The October 21, 1989 _Melody_Maker_ interview

[IED0DXM%OAC.UCLA.EDU@mitvma.mit.edu]

From: IED0DXM%OAC.UCLA.EDU@mitvma.mit.edu
Subject: The October 21, 1989 _Melody_Maker_ interview


 To: Love-Hounds@GAFFA.MIT.EDU
 From: Andrew Marvick (IED)
 Subject: The October 21, 1989 _Melody_Maker_ interview

     Sorry, folks, IED sent this in a few days ago but for some
reason (no doubt an error of IED's) it never showed up. So here
it is again. Note once again that IED's comments are always enclosed
in brackets <>, so anyone who doesn't want to read them can just
skip over them. Anything in parentheses () is part of the original
published text.

                        _The_Language_of_Love_

                      With her _Sensual_World_ LP
        being hailed as one of this year's best and the single
      of the same name still high in the charts <This was already
    untrue at the time this interview was published&rbr., Kate Bush
        celebrates her triumphant return with Steve Sutherland.

     An hour before she tells me I have a lovely energy and just
about makes my year, she apologises for keeping me waiting.
     "I just had to have a fag," she says, dogging a butt
in the ashtray. "I was just _dying_ for one."
for one."
     Something isn't right here. I mean, I don't know who
I thought Kate Bush would be when I walked into the downstairs room
of Durrant's Hotel where she is drinking tea and, but I didn't
think Kate Bush would smoke.
     I think perhaps I was expecting her to be like Emma Thompson, a
woman whose precocious talent has been critically downplayed because
it springs from a privileged background rather than one of strife or
suffering; a woman not so much
_other_-worldly as cocooned from the weird old world for her own safety and
sanity.
     I think I still expected to meet a hippy nymph despite the evidence
of my ears. Sitting in the foyer under the influence of her new LP,
watching the first, solitary autumn leaf blow in off the street onto
the Axminster, and reading symbolism into the American photographer
asking for the price labels to be removed from the olde worlde
mementoes on show in the Regency cabinets, I must have ignored the
fact that only Prince has been more consistently intriguing <More?
_More_??>, more exuberantly experimental, more willing to take risks
for the sake of pure music in the Eighties. Only the pneumatic _Purple_
_Rain_ pumped blood faster than _Hounds_of_Love_, only _Around_the_World_
_in_a_ Day_ repatterned the embroidery of pop with the same haughty
disregard for convention as _The_Sensual_World_, her seventh LP if you
her seventh LP if you count the greatest hits compilation,
     I think I thought Kate Bush would be Green and ozone-friendly--all
ballet shoes and Laura Ashley frocks. The St. Michael's blouse
and slacks, the tiny navy socks and no shoes, the Benson & Hedges
freaked me out.
     I think I thought of Kate Bush as a precious oasis in a tarnished
world, a pearl cast before the swinish hordes. I gues I forgot Kate
Bush is a genius.
     "I think most people tend to think of me as the weird _Wuthering_Heights_
singer--that is definitely the image that's stuck with most people,
which I find extraordinary because it's...so long ago."
     She laughs and, when she laughs, her cheeks dimple like a
Disney chipmunk.
     "Extraordinary is a very good word, I think. I don't
know why people are still keen on...I don't know why people
bother with me."
     Really?
     "Really."
     She's so small, it't extraordinary.
     It took Kate Bush four years to make _The_Sensual_World_,
and we've been given an hour to talk about it. Great.
     I think about telling Kate how surprised I am she's
so small, or how shocked I am she smokes, but time is not
on my side so I decide, instead, to tell her how delighted
I am that she's come to the conclusion that the past and
the future aren't beyond changing. The album sounds so
optimistic in an era when absolutely everything appears to
be falling apart. <Kate naturally loves this interpretation,
but the fact is that the album is certainly as loaded with dark
and pessimistic images and ideas as it is with optimistic ones. In
IED's opinion Sutherland has swotted up on what Kate has been
saying recently, and is now rephrasing a lot of her own preferences
in conversation with her, as though they were his own ideas rather
than borrowed ones, precisely in order to ingratiate Kate. It works,
and it may even be a good idea, since the other methods of engaging her
in conversation have seldom produced great publishable material.>
     "Oh, thank you! Thank you so much! That's really how
I wanted it to be but, talking to a lot of friends and that, they
feel it's a dark album."
     I didn't think that at all...
     "Oh, great."
     ...I thought some of the situations were dark, but the
way they're resolved is optimistic. <What about the way _Heads,_We're_
_Dancing_ is "resolved"? What about the way _Deeper_Understanding_ is
"resolved"? What about the way _Never_Be_Mine_ is "resolved"?>
     "Oh, that's great. Thank you. Yes. That's really
great. I'm so pleased you heard it like that. You see, for a
lot of people it's so complicated to listen to, and that worries
me, because I like the idea of people being able to listen to it
easily and...uh...I don't want to confuse people but, for
some people, it's very hard for them to even take it in,
let alone sort of get anything out of it.
     "I do think art should be simple, you see. It shouldn't
be complicated, and I think, in some ways, this has come across
a bit complicated." <This is one of Kate's "new"
ideas--opinions which she has not really made prior to 1989, but
which she has been repeating in multiple interviews since the
release of the new album. IED finds it highly intriguing, because
it is so vague and so patently at odds with the way her own art
has always been--and continues to be--made.>
     Maybe that's because, for me, the album's about
relationships--the relationship between language and emotion,
the relationship between language and music, the relationship
between emotion and music and how all this expresses, or more crucially
_fails_ to express, the relationship between people. And relationships,
as we all know, are never ever easy.
     "How interesting. Could you give me an example?"
     Well, in _Love_and_Anger_ you say, "It's so deep I don't think that I can
speak about it," as if language betrays your aims, and then
you go on to say, "We could be like two strings beating/Speaking
in sympathy," which suggests that music, rather than language,
comes closest to expressing our emotions.
     "Yeah! Actually, _Love_and_Anger_ was an
incredibly difficult song for me to write and, when
people ask me what it's about, I have to say I don't know
because it's not really a thought-out thing. It was so
difficult for me to write that: in some ways, I think, <it's> about
the process of writing the song: I can't find the words; I don't
know what to say. This thing of a big, blank page, you know: it's
so big...It's like it doesn't have edges around it, you
could just start anywhere."
     She studies her socks for a moment.
     "Yes...um...I don't think I was consious of it, but it's
something I'm aware of when writing songs. <Has IED missed
something here, or did Kate just contradict the first half of this
sentence in the second half?> There's such a lot you need
to say through words. And it's a beautiful thing, language: actually
being able to put words together and say something...maybe say two
things in one line. But, like you say, it misses the mark so often."
     You created your own language, too, don't you? It seems
when you're at your most sexual, your most emotional, you emit...the
only word I can find for it is _noises_, but that sounds too crude. Your
"Mmh yes" on _The_Sensual_World_(the most heavenly sound ever on _Top_
_of_the_Pops_) and your "Do-do-do-do-do" in _Heads,_We're_Dancing_
are like cries that language has deserted you or, more positively,
an attempt on your behalf to merge words and music, to create a new
emotional language from a combination of meaning and sound. I remember
you used to go "Wow!" when words failed you. It shivers me.
It's thrilling.
     "Well, I think that's a lovely thing to say...Yes,
often words are sounds for me. I get a sound and I throw it in
a song and I can't turn it into a word later because it's
actually stated itself too strongly as a sound. Like, in
_Love_and_Anger_, the bit that goes 'Mmh, mmh, mmh'
was there instantly and, in itself, it's really about not being
able to express it differently. Do you know what I mean?"
     Indeed I do. Liz of the Cocteau Twins does it all the time.
She never sings a lyric as such, it's all noises. <Actually
this is not true. Fraser has admitted that she picks real words
and names from dictionaries, but simply throws them together without
a narrative foundation.> But somehow, the way you burst language,
the tension that leads to the victory of sound over sense whips your
music into another dimension. It's the frustration that gives your
songs dynamic, and the way you remedy it that makes them attractive.
Most of the _Sensual_World_ LP seems to be saying, "_This_
_can_be_worked_out_." <IED does not agree. Fully half the
songs on the album simply do not bear this claim out.>
     _Between_a_Man_and_a_Woman_
is almost a soap opera situation, with you trying to drive off any
external interference which might ruin the chances of a
relationship's natural growth. It's like you're
saying we live in a fast culture--fast food, fast-edit TV,
disposable pop, disposable sex--and, if we don't get instant
gratification, we're not interested. You seem angry and
determined.
     "Well, that's nice, because when people ask me about
this song, in terms of having to talk about it, it's rubbish.
But yes, I think you're right, it is perhaps about how you actually
have that choice sometimes, whether to interfere or not. <This was
not Sutherland's idea at all, but Kate's.> You know,
there's this tendency to want to leap in and take over and control:
'Oh, I know best!'; when I think a relationship is a very
delicate balance: it's very easily tipped, and then needs
to be refound again."
     No matter how precarious, though, you think love's worth it,
don't you? _Reaching_Out_ is full of
danger--the child reaching out to feel the fire, for the
hand that smacks...You endorse the instinct.
     _Rocket's_Tail_ probably sums up what I'm getting at best. In the
beginning you scoff at someone else's romantic notion. They say they
want to be the glorious rocket, and you say you only see
"A stick on fire/Alone on its journey/Home to the
quickening ground/With no one there to catch it". But a verse
later, you're putting on your pointed hat and strapping the
stick to your back. It seems to me that love triumphs over
cynicism and, whether you're dashed to the ground and
destroyed by throwing yourself into a relationship or whether
you survive doesn't matter. The risk, the vulnerability's
worth taking. It's the only way you're alive, and anything's
better than the loneliness of, say, _Deeper_Understanding_.
     "Yeah! Yeah! There's a lot of that going on on
the album, and I'm really pleased that you should hear it:
like, 'It might not be easy, but there is a way of
getting out of it, so try not to worry too much.'"
     Perversely, you seem to revel in the mess our emotions
can get us into. Having said all that about language wanting to
be music, you then take some poor soul and allow music to mislead
her into the most dangerous relationship of all. In _Heads_We're_
_Dancing_, the girl surrenders to the rhythm and ends up dancing with Hitler!
     (It's okay--she survives. The man wasn't Hitler when
she danced with him, he was just a man. He became Hitler later.
We all have the capacity for infinite evil. And infinite good.)
<This parenthetical aside was evidently not addressed to Kate
during the interview, but was added by Sutherland to his text
afterward. There is furthermore no support in the song's text for
for Sutherland's interpretation.>
     Even under these extreme circumstances, there's no regret.
Again you're saying it's worth giving yourself up to
another because anything's better than being alone. <This
is a very weird way of interpreting the text of the song. IED would
say that the narrator's wry admission that she just stood there
laughing even _after_ learning who it was she had danced with was an extremely
bitter comment on the human consciousness.> There are so many images of
loneliness on the album...
     "Yes, I think there are. I suppose, in relationships,
there's a lot that can go wrong very quickly, and you
have to work at them, which, I think, is something a lot of people
aren't aware of until they grow up a bit. These things gradually
reveal themselves to you, don't they?
     "You're right--most of my songs are about relationships,
probably always have been, really. That feels to me how things are,
really: relationships towards other things and people, and how we
actually manage to make these forms of contact..."
     _Deeper_Understanding_
is the most extreme song on the album. <'Most extreme?'
This seems a very arbitrary selection.> How do you feel about
the character who's so desperately, pathetically lonely, (s)she's
formed an addictive relationship with a computer?
     "Well, wherever you live, chances are you won't
know your neighbours, you won't even know the person who lives
next to you. But I see this song set in America, just because it's
so much more extreme out there: people don't go out of their
houses, they watch the television, they can shop from the television,
they speak to people on the phone. If they want, they needn't
have any form of human communication of a real kind at all, and I
think that's being encouraged.
     "You know, a couple of years ago there was a lot of
news about how women were divorcing their husbands because they
were spending all their time with their computers--they were in
there all night. I suppose it's still happening. And this song
is about this very intense relationship that developed, where this
person spends all their time with computers. They talk to
the computer and the computer talks back.
     "I suppose I really liked the idea of deep, spiritual
communication--deep love which should come from humans--coming
from the last place you'd expect it to, the coldest piece of
machinery. And yet I do feel there is a link. I do feel that, in some
ways, computers could take us into a level of looking at ourselves
that we've never seen before, because they could come in
from outside all this...I'm not really sure what I'm
saying..."
     She laughs and takes a sip of tea.
     "I think a lot of things in Nature are almost
programme-based, and a lot of things that we do are very mechanical,
so maybe somehow going right through a computer, almost so that
you come out the other side--going through all that science--will
take us to something very spiritual but very earthy.
     "I was very inspired by Stephen Hawkins <sic--this is
almost certainly Sutherland's mistaken spelling, not Kate'.
The man she is referring to is Stephen Hawking.> Have you
heard about this guy? I think he was an Oxford scientist.
<Cambridge.> He's very ill and, basically, he's
coming up with how everything is created...or not created, as
he sees it.
     "I saw him on television, and it was so moving: this guy
who's so close to the answer of it all, in a body that was
desperately...it was going, and quickly. And he was fighting
against the time he had left, and yet...Here was this guy who
was probably the closest to knowing it all, and he was speaking
through this voice-processor. It was almost, for me, like hearing
the voice of God.
     "What he was saying was so spiritual, it was not like
a scientist. It was someone saying, 'Well, look: it wasn't
ever created and it won't end, it just _is_.'
You know, this wonderful conceptualism is almost beyond words, because
he's gone so far through the process. Words can't explain
what he's discovered."
     I find that a bit scary. I wonder if we _want_ the answer?
     "Well, I wonder if we'd _understand_ it!
Even if we knew the answer, we probably wouldn't understand it."
     But if we ever found out, definitely, whether there's a God
or not, it would be like definitely finding out there are aliens
from outer space: the human race couldn't handle it, couldn't
cope with not being the centre of the universe. And what if we
found out there definitely isn't a God, what then? The truth
would be too much to bear. The idea of death being an inconceivable
nothing would drive us mad with the contemplation of extinction.
     "We seem to be very much in the era of reason, and I think
science is the ultimate example of that. The other
side is the instinctive, which is not logical on any level.
Perhaps it's the putting together of the two. You know, like
what you were just saying there about aliens? Most people's
response would be that it's just not possible because their
reason says so, but then an instinctive person might feel, 'Yes,
this is so's because it just feels right.
     "Maybe we've lost touch with our instincts, so it's
become very important for us to work out logical explanations for things
all the time, which I think is a bit of a shame, really."
     After months of experimentation, Kate Bush decided the Trio Bulgarka
were the closest thing she'd ever heard to the voice of God. She
first heard Yanka Rupkhina, Eva Georgieva and Stoyanka Boneva--Bulgaria's
foremost vocal trio--just after she'd finished _Hounds_of_Love_,
when her brother, Paddy, played her one of their few recordings available
in the Western world. <This was before any of the now-popular
compilation albums had been released in the west.>
     "I was devastated. Everyone I know who hears it is. At the
time I didn't really think in terms of us working together but,
the more I listened to it, the more I thought how wonderful it would
be, and it seemed to gradually make more and more sense to try and
get them involved in the album. Still, I needed a lot of time to
gather the courage to do it. I was scared about it not working."
     Did you think you might cheapen their gift?
     "Oh God, absolutely. It was a big responsibility. And what
was so nice is that they really enjoyed the experience. I mean,
when we first met them, they asked us into their house, and they'd
made a big meal for us: it was a big social event, and yet we'd
never met. And within minutes, someone said, 'Oh, why not sing
them a song?' So Eva, the eldest one, picked up the phone,
listened to the dialing tone, went 'Mmmmmmh,' and they
all tuned to that, and just burst into song!
     "They were sitting over the kitchen table and, within
minutes, I was just completely taken by them and the tears just...And
they loved this, because it meant that the'd got through. Everyone
who was with me was really moved--you could see people just trying to
wipe the tears away.
     "When I was working on _Deeper_Understanding_,
the idea was that the verses were the person and the choruses were
the computer talking to the person. I wanted this sound that would
almost be like the voice of angels: something very ethereal, something
deeply religious, rather than a mechanical thing. And we went through _so_
many different processes, trying vocoders, lots of ways of affecting
the voice, and eventually it led to the Trio Bulgarka.
     "it made absolute sense--you know, this loving voice--because
they have a certain quality: their music feels so old and deep. It's
really powerful; such intense, deep music that, in some ways,
I think it is like the voice of angels."
     It's as if they're possessed of it, rather than it's
theirs.
     "Yeah! Absolutely! Beautiful music! Old music like that is
magical, and it can be preserved and kept. We must have lost so much
of it all over the world. It must have just gone!"
     If we take it as read that the album is concerned with relationships
and the problems of communication and how these problems aren't
insurmountable, I imagine working with the Trio Bulgarka must have put
this to the test and enriched the LP through the experience of recording.
I mean, I assume you couldn't talk to each other. I assume you had
no mutual language, and yet you created together through music.
<IED, ever the cynic, submits that this sounds an awful lot
like Sutherland had read the _NME_ interview or seen the _Rhythms_of_the_
_World_ programme, and was here pretending that this observation was
original.>
     "Yeah, and it was extraordinary. They didn't speak
a word of English and we didn't speak any Bulgarian, but we
could communicate through music, so that absolutely transcended
barriers. There were things we needed to translate but, generally,
we communicated emotionally, and I just loved that. They'll
come up and give you a big cuddle. They'll just come up and touch
you and cuddle you, and you can go up and give them a big cuddle,
and I really enjoyed that kind of communication, it felt very
real and direct to me. I'd never experienced that kind of
communication before. It's something we could do with more
of. It's a lovely thing.
     "They were over not long ago, and we hadn't seen
each other for a while and, when the translator went out of the
room, we all started chatting. I don't think any of us knew
what the other one was talking about but everyone was talking
at the same time, and we were all chatting away, about six of
us in a room. Then the translator walked back in and suddenly
everyone felt really self-conscious and shut up. It all went
quiet and we all sat and looked at the floor. It was a really
great moment, really great!"
     Apart from The Cure's sumptuously creepy _Lullaby_, _The_Sensual_World_
is surely unrivalled as the most seductive single released this
year. Like her very first release, _Wuthering_Heights_,
its inspiration lies in literature, but it expands on its theme with
an insight and maturity which would have been unthinkable to the
girl who rewrote Bronte. <This is highly debatable.>
     _The_Sensual_World_ is about Molly Bloom, the fountain of lust and
life in James Joyce's dauntingly super-realist novel, _Ulysses_.
It's a book that't defeated my attempts to read it again and
again, and I confess to Kate that it gives me a hell of a lot of
trouble.
     "God, yes!"
     Why Molly Bloom?
     "Well, I just thought it was such an extraordinary
piece of writing. It's so...ooh!...It's such a beautiful
style. It's like trains of thought continually tumbling...You know,
tumbling speech, and not kind of...'stopped.' I first heard
her speak being read years ago by...I'm pretty sure it was
Siobhan McKenna. <There is in fact a recording
of McKenna's reading of this soliloquy, so Kate is
almost certainly remembering correctly.> And it had such
a femininity about it. That was my first exposure to it.
     "And it just came together with this song. We'd
written this piece of music in the studio, and I thought,
'What about putting the Molly Bloom speech together with
this?' So I went and grabbed the book, and it worked
perfectly. It just scanned--the whole song. But, unfortunately,
when I applied for permission to use the words, they wouldn't
let me.
     "Obviously, I was very disappointed. It was completely their
prerogative, you know, they don't have to give their permission.
But it was very difficult for me, then, to reapproach the song. In
some ways I wanted to just leave it off the album. But we'd
put a lot of work into it--the Irish musicians had worked hard--so it
was a matter of trying to rewrite the lyrics so it kept the same
rhtymic sense, because the words are _so_ rhythmic; and to
keep the sense of sensuality as well, without
using the Joyce lyrics. So it all kind of turned into this piece
where Molly Bloom steps out of the book into real life, where she
can actually reach out and touch things in the real world. In a
lot of ways, because of their lack of co-operation, it transformed
the track into something else."
     When you say the Joyce piece had a "femininity" about
it, what do you mean?
     "It's difficult to put into words, but I think, on the last album,
_Hounds_of_Love, particularly in the production, I wanted to try and get across
a sense of power, and the way I related to that was very much what I consider
very good male music--the kind of power I found there was not what
I found in a lot of females' music.
     "It's not that I was trying to write like a man or
anything--but there was this level of approaching the album,
soundwise, that I think had a male energy. But I didn't want
to do that on this album. I wanted to do it as a woman, not
as a woman working around a man's world. This all sounds awful!"
     It's making sense.
     "Oh, is it? Good! _The_Sensual_World_
was very much a chance for me to express myself as a female in
a female way, and I found that original piece very positive
female talking...That's the only way I can describe it."
     It's like a sister piece to _This_Woman's_Work_. _The_Sensual_World_
is completely self-absorbed in its own erogenous pleasure, while _This_
_Woman's_Work_, plaintively, over stark acoustic piano, reviews the man's
side of the relationship and, really, pities him.
     "John Hughes, the American director, was doing a film called _She's_
_Having_a_Baby_--a great film, very nice and comic. And he had this scene
which he wanted me to write a song for where it gets very
heavy. The film's about this guy who gets married and
he likes being a kid, really--very much up in the clouds--and
she gets pregnant and they go into hospital, and she's
rushed off becuase the baby's in the breach position.
     "And suddenly there he is, just left in the waiting
room by himself. It's probably the first time in his
life he's had to grow up. It's a lovely piece of film,
where he's looking back on their times together--there are
scenes where they're decorating their flat, going for walks
and things--and it was very much just a matter of
telling the story in words--how, at times like that, you tend
to go into something akin to guilt mode and you think of all
the things you should have done and you just didn't."
     I think men are bigger babies than women. I don't think
we grow up so fast.
     "Maybe men can avoid more situations than women in
terms of facing things. I guess there are things for women that
are different and they tend to deal with life situations rather
than perhaps the business world or whatever. God, this sounds
so sexist..."
     Not at all. Women give birth, they are physically part of
the creative process. It's as if their orgasm grows and
bears fruit, whereas men fuck and that's it--it's a release,
something we get rid of rather than something we gain. Then it all
builds up again, and we can't handle it. I think women are far
stronger emotionally. Men can't cope with emotions. We get
frustrated and aggressive and destructive because we can't
express ourselves, whereas women seem to _embody_ their
feelings better. Something positive grows from them.    .
     "Yes, I think you're right. It's very hard on
all of us but, yet, through the process of giving birth, I'm
sure women are much stronger than men, and it's incredibly
hard on them that they should not be able to show their emotions
when actually it's okay to be weak."
     We men are confused. The trouble with the invention of the
notion of sexism and the paranoia surrounding it is that the only
way we can deal with it is based on a fallacy. We think that,
just because women should quite rightly have equal rights and
equal opportunities, the sexes are the same. But we're not--women
are aliens to us, we don't understand you at all. You speak
a different language altogether. We're different creatures
entirely.
     "Absolutely, I'm with you 100 per cent. I couldn't
agree more. I think it's awful what's happening to
people's sense of their own sexuality. Women are made to feel
awkward about expressing themselves as women in a man's world,
so, subconsciously, a lot of the time, they're behaving
like men because they don't know how strong they're
supposed to be. Then again, women's lib has left men in a
lot of areas where they don't know how to behave in case they
get called sexist, a pig, or whatever.
     "We are different, and we should be helping each other.
Unfortunately there was such a lot of shit to get through that
it was a battle, but I don't think it need be."
     The album seems to be saying, "If you find yourself
in a tricky situation, follow your instincts--just behave the
way if feels right and at least you're being true to yourself,
irrespective of the outcome."
     "Yes, absolutely...And what an incredibly difficult thing
to apply to life. I think there are some very good things going on
to help us through. I must say, for me, the comdy in this country
has been really educational. You know, Ben Elton and The Comic Strip--all
those people you can't really call alternative comedians anymore
because they've become mainstream. I think they've really
done a lot to stop it being fashionable to be humorous with sexist
overtones.
     "It used to be very hip to make fun of women. Old
comedy was all about treating women as a threat and, therefore,
making fun of them. And I think they've really changed a lot
of that. They've done so much for men and women because now,
in most circles, among people our age, if you make a sexist joke,
it's really considered tasteless. I think that's a fantastic
step forward. And to see people like Dawn French and Jennifer
Saunders out there doing comedy being women as women is brilliant.
     "They're just out there doing it and, the more
women can be strong enough to do that, the more it'll help
everybody. It used to really scare me the way women were portrayed
in comedy, and the way they behaved: either they were bitching off
other women and being sexist themselves, or they were allowing
themselves to be used as sex objects, either positively or
negatively--they were either very beautiful or very stereotypically
ugly. Women would just be batted around from these extremes, but
that hold's been broken now and, as comedy's so much part
of our nature in this country, so much a part of our roots, to
break old things like that is an incredible step."
     What you've achieved musically is pretty incredible
too--the way you can do exactly what you want exactly when you
want without anyone interfering. You're very much admired
for your independence, and most of the women I know who aspire
to make a living making music would rather be you than, say,
Madonna.
     "Oh, really! Ha!"
     You seem to live the life you want to, almost in a world
of your own, whereas Madonna's constantly playing corporate
games. She has to compete, you don't
     "I think I'm incredibly lucky to be in this position
now, although it's not something I'm aware of without people
sparking off my realisation. I think Madonna's very clever,
and I think she's very aware of what she's doing, don't
you? I think that's the game she wants to play, and she seems
to have her heart stuck on being an actress, and absolutely
good luck to her because she's really...talk about on the
front line! She's such an exposed person. I would find that
so difficult to live with.
     "I guess I have fought for what I want, but you always
have to do that. I am very lucky. But it's hard to keep up that
level of concern, particularly when you feel the music business
becoming very mercenary--there are so many things that encourage
you to abuse it. It's so horrid. It's such a shame."
     Do you listen to much pop music?
     "Not much when I'm making albums. In the evenings
I probably watch a film or comedies or something visual to take
me away from my ears. But, in between albums, yeah--there's
some great stuff. Johnny Lydon's new album is just great,
and I heard some tracks off the new Jeff Beck album and they
were great, too. I think there's been some good, good music
out there. Everyone in the music industry's been wearing
black for, what, the last four years? Well, I think everyone's
in mourning for good music. It's a show of mourning--'Look,
here we are, where's the music?' And there's little
snatches now, and that's exciting."
     Are you hypersensitive to music? I mean, just because
you make music that moves other people, that doesn't necessarily
mean that music moves you, does it?
     "God, I'd love to think that my music could move people,
because it doesn't happen to me often, but, when it has, it's
a lovely experience. The Bulgarians did it to me, and Nigel Kennedy
(the young classical violinist who also plays on the album) sometimes
makes me cry."
     There are so many musical cliches, and you're breaking them
down. Using Davey Spillane's Uillean pipes and Dave Gilmour's
guitar and the Trio, you've succeeded in creating a new,
uncategorisable sort of music which isn't anything, it's
just music. I think that's important, because it makes people
open their ears to stuff. It enriches their lives.
     "Well, that's lovely. What a really nice thing to
say. Um...I think everything seems too easy to categorise, and...I
think that's just such a lovely thing to say..."
     It's like what you were saying about relationships--you've
done it with music. You've given it time to grow, to see if it's
compatible. And it sounds natural, not cosmetic.
     "Well, I think that's fantastic...that's just such
a nice thing to say, that's really great...wonderful, absolutely
wonderful. Because I think this is really what music is--a continual
process of people experimenting, taking this and that and putting
them together: all these experimental marriages. And when they
work, I think that's such an important step, because then
they've created a new music of a sort which then goes on to
evolve.
     "And, if it doesn't work, that's absolutely fine,
too, because that shows you what doesn't work. So, if you
feel this is a natural union, that's really good. I suppose
I'd like to think that, as long as I really care about making
music, there will always be people out there who want to hear
music that is cared for."
     The hour's up and Kate thanks me for saying such lovely
things about her album. I thank her for making such a great album,
and she thanks me for thanking her, and says I have a lovely
energy, and...shucks...We blush a bit and shake hands, and
I shuffle out of the room, out of her life, elated and
embarrassed.
     Another relationship we just couldn't handle.

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-- Andrew Marvick