Still, the new album's standout track, "Don't Blame Your Daughter (Diamonds)", seemingly directed at mum, Anna, is heart-on-sleeve even by her standards. The singer also concedes that she will find it hard to keep her emotions in check when she performs the song live."It's extremely personal, but I wasn't particularly aware of that when I was writing it. Afterwards it was like holy fuck! What am I saying here? I suppose it's about taking responsibility for your own life. Most people are familiar with the search to find something that you can finally blame everything on, or the need to turn to someone else to do things for you I've had friends who've been in therapy I tried it but I quit.
People spend thousands, and after seven years they haven't changed at all I went for depression, simply But when I came out of my depression, I quit. Certain things you just have to deal with on your own."Can they imagine a time when The Cardigans will shut up shop? "It's a scary question," Sveningsson says. "I've thought about and even sometimes wished for The Cardigans to end, but what would I do? Open a restaurant?""For me, it would be a happy day," says Persson, more ominously. "If it was no longer right for us to work together, there would be nothing scary about it It would be sad, of course. But when I imagine that day, I also imagine that we would remain friends."'Super Extra Gravity' is out now on Stockholm Records/Universal. Early next month, Kate Bush releases Aerial, her first new album since The Red Shoes back in November 1993.
Even by the relaxed schedules adopted by pop's more established artists, this is an extraordinary career hiatus - not quite the 20 years separating Steely Dan's Gaucho and Two Against Nature, perhaps, but well on the way there. Entire pop scenes and musical movements have budded, bloomed and withered in the interim - Oasis's first singles, for instance, appeared in 1994 - but such is the diminutive Kate's enduring artistic stature that the forthcoming double-album has prompted a feverish flurry of record-company attention on its behalf. Some would consider their concern paranoiac - only last week, I was accosted like a shoplifter in the street by an EMI security guard, for the terrible crime of believing that the lyric-sheet I had been given at a playback of the album was mine to keep. Apparently, none shall know of Her words until the two discs are actually brought down from the mountaintop to the record shop. But we'll let that pass. The more pertinent concern is whether her music remains relevant in a music landscape that has seen Britpop come and go, grunge atrophy into skate-metal, hip-hop conquer the known world, and talent-contest TV reduce chart pop to a production-line of vacuity. Changes flash by ever more rapidly in the modern, computer-assisted music world, and in decoupling from its dizzy progress for a dozen years, Kate Bush runs a serious risk of getting flattened like a hedgehog crossing a motorway upon her return.
