FEATURE:
Best of British
IN THIS PHOTO: Bush performing Room for the Life on the Tour of Life in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Max Browne
Why Kate Bush Is the Finest Female Artist This Country Has Ever Produced
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I have sort of touched upon this…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the Hounds of Love music video shoot in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
in other Kate Bush features. I have argued why Bush needs to be made a Dame and how, over forty-five year since her first professional recording, she is one of the most influential artists in the world. Some might say that it is a bit of a no-brainer in terms of Bush being the greatest British female artist ever. Maybe it would be more contentious taking it international as some would say Joni Mitchell is a more influential and successful artist. I could argue against that but, when it comes to British women, we have some stunning talent. I am a huge fan of Annie Lennox, Amy Winehouse, and Dusty Springfield. There have been so many terrific and influential British women through the musical years; we have so many stunning female artists coming through right now. I am going to finish with a playlist of Bush’s greatest tracks. Before then, I want to bring in a Wikipedia segment that highlights the artists who Bush has inspired. I have already highlighted the awards Bush has won but, through the years, she has been nominated for thirteen British Phonographic Industry accolades (winning for Best British Female Artist in 1987) and has been nominated for three Grammy Awards. In 2002, Bush was recognised with an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. Bush was also appointed a C.B.E. in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to music. In 2017, she was nominated for induction in the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - she has also been nominated this year. I think every award she has been nominated for and won has been very much deserved as her music has impacted so many people through the years!
In terms of those who have been inspired by Kate Bush, it does make for very varied and impressive reading:
“Musicians who have cited Bush as an influence include Beverley Craven, Regina Spektor,Ellie Goulding, Charli XCX, Tegan and Sara, k.d. lang, Paula Cole, Kate Nash, Bat for Lashes, Erasure, Alison Goldfrapp of Goldfrapp, Rosalía, Tim Bowness of No-Man, Chris Braide, Kyros, Aisles, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, Darren Hayes, Grimes, and Solange Knowles. Nerina Pallot was inspired to become a songwriter after seeing Bush play "This Woman's Work" on Wogan. Coldplay took inspiration from "Running Up That Hill" to compose their single "Speed of Sound". In 2015, Adele stated that the release of her third studio album was inspired by Bush's 2014 comeback to the stage.
In addition to those artists who state that Bush has been a direct influence on their own careers, other artists have been quoted expressing admiration for her work including Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Björk, Florence Welch, Little Boots, Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, Dido, Sky Ferreira, St. Vincent, Lily Allen, Anohni of Antony and the Johnsons, Big Boi of OutKast, Stevie Nicks, Steven Wilson, Steve Rothery of Marillion, and André Matos. According to an unauthorised biography, Courtney Love of Hole listened to Bush among other artists as a teenager. Tricky wrote an article about The Kick Inside, saying: "Her music has always sounded like dreamland to me.... I don't believe in God, but if I did, her music would be my bible".
IN THIS PHOTO: Florence Welch (Florence and the Machine )
Suede front-man Brett Anderson stated about Hounds of Love: "I love the way it's a record of two halves, and the second half is a concept record about fear of drowning. It's an amazing record to listen to really late at night, unsettling and really jarring". John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, declared her work to be "beauty beyond belief. Rotten once wrote a song for her, titled "Bird in Hand" (about exploitation of parrots) that Bush rejected. Bush was one of the singers whom Prince thanked in the liner notes of 1991's Diamonds and Pearls. In December 1989, Robert Smith of The Cure chose "The Sensual World" as his favourite single of the year, The Sensual World as his favourite album of the year and included "all of Kate Bush" plus other artists in his list, "the best things about the eighties".
Apologies if I repeat myself in terms of articles sources and points raised, but I am thinking about the fact that Bush has influenced so many artists and people through her career! Even though Bush has Irish roots (her mother was Irish), many think of her as a quintessentially British artist. One might ask why now I am making a case for Kate Bush being the all-time greatest British female artist. I keep coming back to this absence of documentaries about her and a real disservice. It seems remiss that there has not been more attention about Bush because, the more you know about, the more one understands how varied and original her music is!
I am going to wrap things up soon, but I want to quote from an article from The New Yorker from 2018. I have sourced from it before, but I think Margaret Talbot raises really great cases. Not just in terms of influence but, as someone who is not necessarily a completist, she has rediscovered new layers in Bush’s music:
“Kate Bush, the English singer-songwriter, is one of those who have held fast without shrinking, so it is curious and instructive to see how certain cultural signifiers have been trotted out over the years to diminish her. Certainly, she’s had her share of respect and even adoration. Prince, Peter Gabriel, and Elton John collaborated on songs with her, and she has inspired younger talents; Tori Amos, Björk, Joanna Newsom, St. Vincent, Perfume Genius, and Mitski are all heirs. Every year, around the world, people get together by the hundreds to dance in public to Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”—a goofy but heartfelt tribute to her interpretive dance moves in the song’s glorious freak flag of a video. 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.
Yet, with this listen, I discovered that I really liked the animalistic cacophony of “Get Out of My House”—for all it suggested about how few fucks Bush gave when it came to getting radio play or charming people in any conventionally girlish way, and for its brazen strangeness. And I loved a song called “Suspended in Gaffa.” It starts with a tinny music-hall bounce that swells into a rich, chunky rhythm, accented with a chirping, distorted vocal that sounds trippy and modern. The lyrics, about seeing God or achieving some creative peak, only to have the vision snatched away, were inspired by Bush’s Catholic upbringing. The title is a reference to sticky black gaffer tape—a metaphor for frustrating ensnarement. But it also sounds, marvellously, like a geographical location in which a character from a Paul Bowles novel might be immured.
And then there was the extraordinary “Hounds of Love.” Bush’s voice is deeper and more resonant than on earlier records, the use of the synthesizer is more assured, and the experiments are never awkward, as Bush’s sometimes can be. When “Hounds of Love” came out, in 1985, I was in graduate school, at Harvard, and my mother had just had a stroke that robbed her of most of her speech. I’d soon be leaving school for a year to help take care of her. But, in the meantime, I’d walk home from Widener Library every day in a pen-and-ink drawing of a Cambridge November, the metallic smell of incipient snow permanently in the air, and when I got to my apartment with the sloping floors in Central Square—sometimes before I’d removed my winter coat or said more than hello to my boyfriend—I’d put “Hounds of Love” on the turntable, turn it up very, very loud, and wait for the galloping drum loops and the salty-sweet emotional rush of Bush’s vocals to comfort and exalt me.
When it got to the end of the first side, I’d lift the needle up and put it right back at the first track, “Running Up That Hill,” the song with the pounding beat and irresistible synthesizer hook about “making a deal with God” so that men and women might “swap our places” and feel what it was like to be one another. Those songs always evoked the possibility of a headlong happiness that seemed, at that moment, wholly out of reach. Something about the particular way that they projected roiling human emotions onto images from the natural world—thunder, the big sky, clouds that looked like Ireland, the little fox, caught by dogs, who let her take him in her hands—was liberating and uplifting to me. I don’t think that I ever listened to the second side, the song cycle “The Ninth Wave,” and maybe that’s just as well, for, as gorgeous as it is, it’s also about the saddest set of songs that I have ever heard.
One secret of Bush’s artistry is that she has never feared the ludicrous—she tries things that other musicians would be too careful or cool to go near. That was apparent from the very first lines of “Wuthering Heights”—“Out on the wiley, windy moors / we’d roll and fall in green / You had a temper like my jealousy / too hot, too greedy.” When she wrote that song, she hadn’t yet read the Emily Brontë novel; she’d only caught the end of a TV adaptation. But of course she got the essence of the book, sucked it in, and transmogrified it in her teen-aged soul, and she knew how to keen those lyrics like a ghost ceaselessly yearning”.
Because Bush is our greatest British female artist, I do hope that there is more media attention and love. Not just in terms of documentaries, but texts and albums that explore her work and enormous legacy in greater depth. I think that Kate Bush is our most esteemed and amazing female artist; a status that will…
NEVER change.