Another Day
CW: child sexual abuse. 
Another Day
Another Day (Bush/Gabriel)
We must address some important facts in this blog post. For starters, folk musician Roy Harper is a songwriter of note. He’s got solid and interesting work in his discography, bits of which get covers by remarkable artists like the Cocteau Twins or, as this post demonstrates, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. It’s intuitive that Bush and Gabriel would choose to duet on a cover of “Another Day”; an sturdy and compelling break-up song, whose themes of wistfulness and the cognitive dissonance of desire overlap with both artists’ interests. The Harper album “Another Day” hails from, Flat Baroque and Berserk, has songs that are the equal of mid-tier tracks from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, or Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer’s Flowers of Avalon. Harper’s work is firmly second-tier folk music, respectable but not transcendent. Given that he’s a direct influence on Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd (with whom he cut a lead vocal on “Have a Cigar”), and Pete Townshend, he’s clearly a figure with some relevance to both rock and folk music and a force to be reckoned with.
The other thing we need to address in this blog post is the revelations about Roy Harper that have been made over the years. He is the subject of child sexual abuse allegations by two women, who were 11 and 16 at the time the abuse occurred. These women, who have chosen to be anonymous, have recounted their trauma in accounts too harrowing to quote on this blog but which can be read here. As is typical of these cases, Harper was cleared of these charges in 2015 and served no prison time. Any discussion of Harper must at least acknowledge the violence he’s committed against these women, and that he effectively ruined their lives.
It’s not often when relating the story of Kate Bush that I have to talk about things like this. Most figures in this narrative aren’t actively monstrous, although we’ll talk about Rolf Harris in time. But in the era of #MeToo, it’s vital that we talk about the violence committed by influential persons. When you write about Roy Harper, you can’t simply stop at saying Flat Baroque and Berserk is pretty good. While the objective quality of his work isn’t diminished by his actions, what he’s made is necessarily tainted by his crimes. The fact that these songs were written by a rapist has them in the same way that the revelations about Louis CK and Kevin Spacey have affected their work.
Harper is also influential enough that in 1979, “Another Day” was covered on TV by two popular artists. Bush and Gabriel covered it on Bush’s BBC Christmas special, “Kate,” the most gonzo thing the BBC has aired that’s not The Web Planet. It’s an eclectic piece of stage theater that serves as a 45-minute sampler of the Tour of Life as well as a warm-up for Never for Ever.…
The long awaited (by a small number of people with extremely good taste) return of the Shabcast. I chat with Kit Power about his new books, a non-fiction book about the movie Tommy and, more particularly, his new novella The Finite.
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On October 7th, 2017, just over two months after The Doctor Falls, police were called to several McDonald’s locations following a disastrous promotion in which the fast food restaurant brought back an obscure McNuggets dipping sauce, “Szechuan sauce,” that had briefly been released nearly twenty years earlier to tie-in with the release of Disney’s Mulan. The limited amount of sauce released to select McDonald’s was wildly insufficient for the crowds that arrived, which consisted of hundreds of people lining up for hours only to discover that restaurants had as few as twenty sauce packets. The result was bedlam—young men (the crowds were almost exclusively male) hurling obscenities and venting their frustration on minimum wage workers. On Twitter, people seriously suggested class action lawsuits and claimed that any workers who had a bad day deserved it because of the company’s bad actions.
And so begins the endgame of an era, in which I traditionally wander around a bit and look at other things before actually resolving the era. We’ve two more Capaldi-era stories and five entries to cover them with. And today we dip into the BBC Books line for the fourth time this era because I want to talk a little more about Missy, and the alternative is Big Finish’s box set and, well, 