Darin
In the 2015 BBC documentary on Kate Bush, Steve Coogan said, “The music speaks for itself, but liking her makes you feel a bit clever.” It may be a mistake to tackle such a big topic on the second blog post. Talk about Kate Bush. Not a song, not an album (of which any could form several blog posts), but all of Kate Bush, as an artist. Unique is an overused and nearly meaningless word best avoided. Unconventional gets a little closer. Avant Garde is pretentious. I am going to go with fully independent. Kate Bush is, and has always been, a fully independent artist who has charted her own course from age 19 in a male-dominated business driven by the dollars of formulaic pop success. Kate Bush rejected all of that and still proved successful from her very first album. She has consistently defied and ignored the expectations placed upon her by the industry, and, quite frankly, her fans. She topped the UK single charts for four weeks at age 19 with “Wuthering Heights,” she has 25 UK top 40 singles, and all 10 of her studio albums made the UK top 10. According to Wikipedia, “She was the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts and the first female artist to enter the album chart at number one.” All without filling out the form of a rock star. She had exactly one tour with 24 shows in 1979, followed by a 22 night residency 35 years later, along with a smattering of TV appearances. Imagine if Madonna’s first tour in 1984 (The Virgin Tour) was half as long as it was, and was the last live performance of hers until her 2019 Madame X tour. Private and reclusive, Kate Bush has pursued her own musical interests and projects for 44 years. She has been profoundly successful and impactful on music and musicians in ways that are not always visible, but often acknowledged, influencing many through her unrelenting independence and commitment to her art, her way.
But Kate Bush’s music is not for everyone. Her music provokes strong reactions from some listeners. Her early vocal style made her inaccessible for many. For her devotees, there is no part of her music that isn’t innovative and pushing boundaries. For her detractors, she is just kooky and weird. She is, in these respects not unlike Bjork, who has pursued an equally defiant path committed to her art, blending music, dance, and performance art. Not surprisingly, Bjork identifies Kate Bush as an artist of important influence on her career and development (Kate Bush’s album The Dreaming is one of Bjork's 11 favorite albums of all time). Of course, you might be saying, “Yeah, well, I don’t like Bjork either!” Fair enough.
I must admit that if my first exposure to Kate Bush had been tracks like “Kite” or “Strange Phenomenon” from her first album, I might have missed the boat. But that was not the case. My first exposure to Kate Bush was in Warehouse Records near the corner of Broadway and Country Club in Tucson Arizona, and I’m gonna say it was sometime in 1983 in the early months when Pam and I were dating. Browsing the record store was a great way to spend time together and share our interests without spending money. She’d rummage through her favorite artists, who were more popular artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, The Carpenters, Abba (but who doesn’t love Abba?) Peter Paul and Mary, and even some teen idols like Shaun Cassidy or Leif Garrett. I would browse for Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Rush, Uriah Heep, Alan Parsons and the like. From time to time we would check in with each other and share the interesting items we found. Whatever day that was, we were both captivated by the music being played in the store. Mind you, we mostly browsed separately. I distinctly remember going over to Pam at the end of “Jig of Life” from the incredible second side of Hounds of Love and saying something to the effect of “Are you listening to this? It’s amazing!” I recall going up to the counter where they always displayed whatever album they were playing and seeing the iconic cover with Kate Bush and two chocolate Weimaraners. I can’t recall if we bought the album right then or shortly after, but Hounds of Love, heralded by some as her greatest album, was my first exposure to Kate Bush’s music and it was powerful and transformative. Pam and I have loved Kate Bush ever since.
If you have never listened to this album, you have missed a true masterpiece, and I encourage you to seek it out and give it a listen. Evocative, challenging, lyrical, cinematic, disjointed at times, and expressively beautiful and emotional, Hounds of Love is a profound listening journey. The first half of the album comprises separate tracks, while side two is a suite titled “The Ninth Wave” (referenced in a Tennyson quote from The Coming of Arthur on the back of the album cover). I’d actually recommend listening to “The Ninth Wave” first. It is meant to be experienced in one sitting, and to approach it any other way is a disservice to it. In this respect, it is similar to Pink Floyd’s Meddle album with its side of shorter tracks balanced by the twenty-three minute long “Echoes.” I know my goal here is to take a more comprehensive approach to Kate Bush, but I must pause to note that while maybe not deliberate, this correlation is completely understandable given that Kate Bush was supported and essentially “found” by David Gilmour who helped land her first record deal. It would be simplistic and incorrect, I think, to say that “The Ninth Wave” is Kate Bush’s “Echoes,” because she is never imitative. However, there are truly interesting parallels between these two lengthy suites of music–but THAT sounds like a later blog post . . . and a more lengthy exploration of this amazing piece should also wait for a later post (so much to write about). As a teaser, the Tennyson quote is only the top of the rabbit hole. The ninth wave is an old seafarer’s reference for a giant wave that comes after a succession of smaller waves and brings death and destruction (see the great 1850 painting by Russian-Armenian marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky). In Celtic mythology (so important to Kate Bush), the ninth wave is the barrier between this world and the otherworld. To go beyond the ninth wave is to access that otherworld and encounter its magical powers. That’s all for now . . . back to the bigger picture.
For me Hounds of Love is a center point for looking at all of Kate Bush’s work. It is a bit simplistic to classify her pre-Hounds of Love work as more experimental and quirky and her post-Hounds of Love music as more intimate and mature, but there is some validity in the assertion. It’s also possible to say that her earlier albums are characterized by being highly imaginative but often fictive, filled with little vignettes and dramas that come from imagined lives and moments, while her later work’s imaginative force finds more of a focus in lived moments that feel more grounded in experience. This is not to say they are autobiographical–though increasingly that happens too. It’s perhaps best explored by the juxtaposing of some tracks. Take, for example, her song “The Kick Inside,” the last and title track of her first album. Based upon the English/Scottish folk song “Lizzie Wan” about a girl who becomes pregnant with her brother’s child and is murdered by him, Kate Bush tells the story from the sister’s point of view, where she decides instead to commit suicide. The song’s lyrics are, in effect, her suicide note:
This kicking here inside
Makes me leave you behind
No more under the quilt to keep you warm
Your sister, I was born
You must lose me like an arrow shot into the killer storm
It is a beautiful and powerful track–and a brilliant ending to a debut album. Her reformulation of the traditional song from an alternate point of view foreshadows much of her approach to art in the coming years. Jump ahead 11 years to The Sensual World album and the track “This Woman’s Work” and you have a very similar piano-based feel, but a much different emotional approach. The common denominator is pregnancy, giving birth, and the metaphorical death/transition of sacrificing one’s independent life to bringing another into the world. She wrote this track specifically for a movie (“She’s Having a Baby”), and it is written from the man’s point of view as he waits restlessly for news of his wife’s precarious labor:
I should be crying, but I just can't let it show
I should be hoping, but I can't stop thinking
Of all the things we should've said
That were never said
All the things we should've done
That we never did
All the things that you needed from me
All the things that you wanted for me
All the things that I should've given but I didn't
Oh, darling, make it go away
Just make it go away now.
You can see a similar contrast with “Babooshka,” from her 1980 album Never for Ever and her magnificent “Love and Anger” from The Sensual World ten years later. There’s an emotional maturity about the buried feelings in relationships in “Love and Anger” that doesn’t exist in “Babooshka,” which relies upon deception and disguise to “out” the painful reality of a relationship that has deadened over time. I think that growing up and growing older has a lot to do with this change. She was 19 when her first album came out, and many of the tracks were written earlier than that. There is certainly brilliance in them, as in the amazing track “The Man with the Child in his Eyes,” written by her at age 13:
I hear him, before I go to sleep
And focus on the day that's been
I realise he's there
When I turn the light off and turn over
Nobody knows about my man
They think he's lost on some horizon
And suddenly I find myself
Listening to a man I've never known before
Telling me about the sea
All his love is 'til eternity
Beautiful lyrics in a beautiful song. But jump ahead to “Moments of Pleasure” from her album The Red Shoes, and Kate Bush, now 35, has a deeper grasp on the topic, and it just feels more real, more emotionally impactful, and more like life lived:
Some moments that I've had
Some moments of pleasure
I think about us lying
Lying on a beach somewhere
I think about us diving
Diving off a rock into another moment
The case of George the Wipe
Oh God, I can't stop laughing
This sense of humour of mine
It isn't funny at all
Oh, but we sit up all night talking about it
Just being alive
It can really hurt
And these moments given
Are a gift from time
For me this is the overarching progression of Kate Bush’s artistic output–from youthful, dare I say reckless and courageous exploration to deeply emotional and richly sophisticated expression, subtlety, and beauty that can perhaps only come with time spent on earth. I also can’t help tracing that arc personally, in that I first heard Kate Bush when I was 19, falling in love, and mostly a cerebral doofus without any focus–awkward and uncomfortable with myself, amazed that someone was interested in me, and feeling pretty euphoric at the prospects of life as a result. Now in my late 50s, I can still feel that youthful self, but the textures and nuances of life are more complicated, more painful at times, but finally more impactful. Expressing emotion always made me anxious and insecure when I was young. It has taken me many years to be able to be openly emotional and expressive. I’m not saying that I am like Kate Bush. I am going saying that she has always been a deeply private person who has shunned the spotlight and its intrusion on her life, so the richly domestic nature of some of her later albums is powerful for me.
And that brings me to Aerial–her eighth album released in 2005 after a 12 year hiatus. It is a complex and carefully interwoven exploration of domestic life, quiet moments, deep love, and the exuberance of family life. Like Hounds of Love, the first album is a string of loosely connected tracks (“A Sea of Honey”) while the second album (“A Sky of Honey”) is a suite of songs built around the progression of a full day through the night and into morning. Though it is all wonderful, like Hounds of Love, the deep magic is in the second half (“A Sky of Honey”). Not gone, however, is the quirky and glorious reveling in vocal sounds, and in the case of Aerial, birdsongs. The cover of the album looks like craggy islands in a sea of sunset until you realize that it is the visual wave of recorded birdsong. Birdsong runs throughout the album but reaches its pinnacle in the final song, again the title track, “Aerial” where she vocally reproduces various birdcalls as different forms of laughter. Sounds crazy, yes, but it is amazing and wonderful and ONLY Kate Bush could pull it off. While the totality of the “Sky of Honey” suite does not hold together quite as strongly for me as “The Ninth Wave,” three tracks in particular stand out as perhaps among Kate Bush’s greatest achievements: “Sunset,” “Nocturn,” and “Aerial.” And though they are not quite sequential, if listened to as a trio, they are stunning. Go see for yourself.
There is so much more to say about this amazing artist, but it will have to wait. And for a completely different take on her later years, have a look at this: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n08/ian-penman/sonic-foam. Who knows if she will ever release any new music, and I have resigned myself to the fact that I will only ever get to see her perform live through recordings. Her work does speak for itself, and I am willing to say that I do feel clever for liking her. Mostly I am profoundly grateful to have been alive on this planet during her creative output–a rich gift that continues to give.
Elise
I’ll never forget the complete betrayal I felt when my friend Miranda said she hated Kate Bush. We were inseparable during those years of high school and I don’t think I had ever been this upset at her. Miranda was the one who showed me Regina Spektor’s Soviet Kitsch with its dramatic vocals and story driven songs. We constantly listened to The Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer with her loud brash voice with vocal fry. Tori Amos was a deep obsession for Miranda in those days.
I demanded an explanation from her because it was completely inconceivable. It wasn’t like I played some of the weirder stuff. I carefully chose the least offensive song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” the one that could have been a Tori Amos song in a different world. Miranda couldn’t come up with any reason that I found valid, and it drove me into an almost rage fueled determination. In those days, I was a pretentious little shit, so I told Miranda that it was idiotic to like any of the other things we were listening to if she didn’t like Kate Bush. Kate Bush is an inspiration to every one of those musicians. I remember ranting to my dad about it, and he just said “Kate Bush is polarizing. You either like her or you don’t.”
I, of course, forgave Miranda for her blunder and that I thought it would be best if we avoided talking about Kate Bush. Don’t worry, we are still friends. If you are reading this Miranda, sorry for being such a dick.
My partner Danny would put on record that I am the MOST pretentious about Kate Bush. I still secretly judge people’s music taste based on their opinion on Kate Bush. Much like Miranda who tried so hard to like Kate Bush for me, I’ve tried to be diplomatic like my dad, but it's futile. Kate Bush is the most important artist in all of music and I will die on this hill.
When my dad says people like her or they don’t, the dramatic nerd that I am takes it a step further. I believe that you either get Kate Bush or you don’t. I’ve since grown up and don’t force people to try and understand. Everyone has a tolerance level for the weird and I will be the first to admit she is WEIRD. I want it to be clear that if you are reading this and don’t like Kate Bush, I understand. The Kick Inside is like they asked a fairy to make a David Bowie album. Her voice is the first thing that gets people to turn it off and say not for me. Then if you like subtle music you can play in the background, Kate Bush isn’t it. She’s bold and dramatic. She doesn’t do subtle, everything is seeped in a narrative and weird drama fueled nosies. All that is to say, sure, she might not be for you, but I don’t think it's her voice or small things. I think that when you listen to Kate Bush, you have to acknowledge this isn’t for you. She lets us live in her head space, full of drama and noise. That’s her magic.
It all begs the question, why? Why Kate Bush? Why be such a jerk about her? I wouldn’t say that I have any foundational memories around her music. Honestly, it has taken me a long time to fully love every album of hers and some of them I still feel lukewarm about. Everyone that I know that calls themselves a Kate Bush fan has the album that is THE ALBUM for them. For a lot of people it’s Hounds of Love. It’s The Dreaming for me. I’ve heard a few with a deep love for her debut album The Kick Inside. Each one of the records is so different and still completely 100% Kate Bush.
It’s in her voice shifting as she ages but still otherworldly. It’s in the drama seamlessly weaving between genres while still somehow remaining pop music. It’s in the deeply weird sections of vocal play. It’s the strong sense of narrative that drags you along through lyrics whose meanings are just out of reach. It’s in her dance centered music videos. She is captivating.
She is known and loved for the famous “Wuthering Heights” red dress dance, and it’s great and whimsical. The music video that first made me say, you know what this is the coolest? “Hammer Horror.” I watched that as a teenager and was just obsessed. It was so cheesy and silly, but captivating. I just said, sign me up, what else does she have? Then I watched the “Running Up that Hill” music video in all its sensuality. I have seen that music video at least 100 times, always blown away by its simple beauty. She is so expressive with her movements. “Babooshka” with its weird upright bass dancing that’s so sexy and direct as she stares at the camera. Every single one is so weird and entracing.
I could go on about her progression and about her whole career, but I’m going to leave it to my dad. I could yammer on and on about why I think Kate Bush is the best. In the end, she makes art. Art is not something that you can be forced to love. It has to speak to you. You have to make space for it. You have to accept that it might be saying something that takes a while to understand.
And despite all my posturing early on in this post, I truly believe that the only way to love her and all her dramatic weirdness is to work through it yourself. Find the tracks that call you to the fairyland of her music. So I’m going to list some examples of what makes me love Kate Bush. Take them or leave them, but if you listen. Listen with an open mind and just let her take you on a journey.
The Kick Inside
Moving
Wuthering Heights
Lionheart
Don’t Put Your Foot on Heartbreak
Hammer Horror
Never for Ever
Babooska
Wedding List
Army Dreamers
Breathing
The Dreaming
All The Love
Houdini
Get Out of My House
These are the last 3 songs on the album. Just listen to these with lyrics up. It’s a beautiful, emotional progression. Unlike the Ninth Wave, this is riddled with anger and heartbreak. Get Out of My House might be my favorite Kate Bush song ever. It’s loud and weird (like maybe the weirdest Kate song), but it feels so intensely personal.
Hounds of Love
Running up That Hill (Deal with God)
Cloudbusting
The Ninth Wave- see my dad’s blog post for all the reasons you need.
The Sensual World
This is Women’s Work
The Red Shoes
Rubberband Girl
The Red Shoes
Aerial
Bertie-A simple joyful song about her son
Aerial- She laughs bird calls…need I say more?
Sunset- This song is amazing in its own rights, but it makes me think about my dad sitting on a sailboat watching the sun go down. It brings me to tears every single time.