You Magazine interview

[nbc%INF.RL.AC.UK@mitvma.mit.edu]

The following is an article which appeared in You Magazine (The Mail on
Sunday), October 22nd, 1989. Writer Lesley-Ann Jones, with pictures
by Alistair Morrison. Copyright Associated Newspapers Plc.

Don't expect too much about the music - this is the same paper that
is serialising Nancy Reagan's memoirs!!

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                 Under The Burning Bush

... is just an ordinary woman very much in control of her life.
But in front of the camera Kate Bush ignites and the release of her latest
album, The Sensual World, is bound to start the sparks flying again.

She looks like any other young student making the best of a bad grant.
Her uniform - jeans, sweatshirt and trainers - is on overtime. A
plum-rinsed, disorderly mane. Kate Bush is a 31-year-old millionairess.

The pure unearthly quality in her voice has made a mockery of musical fashion
and made Kate Bush a platinum-selling artist for over a decade. In the flesh
she is nice, kind, pretty and she smiles a lot. And that's about it.
Confront her with a lens though and she ignites. In the 11 years since she
made `Wuthering Heights' she's learned about the potency of her image and
the sexual invitations it gives out.

"I never really understood the power of photography. As a dancer, I was
incredibly at home in my body. I simply didn't see it the way other people
did. Pictures give such immediate impressions. In all the early photo
sessions I did, we experimented with dancers' clothes, discovering how
interesting and versatile dance garments can be. This was all well before
the leotard era.

"Subsequently, EMI produced a large poster of me in which you can clearly see
the outline of my breasts through a rather skimpy vest. It seemed innocent
enough, rather nice, even - at the time. But with hindsight, I completely
understand why people said I was overtly sexual. It stood out a mile. Then it
didn't seem the least bit suggestive. Now, I would definitely have the picture
cropped."

Today she says, almost sadly, that she is now much more aware of the darker
side of life. And, just as sexuality must not be confused with things sensual,
there is a great difference between innocence and naivety.

"You can retain your innocence throughout life," she believes, bless her.
"It never really goes away. No, innocence has nothing to do with being
childlike. No, I'm not a child-woman. No, I'm not reluctant to grow up. God.
What is this world for if you can't always appreciate the innocence in life?"

Kate Bush is not exactly the archetypal rock star. When she hasn't got a new
album out, she disappears off the face of the earth (I mean Eltham). While
most rock 'n' rollers seize every photo opportunity, from falling out of
Langan's Brasserie to cropping up at every showbiz bash going, Kate has not
even been on the road for ten years.

"I did a tour once," she remembers, squinting into the distant past. "I haven't
wanted to do one since. Consequently a lot of people think that I hate touring,
but that's not so. I absolutely loved it. But it was so exhausting mentally and
physically that I was literally drained, wasted, afterwards. It took a long
time to recover."

She gets away with murder when you think about it. One tour in a decade, then
she retreats into her personal recording studio, leaps about in her own dance
studio to her heart's content, evaporates into thin air for years at a time,
then comes belting back into the charts like she's never been away. In any
other artist this would be intensely annoying, sickening even. In Kate, it is
endearing.

You could say she has well and truly screwed the system. She is doing it still.
It is four years since Kate's last album, Hounds of Love. Last week saw the
release of her sixth, The Sensual World, which features, so I'm told, Bulgarian
backing singers, and Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour, the man who discovered Kate.

Theirs was an unlikely encounter: she the shy, 15-year-old, violin- and
piano-playing doctor's daughter, he the wild and wicked lead guitarist with 70s
supergroup Pink Floyd.

"A friend of the family, Rickie Hopper, introduced us", Kate recalls.
"Absolutely terrified and trembling like a leaf, I sat down and played for him.
But Dave liked my songs very much. He put up some money, sent me into the
studio to make three really well-produced tracks. I did "The Man With the Child
in His Eyes", "The Saxophone Song", plus some obscure thing which ended up on a
B side somewhere."

By 16, Kate was signed to Pink Floyd's own record company EMI. She has been
there ever since. To gain live experience, she sang in a three-piece rock 'n'
roll band, the KT Bush Band, playing pub gigs around the Lewisham area. At the
same time she started dance and mime classes.

She now has a string of top ten hits and five huge selling albums under her
belt. "It's all thanks to Dave," says Kate, modestly. "He's such a lovely
person. So generous. So ... yummy! He did it out of love, you know. I paid the
money back, of course, eventually - but I couldn't have done it without his
backing. For me to work with him on this album was a real honour."

Not half the honour it must have been for a gauche South London schoolgirl to
be heard by one of the world's most respected rock guitarists. "I don't know,"
says Kate. "I wasn't really into Pink Floyd at the time."

She wasn't really into school either. Not exactly academically thick, but "the
idea of university just loomed like a really sinister thing. I couldn't face
it. I was lucky - something came up and took my mind off it."

Kate would be the first to admit she has led a sheltered life. She emerged
from a tightly-knit, middle-class family environment (mum, dad, two older
brothers - John, a photographer, Paddy, a musician) to share her life with the
same boyfriend, bass player and music engineer Del Palmer, for the past ten
years.

She says she was incredibly close to her father. "My mother, to whom I have
always been very close also, was a muse. But my eye was almost always on what
my father was up to. Don't you think that, as a child, your aspirations are out
into the world?"

"You take the whole domestic situation, including your mother, for granted.
Little did I know it was mum who was holding it all together.

"My relationship with Del is very stable. We work together, we live together.
It works so well for us. That can be a very intense set-up, but I wouldn't have
it any other way. It's all very close and direct. After ten years, maybe we
ought to be restless, but we're not. Some say the decade between 20 and 30 is a
very telling time in terms of human development, but I believe that the whole
of life is like that.

"Del and I argue a great deal - over songs. But we consider it healthy. Who
wins? Normally, I do. I'm not the shy, retiring, fragile butterfly creature you
sometimes read about. I'm tough as nails."

She's still rather shy and home-loving. Kate laughs openly when you call her a
recluse, but then admits that, yes, she is happiest behind closed doors.
Preferably those of her elegant, unostentatious South London Victorian mansion.
Beautifully decorated, with shades of blue predominant, her home is Kate's
absolute refuge.

"I don't go on holiday," she says. "I'd rather stay at home. I went to Jamaica
once years ago. It was a real culture shock. I went from a dingy little London
studio with no windows to this absolute paradise. I could barely stand it. Even
the sound of the birds was deafening.

"People go on and on about me being a recluse, but it doesn't bother me. To me,
a recluse is just someone who gets on with what they want to do. If that's me,
then I'm happy to be one.

"A large part of this business is so false, isn't it? You hear such a lot about
the rock 'n' roll life-style, but I really don't know what that is meant to be
about any more. The showbusiness life has simply never appealed to me. I wasn't
attracted to the music business by the idea of wearing a black leather mini and
getting legless at all the right parties every night. What I wanted to do was
make music. That's all I want to do now."

She makes music, she makes millions. She would be making babies had she the
time and the immediate inclination, being a gently maternal soul, but she will
make do with cats for now. She is kind to animals, refusing to eat or wear
them, but gives in to a fish dish occasionally.

"Once, that would have been impossible for me," she says. "But later I decided
we have not to be so hard on ourselves or other people in terms of eating
habits or anything else. It's like me and smoking. It's such an awful thing to
do, it's so obviously bad for us, but we gaily carry on. I've cut down a bit,
but I can't kick the habit."

Some call Kate obsessive, claiming that her work is the most important thing in
her life, and that everyone around her gets dragged in with her. "It's true,"
she smiles. "I'm obsessive about most things which take my fancy. I'm just like
that. Once I start something, I'm committed. I just can't put it down.

"It's very hard for example, to stand back from an album, allow it to be
finished and then let people evaluate it for what it is. It's a terrifying
process for me. And consequently making the album in the first place gets harder
and harder for me. This one took me over two years to make, so I had about two
years `off' after the last one. So I come back to writing completely cold. It's
like, I sing, do I? Every time it's like I've never done it before. Is it good
enough? Is it rubbish? I've had to train myself to listen to that internal
voice, the one I go to sleep with. I've had to learn to believe in myself
and in my own judgement.

"Most of the new songs are about relationships again. Maybe I'm saying, "If
things get rough, it's OK really." And, it takes me two years to say that!
I have to sweat blood and shed real tears before I know I've put everything
into it. That's why I worry that the creative process is getting harder and
more painful for me every time. At what point will I find that I've used it all
up? That there are no more albums left inside me?"

That's a thought. What will she do then?

"I think I'd like to make a little film. Being a movie actress is not
something I have craved, but the right thing might tempt me. If there comes
a time when I can only manage one album a decade, it would be good to have
something else to keep me busy. And anyway, you learn so much just by jumping
in at the deep end."

And jump she intends to.

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The article includes 5 photos: a page and a half head and shoulders shot,
one of Kate sitting, an old photo in costume, a head shot with shawl, and one
with Del.

Be seeing you.
Neil
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