The second John Diliberto interview, _Musician_, February 1990

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

 To: Love-Hounds
 From: Andrew Marvick (IED)
 Subject: The second John Diliberto interview, _Musician_, February 1990

     <First, many thanks to Andy Semple for his transcription of the
_Daily_Mirror_ interview. It was much appreciated by this Love-Hound,
Homegrounder, Cariad Kate Internationalist and KBC member! Here's
another interview, which IED posts by way of reciproKation.
     <IED couldn't remember ever seeing this interview posted in L-Hs,
so here it is. He apologizes if it _did_ appear here before. It is John
Diliberto's second interview with Kate Bush. (His first, which appeared
in _Keyboard_ in 1985, was posted a few years ago in Love-Hounds by one-
time Love-Hound Extraordinaire MarK T. Ganzer, in a L-Hs-exclusive complete
edition.) This new interview is from the 2/90 issue of _Musician_. Edited by
Andrew Marvick. As usual, anything contained within parentheses () are part
of the original published text, anything within brackets <> are IED's
commentary.>

                      Kate Bush's Theater of the Senses
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   "When people listen to your record, that's an _audial_
experience; you don't necessarily want to see things," says
Kate Bush. "Like when you write a song: the person singing the song
is a character. Although it might be you vocally, it's not yourself
you are singing about, but that character. It's someone who is in a
situation, so you treat it like a film. That's how I see songs.
They are just like a little story: you are in a situation, you _are_
this character. This is what happens. End. That's what human beings
want desperately. We all love being read stories. And none of us get it
anymore. 'Cause there's a television now instead."
     Kate Bush creates that elusive theater of the mind, a mood and
atmosphere populated by actors from subconscious Central Casting, moving
through audio stage settings that could be inspired by Charles Dickens
or Werner Herzog. Perhaps that's why her self-produced videos have
been so successful. You won't find Bush up there lip-synching her
songs in lingerie with jump-cuts and smoke-bombs. Instead, we're
treated to intricate morality plays starring Donald Sutherland on
_Cloudbusting_, the sword-wielding temptress of _Babooshka_, the
surreal aboriginal-alien landscapes of _The_Dreaming_, and
Bush emerging from a clear plastic womb into the polluted world of
_Breathing_.
     It's also why Bush doesn't tour. Her last excursion in
1979 was an elaborate affair full of costume changes, dancers and
even magicians. She can't get worked up to do it again, and
doesn't see the validity of, as she said in 1987, just being
"up there onstage being me."
     "What I was trying to say," she now explains, "was
that if you give a show, I feel it should have visual elements."
     But coming from a folk tradition with two older brothers who
play Celtic music, it would seem Bush might appreciate simple
storytelling, with nothing but words and movements: no props,
costumes or lights.
     "Oh, I disagree completely," she says dismissively.
"Folk is storytellers telling stories. And in the past,
storytellers would certainly act things out. It was not unusual
for a poet to be brought into a person's house and treated
the way we treat television now. Performers are performers, not
just themselves, and they show you an exaggerated side. They
want to move you. They are being what they feel you want them to be.
That's why they are performers and larger than life. They create an
illusion that people enjoy."
     Bush sweeps into Abbey Road Studios followed closely by her
boyfriend/engineer/bassist Del Palmer. Dressed entirely in black,
with loose sweater, jeans and high-heeled boots, Bush is less the
erotic exotic and more hip bohemian. Settling into a black leather
studio chair in a control room, surrounded by the ghosts of Billy
Shears and Eleanor Rigby, Bush is at once revealing and concealing
about the nature of her music. In many ways she works in an enclosed
world, with the doors carefully guarded and only the appointed few
managing to get inside. Since _The_Dreaming_ in 1982, she's
composed her music almost exclusively on her own, demo-ing
tracks with her Fairlight CMI and often playing many of the parts
that way. _The_Sensual_World_, her first album since 1985's _The_Hounds_
_of_Love_ <sic> was mostly recorded in her home studio in kent where she
works and lives with Palmer. For many, that's a prescription for insularity
and self-indulgence. For Kate Bush, it's resulted in her most direct
and personal album to date.
     "There are personal elements in the other albums, but yes,
this is definitely personal, on every level, the process and
everything," she avers. "It's a very intimate process I make
records in now. We don't have tape operators. I'm producing.
So most of the time it's just the two of us, and Del knows
the kind of sounds I like. So the communication is very good,
and most of the time it's just beating my head against the
wall for ideas and things. But all the recording is done very
quickly."
     Ever since she took over production on the 1980 album _Never_For_
_Ever_, Bush's music has grown increasingly textured and complex,
full of eddies and rivulets of sound. She layers line upon line
of synthesizer orchestrations with flourishes provided by a small
coterie of musicians like Palmer, drummers Charlie Morgan and
Stuart Elliott, and her brother Paddy Bush. Kevin Killen, whom she
met on Peter Gabriel's _So_ sessions and who has mixed for Elvis
Costello and U2, is one of the few to gain entry to Bush's inner
sessions and who has mixed for Elvis Costello and U2, is one of the
few to gain entry to Bush's inner circle.
     But Bush will have to make some changes following the death of
long-time guitarist Alan Murphy. He had played with Long John Baldry,
Level 42 and Go West. His textures provided the dark undercurrent and
pointed punctuation on so many Bush songs since 1979. He died shortly
after _The_Sensual_World_ was completed. "He was a guitarist who I felt
used his instrument like a voice," says Bush solemnly. "But also like
a chameleon, I guess. He could just change it into anything.
'Al, I want you to be a racing car.' Fine, he'd become
a racing car. 'Al, could you be this big panther creeping through
the jungle?' You could throw any imagery at him and he
would never balk, he would just be with you, you know. Making albums
will never be the same again for me without Alan. I'll miss him
terribly. I already do, as a person as well as a musician."
     Her brother Paddy keeps her abreast of world music sounds, from
Celtic music to the aborigines. Her acute sense of orchestration has
found ways to interpolate digeridus, bouzoukis, uillean pipes and
fiddles along with Celtic harpist Alan Stivell, German jazz bassist
Eberhard Weber, string quartets arranged by minimalist composer
Michael Nyman, and on her new album the haunting, ecstatic vocals
of the Trio Bulgarka.
     She approaches this sound palette without the self-consciousness
of world-music chic. Instead it's all blended through her dramatic
sense of studio space and Fairlight and synthesizer orchestrations.
She never loses her own sense of self in a delicate balancing
act of assimilation, one that she approaches with deference.
     She speaks in awe of all the musicians who support her, but
none more so that the Trio Bulgarka, whom she feels are working on a
higher plane of creation. "We are talking big music here,"
she admits. "We are talking real music, that goes back so far.
I can't imagine who would have put music like this together.
Way beyond me.
     "I suppose the main thing was getting up the courage to
actually approach the Trio," she reveals. "Cause I wanted
to work with them so badly. But I was also very scared that I
wouldn't do them justice. Particularly in the context of
contemporary music. I really didn't want them to be belittled
into pop music. The kind of music that they are working with was
in touch with something that I think we've lost touch with. And
it's very rarely now that you are affected that powerfully by
music, like that. Contemporary music occasionally hits you in the
heart and very, very rarely reaches your soul. But music like that
is so old, intense, powerful and spiritual--instinctive music,
almost. You know, I'd like to see anyone who could stand in
the room with those three women singing for more than twenty minutes
and not cry."
     Smiling behind her wide brown almond eyes, Bush is too modest
to concede that there are many who would say the same for her music.
Songs like _Houdini_, _Under_Ice_ and _Suspended_in_Gaffa_
plumb a psychological, emotional range <plumb a range?>
that's rarely heard in modern music. It can be frightening in
its cathartic nakedness on _Get_Out_of_My_House_, and poignant in
its insights on _The_Fog_, from _The_Sensual_World_.
     Both emotionally and sonically, the Trio fits deftly into Bush's
multi-tracked choral vocals. On _Deeper_Understanding_
they are the spiritual countervoice in a song about emotional
disconnection, where the protagonist finds love in a computer
program.
     "Yes, it is emotional disconnection, but then it's very much
_connection_," says Bush, "but in a way that you would never expect.
And that kind of emotion should really come from the human instinctive
force, and in this particular case it's coming from a computer.
I really liked the idea of playing with the whole imagery of
computers being so cold, so unfeeling. Actually what is happening
in the song is that this person conjures up this program that is
almost like a visitation of angels. They are suddenly given so much
love by this computer--it's like, you know, just love.
     "There was no other choice. Who else could embody the
visitation of angels but the Trio Bulgarka?" she laughs.
     Yet she also finds an emotional fury in those same voices. On
_Rocket's_Tail_ she launches Pink Floyd's David Gilmour on a
screaming feedback guitar coda intertwined with the Trio. "Well,
I'm sure that secretly Dave has always wanted to be Bulgarian," she
laughs. "Electric guitar for me has always had that suggestion of a
human voice."
     Gilmour and Bush's association goes back fifteen years, when
Gilmour discovered her, produced her initial demo tapes and shopped
them around. "It was such a buzz for me to work with him,"
she exclaims, "because obviously I've known him for a long time
and he's done little things before, like backing vocals. But
I've never really had a song where he could just let rip on a
guitar--and it was great."
     _Rocket's_Tail_ is one of those beguiling Bush songs that have a
simple story on the surface, about an eccentric strapping a rocket
to his back, but you want to know just where it comes from. "I'm not
sure if it's meant to be figured out," says Bush, offering
little help. "If you want to figure it out, great; but again,
songs should exist in their own space. And if they are a curious
item, then that's very nice. Some people are, aren't they?"
     _The_Sensual_World_ continues Bush's flirtation with a certain kind
of innocent eroticism, with lines sung in a sultry voice: "Then I'd
taken the seedcake back from his mouth/Going deep South, go down,
mmh, yes." Bush has said that _The_Sensual_World_ is an album that
brings out her more feminine side, although it seems like the
feminine side was where she was always writing from anyway.
     "I just felt that I was exploring my feminine energy more--
_musically_," she insists. "In the past I had wanted to emanate
the kind of power that I've heard in male music. And I just felt maybe
somewhere there is this female energy that's powerful. It's
a subtle difference--male or female energy in art--but I think there
_is_ a difference: little things, like using the Trio. And possibly some
of the attitudes to my lyric writing on this album. I would say it
was more accepting of being a female somehow."
     There's an almost motherly quality to some of these songs
written by the thirty-one-year-old singer. _This_Woman's_Work_,
written for the John Hughes film _She's_Having_a_Baby_,
looks at the plight of a man left on the outside during childbirth.
The schism between male and female has been a constant theme in
Bush's music and professional life. She was initially marketed
as a somewhat quirky chanteuse who cavorted in revealing clothes,
singing with that high, panting voice. It's an image she's
fought to overcome while never giving up the sensual, erotic images
she employs in her videos. Given her desire to be taken seriously,
and the obvious control she now exerts over her own career, it has
always seemed curious that a woman identified as Kate Bush did
a nude spread in _Penthouse_International_ Magazine (not
released in the U.S.) in the 1970s, samples of which have subsequently
appeared as bootleg covers. <This is just bad journalism: the
_Penthouse_ spread did _not_ identify the woman in question as "Kate
Bush", but as "Kate Simmons". Since the woman did not really resemble
Kate closely anyway, there is no excuse for dredging up this
nonsense again without first checking the facts. Clearly the writer
never bothered to see for himself.>
     "No, I didn't," she says, suddenly drawing up her
defenses.
     "Well, what was it then?" I ask.
     "It was someone who looks like me," she says. "I have
never done anything like that. All I know is there is a look-alike
who's done spreads in magazines, and I presume this is what
you're talking about, because I have never taken my clothes off
publicly for anyone. I am offended that you should think it's
me," she adds, with a tinge of anger lingering in her voice. "I
would not do that."
     There was little on her first records, _The_Kick_Inside_ or
_Lionheart_, to suggest that Bush was anything more than a hit-making
vehicle (in the U.K., at least), shaped by image-makers and handlers.
<This is just colossal stupidity. Both _The_Kick_Inside_ and _Lionheart_
are, despite their commercial production and marketing touches,
deeply personal and profound works of art. Anyone who can dismiss
them so cavalierly as this journalist is a fool.> Peter Gabriel helped
change that. When Bush sang back-up vocals on _Peter_Gabriel_(III)_,
she borrowed the idea of the cymbal-free rhythm section and the
Fairlight CMI. Just as Gabriel's music took a more personal
and adventurous shift after he got the Fairlight <another highly
questionable assessment>, the instrument seemed to free Bush
to create, independently of other musicians or producers, soundstages
for her stories. _The_Dreaming_ and _The_Hounds_of_Love_ <sic> are
rife with orchestral textures and hallucinatory effects. In many
ways they are Bush's _Sergeant_Pepper's_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band_,
filled with giddy experimentation brimming with the joy of seemingly
unlimited possibilities.
     And like _Sgt._Pepper_, along with the timeless brilliance, come some
dated ideas and effects that connect it to a certain moment in history.
The dating came from some of the Fairlight's sampling capabilities, in
particular the sounds of smashing glass and the infamous Orch. 5,
the orchestral hit that was heard on every rap and techno-pop record
of the early 1980s. <Yes, but _after_ Kate had discovered them! Besides,
what rock album _isn't_ "connected to a certain moment in
history?">
     "That was terribly unfortunate," nods Bush. "Something
I try to do whenever we are working with sounds is to try and
make stuff original. I mean, when we were using Orch. 5, that
was back in 1980, you know, and we had no idea that people were
going to be using Fairlights or that sound the way they did in the
times to come. So that was just unfortunate. We happened to pick
a sound that is now very recognizable and dated."
     Bush also thinks that synthesizers caused her to
de-emphasize the voice in her music, although you wouldn't know
it from the elaborate vocal arrangements of _The_Dreaming_,
with its tribal, Aussie-slang beat; the backing choirs, all by Kate
Bush, on _The_Big_Sky_; or the distorted demons of _Waking_the_Witch_.
True, she doesn't sing in the high-pitched girl-child's voice anymore,
although she and Paddy do a good approximation of a children's chorus on
_Love_and_Anger_. "Ah, well, Paddy wore some very tight trousers
and I stood in a bucket," she laughs mischievously.
     "Initially I put a tremendous amount of emphasis on the
vocals because that was my instrument, apart from playing the
piano," she continues. "That was all I had, was my voice.
So the piano and voice were pushed into lots of areas to try to get
something interesting. Once I started working with synths and the
Fairlight, I could take the emphasis off that voice again and off the
piano, and put it into instrumentation. Besides the fact that the
Fairlight suddenly gave me instruments to play with instead of
my voice, and took quite a nice, new attitude into some of the songs.
Because by not writing on the piano anymore, that changed a lot of
things. But now I'm actually coming back to the piano again.
A little less with the Fairlight. It's still very much there.
And the same with voices. I've kind of come full circle, but
I now have a different approach."
     What marks _The_Sensual_World_ is the way the electronics and
synthesizers are organically integrated into Bush's songs. "When I started
to write this album, I was in a situation where we had updated our
studio," she says. "We had a new desk, and generally just more equipment.
The high-tech quality-level of our studio had gone right up. And I
found it quite difficult to write because I felt overwhelmed by the
amount of equipment around me. It was quite stifling, and I made a
conscious effort to move away from that, and treat the song as a song.
I wanted to write songs, and then just use the equipment to do what
I wanted. Because otherwise it drags you along behind it if you're
not careful."
     Bush wrote many of the songs on her Bechstein acoustic upright
piano, and it remains in the final songs like _This_Woman's_Work_.
That might also explain why _The_Sensual_World_ is a song cycle, rather
than a concept piece like the _Ninth_Wave_ side of _The_Hounds_of_Love_
<sic>.
     "Yes, that's very true," she agrees, returning
to the common theme of all her music: stories. "It's not
conceptual at all. For me they are like short stories, where each
song is conjuring up a different mood, hopefully. Although there
are definitely feelings that go throughout this album, with this
album I really wanted to write ten songs. I didn't want it to
be a big elaborate thing. I just wanted to explore what I felt was
my technique of songwriting. And that's what I always try to do."
     Still, change seems to be constant with Bush, perhaps best evoked
by the song _Reaching_Out_, which seems to be about a child leaving
the nest. "That's kind of about how you can't hold on to anything," says
Bush, "because everything is always changing and we all have such a
terrible need to hold onto stuff and to keep it exactly how it is,
because this is nice and we don't want it to change. And sometimes even
if things _aren't_ nice, people don't want them to change. And
things do. Just look at the natural balance of things: how if you reach
out for something, chances are it will pull away. And when things
reach out for you, the chances are _you_ will pull away.
You know everything ebbs and flows, and you know the moon is full and
then it's gone: it's just the balance of things."
     Bush suddenly catches herself at the crest of this philosophical
wave. "Absolute rubbish," she pshaws, laughing. "Just tell them to go
buy the record and see if they like it."

                         Kate's Crates
                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

     IN 1984 Kate BUsh built her own studio in Kent, which is used
by her and Del Palmer. <What, Kent or the studio?> Her dominant
piece of equipment is the Fairlight Series III, but she also uses
the Yamaha DX-7 extensively. It's centered around a Solid State
Logic 48-channel console with automated mixing and two 24-track decks
that are slaved together. She takes pains to note that they have a
"lot of outboard gear, that's really important."
     They use Pultec valve equalizers. Reverbs and delays include
the AMS, the Quantec, the Lexicon 224 and 224XL. They also use an
AMS Harmonizer and Eventide 3000 Ultraharmonizer. Monitors are AR18s.

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-- Andrew Marvick