Playlist: Changing narratives

Amelia Coburn - Something Wild

If you’ve been following these playlists from the start, you’ll know all about my enthusiasm for Amelia Coburn. Her See Saw, from the excellent 2024 album Between the Moon and the Milkman, featured in the first of these, and she continues to go from strength to strength.

This Teesside teller of tales introduced us to a world of off-kilter folksy chatter back then, and last year’s most recent single, Something Wild, represents an evolution in sound and subject matter alike. With extravagant strings (arranged by the impressive Ruth Lyon, another rising star on the Northeast scene), this is another step up for Amelia’s production values. The whole song has an epic sweep, recalling Sleepy Town’s cinematic scope.

Meanwhile, that twisted fairytale theme is bubbling along like something from Baba Yaga’s cauldron. This time, it’s a take on Little Red Riding Hood and a reimagining of the Big Bad Wolf, complete with a hint of howl in the backing vocals. Well worth braving a full moon to explore further.

Amelia has a sold-out show at The Common Room of the Great North on Saturday and is also on the bill at Stockton Calling on April 4. In between, she plays in Hertford and Arnhem. For all live dates, check her website.

Isabel Maria - Did I Deserve This?

This is one for anyone who had to contend with the applause suddenly stopping. When I first wrote about Isabel Maria’s music back in 2024 she was rocketing to the top – and looking forward to going to uni to continue that journey. But the next step proved to be a slight misstep: “Hallowed halls, but I don’t fit through the entrance,” to quote the first verse.

In Isabel’s own words, it’s “for everyone who grew up a notorious ‘smart kid’ and then got their comeuppance eventually, mine in the form of dropping out of my dream uni and sending my flatmates a dolphin meme to break the news.”

Happily, though, academic set-backs haven’t halted the flow of banging tunes. Did I Deserve This? takes the whole experience to sift out a strong and relatable single. Lyrically and musically there’s a strong Swiftie vibe to this – in a good way, rather than derivative – as well as the strength to look back on adversity and laugh at it. Someone clearer gave her back her thunder.

Meanwhile, in the real world Isabel’s music continues to impress and her reputation is still growing. Next month she’s playing at Signature Brew in Haggerston as part of Breaking Sound, a London series promoting up-and-coming unpublished artists. Closer to home, there’s a second EP, Because I Care, scheduled for release on April 17 (pre-order here). Closer to home, there’s a May 29 gig booked for Stockton’s Green Room and, in all likelihood, more dates to come in support of the new release.

Suede – Animal Nitrate

Neither new nor local, of course, but a band playing Newcastle this weekend and sending an old man down nostalgia lane. All the way back to 1993, when my 17-year-old self was thrilling to the release of Animal Nitrate.

We’re talking a strange, pre-internet era here. New music existed in physical form, unless you were lucky enough to have access to seeing bands live. Since I was 17 going on 12, and most venues at least paid lip service to age limits, this wasn’t going to fly for me. But I could hop on the train with my girlfriend and head to Newcastle for a day of poking around record shops looking for treasure among the CD racks.

Suede were the band with the buzz. Again, in pre-internet life, we relied on NME and Melody Maker as our taste-shapers, then hoped to hear what we read about on the John Peel Show (or possibly Out on Blue Six with Mark Radcliffe). But there were plenty of blind punts on releases that sounded great on paper but could be almost anything when the seductive silver disc was unwrapped and sent spinning for the first time.

Animal Nitrate, the last release before Suede’s much-hyped debut album, was an instant triumph. It crashed straight into the top 10, back when chart positions meant something. Since I already had the two previous singles, I got a satisfying frisson of ‘knew them before they were big’ (and how important was that to a spotty music geek?). I also got a belting blast of what would later be debased into Britpop: ambiguous lyrics, choppy guitars and a sound that instantly felt like it belonged to us (as opposed to all the other music, from Kylie to the Kinks, that clearly belonged to the equally nebulous ‘them’).

Suede have changed, of course. Their more recent work has an epic “cathedral of sound” quality that I’d have sneered at in my teens. Much of the later stuff is audibly superior in terms of depth and ambition. But none of it quite matches those first songs as they blazed into a young and impressionable consciousness.

Some time ago I indulged in a longer piece of musical nostalgia to celebrate The Record Shop ritual.

Thanks for reading another playlist. This year has already brought Back on the Beat and One Old Favourite, Two New. For an archive of the 2024 playlists, click here.