Kate in the Philly Inquirer (LONG)

["Robert P. Keefer" <keefer@msmary.edu>]

Several people asked me to post this here, so here it is.  I also have a
more complete version of the side bar on other female singers which Kate
may have influenced from the same paper, same day.

/Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday January 9, 1994, Section F, pp. 1, 7/

[headline] A Return to Innocence

[subhead] Kate Bush found a way to break out of her shell and
	cut loose for her new album.  But she still fears flying.
[subhead, pg. 7] With no one around, the shy Kate Bush finds 
	a way to cut loose

by Tom Moon, Inquirer Music Critic
New York -- Every now and then, and idea comes along midway in a
creative project and becomes the flash of insight that pulls it all
together.  For Kate Bush's new album 'The Red Shoes,' it was a
remote-control device.

The notoriously shy composer, vocalist and cult heroine works in a
studio she built in her house outside London.  Bush finds the house,
filled with floppy old couches and homey furniture, a "far more
relaxing" place than most recording studios, where the air is often
thick with stress.

But even the comforts of home weren't enough when it came time for Bush
to lay down her tracks.  She sent away her musicians and her
engineer-producer (who is also her boyfriend), and rigged up a remote
that allowed her to operate the tape machine and mixing console from the
isolation booth where vocals are recorded.

She was alone.  No distractions.  And the result, Bush recalls, was "a
major unblocking."  At various times on 'The Red Shoes,' the usually
reserved vocalist can be heard scat singing, babbling nonsense syllables
and screaming with abandon, reacting to the moment rather than to a
plan.

"You have to have a real lack of inhibition to make records," Bush said
last month, on a rare trip to the United States to promote 'The Red
Shoes' and it accompanying film, 'The Line, The Cross, The Curve,' which
she directed.

"If I feel I'm being observed, I get very nervous.  I'm more likely to
play with ideas if there's no one around.  And it's boring for someone
to have to sit and operate the tape machines.  [With the remote] I could
do it myself.

"That made a huge difference," said the 35-year-old singer, sitting in
an Upper East Side hotel lounge.  "I didn't have to do the quick thing
that would work.  I could try 10 things, I could do things without
worrying what anybody would think.

"It made me realize we get to a certain age, and then the rest of our
lives we do everything we can to get back to the way we were when we
were little ... using wisdom to come back to innocence."

That maxim neatly sums up Kate Bush.  Since her 1978 debut 'The Kick
Inside,' she's used all of the wisdom at her disposal -- high-tech
sequencers, a full orchestra, lyrics filled with literary allusions and
nursery-rhyme mantras -- to achieve an innocence absent from most pop.
Whether singing about the aftermath of nuclear holocaust or
guru-philosopher G.I. Gurdieff, Bush is unburdened by the clutter of
adult reality.  Some reviews of 'The Kick Inside' insisted that it was
the work of a preteen prodigy.  Music this fragile could not have come
from an adult.

Bush's distinctive Victorian soprano reinforces the impression.  Her
haunting, mewling vocals have helped her carve her own subgenre,
somewhere between too-sweet pop ballads and ostentatious art-rock,
between no-bull and florid love poetry, between the tactile and the
abstract.

Whether they focus on grand themes or tiny frailties, her songs are
wracked with a hovering doubt, wary that fate might rearrange things at
any moment.

Bush maintains that she lost her innocence before she knew how valuable
it was.  And now, she said, she's immersed in the job of getting it
back.  She's investigating past-lives therapy and communicating with her
angels.

She's even doing a few of the mundane music-business things she tried
for so many years to avoid: like sitting for two hours at Tower records
in Lower Manhattan where 2,000 pilgrims journeyed to see their idol on
her first promotional trip in nearly a decade.

Respectfully, they shuffled by in an orderly line.  Couples with tears
in their eyes who gave Bush credit for bringing them together.  A woman
who begged for Bush to sign her arm, so she could go directly to the
tattoo parlor.  Legions of fans who waited in freezing weather for
nothing more than an autograph.

For personal reasons as well as commercial ones, Bush is relieved that
response to 'The Red Shoes' has been so positive.  The album, three
years in the making, represents an attempt by Bush to lighten up.  On
her debut, she cribbed from literature and quoted Scripture, setting
straightforward notions of love in grandiose, and occasionally
pretentious, language.  Now, she's comfortable with the simple
statement, the reduction of complex concepts into childlike
observation.

On 'The Red Shoes' "Moments of Pleasure," she sings, "Just being alive,
it can really hurt," and infuses the line with a suffering she might
once have probed in painstaking detail.

"Lily" (which Bush said was written a full year before the "angels"
meta-pop boom) finds her chanting a prayer that her friend Lily claims
will summon a celestial guide.  "It's an incredibly positive message to
be given, I think, at a time when people are wandering," muses Bush.
"Lily says they're very powerful, benevolent beings whose purpose is to
help us."

Bush is aware that many of her ardent fans misunderstand songs such as
"Lily," analyzing them word-for-word, like clues in an autobiographical
puzzle.  "People seem to read a more ethereal dreaminess into my lyrics.
I like messages in songs that are much more based in reality."

Often, that reality is suffused with melancholy.  Though she
acknowledges that the album has its weepy moments, she draws a
distinction between morose songs and her work, which she believes are
"the complete opposite."  ON the affecting "Moments of Pleasure," for
example, "I'm not talking about only pain or only ecstasy, but this
notion that life is so precious.  The moments of pleasure couldn't exist
without the sadness."

Bush speaks from a hard-earned perspective: Her own career has been a
seesaw.  She was 20 years old when her debut album (which was guided and
partially financed by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour) was released, and
before she knew it, her song "Wuthering Heights" was an international
hit.  She went on one promo outing after another and, in the process,
acquired a fear of flying that explains her current reluctance to
undertake extended concert tours.

When she returned to England, Bush's record company was clamoring for a
follow-up.  That's when the singer snapped.

"They took me away from everything familiar and, four months later,
wanted another record," she said.  "I figured out right then that music
was [my] priority, not publicity.  And that completely changed my life.
I stopped doing all the things that were expected."

After 1980's 'Never for Ever,' which contained the apocalyptic hit
"Breathing," Bush stopped touring completely.  Her next project, 1982's
'The Dreaming,' was slammed not just for being noncommercial but for
being fundamentally inaccessible.  Its somewhat pandering corrective
measure, 1985's 'Hounds of Love,' yielded the single "Running Up That
Hill," but little else -- a three-years-in-the-making disappointment.

Though Bush wrote the songs for 'The Red Shoes' quickly, and intended to
be less fussy about recording them, she became obsessed with creating a
more "live" sound, a record "full of the human element."  Her goal was
to "let the songs speak more strongly than the production."

She made sure that her somber ballads alternated with buoyant
celebrations.  And she opened her studio to a parade of guests -- Jeff
Beck, Eric Clapton, the Trio Bulgarka.

If Bush's lyrics are more direct this time, their settings, and the way
each guest's contribution is utilized, show that her musical gift has
also matured.  The best material on 'The Red Shoes' plays to the
strengths of her collaborators: "And So Is Love," for example, features
Clapton's guitar in a tense duet with Bush's voice.

With that tune, "I really wanted to get at the rawness of relationships,
the way things just burn at people but never quite erupt," Bush
explained.  "And Eric just sensed that.  The track couldn't say it, it
just had to unfold, holding the tensions until the voice goes up into
the higher octave.  He followed brilliantly, like it was a conversation.
It feels like the guitar is answering the voice.  I was so moved by what
Eric played."

When she began work on 'The Red Shoes,' Bush said, one objective was
simply to overcome the internal doubts that plague her at the start of
every project.  But the larger objective was t link her music with a
story -- in this case, Has Christian Andersen's tale of the magical
ballet shoes that force whoever wears them to dance, nonstop.

Bush's loose interpretation of the fairy tale -- an hour-long film she
calls 'The Line, The Cross, The Curve' -- gives a nod to Michael
Powell's 1948 film 'The Red Shoes' and links six of her thematically
divergent compositions into a narrative.  Slated for limited art-house
release in the spring, it stars Miranda Richardson ('The Crying Game')
and finds Bush dancing for the first time since her highly theatrical
concerts in the late '70s.

"Getting up and dancing again was another thing to overcome," Bush said.
"I'd not done anything that physical in years, and it brought back all
the self-consciousness and the fear.

"But then I discovered that I did have this ability I hadn't been using.
I started listening to the little voice rather than what people were
telling me, which is the same thing that happens every time I record.

"Through the process, I slowly get the sense of having some ability
again.  I start to regain the confidence I lost in those in-between
years.  And I lost a lot."
		---  30 ---- 

Included Pictures:
Page one: 
Large Picture of Kate with a flower-print babushka over her
head; Caption: "You have to have a real lack of inhibition to make
records," say Kate Bush.  She sought Privacy to achieve her sound.

Small, column-sized picture of TRS cover above the text; Caption: Bush
was alone when she cut "The Red Shoes." 

Page seven:
column-sized picture of Kate's head with a flower in her hair, 
and the hair somewhat 'tousled.' Caption: Kate Bush recently sat down to
sign autographs in New York.