Re: Question about Big Country's Greatest Hits and kate

[jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu (Jeffrey C. Burka)]

Michael Kaufman writes:

>I had heard that Kate was on a CD called "Through a Big Country - Greatest
>Hits", and sure enough I just purchased the disk tiday, and under Additional
>Musicians is says Kate Bush. Does anyone know which songs she is on? Is she
>singing or only playing? Etc?

If you can't tell which track she's on, there's no hope for you...

Oh, I'll alright, I'll give you all the perinent stuffs:

KaTe only appears on one song.  It's the title track from BC's third album,
_The Seer_.  She is credited with "additional vocals" which is a pretty
good description, as it's hard to call what she's doing BVs.

To get the full effect of the KaTeness of the song, try listening to it
on headphones.  The first verse is sung by Stuart Adamson alone, but I
believe all the other verses are sort of a duet between the two, with 
Adamson's voice on one track, loud, and KaTe singing the same words on the
other track, in kind of a wonderful whisper.  Once you hear it like that
a few times it becomes quite clear no matter what situation you hear the
song in.  I'll admit that I owned the album for quite some time before I
ever noticed that there were female vocals other than the rather obvious
stuff.  On the other hand, I bought _The Seer_ 2 years before I bought my
first KaTe album.

I know this isn't the place for Big Country proseletyzing, but since
KaTe worked with them....

They really were a great band (I was vastly disappointed with their latest
album, _Peace In Our Time_, as well as the singles released since then), 
with 3 superb albums.  They've always been a bit more interested in having
a celtic slant to their music, doing a lot of bagpipe-sounding stuff with
e-bows, using bhodran (is the the plural of "bhodran" "bhodran" or "bhodrans"?)
and that sort of thing.  "The Travellers," a bonus track on the _Peace In
Our Time_ CD is reminiscent of the intstrumental portion of "Jig of Life"
in that as the song progresses, instruments are added, one at a time.  It's
a wonderful celtic instrumental that I wish could have lasted the whole album.

The band members are fairly well recognized and used by many artists in their
studio bands--most notably the drummer, Mark Brzezicki.  Now we start seeing 
some weird KaTe KonneKTions:

Brzezicki played drums on some of the tracks on Fish's first solo album...
tracks that also had Davey Spillane, a name we should *all* recognize.

Brzezicki played drums on some of the tracks on Midge Ure's _Answers to
Nothing_--including "Sister and Brother," the duet with KaTe.


Oh well.  That's enough from me this morning.  It's too early to
be thinking.

Jeff



-- 
|Jeffrey C. Burka                |  Life is a lot like the Freak Show     |
|                                |  Nobody laughs when they leave.        |
|jeffy@lewhoosh.umd.edu          |                     --The Residents    |