FEATURE:
Thunder in Our Hearts
The Determination and Defiance of Kate Bush
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WHEN it comes to writing future Kate Bush-related pieces…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the studio in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix
I will look at specific time periods and songs. I have been listening a lot to her music (as you would expect) and watching interviews, and I am always amazed by the determination and sheer strength of Bush. In terms of her musical vision, Bush knew what she wanted to achieve. Right from the off, on 1978’s The Kick Inside, Bush was keen to have as much say as possible. I know I am repeating myself – and others who have written about her -, but Wuthering Heights was not intended to be her debut single. Her record company wished the more conventional James and the Cold Gun would be her opening single. Accounts vary regarding the course of events, but Bush was near the point of tears trying to convince her label that she knew best regarding Wuthering Heights. By the time it came to her next single, though the battle was not as intense, Bush disagreed with what the record company had in mind – The Man with the Child in His Eyes was picked. Moving and Them Heavy People were released as singles in Japan, whilst Strange Phenomena was released as a single in Brazil. One gets the sense that EMI would have been happier with tracks such as Moving put out as singles, but Bush wanted to ensure that her music was being fairly represented and the singles were as strong as possible.
I am going to extensively cover The Kick Inside soon, as the year 1978 was a busy and particularly important one for Bush. Look at some of the interviews from 1978 and a pattern emerges that would follow her for much of her career: a patronising tone and lack of respect from some interviewers. Not all of the media were condescending, but I think Bush was seen as this rather slight girl and one who was surely determined. I look back at interviews she conducted in 1978 and 1979 – when she promoted her stage show, the Tour of Life -, and there is this very worrying angle. It is mainly men interviewing her, but they sort of felt like she was very fragile, and it was amazing, God forbid, that a young woman would be so strong-willed and ambitious! Bush was not a massive feminist early in her career, and the media was not being held to account like they should have been. Look and read any interview she gave early on, and there is this exceptional strength and maturity that blows you away. Yes, Bush’s voice was sweet and melodic, but she countered any stupid question and rather foolish naivety with plenty of fact and reason: she is an artist who knows what she wants and has a bigger plan.
Maybe songs on The Kick Inside concerning spirituality and synchronicity led many to assume that Bush was hippy-dippy and somewhat insignificant. I will pull from an article published in The New Yorker, as it is a rare article that focuses on Bush as an innovator who, whilst she was strong and incredible talented, was often portrayed as this beautiful woman; there was a little too much focus on her natural assets and looks, rather than what she was producing in the studio and on the stage:
“She’s got credit for her pioneering use of the Fairlight synthesizer, in the eighties, and the headset microphone onstage, for producing her own albums, and for evolving an ahead-of-its-time sound that combined heavy bass with the ethereal high notes, swoops, and screeches of her own remarkable voice. She is a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, and critics have always noticed that”.
Perhaps interviewers fancied themselves as suitors as they talked to Bush, and one can forgive any wide-eyed adoration and incoherent babbling. Bush was, and is, a remarkably striking woman and she has a beauty that is incomparable. I feel Bush wanted to assume a mantel of control over her output because she did not want to be lumped in with the more conventional singer-songwriters of the 1970s. Whilst Carole King and Joni Mitchell are legends, their lyrical style and vocal delivery was not what Bush wanted to do.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
She deliberately listened to very few female singers as she did not want to be influenced. I think EMI sort of had plans for Bush to be more commercial and accessible. Songs like Wuthering Heights meant more, and Bush did not want to be taken down a path that was not right for her. By her second album, Lionheart, she was co-producing/assisting with production, and she was in the co-producer’s seat by 1980’s Never for Ever. I think Bush looks back on her first two albums with a little bit of regret. She wanted to move her voice from the more high-pitched and dramatic to something more masculine, anchored and diverse. She also laments the lack of control she had over her career; she felt like she was part of the machine rather than the one controlling it. As a teenager, it would have been unrealistic for Bush to produce solo – she needed the wisdom and expertise of Andrew Powell (producer) -, and her vocal style actually made her stand aside from her peers. This passion and ambition, one might say, is quite common and has been seen a lot since 1978. Perhaps so, but I think Bush has influenced so many artists and she inspired countless artists to follow her lead. Against this pioneering spirit and indefatigable vision, Bush was being written about in the media in not always positive tones. Like I said, many of her T.V. interviews were rather belittlingly, and she was ripe for parody and intense scrutiny.
As Margaret Talbot wrote in The New Yorker, the fact Bush was quite privileged and came from a comfortable home, maybe, provoked journalists to attack and underestimate her:
“In “Under the Ivy,” the music journalist Graeme Thomson’s smart and respectful biography of Bush, from 2010, the author describes how, early on, reactions to Bush often condescended to her as a child of privilege. She was a doctor’s daughter from Kent, raised by an affectionate, mildly oddball family in a rambling old farmhouse (I kept thinking of the Weasleys from the Harry Potter series), where she was kindly listened to and afforded time and space in which to play the piano and write songs”.
By 1980 – I will not go through her entire career, but I want to concentrate on her 1978-2005 output at least -, Bush was co-producing Never for Ever (alongside Jon Kelly, who was one of her engineers on The Kick Inside and Lionheart). It is ironic that aspects that divided critics are the very facets that left people spellbound in 1978. Look at Bush’s output from 1978-1980, and there are scenes of mystics and strange characters, of teachers and literary heroines, of lust and dreams no less. Alongside unique and gymnastic vocals, maybe there was a feeling that Bush’s songs were not angry enough; her voice not as charged and political as it should have been – Punk still had legs by the end of the 1970s and early-1980s.
Let us not forget that, in 1979, Bush took the massive Tour of Life around Europe. Bush’s set was mind-blowing, and her routines and performances were heralded and rhapsodised. It seems a shame that – with the help of a very dedicated team – someone who was pushing boundaries and transforming the realms of live performance still had to ‘answer’ criticism and a lack of respect past 1979 – not that she should have received any at all! A lot of the press patronising subsided after the Tour of Life, as they could see what Bush was capable and just how exceptional she was. I cannot include all interviews in this feature, but there was a bit of a turning point when Danny Baker interviewed Bush for NME back in 1979. Although Never for Ever’s Army Dreamers and Breathing was Bush reacting to the news and fears of the time, I do feel like a lot of people wrote her off by the end of the 1970s. This impression of the hippy-ish girl singing twee songs followed her around. Baker’s tone throughout the NME interview illustrates my point:
“Well, that certainly seems a worthwhile thing to do, all right, although it has in fact been done before. Y'see, occasionally Kate allows the poet and all-round Tyrannosaurus Rex dreamer to slip out, a sucker for Lord of the Rings. For a start I have cut about a hundred "wows" and "amazings" from her speech. She talks at length about how important she feels it is to be "creating" all the time, and when I asked her if she looked to the news for any song inspiration I got this curious answer:
"Well, whenever I see the news, it's always the same depressing things. War's hostages and people's arms hanging off with all the tendons hanging out, you know. So I tend not to watch it much. I prefer to go and see a movie or something, where it's all put much more poetically. People getting their heads blown off in slow motion, very beautifully".
Of course, like most interviews of the time, Bush was asked about men fancying her and, rather than dig into her music, Bush was keen to explore her attractions and whether she had many hearts fluttering in her direction:
“Incredible. Do you find men in awe of you?
"Socially? Well, I find that – with people that I haven't seen for a couple of years, because they won't treat me as a human being. And people in the street will ask for autographs and also won't treat you as human, but … ah … sometimes I get really scared. Sometimes when I'm going to the supermarket to get the coffee and cat litter, I get freaked out and see all these people staring, and you turn around and there's like 40 people all looking at you… and when you go around the corner, they're all following you! You start freaking out like a trapped animal”.
Baker signed off the interview with a rather dismissing sentence that echoed a lot of what was being felt in the media at the time:
“Here, listen, I think you've got the picture. Kate Bush, to meet, is a happy, charming woman that can totally win your heart. But afterwards on tape, when she's not there and you actually listen to all this, well… golly gosh. Don't lose sleep, old mates, it's just pop music-folk and the games they spin. Wow”.
Danny Baker has come out since to say he is a Kate Bush fan and, at the time, he was trying to get a rise and be a bit more jocular; maybe push some buttons and deliver a memorable interview. I agree that we get something interesting and original from the interview, but that underlying whiff of contempt and condescension is genuine.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs The Big Sky in Germany for the T.V. show Peter's Pop Show in November 1985
Bush did not change herself and her music in 1980 to please critics and throw off the uneducated. To her, the first couple of albums were a particular stage she evolved from. As she grew into her twenties, and moved into the Eighties, Bush’s determination to produce and lead her own musical course intensified. There was more respect from the media by the time of The Dreaming in 1982, but that album was viewed as being experimental and harder to love. No big singles like Wow (Lionheart) can be found on that album. That said, looking back review of the time, and there seems to be this common outcome: the album is very different to her previous work but it is rewarding if you stick with it. In retrospect, The Dreaming has picked up a lot of love and many positive reviews have come out. It was clear that some corners of the media were still not sold on Kate Bush. EMI were not too thrilled that The Dreaming arrived two years after Never for Ever – that was, apparently, seen as a long wait! -, and it did not sell too well. Critical impressions, thankfully, shifted by 1985’s Hounds of Love. Maybe it was a more commercial feel of the album of a toning down of her voice that sold it to many but, to me, it was Bush not following what was expected of her and making music her way. Of course, there were still drooling interviewers and some who could see Bush as a serious songwriter – her beauty was, once more, the main point of focus.
Bush built her own studio and took three years to follow The Dreaming. I have written how the year 1983 was especially restorative and important. Although there was not as much critical praise for 1989’s The Sensual World, one can admire Bush was not repeating Hounds of Love and never standing still. I will talk about Bush being Beatles-esque in the way she moved between albums in a future feature, but the 1990s was a decade where she had to face personal troubles and speculation from the media. 1993’s The Red Shoes is the only album from her in that decade. She had been working relentlessly since her career started, and it was inevitable that she would need to make some changes. The Quietus talked about a challenging time in Bush’s career:
“Bush, who had spoken of feeling emotionally burnt-out years before the album was released, was ready to withdraw, too: she vanished for 12 years until Aerial, and then went on hiatus for another six before returning with Director’s Cut. “I think there’s always a long, lingering dissatisfaction with everything I’ve done,” she said in 2011, glad to have the chance to right some of the wrongs that had been bothering her for 20-odd years. For me, though, the original album has always been enough: it might have its flaws, and there might be a handsome alternative, but just like Bush on ‘You’re The One’, I still want to keep going back”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993 in a promotional photo for The Red Shoes (this is the dress she wears in the Eat The Music portion of The Line, the Cross and the Curve)
Bush would return splendidly with Aerial in 2005 – which I shall end on -, but she was having a break from music and more concerned with taking care of herself and having a family – she gave birth to her son Bertie in 1998. The media went into a frenzy when they learned of the news in 2000 - I think it was Peter Gabriel who accidentally let slip the news - and saw Bush of hiding this secret family and love child - although Bertie MacIntosh performed at Bush’s 2014 residency, Before the Dawn, some corners of the media saw it as the shielded child stepping from the shadows! Returning The New Yorker feature, and it is clear that, again, the press were not really as informed as they should have been:
“In the nineties, when Bush’s output slowed and her public appearances dwindled, the British tabloids seized on another archetype for her: she was a “mythical recluse,” as Thomas writes, a rock-and-roll Miss Havisham. It’s a persistently alluring reversal-of-fortune story—the celebrity, especially one who blazed early and prodigiously, fading away, vain and lonely, ideally in a mansion. (See narratives stretching from “Sunset Boulevard” to the 2017 podcast “Looking for Richard Simmons.”)
But her real story doesn’t conform all that well to the fable. She was most productive between 1978 and 1994, when she made seven albums, but in the years since, she’s put out two critically acclaimed albums of original material plus a live album and a collection of some new versions of her old songs. She’s raised a son, Albert, who’s now in his late teens, with her partner, the musician Danny McIntosh. In 2014, she put on “Before the Dawn,” a twenty-two-night residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, in London, that combined theatre, puppetry, film, and music in a spectacle that critics found occasionally ridiculous and genuinely, almost unbearably moving. Tickets for all twenty-two performances sold out within fifteen minutes online”.
There were also a lot of stories (in the 1990s) regarding Bush’s weight gain and the fact that she was out of the public eye. It is a pity that someone as beloved and non-assuming – in the fact she did not court fame and attention – would not been immune to the poison pen of the tabloid media. Before I end on Aerial, I want to track back to 1985 and an interview from Hot Press that sort out outlines a lot of the questions she had to face. At a time when she had released her most successful and respected album, the subject of sex was still needlessly being put on the table:
“At the same time, there is a projection of sexuality through the photos on the latest album.
"Do you think so, on this album cover?"
Yeah, I suppose it begins with the fact that you're in a sleeping position...
"Yes, you are right. That was very difficult. Because the album is called Hounds of Love, and it was very difficult trying to get a picture of myself with dogs that wouldn't look either like something out of Country Life or too period--it was impossible. The original idea was just to have the three heads--myself and a dog each side of me, but it just didn't work. The dogs wouldn't stay still! It was ridiculous, and the only way we could do it was to lie down with them and just get them to relax enough so that they would sort of ZZZzzz! And that was the way it worked. But I suppose you're right, though it wasn't initially or consciously thought of as a sexual thing at all. In fact it's something--I have become I think a bit--It worries me anytime I think there is any kind of sexual connotation: 'My God! Should I be careful?...'"
But why does that worry you so much?
"I don't know. It confuses me. It's really annoying, too, because I don't see what's wrong with having sexuality, with recognising the sexual quality of things. But I suppose it confuses me because when I am doing things at the time, maybe people will say "That's sexy," and I can't relate to it. I can't see myself sexually-- I just see me being silly. I can't be objective about myself."
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980
The interviewer turned to feminism and whether she was one. Bush had always been a little uncomfortable discussing feminism, but this question provoked a remarkably interesting response from Kate Bush:
You have actually charted a very independent course yourself, and in some ways you'd offer a definition of what feminists would want women to be able to do.
"I would like to think that there is actually a very strong force of women who believe we should have equal opportunities, be able to work, be treated nicely without any threat, all of that. And not necessarily come on with 'We hate men--Off with your balls!' Do you know what I mean? And I think there are lots of women who are starting to really do it properly. Look at comedy. I think comedy in this country is incredible. The best. It really is, it's superb. I suppose a lot of it is negatively based, but it still is superb, and just streets ahead of anyone else in the world. But, I think women have been used so much in comedy. Either there's something really hideous and ugly that's meant to be attractive, and then when it's hideous and ugly everyone goes 'aah!", or there's Benny Hill's cutie-pies that don't speak. But now there's a revolution in comedy which involves women in a much more interesting way. They're not being used as women, they're not really pretty or really ugly, they're just people. I think that really says a lot. And it's nice to see that, because so often I think women are pandered to. Like: a couple of years ago there was a trend of these feminist programmes that were meant to be for women, and they were all basically anti-men jokes. And all the women I knew thought they were horrific. It was totally insulting and unfunny. Yet women were presumed to laugh at this. Women came on and told jokes just as sexist as the men's. But it seems to have changed. It's women--Victoria Wood, Jennifer Saunders, Tracey Ullman--it's women, real women".
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the 1980s
When she stepped into the studio, Bush always produced something interesting and new. She is able to resonate in the heart in a way other artists cannot. She had to face a lot of rather patronising interview lines, and there was not really a lot of sea change in terms of attitudes until fairly recently. Whilst we will always get some corners of the media turning up their nose, it is amazing that Bush had to deal with dismissal, patronising interviews and those who labelled her as overly-private, reclusive and strange. Although 2005’s Aerial was this big return that saw many glowing reviews come through, some were disappointed that the music was more domestic and less, perhaps, dramatic than some of her previous output. Pitchfork were one of a few sources that, for some reason, expected Bush to bring out a Hounds of Love part two:
“Non-shocker: I was disappointed the first few times I listened to Kate Bush's first new record in 12 years. Having spent some time recently wondering if the woman responsible for so much haunted, supernatural music might be producing some beacon of artistic integrity that would shine through layers of anticipation and cynicism, it was difficult to not be let down by the mundane discovery that, in fact, she's merely being herself here, writing more about everyday epiphanies than great cosmic truths. It's a pretty Zen lesson in expectation when I think about it, teaching me a thing or two about the pitfalls of hanging onto anything other than gradual enlightenment and a zero-sum world.
By the time of the closing title track, my ears are lightly glazed over, and its frail "rock" section does little justice to lines like "I want to be up on the roof, I feel I gotta get up on the roof!" At one point, Bush trades cackles with a bird's song, suggesting she's quite happy with her simple life as a mother and artist. Far be it from me to criticize happy endings, but in musical terms, a comfortable, even-keeled existence sometimes comes out as isolated and ordinary art”.
I wanted to write this feature, just to show how Kate Bush has forged her own path and has produced such innovative and unique albums. Bush arrived at a moment when Punk and other genres were raging and, perhaps, the media were not sure to make of her. She had to battle a lot of sexism and the subject of sex coming up. Things gradually improved in that respect, but Bush, by the 1990s, was seen less as a mythical fairy and fantastical oddity and more of a reclusive – hardly surprising as she had been worked to the bone until 1993 and just wanted to be a normal person and have a break! Whilst recently she was accused of supporting the Tories (which she then denied), I wonder what sort of reception she will get when she brings a new album out. Will it be a sort of return of the recluse or will she garner more respect? I am being harsh, as it is only a minority of the media that do not show proper dignity towards Bush. There is no doubt that Kate Bush is a pioneer, genius and…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promo photo for Before the Dawn in 2014/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
A national treasure.