*** Kate Bush Crash Course PART I ***

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

KATE BUSH SONG CRASH COURSE
        
        Compiled by Ron Hill

        Each song is followed by quotes from Kate, except when no 
quotes exist.  More detailed quotes can be found in the electronic book 
Cloudbusting. 


        Moving - "I actually wrote the song for my teacher, Lindsay 
Kemp.  But the inspiration came from whales."
        Saxaphone Song - "...for me, the saxophone is a truly amazing 
instrument.  Its sound is very exciting - rich and mellow.  It sounds 
like a female."
        Strange Phenomena - "It's all about coincidences.  And there's 
in fact a school of thought about that called, well it's 
Synchronicity."
        Kite - "The character starts to feel that he is rooted to the 
ground, but there is a force pulling him up to the sky."
        The Man with the Child in his Eyes - "This was about an adult 
who is still very much of a child and could still take a delight in the 
innocence of things."
        Wuthering Heights - "...one of the reasons it stuck so heavily 
in my mind was because of the spirit of Cathy, and as a child I was 
called Cathy.  It later changed to Kate."
        James and the Cold Gun - NOT based on Jesse James.
        Feel It - "A song about a woman who is looking forward to 
enjoying a relationship with a man she has not yet explored."
        Oh, To Be In Love - NO QUOTES! The only song from the first two 
albums not done on the tour.
        L'Amour Looks Something Like You - Looks at the agony of 
unfulfilled love through the eyes of a woman. 
        Them Heavy People - Often incorrectly refered to as "Rolling 
The Ball".  "I heard the phrase "Rolling the ball" in my head, and I 
thought that it would be a good way to start a song, so I ran in to the 
piano and played it and got the chords down."
        Room for the Life - May be about the idea that women are 
mentally and physically programmed to bear children, and because of 
this, the female of the species possesses a much greater instinct of 
survival and protection. 
        The Kick Inside - "This song is about a brother and a sister 
who are in love, and the sister becomes pregnant by her brother.  And 
because it is so taboo and unheard of, she kills herself in order to 
preserve her brother's name in the family.  The actual song is in fact 
the suicide note.  The sister is saying "I'm doing it for you" and 
"Don't worry, I'll come back to you someday." "

        Symphony in Blue - No QUOTES! 
        In Search of Peter Pan - "How a young innocence mind can be 
just controlled, manipulated, and they [the parents] don't necessarily 
want it to happen that way."
        Wow - "People say that the music business is about ripoffs, the 
rat race, competition, strain, people trying to cut you down, and so 
on, and though that's all there, there's also the magic."
        Don't Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake - "[written like] a 
Patti Smith song."
        Oh! England, My Lionheart - "My patriotic number!"
        Fullhouse - "Probably quite autobiographical, you know: talking 
about how hard I find it to cope with all the feelings I get, from 
paranoia, pressure, anger, that sort of thing. "
        In The Warm Room - "Written for men because there are so many 
songs for women about wonderful men that come up and chat you up when 
you're in the disco and I thought it would be nice to write a song for 
men about this amazing female."
        Kashka From Baghdad - "A very strange American Detective 
series...inspired the idea of this old house somewhere in Canada or 
America with two people in it that no-one knew anything about.  And 
being a sorta small town, everybody wanted to know what everybody what 
else was up to.  And these particular people in this house had a very 
private thing happening." [Yes, the characters are gay!]
        Coffee Homeground - "Someeone who thinks they're being poisoned 
by another person, they think that there's Belladonna in their tea and 
that whenever they offer them something to eat, it's got poisen in it.  
And it's just a humorous aspect of paranoia really".
        Hammer Horror - "An actor had a part in a moive but he died on 
the set, and the current actor was being haunted by the actor before."
        The Empty Bullring - "It is really about someone who is in love 
with someone who is obsessed with something that is pretty futile.  
They can't get the person to accept the fact that it is a futile 
obsession."

        Babooshka - About futile situations: the way in which we often 
ruin things for ourselves. 
        Delius - "The thing about Delius's music is it's so 
emotional... and really that is what art is, art is pure emotion.  And 
so anyone that is full of it will attract me, obviously, because I'm 
looking for the same thing, I'm tuning into the same thing."
        Blow Away - "Is a comfort for the fear of dying, and for those 
of us who believe that music is perhaps an exception to the Never For 
Ever rule.  "
        All We Ever Look For - "about how we seek something, but in the 
wrong way, or at wrong times, so it is never found."
        "Egypt" an attempted audial animation of the romantic and 
realistic visions of a country.  
        "The Wedding List" - "That was based on a film, a Jeanne Moreau 
film I once saw on the telly, when the bride's husband was killed and 
she sought revenge for those responsible."
        "Violin" is for all the mad fiddlers, from "Paganini" to "Old 
Nick" himself.  
        The Infant Kiss - "About a governess.  She is torn between the 
love of an adult man and a child, who are within the same body... It 
was based on the film, The Innocents."
        Night Scented Stock - "I love music without words when it works 
because it suddenly becomes so much freer, it's like landscapes moving 
around you and I've always wanted to work in a musical area sometimes 
rather than always putting lyrics to my songs. "
        Army Dreamers - "About a grieving mother who, through the death 
of her soldier boy, questions her motherhood."
        Breathing - "It's about a baby still in the mother's womb at 
the time of a nuclear fallout, but it's more of a spiritual being... It 
has all its senses: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing, and it 
knows what is going on outside the mother's womb, and yet it wants 
desperately to carry on living, as we all do of course."
        "Warm and Soothing" was a demo-tape which we did basically just 
to see what Abbey Road sounded like. 

        Lord of the Reedy River - "One of my favorite [Donovan 
tracks]... which he actually wrote himself to his own music."

        Sat in your Lap - "About the way you try to work for something 
and you end up finding you've been working away from it rather than 
towards it.  It's really about the whole frustration of having to wait 
for things - the fact that you can't do what you want to do now, you 
have to work toward it and maybe, only maybe, in five years you'll get 
what you're after."
        There goes a Tennor - "It's very much a song about bank 
robbery... it's about the fear that people feel rather than the 
glorification of bank robbers."
        Pull Out The Pin - "I saw a programme with a camera man on the 
front line in Vietnam.  The Vietnamese were portrayed as being very 
craftful people who treated their fighting as an art.  They could 
literally smell the Americans coming through the jungle.  Their culture 
of Coke cans and ice creams actually made them smell...Anyway, I learnt 
that before the Vietnamese went into action they popped a little silver 
Buddha in their mouths.  I thought that was quite beautiful."
        Suspended in Gaffa - "The idea of the song is that of being 
given a glimpse of "God" - something that we dearly want - but being 
told that unless we work for it, we will never see it again, and even 
then, we might not be worthy of it.  Of course, everybody wants the 
reward without the toil, so people try to find a way out of the hard 
work, still hoping to claim the prize, but such is not the case.  The 
choruses are meant to express the feeling of entering timelessness as 
you become ready for the experience, but only when you are ready."
        "Leave It Open" - "The idea of human beings being like cups - 
like receptive vessels.  We open and shut ourselves at different times. 
 It's very easy to let you ego go "nag nag nag" when you should shut 
it.  Or when you're very narrow-minded and you should be open.  Finally 
you should be able to control your levels of receptivity to a 
productive end."
        "The Dreaming" - "The song was originally going to be called 
"Dreamtime," which is the name the Aborigines gave to a magic time 
before man was man as he is today - when man was an animal and could 
change shape.  This magical time was also known as the Dreaming to the 
Aborigines, so I thought it would be an ideal title for the song."
        "Night of the Swallow" - "The whole idea of the song was that 
the choruses were this guy flying off.  He's a pilot who's been offered 
a load of money if he doesn't ask any questions.  He really wants to do 
it, for the challenge as well, but his wife is really against it 
because she feels he's going to get caught.  The verses are her saying 
"Don't do it!" and the choruses are him saying "Look, I can do it, I 
can fly like a swallow".  We used the idea of the ceilidh band taking 
off. "
        "All the Love" - "Although we are often surrounded by people 
and friends, we are all ultimately alone, and I feel sure everyone 
feels lonely at some time in their life.  I wanted to write about 
feeling alone, and how having to hide emotions away or being too scared 
to show love can lead to being lonely as well."
        Houdini - "And the song is written from Mrs. Houdini's point of 
view.  And what was rather beautiful was she used to help him a lot 
with his tricks and one of the things that she would do, before he went 
off into his tank or to jump into the sea or whatever it was, she would 
pass him a tiny key with a kiss before she left him and he went off.  
And when he was then in the water he would use the key to unlock the 
padlocks.  So in many ways by passing that key she was keeping an eye 
on his life, making sure that he be safe, that he would come out 
again."
        Get Out of My House - "The idea with that song is that the 
house is actually a human being who's been hurt and he's just locking 
all the doors and not letting anyone in.  The person is so determined 
not to let anyone in that one of his personalities is a concierge who 
sits in the door, and says "you're not coming in here" - like real 
mamma. "

        Ne T'enfuis pas - "Really the only language I know enough of to 
be able to work creatively with is French, so I thought of all the odd 
words I know, and tried to piece a story together.  It's surprising how 
inspiring it can be to work from a slightly different tangent."
        Under the Ivy - "It's very much a song about someone who is 
sneaking away from a party to meet someone elusively, secretly, and to 
possibly make love with them, or just to communicate, but it's secret, 
and it's something they used to do and that they won't be able to do 
again.  It's about a nostalgic, revisited moment."

        Running Up That Hill - "It's the two people in the song, a man 
and a woman, that what to make a deal with God in order to swap places 
with each other.  That if the man could be the woman, and vice-versa, 
they would understand what it's like from that other person's point of 
view and that perhaps there'd be less problems in the relationship."
        "Hounds of Love" - "about someone who's scarred of falling in 
love with someone, of being trapped, and sees it as a simile of a pack 
of hounds that are chasing them.  And instead of being happy about it, 
terrified, so they're running for their life really. "
        "The Big Sky" - "Someone sitting looking at the sky, watching 
the clouds change.  I used to do this a lot as a child, just watching 
the clouds go into different shapes.  I think we forget these pleasures 
as adults.  We don't get as much time to enjoy those kinds of things, 
or think about them; we feel silly about what we used to do naturally.  
The song is also suggesting the coming of the next flood - how perhaps 
the "fools on the hills" will be the wise ones."
        "Mother Stands for Comfort." - "It's about a son who has 
committed a terrible crime, and how basically, although his mother 
knows that he's done something wrong, she'll protect him and care for 
him and hide him from the people who are looking for him.  It's talking 
about a mother's love, and how sometimes she will actually go against 
the morality she feels within herself about what is right and wrong, if 
the child is endangered."
        "Cloudbusting" - "Draws its subject from A Book of Dreams by 
Peter Reich.  The book was written as if by a child who was telling of 
his strange and unique relationship with his father.  They lived in a 
place called Organon, where the father, a respected psycho-analyst, had 
some very advanced theories on Vital Energy; furthermore, he owned a 
rain-making machine, the Cloudbuster.  His son and he loved to use it 
to make it rain.  Unfortunately, the father was imprisoned because of 
his ideas."

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