FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush circa 1990
1990: Daily Mirror (John Diliberto)
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I can’t see too many interviews…
I haven’t covered in this series yet. Thanks to this exhaustive website for leading me to great Kate Bush chats. The one that I want to explore and take a lot from is her 1990 talk with John Diliberto of the Daily Mirror. Promoting her album, The Sensual World, it is clear that it was a moment when Bush was heading more in a personal direction. I am not going to quote the entire interview. There were some sections that were particularly highlight-worthy:
“Bush sweeps into Abbey Road Studios followed closely by her boyfriend/ engineer/bassist Del Palmer. Dressed entirely in black, with loose sweater, jeans and high-heeled boots, Bush is less the erotic exotic and more hip bohemian. Settling into a black leather studio chair in a control room, surrounded by the ghosts of Billy Shears and Eleanor Rigby, Bush is at once revealing and concealing about the nature of her music. In many ways she works in an enclosed world, with the doors carefully guarded and only the appointed few managing to get inside. Since The Dreaming in 1982, she's composed her music almost exclusively on her own, demo-ing tracks with her Fairlight CMI and often playing many of the parts that way. The Sensual World, her first album since 1985's The Hounds of Love <sic> was mostly recorded in her home studio in kent where she works and lives with Palmer. For many, that's a prescription for insularity and self-indulgence. For Kate Bush, it's resulted in her most direct and personal album to date.
"There are personal elements in the other albums, but yes, this is definitely personal, on every level, the process and everything," she avers. "It's a very intimate process I make records in now. We don't have tape operators. I'm producing. So most of the time it's just the two of us, and Del knows the kind of sounds I like. So the communication is very good, and most of the time it's just beating my head against the wall for ideas and things. But all the recording is done very quickly."
Ever since she took over production on the 1980 album Never For Ever, Bush's music has grown increasingly textured and complex, full of eddies and rivulets of sound. She layers line upon line of synthesizer orchestrations with flourishes provided by a small coterie of musicians like Palmer, drummers Charlie Morgan and Stuart Elliott, and her brother Paddy Bush. Kevin Killen, whom she met on Peter Gabriel's So sessions and who has mixed for Elvis Costello and U2, is one of the few to gain entry to Bush's inner sessions and who has mixed for Elvis Costello and U2, is one of the few to gain entry to Bush's inner circle.
But Bush will have to make some changes following the death of long-time guitarist Alan Murphy. He had played with Long John Baldry, Level 42 and Go West. His textures provided the dark undercurrent and pointed punctuation on so many Bush songs since 1979. He died shortly after The Sensual World was completed. "He was a guitarist who I felt used his instrument like a voice," says Bush solemnly. "But also like a chameleon, I guess. He could just change it into anything. 'Al, I want you to be a racing car.' Fine, he'd become a racing car. 'Al, could you be this big panther creeping through the jungle?' You could throw any imagery at him and he would never balk, he would just be with you, you know. Making albums will never be the same again for me without Alan. I'll miss him terribly. I already do, as a person as well as a musician."
Her brother Paddy keeps her abreast of world music sounds, from Celtic music to the aborigines. Her acute sense of orchestration has found ways to interpolate digeridus, bouzoukis, uillean pipes and fiddles along with Celtic harpist Alan Stivell, German jazz bassist Eberhard Weber, string quartets arranged by minimalist composer Michael Nyman, and on her new album the haunting, ecstatic vocals of the Trio Bulgarka.
She approaches this sound palette without the self-consciousness of world-music chic. Instead it's all blended through her dramatic sense of studio space and Fairlight and synthesizer orchestrations. She never loses her own sense of self in a delicate balancing act of assimilation, one that she approaches with deference.
She speaks in awe of all the musicians who support her, but none more so that the Trio Bulgarka, whom she feels are working on a higher plane of creation. "We are talking big music here," she admits. "We are talking real music, that goes back so far. I can't imagine who would have put music like this together. Way beyond me.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with the Trio Bulgarka
"I suppose the main thing was getting up the courage to actually approach the Trio," she reveals. "Cause I wanted to work with them so badly. But I was also very scared that I wouldn't do them justice. Particularly in the context of contemporary music. I really didn't want them to be belittled into pop music. The kind of music that they are working with was in touch with something that I think we've lost touch with. And it's very rarely now that you are affected that powerfully by music, like that. Contemporary music occasionally hits you in the heart and very, very rarely reaches your soul. But music like that is so old, intense, powerful and spiritual--instinctive music, almost. You know, I'd like to see anyone who could stand in the room with those three women singing for more than twenty minutes and not cry."
Smiling behind her wide brown almond eyes, Bush is too modest to concede that there are many who would say the same for her music. Songs like Houdini, Under Ice and Suspended in Gaffa plumb a psychological, emotional range <plumb a range?> that's rarely heard in modern music. It can be frightening in its cathartic nakedness on Get Out of My House, and poignant in its insights on The Fog, from The Sensual World.
Both emotionally and sonically, the Trio fits deftly into Bush's multi-tracked choral vocals. On Deeper Understanding they are the spiritual countervoice in a song about emotional disconnection, where the protagonist finds love in a computer program.
"Yes, it is emotional disconnection, but then it's very much connection ," says Bush, "but in a way that you would never expect. And that kind of emotion should really come from the human instinctive force, and in this particular case it's coming from a computer. I really liked the idea of playing with the whole imagery of computers being so cold, so unfeeling. Actually what is happening in the song is that this person conjures up this program that is almost like a visitation of angels. They are suddenly given so much love by this computer--it's like, you know, just love.
"There was no other choice. Who else could embody the visitation of angels but the Trio Bulgarka?" she laughs.
Yet she also finds an emotional fury in those same voices. On Rocket's Tail she launches Pink Floyd's David Gilmour on a screaming feedback guitar coda intertwined with the Trio. "Well, I'm sure that secretly Dave has always wanted to be Bulgarian," she laughs. "Electric guitar for me has always had that suggestion of a human voice."
Gilmour and Bush's association goes back fifteen years, when Gilmour discovered her, produced her initial demo tapes and shopped them around. "It was such a buzz for me to work with him," she exclaims, "because obviously I've known him for a long time and he's done little things before, like backing vocals. But I've never really had a song where he could just let rip on a guitar--and it was great."
Rocket's Tail is one of those beguiling Bush songs that have a simple story on the surface, about an eccentric strapping a rocket to his back, but you want to know just where it comes from. "I'm not sure if it's meant to be figured out," says Bush, offering little help. "If you want to figure it out, great; but again, songs should exist in their own space. And if they are a curious item, then that's very nice. Some people are, aren't they?"
The Sensual World continues Bush's flirtation with a certain kind of innocent eroticism, with lines sung in a sultry voice: "Then I'd taken the seedcake back from his mouth/Going deep South, go down, mmh, yes." Bush has said that The Sensual World is an album that brings out her more feminine side, although it seems like the feminine side was where she was always writing from anyway.
"I just felt that I was exploring my feminine energy more-- musically ," she insists. "In the past I had wanted to emanate the kind of power that I've heard in male music. And I just felt maybe somewhere there is this female energy that's powerful. It's a subtle difference--male or female energy in art--but I think there is a difference: little things, like using the Trio. And possibly some of the attitudes to my lyric writing on this album. I would say it was more accepting of being a female somehow."
There's an almost motherly quality to some of these songs written by the thirty-one-year-old singer. This Woman's Work, written for the John Hughes film She's Having a Baby, looks at the plight of a man left on the outside during childbirth. The schism between male and female has been a constant theme in Bush's music and professional life. She was initially marketed as a somewhat quirky chanteuse who cavorted in revealing clothes, singing with that high, panting voice. It's an image she's fought to overcome while never giving up the sensual, erotic images she employs in her videos. Given her desire to be taken seriously, and the obvious control she now exerts over her own career, it has always seemed curious that a woman identified as Kate Bush did a nude spread in Penthouse International Magazine (not released in the U.S.) in the 1970s, samples of which have subsequently appeared as bootleg covers. <This is just bad journalism: the Penthouse spread did not identify the woman in question as "Kate Bush", but as "Kate Simmons". Since the woman did not really resemble Kate closely anyway, there is no excuse for dredging up this nonsense again without first checking the facts. Clearly the writer never bothered to see for himself.
"No, I didn't," she says, suddenly drawing up her defenses.
"Well, what was it then?" I ask.
"It was someone who looks like me," she says. "I have never done anything like that. All I know is there is a look-alike who's done spreads in magazines, and I presume this is what you're talking about, because I have never taken my clothes off publicly for anyone. I am offended that you should think it's me," she adds, with a tinge of anger lingering in her voice. "I would not do that."
What marks The Sensual World is the way the electronics and synthesizers are organically integrated into Bush's songs. "When I started to write this album, I was in a situation where we had updated our studio," she says. "We had a new desk, and generally just more equipment. The high-tech quality-level of our studio had gone right up. And I found it quite difficult to write because I felt overwhelmed by the amount of equipment around me. It was quite stifling, and I made a conscious effort to move away from that, and treat the song as a song. I wanted to write songs, and then just use the equipment to do what I wanted. Because otherwise it drags you along behind it if you're not careful”.
I really like The Sensual World - and it was quite a change of direction from Hounds of Love. Entering her thirties and creating this sensual, mature and stunning album, it is no wonder so many people wanted to speak to her about it. I am going to wrap things up. An album that utilised new technology and avenues, The Sensual World is one of finest and most nuanced albums. Although there are a couple of questions from John Diliberto, I think he gets some good answers from Kate Bush. From here, she would start to work on 1993’s The Red Shoes. The Sensual World could have been a disappointment compared with 1985’s Hounds of Love. As it is, her fifth album is among her very best. The more interviews I read around the release of The Sensual World, the more I appreciate it. Her 1989 release is…
A tremendous album.