November _Q_ magazine (long)

[ed@das.llnl.gov (Edward Suranyi)]

The November _Q_ magazine has Kate on the cover.  Inside, there's
an interview and a review of the album. (There's also a full page ad
for the album.)

First, the review:

WIGGLY
Welcome back to the fey, pattery, indeed *sproingy* world of Kate Bush

KATE BUSH
The Sensual World
EMI EMD 1010 LP/Cass/CD

     Romping home a close second to the Blue Nile in the increasingly
competitive Studio Marathon stakes, Kate Bush's sixth album has finally
arrived almost exactly four years after her last, The Hounds Of Love.  
"Each record gets harder to make" may not sound like much of an excuse
for being so late either, but to judge from the fineness of detail and
diversity of influences Bush has compressed into the 40-odd minutes here,
it's a perfectly plausible one:  The Sensual World is as highly wrought
and deeply thought as any album since the last by Peter Gabriel.
     Like Gabriel, Bush has been busy thinking up ways to incorporate
more exotic and atmospheric elements into her already broad and quirky
rock coalition.  Unlike him, though, she has leaned less heavily on the
obvious source, Africa.  The Uillean pipes (courtesy of Davey Spillane) 
which barge brilliantly into the chorus of the album's opening, eponymous
track are the first of a number of surprise guests, of whom the all-woman
Bulgarian folk a cappella troupe, Trio Bulgarka, are the ones who stay the
longest and leave the strongest impression.  Their shrill, ghostly whoops
and harmonies decorate three of the tracks on side two: a pattery,
Gabriel-esque meditation on the ambiguous blessings of technology, in
this case computers, called Deeper Understanding; a heavily modified
bluesy rocker, Rocket's Tail; and best of the lot, Never Be Mine, a 
tremulously Bushy ballad with a beautifully wiggly interlace of keyboard
motifs.
     While Bush's famous fey voice would probably be enough to hold the
disparate strands of The Sensual World together, the album takes its cue
and colouring too from the hypnotically sinuous sway of the pipes on the
title track.  There are some strapping power chords to be despatched
here and there, most notably on Love And Anger, but the dominant mood
is of Oriental reverie, similar in feel to that achieved latterly by
Japan.  And in fact the last track on side one, Heads We're Dancing,
reproduces that mysteriously *sproingy* bass sound favoured by Mick Karn.
     An analysis of its parts however doesn't really do justice to the
boldness of the album.  Bush has taken on a lot of styles but The Sensual
World doesn't, thankfully, end up sounding simply clever or stylised.
Which is not to say that all the bridges she tries to build here stand
up, but to acknowledge that the imaginative effort and patience that 
went into their design should guarantee Kate Bush's position in that
peculiar class of her own for some while yet. ****
			 -- Robert Sandall

And now, the interview:

IRON MAIDEN

Although signed at the tender age of 18, Kate Bush stoutly refused to be
"the record company's daughter."  She's quietly become her own manager,
producer, publisher, and video director, retreating to the strife-free
sanctuary of a home studio to agonise over her complex recordings and
cautiously contemplate trips to the outside world.  Phil Sutcliffe
encounters "the shyest megalomaniac you're ever likely to meet".

     "It felt like a mission," says Kate Bush.  "Even before I'd had
a record out I had a tremendous sense of conviction that my instincts
were right.  You know, *This is it!*  There could be no other way.
     "I remember so well sitting in an office at EMI with some very
important people who were saying that James And The Cold Gun should be
the first single.  For me this was just *totally* wrong.  How could it
possibly be anything other than Wuthering Heights?  But they were going,
Defintely not.  Look, you don't understand the market.  So we went on 
saying the same things to one another for a few more minutes -- I was
being politely insistent, I usually am in an argument, I'm not good at
expressing anger, that's still hard for me.
     "Then a guy called Terry Walker, another executive, came in with
some papers in his hands and put them on the desk.  He looked around,
saw me and said, Oh hi Kate, loved the album!  Wuthering Heights
*definitely* the first single, eh?  And he walked out again.  If he
hadn't come in at that moment, well, I don't know what would have 
happened.  It was so well-timed it was almost as if I'd paid the guy 
to do it.  They obviously thought of me as just a strong-willed girl,
but they trusted his opinion."
     After Wuthering Heights had spent four weeks at Number 1, these same
execs -- most of whom, a contemporary recalls, had groaned "What is
*that*?" when they first heard it wailing round the corporate corridors
-- began to view this stubborn kid (all five feet three and seven stone of
her) with a mixture of guarded respect and superstitious awe.  Kate Bush
was on her way to taking control of her working life and, as she puts it,
becoming "the shyest megalomaniac you're ever likely to meet".

     She'd have put her best dress on for that meeting.  Probably the
smart red number she used to favour when she met the press, black patent
leather shoes, make-up elaborately conceived and executed.  The approach
was consistent, the effect varied.  Sometimes she looked beautiful.  
Sometimes she looked oddly blowzy, like Joan Collins or Elizabeth Taylor
at a royal premiere.  "I used to dress up all the time," she says.  "Every
day I felt as if I was *presenting* myself.  Hopefully I'm more relaxed
now."
     So it seems: she's wearing battered sneakers, old blue jeans, the
sort of Fair Isle sweater her mum would probably dig the weeds in, hair
just combed back, maybe a touch of eye shadow, nothing more.  But then she
is in her home-from-home, a recording studio at Abbey Road where she's 
worked on all her albums, including the latest, The Sensual World.
     Lounging in a swivel chair beside one of the mixing desks, she talks
very quietly, full of thoughtful pauses and also laughter at herself and 
other things.  Her voice is faintly accented with the suburban twang and
burr from the boundaries of South London and Kent where she's lived for
all of her 31 years.
     It's an undistinguished area, neither town nor country, but it seems
to have been a safe haven for her.  At least, her family certainly has 
been.  Her home itself could hardly have been more solid, a 350-year-old
farmhouse with ample grounds and outhouses.  Her father is a doctor, her
mother an Irish nurse.  Brothers Paddy (now 37) and Jay (45), musician and
poet respectively, were always around and encouraged her to share their
own very '60s awareness of self-expression:  writing poems and painting
butterflies on the walls of the old barn that was her hang-out, listening
to The Beatles, The Incredible String Band, T. Rex, and reading the
tranquil philosophisings of mystics like Gurdjieff and Kahlil Gibran.
     When she was 10 her father showed her middle C on a decaying 
harmonium and, with nobody around who would dream of mocking her efforts,
she thumped and pedalled away at it.  When the mice had finished eating
most of the moving parts, she moved to an upright piano and drifted 
naturally into writing her own songs -- 200 of them by the time she was
16.
     By comparison, the outside world could only have appeared the more
unpredictable and threatening.  Finding herself "a loner" in the crowd
at school, she would invite a few best friends back to the barn to play
records, cook feasts and smoke, but she kept her own music secret from
almost all of them.  In particular, she would never mention it to her
boyfriends because when they found out, as happened a couple of times,
"It would always cause trouble.  They'd think I was cleverer than them
or something daft like that -- I was a threat to their masculinity."
     Her own instinct as she approached the outskirts of the music
business was to make her career feel as much like an extension of her
own family life as possible.  However, young as she was, there was soon
a queue of potential Svengalis forming whose intention, kindly meant, was
that she should become what EMI people called "the record company's
daughter" -- which she very nearly did.
     At first, in ignorance of the industry, the family sent out
dauntingly indigestible demos of 60 songs at a time.  Then when she
was 14, a friend of her parents called Ricky Hopper, who had some
connections with the industry, contacted Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd.
Something about those rough tapes caught his ear and he began his
remarkably generous one-man campaign on her behalf.  He invited her
to his home studio where she recorded three tracks including The Man
With The Child In His Eyes.  When Bob Mercer, an EMI executive, came up
to Abbey Road where Floyd were recording Wish You Were Here, Gilmour
handed him a cassette with his recommendation.  This was just after
Dark Side Of The Moon.  Suggestions from Pink Floyd were treated with
all due reverence.
     Mercer played it and he was hooked too.  After long discussions
with Kate and her family, at which it was agreed that, even if she
already had the songs, she wasn't emotionally ready for the hurly-burly,
he came up with a novel "sponsorship" scheme:  in July, 1976, she was 
given 3,000 pounds by EMI Records and a further 500 pounds by EMI
Publishing to finance her for a year of personal and professional
development.
     She had passed 10 "O" levels, but she left school without a 
backward glance.  She left home too -- but only to a degree, as the 
Bush siblings took over a three storey house in Lewisham with Kate and
her piano ensconced in the top flat.  She took singing lessons to help
her reach the improbable highs and lows she had begun writing into her
songs.  She studied mime with a leading teacher called Adam Darius, and
trained as a dancer in Lindsay Kemp's 50p-for-two-hours public sessions
at The Dance Centre, Covent Garden -- she wasn't the sort of person to
know that Kemp was already a pop cult figure after his work with Bowie on
the Ziggy Stardust show, but she wrote Moving, on The Kick Inside, about
him.
     From April '77 until recording began in July, she even served a brief
apprenticship in a proper carry-your-own-amps rock group.  Paddy enlisted
muso mates Brian Bath (guitar), Charlie Morgan (drums) and Del Palmer
(bass) to form the KT Bush Band who hardnosed the high streets of South
London with their elfin lead singer getting stuck into stompers like 
Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Women, and I Heard It Through The Grapevine.  She
also hit it off with the bassman who soon moved in with her.
     "In many ways I was at my strongest then," she says.  "I was at the
beginning of something and I had a tremendous desire to make an album.
That was all I'd wanted to do for a long time."
     As soon as she'd secured the release of Wuthering Heights as her
first single, she started arguing about the picture bag.  EMI were intent
on going with the subsequently famous Gered Mankowitz shot to tie in with
the poster campaign -- dewy eyes and a skin-tight vest not inadvertently
emphasising her nipples.  Although later embarrassed by the way men 
reacted to this photograph, Kate saw nothing dubious about it at the time
in terms of either taste or sexism ("I suppose it's reasonably sexy 'cos
you can see my tits, but I think the vibe from my face is there," she 
said).  She was simply adamant that something echoing the kite picture
she had chosen for the album sleeve would work better.  Again she won,
even though the re-design meant putting the release date back two months
to January, '78.
     By then EMI must have been getting used to waving the white flag
under the onslaught of relentless calm and charm.  With Wuthering Heights
taking off, the next joust was virtually no contest.  The follow-up should
be Them Heavy People, said the company.  No, The Man With The Child In His
Eyes, said the company's daughter.  The company conceded.  However, if
she'd got a grip within the office, she soon encountered the chaos of 
other pressures and interests attracted by an overnight sensation.
     "My first Top Of The Pops I didn't want to do," she says.  "I was
terrified.  I'd never done television before.  Seeing the video afterwards
was like watching myself die.  That was when things started getting very
difficult for me because until then it had all been very creative work,
writing, recording, learning to dance."  But now what she was involved in
was promotion.  "I was talking to press, talking to television, and I
couldn't express myself easily.  I wa up against a different beast."
     Improbable schedules were demanded.  Suddenly a five-minute mime
on an Italian pop programme became imperative because it was to be beamed
around Europe.  Kate tried to defend herself by setting what seemed to her
impossible conditions:  OK, if they got her there and back inside a day.
A private jet was chartered, no problem.  "To me it was bizarre," she
recalls.  "Up in the morning, over to Verona, I think it was, and walk
out on this stage.  I'm facing the cameras and a few hundred people who
I assume are the audience.  Then the stage and the whole set starts to
rotate and I realise that it's a huge circular stadium and out front 
there are thousands and thousands of people.  I've never seen so many
people in my life!  Anyway I mimed Wuthering Heights, bowed, and flew
off home again."
     That autumn, when she found the couple of months she had to record
Lionheart being constantly interrupted by promotional work (much of it
abroad as The Kick Inside reached new territories), she realised that it
would take more than her own reserves of polite obstinacy to keep control
of the musical life she'd dreamed of for so long.  "I need to feel free,
not manipulated," she said.  To do that she had to get organised.

     With the help of a music industry lawyer, she set up Kate Bush
Publishing and Novercia, a management company with herself as MD and
her parents and brothers the board of directors.  Thenceforth, these
companies licensed her work to EMI.  "Because my family were involved
I was with people I could trust," she says, then breaks off.  "I'm sorry,
I feel quite worried about mentioning the companies' names."  But they're
on the album sleeves.  "They are, aren't they?  You're absolutely right.
It's my paranoia again!  There have been things in the past. . . Oh, I
can't remember.  When you're doing interviews you have to be almost like
a security guard sometimes.  Anyway, for me, one of the most important
things to come out of managing myself is the fact that I could decide
how long I spent on each album."
    Ever since, Kate Bush has been wholly responsible for herself.  On
occasions, though, the burden of her own aspirations has been all but
unbearable.  Her stage show was like that.  Bashing out Stones classics
in the back room of a pub was one thing, but a concert of her own music
had to be a complete expression of her art and soul.  In four months from
January '79, she choreographed and rehearsed a separate dance drama for
every song in the set, worked in a new band, took the leadaing role in
set and lighting design, and even interviewed and picked the senior crew
members.
     Constantly putting in 15-hour days, she stood up to it because she
was in Olympic shape from her dance training.  But the shows,
two-and-a-half hours long with 17 costume changes, took her to
unforgettable depths of fatigue -- such that the 28 nights in Britain and
Europe remain the entire concert career of Kate Bush, give or take a
Secret Policeman's Ball.  "The idea is so unattractive when I think about
what the tour took out of me," she says.  "I haven't wanted to commit
myself since." And, being the overreacher she is, she simply can't 
contemplate the straightforward band set that suffices for other pop
stars.
     It was the same with TV.  Later that year she conceived a half-hour
special for BBC2 with more elaborate set-pieces including a dramatised
version of Roy Harper's Another Day with Peter Gabriel.  But that was
the last time she tried it.
     Which left video as her only active visual medium.  "They're so
cliched and narcissistic," she says.  "Most of what I've done makes me
cringe, though I liked Army Dreamers, because it was a complete little
film, not too grand and not clouding the issue.  And Cloudbusting too
(featuring Donald Sutherland and the rain-making machine).  That's
probably the best I've ever done.  But Experiment IV was the first one
I directed myself.  I was so keen to do that because I actually knew I
would be making a video while I wrote the song, so I was thinking 
visually from the start.  But then it nearly killed me, the hours it
took, directing and acting in it.  Two weeks non-stop.  It was too much
for me. . ."
     Perhaps it's only in the sound studio that she can truly encompass
what she strives for.  Once Novercia was set up it was clear that, before
long, she would be producing herself and, after co-producing her 1980
album Never For Ever with Jon Kelly, the engineer on her first two albums,
she was ready.  Setting out on The Dreaming, she remarked with tact and a
touch of steel that, "Jon wanted to keep working with me, but we discussed
it and he realised that it was for the best."
     Then, the only people she still had to convince were the musicians:
"I think the basic fear in everybody's head was, God, does she really know
what she's doing?  But you have to trust your own decisions.  When
everyone else is saying, No, that's dangerous, there's always a little
voice in my head syaing, Yeah, yeah, it's all right."  There again she's
never dealt with hacks who keep time with the meter running and the 
statutory tea break on their minds.  She has a regular team who have
become her alter-family, just as the studio is a second home -- the tight
circle has included all of the KT Bush Band, Dave Gilmour and Stuart
Elliott (the former Cockney Rebel drummer, supplied by EMI as a sessioner
on The Kick Inside, and adapted long-term).
     Most of these people can make handsome livings anywhere and wouldn't
keep coming back for more if they didn't enjoy the work and know they're
appreciated.  "They're very good for unblocking the pipes," she says, then
laughs at the indelicate image.  But the creative plumbing does get
clogged on every album, including The Sensual World.  "There's a song
called Love And Anger which I started two years ago and kept on shelving
because it was rubbish,"  she says.  "Paddy and Dave Gilmour, who put
overdubs on it, had so much trouble with it.  They kept on asking, What's
it about? and all I could say was, I dunno but, uh, doesn't it feel, uh,
cohesive to you?  Well, I started bringing musicians in to see if they
could bring it to life and John Giblin, the bass player, just said, This
is great! and came up with something fresh right away.  It was so nice
having someone put all this enthusiasm into a song I'd almost given up
on."
     Even her writing technique has reflected the will to hold her work
in the palm of her hand.  Plonking away, untutored, on the piano 
certainly developed her unmistakable style, but it left her exposed to
experts in rhythm, arrangement, orchestration -- a frustrating 
vulnerability.
     It was Peter Gabriel who gave her the lead when, in 1980, she sang
backing vocals on Games Without Frontiers.  She was intrigued to find
him writing not with a melodic instrument, but with a drum machine.
She wondered whether she could do the same as she plunged herself into
The Dreaming.  "That was a brave time for me," she says.  "I *had* to be
brave, take control of the whole album and go for it, see if I really
could pull it together -- put some balls into my voice for the first time
too."
    With the beat box, which she'd never used before, she set herself a
peculiarly disciplined task: to sit at home and write a new song every 
night for as long as she could.  At first the rigid beat drove her up
the wall.  Then she got the hang of moving in and out of it and started
to like it.  She wrote 20 songs that way before she was satisfied.
     She had also begun experimenting with the recently introduced
Fairlight CMI all-round miraculous synthesizer-sampler.  Once she'd
mastered that, it was within her power to create every part of an
arrangement on a keyboard at home.
     But if the theory of self-determination was coming along fine, the
practice was on the blink.  Kate Bush may seem to have had a fairly
stable career, always coming up with something fresh and surprising,
always played on the radio and talked about, but the commercial reality
was that her album sales had plotted a uniform downward curve in Britain,
her main market-place given America's resolute lack of interest up to that
point.  The Kick Inside did triple platinum plus (more than a million),
Lionheart platinum (over 300,000), Never For Ever gold (100,000), and The
Dreaming was where she hit bottom with a mere silver (60,000).  Reviewers
were ecstatic, Radio Once wholly unreceptive, EMI utterly miserable.  As
a single the title track expired at 48 and the follow-up, There Goes A
Tenner, was her first release not to show in the charts at all.  Harsh
things were said in the corridors of EMI, and some of them to the artist's
face, which had never happened before so fond and respectful was the 
company's attitude to her.  "That was my 'She's gone mad' album," Kate
says, "my 'She's not commercial any more' album."

     It was time to regroup and rebuild, in every sense, close to home.
Kate's remaining dependency in EMI, more conspicuous after a commercial
flop, was for advances to pay recording costs -- an Abbey Rosd studio
then weighed in at 90 pounds an hour, for instance.  The Bush response
was to reduce the company's leverage.
     In June '83 she began a major upgrading of the little demo studio
she'd had in the old barn at her parents' house.  As her boyfriend Del
Palmer, more of an equipment buff than Kate, has acknowledged, they
couldn't afford to buy state-of-the-art, but they moved a decent 
48-track desk in with most of the trimmings and by September they
were hard at work again on what was to become Hounds Of Love.
     For Kate it must be the perfect sanctuary, a place of freedom to
pursue her work at the heart of her happiest memories of childhood.  It
certainly seems to have changed her luck, though ironically it emerges
that she may be so much at her ease there that she's prone to
disorientation when she goes elsewhere, such as when recording Gabriel's
Don't Give Up.  "I was so thrilled he asked me to sing such a beautiful
song,"  she says, "but then I got very nervous.  Recording at my home 
studio we don't have window contact between the studio and the control
room, you know.  We can't see each other, we talk to each other through
the mike and headphones, that's all (her choice, of course).  It's quite
isolated the way I work and I hadn't been to anyone else's studio for
ages.  And then at Real World I was *terrified*.  I messed it up and had
to come back another day to re-do it."
     On delivering Hounds Of Love she found EMI slightly changed in 
personnel and much better pleased with her, but there was an old familiar
debate to engage in.  The A & R department had picked Cloudbusting as the
first single, while Kate said it had to be Deal With God.  Good grace 
revived, EMI gave way.  But then they said she couldn't call it Deal With
God.  "For me, that *is* the title," says Kate, "but I was told that if I
insisted the radio stations in at least 10 countries would refuse to play
it because it had 'God' in the title -- Spain, Italy, America, lots of 
them.  I thought it was ridiculous.  Still, especially after The Dreaming,
I decided to weigh up the priorities.  Not creatively compromise, but not
be so obsessibe that. . . I had to give the album a chance."
     Running Up That Hill was her biggest hit since Wuthering Heights and
EMI gave Hounds Of Love the big send-off with a laser show at the London
Planetarium.  It went straight in at Number 1 (it's now sold nearly
900,000, while the following year's The Whole Story hits collection is
over the million).  David Munns, then handling her A & R, now MD of
Polydor (UK), says of her renaissance in the charts and the company's
regard, "This is my favourite artist in the world.  But for someone like
her it's sometimes a lonely road and that can be difficult for people to
understand.  Make a record that's a bit obscure and some people in the
company may start to say things to the artist that aren't sensible.
Well, EMI and Kate just lost the plot for a while."
     Throughout her indefatigable quest for a working environment
sufficiently sheltered to allow her the artistic freedom she required,
there was one area of Kate Bush's life that could not be brought under
any semblance of control: the press.  It's a preoccupation, something
she often finds herself talking about when trying to avoid what she
suspects are privacy-infringing enquiries -- as she's said, "People
ask you questions you'd only answer under psychoanalysis."
     Sometimes it must seem to her that the Garbo solution is the only
answer.  For years, her relationship with Del Palmer was an official --
that is, open -- secret, the subject of many tortuous evasions.  Then,
in an access of optimism, they went to the Hounds Of Love launch 
arm-in-arm.  They smiled for the photographers.  Then the next day they
found that the tabloid party yarn was that Youth, the former Killing
Joke member who played bass on one track, had informed the world that
Del was a "wally".  Quite probably he'd said no such thing, but the whole
venture was soured.  "It surprises me that people can put such an
incredible amount of energy into such negative stuff," says Kate, "They
can be so wicked."
     She still can't take it in stride.  She's equally put out by both
the in-depth probe and the careless stereotype of her as the "sex symbol"
or the "wacky hippy" whose every third word was "Wow!" or "Amazing!".
     The life Kate Bush has created is governed by the cycles of her
albums.  Despite her early versing in cosmic philosophies, no-one's
ever accused her of being "laid-back", and she once enunciated something
adjacent to a motto:  "In music you have to break your back before you
even start to speak the emotion."
     She went through all the usual turmoil on her way to completing The
Sensual World.  "It's really frightening to me the way each album has 
taken longer than the one before," she says.  "The writing gets harder
every time.  The Sensual World took about two-and-a-half years to make
in all, but with a lot of gaps.  I was going quickly at first, thinking,
Nah, piece of piss!  Then it all seemed like rubbish and I had to stop
for a while.  There's tremendous self-doubt involved.  You think, Oh, God,
I'll never get it finished."
     The problem was that she had started too soon after Hounds Of Love,
she decided.  "I'll come off promotion of one album, start on the next and
if I'm not careful it's nothing but a continuation and I don't want that,"
she says.  "It's important for me to create some kind of wall, shut it
off."
     In part, she does this by going back to dancing.  While totally 
embroiled in the studio and consoling herself with chocolate, she gets
out of shape -- cause of the intermittent chubbier cheeks and hint of
extra chin which have launched a thousand press rumours of her "blowing
up" to 18 or even 20 stone.  She gives her fierce workouts at the 
_barre_ and mirrors credit for refurbishing her mind as well as her body
after The Dreaming.
     This time round, apart from dancing and running, the panacea was the
garden at the house she and Del moved into three years ago in Eltham,
Southeast London (brother Jay and family live next door; her parents'
home still only half an hour away).  "I sometimes I think I might as 
well just be a brain and a big pair of ears on legs, stuck in front of
a mixing desk," she says.  "But when I took that break from The Sensual
World I really got into gardening.  I mean, it's literally a very
down-to-earth thing, isn't it?  Real air.  Away from the artificial light.
Very therapeutic."
     Another renewable source of inspiration has been exotic
instrumentation, usually provided by a visit to Dublin and various members
of the staunchly traditional folk troupe, The Chieftains, or by turning
to brother Paddy (who specialised in making medieval instruments at the
London College of Furniture and will knock out the odd koto or strumento
de porco as and when).  But for The Sensual World she's leavened the
Celtic skirl with a bit of Balkan.  She first heard the Trio Bulgarka
in '86 and was suitably astonished.  A year later it dawned on her that
their full-throated harmonies might suit her songs.  Connections were
made through Joe Boyd of Hannibal Records, their UK label, and Kate flew
out to Sofia for an entrancing experience of world music.
     "They couldn't speak a word of English and I couldn't speak a word
of Bulgarian," she says.  "Everything went through translators and it
didn't matter at all.  Lovely working with women, and especially them, 
they're very affectionate.  We tended to communicate through cuddles
rather than words.  In fact, we could get on perfectly well without the
translators.  At one point we were talking away in the studio when the 
translator walked in and we all shut up because she'd suddenly made us
self-conscious about what we were doing."  The Trio can be heard on
three tracks, including the strikingly unlikely setting of Deeper
Understanding, a very modern-world song about an alienated woman and
her relationship with her computer.

     "This is definitely my most personal, honest album," she says.
"And I think it's my most *feminine* album, in that I feel maybe I'm
not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man's world -- God,
here we go!"  She seems to be wary of provoking a heavy debate about 
feminism.  "On The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, particularly from a
production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power,
which I felt was a very male attitude.  In some cases it worked very
well, but. . . perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying
to do the things that men do in music."
     The Fog is a brave song.  It co-stars Kate's dad on spoken vocals
intoning with fatherly/doctorly reassurance, "Just put your feet down
child/'Cos you're all grown-up now".
     "I started with the idea of a relationship in deep water and 
thought I could parallel that with learning to swim, the moment of
letting go," she says.  "When my dad was teaching me to swim he'd hold
both my hands, then say, Now, let go.  So I would, then he'd take two
paces back and say, Right, swim to me, and I'd be , Oo-er, blub, blub,
blerb.  But I though it was such a beautiful image of the father and
child, all wrapped up in the idea of really loving someone, but letting
them go, because that's a part of real love, don't you think, the letting
go?"
     So it's personal about Kate and her father then.  It sounds as though
it might be personal about her and Del too.
     "Yes, it does, doesn't it?"  She laughs, really amused by her
professionally evasive reply.  "Have you ever watched Woody Allen being
interviewed?  Obviously his films are very personal and when the 
interviewer asks him the 'Has this happened to you then?' question, he's
all. . ."  She cowers back into her chair, crosses and uncrosses her legs,
thrashes about like a speared fish.  "Then he'll say, Uh, well, no, I'm
just acting out a role.  It's ironic, but it's much easier to speak about
very personal things to lots of people through a song, a poem or a film
than it is to confront the world with them through someone asking
questions.  Maybe you worry because it's going to be indirectly reported."
    Kate Bush leads a quiet, fairly limited life so her options on subject
matter my be relatively restricted.  Although she has ventured into
political issues with Breathing (nuclear war) and The Dreaming (Aborigine
rights), she generally declares her own ignorance and refrains from
writing songs that would only prove it.  But she will often borrow a 
story and make it her own -- from books (Wuthering Heights, obviously,
and Cloudbusting, from Peter Reich's memoir of his father called A Book
Of Dreams), TV (Pull Out The Pin was inspired by a documentary about the
Viet Cong), or films (the idea for Get Out Of My House came from The
Shining).
     However, it was a story told by an older friend that sowed the seeds
for Heads We're Dancing, a near-disco piece about a night out with Hitler.
"Years ago this friend of mine went to a dinner and spent the whole
evening chatting to this fascinating guy, incredibly charming, witty,
well-read, but never found out his name," she says.  "The next day he
asked someone else who'd been there who it was. 'Oh, didn't you know?
That's Oppenheimer, the man who invented the atomic bomb.'  My friend
was horrified because he thought he should have given the guy hell,
attacked him, he didn't know what.
     "But the point was one moment this person is charming, then when you
find out who he is, he's completely different.  So I thought, Who's the
worst person you could possibly meet in those circumstances?  Hitler!
And the story developed.  A woman at a dance before the war and this guy
comes up to her tossing a coin with this cocky chat-up line, Heads we're
dancing.  She doesn't recognise him until she sees his face in the paper
later on and then she's devastated.  She thinks that if she'd known she
might have been able to *get* him and change the course of history.  But
he was a person who fooled a tremendous number of people and I don't 
think they can be blamed.  It worries me a bit that this song could be
received wrongly, though."

     It could well be that the musically extended family and extended
home of Kate Bush even embrace her feelings for her songs themselves.
She has an intimacy with them, a distinctive candour about sensuality
and sexuality to which her present album title track is something of 
a natural conclusion.
     It passed more or less unnoticed in her early days that she was 
casually breaking taboos in every other song.  Tricky items on her
agenda included incest (brother and sister in The Kick Inside, woman
and young boy in The Infant Kiss), homosexuality (Wow, Kashka From
Baghdad) and period pains (Strange Phenomena, Kites [sic]).  Her 
sympathetic, non-judgmental approach was probably one of the less obvious
reasons why she appealed so strongly to both sexes, but she would 
occasionally remark that she was grateful the tabloids didn't read lyric
sheets.  Otherwise she could have been up to her neck in bishops and Mrs.
Whitehouse demanding that the nation's children be protected from this
filth.
     In fact, the moment anyone other than a fan thinks they've spotted
a hint of sex in her songs she becomes very hesitant.  Once, when she
was working on Breathing, an EMI executive walked in to be greeted by
the hypnotic "out-in, out-in, out-in" chant.  Taking a firm hold on the
wrong end of the stick, he asked her how she could even dream of releasing
this pornography.  The possibility of such gross misunderstandings shakes
her faith in the "purity" -- a favourite word -- of what she's doing.
But not enough to make her back off.
     "Don't you think Art is a tremendous sensual-sexual expression?
I feel that energy often. . . the driving force is probably not the 
right way to put it," she says, still trying to skirt the fnaarr-fnaarr
potential of the topic.
     Whether or not her speculation about the nature of Art is on the
money, she made her own experience of the creative process quite clear
with the cover of Never For Ever.  A cornucopia of fantastic and real,
beautiful and vile creatures -- the products of her imagination -- is
shown swirling our from beneath her skirt.  At the time, thinking about
this and the steamy, masturbatory atmosphere of many of the songs she
wrote in her teens such as The Man With The Child In His Eyes and 
Saxophone Song, she said:  "It's not such an open thing for women to be
physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it.  I can't
understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful. . .
Physical masturbation, it's a feeling so bottled up you have to relieve
it, as if you were crying."
     The Sensual World is a song that translates the old ache to a 
different level -- with the invaluable help of James Joyce.  "I had a 
rhythm idea with a synth line I took home to work on one night," she
says.  "While I was playing it this repeated *Yes* came to me and made
me think of Molly Bloom's speech right at the end of Ulysses -- which I
*have* actually read all through!  I went downstairs and read it again,
this unending sentence punctuated with 'yeses', fantastic stuff, and it
was uncanny, it fitted the rhythm of my song."  (The last lines of Molly
Bloom's great stream of consciousness read:  "then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.")
     Although to Kate "it felt like it was meant to happen", when she
applied through "official channels" (presumably the Joyce estate) for
permission to use it, she was refused.  But she wasn't to be deflected.
"I tried to write it like Joyce," she says, smiling in self-mockery.
"The rhythm at least I wanted to keep.  Obviously I couldn't do his
style.  It became a song about Molly Bloom, the character, stepping
out of the page -- black and white, two-dimensional, you see -- and
into the real world, the sensual world.  Touching things."  She
declaims exaggeratedly.  "The grass underfoot!  The mountain air!  I
know it sounds corny, but it's about the whole sensual experience, this
wonderfully human thing . . ."
     And lines like "his spark took life in my hand"?
     "Yes, it is rather saucy.  But not nearly as sexy as James Joyce."
She looks concerned again.  "I'd be really worried -- there's nothing I
can do about it now because it's all part of the process -- but I would
be worried if people felt this ambiguity between sensual and sexual.

     "I definitely *became* a person when I left school and suddenly took
control of my life," she says.  "I felt like that was the first time I'd
really been there.  Do you. . .?  It was the beginning of my life really.
     "Now I think I get a tremendous amount of security from my work, 
through being able to write songs.  Though perhaps I'm very insecure
except when I'm working.  There again I work so much. . . I'll have to
think about this.  I'll be thinking about it all day now.  What I'm
looking out for is to let go of being so damned obesessive about work
that I just get sucked into it.  It's important for me now for there to
be some kind of, er, *lightness* about it.
     "You know, it's only an album.  That is what I keep saying to
myself."

Ed talking again:  There's lots of great pictures with this article.
 


Ed (Edward Suranyi)        |"Kate Bush:  Needs more exposure in the United
Dept. of Applied Science   |     States, but a magnificent talent."
UC Davis/Livermore         |                 -- Robert Hilburn,
ed@das.llnl.gov            |                    _Los Angeles Times_