Antony and the Johnsons' I Am a Bird Now is a story told from within a chrysalis. Featuring the unmistakably haunting vocals of lead singer ANOHNI, the album speaks of a yearning to be grown, the confronting nature of evolution and the delicious freedom of eventual self-actualisation. While it’s fair to assume the subject matter was directly informed by the experiences of ANOHNI, a trans woman, the themes of I Am a Bird Now hold assorted meanings for folks across the queer spectrum. Collaboratio...
Feb 10, 2021•53 min•Season 6Ep. 2
This episode we explore Bowie's succinctly titled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars . We journey on through Bowie's legacy to queer audiences, his vast array of bangers, and how we turned death into an art form. Facts are facts – David Bowie made life more bearable for othered people around the world. From the Seventies onwards, queer people could see parts of themselves in an unconventional patron saint – sexually ambiguous, highly successful, and full of joy. He als...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Q: Has cycle five been Aural Fixation's most diverse yet? A: Possibly maybe, mary! Over the past eight eps, we've beaten around the Kate Bush, dreamt of Tejano superstar Selena, salivated over Honey Dijon and gotten physical with Dua (to name a few!) We've welcomed incredible guests, gone profesh and moved in-studio (again, a huge shout out to the incredible guys at Forbes Street Studios ) and in December we celebrated our most-listened month EVER! And so, in the great tradition of ourselves, we...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 9
What do sequels, ghosts, and Christmas all have in common? They're queer! Join us (won't you?) for our second annual Christmas episode, where we take a trip down Yuletide Lane and dust off festive classiques by previous Aural Fixation subjects. It's mulled wine, it's mince pies, it's... listens. Despite non-stop merriment, we're still asking the hard questions – is You-Know-What even Mariah's best Christmas song? Who has more Christmas albums, Dolly Parton or RuPaul? Is "These Days" by ARIA-winn...
Dec 16, 2020•51 min
In March 2020, it's safe to say that the world was in search of a spark to pierce the dark. One such spark came in the form of Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia – a bombastic retro-journey that took pop and dance music cues from the past and thrust us towards a (hopefully) brighter tomorrow. A few short months later came the lockdown project to end all lockdown projects – Club Future Nostalgia. The companion remix album was created in collaboration with noted DJ The Blessed Madonna and featured guests...
Dec 09, 2020•54 min•Season 5Ep. 8
As one fifth of the most successful girl group of all time, Mel C spent her early twenties inseparably tied to her athletic alter ego. Her status as Sporty Spice was so entrenched in her public persona that when the Spice Girls took a hiatus in 1999, Mel C did what any trapped queer person would do; she cut her hair, dyed it blonde, changed her name and reached out to Madonna. Northern Star by Melanie C was the outcome. The debut tells tales of aggrieved emancipation, potential secret sapphism a...
Nov 25, 2020•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 7
After a winning streak of iconique guests, Andy and Drew sit down this episode with nothing but a bottle of bubbles and one of the world's biggest pop acts... ever. If you've been to a wedding, experienced a road trip or watched a film starring Meryl Streep, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski, you've probably heard an ABBA song. If you've enjoyed a £2.50 triple gin and tonic at Thompson's on Canal Street in Manchester, you definitely have. If so, you'll know it's fabulous, you'll know it's joy...
Nov 11, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Honey Dijon was born in Chicago and leapt headfirst into the club scene as a teenager. Mentored by house music legends Derrick Carter and Mark Farina, it wasn’t long before she established herself as a world-class club and remix DJ and producer. In 2017, Honey produced her debut album with an array of guests lending their vocals. Aptly named The Best of Both Worlds , the album takes its cues from a plethora of musical references and evades genre. Pretty on-brand for Honey, who renounces gender b...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 5
In 2009, multi-talented queer power duo Wendy & Lisa confirmed that their former bandleader, brother-in-arms and boss, Prince, was definitely not gay, but rather a… fancy lesbian. What a relief. Not that we’re scrambling for excuses to explore the Purple One for Aural Fixation. Purveyor of assless chaps, a deft hand with eyeliner and a spiritual connection with the fight to be one’s authentic self are just the tip of Prince’s queer iceberg. To lead Drew and Andy to Paisley Park, we secured t...
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 5Ep. 4
In the pop pantheon of stars taken from us too soon, few tales are as tragic – or as gruesome – as the tale of Selena. The lead singer in a family band created by her ambitious father, Selena spent most of her young life on the road playing in restaurants and state fairs. Despite being a first-language English speaker, most of Selena’s music was recorded and performed in Spanish, and Latin crowds swiftly became enamoured by the singer’s voice and charm. In early 1995, with four Spanish albums an...
Sep 30, 2020•57 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Hey, so glad you could make it! This episode we talk Celebrity Skin , the 1998 crack-at-the-mainstream album by Courtney Love and her band, Hole. Firmly planted in the mystique and fallacy of Hollywood and California, Celebrity Skin serves as a worthy counterpart to the mystique and fallacy of Courtney Love. A hotbed of raw talent, yes… a problematic fave, no doubt, but more than anything else, Love’s defining attribute remains being deeply misunderstood. We look at Courtney before, during and a...
Sep 16, 2020•55 min•Season 5Ep. 2
We’ve reached Cycle 5 of Aural Fixation, and what better way to celebrate than with a discussion on the woman that completes the quinfecta of Andy’s top bitches – the incomparable Miss Kate Bush. A child prodigy with a penchant for dancing, karate and pianos, Bush released her first album The Kick Inside aged 19 (with some songs written when she was just a young teenager). From there, Bush parlayed her subsequent albums to firmly establish herself as British pop music’s sacred moonchild, before ...
Sep 02, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 1
The term “iconic” is bandied about on this podcast far too often, but when it comes to describing Madonna’s Vogue , there’s really no better adjective. At the intersection of old Hollywood glamour and the New York ballroom scene, Vogue was responsible for introducing queer POCs and their art to the mainstream on its release in 1990. Accompanied by David Fincher’s chill-inducing black and white video and *that* performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, the song immediately became required readin...
Aug 19, 2020•56 min
We started Aural Fixation's Cycle 4 by paying homage to Mother Robyn, with no idea of the extent we would truly be dancing on our own over the next few months. We found solace with queer giants like Queen, Janelle Monáe and Cher, and explored iconic queer tracks in a streak of mini episodes. We also recorded mostly 600km apart, with technical difficulties, corrupt memory cards and deleted vocal tracks just adding to the general 2020-ness of it all. But dolls – we soldiered. It’s with relief and ...
Aug 05, 2020•58 min•Season 4Ep. 9
If you’re a human being with ears under the age of 40, Queen have never not existed. For decades the iconic four-piece – fronted by the frontman to end all frontmen – pumped out hit after hit after hit. So much so that when Freddie Mercury passed away in 1991 from AIDS-related bronchopneumonia, he had left us with ten careers-worth of music despite only being 45. Our gateway drug into the land of rock royalty is 1975’s A Night at the Opera . The band’s fourth studio album, and home to their defi...
Jul 22, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Iconic duos have been cruelly separated by Miss Rona the world over, but finally your most loved audio couple reunite. Against the suitably spectacular backdrop of Australia's Snowy Mountains region, Drew and Andy are joined by a very special guest, for a very special topic. ARIA-nominated, Golden Guitar Award-winning, chart-topping country singer Fanny Lumsden invites Aural Fixation to swap the Snowies for the Smokies and hitch a ride to Dollywood. No other artist manages to unite the United St...
Jul 08, 2020•1 hr•Season 4Ep. 7
At the intersections of Black, female and queer excellence in 2020 sits a Baptist-raised sci-fi nerd who can act, dance, rap, write, and of course, sing. Not remotely intimidating to tackle in fifty-seven minutes at all, but Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer is worth it. From her first EP in 2007, Monáe has put her money where her mouth is. High concept and intricate imagery are complimented with top tier songwriting, production and bangers, with each piece of the puzzle held to the highest standar...
Jun 24, 2020•58 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Years & Years bound to the top of the UK charts in 2015 with their fourth single "King", the band's unapologetically queer frontman Olly Alexander sitting proudly at the helm. Their debut album Communion shortly followed, an 18-strong cavalcade that spawned a total of seven (!) singles and global recognition among straight and gay fans alike. As the band started to make traction, so Alexander began to use his ever-growing platform to speak candidly but fluently about mental health, sexuality...
Jun 10, 2020•56 min•Season 4Ep. 5
Now seems a better time than ever to crack the fire exit and escape Earth, so thank the gay gods for Gaga who's created a whole new planet where equality rules and kindness punks run free. Welcome to Chromatica . In our inaugural “First Fix”, we tackle Lady Gaga's sixth studio album upon its release to dish our initial thoughts and dissect our favourite bops. Where does Chromatica sit in the pop pantheon? What do Ariana Grande, Elton John and BLACKPINK have in common? And does "Babylon" sound pe...
Jun 03, 2020•59 min
Mom, she is a rich man – and one of the fiercest icons in the queer canon at that. Cherilyn Sarkisian's inimitable force has carried her from 1965 to the present day. There really is no one like Cher. A towering goddess of this stature couldn't be tackled by Drew and Andy alone, so we roped in long-time listener and huge friend of the pod, Matthew Harden – aka @slaydydiana . Slaydy dialled in from Melbourne to offer up a deeper understanding of Cher's place in the pop pantheon through the lens o...
May 27, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 4
If you're not listening to Quick Fix, you're only getting half the story – and we've got the full download on the lead single, "Tenderoni", from Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke's first solo album The Boxer . Released ten (!?) years ago, Kele's bold new musical direction and image was in stark contrast to that curated over Bloc Party's meteroic rise to fame and adoration in British indie. Change was now underfoot, all clues point toward that – but why? What had shifted for Kele? Quick Fix is Aur...
May 20, 2020•20 min
Over 30 years ago, Beverly Glenn-Copeland released Keyboard Fantasies , a six track album that sold very few copies. It wasn’t until a Japanese music stan discovered the album in 2015 and shared it amongst his fellow audiophiles that it was lauded as a new-age, synthesised masterpiece. Before long, a number of record labels were fighting to sign Copeland, now in his seventies. From there the fascinating details of Glenn’s life began to surface – such as his life living in relative solitude with ...
May 13, 2020•54 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Heaven is, in fact, a Quick Fix on Earth, as well as four minutes of utter pop excellence performed by iconic ally Belinda Carlise. Join us for an exploration of this A grade masterpiece, including but not limited to, topics such as why this song is so bloody good, why this song is particularly gay, and why “San Junipero” is the greatest episode of Black Mirror ever. If you’ve made it this far into the bio, and you’re gay and/or a millenial, then you’ll likely know precisely what we’re talking a...
May 06, 2020•29 min
What have I done to deserve this? What are we going to do about the rich? I don’t know what you want but I can’t give it to you – musings we should all be considering, or Pet Shop Boys song titles? Both! We’re well into Cycle 4, and for a supposed queer music podcast we took our sweet time getting to this iconic duo. Nevertheless, here we are with the PSBs, an act who have shaped many of the artists we know and love, queer or not, and continue to pump out their own unique brand of pop to this to...
Apr 30, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Few break-up tracks capture the boppery, struttery and sheer i’m-so-over-you-ery found soaked throughout Song 4 Mutya, our next selection for Aural Fixation's Quick Fix . Conceived by UK electronica duo Groove Armada, the song was originally meant for Estelle before being handed to ex-Sugababe (and current hun) Mutya Buena shortly after she departed the band. We couldn’t imagine it in anyone else’s hands; Buena’s chocolatey vocals provided us with the definitive heartbreak anthem of summer 2007....
Apr 22, 2020•22 min
As we’re sure you’re aware, recent developments surrounding Madame Rona and government mandates regarding social distancing mean that for the foreseeable future, Drew and Andy won't be able to record Aural Fixation in the same room as one another for a while. While we play around with ways in which we can record our episodes remotely, we wanted to share our first ever experiment with you – Episode Zero. Recorded in October 2018, this is the pilot episode of Aural Fixation – just two boys, a lapt...
Apr 15, 2020•53 min
In the grand tradition of reality TV show companion spin-offs broadcast on D-grade companion TV channels, we're keeping the flame burning at Aural Fixation with Quick Fix: Shorter episodes focusing on a song, rather than an album, which left a similar impact on our queer selves. We're kicking off with a look at the "finest all-female collaboration between 1988 and 2018" (a big call from Entertainment Weekly ), the 2001 cover of "Lady Marmalade" by Christina Aguilera, P!nk, Lil' Kim and Mya. We e...
Apr 09, 2020•29 min
The world continues to get more topsy turvy, but it also continues to spin, so therefore you have a brand new episode of Aural Fixation. We're kicking off with an artist who, quite frankly we cannot believe we haven't tackled sooner! Hang on – have we done Robyn before? As you can imagine with three EPs and a lot of heartbreak to get through, it's a bumper episode indeed, which we hope provides a glimpse of escapism (if that be what you're seeking). Andy gets emotional about Candi Staton's life ...
Apr 01, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 1
We can't lie – these are mysterious times. Everything feels a little bizarre and confusing at the moment, but something you can rely on is your fortnightly dose of unbridled queer joy from Drew and Andy. To wrap up our third (third!) season (cycle?), the boys once again take a deep dive into the DMs to provide their answers to your questions. This ep is pepped with conjecture on Gaga's upcoming Chromatica (save us Mother Monster), discourse on Whitney's bisexuality (RIP our Queen of the Night) a...
Mar 18, 2020•52 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Have you ever felt like you’re ever-so-slightly less-than? Do you ever get the sense that you’re living in someone else’s shadow? Have you, too, experienced that niggling sensation that there is somebody else – somebody more successful than you, more recognised, more universally revered – consistently beating you to the punch? OF COURSE YOU DO! You’re queer for christ sake, those feelings of inadequacy are literally engrained in us during childhood because of the systemic patriarchal dictatorshi...
Mar 04, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 8
