FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush under the ivy in 1981/PHOTO CREDIT: Clive Arrowsmith
1981: Record Mirror (John Shearlaw)
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A man….
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for the single, Sat in Your Lap/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
who interviewed Kate Bush a few times, I have used John Shearlaw’s name for this feature before when looking at a 1979 interview with Kate Bush. I am going to take it forward a couple of years. Bush did not release any albums in 1981, but she was releasing music. In fact, speaking with Record Mirror in September 1981, Bush was promoting Sat in Your Lap. It would be another year until she released the album it is from, The Dreaming. In the couple of years before the interview, Bush took The Tour of Life on the road in 1979; her third studio album, Never for Ever, came out in 1980. At the start of the interview, it is said that depression, introspection and reassessment were part of Bush’s life since The Tour of Life. Marking a big shift in sound and direction, Sat in Your Lap sounds like a new lease of life. A burst of energy that she might not have possessed as recently as a few months before she wrote the track. Maybe tired or uninspired, the shock that is Sat in Your Lap got her going again! I am relying on the wonderful Reaching Out directory for transcribing the 1981 interview between Kate Bush and John Shearrlaw. There are a few part of the interview that caught my eye, and that gives us a sense of where Bush’s mind, music and ambitions were in 1981.
“Kate Bush today sets up her own interviews, controls her own photographs, slavishly protects her fans through her club and, more so than ever, works on albums and tours at her own pace. And still we love her for it?
It's been two years now since what Kate calls her "Tour of Life", a massive circus of a tour that won't, repeat won't take place again until next year at the earliest. Again, it's been six months since the last single and Sat In Your Lap, as much as anything she's done, is the start of a new era, another "cosmic cycle" that will see the release of a new album later this year.
And now that all those ideas in the past--a theatrical tour that was a combination of the innovative and the unexpected, an album last year that surpassed all that went before it--have become reality, she's a powerful personality. SHe makes points where she used to make only comments, argues from experience now as much as from excitement, pushes herself as an artist ("one of us", she says, referring to the type) much more than a surprised, precocious talent.
Yet she's still infectious [huh?], vulnerable at times, as open to ideas as ever. Richness and fame don't embarass her; slowness in honing her creativity probably does, just a little.
Her favourite expression on this meeting wasn't one of wonderment, astonishment (ah, the cliche!); rather a dismissive pout of "Pah!" -- almost French, knowledgeable, and nearly coquettish.
"Pah! Let them think that! Pah! That's wrong!" she seems to imply, ready to underline her ideas. Call it a change, call it maturity, call it confidence in her art, for it almost certainly is. Take money:
"I've changed. I don't pretend it's not there any more, which I used to do," she says. "I'm not worried about being rich, I just didn't think of taking advantage of it. Now I buy things that I can use, things that will help me, like synthesisers and drum machines.
"My life has never been into money, more into emotional desires; like being an incredible singer or an incredible dancer; and if I can buy something that can help me, I will now. But I wouldn't buy something that I couldn't live with, like a country house which I don't need. [Actually, about two years after giving this interview, Kate bought--a country house.] I'd rather buy a huge synthesiser that I could live with all day."
She emphasises and explains, thinks out the question, returns to her theme. The easy answers have gone over the years. Take her career...
Kate maintains that there hasn't really been a gap, even though she admits that Sat In Your Lap only surfaced after her longest break to date.
"My slowness at doing things surprises me," she says, "but i have been doing things continuously. It's a battle to keep up with all the things I want to do, and obviously things like dancing are going to suffer. I couldn't spend twelve hours a day in a studio like I'm doing at the moment, and dance, as well."
Again the emphasis on her way of working--the only way. The ups and downs are of her own making, they don't follow rules. And Kate only bows to her own pressures.
“The last album was the first one that I would actually hand over to people with a smile," she says, almost seeming to imply that it was the first one she was actually pleased with, "and that was followed by a greater period of non-creativity, when I just couldn't write properly at all.
"It happened before, when the tour was over, and then I felt I'd just given so much out that I was like a drained battery, very physically and tired and also a bit depressed.
"This time it was worse; a sort of terrible introverted depression. The anti-climax after all the work really set in in a bad way, and that can be very damaging to an artist. I could sit down at the piano and want to write, and nothing would happen. It was like complete introspection time.
"I suppose I had about two months out earlier this year...and that was a break I really needed. It gave me time to see friends, do things I hadn't been able to do for three years.
"It wasn't really as if I was missing out on normality," she laughs. "I'd rather hang on to madness than normality anyway, so it was more like recharging."
But something more came out of it than just a rest?
"Oh yes!" The smile returns. "I felt as if my writing needed some kind of shock, and I think I've found one for myself. The single is the start, and I'm trying to be brave about the rest of it. It's almost as if I'm going for commercial-type "hits" for the whole album.
Drums, Kate enthuses, are as wide a concept as music itself, and she's determined to go further than "a lazy acceptance of a drum kit." Add that to the news that she'll be working with other musicians on the new album--"the best around"--and it seems likely that "Kate Bush 4" will be one of the big surprises of the year.
As a preview she plays me one track that's currently being worked on: a wild soaring collusion with Irish group Planxty entitled Night of the Swallow, which also features one of the Chieftains. Again the sound is unmistakable, but this time it's Kate Bush married to the heartbeat of traditional Irish folk.
Discussing the project brings Kate Bush into larger-than-life focus once more. The burning enthusiasm returns, along with the string of "amazings", "incredibles" and "fantastics". She'd been up all night in the studio the previous night in Dublin, and her reactions are genuine, real and hard to resist.
"I'm still really up from the experience," she says. "In fact, I'm still reeling from it. I asked them if they'd be interested, and the whole thing was so relaxed, it was wonderful. I badly want to work with them again. I'm so excited about the fusion.
"And I think that there's so much of the Irish in my mother that it all suddenly came back to me--it was fate rearing its head at just the right time!"
So that's two surprises already, and although Kate has been making demo tracks since March, and Abbey Road is now her second home, the rest will have to wait until summer completion...if all goes according to plan.
What about the book you're planning to write, though? Again, she sighs (a marginal sigh) and repeats her line: "There's so many things I want to do, and it's so hard to fit them all in..."
But yes, a book is on the cards, hopefully before the end of the year, and she says: "I'd like to write it myself. Without saying anything about the other books, which I don't want to, I feel almost pressured to speak, otherwise there's this huge misrepresented area.
"In one way it's ridiculous--I feel it's much too early to write a book, I've hardly done anything yet. But I really want people to be aware of reality--subjective reality, obviously.
"It'd be about what it's like being me, my feelings, my friends, the people that I rely on. I need to be represented in a positive way, and I'll have to do it myself."
Slowly Abbey Road is beginning to wake up for another Kate Bush day that is likely to last until the early hours of the next morning, and she announces candidly: "I'm beginning to feel like shit. Ireland's catching up on me. And all the things that have to be done. It's impossible to do it all in the time...perhaps if I could stop sleeping it would help."
Twenty-two years old, a Tour of Life and three albums behind her...and the rest can wait. Treading devastatingly and surely between the doubters and the devotees, Kate Bush may well continue to "amaze" us all”.
Every interview with Kate Bush offers such richness and insight. The one above, published when she was only twenty-one, finds her in an interesting places. Three albums and an international tour under her belt, this was this brief period between albums. She had already begun The Dreaming, though people would not get to experience that album until September 1982. This moment (September 1981) is a bridge between one type of Kate Bush and another. A period where she is solo producing her own albums and is more experimental and bold with her music. She said in the interview how people are irritated by her – but she found that this is a good thing in a way. Things would change drastically by 1982. In a way, we get one of the last interviews with Bush before this transformation. The interesting conversation between Kate Bush and John Sherlaw really struck me, so I wanted to share it here. As I always say when sourcing old interviews with Kate Bush: she is this incredibly articulate, wise, warm and…
INCREDIBLE subject.