1978
The Kick Inside
Most of it written before she was old enough to vote, released when she was nineteen, and carrying a first single that went to number one for four weeks and rearranged what a British hit could sound like.
Read the essay
The work · section
The Work, album by album
Ten studio albums between 1978 and 2011, made by somebody who took control of her own recordings earlier than almost any of her contemporaries and then used that control to get stranger rather than safer. These are the essays, in the order we would read them.
Original photography. The single most consequential fact in this discography is the decision to stop paying by the hour.
Start with these
Three records that explain the whole shape of it
A debut made by a teenager on somebody else’s terms, the album that broke the budget and the patience of everyone involved, and the one that came out of the wreckage sounding like nothing else. Read in that order and the arc makes sense.
1982
The Dreaming
The first album she produced alone, made across expensive London studios at ruinous cost. Her worst-selling record at the time and the one that made everything afterwards possible.
Read the essay1985
Hounds of Love
Five singles on one side and a drowning woman on the other, made in a studio nobody was charging her for. The clearest argument anyone has made for the album as a form.
Read the essay
Not an album, but it belongs here
Before the Dawn, and the thirty five year gap
Her only full concert tour ended in May 1979. The next time she played a live show of her own was August 2014, at the theatre in Hammersmith where that tour had finished. Twenty two nights, sold out in a quarter of an hour, with the second side of Hounds of Love staged in full as theatre.
We have put it in this section rather than in the gatherings pages because it is a piece of work, not an event. It was written, rehearsed and directed like a record, and the people who saw it mostly talk about it in the same way they talk about an album.
It also gave a generation of listeners the thing they had assumed they would never get, which is worth thinking about if you are running a room where half the people have never seen the artist they love.
A London theatre before the doors open. The 2014 residency ran for twenty two nights in a room this size.
The whole run
Ten studio albums, in the order they arrived
Where we have published an essay the title is a link. The rest are on the list, and we write them in the order that seems most useful rather than in the order they came out.
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The Kick Inside 1978. The debut, produced by Andrew Powell, carrying a number one single she had written herself.
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Lionheart 1978. Recorded in the south of France and released ten months after the debut. She has been open since about how rushed it was.
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Never for Ever 1980. Co-produced by her, and the first album by a British female solo artist to enter the UK chart at number one. The Fairlight arrives.
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The Dreaming 1982. Self-produced, expensive, difficult, and the record that ended the era of hiring other people’s rooms.
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Hounds of Love 1985. Made at her own studio. Number one in the UK, and the home of the seven-part suite The Ninth Wave.
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The Sensual World 1989. The title track began as a Joyce adaptation, was refused permission, and became her own words instead. The Trio Bulgarka sing on it.
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The Red Shoes 1993. Named after the Powell and Pressburger film, made during a run of family bereavements, and accompanied by a short film she has since disowned.
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Aerial 2005. A double album after twelve years away: seven songs on one disc, and a continuous suite about a single summer day on the other.
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Director’s Cut 2011. Eleven tracks from the 1989 and 1993 albums rebuilt from the original multitracks, including the Joyce text she was finally allowed to use.
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50 Words for Snow 2011. Seven long pieces, piano and voice and very little else, released in November and set against falling snow throughout.
How we write these
Three rules we set ourselves early
No lyricsWe describe what happens in a song and leave the words where they belong
No images of the artistNo sleeve art, no press photographs, no stills. Every picture here was made for us
Studios namedWhere a record was made, and who paid for the hours, usually explains more than the reviews did
If you are choosing a record for a room full of people, the two we get asked about most are Hounds of Love, because it splits into two halves of roughly twenty minutes with a natural interval between them, and The Kick Inside, because almost everybody has a way in through the first single. Our guide to starting a gathering covers the practical side of running a listening night, down to which piece of kit to spend your money on.