Cloudbusting -- Kate Bush In Her Own Words

Blow Away

"Blow Away'' is a comfort for the fear of dying, and for those of us who believe that music is perhaps an exception to the Never for Ever rule. (1980, KBC 7)

So there's comfort for the guy in my band, as when he dies, he'll go ``Hi, Jimi!'' It's very tongue-in-cheek, but it's a great thought that if a musician dies, his soul will join all the other musicians' and a poet will join all the Dylan Thomases and all that. (1981, RM)

She mentions those people who you must've read about in the sunday papers who have been clinically dead for a few minutes and report walking a corridor to paradise.

None of those people are frightened by death anymore. It's almost something they're looking forward to. All of us have such a deep fear of death. It's the ultimate unknown, at the same time it's our ultimate purpose. That's what we're here for. So I thought this thing about the death-fear. I like to think I'm coming to terms with it, and other people are too. The song was really written after someone very special died. [Bill duffield, on the opening night of the tour.]

Although the song had been formulating before and had to be written as a comfort to those people who are afraid of dying, there was also this idea of the music, energies in us that aren't physical: art, the love in people. It can't die, because where does it go? It seems really that music could carry on in radio form, radio waves... There are people who swear they can pick up symphonies from Chopin, Schubert. We're really transient, everything to do with us is transient, except for these non-physical things that we don't even control... (1980, Zigzag)

I have just finished reading shakespeare's othello. in the scene just before othello kills desdemona, he says, ``put out the light/then put out the light.'' I was wondering if this means the same thing in ``blow away''

You're the first person in four years to pick up on this - so, thank you. (1984, KBC 16)

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