Kate Bush, a 1993 interview

KATE BUSH

Melody Maker, 1993

by Simon Reynolds

    Kate Bush is an English original. In 1978, when her debut single

"Wuthering Heights" hit Number One in the UK, her wavering,

starburst voice seemed to come out of nowhere. But only because it's

from that same un-American, un-rock'n'roll place as Johnny Rotten's

snarl or Morrissey's plummy plaintiveness.  Like the above, Kate

Bush's singing is almost like 'English soul' (ie, nothing to do with

pseudo-American blue-eyed soul).

     Exploding into fame at the tail-end of punk, Bush was initially

far from hip. Her sense of glamour, while outlandish and eccentric,

seemed closer to the conventionally feminine than the likes of

Siouxsie and Poly Styrene, while her florid art-rock, with its

frilly, sumptuous surfaces and lofty conceptualism, seemed to belong

with the middlebrow likes of Pink Floyd (whose Dave Gilmour was

instrumental in getting her career off the ground) and Peter Gabriel

(later a friend and collaborator). Songs like "England My Lionheart"

partook of the olde Albion nostalgia of progressive rock (Floyd's

"Grantchester Meadows", Genesis' "Selling England by The Pound").

Actually, Bush is half-Irish on her late mother's side, and thinks

herself as much Celtic as Anglo-Saxon.

     But now sufficient time has elapsed since the punk v. hippy

wars for Bush to be reclaimed and acclaimed as part of the canon of

British-and-proud-of-it art-rock. And so the likes of Brett Anderson

of Suede rave about her in the same breath as Bowie or Bolan; Suede

play Bush melodramas like 'Wuthering Heights' as a prequel to

hitting the stage and singing ballads like 'The Next Life', in which

Anderson endeavours to scale Bush's stratospheric heights of vocal

excess.  And as may prove the case with Suede, it's the Englishness

of Bush's singing that's prevented her from breaking America.

    "I don't sing with an American accent," she admits. "I'd not

considered that as a factor before, but certainly a lot of English

singers do sing with an American accent.  I used to love that about

Bryan Ferry, that he sung with such an obviously English voice, when

so few people did. I loved Roxy Music, really loved the first four

albums. I loved David Bowie circa 'Young Americans' too."

     Hipness may have eluded her during punk, but with her first few

albums, Bush plugged into the same realm of suburban teen dreamlife

and angsty, arty intensity as The Cure (Robert Smith was once

described as "the male Kate Bush") and The Smiths did later.  If she

lacked the street credibility that was de rigeur during punk and

post-punk, it's because she was busy exploring "the great indoors"

of her imagination, fuelled by visions from literature and

mythology.  Bush's early music and image exude much the same kind of

wispy pre-Raphaelite feminism as Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks

(another England-obsessed hippy chick): a wild and free femininity,

an autonomy achieved not through confrontation but elusiveness. A

nicer, girl-next-door-ier Siouxsie Sioux, Bush has used maquerade

and mystique as a way of tantalising but evading the male gaze (as

opposed to the demystification strategy utilised by she-rebels from

The Slits and Poly Styrene to Riot Grrrl).  For a certain kind of

young woman, Bush's dressing up and fantasies of flying free was a

form of rebellion that spoke to them more keenly than punk's anti-

glamour postures and agit-prop polemic.

     In 'The Secret History of Kate Bush (& the strange art of

pop)", a brilliant subversion of the star biography, Fred Vermorel

pinpoints suburbia as the well-spring of Bush's magick. He quotes

the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: "If I were asked to name

the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters

daydreaming, and the house protects the dreamer, the house allows

one to dream in peace".  Where Siouxsie sang songs like "Suburban

Relapse" which presented domesticity as a prison that drives women

mad, Bush was a homebody, cocooned in the bosom of her family, whose

encouragement allowed her to become the teen prodigy she was and

Renaissance woman that she remains.  Home-loving, suburban, Bush has

never been much of a rock'n'roll character (rock being the sound of

the city, of leaving home, cutting the ties that bind).

     "Being born in the back of a pick-up truck, yeah, that's

rock'n'roll...," she laughs. "I've always found it really ridiculous

that I'm doing what I'm doing, cos in some ways I'm really

unlikely."

      Fred Vermorel also waxed lyrical about Bush's NICENESS, but

acknowledged that she sometimes seems to use it as a shield, fending

off intrusive questions, protecting her private space (one of her

most disturbing and perplexing songs is "Get Out Of My House" off

1982's "The Dreaming").  "She will neutralise you by dissolving her

prescence in a polite fog", Vermorel observed. A few of my more

pretentious or lofty lines of enquiry are deftly neutralised and

dissolved in this fashion. For instance, citing the host of female

friends who testified to me about the huge impact Bush's music had

on them as teenagers, I move on to ask her about the female-ness of

her art.  But she snuffs out the woman-in-rock approach by

responding to the prequel: "if people get anything out of my music

that's fantastic, I feel very privileged to do what I like for a

living, it makes me feel very humble that people actually play my

records." Only later, in transciption, do I realise how expertly she

parried and quashed a line of enquiry that probably bores the pants

off her. Kate Bush is nobody's fool.

     *         *         *         *         *         *

Bush's new album "The Red Shoes" is a diverse affair, almost a

collection of singles rather than an 'album', ranging from a classic

Bush-style keyboard-based ballad like "Moments Of Pleasure" to a

futuristic funk-rock scorcher like "Big Stripey Lie".  And she's got

a raft of illustrious guest players on board this time, 'big names'

like Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Prince.

     "My guitarist [Alan Murphy] died a few years ago," says Bush,

now in her mid-thirties but remarkably ageless. We're sitting in a

North London film editing studio where she's putting finishing

touches to her directorial debut, "The Line, The Cross, The Curve".

"And there were a lot of tracks I wanted guitar in and I felt a bit

lost. So when I wrote a song I'd start to imagine who would be the

best guitarist I could possibly have. It was a bit of game at first!

But people were so responsive. It did concern me a bit that if I

wasn't using these people well, it would just come across as very

flash. Sometimes having someone who has a distinctive sound doesn't

always work very well in other people's music."

    The subdued, desolate ballad 'And So Is Love' features Eric

Clapton and, on keyboards, Gary Brooker (ex-Procul Harum).  "When I

was writing that song, it took on a certain flavour.  Quite empty,

slightly bluesy.  And I felt how wonderful it would be to have Eric

to play on it.  What he played was so beautiful, it became a

question of finding other sounds that would suit the texture.  I

love the Hammond organ, and I'd met Gary Brooker years ago on some

charity thing and I'd wanted to work with him."

     Other guest players include Jeff Beck, the punk-hairstyled

classical violinist Nigel Kennedy, and the Black British comedian

Lenny Henry, all of whom Bush describes separately as "a bit of a

mate".  Lenny Henry doesn't tell any gags, but does some rather fine

soul singing on "Why Should I Love You"--the same song to which

Prince contributes guitar, keyboards, bass and vocals, lending the

track a luscious Paisley Park feel.  Apart from obviously having

some kind of mutual admiration pact, Prince and Bush share some

affinities: hippy-dippy mystical leanings, but more importantly, a

love of sumptuous arrangements, a delight in molding the exquisite

stuff of sound, frolicing in the studio playpen.  Prince and Bush

both make records that are so luscious, tantalising and succulent,

they're almost edible.

   "I think he's so talented," gushes Bush. "One of the few people

in this business who's very prolific, but very consistent.  Again,

it was a bit of a whim, I was writing the song and I thought 'who'd

be nice to play guitar?'. We never actually met while doing the

track, only later. But that appealed to my sense of humour, sending

tapes back and forth."

     Another track on the album, "Big Stripey Lie", is the kind of

futuristic funk-metal freak-out that the boy wonder might have

knocked out circa "Purple Rain" or "Sign O'The Times".  Unusually,

it's Bush herself who does the screeching axe-work.

   "I'm not one of those people who can pick up an instrument and

make a noise - keyboards are my instrument.  But for a couple of

years I really wanted to play electric guitar. I had no interest in

acoustic, I just wanted to have a thrash.  There was this heavy

metal wild man inside me that just wanted to come out!"

     The song also reminds me a bit of the cross-generic

crush-collisions that a producer like Bill Laswell loves to throw

together (only less academic and sterile than his hybridology tends

to be).

    "I do have a fascination with taking things that supposedly

don't go together and finding a way of making them go together. I

like playing with opposites a lot.  The whole question of songs and

sounds and which ones go together and which don't - it fascinates

me."

    "The Red Shoes" also sees Bush resume her periodic delvings into

non-Western ethnic music. The sprightly "Eat The Music" is the

result of a recent infatuation with Madagascar's folk music. She

first heard it through her brother Paddy, who hips her to a lot of

world music. (He plays 'fujare' and Tibetan singing bowls on "Lily",

another song on the album).

     "If I hear things and think they're really great, it's hard not

to be influenced. I've always had an interest in traditional music.

Madagascan music is so fantastically joyous.  And I really wanted to

do something that could hopefully use that joy but fit it into a

rock context. It was wonderful working with this Madagascan guy,

Justin Vall. His energy was extraordinary.  Just like the music, so

very innocent and positive and sweet.

     "Paddy's always listening out for traditional music.  It

probably came from my mother, who was Irish. She was always

surrounded by traditional music when she was a kid.  When I was

growing up people would come in and they'd just start playing a

tune. So there was always, in my early life, this thing of music

being treated as a joyous thing, part of life.  Someone would pick

up a fiddle and everyone else would get up and dance." Bush mourns

the absence today of that festive, convivial, participatory approach

to music. "It's to do with our English temperament, it's hard for us

to learn to enjoy ourselves. In Ireland, people just play music all

the time cos they love it."

     "The Red Shoes" also renews Bush's collaboration with the Trio

Bulgarka, whose Bulgarian harmony singing stems from a folk culture

in which music is intertwined with the prosaic textures of everyday

life.  The Trio can sing songs about doing the laundry and make it

sound transcendental.  "Well, not all of their songs are so trivial

as that," says Bush.  "Some of the stories are really quite sad. But

yes, they can make you cry to a tune that's about making bread!"

     Bush first called on the Trio's services for her

last album, "The Sensual World".  Again, it was Paddy Bush who

turned her on to Bulgarian music, but it was Joe Boyd (legendary

producer of The Incredible String Band and other folkadelic weirdos

associated with Elektra, and founder of Hannibal, the pioneering

world music label) who hooked her up with the Trio, and equally

important, with a translator and an arranger. "I was scared,"

recalls Bush. "'Cos what they do is so...  profound and so ancient,

and I felt naive in my musical ability.  I didn't want to involve

them in some...  pop song, y'know, and end up abusing their talents.

They're people with such integrity.  Such lovely people.  They have

such hard lives."

     The everyday hardship of Eastern Bloc life led the Trio

Bulgarka to respond rather oddly to one line in "You're The Only One

I Want". It's a song about breaking up a relationship, and Bush

proclaims herself a free spirit who can go where she pleases 'cos

"I've got petrol in the car".  "The Trio were most jealous, cos they

have to queue for 48 hours to get a gallon of gas.  They had a

totally different way of looking at it!"

     *         *         *         *         *         *

    Along with her "wispy" mystical leanings (in the past she's had

hit singles with songs about oddball mystics like Gurdjieff and

Reich), if there's one thing that makes Bush a love-or-hate,

adore-or-abhor proposition, it's her voice.  For some it's swoonily

intense, a voice to drown in; for others, it's gratingly

over-the-top, frilly and overwraught.  Bush's bursting, exultant

style is unique and unprecedented, and, as is the way with

originals, it's been a big influence on subsequent female singers.

Not that Bush appears to have noticed (indeed she likes to make out

she doesn't listen to much contemporary music). She's non-committal

when I reel out the roll-call of the indebted.  These include Tori

Amos (whose piano-based melodrama owes a lot to Bush's early style),

Sinead O'Connor, 'kooky' Canadian singer-songwriters like Mary

Margaret O'Hara and Jane Siberry, and even a few post-punk

chanteuses (ex-Sugarcube Bjork, Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins).

     Bush has always loved to  make an unusual voice even more

unearthly, by revelling in studio treatments and multi-tracking

herself into a disorientating polyphony. On the new album's

"Rubberband Girl", she lets loose a geyser of scat-vocalese mid-

song, a sort of horn solo for the human voice, then spirals off into

an eerie drone-chant.  "A lot of those vocal experiments just happen

in the studio," she says. "But then a lot of the times I'm writing

in the studio, onto tape, as opposed to taking a song in with me."

     From very early on, Bush made production an inseparable part of

composition. She's vigorously and flamboyantly seized on the

studio's possibilities for sound-sculpting.  Surprisingly, given

that she's one of the few female artists to go so deeply into

studio-mastery, she's done hardly any production for other artists.

    "I've had offers, but I've been too busy.  I do love the idea of

helping someone else to make a record, 'cos it's a very difficult

process. The whole question of songs and sounds and which ones go

together and which don't, it fascinates me.  You have to use very

strange language to describe sounds to musicians or engineers, like

'cold' or 'warm'. Sound's a bit like smell, in that it's hard to

describe without comparing it to something inappropriate.  They say

that smell is most closely connected to the memory centre of the

brain, and I've always been obsessed with the fact that you can just

smell something and it'll take you right back. You can't even place

where it comes from, but you just know it's from someplace way back

in your childhood.  And in some ways, maybe music does the same

thing."

    Bush's interest in exploring the possibilities of the

studio-as-instrument, the importance she places on "chromatic"

timbres and textures in music, makes her very much part of the

British art-rock tradition.  In particular, she has much in common

with Brian Eno.  Both are fascinated by what Eno regards as the most

radical aspect of rock, the timbres, textures and treatments that

can't be scored with traditional notation, can only be gestured at

feebly with metaphor and simile.  Eno too has pointed out the

affinities between smell and sound as sensory zones for which we

have no verbal map.

     As it happens, Bush has "a lot of respect" for Eno.

"I think he's had a very big influence on the music business.  The

album he did with David Byrne, "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts",

that's been incredibly...  revolutionary. A lot of the sample-based

music that's happening now stems straight from that. Such a turning

point in music, the whole use of repetition. It was a big influence

on me too. It's a shame that 'My Life In The Bush' was so

under-rated at the time.  But that's always the way: the innovators

tend not to have such big hits.  And then you get people who copy

two or three stages down the line, who get huge hits and are hailed

as the new sound. "

     Could this be a veiled allusion to Bush's own neglected

masterpiece, "The Dreaming"?  While far from a flop, the 1982 album

was sufficiently avant-garde to alienate some of her audience, and

it didn't spawn many chart-toppers.

    "I had bit of a rough time with 'The Dreaming' but I'm not

surprised really. It's kind of a weird album.  But it was a very

important period for me, I just wanted to do something that meant

something to me and wasn't at all commercial. I was happy with what

we achieved, even though a lot of people didn't get it. It

consolidated feelings in me about doing things that felt right as

opposed to doing things so they'd be incredibly popular."

     As well as containing her first concerted embrace of world

music influences (like the didgeridu-driven, aboriginal soundscape

of the title track), "The Dreaming" was also the album on which Bush

got to grips with sampling, in the form of the then expensive and

rather exclusive Fairlight.  Nowadays samplers are cheap and

commonplace, and the sampler-delic sorcery Bush trailblazed is part

of the fabric of modern music, from hip hop to techno.

Appropriately, Bush recently found herself being 'sampled'.  For

their rave hit "Something Good",  British techno unit The Utah

Saints took a slice of vocal euphoria from her "Cloudbusting" hit

(off 'The Hounds Of Love'), and modulated it into a swooning loop.

Bush's mystic ecstasy ("I just know that something good is going to

happen") was transformed to evoke the raver's breathless

anticipation as the Ecstasy starts to come on strong. Perhaps

unaware of its full naughtiness, Bush approved of the song, and with

typical, almost thespian modesty, says she was "flattered".

     *         *         *         *         *         *

Coincidentally, the title track of "The Red Shoes" hymns the

trance-dental power of dance - an obsession that also inspired

Bush's directorial debut, "The Line, The Cross, The Curve".

Currently in the final throes of post-production, the hour long film

stars Miranda Richardson and mime Lindsay Kemp, (with whom Bush

studied dance in her early days of stardom).  It's based on the same

fairy story as Michael Powell and Emerick Pressburger's classic

movie "The Red Shoes".

    "It's just taking the idea of this shoes that have a life of

their own," Bush says of both the song and her film.  "If you're

unfortunate enough to put them on, you're just going to dance and

dance.  It's almost like the idea that you're possessed by dance.

Before I had any lyrics, the rhythm of the music led me to the image

of, oh, horses, something that was running forward, and that led me

to the image of the dancing shoes.  Musically, I was just trying to

get a sense of delirium, of something very circular and hypnotic,

but building and building."

     With its mix of acoustic instruments (mandola, whistles,

valiha) and synth-like keyboard textures, "The Red Shoes"

immediately made me think Bush was trying to make a link between

ancient and modern ideas of dance, pagan rites and techno-pagan

raving. The way that these primal modes of ecstatic trance-endence

have resurfaced in an ultra-modern hi-tech context --lasers,

strobes, 50 K sub-bass sound--suggests that these impulses lie

dormant in our collective unconscious or even genetic code.  People

have instinctively reinvented these rituals despite, or perhaps

because, our culture in impoverished when it comes to forms of

communal release.

     "Something very similar was on my mind, the idea of trance,

delirium, as a way of transcending the normal.  Maybe human beings

actually need that. Things are very hard for people in this country,

maybe they instinctively need to transcend it. It's very much that

ancient call."

     Has dancing ever had that ecstatic function for you?

    "A couple of times, it has really made me feel like that.  Of

course, just doing exercise puts you in a much better state of mind.

I can feel negative before I do a class, and I always feel so much

better afterwards. But that may simply be a question of getting

oxygen to the brain!"

     The reason I ask was that you used to tell a story sometimes

about your childhood: how you would dance unselfconsciously to pop

music on TV, but then some visitors laughed at you, shattering your

innocence, and you never danced that way again. You even said: "I

think maybe I've been trying to get back there ever since."

     "I do remember being incredibly unselfconscious, but it wasn't

that people laughed at me, it was that they came as an audience at

one point. And suddenly being observed made me terribly

self-conscious.  I was only 3 or 4 and I would dance to any music.

But children all reach that point where they become self-conscious

about things that are obviously extremely natural to them. And then

you either never get back there, or you spend a lot of time trying

to recover it."

     *         *         *         *         *         *

   This longing for lost innocence is a thread running through

Bush's oeuvre. The genderless protagonist of "In Search Of Peter

Pan" (from 1978's "Lionheart"), keeps a picture of Peter Pan in a

locket, as a symbol of the limitless imagination and fantastical

dreams of chilhood, which he knows he's about to lose as adulthood

looms.  Some critics have seen J.M. Barrie's immortal boychild as

androgynous (before the calamity of puberty, which Peter Pan never

suffers, the sexes aren't so differentiated, which is why the Riot

Grrrls so often mourn the lost invincible tomboy of prepubescence).

As it happens, androgyy remains an obsession for Kate Bush (another

Suede connection!), and surfaces on the new record with "Eat The

Music".  The song's crux is the lines: "he's a woman at heart/and I

love him for that/let's split him open/like a pomegranate/insides

out/all is revealed/not only woman bleed".

     "It's playing with the idea of opening people up," explains

Bush, "And the idea of the hidden femininity in a man, and the man

in a woman. I do think androgyny is a world movement. Whether people

are consciously controlling it or not, it's what's happening.

Although in some ways it's extremely confusing, it's got to be

positive in the long run.  It seems such a shame that men and women

don't help each other. Maybe that's a naive thing to say, but

they're always working against each other.  The main thing I'm aware

of is, in terms of growing awareness, is the fact that the 'anima'

and 'animus'" - she's referring to Carl Jung's feminine and

masculine archetypes -"is quite a popular conception now."

    Back in 1978, Bush declared: "when I'm at the piano writing a

song, I like to feel I'm a man, not physically but in the areas they

explore".

    "I do remember saying that I didn't necessarily feel like a

woman," she says now. "If you have a subject matter for a song, you

pretend to be that character.  It's one big make-up and dressing up

game.  Not so much now, but early on, I did write songs from a man's

point of view, or even from an object's point of view".

     While the 1978 quote may simply reflect the lack of female role

models in the prog-rock/art-rock field to which Bush aspired, it

suggests to me another idea: that pop is androgynising. It's a space

which in which either gender can appropriate the other gender's

"privileges": men can be hyper-emotional and vulnerable, women can

seize the creative reins, be self-aggrandising, aggressive,

larger-than-life, loud. Is pop, at its best, a utopian space in

which the limits of gender and physical identity are transcended?

     "That's what all art's about - a sense of moving away from

boundaries that you can't, in real-life. Like a dancer is always

trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible.

But you try to do as much as you can within those physical

boundaries. All art is like that: a form of exploration, of making

up stories. Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make believe,

really."