VOX Interview

[nbc@inf.rl.ac.uk]

Here is the VOX Magazine interview. Enjoy.

Neil
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Kate Bush has worn countless images, but when the most incisive of 
examinations all bounce off, it's impossible to gauge those true to
her private self. In a rare interview, she provides a few clues about
her latest opus, The Red Shoes


Rubber Souls

By Marianne Jenssen

There's Eric Clapton, and Prince, and Nigel Kennedy... and Lenny 
Henry. The guest appearances on The Red Shoes, Kate Bush's ninth 
album, and her first since The SensualWorld, testify to the astonishing 
pulling power of one of the business's more enigmatic and reserved 
souls. She could teach the Purple One a thing or two about reticence. 
Encounters with Bush are rare and frequently leave the selected 
interviewers more baffled than when they entered. Opinions differ on 
whether Bush's ambling responses are the archly drawn veils of 
someone who deliberately wants secrets kept, or the honest display of 
an artist with no more to say than what's already in her lengthily 
gestated albums. Not to mention a frowning wonder at why anyone 
would think there was something else anyway.

"I  think that's personal and I'm here to talk about my work," she said 
recently in an interview for The Sunday Times. "My private life, I 
don't want to let go of. I need to keep it close and tender so that it's 
still my own."

As befits a masterwork, The Red Shoes was kept carefully under 
wraps, reviewers being handed numbered lyric sheets (for later 
collection) at select playbacks. The detail within the tracks and the 
choice of guests offer witness to Bush's confessed pursuit of perfection. 
Sadly, history does not relate whether Prince and backing vocalist 
Lenny Henry were in the studio at the same time for the track 'Why 
Should I Love You', or whether Henry got to say: "Hey Vic, I do this 
great impression of you".

A film to accompany the album, with a working title of A Lion. A 
Cross And A Curve, features Miranda Richardson and Lindsay Kemp. 
Currently, its release is being delayed (and the album with it) as Bush 
toils over getting it right. It's been described as her Magical Mystery 
Tour, but she's reluctant to discuss it until completed, and has 
postponed other interviews to allow a clear run at the work. Again, 
she told the nationals: "I've always been tenacious when it comes to 
my work. It seemed ironic that I was expected to do interviews and 
television which took me away from the thing that had put me into 
that situation. It was no longer relevant that I wrote songs. I could see 
my work becoming something that had no thought in it, becoming a 
personality. All I wanted was the creative process."

In the following interview, Kate Bush reveals just how important that 
process has become...


What inspires you? Do you have to achieve a particular mood or are 
songs triggered off by particular events?

"I think it's incredibly elusive. I think I used to write in a more 
formulated way. When I was very young, I would sit there at the piano 
and just write a song - I actually hadn't done that for a long time.

"When I'm working, I'm continually hit by how you start off with 
something, and though it doesn't necessarily change in essence, there's 
this whole evolution that happens around it, little ideas that get pulled 
in. I think that may be one reason why the albums take so long. I feel 
very grateful, really, to have my work."

Do you escape into it?

"Umm... I don't know about escape - I think it's inseparable, that's 
what it is. It's not that I'm running away into my work, it's more that 
my work moves headlong into my life. There's a lot of my very 
personal experiences that go into my work, and my work gives me a lot 
of very personal experiences."

If something traumatic occurs in your life, do you find it easy to 
express, or does it come out in some other form?

"It depends on the trauma, it depends how heartbroken you are. 
Usually, 1 can pull myself through things like feeling low or having 
problems by working that through. But I have been at points where I 
just couldn't work. I couldn't possibly sing--it was beyond me, it just 
hurt too much. Sometimes you have to allow a bit of time to come 
between you and the experience in order to even touch it.

"I think the biggest thing on this album is that I lost my mother. I 
haven't been able to write about any of it--nevertheless, the experience 
is in there. It's something I couldn't possibly express in music, and yet 
it is being expressed through very subliminal things, like the quality of 
some of the performances. I couldn't work for months, I couldn't go 
near the whole process. I had no desire to start, no desire to work at all.

"It was a terrible shock for all of us. Really, I'm so grateful that we had 
so much time together and we had such a good relationship. I had an 
incredibly good relationship with her, as did all my family. I often 
think how awful it must be for people who don't really get on with 
their parents--or don't them - to lose them and be so bereft after having 
had nothing."

What happens if people want to interfere in your work? I take it you 
don't let them?

I don't think it's so much that I got interference at the start, but I was 
aware that things wouldn't be how I wanted them to be unless I was 
willing to fight. I think you have to fight for everything you want. 
Whether it's work or life, it's just that sort of thing of struggling; 
struggle is very important. It's how you grow and change and it also 
tests your intention - if you really care about something, you won't let 
go.

"I was 19 when it [the first album] came out, and my life completely 
changed. The big emphasis was that I was no longer allowed to work. 
My whole day used to be centred around work, in the most pleasurable 
way: I'd get up and play around on the piano, then I'd go up to London 
and see some friends, go dancing ..."

Did you feel that you were manipulated. Were you ever encouraged to 
be bimbo-esque for pictures?

"I think, on a couple of occasions, I was very naive and I was very 
young. It was all very new to me and, in the first year, 1 learnt so many 
lessons about how people wanted to manipulate me. I was always quite 
strong about what I didn't want to do, but nevertheless it doesn't take 
much."

Do you think of yourself as a feminist?

"I think a lot of respect went for the feminist movement. I think it's 
really wrong. A lot of women resent women who have pushed their 
energies, because it's kind of made feminine energy look stupid. I 
believe there is a way that feminine energy can stand strong and 
powerful without having to be something it's not."

Qualities such as ambition and competiveness are, supposedly, 
traditionally male ones, but do you possess either? 

"I hate both words intensely I suppose that's because, in a lot of ways, 
they represent to me an incredibly driven male energy that offends my 
feminine energy. But I do think I'm driven, and I don't know about 
this thing of ambition. I don't know because I think my ambition is 
creative I don't think I'm ambitious to conquer the world, but I am 
ambitious to try out ideas and push things, to see if you can make it 
better. I'm certainly very driven in my work. I do think that for a lot of 
women, their creativlty is quite masculinely driven--it's quite a 
masculine trait to speed forward, I suppose."

How much thne have you spent working on The Red Shoes?

"Well, 1 haven't spent that long. It went on over a long period of 
time-about two years of solid work amongst three-and-a-half to four 
years."

Each album seems to take you longer to make than the last Is this 
because you are a true perfectionist?

"I think 'perfect' is... I have used that word in the past, and used it 
wrongly because, in a way, what you are trying to do is make 
something that is basically imperfect as best as you can in the time 
you've got with the knowledge you have"

You don't normally release material unless you're totally satisfied...

"That's right. That doesn't necessarilly mean'perfect', but it's to the best 
of my ability. I've tried to say what needed to be said through the songs, 
the right structure, the shape, the sounds, the vocal performance--that 
is, the best I could do at the time."

When you've worked hard for something, you obviously don't want 
somebody interfering with it. In your cuttings, you've been described as 
the shyest megalomaniac on the planet, so how do yout work out the 
balance between that and being an incredibly quiet, private person?

"I think it's quite true that most people are extreme contradictions. It's 
like this paradox that exists, and I think that on a lot of levels, I'm quiet 
and shy, and a quiet soul.

I like simple things in my life...I like gardening and things like that, but 
when it comes to my work, I am a creative megalomaniac again. I'm 
not after money or power but the creative power. I just love playing 
with ideas and watching them come together, or what you learn from 
something not coming together.

I'm fascinated by the whole creative process--I think you could probably 
say I was obsessed I'm not as bad as I used to be, I'm a little more 
balanced now."

What's calmed you down?

*Just life, I think... Life gets to you, doesn't it? I also think there's a part 
of me that's got fed up with working. I've worked so much that I'm 
starting to feel... I felt I needed to rebalance, which I think I did a bit, 
just to get a little bit more emphasis on me and my life."

Where did you get the idea of 'Rubberband Girl"?

"Well, it's playing with the idea of how putting up resistance... um... 
doesn't do any good, really. The whole thing is to sort of go with the 
flow."

What about the sexual content--'He can be a  woman at heart, and not 
only women bleed?

"It's not really sexual, it's more to do with the whole idea of opening 
people up - not sexually, just  revealing themselves. It's taking a man 
who is on the outside, very macho, and you open him up and he has 
this beautiful feminine heart."

Have you found many of those?

"I think I've seen a lot of them, yeah. I think there are a lot of men who 
are fantastically sensitive and gentle, and I think they are really scared 
to show it."

A father image often comes out in your work. Is that because you're 
particularly close to your father or does it merely represent somebody 
or something you respect?

"I think they're very archetypal images: the parents, the mother and 
the father... it's immediately symbolic of so many things. I'm very 
lucky to have had an extremely positive, loving and encouraging 
relationship with both my parents. And you know I feel very grateful... 
I feel very honoured, actually."

Who is the Douglas Fairbanks character in 'Moments Of Pleasure '?

'Ah... In a lot of ways that song, er.. well it's going back to that thing of 
paying homage to people who aren't with us any more. I was very 
lucky to get to meet Michael (Powell, the film-maker who directed the 
original The Red Shoes) in New York before he died, and he and his 
wife were extreme;y kind. I'd had  few conversations with him and I'd 
been dying to meet him. As we came out of the lift, he was standing 
outside with his walking stick and he was pretending to be someone 
like Douglas Fairbanks. He was completely adorable and just the most 
beautiful spirit, and it was a very profound experience for me. It had 
quite an inspirational effect on a couple of the songs.


"There's a song called 'The Red Shoes'. It's not really to do with his 
film but rather the story from which he took his film. You have these 
red shoes that just want to dance and don't want to stop, and the story 
that I'm aware of is that there's this girl who goes to sleep in the fairy 
story and they can't work out why she's so tired. Every morning, she's 
more pale and tired, so they follow her one night and what's 
happening is these shoes... she's putting these shoes on at night before 
she goes to bed and they whisk her off to dance with the fairies."

Are you still as involved in dancing as you were?

"I've had a lot of periods off, unfortunately, because my music is so 
demanding and I went through a phase where I just had no desire to 
dance. The last couple of years, it really came back, and it's been very 
interesting working in an older body. Your brain seems better at dealing 
with certain kinds of information. And I think there's something about 
trying too hard which takes the dynamics out of everything.

"I think I've become less conscious through dancing, because it's very 
confrontational in a positive way - standing in front of a mirro and 
looking at soemthing that basically looks like a piece of you, and you've 
got to do something with it."

Does that mean looking like a piece of shit?

"It does at nine in the morning. When I started dancing again, a couple 
of years ago, I hadn't done anything for about three or four years and 
although I had the desire to dance again, I really didn't know if I had 
the energy, or whether I could be bothered to go through all that and 
my body being so sore. But I was aware that, although it was difficult for 
me, I always felt better after the classes than I did before. I'd get up 
grumpy, then after I'd feel really good."

Is it true you once planned to be a psychologist or psychiatrist?

"Yes I did. I really wanted to be a psychiatrist, I really did, but I knew I'd 
reached the point where I would never be able to do all the training. 
You have to train as a doctor, I think, and be good at chemistry, physics, 
etc. I was never any good at maths, I just knew I'd never make it."

Are there any parallels with what you do now?

"I've never really thought of it, but I suppose I really like the idea of 
helping people and that I was really fasdnated by people's minds and 
the way they work--I still am. I don't think I've ever got into people's 
minds, but I've always been interested in how people think.

"People think so differently from each other, people come to 
completely different conclusions from seeing or hearing the same 
thing... Now, how do they do that, other than there's all these internal 
processes going on? 

"I think it's like anything in life--you can never be sure. Sometimes I 
think you have to put complete  trust in your feelings: this doesn't feel 
fight, so I won't do it; logic says I should bury my feelings and say no, so 
I won't.

"Also, in my position, you can't be naive. The chances are, there will be 
people who will approach me whose intentions are not pure, they're 
after something which is not necessarily kindly. Again, I think the 
whole process of allowing people to misrepresent you puts you in an 
extremely dodgy situation.

"If you show someone something that's very honest and revealing, 
what are they going to do? Are they going to show themselves or are 
they going to hit you in the face?"

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Neil Calton                          UUCP:   ..!mcsun!ukc!rlinf!nbc
Informatics Department,              NSFNET: nbc%inf.rl.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory,      BITNET: nbc%uk.ac.rl.inf@ukacrl
Chilton, Didcot, Oxon,  OX11 0QX     JANET:     nbc@uk.ac.rl.inf
England                              Tel: +44 235 44 5740  Fax: +44 235 44 5831