An AP telephone interview with Kate!

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

There is an Associated Press telephone interview with Kate. 
It appeared locally last Friday in the _Valley Herald_ a small 
newspaper serving the Livermore, Amador, and San Ramon Valleys.
I never expected to see anything about Kate in *this* newspaper!
I suppose the article must have appeared in other places as well.

I believe there are several errors in the article.  I won't bother 
correcting them, but if anybody wants to, such as IED, be my guest.

In any case, here it is:

Getting past the myths surrounding Kate Bush

By Hillel Italie
Associated Press

     Some myths about Kate Bush:
     -- The four-year wait for her new album, "Sensual World," was by
choice.
     Bush, a perfectionist in the studio, says no.  She did take a brief
rest after issuing the popular greatest hits package, "The Whole Story,"
but said creating suitable material caused the delay.  She also changed
labels, from EMI to CBS.
     -- She doesn't like to perform live.
     Not so, the singer insists.  This most visual of artists loves the
stage, but worries about maintaining the intensity night after night of
material such as "Get Out of my House" and "Sat in Your Lap."  That's why
she hasn't toured in 10 years.
     -- Her favorite author is Emily Bronte.
     Wrong again.  Yes, the title and story of "Wuthering Heights," a 
No. 1 single in England in 1978, were taken straight from the novel.  But
no, Bush didn't like the book and, in fact, hadn't seen the movie.
     It is true, however, that the British star has a few things to say
about love, and a few more about the, well, "Sensual World."  All that is
no surprise to anyone whose ears have rung from her operatic passion on
"Wuthering Heights" or has gazed at those penetrating brown eyes which
glow from her album covers.
     So Bush fans won't be surprised that the title song of her new record
more than lives up to its name.
     A better story is how it came to be recorded.  Originally, having
composed an appropriately seductive track, Bush thought of James Joyce's
erotic classic, "Ulysses," and thought she had found the ideal lyrics.
     "The lyrics were taken straight from Molly Bloom's soliloquy," the 
31-year-old singer-songwriter siad in a telephone interview from London.
"The words were so rich, so intimate.  It was like magic the way they
fitted."
     Unfortunately, the Joyce estate had no interest in hearing the
author's words set to music.  If Bush wanted to invoke "Ulysses", she'd
have to start from scratch.  She did, cooing "Mmh, yes," and murmuring
images of "seedcades" and "arrows of love" while uilleann pipes and
an Irish bagpipe moaned in the background.
     "I was disappointed," Bush admitted, "and it was very difficult.  I
wanted to keep the original sense, but obviously I am not Joyce.  But
with the rhythms I had it began to turn into what the Molly Bloom
character is about.  I was stepping out of the song into the beauty [of]
nature."
     She calls her dreamlike songs "short stories," and brings to them
a fiction writer's fascination with legend and reality.  That means 
imagining heists with Bogart and Cagney, summoning the spirit of Houdini
and springing from the head of Zeus.
     On "Heads We're Dancing," a young girl meets a charming stranger at
a dance in 1939 and discovers she is conversing with Hitler.
     "I was thinking of the devil incarnate, the ultimate evil," she
said.  "It was inspired by a friend of mine who had been to this dinner
and sat next to this guy and found him absolutely fascinating, intelligent
and well-educated.
     "He asked the next day, 'Who was that?' and was told it was (atomic
bomb developer) J. Robert Oppenheimer.  My friend went back in horror.
He said he would have behaved completely differently if he had realized
who it was."
     Obsession, like Cathy for Heathcliff, drove Bush to make music.  She
played piano for hours as a child and was 15 when a friend introduced her
to Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour.
     "He was looking for different acts and my friend said to him, 'Come
and have a listen.'  They came down and worked on a few songs with me.  I
couldn't afford anything like paying for a studio so Dave put up the
money.  We put three tracks down, two of those tracks went on the first
album ('The Kick Inside')."
     Go to a record store and you'll find her albums in the "pop" or
"rock" section, between Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds.  But neither
of these 1960s groups had a singer with a four-octave soprano, or called
a song "Suspended in Gaffa," or ever used the Digeridu or Bouzouki.
     Bush was inspired by British art rockers Peter Gabriel and Bryan
Ferry rather than country and rhythm 'n' blues.  Instead of getting her
kicks from electric guitar, Bush fell in love with the Fairlight 
synthesizer, which she began using on her third album, "Never for Ever."
     "I took one look at it and said, 'This is what I've been looking for
all my life.'  I couldn't believe the Fairlight.  It's called a
synthesizer, but many of its sounds are of natural source.  To be able
to play with strings, waterfalls, anything you want, it's wonderful.
     "It was just like opening this great door for me, a complete
revolution.  It meant I no longer felt a need to write on the piano and
fill it out with synthesizers."
     Bush talks of colors, moods.  There's the anger of "Between a Man and
a Woman," the loss of innocence of "The Fog," the dry wit of "Running Up
That Hill (a Deal With God)."
     She also writes of lying awake at night, worrying about love, in
"The Man With the Child in His Eyes," and being brought to tears by a
bad dream in "Cloudbusting."
     "All of us tend to live in our heads.  In 'Cloudbusting,' the idea
was of starting this song with a person waking up from this dream, 'I
wake up crying.'  It's like setting a scene that immediately suggests
to you that this person is no longer with someone they dearly love," she
said.
     "It puts a pungent note on the song.  Life is a loss, isn't it?
It's learning to cope with loss.  I think in a lot of ways, that's what
all of us have to cope with."

There's also an old picture of Kate from the _Hounds Of Love_ promotion
days (the one with Kate wearing the hat), and the caption reads:  "Kate
Bush draws on a more varied background than pop and country music."


Ed (Edward Suranyi)        | Caption:  "Kate Bush goes from cult fave to
Dept. of Applied Science   |        chart rave."  -- _Billboard_
UC Davis/Livermore         |   (In "Was It A Hit Or A Miss" in the 1985
ed@das.llnl.gov            |          year-end special issue.)