War Child Piece

[nth-wave@easynet.co.uk (Dave Watkins)]

Here is the War CHild piece in the inderpendent for all you Lovehounds:-

Acts of love from Bob Geldof, Lou Reed, Dave Stewart, Pet Shop Boys and
Holly Johnson (not to mention Kate Bush)

Holly Johnson loves the Beatles; Bob Geldof loves the Stones; Lou Reed
loves Ornette Coleman (Brian Eno loves Lou Reed); Pet SHop Boys love the
Bee Gees.  And they've all made something of it for a good cause.  On 4
February at the Saatchi Gallery in London their works of homage will be
auctioned in aid of the charity War Child.  Emma Daly found out who made
what how.  Photographs by John Voos



Kate Bush
Billie Holiday
"Strange Fruit"  -  Bronze sculpture of lips and flowers

"Billie Holiday was a very big influence on me in my late teens.  I loved
the sound of her voice and I loved the quality of her songs, the sound of
the recordings.  And I suppose what I found most striking was the way she
was able to convey such incredible feeling.
When I was in a band years ago, I used to wear a flower behind my ear as a
kind of good luck memento (sic), that was something that she always used to
do when she performed.  SO I suppose whenever I think of Billie, I think of
her beautiful voice and the flower she used to wear.
When the image came up of the mouth and the flower, it just felt for some
that some reason that bronze was a really good medium.  I had been wanting
to try for six months to do sculpture and to try Bronze.

It was really fun for me.  I've not done anything like his before, to work
with something that's a solid, three-dimensional object, as opposed to
music which is so completely untouchable physically.  It was thrilling to
have something which was just a lump of metal, which you can turn around
but you can no longer change of fiddle with.
The Royal College of Art very kindly let me use their facilities and cast
the piece for me.  I modelled it in wax.  I'd never really appreciated how
lovely it is to be working with something so tactile.  It really does take
shapes, it takes your fingerprints into it.  I found it very therapeutic,
I'd recommend it to anyone.  And I'd never appreciated how wonderful bronze
is, when it's molten it looks like liquid fire."

The picture of Kate's work kinda looks like a shoe with huge lips at the
toe and a flower like an Amarillas (right spell?) at the heel.  Very cool.

Dave


PS  TO all those who enquired about "The MAn I Love" Vid -  I mananged to
only record the last 20 secs cos i had to rush downstairs and find a video
and by the time i realised it was on the song was half over.  SOrry.