FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Aerial at Nineteen
A Glorious Return: Reaction and Reception
_________
I am going to do more…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
than cover the praise and reaction for Kate Bush’s Aerial. Released on 7th November, 2005, this album was the first from Bush since 1993’s The Red Shoes. The same as I have done with other album anniversaries, I am going to explore some of the songs on Aerial. Regularly seen as one of Kate Bush’s best albums, it is her personal favourite. I guess, because she gave birth to Bertie in 1998, this album means a lot because of him. Everything sort of coming together. This double album is a masterpiece. I cannot go into all of the songs but, suffice to say, ahead of the nineteenth anniversary of this album, I wanted to cover as much as I could. Actually, I want to get to an interview and a couple of reviews to finish things off. Being a double album, everyone has their favourite Kate Bush songs on the majestic Aerial. I personally think that A Coral Room and Mrs. Bartolozzi are the best on the album. Many prefer the suite, A Sky of Honey. That is up there with Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave in terms of its impact and scope. The reviews for Aerial were largely ecstatic. People heralding this grand return. Of course, Kate Bush had not gone anywhere. Instead, she was raising a family and still out there. However, there was something about Aerial that seemed to be above what anyone could have hoped for. King of the Mountain was the one and only official single from Aerial. I have covered that recently. I want to spend a little time with a song that I felt should have been a single. The magnificent and entrancing Mrs. Bartolozzi is a distinctly Kate Bush song. Here, we discover more about the song:
“Is it about a washing machine? I think it’s a song about Mrs. Bartolozzi. She’s this lady in the song who…does a lot of washing (laughs). It’s not me, but I wouldn’t have written the song if I didn’t spend a lot of time doing washing. But, um, it’s fictitious. I suppose, as soon as you have a child, the washing suddenly increases. And uh, what I like too is that a lot of people think it’s funny. I think that’s great, because I think that actually, it’s one of the heaviest songs I’ve ever written! (laughs)
Clothes are…very interesting things, aren’t they? Because they say such an enormous amount about the person that wears them. They have a little bit of that person all over them, little bits of skin cells and…what you wear says a lot about who you are, and who you think you are…
So I think clothes, in themselves are very interesting. And then it was the idea of this woman, who’s kind of sitting there looking at all the washing going around, and she’s got this new washing machine, and the idea of these clothes, sort of tumbling around in the water, and then the water becomes the sea and the clothes…and the sea…and the washing machine and the kitchen… I just thought it was an interesting idea to play with.
What I wanted to get was the sense of this journey, where you’re sitting in front of this washing machine, and then almost as if in a daydream, you’re suddenly standing in the sea.
Ken Bruce show, BBC Radio 2, 1 November 2005”.
There is no denying that Aerial is one of Kate Bush’s most accomplished albums. That time away to concentrate on something very special. With the exception of Rolf Harris being featured on a couple of tracks, you cannot fault the album. Harris was removed from a future reissue of Aerial and replaced by her son Bertie. Nineteen years after its release, you cannot really compare Aerial to anything else. It is still very much a Kate Bush album. In my previous Aerial anniversary feature, I discussed the domesticity that influenced the album. How the seeds of Aerial were planted and what Bush’s life was like in the run-up to 2005. Before moving along, there is actually another song that I want to highlight that I mentioned in the previous feature. It is one that nods to her late mother, Hannah. Here is some details about the stunning and stirring A Coral Room:
“There was a little brown jug actually, yeah. The song is really about the passing of time. I like the idea of coming from this big expansive, outside world of sea and cities into, again, this very small space where, er, it’s talking about a memory of my mother and this little brown jug. I always remember hearing years ago this thing about a sort of Zen approach to life, where, you would hold something in your hand, knowing that, at some point, it would break, it would no longer be there.
I am going to move to an interview I have sourced previously for another feature. In 2005, there was a lot of interest in Kate Bush. With this new album being out, it is understandable there would be huge buzz and love for her. Bush was quite giving with her time. Among those who spoke with her was Greg Quill from The Toronto Star. It is interesting how he picked up on questions about her personal life. How Bush always has to answer that question as to whether she is a recluse. Someone painted as weird or hidden away:
"I don't hide from people. I go shopping, I go to restaurants and movies ... yet somehow I'm made out to be some mad hermit. It's too much.
"I think my cult following got grumpy waiting so long," she laughs.
That all sounds a bit disingenuous in light of the number of high-end European art and fashion photographers whose ubiquitous images of Bush created at least the impression of a showbiz diva between 1978 and 1990, when an eight-CD anthology appeared in the box set This Woman's Work complete with a colour booklet containing nothing but these extravagant portraits.
In lieu of personal appearances erroneous reports of stage fright that have apparently prevented her from touring after 1979 are another bone of contention with her fans have had nothing to fuel their addiction other than Bush's wild, rich and allusive music, and magnificent, stylized graphics.
"I never consciously gave up touring," she explains. "I only did just one, in 1979 and 1980, and I think other people gave up on me. I remember it as a fantastic experience, like being on the road with a circus. We're working on some ideas about doing some shows to promote this album, but it's early days."
And she says she has no regrets about the image she helped create, though Aerial comes unadorned with large and ornate likenesses of her, and instead features realistic images of the ornaments of an ordinary village life washing on the line, a view from the kitchen window, a placid seashore, pigeons in the yard.
"Graphics are important," she adds, by way of explaining the effort that went into designing the honeyed landscape artwork for Aerial. "This may sound pompous, but I'm uncomfortable working with the CD format. I used to work in vinyl, when the artwork was big, and said something significant about an artist.
"And I loved double albums. They indicated that the music was conceptual, too important to be reduced, and you could open up the covers and get lost in the pictures and information inside.
"I liked it when an album was 20 minutes of music a side, with a breathing space in the middle. I think CDs are too long for people with short attention spans, people who are distracted by all the technological tools we have these days."
The Aerial format, she explains, is a respectful nod to the great days of vinyl. The package contains two discs, both around 40 minutes in length, the first a collection of single songs, the second a conceptual piece that unfolds as a musical panorama encompassing the span of a single day, with vast dreams and powerful reminiscences inspired by simple sounds of nature, the words of passers-by and routine chores.
The album lacks the frenetic pace and bluster of her last conceptual effort, 1985's Hounds Of Love, and achieves an almost elegiac, English pastoral grace. Several songs feature just vocals and piano, and expose matters closer to her heart than the turgid melodramas of her earlier work: the joy childhood brings in "Bertie," memories of her late mother in the eerie but strangely comforting waterscape "A Coral Room," the bucolic "Sky Of Honey" with its compelling echoes of Vaughan Williams. Orchestral charts were written by award-winning composer Michael Kamen, who died of a heart attack at age 55 in 2003. They were recorded just weeks before his death.
"He was a lovely person, very talented and brave," Bush recalls. "I'd worked with him on other albums, and he was never offended if I suggested changes he'd rewrite arrangements on the spot, even with the orchestra waiting in the studio. I admire his work for its visual qualities."
While it's debatable, as acolytes claim, that Kate Bush's impact on Western music and female artists in particular is as profound as Joni Mitchell's, it can't be denied that Bush has attracted more than a fair share of serious attention from new artists in the years since her so-called self-exile began. This includes R&B singer Maxwell, whose reworking of Bush's childbearing chronicle "This Woman's Work" was a hit in 2001, as well as male-dominated British rock acts Placebo and The Futureheads, who scored a hit last year with a version of her "Hounds of Love."
Her beginnings were more than auspicious. Bush was "discovered" at age 16 by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. He who paid for an orchestra to back her distinctive, hyperbolic soprano on demos of several elaborately theatrical, sexually loaded romantic fantasies that would become the core, three years later, of her hair-raising debut, The Kick Inside.
Though she had nothing in common with the post-punk, new wave acts with whom she shared the high end of the charts she was genteel, well educated, and possessed of aesthetic and artistic sensibilities that had less to do with rock than with the progressive side of opera, world music, jazz, musical theatre and epic cinema she became the darling of British prog-rock. Peter Gabriel gave her a nod by recording the moving duet, "Don't Give Up" with her in 1986. Procol Harum member Gary Brooker's organ and vocal contributions anchor Aerial, an exotic two-CD set.
Some pieces on Aerial will remind fans of the daring Kate Bush of old: "Pi" is little more than a series of numbers sung with dramatic extremes of emotion; "King Of The Mountain," the first single, is a contemplation on celebrity and its cost, with direct references to Elvis; in "Mrs. Bartolozzi," a washing machine becomes a sexual allegory in the romantic fantasies of a cleaning woman.
"After seven years with Bertie, I know a lot about washing machines," Bush chuckles. "He keeps me normal. I never wanted to be famous. I just want to create nice music, and I believe celebrity threatens creativity”.
I want to finish off with a couple of reviews for Aerial. When I explore it next year for its twentieth anniversary, I will be more forensic regarding the songs. Bigger ambitions and more features. Now, a year shy of that big anniversary, I wanted to give some overview. The Guardian saluted and heralded this masterpiece when they sat down to review Aerial in November 2005:
“Kate Bush means a lot to a lot of people. There are gay men who thrill to her rococo sensibilities, who repay her early endorsement of their sexuality with worship. There are straight men who fancied her in her 1980s leotard and found the songs fetching, too. For me, Kate Bush was always a trump card when the tiresome 'question' of female artistic genius came up.
There are many male music fans out there - and just a smattering of male music journalists - who believe quite matter of factly that Damon Albarn wrote Elastica's first album; that Kurt Cobain penned all Courtney Love's songs; that artistic production is self-evidently a guy thing. Before disgust stopped me getting dragged into these skirmishes, I had a ready arsenal of Girl Greats - Patti Smith, Bjork, Nina Simone, Delia Derbyshire, Polly Harvey, and so on. And yet, there would often be some caveat why genius eluded my candidates (ripped off Dylan etc). Until we would get to Kate. Female genius? Kate Bush. End of.
Aerial, the first Kate Bush album in a young lifetime (12 years), re-establishes the fact. It is extraordinary - jaw-dropping, no less. It's also tearjerking, laugh-out-loud funny, infuriating, elegiac, baffling, superb and not always all that great. Her beats are dated, for instance; unchanged since the Eighties. For a technological innovator with the freedom of her own studio, Bush's whole soundbed really could do with an airing. And there's a sudden penchant for heady Latin rhythms here that sits a little awkwardly, even for this enthusiastic borrower of world music.
More problematically, however, Bush's whimsies have never been quite so amplified. If you thought the young Bush prancing around to Bronte was a little de trop, this album is not for you. There's a song about a little brown jug and one about a washing machine (both, though, are really about other things). There are several passages where Bush sings along to birdsong, and one where she laughs like a lunatic. Rolf Harris - Rolf Harris! - has a big cameo.
But Aerial succeeds because it's all there for a reason. And because the good stuff is just so sublime. 'King of the Mountain', Bush's Elvis-inspired single, is both a fine opener and a total red herring. Bush's juices really get going on 'Pi', a sentimental ode to a mathematician, audacious in both subject matter and treatment. The chorus is the number sung to many, many decimal places. It's closely followed by a gushing ode to Bush's son, Bertie, that's stark and medieval-sounding. The rest of disc one (aka A Sea of Honey) sets a very high bar for disc two, with the Joan of Arc-themed 'Joanni' and the downright poppy 'How to Be Invisible' raising the hair on your arms into a Mexican wave.
Disc two, subtitled 'A Sky of Honey', is a suite of nine tracks which, among other things, charts the passage of light from afternoon ('Prologue') to evening ('An Architect's Dream', 'The Painter's Link') and through the night until dawn. Things get a little hairier here.
The theme of birdsong is soon wearing, and the extended metaphor of painting is laboured. But it's all worth it for the double-whammy to the solar plexus dealt by 'Nocturn' and the final, title track. In 'Nocturn', the air is pushed out of your lungs as you cower helplessly before the crescendo. 'Aerial', meanwhile, is a totally unexpected ecstatic disco meltdown that could teach both Madonna and Alison Goldfrapp lessons in dancefloor abandon. It leaves you elated, if not a little exhausted. After the damp squib that was The Red Shoes, it's clear Bush is still a force to be reckoned with.
The problem, though, with female genius - for many men at least - is that very frequently it is not like male genius. And with its songs about children, washing machines going 'slooshy sloshy', Joan of Arc, Bush's mother, not to mention the almost pagan sensuality that runs through here like a pulse, Aerial is, arguably, the most female album in the world, ever. There's an incantation to female self-effacement that rewrites Shakespeare's weird sisters: 'Eye of Braille/ Hem of anorak/ Stem of wallflower/ Hair of doormat'. Even the one about maths is touchy-feely. But the artistry here is so dizzying, the ambition and scope so vast, that even the deafest, most inveterate misogynist could not fail to acknowledge it. Genius. End of”.
It is interesting how Kitty Empire picked up on Aerial being the most female album ever. Perhaps so. I think that about The Kick Inside (Bush’s 1978 album). She has always been a feminist and someone who explores her womanhood. On The Kick Inside, there was this teenager exploring femininity, sexuality, menstruation, lust, heartache and her body. On 1989’s The Sensual World, we have this very womanly and sensual album that is so evocative, explorative and open. I do wonder if people discuss this when they consider Kate Bush. How she has released this incredible feminine album and how that is perceived. It is not a weakness at all. I think it gives her music more depth and beauty. Songs that stay in the mind. I will end with a review from the BBC:
“After 12 years of waiting Kate Bush fans finally get their hands on an album of new material. A double album-sized helping of new songs should keep most fans happy with 16 tracks to delve into.
Disc one is a varied set of numbers which mainly centre around her private life, with odes to her son and a moving song about the loss of her mother. But at times these songs feel too personal and are hard to decipher with dense and difficult melodies. They encompasse a range of musical styles - from folk ("Bertie") to new age ("Pi") and classic Kate Bush ("How to be Invisible"). However, some of these tracks never really achieve lift-off and could have been left on the recording studio floor.
The Kate Bush of "Cloudbusting" and "Wuthering Heights"-fame is in there but struggles to get out. After the flatness of disc one, the second disc is full of surprises. It's an old-fashioned concept album that takes the listener on a journey. And what a journey! Bush has written a lyric poem set to music, which has an epic quality, transporting the listener to a deeply lush and fertile landscape. Lyrically cryptic, but strangely seductive, side two is the album Pink Floyd might have made in 1979 if Bush had been their lead singer.
Concept albums are not everyone's cup of tea - but this is a masterpiece”.
Tomorrow (7th November), we remember Aerial at nineteen. It is a masterpiece. Perhaps not regarded as highly as Hounds of Love, the fact Kate Bush sees it as her favourite and best tells you all you need to know. A brilliant and truly captivating album, I would advise people to listen to this. You can play the album and get lost in it. Extraordinarily powerful and potent. The minute you press play and let the music start, Aerial draws you…
INTO its universe.