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Date: Sat, 27 Sep 86 16:43 PDT
From:
IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Subject: KBC News
A new KBC Newsletter was received by IED today, and he forthwith relays news of the utmost importance to the world at large.
...
The third piece of interesting news is that further mention (albeit still no confirmation) of the proposed EMI compilation, "Kate Bush's Greatest Hits", or "The Best of Kate Bush", has been made in the new Newsletter; and the possibility has once more been acknowledged that a new song might be included in such a release.
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 86 11:32 PST
From:
IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU
Subject: KT LP
Finally got hold of a UK pressing of "The Whole Story". Very interesting effect it has, the selection and sequencing of songs from throughout Kate's career. IED tried to imagine the impression an uninitiated listener would receive from this collection, and decided he/she would get a clear idea of Kate's stylistic range, but not a very good sense of the context in which the style developed. For one thing, the songs go from early to late and back again, the sequence apparently determined by sound dynamics, so unless the listener studies the LP notes carefully, he/she is likely to get a distorted idea of the sounds that Kate herself designed.
But most confusing of all, IED thinks, would be the subject matter of the songs. No lyric sheet is included, so (as most L-Hs will be able to appreciate) a new listener couldn't really hope to decipher more than two thirds or so of the lyrics, even after prolonged listening. And since greatest hits packages are designed primarily for the casual music fan, it seems unlikely that this compilation will do much to edify the public about the REASONS for the sounds within Kate's songs.
The KT symbol is not hidden within the cover art, but etched into the vinyl. The inside of the gatefold sleeve is bordered at the top by four photos: one from Doug's favourite photo session (the pink leotard shots), one from the live "James and the Cold Gun", one from the "Sat In Your Lap" single cover session (a slightly different shot than the one which appears on the 7"), and the last from the 1985 Guido Herrera (sp.?) sessions.
Along the bottom of the inside is a long row of tiny colour photos of "all" of the single covers (actually, of course, just all of the UK covers), the LPs, plus The Single File, the live EP, and the three videos released to date. The back cover features a JCB sunset silhouette photo of Kate as Peter Reich sitting at the controls of Ken Hill's cloudbuster. A video is to be made available to accompany the LP.
From: Neil Calton <seismo!mcvax!vd.rl.ac.uk!nbc>
Date: Thu, 20
Nov 86 16:03:23 GMT
Subject: TWS reviews
Here are the opinions of a few critics on the new album.
Kate Bush 'The Whole Story' (EMI Records KBTV1) ***** (Sounds top rating!)
Over the last nine years and five albums, Kate Bush, the most beautiful woman-child in Kent, has matured into quite the most sensual, expressive and creative artist this country can now boast. And this 12 track compilatin of hits and near misses more than adequately documents her evolution, from the often clumsy and overreaching ambition which marred her early works to the stunning and immaculate conception of her more recent 'Hounds of Love' material.
Though there were great gaping flaws within the fabric of the perhaps over-adventurous Bush albums, up to and including 'The Dreaming', she at least had the sense always to release the best and most important cuts as singles. And although I would have liked to see both 'December Will Be Magic Again' and the gloriously sweeping 'The Big Sky' included here, it's hard to argue against a selection which spans from the quite overt sensuality of 'Hounds of Love' to the harsh rhythms and intense delivery of 'Sat In Your Lap', and from the cautionary tale of 'Army Dreamers' to her best work to date, 'Cloudbusting'.
That she felt the need to restructure her greatest commercial success surely reveals that Kate Bush is only too well aware of her own ever-improving abilities. Though the new 'Wuthering Heights' is the same at base as the original, her new vocal soars far above the comparatively pedestrian if novel squealing of the old. So much so that to balance the added hunger and bite of her own performance, the guitar which counterpoints her at climax has been pushed forwards most emphatically in the mix.
All we can do now is hope that Kate Bush will continue to grow in the way that her past career suggests she might. And give thanks that her new single, the subtle yet insistent 'Experiment IV', also featured here, implies that she will.
Roger Holland
Published by Spotlight Publications Ltd.
---
Somewhere up in the polar wastes of Lapland, we may be sure that Santa's elfish underlings are, even as we speak, hefting gigantic boxes of Kate Bush greatest hits albums, ready for Xmas despatch. Their labours will not go unappreciated.
Despite Kate's fondness for lyrics that unkinder commentators are apt to describe as whimsical hippie tripe, her gift for melody (Army Dreamers, Man With The Child In His Eyes) and ingeniously arranged melodramas (Running Up That Hill) are enough to rank her as a supreme talent in English pop. What's often overlooked, as well, is her readiness to take greater risks than most stars in her position - even where the results come rather unstuck (Sat in Your Lap, The Dreaming).
Latest single Experiment IV, and a new and more powerful version of Wuthering Heights, sit along with Wow, Babooshka and so on to render The Whole Story an essential collection for anyone who can forgive a line like "I pine a lot/ I find the lot/ Falls through without you" when it comes in a gorgeous tune. **** (= excel-lent)
Paul Du Noyer
Q is published monthly by EMAP Metro.
An Intelligent, concise compilation which draws out the con-sistency behind Bush's aparent flights of fancy. Nine years of hit-making show her progressive spiritual and philosphical dissertations to be rooted both in a strong pop sense and music that is extraordinarily fundamental. It includes the obvious -'Wuthering Heights', 'Running Up That Hill', 'Babooshka' - and a surprise: 'The Dreaming', an aural equivalent of Nic Roeg's 'Wal-kabout.'
Jon Savage
From: Neil Calton <nbc@vd.rl.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 86 17:23:22
GMT
Subject: TWS reviews
Here are a couple more English reviews of 'The Whole Story'. The reviewers (those below and in my earlier posting) are remarkably consistent in their verdicts - which seem to be that (1) Kate Bush is a major artist, (2) the record is a good summary of her career to date, and (3) the early songs now appear (to them) as twee or whimsical in comparison to her latest compositions.
... Kate Bush ... whose album 'The Whole Story' neatly encapsulates her 12 best single releases, including the current hit "Experiment IV".
When "Wuthering Heights" soared with such ease to No. 1 in the spring of 1978, many observers either imagined or hoped that the success of the pouting 19 year-old girl with the caterwauling vocal style and preposterous dance routines would be a short-lived novelty. But despite some of her more offputting mannerisms - the babyish gurgling in "Army Dreamers" and the strident screeching in "Sat in your Lap" - she has developed as a writer and performer of some depth. Despite the big production job, "Wow" demonstrated a pleasing sense of irony while "Cloudbusting" and "Running Up That Hill" revealed an increasingly sophisticated sense of rhythm, melody and narrative awareness.
David Sinclair
It was Mark Smith of top pop group (sic) The Fall who, in a typical broadcast of dedicated antitrendiness, announced that vegetarianism helped one leave the trolley of normality behind. Something to do with vital enzymes only being available from the flesh of murdered livestock.
Kate Bush is a vegetarian. And if Mark's MESsy (sic) theory is true, then it might account for the large quotient of strangeness coiled inside the songs and sounds that make up 'The Whole Story'.
Of course, being signed to EMI from the age of 14 and getting career guidance from zonked-out ex-Pink Floyd guitarists can't have helped. Listen to the early string-sugared meanderings of 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Wow' (the latter now sounds like a Spitting Image parody) and hear how despite the MORish musical arrangers and the synthetic touch of session musicians, Kate sounds like she'd been talking to the same ghosts as Ian Curtis. The marketing executives still saw her as a Carole King for the Brothers In Arms, an Elkie Brooks who'd soon sort herself out.
But Kate just got curiouser and curiouser. Rejecting the saccharin sheen of pet poodle producers, she took total control, coming up with a whiplashed meditation on fame ("Succeed and heaven is hell/Succeed and hell is heaven") called 'Sat in Your Lap'. 'The Whole Story' really stems from there, the early inclusions being just a way of making this a Christmas-targetted hits collection.
From this point on, Kate Bush began to build on the fact that she belonged nowhere. She smiled at Terry Wogan while shifting buckets full of compact discs to the Strait generation. She dispensed with the walking-stick guitar solo and the comfortably melodious fretless basses and began using odd combinations of samples, sirens, bodhrans and banjos. Listen to last year's 'Hounds of Love' LP. There are three tracks from it here. Kate Bush was and is a law unto herself.
And the voice just gets bigger and darker, climbing from the floor to the ceiling in the space of a line. 'Wuthering Heights' has a re-recorded vocal which is almost evil in its intensity. The single 'Experiment IV' is also included, proving that Kate is still missing the vital enzymes which help make you as sane as Mark Smith.
'The Whole Story' is big, black subversive pop, more useful and more enjoyable than the constipated jangling of a hundred and one little lads with big mouths and even bigger clothes allowances. Such people are not worth a carrot. Meat or no meat, Kate Bush is streets ahead.
John McCready
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 86 12:35:03 EST
From:
drukman%UMass.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU (Jonathan S. Drukman)
Subject:
ANOTHER Whole Story Review
Here is yet ANOTHER review of "The Whole Story" this time from
- the weekly arts/entertainment paper distributed free around UMass Amherst and probably the whole five-college area.
Kate Bush: The Whole Story (EMI-America) (**** 1/2)
This most extraordinary British performer has finally risen above cult status in America, and here is an excellent introduction to her melodic, engrossing and often haunting music. Each of the 12 songs was a substantial hit in England, where this kind of innovative, imaginative songwriting and singing is much more apt to gain airplay than over here. From a somewhat re-worked "Wuthering Heights," her gorgeous breakout 1977 hit, through three tracks from HOUNDS OF LOVE (including "Running Up That Hill," the meaty, beaty tune that finally opened eyes on this side of the Atlantic), one can trace her startling musical development. Songs like "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" and the apocalyptical "Breathing" are pop music at the cutting edge, with a rare sophisication and intelligence. Also included is the previously unreleased "Experiment IV" to make this a must-have for the collector as well.
(by David Sokol)
The Valley Advocate, December 15 1986
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 87 14:15:16 AST
From: Nancy Everson <everson@spca.bbn.com>
Subject: The Whole Story reviewed in Digital Audio 4/87
I was just going through my music collection, trying to decide what I want to put on a "party" tape (good for listening in Walk-person type things), when the mailman came. He brought, among other things, the May issue of Digital Audio and Compact Disc Review, despite the fact my subscription expired in February and I didn't renew it. I started flipping through the magazine, and I opened it right to a page with KT staring out from the cover of "The Whole Story" - with a review. I thought I would share this with my fellow love-hounds. This is copied here without permission, and written by a set of initials, BJM - Brian J. Murphy. The cd gets a 10 (out of 10) for performance, and an 8 for sound quality.
Pop singers don't come any more original than Kate Bush, the highlights of whose career appear on this disc.
Kate Bush has been at the top of British pop charts since 1978 - a tribute to the British audience's ability to understand and appreciate the original and unusual. Americans are still relatively unaware of her, but Kate Bush is rapidly gaining a following here. In its various formats "The Whole Story" has cracked the top-50 album charts as this review goes to press. It deserves to do very well. So what IS the whole story.
It's really quite simple: Kate Bush is unlike anything anyone has heard in pop before. She is so original she almost defies description. Her songwriting and her performances fit into none of the cozy pop music categories which writers like to use to describe artists.
Who else but Kate Bush could record a song like "Wuthering Heights"? [Does anyone volunteer to send him a note that Pat Benatar did a version of it??] This strong opening track is sung with a kind of hysterical passion at the upper reaches of her vocal range for a highly charged performance. Then there is "Breathing," a no-nukes song with an erotic sub-text woven skillfully through it. Bush's performance is stunning - and she makes her point.
"The Man With The Child In His Eyes" is just as stunning, a show-stopper worth repeated listening. The song blends a romantic, erotic component with a performance of such breathless innocence that it totally disarms the listener. Last year she had her first American hit, "Hounds of Love," - have baying hounds ever sounded more fetching?
This compendium also contains "Babooshka," with it's [their typo, not mine] ironic sense of fun, an acid comment on the male ego entitled "Wow," and the unusual "Cloudbursting." [again, their mistake] On the latter she caresses every note with a breathily sweet vocal while, in the background, what began as a beat played softly on strings takes on a strident, military flavor. To begin a song as a ballad and end it as a march is the sort of unusual trick you learn to expect when listening to Kate Bush.
She is served well by the technical quality of this CD, though some tracks sound somewhat compressed - but that's to be expected of a compendium spanning eight years of recordings. Despite a rather sharp edge to some selections, the sound overall is pleasing and room-filling, as are Ms. Bush's talents.
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 87 22:49:58 PST
From:
ed191-bq%violet.Berkeley.EDU@berkeley.edu (Taylor)
Subject: Different
Single Mix of "Sat.." in The Whole Story
Actually, that should be "The same old album mix of 'Sat in Your Lap' on 'The Whole Story' rather than the different single mix."
As I mentioned at some point earlier, this "singles collection" album is supposed to be a collection of the SINGLES original master tapes of the single mixes. Although Kate claimed at one point that none of the singles were mixed again for their single releases, this is definitely not true (at her own admission) about the mix of "Sat in your Lap" - the original single, which came out in the spring of 1981, had drums that were virtually free of echo, which gave them a really elastic, "thop-thop-y" sound. She was originally going to leave the song entirely off "The Dreaming," but was convinced by friends (and her fans?) to put it on. So she re-mixed it, giving the drums much more echo and moving the voice up in the mix. As a result, (I think) the song on the album is totally different sounding than that on the single. But the versi on "TWS" is the album version, which is sort of disapting, since my "SIYL" single warped like lasagna a couple of years ago, and I was hoping for a clear version of it. Oh well.
Does anyone else notice this? Doug? Andrew?
Hugh
From: Scott Telford <s.telford@ed.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 1994
15:52:58 GMT
Subject: TWS 94 VideoCD
There's a review of this (and a Queen VideoCD) in the UK magazine "Computer Buyer" this month - it has a detail of a still from the RutH video on the cover. The reviewer doesn't seem to be aware that the Hammersmith Wow video was Kate's idea 8-)
From: dkastens@titan.rz.Uni-Osnabrueck.DE (Dirk Kastens)
Date: Wed, 2
Nov 1994 08:59:31 +0100
Subject: The Whole Story '94 CD-ROM
I don't know if this was mentioned on love-hounds before, because I'm not on this list anymore, but I thought it could be of some interest.
Taken from CD-ROM magazine, Vol.1 No 3, October 1994
by Paul Nesbitt
When a soft-focus Kate Bush and her doppelgaenger rise from an exotic pool of liquid passion to begin a high-pitched and hysterical tale of scorched jealousy based on the Bronte pot-boiler, you can suddenly recall why Katie was such an overnight sensation. Wuthering heights is still an extraordinary song and Bush's astonishing warble combined with her Home Counties gothic princess persona was a heady audio-visual cocktail. The superly-encoded VideoCD underlines just how attuned Bush was to the then embryonic medium of rock videos, helped in no small part by her training in modern dance. Indeed, the simplest videos in which a soft-focus Kate whirls und wuthers in a lovingly-lit room are invariably the best to watch.
Less successful are the plot-heavy videos for some of her more leaden tracks, such as Cloudbusting and Experiment IV, which feature celebrity chums like Dawn French and Hugh Laurie to no great effect.
Overall this is a reasonable testament to one of the most original artists to emerge in the late 1970s, and is proof that there is no substitute for good songwriting. However, Kate could do with learning a few new modern dance steps.
One gripe, though. The whole package was woefully short on any background information, even omitting to tell you in what year each track was recorded or the album from which it was taken. For twenty quid a throw, consumers have every right to expect a little more effort on the presentation front.
------------
Track listing:
Wuthering heights; Cloudbusting; The man with the child in his eyes; Breathing; Wow; Hounds of love; Running up that hill; Army dreamers; Sat in your lap; Experiment IV; The Dreaming; Babooshka; The Big Sky; The Sensual World; Love & Anger; This woman's work; Rubberband girl; Moments of pleasure;
Requires: DV cart for CD-i, MPEG card for PC.
Price: L 19.99
Contact: PMI 071 486 4488
Encoding: Good
written by Love-Hounds
compiled and edited
by
Wieland
Willker
Sept 1995 June 1996