FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1992/PHOTO CREDIT: Phil Dent
1994: David Sinclair (Rolling Stone)
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I dip in and out of this feature…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart
where I highlight great interviews Kate Bush has been involved with through her career. The reason I am returning to this is that I found on via Gaffweb and their excellent resource of archived interviews. The one I am featuring is with David Sinclair of Rolling Stone. It was published in February, and it is entitled Dear Diary: The Secret World of Kate Bush. Bush released The Red Shoes in 1993 alongside the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve. Neither were particularly well received, but the film especially was subject to some unkind feedback. To be fair, Bush herself dismissed it soon after it was released. I never associate Bush and the year 1994. My favourite year for music, she was still active on the scene, though it would be 2005 when she came back with another studio album. Reading interviews from 1993 and 1994 is fascinating. I will include a 1993 one perhaps when I write an anniversary feature about The Red Shoes too. That was released in November 1993. Although not among Bush’s best albums, it is fantastic and very underrated. I want to drop in this interesting interview from 1994. Of course, like so many interviewers Bush has had to face, she has been misperceived and labelled. Calling her a “control freak” is not really what we associate with Bush. The chat is more of a career-spanning look back, rather than focusing on The Red Shoes. Regardless, it is interesting reading how Bush addresses subjects like touring and her past work:
“A control freak who was already overruling her record company's decisions when Madonna was still playing drums in her first group, Bush writes and produces her albums, has her own publishing company and recording studio and is self-managed. Right down to the post-production tasks of editing and sound dubbing her movie, she maintains a strict hands-on policy. The effect can be draining.
"I don't have enough hours in the day," Bush readily concedes. "I don't do everything myself. I have people working with me who are wonderful. But I've managed for so long without a manager, I'm not sure there are a lot of things I'd want a manager for. I suppose I feel that at least the decisions I make are coming from me, and I'm not put into a situation that I wouldn't want to be in."
But another, unspoken reason why Bush subjects herself to interviews so rarely is her singularly English reluctance to dwell publicly on herself or her private affairs. Gracious but guarded, she will cheerfully burble on about her artistic motivations. But try to pin her down on a matter of emotional substance and her expression goes blank, a shutter descends -- clunk! --and that's the end of that.
"Albums are like diaries," Bush says. "You go through phases, technically and emotionally, and they reflect the state that you're in at the time. This album has been a very big transition point for me. Right from the beginning of writing there was a different energy coming out. It probably sounds a bit silly. But I do believe that the people who are in the studio exude an energy into the tape which is very much to do with what they feel. It's a very emotional process, really. And when you get these close working relationships with people, you start to get this weird communication."
Apart from Bush, the person who has contributed most to the album has been bassist and studio engineer Del Palmer, her partner both musically and romantically since the earliest days. But despite his continuing involvement on a professional level, is it true that they are no longer a couple?
"We have an extremely good working relationship," says Bush, "and I'd like to think that the album reflects that. I tend not to talk about my relationships, really. That's quite a personal thing." Clunk!
The Red Shoes also features an unusual array of high-profile guest musicians: Eric Clapton on the smoldering, bluesy "And So Is Love"; Jeff Beck on a stately ballad called "You're the One"; and Prince, who contributes guitar, keyboards, backing vocals and a very Princely arrangement to "Why Should I Love You?"
"If started off as a bit of a laugh, a game that turned into reality," Bush says of those star turns. "The sort of people that I would have dearly loved to have played on the album, I actually got up the nerve to ring them up and ask them if they would like to come and play on the track. I don't feel they've been used for their names. I'd be very unhappy to think that they weren't being shown off properly. But I do feel honored that all of these people were so responsive."
Bush's surprise at finding such luminaries so willing to participate (even the famously negotiable "fee-paid-will-play" Beck) may not be false modesty. She has collaborated with one or two close friends in the past, notably Peter Gabriel on "Games Without Frontiers" and the affecting "Don't Give Up." But Bush hasn't spent much time fraternizing with the rock community since the whirlwind success of her debut single, "Wuthering Heights," which topped the U.K. chart for four weeks in 1978.
In many ways, Kate Bush has had a privileged -- some would say cosseted --ride, having been elevated from an early age above the general rough and tumble of rock & roll. She was still a schoolgirl when Ricky Hopper, a family friend and wanna-be talent scout, financed a demo tape of her songs, which he passed on to David Gilmour, a guitarist with Pink Floyd (who, she says, neither sought nor received any financial reward for his efforts), Bush was signed to EMI Records in Britain in 1974 at the tender age of 16.
Supported financially, but otherwise left to her own devices, she spent the next three years honing her talents and developing material at her own speed. It's a habit that has yielded diminishing commercial returns in later years as gaps between albums have grown steadily longer. "Wuthering Heights" is still her biggest single worldwide. In America, 1985's Hounds of Love is her only album to have even dented the Top 40, although The Red Shoes has become a current college-radio favorite.
Bush has toured only once, a multi-costume-changing, singing and dancing extravaganza that played for 28 dates in Europe in 1979. It was a trailblazing show, so much so that it was Bush's sound engineers who first hit on the idea of the microphone headset, developing a prototype made out of a wire coat hanger, which she used in the early shows.
"I did enjoy it," Bush says of her touring experienced, "but I was really physically exhausted. Eventually, I got nervous about performing live again, because I hadn't done it for so long, and I think I actually started losing a lot of confidence as a performer. I felt that I'd become a writer in a very isolated situation, just working with a small group of people.
"The more I got into presenting things to the world, the further it was taking me away from what I was," Bush says, "which was someone who just used to sit quietly at a piano and sing and play. It became very important to me not to lose sight of that. I didn't want my feet to come off the ground."
Does she worry that she is missing out, that she is, to use her own word, in danger of becoming too isolated?
"Touring is an incredibly isolated situation," Bush argues. "I don't know how people tour for years on end. You find a lot of people who can't stop touring, and it's because they don't know how to come back into life. It's sort of unreal."
For Bush, the trick seems to be shutting out as much of the background blare as possible. She rarely reads the papers or listens to the radio or goes to see shows or buys albums. She claims no knowledge of the notoriously Bushlike singer Tori Amos -- "I heard one track and I thought it was very ... uhh, nice" -- and cites as her own primary influences the English and Irish traditional music that her piano-playing father, her singing mother and her older brothers played and sang in the house when she was growing up”.
After a very busy 1993, Bush was still being interviewed and featured in the press. After that, there would be a fair gap before she was back in it. I am also marking Aerial’s seventeenth anniversary in November, so I will include more about that nearer the time. Keeping this run of features alive, it has been illuminating spotlighting David Sinclair’s interview with Kate for Rolling Stone. Even if The Red Shoes was not he most successful or best-reviewed albums, there was still a load of interest around her. It goes to show that, when it comes to the incredible and beloved Kate Bush, she is someone who could…
NEVER fall out of favour or fashion.