FEATURE:
When the Smog Begins to Clear…
Reacting to Kate Bush Christmas 2024 Message
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I am not sure about other people…
LITTLE SHREW DESIGN/CONCEPT: Kate Bush/LITTLE SHREW ANIMATION: Nicolette Van Gendt
but I have never been interested in the Queen’s Christmas speech. Or the King now. It seems to fill some with traditional and hope but, for the most part, what you are watching is a very privileged human being who really has not worked hard or sacrificed much giving this sermon. Something quite dry. Sure, uplifting and wise at times, but it does come off as quite tasteless considering they are usually delivering their speech from a lavish and plush setting. We have to endure that this year. I always make sure I watch something else when that is on! For us Fish People our queen, Kate Bush, posts her Christmas message this time of the year. In fact, yesterday afternoon she provided us with a Christmas Eve treat. Her most in-depth, moving, brilliant and best Christmas message. It was a combination of reflecting on the year just gone but also looking ahead. A couple of tantalising possibilities to chew. Hope that there will be new activity in 2025. In a post entitled A Monet Christmas Eve to All!, there was a lot to unpack and luxuriate in. Now more than ever, Kate Bush really writing in depth and detail. Her 2023 Christmas message was wonderful, yet there were notes of caution and fear. How the world was changing and getting worse. This year has some of that though it is, for the most part, a more encouraging one. Maybe Bush, who has cleared a path, archived her work and created a beautiful video for War Child – Little Shrew (Snowflake) was a video written and directed by her that helped raise funds for a brilliant charity -, is looking ahead and has done a lot of what she set out to do. Now she has the space to look around her. Let’s look at the first part of the message:
“It’s been really exciting to see the wonderfully positive feedback to the Little Shrew animation. Thank you so much to all of you who made a donation to War Child. They have been absolutely delighted with the response.
Little Shrew will be getting a bowl of especially delicious earthworms this Christmas morning.
It’s been another year of exceptionally dark news. It just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?
The wars keep raging. We helplessly stand and watch as those poor people are caught up in the horrors of it all and of course there are the children…
PHOTO CREDIT: Heiner/Pexels
It’s hard not to focus on the worry we all feel about these conflicts and the massive changes that are happening around us, but I’d like to try to find something positive to say for this Christmas message:
Happy Christmas Eve! My favourite day of the year. When I was a child, it used to have a special feeling. It even had a sort of Christmas Eve smell… a mixture of smoking coal fires and damp leaves, all bundled up in a drizzly English frozen fog. If I really work on it, I can still summon it up on the day. I’m working on it now…”.
Starting out with that stark yet true realisation: the world is getting worse. Bush lovingly recognising her Little Shrew creation and how well it has done. Raising necessary money for War Child. Something to be very proud of! If 2023’s message had some darkness and fear but also pleasure in the mundane and everyday we take for granted, Bush has started her 2024 message with the pragmatic and inescapable. Then moving on to the positives. It is this warm-hearted person recognising the deficit and harsh realities of war. Her thoughts and mind always with those afflicted. This year has seen Kate Bush very much doing all she can to raise awareness. To get money to War Child. Spending so much time and effort getting that Little Shrew (Snowflake) video complete and out to the world. The start of that next paragraph. Bush delighting in Christmas Eve. I guess it is perhaps more exciting than Christmas Day as there is that anticipation. Especially as a child, that giddiness of knowing what tomorrow holds. But never quite knowing exactly what! Do we lose that as adults?! Bush, now sixty-six, still taking comfort and delight in Christmas Eve. Being with her family and being appreciative for all that she has. If this Christmas Eve was quite warm, I cast my mind back and try to imagine Bush in the 1960s as a girl revelling in the smell of Christmas and the cold weather. Perhaps not romantic to all but definitely to her! The English frozen fog. So evocative! I can imagine the emotions coursing through Kate Bush as she typed the words. That quite stately and dignified opening puts me in mind of the Queen perhaps. Though much more relatable somehow. Then mixing in some reflections on the season.
One might find it odd to analyse or overthink a Christmas message. But, if it was a few words and that was it, maybe I would let it go. However, this is Kate Bush and I do pretty much react to everything she posts and does at the moment! Also, there is a lot of detail in it. Her wording and the images she summons. Painting a scenery and picture. A work of art with little details here and there. One cannot simply let a Kate Bush Christmas message sit or be limited to social media sharing and some brief comment! This is her taking stock of her year but also thinking about others around the world. Also, if you can donate to War Child this year then you can do so here. I like that Kate Bush can be personal. Always thinking of others and conscious that she wants to use her platform to speak about those who are in need around the world, you always get some great personal stories and quirks. Whether it was last year, where she wrote how she stands on awe of running water. That you can turn on a tap and hot water is dispended. That thing we all take for granted is something many others do not have. Appreciating the little things in life. Here, we have something else that is a small detail that may seem ordinary but actually is thought-provoking and distinctly Kate Bush:
“I went to see the Monet exhibition. Twenty one paintings in two rooms – all featuring the Thames in the smog. They were incredibly atmospheric. The fact that they were all of the same environment made you feel like you were there yourself, wrapped up in a mysterious smog of muddy sulphurous yellows, sun-starved pinks, car-sick greens.
You could only make out vague, blurred shapes through the etherial, swirling veils…a majestic bridge here, a wispy boat there… these paintings were completely mesmerising. They transported you to London at the turn of the last century.
Monet thought that the smog was beautiful and that London would’ve looked utterly uninteresting without it. For him it was the smog that created the magic of the place.
I imagined him ready at first light, stood at his easel spluttering and coughing as he peered through the polluted air, with no choice but to gasp at its beauty”.
IN THIS IMAGE: Claude Monet’s Houses of Parliament, sunset, 1900-1903
For those who call Kate Bush a recluse – every article from the press seems to lead with that and I even saw one refer to as a “hermit” recently! -, it does good to realise that she goes out and about. She has never been nor ever will be reclusive or hermit-like! She goes out like normal people but not in the same attention-seeking and often gaudy way many high-profile people do. It is her relatability and normalness that makes her so lovable. 2025 is a year when people need to stop labelling Kate Bush and do their research before lazily parroting the same insulting and stupid words. In their supercilious snootiness, they seem to look down on her whilst lifting her at the same time. Anyway, I digress! That description of her being at an exhibition. The exhibition is in London and runs until January. You should go along if you can and stand in the same spot Bush did (here is a great feature about it). I wonder why she went to the exhibition and why it made such an impact. Not living in London anymore, maybe she is thinking about a time when our capital was quite deprived. Perhaps trying to imagine a time when we were experiencing something quite brutal or depressing. Trying to emphasis with those in today’s world that face that. Maybe the romanticism. In a strange way. I have always wondered whether Bush would turn her hand to art of paint something herself. I feel that art, in addition to film, T.V. and literature, inspires her mind and music, though she does not mention it much. She has produced art herself for a War Child auction in the 1990s but it is not something that has been a big aspect of her life.
IN THIS IMAGE: Claude Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, 1903
Her words sort of transport you to the exhibit. I am interested to go now. I also think that Bush might be, subconsciously, getting ideas and visions for music. Inspiration from artwork. Maybe a song that is smog-filled but has this beauty. Many reacted to this part of the Christmas message and related it to symbolism. Bush looking at smog to clear her own path. A new phase and stage. I also someone suggest Bush is touring next year but that is pure fantasy and hyperbolic lust. Whilst she has not ruled out live work, there definitely has not been any word that she is gearing up to hit the stage once more. I will end by suggesting why next year is one where she will release a new album. It was lovely to spend a moment standing alongside Kate Bush as she was enveloped by and lost in these Monet paintings: “Less known is the fact that some of Monet’s most remarkable Impressionist paintings were made not in France but in London. They depict extraordinary views of the Thames as it had never been seen before, full of evocative atmosphere, mysterious light and radiant colour. Begun during three stays in the capital between 1899 and 1901, the series — depicting Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament — was unveiled in Paris in 1904. Monet fervently wanted to show them in London the following year, but plans fell through. To this day, they have never been the subject of a UK exhibition”.
IN THIS IMAGE: Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge, 1902
“It made me smile to read that although he sketched them while he was in London, he took them home and finished them off in France. Ha ha! So all is not as it seems – that sun-starved pink was actually lavish Giverny pink.
Is that us? Standing in awe at the dawn of AI, the symbol of modernity, as smog was for Monet at that time in the newly industrial London? Do we only see the twinkling light of the new invention, which so often catches the eye of our imagination… and what are those vague, dark sardonic shapes we can see in the background, behind the theatrical gauze?”
Bush talking of Monet starting his work in London and finishing it off in France. I got images of her maybe starting work in one place and finishing it in another. Relating it to her creative process. That perception we get from the paintings is not all that it seems. It is not a purely London-created painting. These paintings started their life in London but they were enhanced and modified in France. Adding an artificial layer to the paintings. Bush thinking about A.I. That use of the word ‘awe’. I think Bush is fearful of what A.I. can do. As an artist protective of her own work and how someone might steal it. Use her song and, through A.I., turn it into something different. Someone using A.I. to replicate her voice maybe. It is a concern all artists have. This dawn of something that can be quite powerful but also reckless and frightening. However, maybe there is a note of caution. If Monet looked at the smog and saw that it was from industry and knew that it was a beginning of an industrious age and something positive, it was also toxic and blackened the sky. The light and purity of a city draped in something odorous and depressing.
I love how Bush made the connection between Monet and his observations on the multiple meanings of smog. What it presented. Why he was compelled to paint these near-identical scenes. Bush finding humour in the way Monet creating this sense of deception with his palette. Some artificialness or inauthenticity. Using colours from France to convey London. How there is this glean and sheen with A.I. that suggests it is a positive thing. That is it advancement and polish. However, like the smog observed in London between the end of the nineteenth century and the very start of the twentieth, something more malevolent and damaging. Rather than attack A.I., Bush can see how it would appeal and entice. However, she knows that it is something that can take from people. That it is perhaps an unknown and something we cannot control. Maybe quite a frightening and foreboding future. However, this being Kate Bush, her use of language and imagery makes it somehow poetic! I do wonder, when a new album arrives, whether Bush will revive her take on technology and its impact on the world. How she did with Deeper Understanding for 1989’s The Sensual World (and for 2011’s Director’s Cut), will A.I.’s lure and potential damage be something addressed soon?! Let’s hope so, as that would be really intriguing to hear!
Before she signed off, Kate Bush perhaps dropped a hint that all this talk of Monet was about her. Maybe how she has seen the fog and smog in the world and is hoping for some answers and clarity. The smog and ash of war perhaps. Hoping for something brighter. Perhaps she is waiting for the smog to clear so that she can move forward. Consider these words:
“It’s hard to make them out, but could they be our human pods, like those from the Matrix, being readied for us by eager, playful digits? Or maybe they are freshly painted bridges – robust, and lovingly built to carry us all into a much longed-for new age of healthy thinking?
All will be revealed when the smog begins to clear”.
Remember the previous sentence: “and what are those vague, dark sardonic shapes we can see in the background, behind the theatrical gauze”. Referring to A.I. and this front cover and shadow of something nice, bright and theatrical. However, peel it away and there could be something murkier and more malevolent. She summons images of a new reality and world. One where we are more puppets or props. A.I. could be this force for bad where we are in its control or we have no control over it and what it could mean for artists’ intellectual rights and music in general. However, Bush also feels we could see a technology working for good. If we harness it correctly and realise its potential then it could change the way we think. Expand our minds, horizons and view of the world. Make a massive change. That idea of ‘healthy’ thinking seems to be the opposite of a lot of the toxicity on social media. We have control of A.I. and the future and need to make the right choice. That sense that all will be revealed once the smog has cleared. In the same way industrial Britain was shrouded in fog and smoke but, once cleared, there was this change that was not always apparently good – when you are breathing in the thick air it seems only poisonous and bad -, we could see something constructive and beneficial when we know more about A.I. This feeling that it is new and seemingly hostile and suffocating.
PHOTO CREDIT: ThisIsEngineering/Pexels
Our perceptions will sharpen when this technological fog clears. It is a very clever and startling way Bush bonds Monet and the modern-day! Rather than weaving traditional Christmas scenes and talking about something quite cliché, she has used her message to largely discuss A.I. and modern technology. The parallels between this and a Monet exhibit. I feel, the more I read her words, the more there is something deeper at work. Almost discussing herself and clearing a path. That might be us being selfish and hoping for a new album. The more Bush highlights A.I. and fears that it could be something negative, I feel that drives her to write and record music her way. Release it on vinyl and record it without the crutch of A.I. “All will be revealed when the smog begins to clear”. That smog of hatred and violence in the world. Bush maybe referencing things to come from her. When she feels that things are in a better place or she is happier about the world, she will then grace us with something new. She does sign off with the perfect and wonderful “Merry Christmas everyone. I hope it’s a really joyful one for you all”. It is a perfect way to sign off 2024. A year that has seen Bush deal with some tragedy – the loss of Del Palmer in January – and, like all of us, have to see images of violence afflicts communities and children. How she has felt compelled to help and highlight the atrocities. She is also not sure of A.I. and its future. Whether it is a positive or negative thing. A Little Shrew, warfare, Monet exhibit, smog, A.I., potential bright futures and what could come when the smog clears. Bush gave us a lot to ponder. A thought-provoking, heartfelt, poetic, details, deep, intriguing and cliff-hanger-like…this is her best Christmas message yet. She has the same excitement for Christmas Eve now as she did as a child. The morning after, she will spend time with her family and also look ahead to the year to come. Just what presents from the wonderful Kate Bush…
WILL we see in 2025?