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  1. Given that she features on the BBC News website at least once a week, I’d say she is lucky to have such a good publicist! At least she’s not doing a Brian May – being increasingly strange in order to get attention.

    • It does to me too. Is seems very short sighted in this day and age to not have a backup of the work which is essentially your livelihood. As soon as I had a song on the page I’d be taking a picture of it. Also, does she really not have versions that she just sang into her phone?

  8. I think we should start a national fundraiser to by the lady a photocopier. Or perhaps a new-fangled mobile phone that would allow her to photograph the pages of the books.

  11. Chatgpt to the rescue.

    Verse 1
    Cruisin’ down the boulevard, windows down, feelin’ free,
    Tunes playin’ loud, it was just you and me.
    Then a shadow crossed my heart, my world went dark,
    My ride’s gone, and I lost all the music in the spark.

    Pre-Chorus
    Memories in the rearview, now they’re out of sight,
    A thief took my melody, my late-night drive.
    But the love we had, they can’t take that away,
    I’ll find a way to sing through the pain today.

    Chorus
    Got a cake with a message, “Sorry your car got stolen,”
    Sweet like the memories, but my heart’s still rollin’.
    Blow out the candles, make a wish for the road,
    Even when I’m broken, I’ll carry the load.

    Verse 2
    Searching for the echoes in the empty seats,
    Every song I sang now feels incomplete.
    But I’ll keep on movin’, got my dreams in the air,
    With a little slice of hope, I’ll find a way to care.

    Pre-Chorus
    Friends gather ‘round me, laughter fills the room,
    We’ll make new memories, chase away the gloom.
    Life’s got its ups and downs, but I’m not alone,
    I’ll build my own rhythm, even if I’m on my own.

    Chorus
    Got a cake with a message, “Sorry your car got stolen,”
    Sweet like the memories, but my heart’s still rollin’.
    Blow out the candles, make a wish for the road,
    Even when I’m broken, I’ll carry the load.

    Bridge
    So here’s to the journey, every twist and turn,
    With every lost song, there’s a lesson to learn.
    I’ll find my new groove, no matter the cost,
    In the rhythm of life, I’ll never feel lost.

    Chorus
    Got a cake with a message, “Sorry your car got stolen,”
    Sweet like the memories, but my heart’s still rollin’.
    Blow out the candles, make a wish for the road,
    Even when I’m broken, I’ll carry the load.

    Outro
    So raise a glass to the moments that stay,
    No car, no problem, I’ll find my way.
    With love in my heart and a song in my soul,
    I’ll keep on driving, that’s how I roll.

  12. Tomorrow: Raye, real name Rachel Keen, does an unusually large poo, and it’s unflushable. So she wraps it in brown paper and hands it in to the Brit School as a protest about the badgers and last week’s Strictly dance-off. Brian May is still nursing his damaged bottom and hence not able to comment.

    • They missed out “the Love & Pride Hit Maker” – I didn’t recognise him without his spray-painted Doc Martens.

      There’s a bit of Chaz & Dave about Tooting-born Rachel Keen. “Singer Raye gave them a seasonal serenade of “Holy Night”” and I imagine it went a bit like this:

      O Holy night! The stars are brightly shining (cor blimey!)
      It is the night of our dear Savior’s birth (wallop!)
      Long lay the world in sin and error pining (on the sideboard!)
      ‘Til He appeared and the soul felt its worth (gertcha!)
      etc.

    • I wonder if the bill was the other way around originally, and that’s why Neil had a bit of a wobble? A sort of ‘who on earth is this Raye, real name Rachel Keen, anyway?’

      (for the record, I feel a bit guilty about having a laugh at her expense – she’s actually very good.)

    • Brian has never struck me as a music man. His top 17 (?) makes for interesting reading – I wonder whether he had help compiling it?

      1. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Could You Be Loved
      2. Millie Small – My Boy Lollipop
      3. Kylie Minogue – The Loco-Motion
      4. Al Bowlly – The Very Thought of You
      5. Grace Jones – La Vie En Rose
      6. Raye (real name Rachel Keen) – Love Me Again
      7. Daddy Lumba – Mpempem Do Me
      8. Davido – Kante (feat Fave)
      9. Miriam Makeba – The Click Song
      10. Jools Holland & Ruby Turner – My Country Man
      11. Anoushka Shankar – Indian Summer
      12. Siti Nurhaliza – Anta Permana
      13. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa – E Te Iwi E (Call to the People)
      14. Michael Buble – Haven’t Met You Yet
      15. Arrow – Hot Hot Hot
      16. Beyonce – Crazy in Love (feat Jay-Z)
      17. Diana Ross – Upside Down

      He’s apparently not heard of Edith Piaf, nor Little Eva.

    • I hope she does the big band thing again, as per Glastonbury… that’ll be worth seeing a longer festival set.

      Otherwise it’s a desperate looking bill, I’m half expecting to see Bev Bevan’s Move, Brian May, and Davros (the evil creator of the Daleks) in the lower reaches.

    • I have to say, “This Tour May Contain New Music” is a winning title for a tour. She’s seemingly hip to the joke about her (perceived) lack of progress on the second album.

      If her album ends up being called “Real Name: Rachel Keen” then we know she’s reading this page. Hi Rachel!

    • She does seem to have fit into the “State Sanctioned Entertainer” role, like a sort of Jools Holland/Ms Dynamite vibe. I don’t actually think this is even her publicist at work, it just happens to some people.

  30. Now she’s gawn and dunnit… Raye’s only gawn and recorded a cover of Perfect Day as a duet with that Al Green fella. I ask yer…

    (is anyone else as surprised as I am to find out that Al Green is still alive?)

    • I’m still trying to erase all memory of that travesty of a cover done for the BBC with multiple acts. Ghastly. The original has lost a bit of it’s shine for me. It shouldn’t have been messed with so this is not needed, although it should be easy to avoid. Oh such a perfect original.

      • The original is the best because both Lou’s vocal (and indeed personal history) bring to the surface the song’s most interesting aspect; the odd juxtaposition between the titular perfect day, full of simple, mundane pleasures, and the pin prick of self loathing in the line “I thought I was someone else/someone good”. That little black cloud passing momentarily across the sun, just to remind you that it’s still there.

        The song is one of Rock music’s most beautiful and affecting ballads, as well as one of its finest B-sides, but it’s elevated beyond simply being a beautiful song by that weird, unresolved tension between surface joy and interior malaise. That weariness in Lou’s vocal, that sense that the perfect day is perhaps an anomaly, heightening its perfection only further. That sense of a man who knows deep down that simple pleasures, a simple life, may in fact be beyond him, that he may not be able to remain on this path, no matter how much he’d like to.

        And then that tension, flickering away at the song’s fringes, dissolves into the refrain “you’re going to reap just what you sow”. Perhaps an affirmation or a mantra, perhaps a dire self-prognosis. We’ll never find out, so it’s whatever you want it to be. And that’s the song’s magic – on a good day it sounds like a corner being turned, on a bad day it sounds like a man hitting one more dead end.

        The Children In Need version is lovely in its way, but it flattens the song out, reduces it to a single dimension. The sheer number of vocalists erodes the through-line, the sense of intimacy and of actual lived experience. The emotional dissonance slips away. Huey Morgan butchers the key moment, reducing it to a tedious play off his own, far less interesting, persona. Heather Small beats the living shit out of “you’re going to reap just what you sow”, her gospel bombast unhelpfully dragging the line back towards its biblical roots. All the weariness is gone, replaced by a jarring mix of plastic pathos and unrepentant bombast. And what’s worse, Bono is on it.

        I think Lou once said that the cover version he really liked was by Duran Duran, but for me none of them really stick the landing. That song was made for Lou Reed, and Lou Reed was made for that song. Not least because it charts a day he actually lived.

          • When Lou Reed was asked whether the song was about heroin, he replied: “No. You’re talking to the writer, the person who wrote it. No that’s not true. I don’t object to that, particularly whatever you think is perfect. But this guy’s vision of a perfect day was the girl, sangria in the park, and then you go home; a perfect day, real simple. I meant just what I said.”

            Still waiting for confirmation on what Heroin is about. Hopefully puppies 🙂

            • I think the record is as pleasant as you could hope for an opportunistic hook up between Rev Al in the twilight of his career and Rachel at the “OMFG I’m singing with Al Green!” phase of hers. Yep, there is quite a discordance between the tone in Lou’s version and theirs – it reminds me of one of my earliest TOTP experiences, watching the dude from The Drifters – who had obviously been drilled to smile while he performed – singing lines like “There goes my first love with the guy I used to call my friend” with the biggest shit-eating grin you’ve ever seen. You might usually expect “the writer, the person who wrote it” to inhabit the song most completely, but the only time the song Creep (the rushed 36O character limit text to Perfect Day’s considered, handwritten poem) has brought an actual lump to my throat was hearing it performed by the artists you will be most familiar with as Zig and Zag in their alternative puppet personas as the malevolent brothers Rodge and Podge.
              But part of the greatness of pop is that you can be on the dancefloor with your arms above your head hollering along to The Supremes’ version of Stop! In The Name Of Love at midnight and lying face down on the bed the next morning with your head throbbing as Margie Joseph puts you right inside the heart of the song…
              …which is why my favourite version of Perfect Day is by The Jolly Boys purely because I can skank to it so it gets played a lot more often than Lou..

    • It’s good that RNRK is continuing to go with the “big band of proper musicians who can actually play” angle. I also like that she’s trying to make her audience feel better, you know…? It seems old-fashioned but it works.

    • In the same article is the news that PinkPantheress has won Producer Of The Year. I’ve been listening during Offspring the Elder’s driving practice and she’s really rather good.

      Rachel Keen is playing the O2 – tickets from 96 quid. I paid £14 to see Fonda 500 last Saturday.

    • They also have a handy Raye (RNRK) topic for you to follow:
      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c0vkgy14q0pt

      I was impressed that the review of the album manages to get the RNRK bit out of the way right at the top. Totally convinced that someone at the BBC is reading this.

      Also, another review that doesn’t quite dare to say that the album is an unholy mess, which unfortunately, it does seem to be.

      • I’ve downloaded it (there’s no space left on the Kallax for double album clunkers). I’m working today and out dancing tonight, will hopefully have a listen over the weekend. I wonder if I’ll make it all the way through.

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