Record of the Day - weekly magazine 18 March 2021 Issue 917 |
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Church Girl Laura Mvula Atlantic Records Single: Out now/Album: 2 July 2021 |
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Premiered on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music Breakfast show yesterday (17 March), Church Girl is the gorgeous new single from Laura Mvula. It follows the release of her euphoric and ethereal synth-pop led return Safe Passage earlier this month, and again, sees Laura revisit the eighties through a modern prism with some delicious shimmering synths, a glossy beat and a punchy chorus. It’s an absolute gem, which has already picked up praise from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Fader and the NME, following earlier support from Spotify, Apple Music, Independent, gal-dem and many more for her comeback single. With both singles set to feature on her forthcoming new album, Pink Noise, her first in six years, we are certain this is set to be another beautiful album. Last month, she performed her first live performance for three years in her Under A Pink Moon livestream, and more recently, showed off her new material on Later with Jools Holland. Next week, Laura will perform Church Girl on the Graham Norton Show. A welcomed return from the Ivor Novello Award and BRIT winner. |
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Mongrel has noted a few interesting lines from Thursday morning’s The BBC Across the UK presentation from the corporation’s
Director General Tim Davie. As of 2027/8, BBC Music and Radio will see 50%
of its output being made outside of London (even including Salford and
Birmingham, that figure today is just 18%, so a huge step change is about
to be set in motion), with the Asian Network and Radio 1’s Newsbeat to be
fully based at a new creative hub in Birmingham within the next 18 months.
6 Music will be rooted in the North with 50% of its schedule being made in
Salford. That figure is currently 39%. Some key daytime strands for Radio
1, 1Xtra and Radio 2 will start to be made across the UK and outside
London, and just as Radio 1’s Big Weekend is an annual touring event, BBC
Radio 2 Live will become so too from 2022, a big showcase which
traditionally has been located every September in London’s Hyde Park. Davie
is insistent that the corporation’s “mission must be to deliver for the
whole of the UK and ensure every household gets value from the BBC”. With
the pandemic already making people rethink how and where they work, expect
the creative exodus from London to continue, with many others following the
BBC’s lead over the next five years. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
It’s been both fascinating and troubling scrolling through Rebecca Ferguson’s Twitter feed during the
past week or so. The former X Factor star has recently been incredibly
vocal about exploitation and abuse that she experienced herself or was made
privy to within the music industry, and she lobbed this grenade into the
mix over the weekend: “A boyband member told me that they were being picked
up and thrown against walls when they challenged decisions! I spoke with
the accused and his words were ‘When you make as much money as you guys do,
you don’t get a say in what you do in your life, you do as we say’”.
Speculation has already begun on who the two parties were, and we admire
her bravery in finally speaking up about such horrific incidents like this,
almost all of which have never been called out, as they were often
normalised as acceptable behaviour at the time.
Mongrel has heard a rumour that Jamie Spinks, highly rated
A&R Director at Polydor whose signings include Jax Jones, Raye and Mura
Masa, is leaving for pastures new, namely his own label at Columbia.
Upon launch, YM&U Management seemed like rather a
random amalgamation of other management companies including Machine, Hall
Or Nothing and Deckstar, but they must be doing something right as they’ve
recently added 5 Seconds of Summer, MNEK and Jesy Nelson - three former
Modest clients - to the roster, as well as Navos who is currently enjoying
his first UK top 40 hit (people are talking about him as a debut artist,
but actually Believe Me is his 17th track to be released on
Spotify, all since 2020 - he’s been busy!). Meanwhile, YM&U US’s DJ
client 3LAU was one of the first to successfully
surf the wave of NFTs.
UK artist Big Zuu and US rapper Taylor Bennett are selling ownership stakes in the
copyright of new songs as NFTs, advertised as the
first ever split music copyright NFT sale. $100 for a 1% share of Zuu’s future earnings feels like a bargain - but
we haven’t studied the small print. It’s going to be interesting to see how
this pans out.
NFTs
seem to have moved from nascent musical phenomenon to
banana skin
to
surreal meme
in the space of days. Will the first retro long read, looking back on the
era of NFTs in music, appear some time next month?
Björk
- always ahead of the curve - “breathed life into a dying industry” by releasing an album that came with cryptocurrency back in 2017. And if
fans held on to the 100 AudioCoins that came with each album, they would
now be worth... over 4p.
We’re looking at a new no.1 this week as drivers license is about
to end its nine-week run, something we flagged in this column last time
around. Had ACR not kicked in, Olivia Rodrigo would still
be holding down a place in the Top 5. As it is, she’ll tumble down into the
mid-teens now that her streaming values have been artificially halved. The
big surprise is that the sea shanty phenomenon is not as dead as we
thought, because Wellerman by Nathan Evans has
burst back to life thanks to some neat marketing tricks - both versions of
the download have been reduced to 59p on iTunes. That alone seems to have
been enough to push it ahead of its nearest rivals. Over on the album
chart, early congrats to all at Insanity working on the Tom Grennan project. He’s still comfortably out in front
right now.
One of the things we like about voting for the BRITs is
finding out about some of the music that passed us by. Who knew that Kelly
Jones and Jim Bob had released solo albums? Or that Phil Campbell, who made
one of our
all-time favourite lost tracks
way back in 1996, has a new rock incarnation Phil Campbell & The
Bastard Sons? The team behind the BRITs may also have learnt something -
namely that The Streets is a solo artist. Voting academy members have been
invited to recast their votes now Mike Skinner’s act has been reclassified
as a Male Solo Artist and been taken out of the British Group category.
Four artists on the International Male longlist have now
passed away - Pop Smoke, Lil Peep, Mac Miller and Juice WRLD.
“Hearing Merck’s plans to keep these songs alive and bring them to a new
generation of listeners, excited me and convinced me now was the right time
to allow a new custodian to take charge of their future” said Carole Bayer
Sager upon selling her remarkable catalogue to Hipgnosis.
We’re really looking forward to the day when someone says “I don’t care who
they are, I don’t care what they do with my catalogue, I just wanted the
massive cheque!”
When Daft Punk’s Discovery was released, it
seemed to us like the whole world was wowed by the pop genius of One More Time and Digital Love. But
this Billboard piece
points out that many critics, including luminaries such as
the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis
and
Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber, missed the brilliance of the album. File it next to ( What’s The Story) Morning Glory? in that respect.
If you fancy a fascinating longish read,
try this
superb New York Times editorial analysis by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding,
from the Switched On Pop podcast, explaining how
and why music has changed so much since the Sixties, and why the old ‘verse
/ chorus / verse / middle eight / chorus to fade’ structure may be gone
forever. Comparing Aretha Franklin back then to Billie Eilish now, all via
Bad Bunny, Billie Holiday, Travis Scott and Rihanna and Calvin Harris’s
landmark record We Found Love (which hits its tenth anniversary in
a few months), we’re now living through the era of ‘an instant hook within
30 seconds so you don’t skip / another (generally musical) hook / another
hook to end. Having said all that, the chorus certainly isn't dead just
yet, as the worldwide success of drivers license proves.
The Capital Radio network have added no new songs to their playlist this
week, but they do seem to have quietly dropped Bang Bang by Rita Ora & Imanbek. There’s literally no sign of it
whatsoever on the current Top 200 midweek figures, even though she
performed it on ITV’s Dancing On Ice last month.
Exactly five years ago this month, we featured
Faded
by Alan Walker as a Record of the Day and noted
“it’s rapidly climbing the UK Spotify Top 30 so now watch it go off like a
rocket. We’re unquestionably looking at one of the biggest global hits of
2016 right here”. That remarkable track (which you’d probably forgotten all
about) has recently ploughed through the three billion views mark on
YouTube. Yet, when was the last time you heard it on the radio?
BBC 2’s most watched show across their entire output last Saturday was a
seven-year-old repeat at 8pm of Top Of The Pops: The Story Of 1980. At its peak,
it had over 1.8 million viewers. This weekend, they’re re-running The Story Of 1985 in the same slot.
Following on from last week’s Mongrel assessment of the contenders for Eurovision 2021, the final two songs that the fans have
been waiting for finally fell into place on Saturday night. Sweden’s
consistently excellent run continues
here
with Voices by Tusse (and they’ve already nailed
their epic staging for the performance as you’ll see) and Iceland’s Daði Freyr (Daði og Gagnamagnið, to give them their full
credit) is back with the wonderfully
funky 10 Years, which isn’t quite a strong as last year’s glorious Think About Things but is still unquestionably one of the ten best
songs on the list this year. By the way, there’s a new favourite with the
bookies, just creeping ahead of
this
outstanding Swiss entry by Gjon’s Tears which we pointed
out to you last week. Get a load of the Maltese entry from Destiny titled Je Me Casse. It arrives on
Spotify on Monday, apparently. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for
the video.
This
sounds massive, so much so that you might feel it’s safe to book your
tickets for 2022’s contest final in the capital Valletta within about a
minute of hearing it. Whatever happens though, it already genuinely feels
like one of the strongest years that we can remember in a long time, and
anyone who still thinks of the show as a bit of a joke (because Terry Wogan
treated that way more than a decade ago) certainly needs to recalibrate
their opinion.
Try this
swift 11-minute montage of every song for 2021 if you’re one of the
naysayers, and you’ll realise how high the standard is these days.
Here’s Tiffany Haddish finding out she’d won a Grammy for
Best Comedy Album while presenting on US TV show Kids Say the Darnedest
Things. (Twitter) A joy to watch.
Laura Barton’s
Notes on Music
has been well received. The half hour programme on BBC Sounds and Radio 4
is an emotional tribute to teenage fandom.
Rolling Stone
have tried to do a clever marketing thing and award every person featured
on the cover of the Australian edition their own diamond ring with the
magazine logo on it to mark the occasion. However, we suspect very few
artists will actually willingly wear it (why would you advertise the
publication?), and the rings will end up in a draw or gifted to a charity
auction. (IO)
We’ve been enjoying watching livestreams and how artists choose to present
themselves. Bicep are a fine duo and Apricots is
one of the all-time great electronic records, but their set from the blank
canvas of the Saatchi Gallery only made us realise how much we miss the
real thing. Watching a couple of blokes twiddle isn’t visually stimulating,
but we have every faith their Brixton Academy shows in September will be
fantastic.
In hindsight, of course HMV’s mascot dog Nipper wasn’t
immediately compliant for the first photo shoot. (Twitter)
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Regressive Left
The new single from Stevenage based trio
Regressive Left
has wound its way into our playlists this week, an exciting follow up to
their previous track Eternal Returns, and equally mad enough to
hold our attention throughout.
Support so far comes via So Young Mag with
this piece, plus airplay via Matt Wilkinson over at Beats1. Speaking on the drive
behind the new single, the band explained:
“
‘Take The Hit’ is about how neo-liberalism acts as a shield for
irresponsible politicians and greedy profiteers – as we try to
disentangle the complex web of capitalism to find the spider at its
heart, we end up instead blaming the countless flies that have been
trapped along the way.”
There’s a sense of warmth to Regressive Left’s sound
that’s sometimes lacking in their current counterparts, a touch of Edwyn
Collins in the vocals too, balancing the higher frequencies and allowing
for instant repeated listening. Better yet, they’ve announced an actual gig for October 1, their debut headline show, and at the
Windmill in Brixton too – grab your tickets
via DICE and Spilt Milk.
Find Regressive Left on FB, Twitter, IG and all streaming.
Contact: regressleft@gmail.com
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Temptress
Goldsmiths graduates Vlad and Jess aka
Temptress
have been working hard through lockdown on a solid string of tracks and
potential new releases.
The duo’s latest single S.O.S is
endearingly upbeat, seeing pick up from the likes of
gal-dem,
New Wave, GodIsIntheTV and many more. They self-describe their sound as:
“…
our own fusion of dark pop and R&B, with hip hop-inspired beats
from our hometown of London.”
Written and produced by both, alongside their friend and collaborator Chris
Zane, they tend to go fully DIY for the visual elements of Temptress too - with this tongue in cheek clip inspired by
some of their favourite film moments
forming the official video.
“SOS is about missing friends and family, knowing you can’t be with
them, but letting them know if you’re needed you’re one call away.”
Temptress
have some truly promising demos in the bank, and are currently building a
new team around them. Free for records, management and live, you can find
all the links you need via their site.
Contact: info@wearetemptress.com
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Signing News
Hipgnosis
have acquired the catalogue of songwriter Carole Bayer Sager.
Holly Humberstone
has signed a recording contract with Polydor in the UK and Darkroom/ Interscope in the US.
eastwest Records
have signed Westlife and will release new music later this
year.
Sentric Music Group
have signed London-based singer/songwriter Tom Speight to
an exclusive songwriting agreement.
Singer HRVY has signed an exclusive global recordings deal
with BMG.
Former Little Mix member Jesy Nelson has signed with YMU for global representation.
Mykki Blanco
has signed to Transgressive Records.
Photo Finish Records
have signed singer, songwriter, and producer
Ross Copperman.
Ones to watch:
SEB, Jacana People, JAK LVR, Orlando, Patrick Paige II, Dead Pony, Kahlla,
Social Haul, workfriends, Dora Jar, Yard Act, Eaves Wilder, Brian Mantra,
Jordana, CMAT, Wallice, Unusual Demont, Mazie, Sonny, Spill Tab,
Faerybabyy, Revenge Wife, HOORSEES, Carris Auburn, Bad Idea, Deb Never,
Seraphina Simone, Hearts, Babygirl, Marinelli, Ezi, Ethan Tasch, Closebye.
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This week's hottest London shows |
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All the music TV and radio highlights |
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Your new career starts here |
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The latest useful charts and playlists |
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