FEATURE:
All Yours
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Back to the Mighty Babooshka
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I do some song-specific features…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the German T.V. show, Rock Pop, on 13th September, 1980 performing Babooshka
about Kate Bush now and then. The reason I am returning to Babooshka is that I have new angles. In fact, I saw photos shared online regarding the single cover; the shots that were taken to promote it. I think John Carder Bush’s (her brother) photos are among the very best on that shoot. Released on 27th June, 1980, Babooshka was the second single (after Breathing) from Bush’s third studio album, Never for Ever. I will go over a couple of bits that I have included in other features about the song. Undoubtedly one of her greatest tracks, I was thinking about Bush’s album openers and how they draw you in. A couple of weeks back, Adele asked Spotify to disable the shuffle feature so that she and other artists could have their albums enjoyed in the running order intended. Although I have suggested in other features how a couple of Bush’s albums might be improved with the rearrangement of a few songs, she is an artist who takes a lot of time to consider the sequencing. Never for Ever starts remarkably with Babooshka! It is a song that showcases the sonic leap Bush took between Never for Ever and her previous album, Lionheart (1978). Evocative and quite epic, it starts an album that remains underrated. Prior to coming to some new thoughts about this song, it is worth getting some story and quotes from Kate Bush herself. Produced alongside Jon Kelly and reaching number five in the U.K, this is a song that has a remarkably memorable music video to boot!
Bush performed Babooshka live on a variety of European shows. The costumes she wore for each are incredible (I found a video from 1979 where Bush discussed playing live and the fact that she wanted to remain grounded). I shall come to that. First, and to get some explanation behind the song, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia helps out:
“Apparently it is grandmother, it's also a headdress that people wear. But when I wrote the song it was just a name that literally came into my mind, I've presumed I've got it from a fairy story I'd read when I was a child. And after having written the song a series of incredible coincidences happened where I'd turned on the television and there was Donald Swan singing about Babooshka. So I thought, "Well, there's got to be someone who's actually called Babooshka." So I was looking through Radio Times and there, another coincidence, there was an opera called Babooshka. Apparently she was the lady that the three kings went to see because the star stopped over her house and they thought "Jesus is in there".' So they went in and he wasn't. And they wouldn't let her come with them to find the baby and she spent the rest of her life looking for him and she never found him. And also a friend of mine had a cat called Babooshka. So these really extraordinary things that kept coming up when in fact it was just a name that came into my head at the time purely because it fitted. (Peter Powell interview, Radio 1 (UK), 11 October 1980)
It was really a theme that has fascinated me for some time. It's based on a theme that is often used in folk songs, which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel that perhaps he's not faithful. And there's no real strength in her feelings, it's just more or less paranoia suspicions, and so she starts thinking that she's going to test him, just to see if he's faithful. So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter. And he responds very well to the letter, because as he reads it, he recognises the wife that he had a couple of years ago, who was happy, in the letter. And so he likes it, and she decides to take it even further and get a meeting together to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her. When he meets her, again because she is so similar to his wife, the one that he loves, he's very attracted to her. Of course she is very annoyed and the break in the song is just throwing the restaurant at him... (...) The whole idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans and how by our own thinking, spinning around in our own ideas we come up with completely paranoid facts. So in her situation she was in fact suspicious of a man who was doing nothing wrong, he loved her very much indeed. Through her own suspicions and evil thoughts she's really ruining the relationship. (Countdown Australia, 1980)”.
There are so many things to love about Babooshka. The video alone is one! It is iconic in her cannon. Her videos up until this point had been original and had lots of interesting things in them but, compare Babooshka to videos for The Man with the Child in His Eyes, Hammer Horror and even Wow, and Babooshka seems like a step forward. The video depicts Bush beside a double bass (symbolising her/the protagonist’s husband). She is wearing a black bodysuit and a veil in her role as the embittered wife. When the chorus comes, her outfit changes into a mythlike Russian costume as her alter-ego, Babooshka. It is a very sexy and bold moment that announced that Bush was taking her music somewhere new! The use of the Fairlight CMI (she was introduced to the technological goldmine by Peter Gabriel) adds some great effects (including the sound of breaking glass). Some great balalaika by Paddy Bush and one of Bush’s most confident and fascinating vocal performances makes Babooshka this treasure of a song. I feel Babooshka is one of Bush’s more under-appreciated songs. That might sound insane considering that is charted well and is played a lot. When critics and fans rank her singles, Babooshka does not make the top five all of the time. I think it warrants a place there. One cannot overlook the impact of Wuthering Heights and The Man with the Child in His Eyes but, in 1980, Bush seemed to be making this statement with Babooshka. It is so different to anything that she had released to that point. The lyrics paint this beautiful picture of mistrust and mystery. One of my favourite ever Kate Bush verses is this: “And when he laid eyes on her/He got the feeling they had met before/Uncanny/How she/Reminds him of his little lady/Capacity to give him all he needs”.
There are a couple of detailed articles that I want to source from. The first, from Dreams of Orgonon examines the story and inspirations behind the song. I love what is observed about Baboshka’s relationship dynamic, and the moral ambiguity:
“Wuthering Heights” was a reunion of lovers. “Babooshka” relates the slow burn of a dysfunctional relationship, culminating in a glam psychotic break. The song’s title character acts as if Bush intended to finally write the Catherine of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: a petty, jealous hooligan ruins her relationship with her partner in a frantic bout of possessiveness. Her plan, of course, is barmy — Babooshka tests her husband’s loyalty by catfishing him through “scented letters” (not a great plan — what happens if Babooshka’s husband finds these letters on a desk while the lady of the house makes herself some Earl Grey? Somebody make a short film about this). Babooshka uses these letters to arrange a tête-à-tête between her husband and her assumed personality — “just like/his wife/but how she was before the years flew by.” The song is unclear on whether Babooshka is recognized by her husband, merely suggesting he gives into her whims (he’s absolutely a sub). Babooshka’s self-poisoning narcissism breaks their relationship, creating a process of martial recursion in which the fear of a relationship’s ending itself ends that relationship.
But what of the relationship’s nature? The details of the emotional split between the couple is expressed vaguely. “Babooshka” is predicated on its protagonist’s desire to “test her husband,” and only supplies the occasional detail on the couple’s relationship. When the husband reads the catfish letters (someone please write a biography of me and title it The Catfish Letters), he observes that she resembles his wife “before the tears/and how she was before the years flew by.” Evidently their marriage was happy at one point, before some cataclysm ruptured it and damned them to a joyless union. Before Babooshka turned to suspicion and jealousy, she had the “capacity to give him all he needs” (we could dedicate an entire piece to the fact that the husband obviously has a mommy kink, but let’s try to keep our readership here). Her scheme to win him over is an expression of desire to return to the joy of their early married years, an act of futile nostalgia. The fantasy she enacts is not simply toxic; it’s regressive and pitiful.
Of course, the song’s moral ambiguity is its most interesting aspect. While there’s an almost reactionary slant to the way “Babooshka” perceives relationships, particularly in the way it treats gender along binary and determinist lines, Bush does push against the grain. She often demonstrates a willingness to interrogate the internal experiences of her characters, particularly women characters. Exploring the ramifications of jealousy is crucial to imbuing her characters with interiority. Bush has Babooshka’s husband failing similarly, even if she doesn’t realize it. Most texts are buzzing with suggestions their authors haven’t considered. In the case of “Babooshka,” Bush enacts a complex meditation on how gendered expectations can poison relationships. Babooshka lets her suspicions and preoccupation with re-becoming young and glamorous overcome her life, and her husband lets his treacherous predilections towards young beauty lead him astray. No party comes out morally in the clear, and yet neither is entirely unsympathetic. They’re trapped in an ugly binary where people are programmed to perform in ways incompatible with human psychology. If there’s a way to use the framework of folklore in a thoughtful and modern way, this is it.
As such, “Babooshka” makes the case that Kate Bush’s songwriting can be multiple things at once and create a conflicting hive of meaning, and that Bush’s love for the archaic is hardly blinded by a nostalgic haze. She demonstrates a consistent willingness to interrogate how stories like these work, how human beings act when plugged into myth and folklore, and the ways in which these situations are incompatible with humanity. Some of the most complex women in fiction are characters in Kate Bush songs. Never for Ever’s status as the first studio album by a female artist to reach #1 in the UK remains significant for a number of reasons. If Dreams of Orgonon has a thesis, it’s that Kate Bush is a traditionally-minded person who can’t stop herself from writing feminist songs. Break the glass. Howl “Babooshka, ya-ya!” The 1980s are here, and there’s a new swordmistress of chaos to herald them”.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Many do not realise that Bush’s songs, in various ways, have helped shape how we view various cultures and nations. Babooshka’s Russian-sounding/named title – though misspelt - was a bit of a breakthrough. At a time when the Cold War was dividing the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, not that many artists – certainty in the West – were writing anything that nodded to the Soviet Union. The Guardian wrote an interesting article in 2014 (as Bush came to the stage for her residency, Before the Dawn). They argue how, as many had a dodgy and stereotyped view of Russians, Babooshka helped changed things:
“Since the concerts were announced, everyone has had something to say about why Kate Bush matters. For me Bush’s music touched parts of the brain that other less cerebral 70s singers didn’t come close to reaching.
For instance, her 1978 No 1 single Wuthering Heights rescued Emily Brontë’s novel from languishing dustily on school exam syllabuses, unloved by unmotivated teenage readers, and gave it a new generation of admirers. The plaintive refrain, “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home,” brought chillingly back to life the uncanny nightmare episode at the start of the book.
For me, though, the key song in Kate Bush’s repertoire is not Wuthering Heights but Babooshka, her Russian-ish single from 1980 – a hit in many countries, not least Britain, France and America.
As a London schoolgirl studying Russian at the time, I didn’t care at all that Kate Bush pronounced the Russian name with the stress in the wrong place, and clearly had no idea that it meant “granny”. I just remember being gobsmacked to realise that any sort of Russian theme could come up in the charts at all – let alone one that didn’t fit either of the two prevailing Russian stereotypes. In those iron curtain days, to my mind Russians were either Ealing countesses, the children and grandchildren of the dispossessed, impoverished, desperately genteel White Russians who’d escaped from the 1917 revolution with nothing but their titles. Or they were solid, slab-faced politburo men from the newspapers, in solid suits, with hair lacquered into silvery central committee quiffs which always rather reminded me of menacing ice-cream cones.
Then suddenly this weird little fairytale about a love test gone wrong, full of the chirpy yet minor cadences of eastern folk and gypsy music, was on everyone’s lips all over the western world.
The song tells the story of a wife trying to check her husband’s loyalty by sending him notes purporting to come from a younger woman, which she signs “Babooshka”. Her fear that her husband no longer sees her as young and attractive are borne out by the barbed lines conveying his thoughts: “Just like his wife before she ‘freezed’ on him / Just like his wife when she was beautiful”. The trap is set when, in her bitterness and paranoia, Babooshka arranges to meet her husband, who is attracted to her alter-ego character because she reminds him of his wife in earlier times – and so she lets her fears ruin her marriage.
The video featured Bush beside a double bass symbolising the husband, wearing a black bodysuit and a veil in her role as the embittered wife, then changing into an extravagant, myth-like and rather sparse “Russian” costume as Babooshka. It was a kind of mass-culture rethink of some of the themes of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, the Shostakovich opera which had so annoyed Stalin – the plotting, the secretiveness, the centrality of human relationships instead of politics, and that wily female desperation bringing tragedy in its wake.
But at the time the important thing was that Babooshka’s story, with its dancey, faintly eastern-sounding music and the emotional subtlety that toned down its cruelty, helped blow away the cobwebs from what most people then thought they knew about life on the communist side of Europe. It was proof that Russians weren’t all about Pravda and giant factories and dreary rolled-steel statistics, after all. There were real people out there, too: people who liked their wild love songs in a minor key; people with hearts, sometimes broken; people struggling to escape frustrating situations.
This made Babooshka a helpful soundtrack as the vast political changes began, very soon afterwards, on the eastern side of 1980s Europe – changes that would eventually bring the divided continent back together. The song opened millions of western hearts and minds to the possibility that the easterners they were reading about were no longer anonymous foot soldiers in a cold war that was ending, but rather flesh-and-blood folks like them”.
One of Kate Bush’s most extraordinary and impactful song, I wanted to return to the magnificent Babooshka. Over forty years since it was released, it is still being discovered by new fans. It is a magnificent and hugely compelling song that will be passed down and adored…
THROUGH the ages.