FEATURE:
All She Ever Looks For
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed in August 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix
The Sonic Layers, Unique Worlds and Details in Kate Bush’s Music
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I have recently published…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982
an article about Kate Bush’s demos. Early recordings that date back to 1973 and 1974. Whilst extraordinary, they were defined by musical simplicity. Not in terms of the richness of the composition but the fact it was largely Bush and her piano. The more her career developed, you could feel Bush building up layers. There was always that layered effect. In terms of the vocals on The Kick Inside and Lionheart from 1978. When Bush took on production duties, you could feel the music starting to expand. Not something afforded under Andrew Powell’s watch, albums like Never for Ever and The Dreaming are dense with different sounds and sights. Much busier and more physical albums. I am going to return to Tom Doyle’s book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush, for this feature. There is a section where he explores the characters and sonic waves, layers and details through her albums. Something that struck my eye and made me think more deeply about her role as a producer and gift as an artist. Think about how Bush adds so much texture and detail to her music. A song like Experiment IV. A single that was the only new song on her only greatest hits collection, The Whole Story, this 1986 song has styled violin stabs; this feeling of a Horror soundtrack. Echoes, as Tom Doyle writes, of the cut-up vocal sound of Hounds of Love’s Waking the Witch. I don’t think any Kate Bush song or album is straightforward or basic. Even the more romantic songs on The Kick Inside feature these fascinating backing vocals and interesting inflections from Kate Bush. Always wants to make her music as arresting as possible. Think about the reworked version of This Woman’s Work that appeared on 2011’s Director’s Cut. The original was written for the 1987 film, She’s Having a Baby. Director John Hughes had Bush in mind when it came to writing a song for the climatic scene where Kevin Bacon’s Jake faced losing his wife, Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern), and unborn child due to a traumatic labour. Bush felt it was a very moving scene. She watched it on a screen in the studio whilst sat at the piano and wrote This Woman’s Work quite quickly. Del Palmer convinced her to include the song in her next album, 1989’s The Sensual World.
I can understand why Kate Bush reapproached this song for Director’s Cut. Giving it a new twist and sound, she expanded the song to over six minutes and played it on a Fender Rhodes. There was boys’ choir-like oohs and ahhs. The vocal dynamics were scaled back. Bush can add to a song but also subtract. Changing it and updating. Making it sound new but familiar. Some artists can overload their tracks or miss opportunities. I don’t think Bush is like that. Definitely as a producer, she utilises technology as much as possible but only adds what is truly necessary. The track Why Should I Love You? from 1993’s The Red Shoes was Prince taking this track and overloading it. I think Bush did not want to repeat this. Having songs that had too much on them and it was too intense. I will come back to albums like Never for Ever (1980), The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds of Love (1985). Even though the well-considered details and layers on her albums is something to marvel, Bush did admit that sometimes she overdid things. Her view and not other people’s. Bush told Tom Doyle, when he interviewed her in 2005, that she wants to be adventurous and loves having the studio at her fingers. However, maybe things can go a bit far at times. There are not conflicts with musicians or anyone around her. It is an internal conflict. Bush said how hard it is to write something interesting. How nothing is original. Everything has been done before in some way. In 1987, when in a studio setting things up to record for The Sensual World, Bush felt suffocated. With all this technology at East Wickham Farm, she struggled to keep control of everything. She could not really go further. It was clear that something had to change. If the first song she attempted for the album, Love and Anger, was an issue and too much was thrown at it, the other songs eventually began to flow. Maybe Bush at her best when she is not trying to push songs to the limit. That fine balance between making something fresh and interesting and not making it too crowded and full.
It is not only layers of sound that Bush puts into music. She draws from film, literature and history. Unlike any other artist ion my view, she has this rich arsenal of sounds and lyrics. Maybe Bowie is a comparison. How both could reinvent themselves between albums and were anything but ordinary. The first couple of albums from Kate Bush were defined by the vocal brilliance. The wonderful banks of backing vocals and the nuances in her piano playing. These rich sonic details and layers that elevated these songs to new heights. From Never for Ever onwards, machinery and technology would play a bigger role. The Fairlight CMI particularly important. Whether it was sound effects like breaking glass or a cocked gun, Bush’s songs had so much colour and emotions. That album particularly is a perfect balance between ambition and economy. Not overdoing things. The vocal conversions and crowd sounds on All We Ever Look For. The vocal blends and sound on Delius (Song of Summer). The epic Breathing and the exceptional production on that. A beautiful segue/vignette like Night Scented Stock. The details and different effects on a song such as Army Dreamers. Bush adding layers to a story. Many people might have different views, though I think Bush’s songs are rife with curious little details and these wonderful additions. A perfect cocktail and brew. I want to come to a couple of articles that discuss Bush’s sonic gifts. Well, one paper that argues Bush is a conceptual artist rather than a traditional songwriter. I am not sure how useful it is to my point, but Bush creates songs and layers sounds much like an artist would approach a work. How she uses technology and what she wants to create for the listener. This publication from 2017 raises some interesting observations:
“Kate Bush is, in the foremost sense, a conceptual artist. Her work, in itself, presents theoretical arguments that are useful for understanding the limitations and creative thresholds of contemporary popular music cultures. Across her career, Bush has consistently elaborated concepts, told stories and communicated ideas. Her work harbours intellectual aspirations, in the spirit of much progressive rock music. We need look no further than the elaborate song cycle of ‘The Ninth Wave’ from Hounds of Love (1985) or ‘Sky of Honey’ from Aerial (2005) to witness the execution of conceptual forms that invite what Ron Moy calls ‘critical connections between influences, works and weighty matters of epistemological analysis’ (Moy 2007, p. 39-40). Yet Bush’s recent work, I want to suggest, exists in tension with the ‘contemporary structure of listening’ that sanctions ‘specific technical mediations of listening as subjectively normative’ (Mowitt 1987 p. 214-217).
Her work, in other words, is at deliberate odds with the contemporary structure of the digital, which is normatively perceived to engender shuffle-based, discontinuous listening. To counter this tendency Bush seeks to recreate the creative and listening processes associated with analogue technology. Through this she remains ‘conceptually analogue,’ 1 primarily in the temporal sense, because her conceptual work relies on the attentive, unfolding of the listeners’ consciousness. Such temporalaesthetic unity is compromised by contemporary structures of listening that have been characterized as an unstable ‘technological ecology’ (Roy 2015, p. 1), within which the consumption of popular music has become multiple, heterogeneous and fragmented (Nowak 2015). Bush’s career straddles many different technological eras. In the 1980s she was at the forefront of innovations driving creativity in the music industry. She was a pioneer user of the Fairlight sampling synthesizer, and effectively mobilized the promotional video to publicise her music at the height of MTV’s popularity. Yet when it comes to contemporary digital technologies, and how they shape listeners’ engagements with her music, there is discernible hesitancy. In her characteristically selective promotion of 2011’s Director’s Cut, such feelings were expressed as a preference for analogue formats: 1 Wolfgang Ernst (2014, my italics) explains that ‘when the transfer techniques of audio carriers changes from technically extended writing such as analog[ue] phonography to calculation (digitization), this is not just another version of the materialities of tradition, but a conceptual change […] material tradition is not just function of a linear time base any more.’ 3 The great thing about vinyl is that if you wanted to get a decent-sounding cut, you could really only have 20 minutes max on each side. So you had a strict boundary, and that was something I’d grown up with as well. Also, you were able to have different moods on each side, which was nice […] There was something about having this 12” disc—it even smelled nice (Bush quoted in Domball 2011). The dis-ease is further elaborated in the special edition booklet accompanying Director’s Cut. Here she reflects on the process of creating 1993’s The Red Shoes, an album that straddled the transition from analogue to digital production methods: ‘everyone was under so much pressure back then [i.e., the late 1980s and early 1990s] to work in the digital domain as it promised so much with the lack of tape hiss and its supposed clarity.
I remain a devoted lover of analogue’ (Bush 2011). These statements reveal two important points. Firstly, that analogue was formative for Kate Bush; it was something she’d ‘grown up with’. Here we can point to certain kinds of studio techniques but also, crucially, how analogue formats—and Bush is explicit in naming the ‘nice smelling’ analogue record—delimited how creative possibilities were embedded within the popular music artefact. The value of a strict temporal boundary—20 minutes maximum each side—profoundly shaped how concepts were formed, lending the artist a technique for structural-aesthetic consistency inherent to the format. This, in turn, shaped the listening experience for the ‘consumer’. The second point to note is that the digital, at the cutting edge of late 1980s early adoption, felt to Bush an imposition. ‘Everyone was under so much pressure back then,’ and under such pressures it is presumably hard to make aesthetic decisions based on preferences for recording techniques rapidly moving ‘out of fashion’, as analogue methods were at that juncture. Bush’s analogue fidelity was therefore informed by her experience as both listener of analogue-borne music and as creative artist working within the enabling constraint of analogue affordances. The sequential/ durational temporalities of analogue forms profoundly shaped her experience and idea(l) of what music ‘is’. The strategic provocation of temporal relationships within Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow are then examples of ‘conceptually analogue’ practices created by Bush that respond to the normative lack of duration within the early 21st century’s social-technical milieu”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
I am going to quickly look inside a few of her studio albums and the various layers and sounds. In 2014, this feature was published. It notes how Bush took risks with her on some albums. Even if the writer found some of her later work a bit simple and less risk-taking, they also highlight wonderful details that made their way into some of her songs. Sound effects and sonic diversions that are delightful. How Bush’s voice is one of the best instruments in her arsenal. How it impacts her music and how it has changed through the years:
“If you go back to Hounds of Love, the first thing you notice is that in those days she took far more risks with her voice: there was far more higher register and far more lower register, far more affectation (in a good way), far more play. It often sounds like she is obeying the pulse of a very personal ceremony, with its time signatures and textures all over the place. These days she relies more on default settings: there are too many songs with just Kate and her rainy-day piano. ‘We become panoramic,’ she sings, but the music never does, quite; it’s mostly ‘qualidy rock’ that’s a smidge too smooth, predictable, homogeneous. All her guest artistes are men of a certain age, from either Saturdays-gone-by light entertainment telly, or 1970s rock. If you can gauge someone’s taste for artistic risk by consulting their visitor’s book, then – well, let’s take a look: Lenny Henry, Dave Gilmour, Nigel Kennedy, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Lol Creme, Gary Brooker, Andy Fairweather Low ... I can’t be the only Kate fan who puts their fingers in their ears when Rolf Harris and Stephen Fry come in as guest vocalists.
‘Hounds of Love’, though, is quite simply one of the most beautiful songs pop music has ever produced. It’s not just a song about abandon, but one that embodies feelings of anxiety and abandon, smallness and bigness, in its dizzying drive and texture and in Bush’s joyously unhinged singing. Her keening vocals suggest adult poise on the verge of helpless childhood fall. The whole song, but especially the line ‘his little heart, it beats so fast,’ still automatically reduces me to tears. The arc she makes of ‘hold’ in the yelp of ‘hold me down’ is truly overwhelming: at once pained and lost and powerfully erotic. Listen to the closing minutes of ‘Running Up That Hill’, with its muted chorus of multi-tracked Kates: screaming, grieving, witchy, shattered, a sonic foam rising above the song’s jagged tribunal. It’s a very odd song indeed. At the very least, it claws and rubs at the dissolute line between ecstasy and abjection in a way that was, shall we say, uncommon in mainstream 1980s pop: ‘Tearing you asunder ... do you want to know it doesn’t hurt me?’ Or listen to the way she enunciates the line ‘you never understood me’ in ‘The Big Sky’, her voice somewhere between a caress and a storm warning. Listen to the bizarre chorus she makes of her voice, how it conveys utter exhilaration at its own just glimpsed possibilities. Such wayward joys begin to explain why some of us were so entranced by her to begin with. (I clearly remember hearing ‘Running up That Hill’ for the first time, on the radio in 1985, on what happened to be my birthday. I immediately rang several people to tell – or maybe warn – them about it.)
We don’t necessarily expect artists to keep taking such giant leaps throughout a long career; but the wild glee and panic play seem to have all but evaporated lately. At the end of a long, gently rocky sequence on side two of Aerial there’s a brief, silvery glint of multi-tracked Kates, but they’re promptly flattened by some awful, hackneyed ‘rock out’ guitar. Then right upon Aerial’s crest and end, she unexpectedly bursts into joyful, pealing, baffled laughter, apparently away with the birds and their morning song. ‘What kind of language is this!?’ It’s one of the only times in late-period Kate with the same gawky, light-headed charm and strangeness of the early days. A small thing, easy to overlook, but on the tiny sticker attached to the CD of Aerial it’s referred to as ‘the new double album’ – as if we were still in the gatefold 1970s, not the digital download 2000s. The Bush home studio, far from being a safe place for risky play, seems to have become a playhouse for her roster of greying rock chums and light entertainment panjandrums. All deeply nice blokes and everything, I’m sure, but maybe a certain fluffy-slipper retreat behind ‘nice blokeness’ is one of the problems here.
There’s an odd thing about both Aerial and Snow, though: under that chummy, soft rock exterior a lot of her new songs sound mournful, even desolate – full of characters middle-aged or older looking back with wistful disappointment and regret at what might have been. They’re figures who can’t come together or stay together or who just missed staying together: adrift, vainly searched for, trapped between or beyond worlds. There’s a sense of lost or frozen time: of double-sided or divided people, who at some point let their more reasonable selves take control, and lost inestimable treasure through the deal. ‘A sense of nostalgia for what never was,’ as Pessoa put it, ‘the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else.’ And, just maybe, the ambiguous cue for her own return to the spotlight”.
It is clear from these two sources is that Kate Bush takes risks. I would disagree that her later albums are less fascinating. Each of them has so much detail and brilliant layers. Even 50 Words for Snow. The Kick Inside has those vocal harmonies and subtle instrumental touches. How beer bottles, a clavinet, celeste and boobam feature. A range of vocals. From Bush’s more high-range vocals to deeper tones from Ian Bairnson and Paddy Bush. Similarly on Lionheart. Recorders, a strumento de porco (psaltery) and a range of different percussion and guitars adding their own shades and contours to various songs. How Bush created entire moods and emotions with her voice. Few people talk about the way her vocals were so important. Not only the lead vocal. How she would multitrack herself and there were so many different accents and sounds she made with her voice. Never for Ever has a few great backing vocalists – including Gary Hurst and Andrew Bryant – and some wonderful esoteric instruments like the balalaika, koto, strumento de porco, musical saw and banshee (all played by Paddy Bush). It was not a case of Kate Bush raiding the sonic toybox and throwing everything onto the floor. Each instrument, voice and element was deployed perfectly to give her songs their distinct sound. Bush utilising technology more for The Dreaming. How the Fairlight CMI and its almost limitless range of sounds expanded Kate Bush’s horizons. Her voice more physical, masculine and primal. How it is a rawer album than its predecessors but the songs are dense but not suffocating. Think about how she utilises instruments like the penny whistle, uilleann pipes, bouzuki and Fairlight CMI trumpet section. Hounds of Love and The Sensual World perhaps gentler or more feminine albums.
That said, Hounds of Love is still a physical album. One that has a masculine energy but there is less darkness - and you can feel the influence of the natural world. Bush creating these songs that were almost like suites. The way she used her voice so effectively. Whether it was the way she projected a line or various inflections, these additions are key to the brilliance of the whole. Her production flawless throughout. A whole range of instruments and players adding to the magic. I will finish soon. It is clear that Bush creates this magic and mystery that has inspired so many other artists. How she puts so much emphasis on the sound and feel of songs. Someone who loves the process of making an album. Wanting it to impact the listener. This 2022 feature from the BBC goes inside Kate Bush’s alternative universe:
“Bush's uncommonly risky decision to retire from touring at the age of 20 enabled her to concentrate on record-making, taking on the role of co-producer with 1980's Never for Ever and experimenting with the latest technology. Her spectacularly weird and wild self-produced follow-up, The Dreaming, was a slate-wiper that made anything possible. "Going into the studio every day with her was like entering a fantasy land," according to engineer Nick Launay. She developed a similar taste for creative control when it came to making music videos. For female artists who are used to seeing the credit for half their work go to male collaborators, her autonomy is an inspiration. "It's so great," St Vincent has said of The Dreaming. "She totally went for it."
Her influence, however, has been constant, with disciples including Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Lady Gaga, Bat for Lashes, Goldfrapp, Florence Welch, Joanna Newsom, Tricky and Outkast. Some artists open the door to a new room in the house of music; Bush is one of a handful whose imagination revealed the existence of a whole new wing. For her, anything can be the germ of a song (inspirations on Aerial include laundry, bird song and the number Pi) and any perspective is legitimate: a child, a foetus, a cockney bank robber, a Himalayan explorer, a man watching his wife give birth, a ghost. She is an adventurer and an alchemist; a perfectionist and a dreamer”.
This 2021 feature tells how Hounds of Love took Electronic music to new places. It was a bit of a revolution. It definitely evolved the genre. I want to quote from this feature. Artists explaining why they love Kate Bush. I will highlight those who talk about her vocal effects and the way she can keep her music busy and layered but also quite sparse and accessible. Sharon Van Etten highlighted the almost cinematic nature of Bush’s voice: “As a singer, the thing that has directly affected me is her circular style of melodies; one comes into the other and they never exactly repeat in the same way. I don’t think it’s ever very strict verse-chorus. The wrong person could make what she does sound really cheesy. In isolation the ideas might not make sense, whereas she can push it to this other place: her choices are really beautiful and massive and dramatic. It feels very much like cinema to me”. Brian Molko (Placebo) admires how “Kate created her own emotional universe”. This is what Rae Morris observed: “Her music is all about combining small details with spiritual, otherworldly, wider cinemascape stuff: a really grand, imaginative to-the-moon-and-back scale, but also the sound of the blood running through your veins”. These words from Hayden Thorpe resonated with me: “It has almost become a subgenre, that form of hyperbolic expression – so singular and so uniquely English. It is as if it’s from English mythology: Maid Marian, good against evil, the woods. I think the thing she maybe isn’t given enough credit for is the sonic mastery of her records: they are pioneering, at times experimental and at times harmonically bizarre, but it just always seems to work. The Morning Fog, the last song on Hounds of Love, is a kind of symphony-in-micro – it takes you on this really compelling journey and transports you”.
Barry Hyde of The Futureheads highlighted how “Her music is entirely idiosyncratic. Every song is a different world with its own voice – she’s like an actor in how she uses her voice”. He noted too how “Even after covering one of her songs, I find that when I listen to her music there is still a lot of mystery in it for me; often, I really don’t know what she’s doing. That’s not something that happens very often any more because I’m a music lecturer now, so I listen to music in a very analytical way. Hers is an incredible art: so unpredictable, deeply beautiful and at times very silly”. Russell Mael of Sparks said this: “Literate. Sophisticated. Not fitting in. Musically challenging, yet not proclaiming that you are musically challenging. Not being part of a movement. Creating your own movement. Not part of a past musical model. Establishing your own world. Staying true to that world”. In 2023, this is what St. Vincent (Annie Clark) said of Kate Bush: “Kate Bush. First heard her song ‘This Woman’s Work” in the pivotal scene in the 1988 film She’s Having A Baby. And though I was 7 or 8 and too young to understand much of anything, I wept. “Then around age 16 I went to CD World in Dallas and saw a copy of ‘The Sensual World’ on the racks. And I was so taken with her. Her expression. The flower to her lips. I hadn’t put the pieces together yet that this was the woman who sang THAT song. But I took it home and it was her. That woman who could soar so high into the ether and reach so deep into your soul. The entire album is a masterpiece, but I still cannot listen to ‘This Woman’s Work’ without weeping. “Then I was working on my first record and an engineer friend played me ‘Hounds of Love.’ It was everything. So urgent. So emotional. An entire sonic world. Deeply catchy and deeply bizarre. ART. Kate. Singular. Inimitable. Then the early records. For me: ‘The Kick Inside’. ‘The dreaming’. And later, still pushing soaring on ‘Aerial’. How could someone be this genius and pure and completely free? Vocally, musically, physically?”. It is that Kate Bush, through vocals, instruments or technology, creates these sonic worlds, wonderful universes and details. Layers and depths to her songs. Standing her music aside from anything any other artist has done. Whether the vocal layering from her earliest albums or the more technology-driven details that worked their way through her albums in the 1980s, Bush always stood aside from her peers. Creating something original, rich and cinematic. That is all she…
EVER looks for.