FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Kris Needs: ZigZag (1980)
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I am really interested in…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the 1980 British Rock and Pop Awards/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix/Getty Images
the print inter views Kate Bush has conducted through the years. It gives us an illustration and snapshot of various stages of her career and where she was as an artist. I have been thinking about 1980 and Never for Ever. Coming off of The Tour of Life the previous year, this album was a chance to start a new chapter. As I have said before, perhaps she wasn’t as happy with her first two albums – 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart – as she could have been. Maybe she was too much of a participant in the album rather than someone having bigger creative control. Never for Ever saw her co-produce with Jon Kelly. It is a more experimental album where she made leaps and bounds. Perhaps the energy and scope of The Tour of Life opened her imagination as a songwriter; she was determined to produce an album that was more reflective of who she was. Because of this, I have goner back and looked at the interviews from the time. Thanks to this Reaching Out for leading me to this ZigZag interview of 1980. Kris Needs’ conversation with Bush is engrossing and respectful. I am not going to put it all in this feature. I have chosen some portions of the interview that I find particularly relevant and illuminating:
“What's Kate Bush doing in ZigZag? It's a fair chance that's the thought flitting through your noggin as you espy our rather tasteful cover. Well, I thought it would be interesting, a laugh and definitely on for you lot to get a peek at the lady without all the 'Oo's yer boyfriend, then?' or 'Drop 'em!' techniques so favoured when she's in the media's sights. Also, because she seems to get roundly slagged, piss-taken or sycophated over every time she pops up in the Music Weeklies. These sort of injustices and the prejudices they foster could've kept you from giving Kate Bush a fair listen
Kate's been boxed and packaged in shiny paper with little ribbons on top, it seems. Safe, but 'odd' enough to let the purchaser feel outrageous displaying it on the coffee table.
Well, let's see. If you profess to like Modern music which is breaking down fences and capturing true emotion, Kate Bush has just as much right to be there with A Teardrop Explodes, Bowie or whoever you care to name. A different field, yeah, but she's capable of moments of heart-stopping passion, breath-taking drama and beauty. She's also very honest. The characters might be put on, but that's it.
Kate Bush has just done the Daily Express. Now it's me...But no way does she just press her nose and gush out the conveyor-belt niceties. We talk for over 90 minutes, touching all manner of subjects in an enthusiastic flow. Quite deep at times--"It's like two psychiatrists talking," she said after. I left impressed with her honesty and sense of awe, which, in the wrong hands, could be the reasons detractors have a field day. She don't deserve it, even if you can't stick her music. And I'm warning you, don't just take my word on Kate Bush, then say I wasted your fiver -- it is down to taste, but if you've got any feelings, or just like music, have a go. It's about the only music I like that I can't dance to.
So, Kate, do you think your audience is restricted by these prejudices against you?
"Yeah, I think I'm conscious of people doing that in certain areas, because of the way they've seen me, and I think that's inevitable. I don't blame them. It's really good for me to speak to other magazines."
It'd be good if people could see that you're doing stuff that's pretty new, too. You could never mistake Kate Bush for anyone else.
"Oh, great. I'd like to think that, but it's not for me to say. When you first come out, people say you're the new thing. then when you've been around for two or three years you become old hat, and they want to sweep you under the carpet as being MOR, which I don't feel I am from the artistic point of view. It doesn't feel like MOR to me at all, although I wouldn't call it Punk! Sometimes it's not even rock...I don't know, I think it's wrong to put labels on music. Even Punk, that's really just a label for convenience--it covers so many areas. I think sometimes it can actually kill people, being put under labels. I think it's something that shouldn't be encouraged. If people could just accept music as music and people as people, without having to compare them to other things...which is something we instinctively try to do."
The way you're presented in the press could alienate some people, I s'pose.
"Don't you think any form of publicity alienates the person who is not involved in it? I think that's part of the whole process. That's why I feel that the good thing about albums and gigs and even radio is that you are directly communicating with your audience, but with papers and appearances on TV you're not really relating directly."
Does the bad criticism hurt you?
"No, I don't get hurt. I've read a few reviews of the album, an some of them really couldn't stand me, probably much more than the album. In fact, one guy didn't like me so much, he had to write four columns of 'I can't stand Bush!' That's cool. Sometimes I find it funny. I think a bad review is a good omen in some papers."
The next single is Army Dreamers, which sounds like a wistful little waltz-time ditty on first hearing, though a bit sombre. Kate adopts a lilting Irish accent--all very nice. But listen to the words and she's mourning her dead son, killed in the army. I thought Kate was singing about Northern Ireland, but not necessarily...
"It's not actually directed at Ireland. It's included, but it's much more embracing the whole European thing. That's why it says BFPO in the first chorus, to try and broaden it away from Ireland."
What about the Irish accent?
"The Irish accent was important because the treatment of the song is very traditional, and the Irish would always use their songs to tell stories, it's the traditional way. There's something about an Irish accent that's very vulnerable, very poetic, and so by singing it in an Irish accent it comes across in a different way. But the song was meant to cover areas like Germany, especially with the kids that get killed in manoeuvres, not even in action. It doesn't get brought out much, but it happens a lot. I'm not slagging off the Army, it's just so sad that there are kids who have no O-levels and nothing to do but become soldiers, and it's not really what they want. That's what frightens me."
She's well into the individual "stating your presence," citing Punk as an example. But everyone's got the same insecurities and fears.
"It's so bloody easy to be forgotten. It's so easy to go under unless you fight. Everyone has to fight, and there are different ways of fighting.
"I'm definitely trying to state my presence, I must be. It's important for me to do things on a one-man basis. I seem to work, produce, create, better as one entity, and then I involve others for feedback. That seems to be the ideal way for me to work. You see, musically, too, I feel I've only just begun. I'm not doing what I want to do musically, yet. I'm getting there, but it's nowhere near to what I actually want. I'd love to play you some of the new stuff I'm doing."
So what are the new songs like, then?
"They're much more up. I'm getting to work much more easily with rhythm boxes and synthesizers at home, and I've got some time. That's what I need, and this year is the first I've really had any time to breathe. I'm experimenting all the time and finding new things. It's great, all the toys that are around to play with--digital delay, chorus pedal, you could write a sound purely round the sound."
The NME review said the album was all glossy dressing and little else.
"Well, the other two albums were what I would call glossy, and I could understand them saying that. I feel this one is the rawest it's been, it's raw in its own context. I feel perhaps the guy just wouldn't let me in, and that was the problem. He saw me as this chocolate-box-sweetie little thing who has no reality in there, no meaning of life. That's cool, I really understand that, but I like to think that people will let me in, and I'm lucky to have so many who do.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with fans in Newcastle in 1980
"I think it's good for you to read reviews like that about yourself, because they don't matter, and although people are going to read them, it's good for you to realise in some ways that people can say anything they want about you. It shouldn't matter what they say. I think the public are starting to realise the hype in the media manipulation, the propaganda. I pick up papers and read something about someone, and I start believing it, and then I realise, 'God, I'm doing just what other people are doing to me!' I think journalism could be such an art, and some people treat it as such. Others use it as an extension of their egos. You get nothing out of reading it, other than this thick blanket of: 'Me-e-e-e!'"
It's good that you've got a big following among very young kids and are doing this, cos they'll have to know more than just Janet and John books and Tiswas soon... [Tiswas was a British television programme which was ostensibly made for children, but which eventually attracted a large adult audience, as well.]
"So many of them knew, you know. They hear a lot more than the media generally give them. They really understand the song, and I don't think it frightens them, but it really upsets a lot of them. That's good--it's not nice but it's good that that actually ot through to them.
"When I wrote the song, it was from such a personal viewpoint. It was just through having heard a thing for years without it ever having got through to me. 'Til the moment it hit me, I hadn't really been moved. Then I suddenly realised the whole devastation and disgusting arrogance of it all. Trying to destroy something that we've not created--the earth. The only thing we are is a breathing mechanism: everything is breathing. Without it we're just nothing. All we've got is our lives, and I was worried that when people heard it they were going to think, 'She's exploiting commercially this terribly real thing.' I was very worried that people weren't going to take me from my emotional standpoint rather than the commercial one. But they did, which is great. I was worried that people wouldn't want to worry about it because it's so real. I was also worried that it was too negative, but I do feel that there is hope in the whole thing, just for the fact that it's a message from the future. It's not from now, it's from a spirit that may exist in the future, a non-existant spiritual embryo who sees all and who's been round time and time again so they know what the world's all about. This time they don't want to come out, because they know they're not going to live. It's almost like the mother's stomach is a big window that's like a cinema screen, and they're seeing all this terrible chaos”.
I really like the ZigZag interview. Whilst some from that time (I think the interview is from 1980; it could have been late-1979) are a little too personal or shambolic (on the part of the interviewer), this one is really solid and balanced. We get insight into the songs on Never for Ever, in addition to a little bit about Kate Bush as the woman behind the music. I will continue the interview series for a bit, as there are some great examples many Kate Bush fans are not aware of. 1980 was a year where Bush had a few albums and a big tour under her belt. Her career would enter a new phase. Her sound and image were changing. The media perceived her, in the first couple of years, as quite hippie-dippy and almost a novelty. Albums like Never for Ever showed there was more to her than that – though I completely disagree with critical perception of Bush before then. 1982’s The Dreaming was the next album…taking the experimentation up a notch and seeing Bush alone in the producer’s chair for the first time. 1980 is a year where Bush was clearly looking to be more independent as a creator. One can feel that urge on Never for Ever. Interviews like the one with ZigZag are portraits of an ambitious and true artist who was…
BOUND for greatness.