Some interesting Kate reviews

["katya" <katya@clear.net.nz>]

Hey,
	I was looking at an old 'Music Central' disc, trying to locate some rather
obscure songs for work, and thought I'd look up any Kate information they
had included. I found the following................

	Kate - biographical
	The Kick Inside
	Never for Ever
	The Sensual World
	The Red Shoes

If you have the time, read on - fairly interesting. One point, the reviews
site Never for Ever as the second finest work (2nd only to Hounds of Love).
After all I have learnt about the Dreaming, I was surprised to see that!!

	Read on, if you have the time........

	Regards, Katya


The following information, taken from Music Central, 1996............
Kate Bush
b. Catherine Bush, 30 July 1958, Bexleyheath, Kent, England. While still at
school, the precocious Bush was discovered by Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour,
who was so impressed by the imaginative quality of her songwriting that he
financed some demo recordings. EMI Records were equally taken with the
product and in an unusual act of faith decided not to record her
immediately. Instead, she was encouraged to develop her writing, dancing
and singing in preparation for a long-term career. The apprenticeship ended
in 1978 with the release of the extraordinary Wuthering Heights. Inspired
by Emily Bronte's novel, Bush had created a hauntingly original piece,
complete with an ethereal, almost demented, vocal that brilliantly captured
the obsessive love of the novel's heroine, and her namesake, Cathy. It was
no surprise when the single rapidly reached number 1 in the UK and
established Bush in Europe. An attendant album, THE KICK INSIDE, recorded
over the previous three years, was a further example of her diversity and
charm as a songwriter. A follow-up single, The Man With The Child In His
Eyes was typical of her romantic, sensual style of writing, and provided
her with another Top 10 success. Bush consolidated her position with a new
album, LIONHEARTand during 1979 undertook her first major tour. The live
shows were most notable for her characteristically extravagant mime work
and elaborate stage sets. An EP from the show, KATE BUSH ON STAGE gave her
another Top 10 hit. After guesting on Peter Gabriel's Games Without
Frontiers, Bush was back in the charts with Breathing and Babooshka. The
latter was her most accomplished work since Wuthering Heights with a clever
story line and strong vocal. Her next album, NEVER FOR EVER entered the UK
album charts at number 1 and further hits followed with Army Dreamers and
December Will Be Magic. At this point, Bush was still regarded as a
mainstream pop artist whose charm and popularity was likely to prove
ephemeral. Her 1982 album THE DREAMINGsuggested a new direction, however,
even though its less melodic approach alienated some critics. A two-year
hiatus followed during which Bush perfected a work which would elevate her
to new heights in the pop pantheon. The pilot single, Running Up That Hill
was arguably her greatest work to date, a dense and intriguing composition
with a sound uniquely her own. The album HOUNDS OF LOVE soon followed and
was greeted with an acclaim that dwarfed all her previous accolades and
efforts. By any standards, it was an exceptional work and revealed Bush at
the zenith of her powers. Songs such as the eerily moving Mother Stands For
Comfort and the dramatic Cloudbusting underlined her strengths, not only as
a writer and singer, but most crucially as a producer. The outstanding
video accompanying the latter featured Donald Sutherland. An entire side of
the album, titled The Ninth Wave, fused Arthurian legend and Jungian
psychology in a musical framework, part orchestral and part folk. After
this, Bush could never again be regarded as a quaint pop artist. Following
another brief tie-up with Peter Gabriel on the hit Don't Give Up, Bush took
an extended sabbatical to plot a follow-up album. In 1989 she returned with
THE SENSUAL WORLD, a startling musical cornucopia, in which she
experimented with various musical forms, even using a Bulgarian folk
troupe. The arrangements were as evocative and unusual as her choice of
instrumentation, which included uiliean pipes, whips, valiha, celtic harp,
tupan and viola. There was even a literary adaptation a là Wuthering
Heights, with Bush adapting Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's
ULYSSESfor the enticing The Sensual World. The album attracted the keen
attention of the high-brow rock press and Bush found herself celebrated as
one of the most adventurous and distinctively original artists of her era.
A variety of artists contributed on THE RED SHOES including Eric Clapton,
Prince, Jeff Beck, Trio Bulgarka and Gary Brooker.   

The Kick Inside
Kate BushTen years on, and celebrating its anniversary with a mid-price
re-release on CD, it's surprising how much of the teenage prodigy's first
(but surprisingly mature) LP still stands today. There are of course those
off-putting flighty vocal excesses of her youth and the odd embarrassingly
arty couplet like "Beelzebub is aching in my bellyo/My feet are heavy and
I'm rooted in my wellios", but the more restrained songs like Man With The
Child In His Eyes have hardly dated at all and can safely be played without
reaching for our revolvers. Then of course there's Wuthering Heights…  
- Ian Cranna
(Issue #21)(June 1988)

  
  
  
Never For Ever
Kate BushTHE KICK INSIDE and Lionheart, with their attendant hits like
WUTHERING HEIGHTS and Wow, had already elevated our Kate to some sanctified
place in English pop by 1980; now she was 21 and facing that difficult
third album time. Bush's stratagem, in NEVER FOR EVER (1987), was to get
herself some Serious Artistic Credibility. And, on one level, it worked
with the graceful inevitability of the nicer kind of dream: the musical
precocity that had blossomed all of five years earlier simply went on
growing, and her melodic gift proved itself more ravishing than ever, as
Blow Away and All We Ever Look For showed. The lyrical content, though, was
still a bit of a problem. Stabs at melodrama (Babooshka, Violin, Wedding
List) seemed overwrought, Delius was twee and Egypt trite. But some very
big themes were tackled, and not unsuccessfully. The mother's grief in Army
Dreamers and the nuclear dread in Breathing are each explored with a
trance-like blankness which conveys the essential sense of horror all the
more powerfully for being set in such chocolate box arrangements. Kate Bush
has occasionally excelled at glimpses of the barbed wire around the
nursery, the crow on the cradle, but without developing them into the sort
of convincing, consistent vision that music so completely realised as hers
finally needs. NEVER FOR EVER (1987), though, ranks with HOUNDS OF LOVE as
her most beguiling attempt.  
- Paul Du Noyer
(Issue #10)(July 1987)

The Sensual World
Kate BushRomping home a close second to the Blue Nile in the increasingly
competitive Studio Marathon stakes, Kate Bush's sixth album has finally
arrived almost exactly four years after her last, THE HOUNDS OF LOVE. "Each
record gets harder to make" may not sound like much of an excuse for being
so late either, but to judge from the fineness of detail and diversity of
influences Bush has compressed into the 40-odd minutes here, it's a
perfectly plausible one: THE SENSUAL WORLD is as highly wrought and deeply
thought as any album since the last by Peter Gabriel. 
Like Gabriel, Bush has been busy thinking up ways to incorporate more
exotic and atmospheric elements into her already broad and quirky rock
coalition. Unlike him, though, she has leaned less heavily on the obvious
source, Africa. The Uillean pipes (courtesy of Davey Spillane) which barge
brilliantly into the chorus of the album's opening, eponymous track are the
first of a number of surprise guests, of whom the all-woman Bulgarian folk
a cappella troupe, Trio Bulgarka, are the ones who stay longest and leave
the strongest impression. Their shrill, ghostly whoops and harmonies
decorate three of the tracks on side two: a pattery, Gabriel-esque
meditation on the ambiguous blessings of technology, in this case
computers, called Deeper Understanding; a heavily modified bluesy rocker,
Rockets Tail; and best of the lot, Never Be Mine, a tremulously Bushy
ballad with a beautifully wiggly interlace of keyboard motifs. 
While Bush's famously fey voice would probably be enough to hold the
disparate strands of THE SENSUAL WORLD together, the album takes its cue
and colouring too from the hypnotically sinuous sway of the pipes on the
title track. There are some strapping power chords to be despatched here
and there, most notably on Love And Anger, but the dominant mood is of
Oriental reverie, similar in feel to that achieved latterly by Japan. And
in fact the last track on side one, Heads We're Dancing, reproduces that
mysteriously sproingy bass sound favoured by Mick Karn. 
An analysis of its parts however doesn't really do justice to the boldness
of the album. Bush has taken on a lot of styles but THE SENSUAL WORLD
doesn't, thankfully, end up sounding simply clever or stylised. Which is
not to say that all the bridges she tries to build here stand up, but to
acknowledge that the imaginative effort and patience that went into their
design should guarantee Kate Bush's position in that peculiar class of her
own for some while yet.  
- Robert Sandall
(Issue #38)(November 1989)

  
The Red Shoes
Kate BushInitially somewhat shrill and unimpressive, THE RED SHOES improves
immeasurably after repeated plays over a long period of time, gaining a
solidity at odds with disparate musical strategies. Though it opens with
the unassuming, direct single Rubberband Girl—Bush lamenting her
inelasticity and finding some compensation in vocal bungee-jumping on the
coda—it soon finds its natural centre with And So Is Love, the first of
several tracks dealing, in an unfocused, woolly-mystical manner, with the
connections between love and the abstract, spiritual nature of creativity.
Eric Clapton chips in a few taut guitar stabs over a gentle keyboard pulse,
while Bush asks vague rhetorical questions: "And whatever happens/What
really matters?/It's all we've got/Isn't that enough?", that sort of thing.

It's her most religious album: "Your name is being called by sacred
things/That are not addressed nor listened to/Sometimes they blow
trumpets," she claims on Big Stripey Lie, a rhythmic sound-collage on which
the fiddling poltroon Nigel Kennedy contributes deft strokes. He's also on
Top Of The City, where Bush's Achilles Heel, her sheltered sensitivity, is
paradoxically her greatest strength: "I don't know if I'm closer to heaven,
but it looks like Hell down there". From anyone else this would seem a
blandly cynical acknowledgement of supposed urban spiritual barrenness, but
her very unworldliness gives it an odd authenticity. 
The same is almost true of Moments Of Pleasure, the closest the album comes
to old-style Kate Bush, with solo piano, string arrangement and whimsy
overload carrying a private lyric whose impenetrable references to "Teddy,
spinning in the chair at Abbey Road" and her mother's contention that
"Every old sock finds an old shoe", renders the song too solipsistic to
transmit beyond her immediate circle. 
Eat The Music is a jolly trifle which blends South American flavours,
courtesy of Justin Vali and Paddy Bush's rhythmic valiha guitars, with a
general township-jive bounce, as Kate stretches a frankly baffling
fruit/sex/music metaphor to snapping point. The ethnic styles seem corny
here, as opposed to the title track, which uses the valiha as the hypnotic
heart of an insistent rolling rhythm in which Paddy's "musical bow" adds
didgeridoo-like reverberation, and his whistles a Celtic jig flavour. 
It's the album's most fulfilled piece, and a more convincing application of
the spiritual theme than the flossier-headed notions —mainly courtesy of
George Gurdjieff—which litter Lily and The Song Of Solomon. Bush says in
the latter, "Don't want your bullshit/Just want your sexuality"—though she
seems to have an apparently boundless appetite for the former. 
Along with Clapton and Kennedy, there is a distinguished cast adding their
signatures to selected tracks. As before, The Trio Bulgarka add their
open-throat harmonic poignance to a number of songs, including the closing
YOU'RE THE ONE, on which Jeff Beck, tense as ever, solos and Procol Harum
organist Gary Brooker pours waves of whiter-shade-of-Hammond organ into the
chorus—so effectively that Bush is driven to quote a line from that most
evocative song. 
The most full-blooded collaboration of all is Why Should I Love You?,
co-arranged with Prince, who does most of the rhythm section and chips in
backing vocals along with The Trio Bulgarka and, er, Lenny Henry. In an
album dominated by the idea of "soul" as a creative force, this track comes
closest to the actuality of soul as a musical style. 
As a whole, THE RED SHOES is more musically varied than thematically, as
Bush's constant returning to the links between love, spirituality and
creativity becomes wearing. In compensation, there's a rich pan-global
tapestry woven here in which the textures and designs from distant cultures
are being used not for effect, but for the way they express an emotional
truth beyond mere words.  
- Andy Gill
(Issue #86)(November 1993)