Cloudbusting -- Kate Bush In Her Own Words

Producing

: As I've gradually gone through the business I've become much more involved in other areas. And I've found that when I worked in the studio, there we all these areas that were connected to the song that were changing it in a way perhaps that I hadn't intended when I was initially writing the song. And I felt that a natural progression for me was to get involved in production, so that then I could take much more control over the whole thing and therefore end up with a result that I felt was my expression, rather than an indirect expression through lots of other people. And again that was a gradual thing, where I went into co-production, and finding that to be pleasing and quite successful, went into producing solely.

Since then you've built a studio in your home, can you tell me about that?

: That's right, again that was another sort of realization on the last album. That as I producing and getting closer to the whole thing, I found that the way I'm working now is so experimental, it takes me a lot of time, I like to play around with ideas. And in a commercial studio it's costing so much money every hour that I found that was becoming anti-productive, I was so nervous, because I shouldn't be taking so much time playing around with things, that it was stopping me trying things. And we felt the only way really to cope with this was to have our own studio and then also I'd be able to write in the studio and just do as much as I could there and make it all part of the same environment. (1985, Good Rockin Tonight)

: Artists say that they are the best equipped to produce themselves, but there's quite a bit of pressure from those who say the artist is exactly the wrong person to produce. I think that makes anyone very wary of taking that on. You get labelled with all kinds of heavy things like ``self-indulgent'' and ``egotistic'' I think you have to be quite brave to make that leap.

: At the same time, I don't like the idea of people saying this is the way you write music - this is the way you produce a record. I feel that ``art'' is one of those things that should have absolutely no rules at all. In fact, the rules that are already laid down I feel like deliberately breaking, to try what they say you can't do. I think really the approach is something you continually experiment with - you try and find the best way of expressing something well. (1985, Now)