An attempt at a newsletter

Friday evening has to be absolutely the worst time of the week to send out an email, and yet here we are

Hello reader!

Last week was exciting wasn’t it? A new Popjustice Substack announced, loads of new subscribers (hello and thank you), a real sense that something might rise from the smouldering ashes of Twitter dot com.

Since then various things have happened, including but not limited to:

1. Twitter not im/exploding after all, although things still aren’t looking great over there so let’s wait and see

2. It suddenly dawning on me that I’d have to start writing a newsletter

3. An opportunity, now, for me to test out Substack’s numbered lists functionality

I’m already starting to wonder if these emails need some sort of header image. It’s quite texty isn’t it? A bit ‘texty yes yes yes’ when it should be ‘texty no no no’.

I suppose you and I should see the coming weeks as a voyage of discovery, by which I mean you and I are totally lost, by which I mean this is hopefully a chance for me to figure out exactly what this Substack is supposed to be. There’s some stuff below. Next week’s might include some of this stuff, or it might include some other bits or things, or bits of things, instead. No-one knows just what the future holds.

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Newsdump

• Superstar popstars are on their way out. (Music Business Worldwide)

• You can pay to sleep in a cupboard with some of DJ Khaled’s shoes. (NME)

• Anyone on the planet will be able to vote in next year’s Eurovision. (BBC)

• Someone has apparently spent at least 10,000,000 (currency unspecified) on Iggy Azalea’s back catalogue. (Digital Music News)

• Madonna is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Sex¹. (Billboard)

• Mariah Carey has performed that Christmas song in the street. (Stereogum)

• I mean regardless of currency, 10m+ is quite a lot isn’t it?

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New Music Friday:
Confidence Man are in Heaven

SONG OF THE WEEK is Confidence Man — probably the best band on the planet right now due to being the perfect combination of Aqua, Scissor Sisters and The KLF — banging their way through DJ Sammy’s Heaven.

I’ve been waiting for this to pop up on Spotify ever since I saw the band do it for Triple J’s Like A Version, which is basically the Radio 1 Live Lounge except enjoyable. Confidence Man get extra points for explaining in the behind-the-scenes video that their manager (“who’s old”) alerted them to the fact that the DJ Sammy classic² was originally by Bryan Adams; “not that good” is the band’s assessment of the Bryad version.

If you’re going to engage with this song, the video of that Triple J performance (above) is probably the best place to start, as the whole brilliant debacle is made all the better knowing that pieces of #content like this are very often filmed at about half ten in the morning, and yet here the band are, giving the whole thing total off-your-choppers 2am energy.

Also this week:

• Ciara Luciani, whose Coeur album was one of last year’s highlights, has released an expanded version of the album that includes, basically, a French version of I Feel Love. I really don’t think there can be enough versions of I Feel Love in the world, so let’s add this one to the pile. (The Coeur Encore package also includes a cover of The Winner Takes It All.)

• Kids Of The Apocalypse is Popjustice royalty Stefan Storm — formerly of The Sound Of Arrows — under a newish name. KOTA seems to revolve around some sort of NFT thing I don’t understand or wish to understand, but the song’s v listenable so at the end of the day music is the real winner.

• Alan Walker’s Ritual is extremely good. Is it as good as Ritual by Rita Ora? No. Has he credited the vocalist? Also no, although this is possibly due to GDPR so let’s not judge.

• The new one by Caity Baser is very “well I did not know of this person or their music before I heard about her via the BBC Sound Of 2023 longlist but hearing this song I can see why a number of the music industry’s most esteemed talentspotters are predicting her for big things”.

• In case the subtlety (?) of their single Lionheart was lost on some listeners, Joel Corry and Tom Grennan have made things easy for everyone and released a new version called Lionheart (Come On England). This version includes football chants and, as is required by law, a commentator wanging on about football. It’s almost as good as the greatest football song of the 21st Century, which is James Corden and Dizzee Rascal’s Shout For England.

• It’s absolutely not in this week’s playlist but I thought it was worth recording — if only in an email you’ve probably deleted before getting to this bit — that Zayn has done a song ‘with’ Jimi Hendrix. A very strange state of affairs.

• I don’t know much about AR/CO — it’s almost as if I’m setting up a regular item where each week I find out more about a song mentioned in the previous week’s newsletter — but Supersonic LUV is very perky.

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Just circling back:
Moli on covering Westlife’s Fool Again

In last week’s newsletter I mentioned Berlin-based singer Moli and her apparently-apropos-of-nothing version of Westlife’s Fool Again, which is one of those strangely overlooked songs from The Olden Days that sort of counts as a deep cut despite also having been a Number One single. I wanted to know more about how this all came to be, so got her on a Zoom and here’s how our chat went.

Where are you now?

I’m in Berlin. Kind of the centre, but it's still a calm area.

So with this Fool Again cover, I thought it was best to go straight to the source and find out what’s happening.

So I got asked, by the Denniz Pop Foundation in Sweden³, to cover a song from the Cheiron catalogue. And I kind of went down this rabbit hole of re-listening to all of those songs, which was amazing because I could go on a real trip down memory lane. And Fool Again just really stuck out to me — from the lyrics to all the harmonies and the drama of it. I completely fell in love with it all over again. And I just had this urge to go back home and try to do it myself on a guitar and see if I could make it my own.

You mentioned memory lane but the song came out before you were born — how did Fool Again first enter your world?

I knew Westlife when I was growing up, even though it was before my time. I loved the music videos and the dramatic choreographies. It sparked memories of me watching those videos and thinking, like, ‘Wow, all these guys are so cute.’

I mean, when you say dramatic choreography I’m thinking of one thing specifically: standing up for the keychange.

I know. But it's the facial expressions too. You know, looking into the camera… It's just a whole different level of performance to what people do now in music videos.

Speaking of then vs now, and also speaking of keychanges: controversially, your cover of Fool Again doesn’t feature the original keychange.

I didn't do it. I thought about it. But I didn't quite go there. Because I was trying to give it a bit of a modern twist. And I felt like doing the keychange maybe wasn't quite something that people would do so much today. Although I'm not against key changes.

There was an article recently about how keychanges have basically totally fallen out of pop music these days. And what you’re saying is that you're complicit in this, because you've been given a song with a very definite key change, and you've just thought: ‘No.’ This isn’t just not writing a song with a keychange — it’s erasing one.

I'm contributing to the problem, I know. But the song did already have a dramatic middle eight in there. So I was like: ‘Okay, well if I'm keeping the middle eight, maybe that’s enough.’ But no? No. I feel guilty now.

To make up for it, you could put two keychanges in your next song.

Oh, gosh, we'd have to do a bit of a Beyoncé on that one. But I’ll think about it.

Apart from Fool Again you’ve already had quite a lot of stuff out, including Crying In The Swimming Pool this year. The artwork — you with a strop on, in a paddling pool — was amazing. Was that your idea?

Yes, I really wanted to show the irony of a fun pool and it being summer then, as you say, just being there with a strop on my face. So I thought it was quite funny.

What do you have coming up?

Between my last EP and Crying In The Swimming Pool, I really took a break from releasing to figure out what I wanted to do and what I wanted to say. I just felt like I'd been releasing music back to back and I was getting a little bit lost with what my identity was. I felt like I needed a break from what I was doing, which was a lot of dance music and writing for other people. I really found joy in rediscovering older catalogues. And now I'm at the stage where I'm finishing up all of the songs I wrote over the last few years, so I'm really excited about everything that's coming out from there. I’ll have a single in February, and then after that I will keep releasing singles and eventually an album. Or maybe an EP.

EPs can be quite helpful if you don’t want the whole weight of “THIS IS AN ALBUM” hanging over the whole thing.

Exactly. There's a lot of pressure behind an album. But I do want to release a piece of work, because I feel like the music that I've been making is cohesive and it works together. But it also just depends on the question of whether, these days, people listen to albums from top to finish so much. It’s about trying to figure out what is right for these times, and how I can reach people that will enjoy this music in the best way possible.

Do you listen to albums?

I do sometimes, but not as much as I used to. Yeah, I think it's hard. There's so much new music coming out. And I get a little bit overwhelmed by all of that happening to then have the time to sit down and listen to a full album. It's happens rarely, but when I do I really enjoy it.

I suppose one way to make sure people keep interest in albums it to make sure something exciting happens near the end of each song. Something like, oh I don’t know, putting in a keychange.

You brought that back didn’t you? But no, you're right. You're right. Next time, I'll try and take that into consideration.

Moli is on Instagram if you fancy giving her a follow.

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21st Century Popjustice:
This week’s playlist

I thought it might be quite fun to have a thing each week where a newsletter reader picks 21 songs from the 21st Century, and chucks them into a playlist. Unfortunately, I thought this yesterday afternoon, and there hasn’t been time to get this sorted out properly, so I thought I’d start it off with 21 of my own picks from the century we call 21st.

Of the included artists with an ‘x’ in their name, there’s Ava Max, Phixx, and Chloe x Halle. There are also artists with other letters in their names.

Let’s see if we can do better next week. If you’d like to submit a playlist, drop me a line on peter.robinson@popjustice.com and I’ll let you know what you need to do.

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An invitation

Oh dear, more audience participation. In the coming weeks I’d like to host a small Zoom discussion, with a handful of this newsletter’s readers, in which the merits of various popstars will be discussed. It’s for, as they say, a thing. If you think you might have an hour to spare, email peter.robinson@popjustice.com and we’ll take it from there.

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FAQ

Last thing on a Friday really isn’t the best time to send out a newsletter is it?
No it is not. I feel like midday on Friday would probably be better. But I didn’t do it at midday, did I? I did it now.

What would it sound like if Kate Bush released a song called Douchebag?
Probably a bit like this this Maja Francis one.

I need to wrap a present but due to various global and local economic factors I’m on a budget, can you help?
I cannot but Charli XCX can. Her Planet XCX wrapping paper is currently half price.

I am a Popjustice reader ‘of a certain age’. What is the best radio show for me to listen to?
If you’re free at 8pm on Monday evenings it’s Ricardo Autobahn’s Transmission For A Nation. Last week’s featured one of the best Pet Shop Boys songs of the last 22 years (ie Brick England), a Bodies Without Organs track, Love Kills by Roberto Bellarosa and Replay by Iyaz. You can listen again here.

Is Ellie Goulding going to Beyoncé her next album?
Absolutely not. Three months ahead of release (???) Ellie has released a teaser video for her fifth studio album featuring sixteen songs in eighty seconds — noteworthy for the fact that EVERY SINGLE SONG sounds quite brilliant in a slightly different way. I feel quite strongly that all artists should do this a quarter of a year before they release an album, so we know whether or not to get excited about the whole thing.

Read any good books lately?
This is absolutely nothing to do with music but this week I’ve been reading Karl Thomas Smith’s mini-book Now Go: On Grief and Studio Ghibli and it’s fantastic.

How do you think this first newsletter has gone?
6/10.

Have you thought of a way to sign off your newsletters? Possibly something that is sort of the same but slightly different each week — like, you’ll have a format for the signoff, but each time there’s a slight variation?
No.

1. The book, not the hobby

2. And yes I do mean classic

3. Moli won an award at the 2020 Denniz Pop Awards.