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From: IED0DXM@OAC.UCLA.EDU
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 88 02:16 PST
Subject: Mailbag
> Yes, it must have been that clip, though I turned it on 10 > seconds before Kate started and turned it off when Phil Collins came > on (yuk), so I didn't see any credits, etc. She did dance with a > suited man at the end, and was dressed in a suit (with skirt) > herself. There was a cello on either side of her during the song > too. > [ Yeah, that's it! One of those cellist was Paddy Bush. > Unfortunately, it wasn't really a live performance -- all the > performances on the awards show were lip-synched, but at least > it was a different mix of the song. -- |>oug ] > -- Ken Spagnolo Yes. Thanks to a tip from Love-Hound extraordinaire MarK T. Ganzer, IED caught the _Best of London Rock_ show, which, as Doug surmised, was a kind of compilation of the various lip-synch performances which originally appeared on the 1986 and 1987 BPI Awards shows, sort of mixed up. Basically, Kate concentrated the late-1930s-era-Hitchcock production design (you know, _The Thirty-Nine Steps_, _The Lady Vanishes_, etc.), which was the model for her self-directed video, into the space of a stage lip-synch. Made perfect sense, if one had happened to have seen the video first, but as is so often the case with Kate's work, there was the little problem that the video hadn't yet been released at the time, so no one could possibly have understood the meaning of the imagery. After the fact, though, the man who danced with her (and who "starred" in the video with her) looked an awful lot like one or two of Hitchcock's male leads of the early all-English production days, as well as being an almost spitting image of the lead actor in Werner Herzog's _Nosferatu the Vampyre_... As for Paddy and the cello, yeah, that's him on the left, but unfortunately it was painfully obvious that he doesn't know how to play the cello! His counterpart on the right must have been Jonathan Williams (not to be confused with either John Williams the guitarist or John Williams the composer!), who played the cello parts on the record, because he really knew what he was about. > From: <KELLER%URVAX.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU> (Le Petit Prince) > Subject: b-side singles > Is there anyone out there in Kate Bush Land who can give me a > comprehensive listing of all b-side singles that are not on any of Kate's > six albums; and on what singles they appear? > "Suspended in Gaffa..." MOO! An attempt will be made to forward The List to you forthwith. > From: jw@math.mit.edu > Subject: about HoL CDs... > (He also gave 9 or better to domestic CDs of TWS, NFE and TKI (for > initial-hounds)), but _Lionheart_ fell short, 6.5 or something. > Oddly enough, no number for _Dreaming_, he said maybe it wasn't > widely available (!) Well? IED can give no info re the domestic CDs, but if they were anything like the U.K. (-packaged) ones, the above ratings would be suspicious. _Lionheart_ generally impresses most people who listen to all of Kate's albums in succession as the least successful artistically, but from a digital-sound point of view, the U.K. CD of that album is extremely good. Anyway, better than a 6.5, no? Sounds as though the listener might have had trouble keeping his/her judgment of the music distinct from that of its reproduction. But maybe not. >> No wish on IED's part to deny Jarre's achievements, which he >> genuinely appreciates, esp. some of the things on _Zoolook_ and >> _Chants(/Champs) Magnetiques_, but... > From description of your opinion of Jarre's music, I think it safe > to say that you're not a Jarre fan|->. I'm sorry for that; you're > missing out on some excellent music, and for all the wrong reasons > to boot. As was stated above in the first place, there's really no lack of appreciation of Jarre at this end, quite the contrary. IED has always rushed to pick up each Jarre album since first hearing _Oxygene_ in the late '70s. Some of it is very beautiful, and there is always much to be admired in Jarre's work from a technical standpoint. But these virtues are extremely modest in comparison with the achievements of Kate Bush, and it would be unrealistic to make too much of the music of Jarre. IED stands by his last description: Jarre has never escaped the rather narrow genres of music in which he began. Though it may be dazzling, in a way, and even beautiful at times, it never comes close to the artistic level of Kate's last two albums. > This is a somewhat messier bit of misinterpretation to unravel. > First off, as an amateur (your definition, Andrew, not the one you > falsely ascribe to me)... Woah, there, that definition wasn't ascribed to you. It was made clear that your point about professionals/amateurs made sense by contemporary definitions, but that IED had his own alternative way of looking at the issue, that's all. In fact, your responses were very convincing until you spoiled everything by signing off with the remark: > Kate ain't bad but I've found better. Your reminder about Jarre's one-copy-only album (IED thinks it was called _Music_For_Supermarkets_, right?) made a good point about Jarre's honourable artistic intentions. You're right, that was the act of a true "amateur" (in the good sense!). By the way, though, that business of selling off his album at auction always seemed to be a pretty illogical stunt. The argument Jarre made at the time was that an album was a work of art like a painting, and that therefore it made sense to sell a single copy and be done with it. But it's silly to try to qualify a work as "art" by the dubious virtue that there's only one example of it. The fact that there's only one example of a given painting is nothing particularly praiseworthy in itself, it's simply a characteristic of that medium. After all, bronze-cast sculpture is no less fine an art just because several identical castings can be made from the original mold. The medium of print-making isn't lower than that of painting merely because it enables the production of numerous copies of the artist's image. And what about books? Would _War and Peace_ have been more "legitimate" if only a single copy had ever been printed? Why, then, is there merit in the idea of pressing only a single copy of _Music_for_Supermarkets_? And you can't argue that the copy that Jarre did sell at auction was somehow more "original" than subsequent copies would have been, because what he sold was not the original master, but a vinyl pressing, by no means the "original" work of art. No, the idea of auctioning a record is flawed. Admirable intentions, perhaps, but the symbolism of the action wasn't very well thought out. > For the first time since _Wuthering Heights_ Kate Bush has sung > a song from anything OTHER than a position of strength. Missing is > the defiance that characterizes virtually all of Kate's more > soulful, sorrowful songs; instead, _TWW_ contains pure, > unadulterated longing. The lyrics may contain a few imperatives > here and there (make...give...give...give...) but the delivery > clearly contains no demands, only begs for help. Opinions, mes > amis? That's an extremely challenging and novel idea. You're saying that Kate's attitude was communicated through some sound in the voice, is that it? It's very interesting, but are you sure that she wasn't "begging for help" in "Under the Ivy"? Or even in "And Dream of Sheep"? It's a really difficult quality to pin down. Can you explain your view of her vocal attitude(?) in more detail? > The parenthesized passages with question marks are cloudy to me, and > I'd appreciate your ideas on what they might otherwise be. > This woman's work > This woman's work IED thinks the second line here is "This woman's world." > (no chance to make the same mistakes?) This is your hearing of the (extremely hard-to-hear) spoken words in the background just before the main vocal begins, right? IED spent ages going over that one, too. Before giving up, he came to the tentative conclusion that it was a line from the film which Kate re-inserted in her recording. It might be the line that the nurse tells the husband immediately preceding the start of Kate's song. Her words were something like "You'll have to wait in here." IED is too cheap to go see the movie again to figure this problem out, but will have another go at it when it comes out on video in a few months. It's neat to see that other people have been studying the song as closely as you have, though. > no (style, it's the craft?) of the father This was the other unintelligible line from the song, all right. IED couldn't get anywhere with it, either, except to conclude that it might not even begin with "No". Couldn't it be "Now", too? Sorry, that's no help at all. > -- Andrew Marvick, who still remembers (vaguely) what it was like to > be under the sad delusion that there were other living musicians > worth paying attention to besides Kate Bush. > Don't be uncharitable, Andrew; Gilels may be dead, but Arrau is still > with us. Uh-oh, are we gonna get into another discussion about pianists? IED leans much more in favour of the Horowitz school, rather than those solid, dependable, profound (but maybe just a little boring?) Arrau/Gilels types. Give IED Byron Janis, Glenn Gould or Ivo Pogorelich over Arthur Rubinstein, Wilhelm Kempff and Stephen Bishop-Kovacevic(?) any day. Not that the latter aren't the great artists (more or less) that everyone says they are -- it's just a matter of taste. To make a very shaky analogy: Byron Janis is to Emil Gilels as Rachmaninoff is to Beethoven -- or as Kate Bush is to Bob Dylan. That is, they're all ultra-great and everything, but the temperaments and aesthetics are fundamentally opposite, at least from a purely musical point of view. Rebuttals, anyone? Has IED not succeeded in getting some L-Hs annoyed at him again? -- Andrew Marvick