Cloudbusting -- Kate Bush In Her Own Words

Sexuality/Sensuality

But she wasn't so happy about it when she was released on the world a year ago with the smash hit number `` Wuthering Heights'' and was immediately hailed as a sex symbol.

That worried me very much. I did not want people to start looking at me just as a face and a body, rather than a person who was presenting music.

As long as the ``sex symbol'' tag doesn't get in the way of that then I'm very happy to be called one. (1979, Call Me Sexy)

I was reading in the guardian, [Inaudible] and it said [??? Sex ????] voyeurs.

I don't know, it's a bit heavy. I don't know. I guess, well I think that really very flattering. And maybe I do, maybe I do. I'm probably quite calculating behind my creativity, yeah.

But if you did, do you think it's fair?

Is anything fair? I mean when I write a song [Inaudible] particular audience. When I write I write the song. And I'm involved in it and I don't think commercially or anything. But you do sort of aim [Inaudible]

That's very nice [Inaudible] in the guardian.

Yeah, I didn't read that. [Laughs] (1979, Personal Call)

All I want to ask you is how does it feel to be a sex symbol overnight?

Ooo! I don't know. Tell me. [Both laugh]

Do you feel that you are a sex symbol?

No, I don't at all. In fact now I feel a lot more worried about how I look then I ever have done, because of all this emphasis on the way I look. Because I'm performing I do have a very different way of looking when I'm quite normal.

You must agree that certain of your tracks are a little bit, should we say, erotic?

Ooo! Shall we? [Laughs] Yeah, I guess so but what's wrong with that?

I wondered if you felt that you were a sex symbol.

If people want to label me that way, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm not a sex symbol. It's very flattering for me to think that people even consider that but I obviously I have errowssements and emotions as other people do and I just happen to put them in my songs.

I see. (1979, personal call)

I don't deliberately try to be sexy when I perform. I just concentrate on getting as much emotion and feeling into it as I can.

If that's the way people interpret it, I'm flattered.

I can feel myself switching on in front of an audience. It's a very physical thing. I get the most fantastic rush. (1979, Wow! What Smuthering Tights)

I didn't want to be seen as a ``sex kitten'' because I feel there is something in my music to be taken seriously. I like to think there is some kind of message there. I don't think I would be taken as seriously otherwise.

Sure, I think it's very much an expression of the things I see and the things I fear. My work is how I go about expressing those feelings, directing my energies. (1983, Music Express)

You suffered a fate in the early goings of your career of being somewhat of a pin-up girl in the british pop mags. [Kate laughs]. How did you deal with that?

I think what worried me was that it was going to stop people taking my music seriously. I've always found it very complimentary if people said that they found me attractive. And my worry is really that it would get in the way of my music. Its not that, um... I find that so much of a problem as...as if people wouldn't accept my music. But I don't think that that has been a problem. I think people do seem to accept my music for its sake.

And does your sexuality have a role in your music?

Well I think that's something I find very confusing because I think that the essence of all art is sensuality. And sexuality, I mean I don't suppose I understand it fully, but I always tend to think that that's something that's projected. And that sensuality is really were art is at. It's a much more subtle form of expression. (1985, MuchMusic)

Don't you think Art is a tremendous sensual-sexual expression? I feel that energy often... the driving force is probably not the right way to put it.

Whether or not her speculation about the nature of art is on the money, she made her own experience of the creative process quite clear with the cover of Never for Ever. A cornucopia of fantastic and real, beautiful and vile creatures -- the products of her imagination -- is shown swirling our from beneath her skirt. At the time, thinking about this and the steamy, masturbatory atmosphere of many of the songs she wrote in her teens such as The man with the child in his eyes and Saxophone Song, she said:

It's not such an open thing for women to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it. I can't understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful... Physical masturbation, it's a feeling so bottled up you have to relieve it, as if you were crying. (1989, Q)

---

Gaffaweb / Cloudbusting / Subjects / Sexuality / Sensuality