pedantry returns to our forum -- and just in the nicK of Time, too!

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

IED has been rereading Doug's fascinating interview with Kate from
November 1985, and feels compelled to comment on a passage in it
which concerns the "backwards" messages. If IED appears to be critical
of Doug's interview, he will acknowledge at the outset that he greatly
admires both the sangfroid which Doug maintained during the interview
and the remarkable answers he elicited from Kate -- answers so unlike her
usual ones that they render his entire interview completely unique
among Kate Bush transcripts. Comforted as he must be to know that his
questions prompted such interesting responses, Doug will surely not be
offended to learn that IED takes issue with many of the premises
contained in the questions themselves.

>         DOUG: In a recent interview you said "I don't really know why
>              people think my songs are strange."  I'm not sure that this
>              was said by the same person who sings "We let the weirdness
>              in" at the end of the song "Leave It Open".  In any case,
>              what is really strange about the singing at the end of
>              "Leave It Open", is that if you play it backwards, it also
>              sounds like intelligible singing.  In fact, it sounds to me
>              like "And they said they wouldn't let me in", which is
>              wonderful because then it has the opposite meaning backwards
>              as it does forwards.
>                   There is also something like this on Hounds of Love in
>              the song "Watching You Without Me".  There is one part where
>              you sing what to me sounds like "Really see" repeated
>              several times.  And if you play this backwards, it sounds
>              exactly the same.  Still like "Really see", though I'm not
>              sure it's "Really see" -- it just sounds like that to me.
>              But whatever it sounds like, it sounds exactly the same
>              backwards.  Well, the question is, I'd be really interested
>              in knowing how you did this sort of manipulation.
>         KATE: Well, that's something I've been experimenting with for a
>              while, and would like to continue experimenting.  It's just
>              a way of using backwards ideas, but actually saying
>              something cohesively.
>         DOUG: But how do you actually get a message or singing which
>              sounds like something both forwards and backwards?  And what
>              are the technical issues involved?  I mean, it seems like it
>              would be really hard to do.
>         KATE: It is.  It's very difficult -- it takes a lot of time and
>              an awful lot of patience.
                    [Kate is saved by the bell, as her brother is at the
>         door, and my half hour is up.  I talked to both of Kate's
>         brothers sometime later, however, and neither had any qualms
>         about giving away the secret of the two-way messages.  It
>         involves listening to singing played backwards on a tape deck,
>         learning to sing the backwards sounds, and then recording that
>         strange singing backwards.

This is apparently a reference to the explanation which Paddy and
John gave to the audience at the Romford convention. The problem is
that their answer did NOT explain the curious fact that the message
also appears to say something when it actually IS played backwards.
Kate seems to be agreeing with Doug that she intentionally devised
a message that said something intelligible bi-directionally, so that
words could be heard when the track was played backwards, and words
could be heard when it was played forwards. But the explanation of just
how the track was made, offered (mainly by Paddy) at Romford, explains
only the care with which a SINGLE uni-directional message was devised.
It does not give a clue as to how -- or whether -- a second, concurrent,
but counter-directional message was constructed. Doug's question to Kate
on this point is so long and contains so many other points in it
that Kate's answer, when it finally does come, might very well be
acknowledging the accuracy of one or two parts of it, and not the
crucial issue of whether or not TWO separate messages were deliberately
recorded for the ending of "Leave It Open": a backwards one and a
forwards one. Also, she rigorously avoids offering any explanation
of what the precise wording of the second message -- if one does in fact
exist -- was. The main impression left by Kate's "answer" to Doug's
question is that she did not want to explain the method, or anything
about it, nor did she care to comment on Doug's insinuation that her
remarks about "weirdness" were inconsistent (which they weren't).
As seems to have been the case throughout most of the interview, Kate
was deliberately evading the thrust of Doug's line of questioning,
deflecting any attempts by him to pin down specific instances of
complex, multi-layered thematic content in her work. Her reasons for
this unusually consistent evasiveness are unknown.

For the record, the "backwards" message just does NOT sound like:
"They said they wouldn't let me in," but more like "They said they
were buried here," or at least words sounding something a bit like those.
As nice as it would be to have the sentence dovetail so beautifully
with the theme of the song, the auditory evidence does not support
such an interpretation.

Also for the record, the section from "Watching You Without Me",
which Doug tells Kate contains an identical-sounding "Really see"
whether heard backwards or forwards, actually sounds quite different
when heard backwards. The words are rather clear: "We see you
here", and not "Really see" (when played backwards) at all. The only
message, in fact, which does appear to say more or less the same thing when
played both backwards and forwards is couched within the "scatter-voice"
section at the end of "Watching You Without Me". And there the method
used to obtain the backwards repetition of the words contained in the
forwards message seems to be quite different and logical: the
gaps of silence which punctuate every syllable of Kate's spoken-voice
message appear actually to be filled in with the same, or very similar,
syllables recorded backwards, so that
when played backwards, the passage creates similar words, but timed
to occur a fraction of a second later (or earlier) than the forward version.

-- Andrew