No Subject

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POP
Tom Hibbert

Daft as a Bush

[bit about playing records backwards, throwing yourself out windows
and Phil Collins deleted]

Kate Bush exudes Englishness of a different kind. Croquet and gingham
and scones on the dainty patio. She is our dottiest dame since
Margaret Rutherford and she is, to use an overworked and undervalued
word, unique.

Her new LP, The Red Shoes (EMI 1047), named after the flitty Forties
ballet flick starring Moira Shearer (only 'our' Kate would think of
this), does not disappoint. There is nothing here that *quite*
compares with her most splendid songs -- 1980's Breathing and 1986's
The Big Sky [yay! -st] -- but The Red Shoes is a triumph noetheless.
She still sings like the slightly crazy girl on the lacrosse team
alarming the opposing Vicarage XII -- on the boisterous title track
she goes quite superbly bonkers.

Her music is exotic and clever -- not *clever*-clever, you understand,
just imaginative: one moment she's sweeping us off on an unlikely
touristico visit to Guinea-Bissau or somewhere equally West African
(Eat the Music), the next she is weeping o'er the pianoforte (Moments
of Pleasure).

She is the only woman in the universe who could hope to get Lenny
Henry and Prince performing on the same song (not necessarily a good
idea, but Why Should I Love You? does work). And, most important of
all, her lyrics are still utterly potty...'Oh big stripy lie moving
like a wavy line.' What *can* she mean?

Kate Bush's only mistake, the first of her glittering career, is to
invite the fiddling goon Nigel Kennedy to scrape his Strad on the LP.
Play him backwards, play him forwards, play him in any direction you
care to, Nige's 'hidden' message is ever the same: 'Squawk-di-squawk-
fiddle-di-dee-Cor!-ain't-I-a-flash-geezer?-Monster!-Hendrix!-Villa!'

Excuse me while I throw myself out the window...
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-- 
Scott Telford, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre,        <s.telford@ed.ac.uk>
University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Rd, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK. (+44 31 650 5978)
-- "We do want to tour again, we will tour again" - Kate Bush, Munich, 1980. --