NewMusic KT interview (part 1)

[Henry Chai <chai%utflis%math.waterloo.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>]

The following interview was aired on May 30 on CityTV, a Toronto station 
which isn't shy about showing KB videos and doing interviews with her.  
This time the interviewer is Laurie Brown.  KT seems more at ease then
in the previous interviews I've seen on CityTV, but there are more
"umm"'s and "err"'s.  They also showed snippets of videos in between parts 
of the interview and the voice-overs.  I have indicated these in {}'s.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What happens when you have a four-octave range voice, Pre-Raphaelite
    Anglo-Irish looks; incredible ability to compose at keyboards, and
    a career in the British and North American charts over the last
    decade which brought 17 hit singles, since the age of 17; a back-
    ground in dance, and a working knowledge of literature and drama.
    Well, it seems you have all the ingredients for a classic British
    Art Rocker.  You also have Kate Bush.  Kate has never performed
    live in North America and hasn't in England for the past 7 years.
    It seems that she's someone who prefers to view the world behind
    her own garden wall.  Yet lately she has been seen doing other
    projects.  She sang live at the Palladium with David Gilmor of
    Pink Floyd, who produced her first album, and she also did a track
    and video with Peter Gabriel, a very compatible music companion to
    Kate's own work.  { _Don't_Give_Up_ }

"Also Kate apppeared in the video of "Let it Be," the Ferry Aid sin-
    gle, a UK charity record to raise money for the family of the vic-
    tims of the British ferry disaster." { _Let_It_Be_ }

"All of these renewed activities in England has Kate Bush fans hoping
    that this bodes well for some future live performances, especially
    here in North America."

KB: I think that other people tend to assume I don't like doing live
    performances because it's been so long since the tour that we did.
    But it's really my other commitments, they are just too involved,
    and since then the albums have taken longer and longer progres-
    sively.  And with videos and promotion that goes immediately after
    an album, I just haven't felt the time or the space to really get
    one together, because it would take a long time to put it togeth-
    er.  But I would like to, very much so, and I have really wanted
    to since the last one, but it just hadn't been really the time and
    I'm hoping that it will feel right and that the time will come
    again.  {  _Wow_ "Live at HO" -- NOT from TWS }


NM: I understand that you've built your own studio and you're working
    from that now.

KB: Yes, and the difference that makes is phenomenal.  One of the best
    decisions I've ever made is to get that studio, because automati-
    cally I'm relaxed, and could put the ideas straight onto tape,
    which again I just could not afford to do when working in a com-
    mercial studio.  It's so expensive; you have to work out a lot be-
    fore you go in and there's not time to experiment and change
    things as much as you like.  Or if you do, the pressure of what
    it's costing I think actually becomes anti-productive.

NM: I'm interested in how your song writing process works.  When
    you're trying to communicate with other musicians and tell them
    exactly what you want, do you give them a tape on cassette?

KB: It very much depends on the musician.  Some people would not want
    to come in to the studio without having had a cassette that they
    could listen to and work some ideas out from.  But normally what
    happens is the musician comes in, we play the track which would
    have the basics on it.  I sort of work backwards to most people in
    a lot of ways in that the bass quite often goes on nearly as one
    of the last instrument.  So the track they would hear would have
    the drums, piano, voice, some keyboards, even guitar sometimes.
    And quite often now, we have a very good atmosphere going on the
    tape before the musician comes in, so although it might be very
    rough, what's on there is a very strong mood of what it will be
    like at the end.  It's got all the feelings in there, and it's
    just a matter of tidying it up.

NM: Yeah, 'cause you don't want to lose that atmosphere.

KB: Yes, it's very difficult to re-create things like that, and that's
    what's so good for me to be able to write straight on to tape.
    You might get some really dauchy [?] things, and quite often you
    do, but there might be something that is so spontaneous, that you
    won't be able to do again in the same way, and it's there on tape.
    { _Wuthering_Heights_ }

"This year Kate released "The Whole Story", which is both a home video
    album and a compilation record of all her biggest hits, and one
    new track, _Experiment_IV_.  She also re-recorded the vocals for
    _Wuthering_Heights_.

KB: I wanted to put a contemporary mark on it.  I felt it sounded like
    a very little girl singing that to me and the production was very
    much a 70's production.  And although there were some other tracks
    in there that you could say the same thing of, they weren't as
    blatant as that one was.  If I have had the time I probably would
    have done the same to some of the other tracks.  But there's just
    no time; there was too much to do with recording and writing _X_4_
    plus doing the video.  It was a very intense period to get that
    out on the deadline.

NM: When do you think your main strength lies; in your family or
    music?

KB: I think that's a very difficult question, because my family are
    very important to me and have been around since I was born,
    whereas my music is something that came much later.  But there's
    such a personal involvement with my music that's very much in-
    spired by people.  But it's a very private thing and it's very
    much a release for me.  I think I've got a tremendous amount of
    support from my family which is very important to me. And I don't
    know if music supports you; it's not necessarily a comforting
    thing, but it's like a very close friend, I guess.  { _Lionheart_
    (Live at HO video; with b/w photos of young KT) }

"Kate Bush is an artist who discovered videos early on and she made a
    lot of them, some of them you are seeing here for the first time.
    You can tell she had plenty of input, because they are just as
    complex and free spirited as her music." { _Army_Dreamers_ }

NM: I was reading that the two videos that you're most pleased with,
    and the ones you like, are _Running_up_that_Hill_ and
    _Army_Dreamers_.  What was it that you didn't feel you like about
    the other ones?

KB: I have a couple of favorites since that.  But the main problem is
    that when you write a song, you write a *song*, and not as some-
    thing that's visual.  So quite often there isn't a visual story
    contained in a song in a way that should be, to actually put on
    film.  Budgets are a particular problem; it costs a lot of money.
    And time - usually it's such a rush job to get it together.  But
    more recently we've been trying to get them done as much up front
    as possible, and spend more time, effort and money on them.

NM: What are you new favorites?

KB: I was quite please with _Cloudbusting_ and _X_4_, and particularly
    with them and _Army_Dreamers_, there was very much a visual story
    that was adequate for film, rather than just putting a song to-
    gether; they very much had visual information that worked well on
    film.  { _Experiment_IV_ }

"Kate Bush is a real innovator when it comes to creating texture in
    pop music.  She achieves this through a layering process, taking
    two or three completely different types of sound to create a whole
    new sound, a process that became a lot easier since the advent of
    the Fairlight synthesizer, the first sampling machine."
    { _The_Dreaming_ }

NM: Is the combination of unlike things a kind of oxymoron, something
    you apply to your visual work as well as your music?

KB: They are very similar processes, but they are not.  The way you
    approach them is completely different.  With sound, for me what
    I'm trying to create is very much the atmosphere, the mood of what
    the song is designated.  It does create its own personality in a
    way.  And that is a matter of treating that personality in a way
    that it wants to, and quite often you think of things that would
    be nice to try on a new track and you put them on and the track
    just won't accept it;  it just won't work.  So there are only cer-
    tain things that will happen.  But visually, it's not so much a
    layering process as the jigsaw, you know, putting it all together.
    It's not quite the same way of layering things up that you do in
    sound.

NM: Sometimes all these different images almost look surreal.  I'm
    thinking of the roller skaters in the white gowns and the dunce
    caps.  Was that just a neat combination of things? or does it add
    up to some point.

KB: I think very much with that one it was the combination.  It was a
    kind of silly video really, which we wanted it to be slightly com-
    ical and it was playing with several different images of
    knowledge, really the lack of knowledge, i.e. people like dunces
    and jesters.  It was a [???] romp where there was just loads of
    people involved, the one you're hearing in the next minute,
    they're very much just images put together, to try and make it fun
    more than anything.  { _Sat_in_Your_Lap_ }

End of part 1.
-- 
                 Henry Chai   "I always look for serendipity."
                {utzoo,decvax,ihnp4,allegra}!utcsri!utflis!chai
                         BITNET: chai@utflis.utoronto
Disclaimer: all opinions, pinions and onions expressed herein are solely mine.