Origin of the Babooshka title

[evs@sunbar.mc.duke.edu]

Since certain Love-hounds were pondering the origin of the "Babooshka"
title, I thought this excerpt from an EMI 1980 interview, "Kate
Discusses Never For Ever", would be of interest.  This is reprinted
from Vol. 1, Issue 2 of Breakthrough.

If hasn't been posted before and if there's sufficient interest I'll
type in the rest of the interview and post it to L-Hs.  The interview
is of historical interest and contains some nice insights into details
of the album.  She talks about working with Peter Gabriel among other
things.  Also interesting is the discussion on long period of time
that they seem to think it took for Kate to produce the album--funny,
considering the interval between HoL and TSW.

----
Int:  One track which has achieved success as a single is "Babooshka"
which is the lead track on this album and when I first saw that you
had done a song on that title I imagined it was a Russian grandmother.
Where had you heard the term?

Kate:  Well, it was very strange, because as I was writing this song
the name just came and I couldn't think where I'd got it from and I
presumed it was from a Russian fairy tale--it sounded like the name of
a princess or something and it was so perfect for the music, it had all
the right syllables and the right feel, so I kept it in.  Many strange
coincidences happened after that--where I'd turn on the television and
there would be Donald Swann singing about Babushka.  So I realized
that there was actually someone called this and I managed to find in
the _Radio Times_ a little precis of a program that was on called
Babushka.  It was an opera that someone had written and Babushka was
apparently the lady that the three Kings went to see because the star
stopped over her house.  They presumed that the Lord was in there, and
when he wasn't they went on their way.  She wanted to go with them to
find Jesus and they wouldn't let her come so she spent the rest of her
life looking for him.  I don't really know where it came from but it
worked.

Int:  It's a very lovely story and one could write another song about
that I suppose.

Kate:  Yes, maybe.

Int:  But the one you've written about is another tale of romance,
successful and failed and a very touching one about a man who is
tiring a bit of his wife but when she dresses up in what we might
call new clothes he falls for her all over again.  Now someone might
say that this is a very novel way of looking at love.  Do you think of
yourself as a writer of love songs?

Kate: I don't know.  I suppose I would say that I have written some
love songs but I wouldn't term that as one.  Really I'm very annoyed
at the way that the woman is behaving in this song because it is so
stupid and in fact she's just ruining the whole situation which was
very lovely--and it's only because of what's going on in her brain
that she does these things so--suspicion, paranoia all these naughty
energies again and it's really quite sad I think.

----------
Ed Simpson    e-mail by ARPANET: evs@cs.duke.edu    tel.: (919)684-6807
P.O.Box 3140, Duke Univ. Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA 27710