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(This article was taken from Andrew Marvick's The Garden.)
Len Brown's New Musical Express interview, November 12, 1988
[Edited by Andrew Marvick.]
Down at the old Bul' and Bush
Kate Bush and Yanka Rupkina sit on a bean-bag couch and sing to me, Bulgarian style; Rupkina bleating high and joyous above Bush's harmony.
Short but sweet, a brief musical meeting of East and West, it's the sort of sensual aural treat every philanthropist would wish to share with the world. Except that the World would have been pushed to fit in this studio broom cupboard off Upper Street, Islington.
We are talking here, my friends, about the power of music. Not "music to make megabucks," or "music to drop acid to," or "music to make you forget," but music that stimulates the pleasure senses and gently feeds emotions. We are talking Trio Bulgarka, those legendary Balkan vocal veterans--Rupkina, Stoyanka Boneva, and Eva Georgieva--who find themselves contributing to Kate Bush's first album in three years.
While a Beeb camera crew films the Trio--in technicolour national costume, laughing and chattering through Dva Kornie --for the Rhythms of the World series, I find myself closeted with the traditionally taciturn Kate Bush. She rarely agrees to interviews these days, and rarely agrees to interviews these days, and rarely allows outsiders to intrude on her studio work, yet here she is relaxed--all in black with long flames of hair--and glad to be back making music. Particularly with the Bulgarians.
Her Bulgarian obsession stems from her brother Paddy, multi-instrumentalist and student of ethnic musics and musicians.
"He had this tape of Bulgarian voices, three years ago," says Kate, "just when we were finishing Hounds of Love. It was the most incredible thing I've ever heard, beautiful. So I decided I wanted to work with them in some form in the future...But it takes me a long time to digest ideas - even if I read a book it maybe won't come out into a song until four years later. So I wrote a track with a choir-synthesiser sound hoping that if we could get to work with them, they would take the weight of the song from the synthesisers."
She made contact with Trio Bulgarka through their British producer/promoter/friend/Bragg-associate Joe Boyd of Hannibal Records, who released the Balkana compilation in '87 and the Trio's own The Forest is Crying LP earlier this year. Two weeks ago Kate visited Bulgaria and returned with the Trio to record two tracks in London.
"I was very worried because chances were it might not work," she admits, particularly because they're so good. It might just sound like we'd bunged them in a Western track. I really didn't want them to be dragged down to my level. I was worried that they wouldn't want to get involved with Western pop music, because it has a bad name and a lot of people are initially scared of it...I don't blame them at all.
"We had to get a special arranger (Dmitr Penev) because the beauty is not just in the voices but also in the ancient arrangements. He was brilliant, it couldn't have been better, the way we managed to communicate exactly what we wanted despite language problems...It sounds corny, but I do feel very honoured."
The raw results of these sessions which I hear by accident, sound impressive. Any fears that Bush might be dabbling in some sort of Bulgarian "Duck Rock" or even Duck Rock or even Graceland territory are dispelled by the true spirit of the recording; the emotion of the Trio's traditional singing is beautifully complimented by Kate's distinctive vocal. The Trio sing Bulgarian words, so perhaps the Azanian chorals of Gabriel's Biko would be a closer reference point, although although there's not quite such a potent message here.
"You're not distracted by words," suggests Kate, "all you're picking up are the emotions that they're translating to you. It feels like very deep information. There's one point when Yanka's belting it out, really fantastic, yet she's singing something like, 'Marco sits down with his mother and has some bread and jam'!"
That's one of the strange things about Bulgarian music. You find yourself sitting, listening, awe-struck, lump-throated, only to find you've been moved to tears by a song about a bumble-bee or a mosquito playing the bagpipes or dark-eyed Yanka's marigolds ("I mislaid my kavals by your gates last night, Elenke, did you see them?"). Whatever they sing about it always comes over as powerful, spine-tinglingly heartfelt (particularly their lament for the Bulgarian Robin Hood Indje Voivode). Just listen and it's easy to understand why Kate Bush and others have been drawn to this music, this antithesis of producer pop for inspiration.
"If they sing Strati Angelaki to me I can't take it," confesses Kate, "I have to leave the room, it just makes me cry and there are very few things musically that affect me like that."
Rather than increasing the difficulties, the language barrier between Kate and the Trio seems to have promoted their personal and working relationship.
"I've been so excited doing it and it's so lovely for me to work with women as well, a tremendous difference. And because we can't talk intellectually - we can't talk about the state of Bulgaria or even what the shops are like in London--our whole communication is totally emotional.
"It's an incredible experience, the warmth they give you, you don't often get it from Westerners. Here it's very much a communication of 'I have this, you don't have that' or 'I don't have that and you do,' whereas they want to know what kind of person you are...you can feel them probing your heart."
Bush has, of course, experimented before with global ideas on odd tracks: Egypt, Kashka from Baghdad, the aboriginally-inspired The Dreaming, Greek rhythms and portentous use of Bulgarian teppan (drum) on Jig of Life. Here, the Bulgarian singers are playing a more central role than previous ethnic musicians (Esmail Sheikh, Donal Lunny, Liam O'Flynn, Rolf Harris), employed to compliment Kate's attempts to create lasting pop rather than quick cash.
It's been a strange experience for Trio Bulgarka, who are more used to the familiar string drones of the gadulka or the strummed tambura or the piping gaida than to Bush-style pop experimentalism. They seem, however, to have adapted with remarkable ease.
"Kate's very popular in Bulgaria," says Yanka Rupkina through interpreter Borimira Nedeva, "young people like her very much. She sings emotionally. There's lots of lovely thinking in her writing and she's a very good musician. It is our first time with such a famous singer, and we hope we'll work with her in the future, if we haven't caused her too many worries."
There's the distinct, appealing prospect of Bush (in full Bulgarian gear?) performing live with the Trio; it's been donkeys since the Theatre of Kate was last seen onstage (benefits aside) but, she says, "if anything could make me tour again it would be the people in this studio".
In the meantime we should be glad she'.s back in the studio; in the 80s she's proved to be one of the few artists with the courage to disappear for years and return with original, quality creations. (Running Up That Hill was voted number 13 in NME's "Top 150 Singles of All Time," February 1987). After her initial late '70s/early '80s burst of energy, it was three years before Hounds of Love followed The Dreaming and, The Whole Story singles-compilation aside, it's been even longer this time.
"I find it very difficult, nothing comes easy to me. I don't know if I'm a perfectionist, although people say that about me. I just find it harder each time to write songs. Ten songs doesn't sound many, but you want each to say something about you and who you are at this point in time; to say something new. But the more you put into something the harder it becomes.
"Making an album for me is very much a psychological process; it's very painful and it gets more painful each time. I think it's hard for people to understand because it seems so silly, an album's such a trivial thing, really...I've had to accept a lot of things about myself for this album that have been hard for me. Every time I kid myself that an album will take six weeks, but once I get in there and get halfway through it's too big for me. I think, 'My God, what am I doing I doing in the middle of this?'"
Well, I know what I'm doing in the middle of all this: enjoying myself, listening to Kate, to the music, to Bulgarian chattering. So ears aroused and with a Balkan spring in my step, I leave Kate with the Trio, wondering to myself how all this works. How it's possible to unite east and West, ancient and modern, while having to overcome cultural and linguistic differences. I express my surprise at the power of non-verbal communication to the translator Borimira, half-expecting a lengthy treatise on glasnost, perestroika or One Worldism. But she replies simply: "Emotions are another world's language"
Ooh, I wish I'd said that. Kate Bush's fifth [sic] album, Yanka Rupkina's first British solo album, and BBC-2's Rhythms of the World programme will all appear in the New Year.
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"The pull and the push of it all..." - Kate Bush
Reaching Out
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Marvick - Hill
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Mapes
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Grepel - Love-Hounds
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