Mailbag

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

 To: Love-Hounds
 From: Andrew Marvick (IED)
 Subject: Mailbag

   Declan writes:
 >  A while ago, I was listening to a friend's copy of the album "It'll End
 >In Tears" by This Mortal Coil, when I noticed the song "Another Day"
 >(which was sung by Liz Frazer of the Cocteau Twins). It's an excellent song
 >and I remember thinking at the time how Bushlike it sounded. Then the other
 >day, I noticed on the CD that the song was credited to Roy Harper. I seem to
 >remember IED saying that Kate and Roy did a version of this song a few years
 >back. Am I right ?

     Yes. More accurately, Liz Frazer saw Kate's Christmas special
in 1979 and later _copied_ Kate by doing a cover of Harper's song.
And don't anyone try to argue otherwise!
     Incidentally, speaking of run-out-groove messages, there's one
on Roy Harper's _The_Unknown_Soldier_ LP (the highlight of which is
a duet with Kate called _You_<The_Game_Part_II>). It reads:
                    "With love to Kate, from Roy, x"

     Evan Welsh writes:
>There are three Beatles covers on <a tape of KT demos> as well
>and I get the impression these are performed by the KT Bush Band in a
>pub. Is this hopelessly off the mark, because her voice sounds a bit too
>mature for that ?

   Well, a bit off the mark, anyway. Kate has performed three Beatles
songs, as far as fans are aware (though she may indeed have performed
some more during her pub-crawling days). Two were performed on Tokyo
television's _Sound_in_S_, during Kate's visit to Japan in June 1978.
They are: _The_Long_and_Winding_Road_ and _She's_Leaving_Home_. You
can tell that these are not simple live performances, because Kate's
voice is overdubbed toward the end of _She's_Leaving_Home_, and there
is a small studio orchestra backing her. These two tracks appeared last
year as the b-sides of a seven-inch bootleg of Kate's live performance
of _Moving_ from the Seventh Tokyo Song Festival (at which Kate won
the Silver).
   The third song is _Let_It_Be_. Kate has performed this song
three times in all. The first performance dates from May 12, 1979, and
is the finale of the so-called Bill Duffield concert, a benefit for a
lighting engineer who was killed immediately prior to the launch of
Kate's only tour. That version of _Let_It_Be_ features Peter Gabriel
and Steve Harley on alternate verses (both Harley and Gabriel had
known Duffield).
     The second version we know of _Let_It_Be_ by Kate is also a
live performance, but this one has David Gilmour trading verses. It
dates from the 1987 Amnesty International concert called _The_Secret_
_Policeman's_Third_Ball_. Kate's other song from those concerts was
_Running_Up_That_Hill_, which appeared on the official LP and CD, but
_Let_It_Be_ only turned up as the b-side of another seven-inch bootleg.
     The third Kate Bush performance of _Let_It_Be_ dates from about
the same time: she sings two lines from the last verse of the song in
the _Sun_-Zeebrucke Ferry Disaster benefit single.
     IED hopes this answers your question.

     Robert Cole writes:
 >>Perhaps Kate doesn't really know what her songs are about.

     And woj replies:
 > I don't think you're going to infuriate anybody with that assertion.

     Well, IED is sorry but that's not exactly true. Though not
infuriated, IED does disagree strongly.
     First of all, far too much has been made of Kate's "lies" lately
in this group. The fact is, IED can think of no more than four isolated
statements that Kate has made that can fairly be called deliberate
flat-out untruths. When one considers the reams and reams of answers
that she has given to the public's and reporters' questions over the
last twelve years, a tally like that really doesn't merit consideration.
     Second, it is _certainly_not_ true that "Kate doesn't really know
what her songs are about." With the exception of a single solitary song--
_Love_and_Anger_--Kate has not said that about any of her work. The fact
is, Kate knows _full_well_ just _exactly_ what her songs are about, and
furthermore, she is very well aware of the secondary meanings which
lie beneath the songs' surface content. The fact that Kate's _public_
explanations of the songs' meanings tend to be a bit superficial doesn't
mean that every possible nuance of alternative or secondary meaning in the
song wasn't _deliberately_ or at least consciously inserted by her at the
 time of creating her work.

     Carl Hansen writes:
 >   Also, regarding the cover of that record--doesn't the key in Kate's
 >mouth resemble the pin of a hand grenade?  That's been long noted I
 >suppose, but I've had the record for years & just thought of it.

     Yeah, of course. It looks _exactly_ like a grenade pin. And come
to think of it, it also looks _exactly_ like a little silver bullet,
a small silver Buddha, and a piece of seedcake, too!

-- Andrew Marvick