Keyboard, May '85 interview

[ganzer@cod.nosc.mil (Mark T. Ganzer)]

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I saw a request for this interview, and decided it might be of interest
again to the new members of the group that didn't see it when originally
posted about 2 years ago...
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     The Keyboard/Totally Wired interview, ca. May 1985

     The following interview with Kate was published in the June 1985 issue
of "Keyboard" magazine (she appears on the cover sitting at the keyboard of
her Fairlight). Portions of the interview were broadcast as part of
the "Totally Wired Mark II" series, which aired on public radio stations.
The interview was conducted by John Diliberto. Upon listening to the radio
interview, it was apparent that Kate's comments, as printed in Keyboard,
had been re-phrased and edited. Similarly, the radio interview
had taken comments from different portions of the interview and
spliced then together to make it sound like one continuous chain
of thought. Despite these faults, the interview is quite good, as
it goes into details of how she uses the Fairlight in her writing.
I have attempted to rectify the faults with the two interviews by
merging the two and using Kate's own words where possible. Those portions
that were transcribed from the radio interview will be enclosed in square
brackets ( [] ).

-- MarK T. Ganzer

     Despite enormous success in her native England, evidenced by a string
of hit albums and singles that goes back to her debut in 1977, Kate Bush is
practically anonymous in the States. Even with an intense cult following
and a Canadian fan club that is so fanatic that they hold their own Kate
Bush conventions and publish a fanzine, she has had no luck breaking into
the American charts. Lost in the trans-Atlantic crossing is the fact that
Kate is a vital and innovative composer, singer, keyboardist, and producer
who has shaped a uniquely personal and organic sound. Her brilliantly
orchestrated vocals weave effortlessly in and out of structures whose
foundations are built on Bush's own piano and Fairlight playing. The
stories told by her lyrics, the way she mingles the music of many cultures,
the shifting rhythms, and even the drum sound on her 1982 tour de force,
"The Dreaming", have caused many to draw comparisons between Kate and another
British luminary, Peter Gabriel.
     The history of Bush's career is one of those classic tales people
dream about: an unknown singer, discovered by a rock star (Pink Floyd
guitarist Dave Gilmour), is molded into a hitmaker who uses success to take
charge of her own career, overcoming the sex-kitten image of her early
years ( which led many a writer to talk about her various sexual
attributes- "pouting lips" and so on- rather than her music).
     Kate was born on July 30, 1958, into a musical family that included
two older brothers who played traditional Irish and British music. At age
11, she began playing the piano. "I was just mucking around with it," she
claims. "There was something in myself that could just wander off when I
started playing the piano."
     She was soon captured by the instrument, and as a self-taught
musician, it took her a while to catch onto the mechanics of songwriting.
"I started trying to put words to the piano, and found it incredibly
difficult," Bush remembers. "I couldn't understand how people did it. So I
got some books from the library to see if I could make those words fit my
music. It was absolutely useless, so I had to try to make my own words to
fit. I spent years of every day getting home from school and playing the
piano."
     Until she was 16, Kate's only audience consisted of friends and
family, but they were so enthusiastic that they tried to get her a
publishing deal. Eventually friends of friends led them to Dave Gilmour,
who was seeking out new talent at the time. He liked what he heard, put up
money to produce some demos, and landed a recording contract for Kate with
EMI. She left school a year later, and the following summer, 1977, she
recorded her debut album, "The Kick Inside". Her first single, "Wuthering
Heights", which was later covered by Pat Benatar, went to the number one
spot on the U.K. charts.
     That first album fell somewhere between cabaret and rock and roll.
Produced by Andrew Powell with top British session artist like Alan
Skidmore, Duncan Mackay, and Morris Pert, it tended to emphasize the
uncanny quality of Bush's four octave voice. She sang in a high, child-like
wail that lent a distinctive unearthly quality to her narrative songs. From
the beginning, she merged dance and theater into her live performances, one
of which is captured on the video "Live At The Hammersmith Odeon." Her
songs provided characters whose roles she played, and as with the best
actresses, audiences could rarely separate Kate Bush from the characters
she portrayed. Fans and media alike hooked onto the image of the
auburn-tressed child seductress singing about mythological incest ("The
Kick Inside") and lost loves.
     Even on that first album, there was maturity of composition and some
fine romantic piano that belied Kate's years. Her idiosyncratically twisted
rhymes and meters sounded perfectly natural. Besides, in the initial
blooming of Britain's punk movement, with it's monochromaticism, Bush was a
refreshing alternative to the "angst" of the day.
     Her second album, "Lionheart", recorded close on the heels of "The
Kick Inside", was a sophomore slump. Its light MOR arrangements seemed to
be grooming Bush for the adult-contemporary audience, but it too yielded
it's share of U.K. hits. With two LP's under her belt, and despite an
inability to crack the U.S. charts, Kate took control of her third album,
1980's "Never For Ever". The results were dramatic. Using a Fairlight CMI
for the first time, her arrangements took on new dimensions and her voice
gained added maturity and versatility. Songs were no longer designed to
show off her chops; instead each song was given its own vocal character-
unique and distictively Kate Bush. "When I was younger", she explains, "I
was into the idea of singing high, expanding my voice and making it leap.
So I wrote some songs to really push my voice and increase it's range. Now
I concentrate more on the song."
     Bush's involement as co-producer as well as performer on her third
album can be seen in the unity of the songs. While each is clearly
different- the romantic "Delius," the haunting "Breathing" (which featured
Larry Fast on Prophet-5 synthesizer), the rocking "Violin"- they all hold
together sonically. Kate is credited with playing piano and some Fairlight
on the album. Max Middleton accompanies on Rhodes and plays a gorgeous
synthesizer solo over some spacious changes in "Egypt." With help from
co-producer Jon Kelly, her studio manipulations hold a wealth of detail.
Coupled with the Fairlight, instruments like kotos and mandolins gave her
music a new exotic quality that seemed to free her voice, allowing it to be
more natural.
     In 1980, Kate also performed on Peter Gabriel's third eponymously
entitled record, and the experience seems to have influenced her own
self-produced masterpiece, "The Dreaming". Gabriel and producer Steve
Lillywhite used the Fairlight (played by Larry Fast) and extensive studio
processing to obtain dark and percussive ethnic textures on "Gabriel".
Bush's "The Dreaming" is also full of tribal rhythms and swirling
electronic atmospheres. The album's title is taken from the concept of
"dream-time", which Australian aborigines consider an altered state of
reality. This is what "The Dreaming" is- a harrowing psychological foray
into another world. From the opening song of failed spirituality, "Sat in
Your Lap", with it's African percussion and Geoff Downes' Fairlight
trumpets, to the trance rhythms of the title track, to the emotional
catharsis of "Get Out Of My House", "The Dreaming" thrusts you into an
uncharted realm and won't let you escape.
     Kate Bush leaves no doubt that she is the master of this dream world
that, frighteningly, has its roots firmly seated in reality. This is not
the woman-child of "The Kick Inside" (if she ever was that). This is the
mature and experienced artist whose own arrangements have a clarity and
depth that makes her previous records, as professional as they were, sound
flat and lifeless by comparison. Her voice becomes a full orchestra,
alternating between hellish choirs, ascending angels, and compelling
exhortations. She can simply narrate a straightforward tale of crime,
replete with Saturday afternoon marching band arrangement (done on
Synclavier by Dave Lawson accompanied by Bush herself on piano and Yamaha
CS-80), sing a poignant lover's lament ("Houdini") or a song of
self-recrimination with phase-shifter-tortured vocal ("Leave It Open").
Kate has always written her own music, but having acquired a Fairlight and
her own studio, she began to orchestrate all her own arrangements, which
include heavy doses of Uillean pipes, penny whistles, and bouzoukis played
by her brother Paddy and his friends from the Irish group Planxty.
     That was three years ago, however, as Kate Bush takes longer and
longer between releases since the rush of the first two albums. We spoke
with her in her suburban London home, just as she was finishing work on her
new release (due out in August), which she describes as a long and
exhausting project. Having just arisen moments before the interview, Kate
was enthusiastic and candid, at least as much as someone could be expected
to be who wrote:

     "With my ego in my gut,
      My babbling mouth would wash it up.
      (But now I've started learning how)
      I keep it shut."
                         -"Leave It Open"

JD: Your image has changed dramatically from that of a pop chanteuse, as
you were perceived on your first two albums, to that of someone with a very
clear artistic vision, which is how people have come to perceive you since
your third and fourth records. Is that an accurate assessment?

Kate : Even on the first two records, I was doing what I'm doing now as an
artist, only
[ because I was a lot younger, and I didn't have the room and the space to
be able to truly present my music. I had to work with a producer and within
certain kind of set-ups because of the fact that- that's how it was, I
wasn't powerful enough basically to be able to say, "Look, I'm producing
this myself. This is what I do."  And that's what I do now.]
I think that if I had been a little older, and if I'd had the experience at
the time, I would have done it then, too.
[ But I was- when I was making my first album, I was 18. I had never really
worked with a band before, let alone a producer in a studio setup. So I
just had- (laughs)- I mean I just about had the guts, you know, to
sing and keep it together.]
But you learn very quickly what you want. By the time the second album was
finished, I knew that I had to be involved. Even though they were my songs
and I was singing them, the finished product was not what I wanted. That
wasn't the producer's fault. He was doing a good job from his point of
view- making it sound good and together. But for me, it was not my album,
really.

JD: Is the album you're working on going to be a departure from "The
Dreaming", or is it a continuation of the ideas you developed there?

Kate: It's difficult for me to say, really. I think it is different from
"The Dreaming". When I sit down and write songs for a new album, that's one
of the things that's important to me- that it's at least somehow different
and hopefully interesting.

JD: "The Dreaming" was quite a radical departure from you previous records.

Kate: Yes, I think it is different, but I don't know if it's that
different. It's very different from the first two albums, but the third
album is where I think we started to get there. I think it was a
progression, really. But perhaps not such an obvious one.

(Note: the following comment appears in the radio interview with regards to
"The Dreaming", but does not appear in the magazine interview--mtg)

[ But it is quite... dark, I suppose, without meaning to be negative. I
think it is saying... nearly all those songs  are saying that people are
great, but they really hurt each other, and you know, look at the things we
do to each other. WHY do we do this... you know, questioning. I think
albums are like that, they're... they are little diaries. You know, you
sort of sit there and write- not autobiographical things- but what you feel
at the time, things that move you. I think it does say alot about you at
the time.]

JD: What were the differences?

Kate: I think the main difference was connected to my involvement. The more
I get involved in the production, then the more I'm going to get exactly
what I can out of it. Therefore, it automatically becomes a more demanding
and personal project.

JD: You started using a Fairlight on "Never For Ever".

Kate: Right, I didn't have my own Fairlight and we had to hire one in.
[ And really as soon as I met the Fairlight, I realized that it was
something I really couldn't do without because it was just so integral to
what I wanted to do with my music. I think I've always enjoyed
synthesizers... I found them very interesting, but I never really enjoyed
all the sounds. And what really gets me about the Fairlight is that any
sound becomes musical. You can actually control any sound you want by
sampling it in, and then being able to play it. I mean obviously, it
doesn't always sound great, but the amount of potential exploration you
have there with sounds is never-ending, and it's fabulous.]

JD: Do you write songs around the Fairlight?

Kate: Yes, I do now. This is actually the first album that I've done that
on. Up until now, I've always written on the piano. It's been a very
important part of it. The songs came from the piano and the chords. But
with this album, the majority of the songs have come from the Fairlight and
working with drum machines and things like that.

JD: It seemed that many of the rhythms on "The Dreaming", especially the
title track came more from vocal rhythms. They don't seem keyboard-based at
all.

Kate: You're quite right.
[ (laughs) That's not a keyboard-based song at all. It's very much based on
aboriginal music that I'd been able to hear.]
[ And it does have quite a specific rhythm - that sort of slow, spacey
thing. It's got so much space in it. And that was very much one of the
things we wanted to get across, this... much like landscapes of huge
deserted flatlands. That's what the music seems to say. It talks about, you
know, where they (the aborigines) went, their environment.]
That was actually an idea I'd had since the third album. I knew I wanted to
write a song that was about abuses-the aborigines, the Indians, these
tribes whose counties had been taken away from them by so-called civilized
man. I wanted it to be based around the aboriginal style of music. Their
music says so much to me about space, earth, and living on the land. So
the whole thing is based around the didgeridoo. I have a rough sample in my
Fairlight, and I sort of worked out ideas from that. Then we got people in
and pieced all the other sounds together. It was quite a visual song,
because you could see so many things that suggested to you where to place
sounds.

JD: But you actually used a didgeridoo player instead of the Fairlight
sample on the track.

Kate: I think it would be insulting to the instrument to suggest that the
Fairlight could do it better.
[ The didgeridoo is one of those incredible instruments with the circular
sound that's incredibly... sort of rooted in the earth. And we got Rolf
Harris in to play it, and he is a brilliant didgeridoo player. He could
just keep it going for half an hour ]
- I don't know if you realize the sort of circular breathing technique
that's involved in playing it.

JD: What kind of things have you been doing with the Fairlight?

Kate: I use the Fairlight in a basic way, really.
[ What really appeals to me most is the idea of having any sound that is
available put into the Fairlight. And I use it  mainly as I would my piano.
So it's finding the sound I want, which can take ages- that's the most
difficult thing- and then working around it musically to make it suit the
song. When I'm writing a song around it, normally I just use chords with a
quite simple Fairlight sound. And then if I want to build up things, I'll
do small overdubs just as we go throughout the album ],
with the Fairlight being dragged in every other week. So in the writing
process, the main Fairlight sound goes down even on the demos. You find the
sounds that work for overdubs at a leter date. For me, the ideal is the
combination of Fairlight and acoutic instruments, rather than it being all
electronic or all acoustic.

JD: Are you using sounds that they give you with the Fairlight, or have you
been sampling your own?

Kate: Some of the presets that they supply are actually quite good. But
there's one favorite that everyone is using, called "Orch.5" or something.
Every time anyone who has a Fairlight hears it they go, "Oh,no! Not again!"
There are a couple of good preset sounds, but I think that the most
exciting thing is actually recording sounds and sampling them in. Quite
often the nature of the sound changes when you put it in the Fairlight, but
that in itself can be quite interesting.

JD: You used Orch.5 yourself in "The Dreaming."

Kate: (Laughs) Yes, but as far as I know, at that time no one had used it.
Of course, this was the early days of the Fairlight. Actually I'm surprised
that so many people have used the same sound.

JD: You seem to go for more natural sounds, rather than electronic ones, on
"The Dreaming" LP.

Kate:
[ There's a human element in that album, that's quite a sort of tormented
human looking for, you know, how to sort out all these problems and pain.
And I think it's... these sounds are right, the human sounds, the sensitive
emotional sounds. It's quite an emotional album really, and I just want to
suit it. ]
I think that the combination of very acoustic real
sounds and very hard electronic sounds is fabulous too. I like to create
contrasts and extremes for the atmosphere that you're building around a
particular song.

JD: You get those extremes in "Night Of The Swallow", going from the Irish
folk music played by the members of Planxty into a very sparse piano part.

Kate: It's always the song that tells you what to do. In my head, I'll be
thinking that I'm finished with this, but the song will go,"Look, you do
this if you don't do this...." The song is controlling you. It's telling
you what to do really. If it works, great. If it doesn't, it just keeps you
dragging along behind it. It's strange.

JD: When you're working out a song to a particular chord pattern you've
come up with on a keyboard, what comes first, the lyrics or the vocal
melody?

Kate: Quite often, I get the lyrics and melody in a short burst. Maybe I'll
get the first verse or the choruses straight away. Then it'll take me
forever just trying to piece the rest together, because you have to try to
maintain a level of quality within the lyrics, especially if you're trying
to tell a story. You have to get the phrasing right, but you're hoping your
audience will be able to see where you're going. I find that the most
difficult thing to do, especially if it's something like "The Dreaming",
which I found totally interesting. It was very difficult for me to do that
and get what I wanted across. Some of the songs really do take me a very
long time, although perhaps the initial ideas came rather quickly.

JD: Your vocal arrangements are often complex enough to suggest that a
keyboard instrument was involved in coming up with the parts. Is this the
case?

Kate: Sometimes the backing vocals just come in automatically as part of a
song when I'm writing it. Other times, maybe it won't be until I've
recorded the main voice and a few events in the song. And then I'll think
it needs something there. Those are really the two extremes: I either come
up with the backing vocals in the initial writing, or I hear a hole that
needs filling. Whether I build up a really thick, grand vocal depends on
the song. If the song needs that, then I'll just overdub the voice and
build the vocals up. If it's a very intimate song between the singer and
the subject matter, then you'd write it with just one voice.

JD: You process your voice quite a bit.

Kate: I'm sure there are quite a few people like me who really prefer the
sound of their own voice when it's affected a bit. To hear your own voice
absolutely straight with nothing on it can be very painful. Again, it
depends on what the songs are about.

JD: Where do you work your songs out?

Kate: I've had a home studio for the last few years. For this album, we've
put together a master home studio. The difference it makes is fantastic.
The obvious difference is that we're not paying a phenomenal amount of
money every hour for a London studio. That makes you feel so much more
relaxed. The amount of pressure that the studio situation puts on you is
quite surprising. You also feel a lot freer to experiment.

JD: We understand that before, you'd do the demos and often not be able to
duplicate the same feeling in the studio.

Kate: I think that's one of the most impossible things to do, and everyone
in the business must have it happen to them. You do a demo and it's the
song, the spontaneity of how you put it down, that little inflection in the
voice there, or something in the demo says it all. Even though the vocals
are rough and the drums are out of time, it's got the feel of the song.
Them you come to master it and it's not there. It's too fast or too clean.
It's just not the same. Trying to recreate the moods of something you did
so spontaneously can be so impossible. What we've done on this album is
make the demos the masters. We demoed in the studio so that there were no
demos anymore. They've transformed into the masters.

JD: When you started working with electronic instruments, did you start
listening to what other people were doing?

Kate: Yes, you can't help but hear other people's electronic music. For me,
music is an inspiring thing to hear. But unfortunately, 99% of my time is
eaten up listening to my own and nothing else. And then, it's only
listening to what I'm working on at that moment. When I'm finished, I go
through these big phases of listening to other people's stuff. It's so
exciting.

JD: Who do you listen to at those times?

Kate: I'm particularly into a label called Windham Hill. That's beautiful
music- absolutely gorgeous. And there's a German label called ECM that has
a lot of jazz-rock music. One of my favorite artists there is (bassist)
Eberhard Weber. He's fantastic (Weber appears on "The Dreaming"). I find
that the most enjoyable thing for me to do when I get in from the studio,
other than listen to music, is to watch videos. My ears are so tired. You
get such a form of concentrated listening- you've got to listen for clicks
and drums and the voice....So when you get back, you want to rest your
ears and let your eyes watch rubbish for half an hour.

JD: Why do you sometimes use other musicians to play certain keyboard parts
on your records? Listening to your piano playing, you wouldn't have any
trouble covering the parts that they play.

Kate: Well, I don't play the Synclavier. I play the Fairlight, but I didn't
have a Fairlight of my own until the last album, and that was only towards
the end of it. In fact, that's why I had to get people in. I had to hire
their Fairlight and Synclavier and I had to have them play it as well-
until I had my own.

JD: What do you have in your studio?

Kate: We have a Soundcraft mixing deck, a Studer A-80 tape machine, lots of
outboard gear, and Q-lock. We normally use 48 tracks now, even if it's for
a vocal idea or something. 24 tracks doesn't seem to go anywhere with me.
And the Fairlight, of course. We have a room simulator called a Quantec,
which is my favorite. It would be lovely to  be able to draw the sort of
room you wanted your voice to be in. I think that's the next step.

JD: Any other synthesizers besides the Fairlight?

Kate: I've got an Emulator, but I haven't really used that on any of the
master recording- yet. It's the only other synthesizer I have in there.

JD: You played Yamaha CS-80 on "The Dreaming". Was that hired?

Kate: No, that was mine, but I must admit the Fairlight has taken over
completely now.

JD: What sort of piano do you prefer?

Kate: I think my favorite piano is the one I have at home. It's an upright
Bechstein. It's absolutely beautiful, but it's not ideal for master
recordings. For me, the piano is one of the most difficult things to record
well. It sounds good in the room, but it doesn't always sound good coming
through the speakers. We find that we have to do quite a bit of work on
them to get them to sound good on tape. But I like Bechsteins, and I think
Steinways are quite good. I find that it sometimes helps for the piano to
be older. I have a Grotrian-Steinweg piano that I use all the time in our
studio, and that seems quite nice.

JD: What sorts of things  do you have to do to get pianos to sound good?

Kate: It depends on the nature of the piano. Some pianos are very
mid-rangey, so it's nice to get away from the mid and go for the top end
and things like that. But there's only so much you can do. Hopefully, you
have the nicest sounding piano you can find and you don't have to do much
to it. It's also nice to have the piano in a live-sounding room with an
ambience mike on it. That helps a lot.

JD: Who was the biggest influence on your piano playing?

Kate: In my teens, it was mostly Elton John. For me, he was the only person
who was writing songs and then playing and singing them together. I thought
his piano playing was fantastic and quite jazzy in some ways. What I liked
was that his accompaniment was always so right for the songs. He was
definitely a big inspiration for me in my teens. I think my favorite
keyboard players are more keyboard players than pianists. And I love the
stuff that Brian Eno does. The sounds he comes up with are really
brilliant.

JD: How did "There Goes A Tenner" come together?

Kate: That was written on the piano. I had an idea for the tune and just
knocked out the chords for the first verse. The words and everything just
came together. It was quite a struggle from there on to try to keep things
together. The lyrics are quite difficult on that one, because there are a
lot of words in quite a short space of time. They had to be phrased right
and everything. That was very difficult. Actually the writing went
hand-in-hand with the CS-80.

JD: It's easy to hear how the piano was used for the verses, but what about
the choruses? Those sections are very uncharacteristic of what you'd expect
to be written on a piano?

Kate: That was really the difficult structure of the song. I could hear
what I wanted, but until we put the Synclavier in there--which was played
by Dave Lawson-- I couldn't get the full picture. I really liked what we
did in that.

JD: How are you putting together songs now?

Kate: At least six or seven of the tracks on this new album have been done
in totally different ways. There's one track that I literally wrote on the
Fairlight and then re-did things completely with strings. And the drums,
which were originally Linn, were re-done with a live drummer. Then there's
another track that's completely different, where I'd write through a
guitarist. It really needed to be based around a guitar and I can't play
guitar. If I'd used a piano or Fairlight, it would've been wrong, so I
literally had to write through the guitarist. That was fabulous.

JD: What was it that made you decide to replace the Fairlight and Linn with
real strings and real drums?

Kate: I suppose it's when I get the voice and lyrics on, they tell me what
to do.
[ I thought...um... although the Fairlight strings were interesting, they
didn't have the... the warmth and the intimacy that the song required,
and... it sounded a bit bland on the Fairlight.]
That particular song was a very intimate one.
[ It needed... a wooden human error, you know the fact that that it wasn't
always on the beat, and that there was this group of people working
together creating that sound ].
I do feel that in most cases when you've got a brilliant musician and an
instrument you really....
[ I mean, what's the Fairlight there for? I think it... it's a different
purpose, to me anyways. I don't feel I want to create the world greatest
cellist on the Fairlight. You know, I'd rather get a really good cello
player in, and record him with a good engineer, and then use the Fairlight
to do something that complimented that. ]
The most exciting thing for me is the combination of real and natural
sounds and extremely electronic synthesized ones. It's just the blend of
two worlds that I find fabulous. In the next few years, it's going to be
really lovely to see how people start working these things. We've been in a
real synthetic era for the last three years. People have been interested in
the new advances in synthesizers. It's really exciting, and I think it's
got people so wrapped up in electronics that now perhaps will come the time
when the blend will happen.

JD: What about the idea that you may not be create the best cellist on the
Fairlight, but that you will be the cellist? It won't be Pablo Casals'
expression, it will be Kate Bush's expression?

Kate: Yes, I think that could be interesting, but I also think that could
be boring. On this album I've done so much of the work that I really enjoy
other people's input. I find it boring, actually, to have to work with my
ideas all the time.
[ The great thing again you can do with the Fairlight that I enjoy so much
is I can write a piece on it, say, with an acoustic guitar or a cello, and
I can write it out, and then I can get a musician in to actually play that.
So he's playing what I've written, but he's doing it much better than I
do.]
[ You see, without the Fairlight, I probably couldn't have written these
parts before. I would have written them on the piano and they wouldn't have
had the feel of the strings, or acoustic guitar. And at the same time, you
know I don't think me playing them on the Fairlight is as good as these
people. But it's an interesting blend. ]

JD: Do you feel you have a better understanding of how these people play?

Kate:  [ Well certainly in my experience it's given me the most incredible
insight into composing and how instruments work. And I think it's sort
of... if you're not careful it can give you an arrogance as well, where
you're sort of sitting there playing all these drums and thinking, "Hey,
you know, why can't you do this?", you know, like, it's so easy. On the
other hand, you know , there are little inflections that would be so
difficult to get on the keyboard. I mean, you could probably get it to
sound very close, but it... it might... just not sound like the real
instrument. A lot of natural instruments, that's what it's about. It's the
inflection of the musician, the way he works it, personalizes it. I mean,
you know real instruments should never die. I don't think they can. That's
what all these electronic things have come from. They should go
hand-in-hand. ]

JD: Do you compose on paper or right into the Fairlight or tape machine?

Kate: It's really in my head first and then onto the tape machine. I only
compose onto paper when it's an instance like a guitar or cello, where I
play in real time to the track, and then when I like what it is, I'll write
it out for someone to play. If it's me playing it, I don't bother to write
it out. I work much better in my head. It takes me hours to write things
out. I'm so slow. But writing it out is a very accurate way to get them to
do what you want very quickly.

JD: There's a depth of texture and complexity to your last two records that
makes them bear up well under repeated listening. They reveal more
every time you hear them.

Kate: That's lovely that you should say that. My favorite albums are the
ones I love more and more with each listening. That would be absolutely
dynamite if I felt that I was doing that for other people with my albums.
Two of my ultimate favorite recordings are "Magical Mystery Tour" and
"Sgt.Pepper".

JD: It's interesting you'd mention those particular Beatle's albums,
because it seems that "The Dreaming" and "Never For Ever" harken back to
that time of the concept album and the idea of stepping into a different
world when you're listening to a record. There is a fantasy element to
your imagery.

Kate: I always tend to resent that. I always feel that the Tolkein,
fantastical images seem to suggest that they're not based in reality, which
I can't help but feel that a lot of my stuff is. Not all of it, but a
majority is based in reality rather than fantasy. A lot of people say this,
and I can't help but feel that the first two albums set that impression.
You know, the feel of the production, the high voice, they sort of had a
floating feel about the. But few of those songs were based in reality.

JD: You do make a lot of social statments in tunes like "Pull Out The Pin"
and "Breathing".

Kate: My motivations are not social or political. It's an emotional
motivation, where I'm so moved by somethings that's happening that I have
to write about it. Apart from a few artists, I think that's how most of us
feel about it. We're not necessarily politically minded. Myself, I'm not at
all. I find politics extremely destructive. I see very few good, long term
productive things being done by politics. It's one of those things that
seems theoretically very sound, but practically, it must be an
impossibility. I think that's just an emotional situation. Like nuclear war
is a political thing, but it's also incredibly emotional, because it means
we could all be blown up. And no one wants to be blown up. That's basic.
The reason that you have to care about politics is because of how bad
people are to each other.

JD: It's interesting that "Pull Out The Pin" was written from the
Vietnamese perspective.

Kate: Yes, there was a fantastic TV documentary about a cameraman who was
on the front lines. He was a brilliant cameraman and he was so well-trained
a technician that he kept filming things no matter how he was feeling about
it at the time. Some of the stuff he was shooting was really disturbing.
Some of the Vietnamese guys would just come in and they were sort of dying
in mid-air. And he'd just keep on filming. It was a strange sort of irony
that
[ the Vietnamese who were fighting the Americans were very into Buddha...
were Buddhists... and they would pop a little silver bullet that they wore
on their neck- on a chain- in their mouth before they went into battle. So
that if they died, they would have Buddha on their lips. This is the whole
irony throughout history between religion and war. Religion, surely, would
never regard killing as a good thing, and yet it is done so constantly, and
so hand-in-hand as well. You know the fact that they...they would have the
little Buddha in their mouth and the guns in their hands to go and kill, I
found the imagery very striking. ]
"Breathing" is about human beings killing themselves. I think that people
smoking is one of those tiny things that says a lot about human beings. I
mean, I smoke and I enjoy it, but we smoke and we know it's dangerous.
Maybe there's some kind of strange subconscious desire to damage ourselves.
It would deem so if you looked back through history, wouldn't it?

END OF INTERVIEW




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