugh at the track list when I saw “Intercourse (feat. Popcaan & Mustard)” though, which is one of the few times I have genuinely laughed at just a track list. “Shots Fired” is a pretty great Tory Lanez diss track though, so I’ll say that. “Body” is relatively deep into the track listing, yet seems to be the biggest hit, mostly because of that polarising earworm hook and the music video. Oh, yeah, and it straight-up samples a woman having an orgasm, so don’t expect this to stick around. In fact, that’s the only melody behind this dirty South bounce-adjacent track, and even with that, it only comes in on that chorus, which is less annoying to me as it is just catchy. It’s not like men haven’t done the same thing, though, I mean, Dr. Dre famously – or infamously – “paused 4 porno” on his album 2001, and just in 2018, Kanye released “XTCY”, a song that is hilariously lacking in any kind of moral compass, let alone born-again Christianity. It did the same thing that “Body” does with the moaning yet it also covers it in this really eerie sample, as well as spare 808s and a drum beat that doesn’t feel like it gets in the way of whatever the hell Kanye’s doing on this track. It also helps that the moaning doesn’t just come in on the chorus, instead we have a string swell to distinguish it, and that Kanye has more of a comical lyrical nature on “XTCY”. This comparison is only fair when looking at the production, though, as whilst Kanye has “sick thoughts”, Megan is just bragging about her own body-ody-ody-ody-ody, etc. over a pretty mainstream, accessible beat, even if it has really ugly, loud 808s that kind of do get in the way of the rapping here. Thankfully, Megan rides this beat forcefully – no pun intended – and with some really great wordplay, even if there are a few immediately dated references here and there. That third verse is also pretty funny, and whilst I don’t want to focus too much on this song – it’s a family show after all – this is pretty lively and whilst I’m not a fan of this beat, Megan makes it worth sitting through and honestly, the song sounds a lot shorter than it is. Check it out.

#67 – “Love is a Compass” – Griff

Produced by PARKWILD

I didn’t say the word “compass” on purpose knowing this song would be next, although perhaps I subconsciously snuck the word in. Maybe I should have made it seem like I foreshadowed this song, but honestly what about this warrants foreshadowing? I don’t mind Disney music at all. In fact, a lot of the films are full of really classic compositions that have aged incredibly, including the Renaissance era of their films, especially. In fact, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Mulan – the original – is one of the few soundtrack songs that is directly related to and featured in the film yet I can still listen to outside of that context. I’ve not even watched either Mulan – or have Disney+ - so it’s not like I’m a big fan, but I can appreciate the music when I find it, even if I mostly despise everything Disney stands for as a company. The issue with this is that it cannot apply to “Love is a Compass”. I’m sure Griff and her producer PARKWILD are talented musicians, but this is purely a product. This wasn’t even made for an original animated feature, or a painfully weak adaptation of one of their original animated features starring Will Smith as the Genie. This is a generic piano ballad made for an advert, because just like literal shops and manufacturing companies like John Lewis, Disney has a Christmas advert. There’s nothing artistic about this. This “emotional” piano ballad is layered in reverb and egregious Auto-Tune that drains Griff of whatever emotion her delivery could have had. It doesn’t sound good in this context at all and it is so obvious, which is unfortunate because her voice, Auto-Tuned in a similar way, could easily work over more lo-fi and interesting production. As it is, this is repulsive, sonically and on every other level beyond that.

#66 – “Angels Like You” – Miley Cyrus

Produced by Louis Bell and watt

So, Miley Cyrus dropped her album, Plastic Hearts, last week and I expected more impact on the chart but the two singles are really THAT big that not any of the album cuts had much of a chance, even if “Prisoner” dropped a few spaces. Other than that, “Midnight Sky” is still in the top five and near the end of the chart, we have a debut: “Angels Like You”. It’s clear why this charted because this isn’t just a highlight from the album or a personal favourite of mine, but it’s a fan favourite honestly, a career highlight – which may not be hard to make, I mean, it’s Miley Cyrus we’re talking about – but it still impresses me with how much I really love this song. This is more of a mellow ballad than many of the tracks surrounding it on the record, with Cyrus’ raspy country twang finally met with a fitting blend of acoustic guitars and a genuine orchestral swell in the chorus, even if at times it decides to start clipping. The shift in guitar tone to a dirtier, aggressive one after the first chorus is a genius touch, and even the pretty stiff drum machine here feels like it adds a lot to the power of this song, especially when it starts kicking behind the screeching guitar solo, leading into an admittedly anti-climactic final chorus... that might even be fitting for the content, which is a break-up song but not one that decides to deflect blame or even focus entirely on the break-up, rather being an acknowledgement of what both parties here did wrong, and why they ended up in the relationship to begin with. Both Cyrus and her ex-girlfriend Kaitlynn Carter were in rough spots coming off of previous relationships in late 2019 and those dark spots are what Cyrus understands lead to the collapse of this relationship. She discusses the lack of connection between the two in the first verse, leading to a literally nameless relationship where it was full of romantic gestures but not any depth. The chorus is a complex look at how Cyrus knew she would look back on the relationship as little more than a fling, but how she regrets that this is her only view of the relationship. She didn’t want anything more and split after things started getting too serious, and feels genuine guilt for using Carter to heal her own depression, because “misery needs company”. She uses the biblical metaphor to demonstrate how she feels she tugged down her girlfriend, described here as an “angel”, to the hell Cyrus thinks she resides in, which may be melodramatic, sure, but I’d be lying if I said Cyrus doesn’t completely sell it here, with some of her best vocals to date, backed up by gorgeous production and really well-written lyrics. This is a genuinely brilliant ballad, give it a listen.

#58 – “Naughty List” – Liam Payne and Dixie D’Amelio

Produced by TMS

I’ve been writing these producers as “TM5” for so long without realising it’s an abbreviation for “The Music Shed”. Anyway, I hope we can all agree that Liam Payne is probably the worst off when comparing the One Direction boys and their solo careers so far. Harry Styles is one of the biggest stars in the world, making a twist on 70s classic rock that I don’t like at all but he IS making headlines and having massive chart success. Niall Horan is having mild success making rock and folk albums that are honestly alright, ZAYN has two albums under his belt that may not be listenable but at least the first one was a success and he did go into a more mature R&B direction, and Louis Tomlinson might not have been met with any success from his album earlier this year but at least there’s some quality there. Liam Payne, however, has been releasing straight garbage to no fanfare for the past three years, dating back to “Strip that Down” with Quavo, and continuing down the path of feigning maturity and development with music clearly not backing it up, demonstrated by the bisexual fetishism on his delayed debut album and how his collaborations went from relying on Zedd to relying on J Balvin to relying on TikTok stars on a sexually-charged Christmas single that couldn’t even crack the top 50. I have no idea who Dixie D’Amelio is other than seeing her sister’s controversies on Twitter in passing, but it is depressing that a major-label pop star needs D’Amelio to chart this high – and no, given his most recent singles with bigger features like A Boogie wit da Hoodie and Cheat Codes, as well as the shoddy performance of his last Christmas song, I’m not even considering that it’s the other way around. This immediately, in its first 15 seconds, makes sure you know this will be awful, with its tedious acoustic guitar strumming fused with cheap sounding sleigh bells and dated trap percussion, even with little “hey!” gang vocals straight out of 2014 that make this sound a lot less new and fresh than I think Payne thought it did. Also, something about these lyrics sounds really odd when you consider the age gap between the two vocalists. I mean, D’Amelio’s 19 years old, so it’s not like this is illegal in any way (and they didn’t have any chemistry to begin with), but the childlike imagery in the chorus just makes this gross. “Santa saw the things we did and put us on the naughty list”? This has less subtlety than 3OH!3’s Christmas song they released this year. Yes, that happened, and somehow the two washed-up early 2010s pop stars made a “dirty” Christmas song that is miles better than Liam Payne’s, probably because of the more interesting lyrical detail, and that, you know, it isn’t a duet. Check out “KISSELTOE” if you’re interested, it’s really good. I liked their comeback single with 100 gecs too so I’m pretty excited for whatever comes out of 3OH!3’s recent productivity. This song, on the other hand, as well as the upcoming joke, is just Payne-full.

#53 – “No Time for Tears” – Nathan Dawe and Little Mix

Produced by Tré Jean-Marie and Nathan Dawe

Okay, so, I understand the marketing of releasing a single after a long time of not releasing a single and after your singles have all dropped out of the chart, but Little Mix are just being managed horribly here. Why would you release a single in the Christmas season that you want to be big? This isn’t a holiday song in any way and doesn’t even sound like one, so releasing it this early into the Christmas season is just begging for it to be forgotten and eventually flop. Nathan Dawe is an EDM DJ so he doesn’t need this type of promotion as long as he can tour next year and he’s got big features, and Little Mix don’t need any extra singles because they’re still in the top 10 and they’ve branched out to reality television. Just let the girls breathe for a second and enjoy their success. Oh, and this song isn’t just logistically unnecessary, it’s sonically unnecessary, acting as a house-pop club banger with that standard piano sound reminiscent of 90s house that has been adopted recently by DJs, with any of the infectious melodies and genuine drive sucked out of it, especially if Dawe is going to add a Goddamn trap breakdown in the second verse with the most pathetic set of percussion I’ve heard in years on a house track. It’s not like Little Mix are saving this either because the lyrical content is re-tread and their performances are largely unrecognisable from each other and songs they’ve made before. Yeah, this isn’t offensive, but it isn’t interesting, outside of that bridge, but even then it builds up perfectly to a chorus that’s interrupted by a pointless, repetitious interlude. This song isn’t just uninteresting, it’s inherently unnecessary on all fronts, which if anything, is just kind of sad.

#35 – “All You’re Dreaming Of” – Liam Gallagher

Produced by Simon Aldred and Andrew Wyatt

Surely out of all of these songs, I’d have the most to say about our top 40 debut, with Liam Gallagher, former frontman of legendary rock band Oasis,  and his new lead single, right? Well, no, because here are some unfortunate truths: Oasis made two good albums, and they’re not as good as you remember. Liam Gallagher is an awful person who continued to rip off his own band with his new one, without the songwriting ability his brother Noel had. Liam continues to be persistent in his making of enemies for no other reason than publicity. Noel’s reaching out to Liam for the sake of at least reconciliation goes completely unnoticed, ignored or criticised by Liam for no discernable reason other than an on-and-off again facade that’s been going on for more than a decade. Noel wasn’t even that great of a songwriter, relying mostly on musicianship and other people’s melodies he liked to co-opt for his own tracks. None of their solo work has been listenable yet still gathers attention that I imagine is to the dismay of those other band members in Oasis who, ultimately, made those classic albums as much as the Gallaghers. Where’s the praise for Bonehead, Guigsy or even Gem Archer, who stuck it out despite decreasing popularity, utter lack of musical quality and increasing tensions between the people who kept the band afloat until they decided to break up? Both Noel and Liam look at Oasis with regret or admiration depending on how they feel that day but when you look at who REALLY won that Britpop battle tabloids liked to hype up in the 1990s, you realise how far away Oasis was from Blur or even Pulp in terms of not only their songs but having their stuff together. This new song is complete garbage as well, with a pretty awful mixing job, Liam being as distinctively nasal and infuriating as he is with any of his songs let alone his uninteresting ballads, and the COVID-19 charity pandering that comes off as really false, especially since even after Noel released an Oasis track this year as a result of the lockdown – and Liam whining about how he wants to bring the band together to help the NHS – he criticised the honest release of the demo, which Noel wrote and sang himself. It’s also especially telling how the proceeds are only going to benefit charity for its first month of release. Afterwards, Liam and the label can scrape up whatever leftover streams they get from diehard fans. I don’t like Band Aid at all, in fact the song is pretty damn rancid, but at least they keep on recording updated versions to give to modern charities. Liam, you’ve got a bank account the average Manchurian would dream of. This charity single is a fraud, and a pretty hypocritical, immoral one at that.

Conclusion

I think on principle on how fake it is and how awful the song is, I have to give Worst of the Week to Gallagher... but I have a rule against crowning any kind of charity single with that title. At the end of the day, at least something at some point is going to the people who need it. Worst of the Week in that case goes to “Naughty List” by Liam Payne and Dixie D’Amelio, with a Dishonourable Mention to the product that is Griff’s “Love is a Compass”. Best of the Week should be obvious as it’s going to Miley Cyrus for “Angels Like You”, with an Honourable Mention to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Body”. Here’s this week’s top 10:

May I remind you this is the first week of December? Anyway, I doubt Shawn Mendes will make anything through the barrage of holiday tracks, but if he does, that’s next week. Thank you for reading and follow me at @cactusinthebank for more ramblings of this sort, I suppose. See you next week!