**** SINGLE FILE INTERVIEW/REVIEW *******

[rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill)]

VIDEO HEIGHTS
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Review of The Single File
>From Melody Maker 1984
Reprinted in Breakthough 4
by Steve Sutherland


        "Like making a film of a book," Kate Bush is wary of the video 
process.  She knows it can intrude on the listener imagination and she's 
acutely aware that the video is the song compromised," that when she's 
writing the songs, she's in 
"the actual place" whereas, when she's filming, much mystery could be 
sacrificed to the concrete image.  
        "The Single File", a collection of her 12 promo videos, not only 
shames any negligent impressions of Kate as some Lena Zavaroni figure, 
pampered and sold cheaply by her record company, but also illustrates, 
perhaps for the first time, an artist defeating the deadening video 
process, using visuals to further rather then wrap-up the scope of her 
songs. 
        Her earliest effort, "Wuthering Heights", was simplicity itself.  
Inspired choreographically by her favourite ballets and enhanced by some 
trick afterimage photography, it was supposed to convey "a feeling of the 
person being a spiritual presence," and Kate turned in a performance that 
flattered the book, served the song and projected her personality.  A 
star was born. 
        The follow-up single, "The Man With The Child In His Eyes", 
proved more of a problem.  Kate's songs are, by nature, introverted and, 
as singles were seldom chosen with visual presentation in mind, the task 
was to preserve the song's delicate confessional while simultaneously 
trying to sell it.  She settle on softfocus:
        "The lighting guy did a complete try on that one.  It was really 
extraordinary.  I was sitting on Perspex that had banks of lights under 
it, like frying on an oven.  I was so hot!  BUt it got that feeling of 
great lightness, like floating without any sense of weight at all." 
        By comparison, the possibilities presented by "Hammer Horror" 
were boundless.  The title itself suggested all manner of gory excess but 
Kate, mindful that the look on the victim's face linger longer in the 
memory than the mechanics of the murder, plumped for character over 
effects.  Involving another dancer for the first time, she acted out an 
intriguing ritual of love and hate, she Ophelia-made often the aggressor, 
he the hooded executioner bound almost blamelessly to his task.
        "Songs have very specific moods and personalities and I feel very 
limited in as much as I'm always, to a certain extent, me," she explains. 
 "I'm never sure if I'm able to create the character in the song.  I 
really rely on my instincts because I don't feel I can act. 
        "I don't feel that making videos is acting because I've written 
the songs and created the characters in my mind.  It's the subject 
matter, not the personalities that moves me.  Like "Wow", though it could 
apply to any kind of art and the character is an actor, it's really 
talking about the music business where a lot of things are really 
unpleasant, but the incredible thing about it is the music and how it's 
worth all the effort, all the rubbish, to get that bit of gold." 
        Whatever her reservations, "Wow" was a success, again through its 
simplicity.  Alone on a stage, she expresses all the song's loathing and 
compassion simply by staling looks into the lens, whereas the video for 
"Them Heavy People" uncharacteristically surrendered the song's 
examination of mental turmoil to a corny slapstick gangster routine. 
        "We liked the idea of beating each other up and enjoying it," she 
confesses.  As always the video was a self aware "performance" but it was 
her last "fun one". 
        Out of nowhere, "Breathing" introduced new possibilities, 
demonstrating that a video needn't be a promotional afterthought; on the 
contrary, it could do a great service existing alongside its companion 
song, adding another interpretation rather than mugging it up.  From now 
on, nothing would get into a kate Bush video without some symbolic 
interest. 
        "Ever since 'Breathing' I've wanted to make videos like little 
films," she admits, and with the added dimension of dance, her songs took 
on several simultaneous lives.  
        Discounting [!!!!] "Suspended in Gaffa" which was thrown together 
and "There Goes A Tenner", which clumsily [!!!] attempted to follow a 
plot, the remainder of The Single File is a treasurehouse. 
        "Breathing" is split in two, the baby in the womb being born into 
a future nuclear age, screaming "Leave me something to breath!" while an 
atom bomb explodes in reverse, "just to try and say 'No, don't let it 
happen', which is a positive statement, I hope..."
        "Army Dreamers", her favourite ("I got everything I wanted to say 
across") deals emotionally with wasted life through a mother-son 
relationship and still managed to comment, though Busby Berkeley 
routines, on the media's presentation of war, while "Sat In Your Lap" 
ushers in a whole roster of dunces and jesters in an attempt to 
articulate visually the songs contrary reactions to knowledge.  It fails 
but superbly. 
        Having something to say inevitably harmed Kate's commercial 
appeal.  Her songs grew so swollen with import that the tunes could 
barely cope while the videos became increasingly alluring, climaxing in 
"The Dreaming" where a straightforward protest against pink creatures") 
[sic?] breeds in a aboriginal atmosphere (Their music is so incredibly 
full of space and loneliness") and blossoms into a full-blown mime of 
man's folly. 
        "The big wind rushing in at the end is the idea of the white man 
on his way in to steal the aborigines' soul and plunder their hills for 
plutonium.  It's involved with time travel.  The doves released express 
the freedom of something that could have been caught or killed but has 
been given the chance.  I suppose that was a little glimpse of hope, 
otherwise..." 
        And then, of course, there's "Babooshka", perhaps her most famous 
promo, perfectly illustrative of her technique.  The plot, inspired by 
the strange pactise of Victorian wives trying to catch out their husbands 
by sending them love letters under assumed names, could have been treated 
straight, much in the same way that Heaven 17 presented "Come Live With 
Me".  But that wasn't the point. 
        The plot may have been central to the song but it's the woman - 
why she does it and how she feels now she's trapped herself into jealousy 
- that's the meat of the video. 
        Thus "Babooshka" exists in two forms - the story on the record 
and the study on video, a duality approaching self-critique.  No other 
video I can recall has attained comparable dramatic completion. 


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rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill)
NetRunner's Paradise BBS, San Diego CA