To the Reaching Out (Interviews) Table of Contents
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the Reaching Out (Interviews) Table of Contents
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 89 10:18 PST
From:
IED0DXM%OAC.UCLA.EDU@mitvma.mit.edu
Subject: The October 21, 1989 Melody
Maker interview
Sorry, folks, IED sent this in a few days ago but for some reason (no doubt an error of IED's) it never showed up. So here it is again. Note once again that IED's comments are always enclosed in brackets <>, so anyone who doesn't want to read them can just skip over them. Anything in parentheses () is part of the original published text.
The Language of Love
by Steve Sutherland
With her Sensual World LP being hailed as one of this year's best and the single of the same name still high in the charts <This was already untrue at the time this interview was published>, Kate Bush celebrates her triumphant return with Steve Sutherland.
An hour before she tells me I have a lovely energy and just about makes my year, she apologises for keeping me waiting. "I just had to have a fag," she says, dogging a butt in the ashtray. "I was just dying for one." for one."
Something isn't right here. I mean, I don't know who I thought Kate Bush would be when I walked into the downstairs room of Durrant's Hotel where she is drinking tea and, but I didn't think Kate Bush would smoke.
I think perhaps I was expecting her to be like Emma Thompson, a woman whose precocious talent has been critically downplayed because it springs from a privileged background rather than one of strife or suffering; a woman not so much other -worldly as cocooned from the weird old world for her own safety and sanity.
I think I still expected to meet a hippy nymph despite the evidence of my ears. Sitting in the foyer under the influence of her new LP, watching the first, solitary autumn leaf blow in off the street onto the Axminster, and reading symbolism into the American photographer asking for the price labels to be removed from the olde worlde mementoes on show in the Regency cabinets, I must have ignored the fact that only Prince has been more consistently intriguing <More? More ??>, more exuberantly experimental, more willing to take risks for the sake of pure music in the Eighties. Only the pneumatic Purple Rain pumped blood faster than Hounds of Love, only Around the World in a Day repatterned the embroidery of pop with the same haughty disregard for convention as The Sensual World, her seventh LP if you her seventh LP if you count the greatest hits compilation,
I think I thought Kate Bush would be Green and ozone-friendly--all ballet shoes and Laura Ashley frocks. The St. Michael's blouse and slacks, the tiny navy socks and no shoes, the Benson & Hedges freaked me out.
I think I thought of Kate Bush as a precious oasis in a tarnished world, a pearl cast before the swinish hordes. I gues I forgot Kate Bush is a genius.
"I think most people tend to think of me as the weird Wuthering Heights singer--that is definitely the image that's stuck with most people, which I find extraordinary because it's...so long ago."
She laughs and, when she laughs, her cheeks dimple like a Disney chipmunk.
"Extraordinary is a very good word, I think. I don't know why people are still keen on...I don't know why people bother with me."
Really?
"Really."
She's so small, it't extraordinary.
It took Kate Bush four years to make The Sensual World, and we've been given an hour to talk about it. Great.
I think about telling Kate how surprised I am she's so small, or how shocked I am she smokes, but time is not on my side so I decide, instead, to tell her how delighted I am that she's come to the conclusion that the past and the future aren't beyond changing. The album sounds so optimistic in an era when absolutely everything appears to be falling apart.
<Kate naturally loves this interpretation, but the fact is that the album is certainly as loaded with dark and pessimistic images and ideas as it is with optimistic ones. In IED's opinion Sutherland has swotted up on what Kate has been saying recently, and is now rephrasing a lot of her own preferences in conversation with her, as though they were his own ideas rather than borrowed ones, precisely in order to ingratiate Kate. It works, and it may even be a good idea, since the other methods of engaging her in conversation have seldom produced great publishable material.>
"Oh, thank you! Thank you so much! That's really how I wanted it to be but, talking to a lot of friends and that, they feel it's a dark album."
I didn't think that at all...
"Oh, great."
...I thought some of the situations were dark, but the way they're resolved is optimistic. <What about the way Heads, We're Dancing is "resolved"? What about the way Deeper Understanding is "resolved"? What about the way Never Be Mine is "resolved"?>
"Oh, that's great. Thank you. Yes. That's really great. I'm so pleased you heard it like that. You see, for a lot of people it's so complicated to listen to, and that worries me, because I like the idea of people being able to listen to it easily and...uh...I don't want to confuse people but, for some people, it's very hard for them to even take it in, let alone sort of get anything out of it.
"I do think art should be simple, you see. It shouldn't be complicated, and I think, in some ways, this has come across a bit complicated." <This is one of Kate's "new" ideas--opinions which she has not really made prior to 1989, but which she has been repeating in multiple interviews since the release of the new album. IED finds it highly intriguing, because it is so vague and so patently at odds with the way her own art has always been--and continues to be--made.>
Maybe that's because, for me, the album's about relationships--the relationship between language and emotion, the relationship between language and music, the relationship between emotion and music and how all this expresses, or more crucially fails to express, the relationship between people. And relationships, as we all know, are never ever easy.
"How interesting. Could you give me an example?"
Well, in Love and Anger you say, "It's so deep I don't think that I can speak about it," as if language betrays your aims, and then you go on to say, "We could be like two strings beating/Speaking in sympathy," which suggests that music, rather than language, comes closest to expressing our emotions.
"Yeah! Actually, Love and Anger was an incredibly difficult song for me to write and, when people ask me what it's about, I have to say I don't know because it's not really a thought-out thing. It was so difficult for me to write that: in some ways, I think, <it's> about the process of writing the song: I can't find the words; I don't know what to say. This thing of a big, blank page, you know: it's so big...It's like it doesn't have edges around it, you could just start anywhere."
She studies her socks for a moment.
"Yes...um...I don't think I was consious of it, but it's something I'm aware of when writing songs. <Has IED missed something here, or did Kate just contradict the first half of this sentence in the second half?> There's such a lot you need to say through words. And it's a beautiful thing, language: actually being able to put words together and say something...maybe say two things in one line. But, like you say, it misses the mark so often."
You created your own language, too, don't you? It seems when you're at your most sexual, your most emotional, you emit...the only word I can find for it is noises, but that sounds too crude. Your "Mmh yes" on The Sensual World (the most heavenly sound ever on Top of the Pops ) and your "Do-do-do-do-do" in Heads, We're Dancing are like cries that language has deserted you or, more positively, an attempt on your behalf to merge words and music, to create a new emotional language from a combination of meaning and sound. I remember you used to go "Wow!" when words failed you. It shivers me. It's thrilling.
"Well, I think that's a lovely thing to say...Yes, often words are sounds for me. I get a sound and I throw it in a song and I can't turn it into a word later because it's actually stated itself too strongly as a sound. Like, in Love and Anger, the bit that goes 'Mmh, mmh, mmh' was there instantly and, in itself, it's really about not being able to express it differently. Do you know what I mean?"
Indeed I do. Liz of the Cocteau Twins does it all the time. She never sings a lyric as such, it's all noises. <Actually this is not true. Fraser has admitted that she picks real words and names from dictionaries, but simply throws them together without a narrative foundation.> But somehow, the way you burst language, the tension that leads to the victory of sound over sense whips your music into another dimension. It's the frustration that gives your songs dynamic, and the way you remedy it that makes them attractive. Most of the Sensual World LP seems to be saying, " This can be worked out ." <IED does not agree. Fully half the songs on the album simply do not bear this claim out.>
Between a Man and a Woman is almost a soap opera situation, with you trying to drive off any external interference which might ruin the chances of a relationship's natural growth. It's like you're saying we live in a fast culture--fast food, fast-edit TV, disposable pop, disposable sex--and, if we don't get instant gratification, we're not interested. You seem angry and determined.
"Well, that's nice, because when people ask me about this song, in terms of having to talk about it, it's rubbish. But yes, I think you're right, it is perhaps about how you actually have that choice sometimes, whether to interfere or not. <This was not Sutherland's idea at all, but Kate's.> You know, there's this tendency to want to leap in and take over and control: 'Oh, I know best!'; when I think a relationship is a very delicate balance: it's very easily tipped, and then needs to be refound again."
No matter how precarious, though, you think love's worth it, don't you? Reaching Out is full of danger--the child reaching out to feel the fire, for the hand that smacks...You endorse the instinct.
Rocket's Tail probably sums up what I'm getting at best. In the beginning you scoff at someone else's romantic notion. They say they want to be the glorious rocket, and you say you only see "A stick on fire/Alone on its journey/Home to the quickening ground/With no one there to catch it". But a verse later, you're putting on your pointed hat and strapping the stick to your back. It seems to me that love triumphs over cynicism and, whether you're dashed to the ground and destroyed by throwing yourself into a relationship or whether you survive doesn't matter. The risk, the vulnerability's worth taking. It's the only way you're alive, and anything's better than the loneliness of, say, Deeper Understanding.
"Yeah! Yeah! There's a lot of that going on on the album, and I'm really pleased that you should hear it: like, 'It might not be easy, but there is a way of getting out of it, so try not to worry too much.'"
Perversely, you seem to revel in the mess our emotions can get us into. Having said all that about language wanting to be music, you then take some poor soul and allow music to mislead her into the most dangerous relationship of all. In Heads We're Dancing, the girl surrenders to the rhythm and ends up dancing with Hitler!
(It's okay--she survives. The man wasn't Hitler when she danced with him, he was just a man. He became Hitler later. We all have the capacity for infinite evil. And infinite good.) <This parenthetical aside was evidently not addressed to Kate during the interview, but was added by Sutherland to his text afterward. There is furthermore no support in the song's text for for Sutherland's interpretation.>
Even under these extreme circumstances, there's no regret. Again you're saying it's worth giving yourself up to another because anything's better than being alone. <This is a very weird way of interpreting the text of the song. IED would say that the narrator's wry admission that she just stood there laughing even after learning who it was she had danced with was an extremely bitter comment on the human consciousness.> There are so many images of loneliness on the album...
"Yes, I think there are. I suppose, in relationships, there's a lot that can go wrong very quickly, and you have to work at them, which, I think, is something a lot of people aren't aware of until they grow up a bit. These things gradually reveal themselves to you, don't they?
"You're right--most of my songs are about relationships, probably always have been, really. That feels to me how things are, really: relationships towards other things and people, and how we actually manage to make these forms of contact..."
Deeper Understanding is the most extreme song on the album. <'Most extreme?' This seems a very arbitrary selection.> How do you feel about the character who's so desperately, pathetically lonely, (s)she's formed an addictive relationship with a computer?
"Well, wherever you live, chances are you won't know your neighbours, you won't even know the person who lives next to you. But I see this song set in America, just because it's so much more extreme out there: people don't go out of their houses, they watch the television, they can shop from the television, they speak to people on the phone. If they want, they needn't have any form of human communication of a real kind at all, and I think that's being encouraged.
"You know, a couple of years ago there was a lot of news about how women were divorcing their husbands because they were spending all their time with their computers--they were in there all night. I suppose it's still happening. And this song is about this very intense relationship that developed, where this person spends all their time with computers. They talk to the computer and the computer talks back.
"I suppose I really liked the idea of deep, spiritual communication--deep love which should come from humans--coming from the last place you'd expect it to, the coldest piece of machinery. And yet I do feel there is a link. I do feel that, in some ways, computers could take us into a level of looking at ourselves that we've never seen before, because they could come in from outside all this...I'm not really sure what I'm saying..."
She laughs and takes a sip of tea.
"I think a lot of things in Nature are almost programme-based, and a lot of things that we do are very mechanical, so maybe somehow going right through a computer, almost so that you come out the other side--going through all that science--will take us to something very spiritual but very earthy.
"I was very inspired by Stephen Hawkins <sic--this is almost certainly Sutherland's mistaken spelling, not Kate'. The man she is referring to is Stephen Hawking.> Have you heard about this guy? I think he was an Oxford scientist. <Cambridge.> He's very ill and, basically, he's coming up with how everything is created...or not created, as he sees it.
"I saw him on television, and it was so moving: this guy who's so close to the answer of it all, in a body that was desperately...it was going, and quickly. And he was fighting against the time he had left, and yet...Here was this guy who was probably the closest to knowing it all, and he was speaking through this voice-processor. It was almost, for me, like hearing the voice of God.
"What he was saying was so spiritual, it was not like a scientist. It was someone saying, 'Well, look: it wasn't ever created and it won't end, it just is .' You know, this wonderful conceptualism is almost beyond words, because he's gone so far through the process. Words can't explain what he's discovered."
I find that a bit scary. I wonder if we want the answer?
"Well, I wonder if we'd understand it! Even if we knew the answer, we probably wouldn't understand it."
But if we ever found out, definitely, whether there's a God or not, it would be like definitely finding out there are aliens from outer space: the human race couldn't handle it, couldn't cope with not being the centre of the universe. And what if we found out there definitely isn't a God, what then? The truth would be too much to bear. The idea of death being an inconceivable nothing would drive us mad with the contemplation of extinction.
"We seem to be very much in the era of reason, and I think science is the ultimate example of that. The other side is the instinctive, which is not logical on any level. Perhaps it's the putting together of the two. You know, like what you were just saying there about aliens? Most people's response would be that it's just not possible because their reason says so, but then an instinctive person might feel, 'Yes, this is so's because it just feels right.
"Maybe we've lost touch with our instincts, so it's become very important for us to work out logical explanations for things all the time, which I think is a bit of a shame, really."
After months of experimentation, Kate Bush decided the Trio Bulgarka were the closest thing she'd ever heard to the voice of God. She first heard Yanka Rupkhina, Eva Georgieva and Stoyanka Boneva--Bulgaria's foremost vocal trio--just after she'd finished Hounds of Love, when her brother, Paddy, played her one of their few recordings available in the Western world. <This was before any of the now-popular compilation albums had been released in the west.>
"I was devastated. Everyone I know who hears it is. At the time I didn't really think in terms of us working together but, the more I listened to it, the more I thought how wonderful it would be, and it seemed to gradually make more and more sense to try and get them involved in the album. Still, I needed a lot of time to gather the courage to do it. I was scared about it not working."
Did you think you might cheapen their gift?
"Oh God, absolutely. It was a big responsibility. And what was so nice is that they really enjoyed the experience. I mean, when we first met them, they asked us into their house, and they'd made a big meal for us: it was a big social event, and yet we'd never met. And within minutes, someone said, 'Oh, why not sing them a song?' So Eva, the eldest one, picked up the phone, listened to the dialing tone, went 'Mmmmmmh,' and they all tuned to that, and just burst into song!
"They were sitting over the kitchen table and, within minutes, I was just completely taken by them and the tears just...And they loved this, because it meant that the'd got through. Everyone who was with me was really moved--you could see people just trying to wipe the tears away.
"When I was working on Deeper Understanding, the idea was that the verses were the person and the choruses were the computer talking to the person. I wanted this sound that would almost be like the voice of angels: something very ethereal, something deeply religious, rather than a mechanical thing. And we went through so many different processes, trying vocoders, lots of ways of affecting the voice, and eventually it led to the Trio Bulgarka.
"it made absolute sense--you know, this loving voice--because they have a certain quality: their music feels so old and deep. It's really powerful; such intense, deep music that, in some ways, I think it is like the voice of angels."
It's as if they're possessed of it, rather than it's theirs.
"Yeah! Absolutely! Beautiful music! Old music like that is magical, and it can be preserved and kept. We must have lost so much of it all over the world. It must have just gone!"
If we take it as read that the album is concerned with relationships and the problems of communication and how these problems aren't insurmountable, I imagine working with the Trio Bulgarka must have put this to the test and enriched the LP through the experience of recording. I mean, I assume you couldn't talk to each other. I assume you had no mutual language, and yet you created together through music. <IED, ever the cynic, submits that this sounds an awful lot like Sutherland had read the NME interview or seen the Rhythms of the World programme, and was here pretending that this observation was original.>
"Yeah, and it was extraordinary. They didn't speak a word of English and we didn't speak any Bulgarian, but we could communicate through music, so that absolutely transcended barriers. There were things we needed to translate but, generally, we communicated emotionally, and I just loved that. They'll come up and give you a big cuddle. They'll just come up and touch you and cuddle you, and you can go up and give them a big cuddle, and I really enjoyed that kind of communication, it felt very real and direct to me. I'd never experienced that kind of communication before. It's something we could do with more of. It's a lovely thing.
"They were over not long ago, and we hadn't seen each other for a while and, when the translator went out of the room, we all started chatting. I don't think any of us knew what the other one was talking about but everyone was talking at the same time, and we were all chatting away, about six of us in a room. Then the translator walked back in and suddenly everyone felt really self-conscious and shut up. It all went quiet and we all sat and looked at the floor. It was a really great moment, really great!"
Apart from The Cure's sumptuously creepy Lullaby, The Sensual World is surely unrivalled as the most seductive single released this year. Like her very first release, Wuthering Heights, its inspiration lies in literature, but it expands on its theme with an insight and maturity which would have been unthinkable to the girl who rewrote Bronte. <This is highly debatable.>
The Sensual World is about Molly Bloom, the fountain of lust and life in James Joyce's dauntingly super-realist novel, Ulysses. It's a book that't defeated my attempts to read it again and again, and I confess to Kate that it gives me a hell of a lot of trouble.
"God, yes!"
Why Molly Bloom?
"Well, I just thought it was such an extraordinary piece of writing. It's so...ooh!...It's such a beautiful style. It's like trains of thought continually tumbling...You know, tumbling speech, and not kind of...'stopped.' I first heard her speak being read years ago by...I'm pretty sure it was Siobhan McKenna. <There is in fact a recording of McKenna's reading of this soliloquy, so Kate is almost certainly remembering correctly.> And it had such a femininity about it. That was my first exposure to it.
"And it just came together with this song. We'd written this piece of music in the studio, and I thought, 'What about putting the Molly Bloom speech together with this?' So I went and grabbed the book, and it worked perfectly. It just scanned--the whole song. But, unfortunately, when I applied for permission to use the words, they wouldn't let me.
"Obviously, I was very disappointed. It was completely their prerogative, you know, they don't have to give their permission. But it was very difficult for me, then, to reapproach the song. In some ways I wanted to just leave it off the album. But we'd put a lot of work into it--the Irish musicians had worked hard--so it was a matter of trying to rewrite the lyrics so it kept the same rhtymic sense, because the words are so rhythmic; and to keep the sense of sensuality as well, without using the Joyce lyrics. So it all kind of turned into this piece where Molly Bloom steps out of the book into real life, where she can actually reach out and touch things in the real world. In a lot of ways, because of their lack of co-operation, it transformed the track into something else."
When you say the Joyce piece had a "femininity" about it, what do you mean?
"It's difficult to put into words, but I think, on the last album, Hounds of Love, particularly in the production, I wanted to try and get across a sense of power, and the way I related to that was very much what I consider very good male music--the kind of power I found there was not what I found in a lot of females' music.
"It's not that I was trying to write like a man or anything--but there was this level of approaching the album, soundwise, that I think had a male energy. But I didn't want to do that on this album. I wanted to do it as a woman, not as a woman working around a man's world. This all sounds awful!"
It's making sense.
"Oh, is it? Good! The Sensual World was very much a chance for me to express myself as a female in a female way, and I found that original piece very positive female talking...That's the only way I can describe it."
It's like a sister piece to This Woman's Work. The Sensual World is completely self-absorbed in its own erogenous pleasure, while This Woman's Work, plaintively, over stark acoustic piano, reviews the man's side of the relationship and, really, pities him.
"John Hughes, the American director, was doing a film called She's Having a Baby --a great film, very nice and comic. And he had this scene which he wanted me to write a song for where it gets very heavy. The film's about this guy who gets married and he likes being a kid, really--very much up in the clouds--and she gets pregnant and they go into hospital, and she's rushed off becuase the baby's in the breach position.
"And suddenly there he is, just left in the waiting room by himself. It's probably the first time in his life he's had to grow up. It's a lovely piece of film, where he's looking back on their times together--there are scenes where they're decorating their flat, going for walks and things--and it was very much just a matter of telling the story in words--how, at times like that, you tend to go into something akin to guilt mode and you think of all the things you should have done and you just didn't."
I think men are bigger babies than women. I don't think we grow up so fast.
"Maybe men can avoid more situations than women in terms of facing things. I guess there are things for women that are different and they tend to deal with life situations rather than perhaps the business world or whatever. God, this sounds so sexist..."
Not at all. Women give birth, they are physically part of the creative process. It's as if their orgasm grows and bears fruit, whereas men fuck and that's it--it's a release, something we get rid of rather than something we gain. Then it all builds up again, and we can't handle it. I think women are far stronger emotionally. Men can't cope with emotions. We get frustrated and aggressive and destructive because we can't express ourselves, whereas women seem to embody their feelings better. Something positive grows from them..
"Yes, I think you're right. It's very hard on all of us but, yet, through the process of giving birth, I'm sure women are much stronger than men, and it's incredibly hard on them that they should not be able to show their emotions when actually it's okay to be weak."
We men are confused. The trouble with the invention of the notion of sexism and the paranoia surrounding it is that the only way we can deal with it is based on a fallacy. We think that, just because women should quite rightly have equal rights and equal opportunities, the sexes are the same. But we're not--women are aliens to us, we don't understand you at all. You speak a different language altogether. We're different creatures entirely.
"Absolutely, I'm with you 100 per cent. I couldn't agree more. I think it's awful what's happening to people's sense of their own sexuality. Women are made to feel awkward about expressing themselves as women in a man's world, so, subconsciously, a lot of the time, they're behaving like men because they don't know how strong they're supposed to be. Then again, women's lib has left men in a lot of areas where they don't know how to behave in case they get called sexist, a pig, or whatever.
"We are different, and we should be helping each other. Unfortunately there was such a lot of shit to get through that it was a battle, but I don't think it need be."
The album seems to be saying, "If you find yourself in a tricky situation, follow your instincts--just behave the way if feels right and at least you're being true to yourself, irrespective of the outcome."
"Yes, absolutely...And what an incredibly difficult thing to apply to life. I think there are some very good things going on to help us through. I must say, for me, the comdy in this country has been really educational. You know, Ben Elton and The Comic Strip--all those people you can't really call alternative comedians anymore because they've become mainstream. I think they've really done a lot to stop it being fashionable to be humorous with sexist overtones.
"It used to be very hip to make fun of women. Old comedy was all about treating women as a threat and, therefore, making fun of them. And I think they've really changed a lot of that. They've done so much for men and women because now, in most circles, among people our age, if you make a sexist joke, it's really considered tasteless. I think that's a fantastic step forward. And to see people like Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders out there doing comedy being women as women is brilliant.
"They're just out there doing it and, the more women can be strong enough to do that, the more it'll help everybody. It used to really scare me the way women were portrayed in comedy, and the way they behaved: either they were bitching off other women and being sexist themselves, or they were allowing themselves to be used as sex objects, either positively or negatively--they were either very beautiful or very stereotypically ugly. Women would just be batted around from these extremes, but that hold's been broken now and, as comedy's so much part of our nature in this country, so much a part of our roots, to break old things like that is an incredible step."
What you've achieved musically is pretty incredible too--the way you can do exactly what you want exactly when you want without anyone interfering. You're very much admired for your independence, and most of the women I know who aspire to make a living making music would rather be you than, say, Madonna.
"Oh, really! Ha!" You seem to live the life you want to, almost in a world of your own, whereas Madonna's constantly playing corporate games. She has to compete, you don't
"I think I'm incredibly lucky to be in this position now, although it's not something I'm aware of without people sparking off my realisation. I think Madonna's very clever, and I think she's very aware of what she's doing, don't you? I think that's the game she wants to play, and she seems to have her heart stuck on being an actress, and absolutely good luck to her because she's really...talk about on the front line! She's such an exposed person. I would find that so difficult to live with.
"I guess I have fought for what I want, but you always have to do that. I am very lucky. But it's hard to keep up that level of concern, particularly when you feel the music business becoming very mercenary--there are so many things that encourage you to abuse it. It's so horrid. It's such a shame."
Do you listen to much pop music?
"Not much when I'm making albums. In the evenings I probably watch a film or comedies or something visual to take me away from my ears. But, in between albums, yeah--there's some great stuff. Johnny Lydon's new album is just great, and I heard some tracks off the new Jeff Beck album and they were great, too. I think there's been some good, good music out there. Everyone in the music industry's been wearing black for, what, the last four years? Well, I think everyone's in mourning for good music. It's a show of mourning--'Look, here we are, where's the music?' And there's little snatches now, and that's exciting."
Are you hypersensitive to music? I mean, just because you make music that moves other people, that doesn't necessarily mean that music moves you, does it?
"God, I'd love to think that my music could move people, because it doesn't happen to me often, but, when it has, it's a lovely experience. The Bulgarians did it to me, and Nigel Kennedy (the young classical violinist who also plays on the album) sometimes makes me cry."
There are so many musical cliches, and you're breaking them down. Using Davey Spillane's Uillean pipes and Dave Gilmour's guitar and the Trio, you've succeeded in creating a new, uncategorisable sort of music which isn't anything, it's just music. I think that's important, because it makes people open their ears to stuff. It enriches their lives.
"Well, that's lovely. What a really nice thing to say. Um...I think everything seems too easy to categorise, and...I think that's just such a lovely thing to say..."
It's like what you were saying about relationships--you've done it with music. You've given it time to grow, to see if it's compatible. And it sounds natural, not cosmetic.
"Well, I think that's fantastic...that's just such a nice thing to say, that's really great...wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Because I think this is really what music is--a continual process of people experimenting, taking this and that and putting them together: all these experimental marriages. And when they work, I think that's such an important step, because then they've created a new music of a sort which then goes on to evolve.
"And, if it doesn't work, that's absolutely fine, too, because that shows you what doesn't work. So, if you feel this is a natural union, that's really good. I suppose I'd like to think that, as long as I really care about making music, there will always be people out there who want to hear music that is cared for."
The hour's up and Kate thanks me for saying such lovely things about her album. I thank her for making such a great album, and she thanks me for thanking her, and says I have a lovely energy, and...shucks...We blush a bit and shake hands, and I shuffle out of the room, out of her life, elated and embarrassed.
Another relationship we just couldn't handle.
To
the Reaching Out Interviews Table of Contents
"The pull and the push of it all..." - Kate Bush
Reaching Out
is a
Marvick - Hill
Willker -
Mapes
Fitzgerald-Morris
Grepel - Love-Hounds
Presentation