FEATURE:
How Does Your Garden Grow?
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Kate Bush’s Aerial at Eighteen: Bringing A Sky of Honey to Life
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ON 7th November…
Kate Bush’s Aerial turns eighteen. It was released after a twelve-year gap. After 1993’s The Red Shoes, many did not expect her to release an album. She unveiled this beautiful double album in a year that really cried out for someone as original as Kate Bush. Critics loved the album. Fans did too. Another top ten success, there was a lot of love for this icon. A relief to have her back, we did not know what would follow. Bush waited another six years to release another album – we got two in 2011 with Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow. I am going to do a few Aerial anniversary features. I wanted to start by looking at the second disc. Bush split Aerial into the first half/disc, A Sea of Honey, was more conventional singles – like on Hounds of Love – and, similar to her 1985 masterpiece where we had the second side, The Ninth Wave, Aerial featured A Sky of Honey. Her second-ever conceptual suite of tracks, this was the charting of a summer’s day. Taking us through the morning and evoking nature and the wonder of the skies, the natural world, gardens, fresh air and this overall tranquillity, the songs on that suite are phenomenal! There is a lot of talk around a new venue that has opened in Las Vegas. A $2 billion Sphere has seen U2 give it an emphatic and sensational opening. This giant sphere that is immersive and filled with LEDs, you get this dazzling and almost cinematic elements around you. I wanted to start in an unorthodox way. Thinking about Aerial, and I see A Sky of Honey suiting that sort of setting. Many people have argued how witnessing The Ninth Wave from Hounds of Love projected on a sphere would be immense!
That suite was about a woman swept overboard and having to survive at sea. Whilst I maintain a short film would be the best option, maybe filming one and projecting it in a Sphere-like venue would be an absolutely incredible thing. I think there is something about A Sky of Honey that warrants the dramatic and beautiful. Maybe it would also be a good short film though, if you imagined Kate bush performing again, being in a giant venue where you had a screen/projection around you would be perfect. Her songs would come to life in a whole new way. I think A Sky of Honey would be breathtaking. Bush did perform songs from Aerial during her 2014 residency in London. We have seen songs from A Sky of Honey performed on stage. There was not anything as bewildering and epic as you’d get from that Sphere venue. Having bird, butterflies, the tumultuous sky and the brightness of the sun all brought together around an audience. That would be something to see! I would urge people to listen to Aerial and check out its phenomenal suite on the second disc. On the album, we have A Painter’s Link – Rolf Harris originally voiced the painter, but he was removed from the album and replaced by Bush’s son, Bertie -, where artwork and artistic visions could spring and dance. A mix of Disney-like animation and different-coloured LEDs would create this fantastical and almost psychedelic combination. If The Ninth Wave could stir drama, fear and let us sea what is in the sea under the heroine and the vast sky above, there are similar possibilities when we think of A Sky of Honey. The expansiveness of the sky together with the nature all around us. The intimacy and beautify of an English country garden brought to life.
IN THIS PHOTO: U2 at the Sphere, Las Vegas/PHOTO CREDIT: Rich Fury
I think there is real scope when you consider the sounds and detail through A Sky of Honey. I definitely feel The Ninth Wave should be turned into a short film. As Bush sees A Sky of Honey as a compassion piece in a way, one could certainly imagine it made into something bigger. Tracks like Somewhere in Between and Nocturn are gorgeous. Imagining those songs and watching the suite go from day to night is sensational. I am going to go more into Aerial in future features. When Bush was interviewed in 2016 - around the release of the live album for 2014’s Before the Dawn -, the suite from Aerial was mentioned alongside Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave:
“She certainly brought new language to pop, and has continued to do so throughout her career – one thinks of the inventive feat of her (literal) 50 Words For Snow, and of her musical realisation of 'Pi' to 80 places. And not just human language, either. On Before The Dawn, the new 3CD live album of her extraordinary shows of 2014, there’s a passage in the suite A Sky Of Honey, from 2005’s Aerial, where she imitates the frolicsome chatter of birds.
“I’ve always loved birdsong,” says Kate, “and I suppose that was the starting point for that piece on the record, speculation about whether it’s a language. The key idea was this connection between birdsong and light, that singing seems to be triggered by the breaking of light, and in the absence of light, they stop singing.” She pauses. “Though there’s a few exceptions – nightjars, reed warblers, blackbirds. And of course, the owl!”
In that suite, an artist appreciates the changing light from sunrise through sunset into night, a progress musically evoked in green and golden tones and timbres. It’s balanced in the show by another suite, The Ninth Wave, from 1985’s Hounds of Love, which presents the drifting ruminations of a woman slowly drowning, alone in the ocean at night. The extraordinary staging for the work involved the skeleton ribs of a boat’s hull, a floating buoy, a helicopter, and a Caligari-esque room of odd angularity, while a huge back-projection of a life-jacketed, singing Kate presented her and her crew with one of the production’s more difficult challenges”.
I have a lot of affection for A Sky of Honey. Maybe pairing it with The Ninth Wave and having this contrasting story about the same woman. The one who is in a garden watching nature around her. Th one who is lost at sea. Never quite sure which is real and which is a dream. Which came first indeed. It could be this spectacle where we see the beauty of nature and the unpredictability of the ocean at night alongside one another. The more I read about Las Vegas’s mega Sphere and what it could do, the more I think of Kate Bush. Because Aerial is eighteen on 7th November, I wanted to explore and spotlight the magnificent A Sky of Honey. Witnessing that projected in a venue as an audience watches agog would be…
A sight to behold!