HERESY on Threee Counts!

[nrc@cbema.att.com (Neal R Caldwell, Ii)]

<PMANCHESTER@ccmail.sunysb.edu> had to expect the Spanish Inquisition 
when he wrote:
 
>        Today I took a drastic step.  I went down to the Record Stop in
> Lake Ronkonkoma, who had the box set for the best price that I've
> seen, $159, and told them not to hold one for me.

Certainly an act well within your rights and an example which I
encourage anyone who isn't sure that the boxed set is a good value for
them to follow.

>        Record Stop is where I forked over $99.95 for the Japanese
> import video "The Single File," $125 for the original 7" vinyl SF box

[list of purchases establishing status as a true KT devotee
 and averting and any question of cheapness deleted]

>        I don't say No! to this new box release because I've ever
> stinted on my devotion to Kate Bush, but because this seems to be a
> marketing scam unworthy of her participation.  

This isn't the first time this has been said and it probably won't be
the last.  I still fail to see the logic.  If Kate wanted to
perpetrate a marketing scam on her public she would have done exactly
what many here have lamented that she didn't do: throw together a
collection of demos and half finished songs that simply do not meet
her standards.   That would have been a quick and easy way to make a
bundle of money.  That would have been a scam because even though many
here would have been happy to buy such a set, Kate would have been
compromising her creative integrity by selling something beneath her
standards.   

That's not what she did.  Instead she created an anthology, a
collection of what she evidently considers to be her essential works.
No one that doesn't have a desire for just exactly that is being
forced to buy the set.  None of the material on the set is in any way
below Kate's standards.  I fail to see the scam.  

> To me it seems the
> latest in a culminating series of bad signs.  I'm gonna be volunteer
> lightning rod here and utter lots of heresy, bring down flame and fire
> upon my head.  But I'm only trying to formulate the disquiet that I've
> heard from many of us in recent months.  The love-hounds who will be
> seeing her in London later this month may have opportunity to help get
> her back in touch with her audience and her commitment to her work.

I agree that what most of what you've noted are bad signs.  I guess I
should, I've written a length about a couple of them.  I don't agree
with your conclusions about what it all means, however.

>        The crassness of the current box release has been well brought
> out these past weeks.  Only fans are going to put out $150-200 for a
> kb collector's item--but we are the very ones who likely have the six
> albums already amd maybe, like me, all the relevant singles.  
...
> But the only *rational* market for this release is to be
> gifts from fans to neophytes.  To me, that feels like I am being
> shaken down.  It's not a katelike feeling.  Have commercial interests
> gotten bigger than her talent?

You give us a list a of reasons why this set has a very small market and
then you suggest that it was motivated by "commercial interests"?
That doesn't make sense.

Some do not have the entire collection on CD, some do not have the
original UK pressings, some have never even heard many of the B-sides, 
some would like to have the entire set in one nice package.  Calling
the set crass because it addresses needs that you don't happen to
share is silly.  

I've yet to hear reports of anyone being forced to buy the set at 
gun-point so any "shake-down" is purely a figment of your
imagination.

>        Five years later, I am worried.  It has helped me to understand
> all this to have John Carder Bush's CATHY set.  Jay is 14 years older
> than Cathy as they conspire together, he to be a photographer, she to
> be a presence.  One can simply see in these photographs the birth of
> what beguiles us in the Kate Bush they were inventing, with Paddy as

Here's where I start to disagree with your conclusions.  I don't
believe that there was ever a plan of this sort.  Now that you mention
it I wouldn't be surprised if Kate's early experience as "the
observed" in Jay's photography helped her to develop the lack of
inhibition that she displays in her early performances but I don't
think there's any real evidence that Kate's image was a Bush family
conspiracy.

>        Well sister Kate is older now, and it's less and less
> appropriate for her to be working inside an image she came to with her
> brothers and Del.  The Kate Bush they saw in her, and she performed
> for us forever--in "The Kick Inside" and the Hammersmith video from
> the Tour of Life--had room for three more albums, but it ended with
> "Hounds of Love."  Dead and drowned, that Kate will forever live again
> to tell her mother, tell her father, tell her brothers how much she
> loves them.  

It seems to me that the image of Kate that you're talking about didn't 
drown at the end of The Ninth Wave, it was blown up in a bank robbery, 
killed with a grenade, lost on a secret mission, drown in a straight-
jacket and finally thrown out of the house in _The Dreaming_.  

There seem to be different forces at work here.  First of all, at
some point Kate seems to have discovered all those inhibitions and
insecurities about her work and herself that she escaped so easily 
early in her career.  At the same time she moved in the direction 
of more and more dense music.  

At some point after _Hounds of Love_ it seems as though the density
of Kate's work reached critical mass.  At some point while trying to 
realize her vision of the music that was to become _The Sensual World_
I have to wonder if maybe it didn't become more of a labor than a
labor of love.

None of this means that Kate is finished, she just needs a slightly
different direction.  The recent HMV/Q interview gives reason to hope
that the boxed set has provided her with the perspective to find that
direction.



"Don't drive too slowly."                 Richard Caldwell
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