FEATURE:
Chart Dreams to Interesting Nightmares
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during a photoshoot for 1989’s The Sensual World/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harrai
Kate Bush’s Move From Pop and Into New Sonic Territories
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ONE of the most interesting….
PHOTO CREDIT: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy
topics of discussion around Kate Bush’s music is her move away from more conventional and commercial Pop to something that pushes beyond the fringes. One could say that Kate Bush has never been conventional or commercial. Consider her debut single, Wuthering Heights, and how strange that still sounds. Since it was released in 1978, nothing like it has come along. However, there are distinct periods of her career where she has released singles that are designed to get chart traction. That are more radio-accessible and less divisive. One can listen to Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside, and see that as a distinct period that ended by the time of 1982’s The Dreaming. Her first three albums, whilst distinct and varied, had songs on them that could be considered relatable. Not too out-there. Perhaps never a traditional ‘Pop’ artist, there was this sense that these songs could be released as singles and be successful. Albums, at the very least, which have a distinct palette. Think about a lot of the love songs on The Kick Inside.Also, tracks like Them Heavy People. Tracks of Lionheart such as Kashka from Baghdad, Wow and Fullhouse. Cuts on 1980’s Never for Ever like Delius (Song of Summer), All We Ever Look For, The Wedding List or Babooshka. These songs are like nothing that was released at the time. However, in spite of a lack of cliché love lyrics and Pop dynamics, these tracks do seem to be of a similar kin. You can draw lines between them. Not as heavy or haunted as some of her other songs. How would one class Kate Bush’s music? At least her early albums? Not commercial Pop like you got in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a degree of relatability to her lyrics and compositions. Shorter songs that could theoretically be played on radio.
Even when she stepped more outside of Pop and experimented more for The Dreaming in 1982’s, the songs were not too long and there were at least one or two on the album that had similarities with her earlier material. I feel tracks such as There Goes a Tenner and Suspended in Gaffa have an air of familiarity. Kate Bush songs but with a slightly different edge and sound. That was the first album where she knew that she could not be a normal Pop artist. Writing songs and producing albums that were want EMI wanted or what the public expected. Bush was always able to release music that was evolving but she did not need to pay homage and acknowledge the scene around her. She had influences and artists she loved, though working with those artists or sounding like them was not high on her agenda. By 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, her most recent album, Bush acknowledged that she was pushing away from Pop and did not want to be considers a Pop artist. There was always this tussle between staying true to herself and making music that was genuine but also needing to connect with her fans and the public. An interesting tussle and development occurred between 1982 and 1985. Two terrific albums that sounds completely different. The former saw the release of Kate Bush’s fourth studio album, The Dreaming. I think it was Bush consciously trying to explore the depth and possibilities of music. Embracing the Fairlight CMI. A move from Pop’s conventionality. It did yield a terrific album that she produced solo. However, given some unhappiness from EMI and low-charting singles, Hounds of Love could not see her follow what she did before. However, though it is still an experimental, ambitious and a profoundly unconventional album – The Ninth Wave, the second side of the album, it a song-suite that is almost an album in itself -, there were songs on the first side that moved slightly more towards traditional Pop. Perhaps Art Pop. 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes were terrific albums but did seem to move away from The Dreaming - and, with it, possibly take Bush back more into ‘accessible’ territory. However, from 2005’s Aerial onwards, she has moved again further from Pop or being easy to predict.
It is no coincidence that Bush seems happier as an artist when she is not bound by chart positions or creating singles. Hounds of Love was a hugely happier time for her, though I do not see that album as ‘mainstream’ or Pop-focused as, say, Never for Ever or even The Sensual World. It leads me back towards the question as to whether Kate Bush was ever a Pop artist or someone who was always outside of that restrictive realm but did move further towards something outside and experimental at various points in her career. She has always been popular, yet that has never been at the expense of brilliance and vision. I want to move on to a few articles that frame Kate Bush as this distinct and pioneering artist. One who has influenced scores of other artists because she was able to mix something accessible or familiar but completely fresh and original. In 2020, this feature saluted Bush as one of the most revered and influential Pop artists ever:
“By 1980 and Never For Ever, her third album, Kate had broken away by setting up her own publishing and management company and producing her own material. This determination to do it her own way rewarded Kate with her first chart-topping album and big hits in ‘Babooshka’ and ‘Army Dreamers’. With her work blending imaginative themes and dramatic promotional interpretation, Kate’s commercial fortunes were consistent and her artistic reputation was soaring. She guested on Peter Gabriel’s hit ‘Games Without Frontiers’ and was continuing to win further industry awards, including another Ivor Novello Award.
It was business as usual when the stopgap single ‘Sat In Your Lap’, released in July 1981 and preceding its parent album by more than a year, got to No.11. But when The Dreaming finally hit the shops amid an exploding new pop scene dominated by The Human League and Duran Duran, the 10 songs struggled to find much of an audience and the set became Kate’s lowest-selling to date, with three of its four singles failing to even trouble the UK Top 40.
1989’s The Sensual World lacked the commercial clout of its predecessor, but contained the well-regarded title track and, perhaps, Kate’s most tender ballad, ‘This Woman’s Work’, which first featured in the cult 80s movie She’s Having A Baby. The era was also characterised by another brief run of more consistent activity with a contribution to an Elton John and Bernie Taupin tribute album that was swiftly culled for a single. Her cover of ‘Rocket Man’ made UK No.12 and was named “best cover ever” in a national newspaper poll, 16 years later. She also made an appearance in a TV play by The Comic Strip team and produced a track for singer and harpist Alan Stivell”.
Someone who never wanted to me famous or live a celebrity life, Bush’s music has always been defined by this desire not to be ordinary. To fit in or sound like artists around her whose agenda and ambitious were less concerned with musical excellence and progression, and more to do with getting them name out there and being ‘celebrated’. Earlier this year, PROG wrote how the less we see of Kate Bush, the more we need and want to know. Since that feature was published, Bush has conducted a new interview (in October) where she has opened up the possibility of an eleventh studio album:
“While the marketing men and mainstream media were far from subtle in their slavering celebration of Bush’s obvious sexual appeal, she was already proving to be more enigmatic and far smarter than the mindless pop star they clearly hoped to pin her as. When The Man With... won her an Ivor Novello Award and she swiftly followed The Kick Inside with second album Lionheart, the critical acclaim grew.
“EMI really had no idea,” says Carder Bush. “It was run by salesmen who saw her as part of an assembly line – they had obviously never studied her lyrics! So once Kate became a success, they barged in with sexy photo shoots, offers of Las Vegas residencies and Bond themes. She said ‘no’ to all of them because it was the brain and not the body that was Kate’s real quality.”
Ultimately though, Bush’s reclusive tendencies would be the making of her. As chart music went through a period dominated by glossy pop that was all veneer and little content, Kate Bush’s outsider status worked to her advantage.
A string of albums throughout the 80s went to Nos. 1, 3 and 1 respectively – Never For Ever (1980), The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds Of Love (1985).
No one song was easy to pin down, with Bush’s music drawing on murder ballads, the childhood wonder of nursery rhymes, her part-Celtic genealogy, the mythology of a lost Albion favoured by some prog and pastoral folk singers, the ethereal end of goth, the organic tones of early music, digital synth pop and emerging sequencing technologies.
Hounds Of Love alone spawned yhree classic singles – Running Up That Hill, Cloudbusting and the tumultuous, dramatically-heightened title track – and further reiterated her prog tendencies by devoting the entire second side of the album to a an experimental opera, The Ninth Wave, whose name came from a Tennyson poem. She also helped define the 1980s whilst being unlike anything else in that era: her skill was not to experiment in the live arena but by embracing emerging technologies in the studio .
“For three or four years it was a rollercoaster for Kate,” says Carder Bush (Joh, her brother). “She was being sent all over the world, and fortunately she had stockpiled a lot of songs. But when that stockpile ran out she was expected to come up with an album, then promote it, go on TV, all within a year. Well, the type of artist Kate is meant that just couldn’t work. That’s why each album has taken longer and longer to come to maturity.”
Today Bush may not be so obviously viewed as a practitioner of prog rock – not at first glance anyway. Yet her career history and collaborations are inextricably tied in with prog and her ever-evolving output has much more common with the genre than the pop world in which she first found herself operating.
In fact, Kate Bush is prog’s first pop star and pop’s first prog star. And one who is always capable of delivering nothing less than the unexpected”.
I am going to end with a feature from 2014. This was released alongside a score of other features to coincide with her returning to the stage for her Before the Dawn residency. This queen of Art Pop always defied the critics. Perhaps the more that they derided or lampooned her, the more her music stepped away from the core of Pop. I don’t think that she ever compromised or made an album that was what was expected. However, one can say that various albums/career points saw her move towards the fringes. 2005’s Aerial and 2011’s 50 Words for Snow show Bush no longer wants to be seen as a ‘Pop’ artist. Just an artist:
“As words and as music, none of these scream "hit single". Yet all but one of them were. It's therefore hardly surprising that Bush's name gets reeled out, with varying degrees of appropriateness, as the ancestor for any new female artist trying to merge glamour, conceptualism, innovation and autonomy: recent examples include Grimes, Julia Holter and FKA Twigs. Yet, strange as it seems now, Bush was not always impregnably cool. In fact, despite her massive record sales and mainstream fame, she was not afforded much respect by critics or hip listeners in the late 1970s.
Despite being as young or younger than, say, the Slits, Bush seemed Old Wave: she belonged with the generation of musicians who had emerged during the 1960s ("boring old farts", as the punk press called them). Some of these BOFs were indeed her mentors, friends, and collaborators: David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel and Roy Harper. Growing up, her sensibility was shaped by her older brothers, in particular the musical tastes and spiritual interests of Jay, 13 years her senior and a true 60s cat.
Punk often sneered at "art" as airy-fairy, bourgeois self-indulgence, but its ranks were full of art-school graduates and this artiness blossomed with the sound, design and stage presentation of bands such as Wire and Talking Heads. Yet Bush's music seemed the wrong kind of "arty": ornate rather than angular, overly decorative and decorous. It was the sort of musically accomplished, well-arranged, album-oriented art-pop that EMI had been comfortable with since the Beatles and had pursued with Pink Floyd, Cockney Rebel and Queen. They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.
And that's where Bush was situated on her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart: somewhere at the crossroads of singer-songwriter pop, the lighter side of prog, and the highbrow end of glam. Like Bowie, she studied mime with Lindsay Kemp, took classes in dance, and made a series of striking, inventive videos. EMI's Bob Mercer hailed Bush as "a completely audio-visual artist" and spoke of the company's intention to break her in America through television rather than radio (this, several years before MTV even existed). Her one and only tour was a theatrical mega-production in the rigidly choreographed tradition of Diamond Dogs, all dancers and costume changes and no-expense-spared staging. Reviewing one of the 1979 concerts for NME, Charles Shaar Murray typified the general rock press attitude towards Bush at that point, scornfully describing the show as a throw-back to "all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era.... [Bowie manager/Mainman boss] Tony DeFries would've loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago maybe I would've too. But these days I'm past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself." Spectacle, in the immediate years after punk, was considered a narcissistic star trip, fundamentally non-egalitarian.
Of the ethereal-girl artists emerging in the mid-80s, Elizabeth Fraser was the most clearly indebted – indeed, the frou-frou side of Cocteau Twins could be traced to a single song on Never For Ever, Delius (Song of Summer). Björk's starburst of vocal euphoria likewise owed much to Bush. Enya, formerly of Clannad, followed in Bush's footsteps in her explorations of synths and sampling, as well as taking vocal multi-tracking to the dizzy limit.
The 90s saw the arrival of Tori Amos, whose piano-driven confessionals blatantly drew on Bush's ornate early sound. But there were less obvious inheritors, too. Touring their first album, Suede liked to air Wuthering Heights immediately before going onstage: Brett Anderson placed Bush in his personal trinity of utterly English ancestors, alongside Bowie and Morrissey. Esoteric-industrial duo Coil hailed Bush as "a very powerful witch", possibly knowing about – or simply sensing – the Bush family's shared enchantment with the ideas of Gurdjieff who, among other things, explored the magical effects of particular musical chords. Closeted fans started to emerge from the unlikeliest places: Johnny Rotten, for instance, gushed about the "beauty beyond belief" of Bush's music.
Still, it's hard to think of an artist with such an amazing body of work who has produced such a small collection of quotable remarks. (Her only rival in this regard might be Prince.) Here, to close, is one she gave me that's not bad as a encapsulation of the spirit of Kate Bush and her Never Never Pop.
"That's what all art's about – a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't – in real-life. Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible. But you try to do as much as you can within those physical boundaries. All art is like that: a form of exploration, of making up stories. Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really”.
One of the most distinctive aspects of Kate Bush’s music is how it cannot be easily labelled or attached to genres. Never truly commercial or conventional, there were waves of sonic change. Albums that had more clear singles. Perhaps an effort to keep her in the public mindset whilst also pushing her music forward. However, in later years, Bush is releasing albums as single pieces. Not concerned with singles or radio play necessarily, Bush definitely wants her fans to experience albums fully. Not to say that her music is inaccessible or outsider. Its greatest gift is that it is like nothing else around it and not concerned with ‘fitting in’. However, the songs resonate and stand up to repeated listens. Less concerned with Pop’s structures and rules, Bush’s lack of being ‘cool’ or even following artists she has inspired gives her music extra depth and credibility. From 1978’s Wuthering Heights to 2011’s Misty, the divine Kate Bush has very much…
BEEN iimpossible to define.