#Ziggy Stardust & Me
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not really <\3 most are just kind of odd occurrences like sometimes at night i'll hear footsteps in the (locked) attic, & sometimes (usually when i'm playing music on my speakers) i'll hear pebbles hitting my bedroom windows (they have bug screens on the outside so thats not really. possible ykwim). once i was using my dad's tube amp in the basement & it worked totally fine, light was on etc etc, & i went to unplug it and it wasn't plugged in.
what are your top 10 favorite albums of all time? & how has your day been?
today i give you one of my favorite “song with a bass solo” of all time: https://open.spotify.com/track/5QIbR39hAEDIOkr4ggh4xc
-❄️
OMG I LOVE ATOMIC!!! its srlsly one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands and when you said "song with a bass solo" i immediately thought of it! thats so fun :)
i thought top 10 albums of all time would be easy but then i started overthinking it so to avoid that im just gonna go based on pure instinct (also these r in no particular order i just numbered them to keep count lmao)
1.disintegration - the cure. it is literally so perfect
2.the queen is dead - the smiths. bigmouth strikes again, cemetry gates, i know it's over, THERE IS A LIGHT THAT NEVER GOES OUT??? what an album.
3.remain in light - talking heads. i had a maths class over zoom during lockdown and the teacher was so boring that i just muted him and listened to this album for the first time ever and i fell in love w it instantly :)
4.ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars - david bowie. i'd love this album anyway but what makes it even better is the fact that my best friend also loves it to the point where david bowie is like our shared thing and moonage daydream is basically our theme song :))
5.unknown pleasures - joy division. this was one of the first vinyls i ever bought (before i even had a working record player) and definitely one of the ones i play most. i have such fond memories of the day i bought it!!
6.in the aeroplane over the sea - neutral milk hotel. bought this at the same time as unknown pleasures and when i listened to it on vinyl for the first time i literally felt my soul leave my body.
7.london calling - the clash. the first time i heard this i thought it was so overrated then i listened to it again like a week later and i thought it was the greatest thing ever so idk what happened the first time
8.punisher - pheobe bridgers. i love this album so much and i am going to see pheobe bridgers at a festival in feb and im so excited :D
9.revolver - the beatles. i have such fond memories of listening to this album with my dad as a kid, and recently ive been obsessed w it again. also its just a classic!
10.the velvet underground & nico. i love this album's individual songs but its also such a great album to listen to as like a whole the progression of it is rly cool to me.
i had to put some honorable mentions since it was so hard to narrow down: the dreaming by kate bush and power corruption and lies by new order :))
also i have had a pretty good day today, it's my first day of the summer holidays and i went to my friend's this morning n we basically just hung out and listened to music so its been a very chill day :) thanks for asking!
how was your day and what are your top 10 albums of all time???
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Fave Five: Queer MCs with Asthma
Fave Five: Queer MCs with Asthma
Rise to the Sun by Leah Johnson (YA)
Ziggy, Stardust & Me by James Brandon (YA)
Forward March by Skye Quinlan (YA)
Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner
Conventionally Yours by Annabeth Albert
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#Annabeth Albert#Asthma#Conventionally Yours#disability#Forward March#James Brandon#Leah Johnson#Meryl Wilsner#Rise to the Sun#Skye Quinlan#Something To Talk About#World Asthma Day#Ziggy Stardust & Me
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Harry Styles On Vogue
Source:
https://www.vogue.com/article/harry-styles-cover-december-2020/amp?__twitter_impression=true
From Vogue MAGAZINE
Playtime With Harry Styles
THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.
But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”
In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.
That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”
Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.
We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.
It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”
Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”
In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”
The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”
Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”
Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”
THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.
Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”
GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”
When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”
“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”
Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”
Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).
Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.
MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”
Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.
I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.
“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”
“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”
Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”
Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”
His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”
Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”
“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”
The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”
Styles credits his style transformation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).
“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’ ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”
“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matchesfashion.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”
“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde
“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”
“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”
STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”
Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Jackie bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.
As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”
#harry styles#non binary#men wearing dress#harry styles in dress#transgender#trans pride#transgender woman#dresses#men in dresses#dress
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Raves & Craves: Ziggy, Stardust and Me by James Brandon
Raves & Craves: Ziggy, Stardust and Me by James Brandon
Title: Ziggy, Stardust and Me
Author: James Brandon
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers
Release Date: August 6, 2019
Genres: Young Adult, LGBT, Historical
Source: Physical ARC from publisher
Synopsis:
The year is 1973. The Watergate hearings are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is still officially considered a mental illness. In the midst of these…
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Miles Kane: the 10 records that changed my life
2018-08-29 By Matt Frost
Before we move on to the top 10 records that changed his life, we just pop one more album-related question to Miles and ask him what gear he utilised to get such an array of fantastic tones. A refreshingly simplistic approach was absolutely key...“It was all old gear - loads of mad, tiny little amps and a Fender Princeton and a Fender Champ, both from the ‘70s. Then, on a lot of it, I was just using a Les Paul Junior with P-90 pickups. That’s about it.”
1. Oasis - (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)
“The first album I got into as a kid would be (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? and that was around the time, I think, when my mum got me the video one Christmas of that Maine Road gig, when Liam’s got the Umbro tracksuit top on.
“That was the first album that really blew my mind and stylistically it was really turning me on. I think it massively impacted my writing, even to this day.
“My favourite song on that record is called Hey Now! It’s not a song that people mention often but I think that’s a fantastic tune, man.”
2. David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
“I’ll go for Bowie, Ziggy Stardust. Again, that was as a kid, growing up. My mum's a big music fan - she likes Motown soul and loads of stuff and she would have played this to me originally.
“Me and my mate really got into this album and the song Soul Love reminds of me of being at school - you know when songs sort of give you a feeling of a path to the past or whatever? That song Soul Love makes me think of being that age at school and I love it. I definitely remember listening to the album and thinking, you know, ‘God this is weird!’ but maybe listening to it when I was younger made me feel weird because the sounds were so different to what I was used to… but in a great way and a sort of intriguing way that makes you want to get more into that kind of stuff.
“It’s influenced me massively. I mean, lyrically, no-one can touch it and Moonage [Daydream] is just like the best song on there. He was such a clever guy. I love it when he goes with the punk vibe on Hang On to Yourself. That’s very sort of me, that tune. I’d love to do a cover of that, actually!”
3. The Beatles - A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
“A Hard Day’s Night is my favourite Beatles album. Obviously, I love every Beatles record but this has always stuck with me and it’s been my favourite one for a long time. I think that’s because it’s just so simple and every tune is sort of two-and-a-half minutes and they're all little pop songs.
“I think my favourite tune on that is Things We Said Today. I can’t picture the where and when and what I was doing when I first heard it but it would have been at my Mum’s house.”
4. Neil Young - On the Beach (1974)
“This is not in order, but my most recent favourite album that I’ve got into is On the Beach by Neil Young. I remember, years ago, I tried to get into Neil Young, but I don’t know what it was.
“I liked it but I just couldn’t really get into it, but then I watched a documentary about six months ago called Don’t Be Denied. It was about an hour long,- I saw it on YouTube and it blew me away. When he’s talking about each album, he’s such the real deal and he was talking about that On The Beach album and they played a couple of snippets off it and I was like, ‘Wow, this is eight-track; they sound mega!’
“It came after his first big success [Harvest, 1972] and he just went straight in to make this record really fast and, for me, it’s just got everything. I love it all. I love the song Motion Pictures and the song On The Beach and then you’ve got Revolution Blues. Yeah, that’s been blowing my mind lately, that. There’s a couple of upbeat songs there, but most of it’s all pretty mid-tempo and I don’t usually sort of go for that.”
5. The Verve - Urban Hymns (1997)
“This definitely sort of goes hand in hand with the Oasis one. Again, being that age, growing up, I can remember when that first came out. It’s got The Drugs Don’t Work, Lucky Man, all the classics.
“As a kid, I loved The Drugs Don’t Work. The emotion on that struck a chord with me, for sure. When you're a kid, you're sort of figuring out what makes you tick, listening to what’s out at the time and realising what kind of music you like. When I heard that, I was definitely like, ‘Wow! That's my music.’”
6. The Coral - The Coral (2002)
“Okay, I'm going to go with The Coral's first album. Their new album's really cool as well, by the way. My cousins are James [Skelly] the singer and Ian [Skelly] the drummer, so they turned me on to a lot of music.
“I think I went to a gig of theirs just before they released that first record and James was spitting and stomping round the stage - I'd never seen anything like it really and I was definitely like, ‘Yeah, I want to do this as well!’
“That record's got just incredible tunes on it and, from start to finish, it's a solid, solid album. I love the song Skeleton Key and I Remember When and Goodbye and Dreaming Of You… it's just that solid! It's a great summer album. I listened to that a lot and I always have.”
7. John Lennon - Imagine (1971)
“It would have to be a Lennon record but it’s hard to choose between Plastic Ono [Band, 1970] and Imagine.
“I have said this a lot, but a thing that changed my life was when I saw... John Lennon's ghost... no, I'm joking! It was when I saw the making of the Imagine album film [Gimme Some Truth] and it was when he was singing the song Gimme Some Truth. He just has that real venom with the politics. It's an angry song, and he's really raw with his feelings when you see him doing that live take.
“The key of the song is probably too high, so it sort of rips his vocal. It’s a bit like my song Silverscreen on the new album where the key is slightly high so you've got to fucking scream it! He just rips it a bit but it sounds great and it sounds cool.
“When I first saw him doing that live take, it was definitely like, ‘Oh my God, this is blowing my mind!’ You can see he was totally in the moment.”
8. Paul Weller - 22 Dreams (2008)
“I remember that came out around the time we were doing the first Puppets album and it reminds me of that time. All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You) is a great tune, and then it's also got Echoes Round The Sun on it.
“I was in my early 20s and I remember loving them tunes. It was before I'd met Paul as well. I'd say that album really inspired me. Stylistically, there's so much going on.
“I met Paul properly when we were both doing this radio thing one Christmas. I'd just done my first album Colour Of The Trap (2011) and he was there and he came over to me and he had this coffee table book on ‘60s fashion and there was this French singer in it called Jacques Dutronc. He goes, ‘I brought this to show you. I’ve been reading your interviews and you said you like Jacques Dutronc - doesn’t he look fucking cool there in his suit!’
“Then we just started talking and chatting and I was obviously in awe, but then a few weeks later, he mentioned about working together in an interview and so I followed that up and said, ‘Of course, I’d love to!’ So we did that [Weller co-wrote two of the tracks on Kane’s second album, Don’t Forget Who You Are (2013)] and that was great, and then he invited me up onstage with him, too.
“Since then, we’ve been friends, and I can't speak highly enough of Paul. He’s such a nice fella and he’s been lovely with me. To have a career like that is something I aspire to.”
9. T.Rex - The Slider (1972)
“I probably should pick a T.Rex album, and I do really like The Slider. It’s got Metal Guru on it and I love Buick MacKane as well. That tune is mega, with that riff that’s kind of like Led Zeppelin. I remember hearing that and getting totally buzzed off it.
“Let’s put that album in then, but I love so many T.Rex albums. Electric Warrior's great as well, isn’t it? That’s got Jeepster and Get It On, and Life’s A Gas is a killer. I got into them just from delving into Bowie and stuff like that. I love Bolan’s persona onstage. He's sort of got that feminine look that's sexy and manly, too. I love that sort of persona... and he was a great guitarist, too. I love the way he moves and plays guitar.”
10. The Damned - Damned Damned Damned (1977)
“The Damned were inspiring me a lot on this album, songs like Neat Neat Neat and New Rose. I love the sound of it as well, all the energy.
“Last year, I remember being in New York and I’d be walking to the apartment where we were writing and doing these demos and I'd always be listening to Neat Neat Neat and New Rose while I was getting on the subway, trying to get them to inspire me because I wanted to write something like that… but it did work, that, because I guess you can definitely sort of hear The Damned in that Silverscreen tune - or you probably would know it if you've ever heard The Damned. So, yeah, that album was definitely inspiring.”
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Sitting around listening to some music. I am feeling inspired by Lindsay’s Daughter’s roommate: who is listening to an album per day, and taking requests. Lindsay and I provided some options. GnR: Appetite, Iron Maiden: Powerslave, Judas Priest: Screaming for Vengeance, Tool: Lateralus, Black Sabbath: Black Sabbath, Metallica: Master of Puppets and Slayer: Seasons in the Abyss were my metal album choices for the week we were allotted. Lindsay voted out Tool and Sabbath and listed the Cult: Pure Cult, Alice in Chains: Dirt, Bruce Springsteen, The Tragically Hip, and Gaslight anthem. She also picked Ride the Lightening over Puppets. Tough hill to die on there, they are both perfect. Flip a coin.
The Bruce Springsteen choice got me thinking about what album I would choose for him, then my thoughts drifted to some other 70s rock that would make a good candidate for Album of the Day and David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust came to mind. That album is damn near perfect, so I thought that I would give it a spin. Of course I don’t have the album, we have no Turntable, wish I did, along with a top notch speaker and amp system. Alas, no such luck, but I do have good head phones and some Music apps. Got caught up right out of the gate. I have not listened to Five Years since my Diagnosis, it hit me like a brick. Straight up shot to the guts. What a song, I have always loved it, man it had me almost in tears this time. Very close indeed.
Pushing through the market square
So many mothers sighing
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying.
Man this opening stanza has always had power. The thought of actually absorbing this about the world is intense, actually absorbing it about yourself is tough as well. Five years sounds good to me, that would be a good start. Hell any firm date would work for me. It's the not knowing that really makes it tough. I'm sure time would run out, no matter how much I had, but it would be nice to have a little more clarity. Right now my hope is that the due date is too far out to calculate now. Let's go with that.
I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TVs
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
And all the fat, skinny people
And all the tall, short people
And all the nobody people
And all the somebody people
I never thought I’d need so many people.
Holy Shit, I feel you David, man that warehouse can be a dangerous one to walk through. It is all stacked so precariously I worry that whole banks of boxes might fall on me at any time. What a line; What a stanza; What a song writer. Why does the warehouse of one’s mind have to always be so fucking plugged up.
A girl my age went off her head
Hit some tiny children
If the Black hadn’t have pulled her off
I think she would have killed them
A soldier with a broken arm
Fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest
And a queer threw up at the sight of that
I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlor
Drinking milk shakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine
Don’t think you knew you were in this song
And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you’re beautiful I want you to walk.
Whoever the song is addressed to is my hero: “I think I saw you…Don’t think you knew you were in this song.” I love that image of the happy and alive person dancing away and drinking milk shakes. Good for you, that is the right response to being in this song, but damn it is a hard role to play. But you hero, you fucking magical hero, you go on dancing and drinking, I’m just going to stand over here in the shadows, I might have something in my eye. Once I get it out I am going to work on the strength it takes to face the end with joy like that. That is a super power.
We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Five Years, What a surprise
We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, that’s all we’ve got.
Hell, five years sounds like a lot. I hope I have five years. Man my brain hurts a lot too David. I love that in life he lived this song a bit at the end. His last album seems like the character in the ice cream shop. Putting out the last of the depths of his mind. Giving the world one last tour of his warehouse and walking away empty. That is what I am trying to do. Good on ya David, you’re a champ. I hope someone out there appreciates my efforts as well. If not, too bad, I will go down thinking someone did. True or false, that is what I will close my eyes to.
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31 for 31 2021 Day 17 Movie: Critters 3 Critters 3 was really disappointing for me. They took all the 80’s violence and campiness from the first two movies and nineties-ified it. They dumbed down the kills and amped up the cheesy fart jokes. A young Leonardo DiCaprio is in it and plays the stepson of a slum lord who is trying to evict the tenants of the shitty building he owns. Also, young Leo looks like this “Eddie Haskell” type kid I know. So he’s got that working against him….also Titanic, fuck Titanic!…sorry I have Post Titanic Stress Disorder 🤷🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️. The only thing this movie has going for it is that it follows Charlie McFadden the town drunk from the first movie. Then after some time off world, suddenly he’s a reformed intergalactic bounty Hunter. It’s sorta like if Ziggy Stardust and Jed Clampett had some kind of weird redneck love child. now Charlie is beboppin’ where the dank smelling Crite infested winds take him. . . . . . #intergalaticbountyhunterfromkansas #critters3 #nasty90s #charliemcfadden #donkeithopper #crites #critters #31for31 #daytonartist #daytonohioartist #ohioartist #sethmarchantartwork #digitalmanipulation #digitalart #creepyart #horrormovies #horrorfan #artistsoninstagram #horrordrawing #horrorfanatic #illustration #macabreart #darkart #horrorlife #creepy #drawing #horrorartwork #horror #horrorgeek #creepyartwork https://www.instagram.com/p/CVOT_cWJV2F/?utm_medium=tumblr
#intergalaticbountyhunterfromkansas#critters3#nasty90s#charliemcfadden#donkeithopper#crites#critters#31for31#daytonartist#daytonohioartist#ohioartist#sethmarchantartwork#digitalmanipulation#digitalart#creepyart#horrormovies#horrorfan#artistsoninstagram#horrordrawing#horrorfanatic#illustration#macabreart#darkart#horrorlife#creepy#drawing#horrorartwork#horror#horrorgeek#creepyartwork
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There was a Pedal Fair at one of my new favorite guitar shops, @truetone_music. I went looking for the new candy. I found it… Kisses to you @menatone. There’s a really rare British amp, the Marshall 200. Not 100 watts. 200. And it gave Ziggy Stardust his backing sound. That’s right, Marc Ronson, Ronno, made much loud sizzling beautiful noise with that amp, and the gain gained them the world. Glam was born on a fantastic wide open British amp that was beyond a Plexi or JTM45. The 200. So huge that, knowing Ronson liked it dimed, his roadies supposedly took a couple of the valves out to spare everyone bleeding ears. So indeed, it had unique sounds. Not just loud, not just gain’y and grizzly and bright. But also full of the fizz of Glam. That machine gave birth to the sonic voice of the Spiders From Mars. And it called to me today from the curio cabinet at TrueTone Music, a new favorite guitar store in Santa Monica. The PiG pedal from Menatone, hand built by Brian Mena, it brings a wild satisfaction to my Quixote search for a British voiced pedal that would turn my Deluxe into a very different beast when I want a different beast to taste. And in an instant I knew it was the gold face to layer onto my blackface that I was looking for. #menatonepig https://www.instagram.com/p/CUqh_hPJJUM/?utm_medium=tumblr
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Alter Ego Research
An alter ego means an alternative self, which is believed to be distinct from a person's normal or true original personality. Usually having an alter ego means you dress in a completely different way with different hair and makeup, maybe with a different personality. This engineered persona could give people the confidence to do things they wouldn’t have the confidence to do as their original selves.
Famous Examples:
David Bowie - Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke and The Blind Prophet.
Bono - The Fly, Mirrorball Man and MacPhisto
John Lenon - Dr Winston O'Boogie
Prince - Camille, Symbol
Morrissey - Ann Coates
Paul McCartney - The Fireman
Jarvis Cocker - Darren Spooner
Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus (fict.)
Superman & Clark Kent (fict.)
Batman & Bruce Wayne (fict.)
Unsurprisingly, most of the list are musicians. Creating an alter ego is said to help with creativity.
The most interesting alter ego example to me are drag queens. That form of an alter ego changes almost every part of yourself, it’s a huge transformation.
Kasey’s alter ego is to help protect her identity online and to give her confidence whilst streaming. Her alter ego’s look is inspired other streamers and what’s popular on social media currently.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alter_ego
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/literaryterms.net/alter-ego/amp/
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.radiox.co.uk/features/x-lists/most-famous-musical-alter-egos/
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New Releases: August 2019
New Releases: August 2019
Ziggy, Stardust, & Me by James Brandon (6th)
The year is 1973. The Watergate hearings are in full swing. The Vietnam War is still raging. And homosexuality is still officially considered a mental illness. In the midst of these trying times is sixteen-year-old Jonathan Collins, a bullied, anxious, asthmatic kid, who aside from an alcoholic father and his sympathetic neighbor and friend Starla, is…
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#A Little Light Mischief#Alice James Books#All the Bad Apples#Audrey Coulthurst#Cat Sebastian#Derek Milman#Heretics Anonymous#Histfic#James Brandon#Katie Henry#Moïra Fowley-Doyle#Of Ice and Shadows#R. Zamora Linmark#Swipe Right for Murder#The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart#Ziggy Stardust & Me
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Exclusive Cover Reveal: Ziggy, Stardust & Me by James Brandon
Exclusive Cover Reveal: Ziggy, Stardust & Me by James Brandon
I am so freakin’ excited to be revealing this cover on the site today, and it’s not hard to see why. LOOK AT THAT MAJESTY. (But wait, not yet! First let me to tell you that this is a cover reveal for a historical YA called Ziggy, Stardust & Me by James Brandon, which releases on August 6, 2019 from Putnam/PRH, and to read on for the blurb and an excerpt!)
The year is 1973. The Watergate hearings…
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