Several bits of business to deal with immediately today. First of all, the Christmas Edition of The SF Squeecast is now up, with myself and my regular collaborators Seanan McGuire, Cat Valente, Liz Bear and Lynne Thomas talking about The Nightmare Before Christmas, Hogfather, the Avengers episode 'Too Many Christmas Trees' and (in my case) It's a Wonderful Life.  It's a joyous edition, and one of our best, I think. Please do give it a listen.  (It's also on iTunes.)

Secondly, the gang from SFX Magazine have put together this festive offering...

 

In which I pop up, alongside a whole bunch of famous faces, doing, well, I'm sure you recognise the speech.

And thirdly, I'm interviewed, with Brian Bendis, Walt Simonson and Sal Abbinantti on this festive edition of the Word Balloon Comics Podcast with John Siuntres.  As always, John gets a lot of details out of me about Demon Knights and Saucer Country.

Now, after the weekend, when our cartoonist in residence Laurie Pink revealed that she'd taken two days off from the blog to play roller derby, a number of you, intrigued, asked for details.  So I asked Laurie, and she writes...

'I skate with Manchester Roller Derby, which has, in the last few months, grown to be not just one team but THREE!  We have a men's team, New Wheeled Order, and two ladies' teams, the Manchester Check'Er Broads and the shiny BRAND NEW (yet to even bout, that's how new they are) Phoenix Furies.  On Saturday the Check 'Er Broads played Croydon Roller Derby and New Wheeled Order (in their first ever bout as a team) played Tyne N' Fear.  Alas, there was no victories for MRD, but both games were so damn awesome we didn't care!  My derby name is Pinky Fingaz and I am number #101 (numbers are chosen when you choose your name.  There haven't been 100 other unfortunate Pinky Fingazs before me).  I started skating in March, and I absolutely love it.  Roller derby is such a great melting pot of folks, all with a passion for skating, and hitting other people with their bums, in common.  Yesterday we did our end of year training session with secret santa, chocolate and dancing to Queen on wheels.

Oh! New intake for Manchester Roller Derby starts in January! No skate experience necessary! Look here for details. More about Manchester Roller Derby is on our site, which is due a big update in the new year. Very exciting!  Also, here are some pictures of Me n' the team from Saturday. I am the one with the pink bits on (I do have teeth, but my gum-shield is black). Don't we all look pretty?!'

Thanks for that, Laurie.  And here's her cartoon for today, which reveals our theme...


As many of our regulars will know, I'm a huge fan of Kate Bush.  (Whose own record label Fish People (she is a Doctor Who fan) now has an excellent website for her.)  And the news that she had two albums coming out this year, after such a long wait, was, well, it took a bit of dealing with.  What took more dealing with was that Director's Cut, in which she revisited tracks from two earlier albums, was, for me, so deeply disappointing.  Everything was longer (Ridley Scott, picking away at Blade Runner, always made it shorter) and less focused.  The choice of tracks certainly included some I felt could do with revisiting (it was, in many ways, a selection of my least favourite Kate works, with a couple of things I loved enough the first time round).  But what Kate seemed to  be doing was emphasising all my least favourite things about her work.

I was even a little worried about the single, 'Wild Man', until I'd got used to it, for reasons I'll get to later.  The track listing of 50 Words for Snow didn't fill me with confidence.  Only eight of them, and at such worrying length.  So it was a vast relief to discover that, while still not quite the second side of Aerial, this is a thorough return to form, perhaps the first step on a completely new journey, even.

Specificity is the curse of Kate.  To me she's at her best when lost in unknown territory, offering the slightest attempts at definition amongst impressionist soundscapes.  (We don't know what 'Suspended in Gaffa' is about, entirely.  We know far too much about what 'Heads We're Dancing' is about.)  I prefer her as musician rather than storyteller, despite the fact that a lot of her early successes were in story-based songs.  The important difference, I think, is that 'Wuthering Heights' or 'James and the Cold Gun' offer a couple of characters and a situation and, above all, an atmosphere.  It's when that gets extended to plot beats and an ending ('Experiment IV') that she flounders.  It's as if everything becomes too concrete and that sinks the song.  So it's a good thing that 'Snowflake', that opens here, has (a mother?) looking for a single, pleading, snowflake in a blizzard, reassuring him that she'll find him... and that's as far as the situation goes.  We're in Kate's musical bedrock of building piano motifs, that pleasing sense that she could write jazz.  The soundscape is an attempt, at what seems just the right length, to put as inside falling snow, where we feel somehow muffled, with bursts of strings on 'fleeting', gusts and flurries.  The music begins, and stays, just the right side of ambient.  We're meant to listen, just about.  It's meant to be in the background, and then seep into our consciousness, as the side-long architectures of her best work do, until we come to anticipate each move, while loving the relaxing atmosphere it puts around us.  At no point is our conscious mind jerked out of the dream with a plot development.  And, thank goodness, that feeling continues throughout the album.  Kate's son Albert's presence on this track (indeed, he's the first voice we hear), is entirely apt, works artistically, and isn't the misjudgment it could have been.

There are sounds one associates with Kate falling back on old certainties, of being, to a certain extent, lazy.  The Trio Bulgarka were brilliantly different, the first time we heard them.  They stayed on Kate's records for far too long afterwards.  The ghosts of them show up on 'Lake Tahoe', but it's only the slightest hint.  And again, it's a piece built on the piano and individual voices, on the sustain of notes, that seem to lead one inside to the spaces of sleep.  The vocals are way down, yearning for something, but one almost doesn't want to read them.  We're perked up not by plot, but by the rattle of a castanet, a signifier of something, threat or mystery, but we're not told what to think.  (It's odd for me, with Lake Tahoe fixed in my mind as a place of summer, to have those words linked to snow.) Those drums build up like drifts against the door, and the voice finally dies away almost mid-word.  Again, eleven minutes, and it hasn't bored us by trying to exist in our waking mind.

'I turn off the light, switch on the starry night', is not, therefore, the most promising start to thirteen minutes of 'Misty', nor is 'but I'm not sleeping'.  And this is very dangerous ground, because this is, to put it bluntly, not just a story, but a story about shagging a snowman.  Thankfully, this is made immediately evident, and isn't the subject of a twist ending ('it was a carrot and two pieces of coal!')  And also, she may have told us this isn't a dream, but she isn't interested in the whys, just the hows: 'his crooked mouth... bits of twisted branches'.  And the music in the background becomes first shuffling jazz, then tiny strings that, since we've had 'Wild Man' in our heads for a few weeks now, signify cryptozoology, the beast seen on the side of the hill.  'What kind of spirit is this?' she asks, and we don't get an answer.  'His creamy skin,' is said with such lust you're reminded that Kate is still one of the few women who's not afraid to express that so openly on record.  This is an experience that nobody has had, something nobody else has possibly ever even thought about, and we're encouraged to see it not as metaphor (she has simple fun with 'melting in my hand' and the wet sheets, comedy being something Kate does a lot but that isn't talked about enough), but as a depiction of an impossible experience.



(That animation, Mistraldespair, directed by Kate herself, really makes the concrete/surreal tightrope bounce.  I can't decide how successfully.  The fact that this edited version of the track has a new, more dreamlike title perhaps indicates where the weight needed to make a new balanced is placed.)

'Wild Man' is a track I now associate with my father, this being the piece of music I was listening to most frequently in the week that he died.  And that's kind of apt, in that this is the fourth track in a row that's about  something being sought, having got lost, and needing to be found.  Lost in the Snow would be an entirely descriptive title for the album.  When I first heard it, all the research detail made me worry that we were in the world of the concrete again, and some of it still hurts, I think ('roof of the world' isn't nearly as significant as the delivery it's given, but is just wordplay).  But this is detail in service to a mystery, the kind of supporting evidence that witnesses always provide about impossible experiences, and here even is one such very reliable witness, the schoolmaster of Darjeeling!  The Christmas bells are an odd idea (was there idea for this to be a 'Christmas single'?)  Kate's emotional reaction, in low mutterings, to Andy Fairweather Low's higher pitched factual sighting details make this feel like the two halves of the brain talking to each other, and as such keep us in the interior.  The beast refuses to be pinned down, and (and I think this is a good sign if it's her current opinion of her own work), Kate doesn't want it to be.



We're at a fluttering, uncertain distance at the start of 'Snowed in at Wheeler Street', but then the piano provides a hint of place.  There's acting that suddenly becomes the emotion of a sung line, the piano tinkle of memory again.  'Don't I know you?  There's just something about you.'  (She's used that line before, it's a keystone of The Red Shoes.) And she does know him, because that rich voice of 'we've been in love forever', oh, wow, it's Elton John!  'When we got to the top of the hill -'  Wait a second, that was nearly 'take me up to the top of the city', from that same album, so close as to be nothing but deliberate.  Why is Elton's voice here so strong, so welcome?  We're very used to him by now, after all.  Is it just the new context?  Well, this is a song about two lovers who've lived through, or are reincarnated throughout history (thankfully, we're not told any more detail), and it's as if Kate has placed her childhood hero here in her own musical history as well, as if this could have, should have, been recorded in 1976.  Those piano chords harken back to The Kick Inside, even.  (That descent on 'I don't want to lose you again' feels very familiar too, and in another way when it's replayed more stridently, but I can't pin it down. 'A Sea of Honey' is touched upon in the way the lyrics hang in a very open musical space.)  It refreshes Elton, takes him back to where he came from too, that enormous soul voice, here dancing along Kate's quite unfamiliar to him line lengths.  It's the best we've heard of him in years, it makes us remember the greatness of that voice.  It makes them both sound young.  'Come with me, I'll find some rope, I'll tie us together', touches on metaphor, but again we're meant to take this as a real, if impossible, experience.  If this were shorter, it could almost be a semi-typical 'rock duet', with drums and cymbals from the 1970s, and as such it could have found an honourable place on 'Lionheart'.  It's all the better for it.

At this point, I'd be saying this is actually her masterpiece, that this atmosphere's been meticulously built up over five tracks and that surely nothing can stop it now.  Unfortunately, something does.  The title track.  Stephen Fry's voice is something that's from, that almost defines, conscious thought.  Kate's putting effort into making the reading of the numbers sound emotional, for some reason that seems utterly misplaced, the backing is keeping up a nice empty windscape that befits the rest of the album, but the definitions aren't particularly resonant or poetic, and Fry's connoisseur's delight in the words that pass his lips just haul us out of the blizzard and into the library.  'Come on Joe you've got thirty-two to go,' is funny, as Kate's gestures towards rock chick energy always (deliberately) are.  But is that gesture actually wise at this point?  (And is 'Joe' a name you'd ever associate with Stephen Fry?  That's just here to rhyme with 'go', isn't it?  Which would conjure up the fun of straight rock and roll.  But is that actually what she should be seeking to conjure up here?)  The vocals have been turned down in a seeming effort to get it under our conscious threshold, but no, actually, the whole point is that we hear them.  After five tracks of dreamlike wonder, we get a far too concrete attempt to stamp what we've heard before into an encyclopedia, a list.  Just when I thought she'd worked out the map of her own talent exactly... well, she wouldn't be Kate if she didn't go off-piste.

'Among Angels' starts with a piano note, then halts, thinking for a moment, then starts again.  Being immersed in that sustain again is very welcome.  This is a summing up of one of the strengths of the album, Kate realising that just her at the piano is actually the heart of her music, that the Trio Bulgarka and all that are, no matter how welcome they sometimes are, bells and whistles.  You don't often hear about Kate as a pianist, but it's one of her greatest strengths, the light touch and then the sustain (you can imagine her feet working the pedals, like the funny image of how hard the serene swan is working under the waterline).  There's the slightest possible story here.  'I can see angels around you.  They shimmer like mirrors.'  ('In the summer', so we've got light at the end of this dark, interior album, an opening out.)  There's a full twelve seconds of fade out at the end, not a triumphant end to the album, but a tailing off, an apt way to close, inviting us to, only now, apply conscious thought to what we've just experienced.

Of these seven tracks, six feature fantasy characters, namely a living snowflake (I'm making that too concrete now), a ghost (who vanishes in that last cut off breath of 'Lake Tahoe'), a living snowman, an abominable snowman, a collective noun of angels and the romantic leads of Highlander.  All of that works.  All of it.  That's so much taking on what didn't previous please in her work, and making a go of it, that it's actually shocking.  It's last she released two albums in the same year that were polar opposites.

The length at which every track is expressed works.  Nothing, apart from, ironically, the faster-paced title track, outstays its welcome.  As well as the return to the core of what she does, Kate has found some new noises here (those yeti on the hillside plucked strings), which is why I feel there's a pleasing glimpse of a way forward.  This isn't the record of an artist resting on their laurels, this is the work of someone who's looking to promote their new label and get back into work, now her child is old enough to take part.  It bodes very well for the future.  Perhaps, incredibly, Kate Bush's best work is still ahead of her.

Kate Bush as the new breakout recording star of 2012.  Who'd have thought it?  I couldn't be more delighted.

As always, we invite a creator to tell us about their festive plans, and today it's a Ms Karen Lord who writes...

'This holiday season I have lots of non-fiction report writing to finish before year-end.  Work or not, I try to keep this time of year as hassle-free as possible, so there’s only one solemn duty on my list.  I must provide dessert for Christmas: the traditional black cake made with rum-soaked fruit, spices and burnt-sugar browning.  You can eat it warm from the oven, but it’s really good after three days of absorbing rum.  We serve it with a warning: don’t eat and drive.  Here’s a picture of one of my cakes receiving its first application of Extra Old Rum (43% alc/vol).  That’s a tropical sunset in the background.  Happy holidays!'

Hmm, I like the look of a Barbadian Christmas. Thanks, Karen.

Tomorrow, I'll be offering some advice for new writers, centering around the topic of things that people often say about writing, where they're right and where they're sometimes horribly wrong.  Until then, Cheerio!