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the Reaching Out (Interviews) Table of Contents
It has been almost three decades since she first topped the charts and 12 years
between albums, but Kate Bush has never followed the rock star script. And, as
she tells Iain Shedden,
she's much happier for it
SHE'S not exactly chatty, Kate Bush, or at least that's the impression one gets
from her lack of media activity in the past 12 years. The reclusive English
singer has done only a handful of interviews in that time, fuelling the
perception of her as the 1980s pop star who lost the plot and disappeared off
the face of the earth.
And let's be honest, she was always a bit mad anyway, wasn't she, even at the
height of her fame 20 years ago?
Only a bit mad, she remembers, but we'll get to that later. The Kate Bush doing
the talking here is no madwoman, no shrinking violet, no temperamental artist
answering questions cagily for fear of being trapped by her allegedly eccentric
past.
What we have is a 47-year-old singer and writer content with her lot, eager to
discuss every aspect of her complex life and brimming with joy at the success of
her renaissance album, Aerial, which has had critics -- some of whom were not
born when she first took the world by surprise with Wuthering Heights 27 years
ago -- gushing about her timeless art.
"Yes, I am happy," she says from her home outside London, where she lives with
her partner, guitarist Danny McIntosh, and their son Bertie, 7.
Her tone is light-hearted, salt-of-the-earth friendly, occasionally mischievous
and peppered with self-deprecating humour. If this is the Greta Garbo of pop,
she has had a crash course in gregariousness.
"I'm in a privileged position to say that I'm very happy," she goes on. "I'm
very lucky. I'm even happier now that the album has been received with such ..."
She searches for the right phrase. "I have never been so surprised. It's
extraordinary. I was really worried that people were going to forget me."
Well, they could hardly have been blamed for that, could they? Taking a 12-year
break between albums is unusual. The fickle world of pop demands that you ride
the wave of success until it dumps you unceremoniously on your backside.
Bush, on the other hand, decided after her 1993 album The Red Shoes that the
music business could take a running jump. Enough with fame; she was going to
have a life.
"I was working very hard trying to be an artist," she recalls of her heyday.
"Somehow I just wasn't being seen as who I was. I was being mistranslated. It
was very frustrating."
So, after 15 years, a handful of albums and with a string of hit singles
including Them Heavy People, Sat in Your Lap and Breathing behind her, Bush said
goodbye to the charts, the recording studio and the spotlight to devote herself
to things that she believed were more real, such as cleaning the house and,
eventually, having a child.
Both these subjects are addressed on Aerial. Bertie gets a few mentions and did
the artwork that appears on Bush's recent single, King of the Mountain, while
domesticity in the shape of a washing machine gets a full cycle on Mrs
Bartolozzi.
It's no accident that these and other quality-of-life issues dominate the two
CDs that make up Aerial. Bush wrote some of the material for it in the years
immediately following her retirement, when she was looking for something more
than artistic fulfillment.
It wasn't the writing that took so long, she explains, more the recording.
"I think a lot of people think I spend years writing stuff," she says. "I don't.
It's shockingly quick."
WHAT took her so long to make a comeback was combining her home life with the
recording process. She tackled the latter in her spare moments, which became
less frequent after the birth of Bertie.
"A lot of my friends couldn't carry on working when they had a child," she says.
"They either had to get child care or they had to stop working. I feel very
privileged that I was able to do both [working and parenting], but I was also
very tired.
"It's difficult to do both. I made a conscious decision early on that my son
would come first."
Her record company, EMI, fretted as another year went by and Aerial remained a
work in progress. Company executives went to visit, hoping to hear it at last,
or at least some part of it. Most often they left, disappointed, after an earful
of tea and cakes.
Early this year, however, their patience was rewarded. The headline on Kitty
Empire's review in British newspaper The Observer was: "Admit it, guys, she's a
genius". For Bush the album's release and the positive reaction to it have been
a validation of her methods, but the proof came only after months of worrying
about how the public would react.
"When I was most anxious was when there was this huge amount of anticipation
starting to build about the record and I hadn't actually finished it," she says,
laughing. "It's hard enough trying to keep that creative focus without feeling
that everybody's banging on the door going, `Where is it?' Mind you, I've got
good soundproofing." Now that it's done, she says, the relief is palpable.
Hardly surprisingly, after that period of gestation she hasn't been able to
listen to Aerial.
"I always put myself under a lot of pressure. It is not an enjoyable process
spending 12 years making a record. Lots of it was fun but it wasn't something I
intended to take 12 years to make.
"I'm so fed up listening to it, I can't tell you. The sense of relief at
actually having it finished ... that was one of the greatest senses of elation,
after all that time. There were so many points where I felt, almost in a
religious sense, that I wasn't going to have the strength to carry on."
There is a hint of melodrama in her voice as she says this, but she calms
herself when I suggest that she should be grateful for the freedom she has to
work at her own pace.
"I have a lot of freedom, but I guess what gives me that freedom, what drives
me, is to try and make something interesting musically. If I was driven by the
desire to be famous and make lots of money, I would try and bring a record out
every year."
BY the age of 16, Bush had written enough material to produce albums every year
until she was in her 30s. Growing up in a musical family south of London, she
devoted herself to music and in particular to composition. She taught herself
piano, wrote 200 songs, then waited.
"I just love sitting at the piano," she says. "Just as some people sit with a
piece of paper and doodle, I guess I was doing that at the piano. I used to
write one song a day, sometimes two.
"But of course it's so much easier at that age. You have a lot less to do."
She jokes that she was so prolific in her teens because she knew she was going
to slow down as she got older. In truth, she couldn't help herself. It was
something she was born to do.
"Right from when I was quite little ... the first thing I really wanted to do
was make a record. I'm quite lucky that that was my heart's desire. There is a
reasonable amount of value in that."
An introduction to Pink Floyd's guitarist Dave Gilmour was the breakthrough. He
played her songs to EMI and they signed her while she was still at school. She
studied dancing and mime, building and cross-pollinating the skills that became
apparent so quickly after the release of Wuthering Heights (and its landmark
video) in 1978.
Her debut album, The Kick Inside, confirmed that her originality and talent were
not confined to screaming "Heathcliff" in the middle of a field, and that
underneath the quirky image lay a complex songwriter and performer for whom sex
and sensuality were essential components. Girls wanted to be her. Boys wanted to
be her really special friend.
She can look back on that pivotal moment of Wuthering Heights with some
amusement, but she also recognizes that the song, so different from anything
that was happening at the time, at the tail end of the British punk phase,
opened the door to a lengthy career.
"It was something I was carried along by," she says. "Like a big wave picked me
up."
The wave ebbed and flowed thereafter, reaching a peak in 1985 when the album
Hounds of Love topped the charts and produced the hits Running Up That Hill and
Cloudbusting.
By then she had long since given up performing live, mainly because she found it
so exhausting, although the strain had been exacerbated by the accidental death
of a lighting technician during her last tour.
There were other setbacks. In 1982 she released what she once described as her
"she's gone mad" album, The Dreaming. It was an ambitious project, with lots of
self-indulgent noodling and Bush taking the production reins for the first time.
It flopped.
"I said that ["she's gone mad"] because of the reaction from other people," she
says. "There were quite a few people who would come up to me in shops and things
and say: `Just bought your new record. Bit weird, isn't it?"'
She laughs again at the absurdity of the scenario, but then controls herself.
"That was the first time I'd really been able to get hands-on properly.
"It was a hard record to make because I got a lot of stick right from the
beginning to the end because I wanted to have creative control. Although I had
co-produced [her earlier album] Never For Ever, I think there was the perception
that, `Well, you know, she might have said she co-produced it, but ...'
"So there I was standing on the front line and I picked up the shrapnel wounds.
It was very experimental, which was something I enjoyed at the time. I suppose
it was a bit mad, but in an adventurous way."
The Dreaming was also her first musical association with an unlikely
collaborator: Rolf Harris, who played didgeridoo on the album, and does so again
on two songs on Aerial. "I needed a singing painter and there aren't too many of
those around," she says. More laughter. "We've been friends for quite a long
time now. He's such a multi-talented guy. He's a musicologist as well as
everything else and, of course, he's an accomplished painter. I don't know how
he does it all, really."
Bush released an anthology and two more albums after Hounds of Love, but The
Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993) were relatively unsuccessful
commercially. The latter dealt with issues such as the death of her mother,
Hannah, and the break-up with her long-term partner, guitarist Del Palmer.
She revisits her mother's death on Aerial in the song A Coral Room, a piano
ballad that seeps emotion from every pore.
"It wasn't difficult to write," she says of the piece. "The bit that was
difficult was that I did consider not putting it on the record. I wasn't sure
how I would feel having it on there."
Now that the album is out and in the charts, there will be some expectation,
from her record company as well as her fans, of another one appearing before her
60th birthday. So will she make one?
"I hope so," she says. "It's not meant to be my last work. Of course I'd really
like to make another one."
Nor is she ruling out performing again. She has even returned to dancing after a
long break.
"This is the first time in years I've had time to do other things, so I've just
started again recently. It's something I've always enjoyed, but it doesn't hold
the same importance to me any more. That's the thing about dance, it's such a
discipline. You can't have too many airs and graces because it's all about the
fragility of the body. It's really hard work. Being a dancer for a living ...
I've got so much respect for people like that, being so strong."
Bush has other strengths, however. She has withstood the pressures the music
industry can impose on artists to do things their way and has made herself happy
in the process.
"There were quite a few times where I found the way I was living my life was
more ... I thought it had more value than someone who was living the life of a
celebrity," she says.
"What is amazing about the way people have responded to this record is that I
did approach things that way. People get it. It's incredibly freeing."
It's as liberating, perhaps, as Wuthering Heights was to that unknown singer 27
years ago. Does she still see herself as she was in that video?
"I think in essence I am much the same person," she says. "But in other ways
I've changed tremendously. I'm glad I have, though. Imagine going through life
without any changes at all. How depressing is that!"
Aerial is out now through EMI. Iain Shedden is The
Australian's music writer.
Bush music
The Kick Inside (1978: Released when she was 19, included songs she wrote at 15.
Wuthering Heights remains her biggest hit, going to No.1 in Britain, Australia
and New Zealand.
Lionheart (1978: The track Oh England My Lionheart, in which a pilot who has
been shot down contemplates his homeland as he hurtles towards the ground,
remains a fan favourite.
Never For Ever (1980): Went to No.1 in Britain, the first time an album by a
female artist had done so. Features the single Babooshka.
The Dreaming (1982): Experimental album produced by Bush that received mixed
reviews.
Hounds of Love (1985): Recorded at a private studio Bush had built near her home
so she could work at her own pace. Album went to No.1 in Britain.
The Whole Story (1986): Compilation album that went to No.1 in Britain.
The Sensual World (1989): Includes the quirky Heads We're Dancing, in which a
woman dances all night with a charming stranger only to learn he is Adolf
Hitler.
The Red Shoes (1993): Why Should I Love You featured input from Prince and guest
vocals by comedian Lenny Henry. Her most successful album in the US, reaching
No.28 on the charts.
Aerial (2005): Guest vocals and didgeridoo by occasional collaborator Rolf
Harris. In mid-December the album was No.3 in Britain and No.48 in the US.
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"The pull and the push of it all..." - Kate Bush
Reaching Out
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