FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
Maria Montgomery Sarnoff: OPTION (1990)
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ONE of the last parts…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
of The Kate Bush Interview Archive run, I wanted to look at another one around the release of The Sensual World (1989). The reason it is another one from this period is because that album is not as highly regarded as it should be. In a month or so, I am concentrating on The Kick Inside (her debut album) to mark forty-five years since it was recorded. Now, I wanted to bring in a great interview that Maria Montgomery Sarnoff conducted for OPTION in 1990. The start of a new decade for Kate Bush, there would have been this sense of pride at what she had achieved, in addition to curiosity as to what she would do next. Of course, The Red Shoes arrived in 1993. I think that The Sensual World is an album that was a maturing woman taking a different course. Perhaps more personal and sensual than 1985’s Hounds of Love, it is fascinating hearing how she shifted and changed in the space of a few years. Maybe there was this sense of ensuring The Sensual World was as good and refined as it could be. I have selected a few segments from the interview that caught my eye:
“I don't know about being a perfectionist," says Kate Bush, describing her attitude towards creating her unique brand of baroque pop music. Coming from one whose recordings demonstrate utmost control and an immaculate sense of detail, the remark seems practically modest.
Though she might not call herself a prefectionist, Kate Bush's music has achieved, over the course of her career, an unparalleled type of musical chiaroscuro - especially in her latest release, The Sensual World. As her musical development progresses, Kate Bush has found many voices beside the ethereal one featured on her initial hit,"Wuthering Heights." Her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart, were dominated by Bush's trademark soprano voice set amid finely-crafted, effervescent songs. Since then, her voice has acquired an earthy, sybaritic quality that she exploits in such new songs as "Walk Strait Down the Middle," in which she trills in Brazilian, as she alternately hums and growls to create a more sumptuous aural atmoshpere. Her lyrics are set in richly ornate musical settings which upon first listen can be almost too much to consume. But like other rich comestibles, her work is seductive in its luxuriant excess.
"It's a layered procedure. I take a lot of time writing, and thinking." She emphasizes the latter as she sits back on the couch, describing the process by which she produces her musical strata. "The actual performances from people are got very quickly. So hopefully, there's a tremendous amount of spontaneity performance-wise. But I have taken a lot of time between to change bits of the songs.
"You'll do something with people that works out really well," Bush explains. "And it works out so well it starts taking you somewhere else. You think, `I wish that worked so well that I could do THIS with the song.' Some-times I do that - take the song away and make it become something better. Working with other musicians is often the key. What worries me is that although the process is very spontaneous, I always feel that it sounds com-plicated."
It's a chilly day in Manhattan, so cold that the ice statues by the Plaza are still in their pristime state. The threat of snow hangs in the air. Kate Bush snuggles deeply into her forest green blazer as she looks out into gray sky, soaking in her wintry surrounding. Even from the comfort of the indoors, Bush is one evidently immersed in the world around her. She ponders a question as to whether she is trying to create an aural environment with her densely textured songs.
"Yes," Bush answers. "That's kind of what it feels like and I'd hate that to sound pretentious, because it could. It's like trying to paint a picture. Each song is like a little picture, and you've got to have the hill there, at the right proportion." Her hand motions toward an imaginary landscape. "When you look at a painting, even a simple painting, it's still got to have the proportions and everything that goes with that. Some songs will be so quick and easy to write. Some lyrics will be so quick. And yet on other songs they won't. They are all individual, and each one has a tricky bit.
"I suppose from a production point of view, the main thing I work toward is a sense of texture. When a song starts, you probably want it to be just sometimes quite small. And then you want it to get very big here so that there's a real sense of climax, and then bring it down again or keep it building. All these thing have shape and texture," she continues, as if visualizing her music in front of her. "I suppose that's just how I work. It's like trying to give the song the right proportions so that when it's big, it's really big and not too big and not to small. Instruments, different sounds and flavors, really affect all that.
"I think the voice is very much an instrument. Especially with backing vocals, because you don't have to have the emphasis on trying to carry the whole story. You can really treat it like an instrument. It's fun just experimenting with different sounds and shapes."
Perhaps it is Bush's preoccupation with experimentation which has kept her from breaking through to a mass audience in this country. Fame, on the scale which the English singer and composer has experienced in the United Kingdom and Europe, has so far eluded her here in the states. Despite this, there exists a huge cult following that fosters Kate Bush fan clubs and fanzines, both here and abroad. Her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart (both 1978), are filled with piano-dominated songs that hold the promise of things to come. On those early works she was already using her voice for unusual effects in the overdubbed backing vocals. Unusual instru-ments such as mandolins, beer bottles, mandocello, and panpipes were being integrated into her songwriting.
Never For Ever (1980), her third album, is in many ways a transitional one for Bush. On that LP she was introduced to the Fairlight synthesizer, which has since become integral to her compositions and arrangments. "The Fairlight was incredibly important," she relates, "because it was really what I had been looking for but had never thought possible. I used to play the piano, and the only instruments I had to work with from that were the piano and my voice. So I used to put a lot of emphasis on backing vocals and arrangements on the piano, because they were - in a way - trying to be violins and trumpets, and my voice was trying to be strings. That's all I had to work with. I was into the CS-80, but I really didn't like synthesizers as such, because they weren't natural sounds, and that's what I really loved. Discovering the Fairlight gave me a whole new writing tool as well as an arranging tool, like the difference between writing a song on a piano or on a guitar. With a Fairlight you've got everything, a tremendous range of things. It completely opened me up to sounds and textures. And I could experiment with these in a way I could never have done without it. It would have cost too much money. The Fairlight gave me a very private experimental instrument."
As an example of Bush's adventurous arrangements, the title track of Bush's latest release, The Sensual World, has a unique blending of both celtic and middle eastern sounds. The song was adapted from a traditional Macedonian piece sent to Bush by a fan, Jan Libbenga. "It was so beautiful that I was completely taken by it. So we used that piece and adapted it." The celtic flourishes are provided by uillean pipes, which Kate has also used on her previous albums The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds of Love (1985).
The text for "The Sensual World" was inspired by a completely different source: the Molly Bloom speech at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses. The lyrics were at first supposed to have been derived directly from the original; when Bush petitioned the Joyce estate, they denied permission. But this road-block, she explains, helped more than hindered the composition. "What was interesting was the fact that through their lack of cooperation, that they wouldn't let me use the lyric, the original piece, the song actually became something else. So I think in many ways them not helping us out turned the song into what it is. The song grew and changed into something more inter-esting. Certainly not lyrically, but as a piece of music."
The album, The Sensual World, is the first time Bush has worked with other female vocalists. Listeners who are surprised by her adaptation of Bulgarian harmonies into her own songs really shouldn't be. On Hounds of Love, the song "The Morning Fog" incorporates a piece of Russian choral music that was featured in the plague scene of Werner Herzog's film Nosferatu. As with "The Morning Fog," Bush is able to adapt and use ethnic music without making the result sound like a pastiche. "Rocket's Tail," on the new album, unites the acclaimed Trio Bulgarka with Bush and audaciously sends them off with a searing David Gilmour guitar solo.
"I think the hardest thing about working with the Trio Bulgarka was just having enough courage to go ahead and do it," says Bush, with charactestically self-effacing bashfulness. "Once I actually did that and I met them I and worked together, it was heaven. It was so easy, we had fantastic communi-cation. You know what the language problem is like. But in terms of music it was no problem. We just communicated emotionally and just kind of cuddled each other and sang to each other. It was just the most incredible experience to meet them as people as well as musicians, and to work with women like that - on a creative level. The whole thing was very exciting.
One of the more unusual aspects of Kate Bush's career is the degree of devotion that some of her fans have for her. "They'd drink her bath water!" was a comment by one record retailer after the release of Hounds of Love. In America and Great Britain, Bush fanzines discuss such probing issues as whether or not the song "Rocket's Tail" is dedicated to her pet cat. There are also testimonials of sorts, letters describing just how Bush has changed someone's life. And it goes far beyond that. In 1985 came the first Kate Bush convention, called a Bushcon. Her fans celebrate her birthday, calling it "Katemas," and spending the day immersed in her recordings, videotapes, and the company of other loyal followers. It's a bit twisted; such fiercely religious devotion might put off a lot of artists, especially in light of the threats that many celebrities receive from deranged fans. But Bush is comp-limented rather than concerned over her rabid following.
"My contact with them has been fantastic," she says, "I get letters, a lot of nice ones. When I'm in the middle of an album and I'm worried because it's taking so long, I'll get a letter that says, `I don't care how long it takes, I just hope you're happy with it.' They're very supportive and enthusi-astic. I'm impressed with them as people. They seem very intelligent and respectful of my privacy. I can't thank them enough for that."
"You do get the odd one or two," quipps Palmer. "But they're usually very discreet. They just want a picture or an autograph. And they're quite patient to wait almost five years for an album with no complaints!"
Privacy is something that is very important to Bush, and it is an aspect of her personality that has found its way into a few of the unauthorized bio-graphies that have come out of England. She is said to be squeamish about interviews because of her private nature, but Bush explains that her lack of interest in interviews has more to do with the manner in which the interview is held than anything else. "In England over the years, I've had alot of trouble with the interviews I've done because they haven't wanted to talk about my music. That's what I don't like. I feel that interviews should talk about my music and not me, not my life. The other thing is that I don't want to publicize myself personally. This is not why I do it. I want to publicize my work and my music. There is a fine line anyway, because obviously a person's work is an expression of what they are as a person. But I don't know if it matters what the person is like. (When I read an interview of an artist,) I don't want to know what they do on weekends, I want to hear and see their work."
Upon meeting Kate Bush, she does not seem as inordinately private so much as she strikes one as fully autonomous in her career. Few major label artists enjoy the measure of creative freedom that she does. Albums come out two to four years apart. From videos to photo shoots, Bush controls all visual images of herself. She refuses to become a star based on an acquired persona, pre-ferring her music to be the focus of her public perception. For someone who had fame thrust upon her at such a young age (she was 20 when "Wuthering Heights" became a hit), she could easily have had her career managed by others. Instead, she has worked steadily and intensely for many years in order to creat music in the manner she wishes, without compromising herself or her work. It's an unusual situation, and she knows it.
"Yeah, I'm tremendously lucky," Bush says. "The amount of creative freedom I have is extraordinary. And yet, it's still not enough. Because I don't think you can ever have enough time to create. You can be creating all the time. But just the way our lives work, the way the system works, there continually have to be big breaks in creating. Do you know what I mean? I would like to be spending even more time than I am just creating music".
I know that is quite a lot of the interview! It is an extensive and fascinating chat that I have to thank this website for archiving and publishing. From 1990, Bush would work on The Red Shoes. There were some song releases between 1989 and 1993 but, like she did after Hounds of Love, it would be four years before Bush released her seventh studio album. That album would be her last before 2005’s double album, Aerial. I think that 1989’s The Sensual World is an underrated Kate Bush album. This 1990 interview for OPTION is illuminating and revealing. It arrived during…
A brilliant period of her career.