And yet another first Katexperience

[Ulrich Grepel <uli@intellektik.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>]

Here's another story of becoming a KaTefan:

My first Katexperience was anno '78 or '80 (I don't know for sure because
I don't know if it was WH or Babooshka, but propably the later one because
I was only 9 years old when WH was a hit and with 9 years I had a terrible
taste of music...), when one of those hits was in the local radio charts.
The (male) DJ always introduced her with a voice at least as high as Kate's:

         Kate Bush
"and now          !"

The layout of the line above shows the acoustic impressions that make up
my earliest knowledge of Kate. I was not particularily hooked then, that
came much later. In 1987, when I bought my CD player, I borrowed HoL from
a friend to feed my new toy. I recorded it onto tape and took that tape
to my car where it was more or less played to tape's heaven: Play side one,
rewind, play side one again... (The second side of the tape almost never
had a chance to get to my ears. If you believe in commercial success, it
should have been the other way round: Side two was Michael Jackson's
'Thriller'...)

Anyway, short after getting that tape, I decided to test Kates CDs for
myself and listened to her CDs in my local CD store. They had all then
6 albums there and I decided that TWS was the best. The friend from whom
I have borrowed HoL stated that HoL was better than TWS, because 'it has
all of Kate's hits on it'. How wrong he was! Not that I think TWS is better
than HoL (at least not for that reason), today I think you cannot compare 
any of Kate's albums to each other!

Shortly after falling in love with that second album too, two by two the 
remaining 5 CDs came into my possesion. Not having heard any real information 
about Kate and her work, I was always looking for more of the stuff on albums, 
I never bought any singles, mostly for two reasons: at that time vinyl was
much bigger than CD so that there were no CD maxis availlable and I almost 
never bought any vinyl "because one day I will have a CD player and then I 
start my musical collection" (that came true, now I own >200 CDs and <20 
non-Kate vinyl records with something useful on it) and second because long 
plays are cheaper (i.e. more minutes per buck).

One lucky day in that search I come across the 12" of The Big Sky, 
listened to it in the record shop and bought it. That was the point 
where I decided to search for all the b-sides. I didn't know then 
that there are so many b-sides that are not on any album! My Katecollectiomania
developed in time and so nowadays I get anything I can put my fingers on.
And that I can afford: There once was an auction somewhere of that kind
where you can get things like 'Elvis' guitar he played on concert xxx,
minimum bid $xxxxx' (count the x'es in the price, they look right). In 
the photocopied catalog my local CD shop had there was it: One of Kate's
gold singles. Not identifiable on the photocopy, but definitively gold,
with frame and everything. Unfortunately I really cannot afford to
bid more than was already done on that item, it was a four-figure-sum...

BTW: If you were an artist, how many golden records would you have
to have to actually give one away to someone who might one day try
to make money out of such a TRUE COLLECTOR'S ITEM (shoudln't that make it 
easily to No. 1 in any collector's list? Or No. 2 after The Early Years?)
I know that Kate's first gold single for WH hang hang around somewhere 
at EMIs for a long time, but I think they already make enough money with 
her. Perhaps a golden record from a very small country (like Monaco, do you 
actually need more than 500 copies to get gold there?) isn't as valuable as, 
let's say, a British one, but...

The latest stage of my Katefandom came soon after getting Netaccess at my
university one year ago when I started reading News. Especially rec.music.misc, 
always searching for some Katerelated stuff and much frustrated because there
wasn't too much there! There had do be one of the boring due to unspecialised
threads of 'What's the greatest band of all times?', where one neat
guy suggested that these should be those who have their own newsgroup.
He (Jonathan J. Moss, THANX!) printed the list and there was - guess who!
Not being a native speaker of English I just had not recogniced the
meaning of the word 'gaffa' in rec.music.gaffa, just because that word
didn't sound 'unusual', but so well known that it just didn't made the
connection for me! |>oug, you made it difficult to recognice your group!

If I am precise, I must admit that even that was not my real first contact
with this group/list. In one of my Homegrounds there's a list printed that
has a comment about each of Kate's songs. This list was compiled by some
group-of-parents-that-worry-about-their-poor-and-silly-children and it was
so ridiculous and irrelevant that I won't repeat or comme (sorry, cut 
off due to self-awareness of my own rules). Anyway, Homeground thanked
LoveHounds for providing that list but didn't say anything about who or
what LoveHounds was! (Read that, Peter...)

Bye for now,

Uli