FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
in this feature but, in this series, I am highlighting great interview through the years. I have not included any from the mid-1980s or later in the decade. I shall rectify that in the next couple of features in this series. Today. I want to spotlight an interview from Tom Doyle. It appeared on The Guardian’s website - though it was an abridged version of an exclusive sixteen-page interview with Bush that appeared in MOJO (which went on sale on 3rd November, 2005). Even though the original interview was published in MOJO, I am taking from the abridged version that The Guardian ran. It was not the only interview conducted around Aerial, although it is one of the best and most illuminating! This was a fascinating period, as Bush released the double album, Aerial. That came twelve years after her previous studio album, The Red Shoes. There was speculation years before as to whether she had retired or was a recluse. Neither was true! Instead, she was looking after her new son (Bertie was born in 1998; there is an Aerial track, Bertie, that is about him). The interview is really interesting to read:
“Yet here, in Kate Bush's home, there is a 47-year-old mother of one, the antithesis of the mysterious recluse, dressed in a workday uniform of brown shirt, jeans and trainers, hair clipped up in practical busy-busy fashion, all wary smiles and nervous laughter. We shake hands, tentatively. She seems tiny (five foot three-and-a-half inches) and more curvaceous than the waif-like dancer of popular memory.
Famously, Kate Bush hates interviews - the last was four years ago, the previous one seven years before that. So the prospect of this interrogation, the only one she has agreed to endure in support of Aerial, must fill her with dread. Around us there is evidence of a very regular, family-shaped existence - toys and kiddie books scattered everywhere, a Sony widescreen with a DVD of Shackleton sitting below it. Atop the fireplace hangs a painting called Fishermen by James Southall, a tableau of weather-beaten seadogs wrestling with a rowing boat; it is soon to be familiar as part of the inner artwork of Aerial. Balanced against a wall in the office next door is a replica of the Rosebud sledge burned at the dramatic conclusion of Citizen Kane, as commissioned for the video of Bush's comeback single, King of the Mountain, and brought home as a gift for her seven-year-old son Bertie.
Can she understand why people build these myths around her?
"No," she begins, apprehensively. "No, I can't. Pffff. I can't really."
You once said: "There is a figure that is adored, but I'd question very strongly that it's me."
There is silence. A stare. You did say it ...
"Well supposedly I said that. But in what context did I say it?"
Just talking about fans building up this image of you as some kind of goddess.
"Yes, but I'm not, am I?"
So, do the rumours bug you? That you're some fragile being who's hidden herself away?
"No," she replies. "A lot of the time it doesn't bother me. I suppose I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person and I just find it frustrating that people think that I'm some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world." Her voice notches up in volume. "Y'know, I'm a very strong person and I think that's why actually I find it really infuriating when I read, 'She had a nervous breakdown' or 'She's not very mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature'."
If the outside world was wondering whether Kate Bush would ever finish her long-awaited album, then it was a feeling shared by its creator. "Oh yeah," she sighs. "I mean, there were so many times I thought, I'll have the album finished this year, definitely, we'll get it out this year. Then there were a couple of years where I thought, I'm never gonna do this. If I could make albums quicker, I'd be on a roll wouldn't I? Everything just seems to take so much time. I don't know why. Time ... evaporates."
There was a story that some EMI execs had come down to see you and you'd said something like: "Here's what I've been working on," and then produced some cakes from your oven. True? "No! I don't know where that came from. I thought that was quite funny actually. It presents me as this homely creature, which is all right, isn't it?"
The shiver-inducing stand-out track on Aerial, however, comes at the end of the first disc. A Coral Room is a piano-and-vocal ballad that Bush admits she first considered to be too personal for release, dealing as it does with the death of her mother, a matter that she didn't address at the time in any of the songs on The Red Shoes.
"No, no I didn't," she says. "I mean, how would you address it? I think it's a long time before you can go anywhere near it because it hurts too much. I've read a couple of things that I was sort of close to having a nervous breakdown. But I don't think I was. I was very, very tired. It was a really difficult time."
Kate Bush begins to tidy up the plates and cups and get ready for Bertie's arrival home from school with his dad. Before I go, however, there is one last Bush myth to bust. Apparently, when she attended a music industry reception at Buckingham Palace this year, she asked the Queen for her autograph. Is that true? Instantly a grin spreads across the face of the Most Elusive Woman in Rock. "Yes, I did!" she exclaims, only half-embarrassedly. "I made a complete arsehole of myself. I'm ashamed to say that when I told Bertie that I was going to meet the Queen, he said, 'Mummy, no, you're not, you've got it wrong' and I said, 'But I am!' So rather stupidly I thought I'd get her to sign my programme. She was very sweet.
"The thing is I would do anything for Bertie and making an arsehole of myself in front of a whole roomful of people and the Queen, I mean ... But I don't have a very good track record with royalty. My dress fell off in front of Prince Charles at the Prince's Trust, so I'm just living up to my reputation”.
The Tom Doyle interview is a rare print interview (as I associate the promotion for Aerial with being largely radio interviews). I will go and get that copy of MOJO, as the full interview is captivating and it is a must-read. I was keen to include bits of it here, as 2005 was when Bush sort of returned for a long spell out of music. Alongside raising a young son, she was taking time out from a rather stressful time in 1993/1994. This was a time when I feel like she was taking on a lot. Her album, The Red Shoes, did not receive that many glowing reviews. The short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve (which was shown at the London Film Festival on 13th November 1993) was also not that well received. It must have been disappointing and upsetting for Bush. It is not a surprise that she needed some space and time to settle. Aerial might have taken a while to come to us, but one only needs to listen to it to realise that it is one of her greatest works – Bush herself has said it is her favourite album, as she associates it with a happy period. One can hear this iconic artist with a whole new lease and sense of purpose.! This new mother brings the domestic and new-found bliss into the album – though one cannot define Aerial by being about motherhood and the home. There are shades of nature and the natural world through the second disc, A Sky of Honey. I would encourage any Kate Bush fan to seek out print/online interviews from 2005. There are a few radio interviews on YouTube that are well worth some time. The interview with Tom Doyle, to me, is among…
THE very best of 2005.