To the Reaching Out (Interviews) Table of Contents
To
the Reaching Out (Interviews) Table of Contents
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 85 21:35:26 edt
From: Henry Chai <chai%utflis%toronto.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Canada TV Aug. 3./4. 1985 about The Dreaming
On Aug.3 & 4, a TV show called "The New Music", produced by CityTV here in Toronto (which also produces MuchMusic, the Canadian equilvalent of MTV), con-tained a 5 minute interview of Kate Bush. I'd like to share it here with the people in (at? on? of?) lovehounds.
NM: It has been three years since Kate Bush released her last album "The Dreaming".Now at last comes a new single and video called "Running Up that Hill". It's taken from the new album "Hounds of Love" which is due out in September.
[clips of RUTH]
The "Hounds of Love" record represents a return to the gentler tones for which Kate Bush is most admired. To many people "The Dreaming"has been inaccessible, her singing abbrasive. When I met Kate on a trip to England last March, we talked about "The Dreaming".
[they were seated on the ground in what looks like a dance studio; mirrors on one wall and a grand piano at the back]
KB: I think the last album is very dark and about pain and negativity, and the way that people treat each other badly. It was a sort of cry really and I think that perhaps the biggest influence on the last album was the fact that I was producing it so I could actually do what Iwanted for the first time. And then there are a lot of things we wanted to experiment with and I particulary wanted to play around with my voices, because there are a lot of different backing vocals and things like that. The different textures were important to me. I wanted to try and create pictures with the sounds by using effects.
NM: You have been, I think, popularly associted with a very, ah, sweet voice, and what you were doing some places on "The Dreaming" was making very glutteral sounds, hoarse and raw, deliberately making your voice crack.
KB: Yes, I find it much more interesting. The first two albums my voice really wasn't capable of doing that. I think my writing and my voice have continually tried to get better, to be able to do something I actually like. And it's very frustrating when you are writing songs and singing them, and you're not enjoying what's coming back. So hopefully, y'know, it will be become more pleasurable for me, the actual process, because it is painful to listen to things that sound awful, when you really wanted them to sound good.
[clips of "Sat in your Lap"]
NM: Those earlier songs "Breathing" and "Army Dreamers", have what you might call a political conscience. Now that so many groups are doing political music, like the Ethiopia Famine Relief Fund music that sort of thing, is your new album going to contain something similar?
KB: No, I don't think..., actually there aren't any tracks that are political as such. I never felt that I've written from a political point of view. It's always been an emotional point of view that just happens to perhaps be a political situation. I mean war is an extremly emotional situation, especially if you're going to be blown up! I think with the whole thing of nuclear war, people are really terrified and increasingly so the more that we hear on the media all the time about it. I think writers always do have a conscience about the things that scare them, they wanted to write about them, to relieve themselves.
[clips of "Breathing"]
NM: I'm reminded by a painting in the corner here, which is a sort of satire of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, that I always have thought that those Victorian painters, the Pre-Raphaelites, were an influenece to the texture of your song writing.
KB: Yes, yes. I think that was particularly in my very early teens I was very enchanted by the whole romance of it, yes. They find their way into songs, the imagery. I think that's what happens: something attracts you because of its imagery and you digest it and it comes up in a song. I think that's how artists work; they are like magpies, picking up little bits of gold and storing them away.
[clips of RUTH]
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