It Eats the Dust 0n Dame katie's XulkuM; plus 2nd Gospel, Part 2

[IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU]

Only problem, Bob K., is that
THERE IS NO DOMESTIC CD OF THE WHOLE STORY.
The only CD of The Whole Story so far is
the UK pressing, and IED is sure you'll
be able to confirm this by looking at the
fine print.

Therefore, the announcement "Also available
on video" refers to the PAL UK video cassette,
and has no bearing on the US video market.

IED would like to discover that he is totally
wrong about this, but according to all the
companies that are involved in this non-starter,
there will not be a U.S. video of The Whole Story,
so don't get your hopes up. The MGM/UA announcement
was completely inaccurate. All of this is confused
further by the shake-up of the video division of
EMI (Thorn EMI), following its acquisition by
Golan/Globus (Cannon Films), who have since gone
very nearly broke.


The Second True and Only Gospel (The Peter Swales interview with
Kate Bush, Paddy Bush and Del Palmer), Part 2

Swales: Paddy, maybe you'd give a quick sketch of your career as a
musician prior to your involvement with your sister.

Paddy: Well, I suppose it all started off initially because there's
always been so much music in our family. Our mother comes from a
very musical family, all her brothers, i.e. our uncles, played on
accordians and fiddles and stuff. So music was something we were
always exposed to as young kids and we were always hearing Irish
dance music, which has been very special to me ever since. But my
initial involvement in music came when I used to play for an
English Morris Dance team. I used to play the concertina, and the
Anglo-chromatic concertina. I did that for a very long time and worked
for the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The Society's image is one
of lady dance-teachers sat at pianos {note colloquial construction}
with children prancing about. But, basically, at that time, it was
the only source of broad-spectrum information concerning folk music.
So I used to play for their Morris Dance team, not a very big nor
a very popular team really, but that was where my earliest experience
of performing came from. We used to work a lot in folk clubs and,
at that particular time in the Sixties, the folk revival was happening
in England and out of it came several thousand LPs that are almost
all unavailable and forgotten by now, but some of the stuff was just
incredible, and that was our source material until I started getting
involved in Irish dance music. It's crazy! I happened to go to school,
here in England, with a guy called Kevin Burke, who's considered the
best fiddler in Ireland. I was just walking past this classroom one
day, and there was this geezer in there doing this absolutely
incredible Sligo fiddle playing. I'd never heard anything like it,
I mean, it was a delirious kind of music! And then, from all that,
my interest in musical instruments just grew and grew to the point
where I tried to seek an apprenticeship with a musical instrument
maker, actually with a harp maker at that particular time, 'cause
I was interested in learning how to play all the things. So I looked
for an apprenticeship for nearly two years -- that would have been
when I was between about eighteen and twenty -- but I couldn't find
anybody at all interested in taking me on. But then eventually,
towards the mid-1970s, I discovered a place in London that was
offering a course in musical instrument technology, not just on one
instrument, but on everything. I mean LITERALLY, piano tuning, violin
making, harpsichord building, keyboards, ethnic musicology with Jean
Jenkings, and so on. And it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
So I went and studied at this college, the London College of Furniture
in Shoreditch, for three years and became a musical instrument
technologist specializing in mediaeval musical instruments.

Swales: And you were still playing around folk clubs during those
years?

Paddy: Oh yes, certainly. Folk music -- it's very, very hard to
give any sort of adequate description of what folk music can MEAN
to you if you're not yourself completely involved in it. It's more
like a way of life. It can't stop. It's like swimming, once you've
learned the art you can't go and forget how to do it. You know,
somebody goes 'dum-dee'diddle-dee-dum-dee-da' (Paddy breaks into
an Irish jig) and you're off! It instantly makes sense! If you're
born into a tradition of playing some particular kind of music,
you can branch out into all kinds of OTHER music. But the tradition
is something that's always THERE and just never, never falls apart.
So, in my case, the folk tradition was constantly THERE. But my
major interest in broad-spectrum musical instruments just grew and
grew and grew. And being at that college was the perfect place to
pursue it...

Swales: So then you came out of that into helping Kate?

Paddy: Well, I struggled by myself for a time as an artist, an
artist of weirdness. I had a couple of exhibitions of some things that
I'd made during that time. You see, towards the end, my
course in musical instrument making became very curious and strange,
I started making instruments with arms and legs and out of very
unorthodox materials; and instruments that didn't play and which
demonstrated other sorts of principles. I had an exhibition at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery and sold a couple of things, there was a
great deal of interest, but not much success! Then one day Kate
said, "Do you want to join the band?"

Swales: Del (Palmer, Kate's demos engineer, bass player and boyfriend),
you played bass in the original K.T. Bush band. The guitarist Brian
Bath was once telling me how one day in the mid-70s, Paddy asked him
to sit in and play with his kid sister and he was so overwhelmed, he
just couldn't believe what he was hearing...

Del: Yeah, and he wasn't the only one. I'd heard about Kate from Paddy
'cause I'd known him for some time. And Brian had told me he'd heard
some of her songs and they were really great, and I trusted his opinion.
But I just had this impression that she must be older and more mature.
Then at our first rehearsal -- Kate, Brian and me, and a fellow called
Vic King on drums -- I felt a little nervous because, you know, I felt
a particular emotional involvement coming on right from the word go.
But I also just thought: this girl's like just eighteen, whereas I'd
been struggling for years on my bass. And I knew I just had to get
involved some way because this was going to be MEGA. It was a PHENOMENON
because it was so completely different from what anyone else was doing.
And I've never had any desire to work with anyone else since. It wouldn't
be anywhere near so adventurous and demanding. It's no good you sitting
there laughing, Kate, it's true! The songs always started off in a
way I found instantly...well, familiar. But then suddenly they'd leap
off somewhere completely different, and I'd think, how could you possibly
THINK of going to THERE from what you were in originally? I would never
have thought of doing that, and yet it always works! And that's the
case even moreso nowadays. For me, a great musical artist is someone
who can always keep surprising you with what they do, and there's very
few people who can do that for me, very few. I've got very limited
musical tastes...

Swales: When you first met Kate, was she herself aware of her own
musical precocity, or was she totally naive about it all?

Del: I'm not sure if I can answer that one. I think maybe she kind
of underrated how much of a talent she actually was, if you see what
I mean.

Swales: Is that still true, Kate?

Kate: I don't know! This is all very interesting for me, it's almost
like I'm a fly on the wall.

Del: No, but I think you DO underestimate yourself a lot. And I
think you're not the only one who does. I think there's a lot of
people in the music business and the press who underestimate what
you're doing and what you're capable of.

Swales: Outside of your own work, you must meet with other musicians,
most of them male, of course. Musically speaking, do they tend to
take Kate Bush seriously?

Kate: Yes, I think they do. In fact, a lot of the people who said how
much they like the last album, The Dreaming, were musicians. And that
really means a lot to me.

Swales: It does seem that, while Kate Bush is something of an acquired
taste, she does on her own tend largely to satisfy the musical appetite
of those who've acquired it, so that henceforth they tend to have a
diminished interest in other artists.