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Bush Is A Sex Kitten
by Mark Mehler
Romantic moves on grassy English moors
Kate is a remarkably self-assured, soft-spoken but articulate teenager. Is America ready for her?
She is 19 yeaars old, is a major recording star in Europe, and has a physical presence that makes grown men cry. Her name is Kate Bush, and someday you will be hearing from her in America.
Her single, "Wuthering Heights," based on the Emily Bronte novel of the same name, rocketed to Number One in Great Britain and stayed there for four weeks. Her album, The Kick Inside, was released on Harvest Records in America last spring. Sales were not especially strong, but Kate's American label has apparently made a long-term commitment to make her a big seller in this country.
On a recent publicity tour of the US, Kate spoke of her childhood in southeast London. She was exposed to music very early, as her two older brothers played in an Irish traditional band.
By age 11, Kate was hammering out basic melodies on the piano. A couple of years later, she began putting poems she had learned in school together with those melodies. By age 16, she had signed a recording contract with EMI in Europe.
That contract came about because Dave Gilmour, guitarist for Pink Floyd, personally funded a studio session to allow Kate to cut her first professional demo. The demo impressed EMI to the extent that the label signed Kate Bush immediatey.
For the next three years, Kate honed her talent, supplementing music lessons with mime and modern dance instruction. Kate feels the three- eyar wait was essential to her growth as an artist.
"The company's decision not to release any product was based on the long-term," she says. "The freedom was good. I was under no pressure to record or write." When producer Andrew Powell became free last summer, the time was finally right for Kate to enter the studio.
Her music is highly evocative; very English-sounding. Kate explains that most of the compositions on her new LP stem from simple chord progressions, that "dictate the mood" of each song. Her quirky voice and nubile posture help conjure up English moors and star-crossed lovers.
Kate insists that her posters, which picture her in a skin-tight sweater that not-so-subtly accents her nipples, are not an attempt to exploit her as a sex kitten. Kate prefers to think that the image is one of "romance."
Whatever the image, in normal conversation she is soft-spoken, articulate, and remarkably self-assured for a teenager. This summer, she and her new band will be performing throughout Europe in support of the album. Kate hopes to return to America when America is as ready for her music as it is for her body.
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"The pull and the push of it all..." - Kate Bush
Reaching Out
is a
Marvick - Hill
Willker -
Mapes
Fitzgerald-Morris
Grepel - Love-Hounds
Presentation