FEATURE:
You Know It's Not for Real, She Just Holds Her Breath
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
The Unique Way Kate Bush Inhabits Characters
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LIKE with so many of my Kate Bush features…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing James and the Cold Gun at Poole Arts Centre for The Tour of Life in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris
I am turning to the good book. A Kate Bush bible: that would be Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. As it was updated last year, I have been rereading it and getting all sort of ideas for features. Details I missed the last time I passed through it. One section caught my eye and made me think hard about Bush and her unique talent. It relates to the way Kate Bush inhabits characters. Think about all the great artists and what makes their music special. Many would highlight their voices, lyrics, composition skills or stage presence. There are few that come to mind where their ability to create characters and inhabit multiple worlds is at the top of the list. Maybe David Bowie or Paul McCartney come to mind. Artists that no doubt influenced Kate Bush when she was growing up. Not just doing accents and providing layers of backing vocals. In the sense that Kate Bush’s albums are defined by their variety and nuance. Songs that are all different to one another. How she sees them almost like films, in that there are multiple characters one discovers through her songs. Right from her debut, The Kick Inside, up to and including 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, Bush very much approaches her songs as if she was creating something visual. One might say that this means very little of her music is personal. How many of her tracks are nakedly about her?! You may feel that is a bad thing, though one of Bush’s ultimate strengths is how she can make her music so imaginative. So many major artists are very personal and do not often have other personas or characters through their music. It can make things seem very one-dimensional. Bush has said she doesn’t find herself that interesting.
If all of her songs were about her feelings and life, how engaging would that be for her and the listener?! It made me think about how she approaches the page. Once more coming back to that idea – which I wrote about recently – that films, T.V. and literature enforced her songwriting imagination. How she is fascinated by people. I am going to repeat some details I have included in other features. However, for this piece about Bush modifying and expanding her voice to embody characters and different sides of her personality, it bears repeating. I did write a feature a while ago how it would be cool if there was a book like Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay’s Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan - American Music Series. In the book, we get more detail about the characters in Steely Dan’s albums. It is a fascinating angle. Kate Bush was also someone who put so many characters through her albums. Even if the book would not be as deep and long, there is still plenty of ammunition and potential! People do not really discuss the cast of people and voices that Bush weaves through all of her studio albums. It is likely that access to new technology enabled her to unleash and realise all the different characters she had in mind. How she could write in this more ambitious way. It started with 1980’s Never for Ever but hit its first peak for 1982’s The Dreaming. The late Ian Bairnson, who appeared on Sat in Your Lap and Leave It Open from The Dreaming (but had worked with Bush since her debut, The Kick Inside), explained how she was thinking more in terms of production and using unusual sounds. That the Fairlight CMI, drum machine and MIDI made her child-like with wonder and excitement. There is going to be some overlap with a recent feature I published about Kate Bush’s sonic experimentation and layers in her music. At the heart of all of this is the pursuit of the cinematic. Kate Bush seeing herself more as a director or auteur than a songwriter.
On The Dreaming, Kate Bush and Nick Launay worked closely together. He was an engineer at Townhouse Studios when she was recording there. Bush said she wanted her music to come across as experimental and cinematic, so his job was to capture the essence of the films playing over and over in her head. Dissect albums like The Dreaming and they are choked full of characters. Soldiers in the jungle. An escapologist and his wife. A haunted house and spirits possessed and turned into donkeys. Bank robbers and answerphone voices. There are voices and characters mingling together. Like scenes in films. Bush using technology and employing various techniques to get into the guise of multiple characters. As I have written before, she used props like chocolate and milk to give her voice more grit and mucus. Handy when recording songs like Houdini, when she had to achieve that sort of sounds for its chorus. Nick Launay recollected him and Bush working together at the front of the desk and at the other end there were huge bars of chocolate and a huge bag of weed. How to make her imagination real! If Bush used various substances to realise a particular effect or open her mind, she would use the studio and its surroundings so that she could create characters naturally. Nick Launay also told how it was always like making films. Bush as a director and Launay the assistant director. Discussing how to make these scenes and characters come to life. How Bush was so excited. Even though technology like the Fairlight CMI offered all sorts of new possibilities, it was still limited. Bush asking Launay how to make this character real. Whether certain things could be achieved.
I guess this feature should also mention Bush as a producer. How she asked these questions of engineers so that she could learn as a producer. Experimenting with technology, acoustics, chocolate and whatever was at hand to realise this larger vision! For the B-side of Sat in Your Lap (released in 1981), a cover of Donavan’s Lord of the Reedy River, Bush wanted to sound like she was a heroine. Not just herself. She wanted the song to sound authentic and like she was recording a music video. To get the affect she was searching for, she descended to the disused swimming pool in the basement of Townhouse so that her voice would reflect off of the water. That sense of a pre-Raphaelite heroine trapped in a watery painting. Bush was not only working on characters and the foreground. She was also working on the compositions and sounds to flesh out the characters. A sense of plugging in things, tuning this and playing around. At one point Bush did start to get lost. She took a sleeper train to Scotland and visited Loch Ness – whether to search for Nessie or unwind – and she spent the period running up to Christmas 1981 working at home. Working between Abbey Road, Townhouse, Odyssey Studios, and Advison Studios on Gosfeld Street, there was a lot of change and shifting. Whatever studio Bush was working out, she was like this director trying to realise all of these characters. The Dreaming very much like a film with ten distinct scene. The same with Never for Ever. Bush has also blended real-life figures and those imagined in her music. From Houidini, Frederick Delius, Catherine Earnshaw, Wilhelm Reich and Molly Bloom in the ‘real’/non-imagined world to a whole cast of people Kate Bush created, she fully embodied them all.
It takes me back to that thought as to whether any other artist has a larger roster of characters. Bush has also been praised for her empathy and breadth of reference. For example, one reviewer described her persona as an "old strain of English magic”. Tying into and updating a feature I wrote in 2020, it is amazing how Bush was less of a songwriter and producer. More like a novelist or film director. Someone thinking beyond the page. When she was in the vocal booth, Bush projecting like an actor. That quote about an “old strain of English magic had returned” was actually from The Waterboys’ Mike Scott in relation to Wuthering Heights and Kate Bush playing Catherine Earnshaw. There is this incredible resource from 2020 that takes us inside various characters from Kate Bush’s music. Rather than this being me repeating what I wrote in the feature about the vocal layers and sonic details in her songs, or going back to that book idea that should unite all Kate Bush’s characters – I will do a feature in the future where I name and explore every character she has created –, this is more about how Bush inhabited these characters. How she approached writing songs so that she create and realise these characters. Various methods she used as a producer. Whether it was utilising the studio or finding ways to alter her voice, it is fascinating!
Think about the importance of characters in Kate Bush’s music. Her first and most recent singles have a character at the forefront. Wuthering Heights has Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. 2011’s Wild Man has this Yeti or abominable snowman. Even if you see 2024’s Little Shrew (Snowflake) as her most recent single, that very much has a character at heart. How much time Kate Bush took to realise this shrew. Making the video for it more like a short film. Filmmaking and acting central to everything she does. Before finishing up, I wonder where that dynamic stemmed from. Why Bush was so compelled to create characters and work in a filmic way, when most of her peers were writing and recording in a more traditional manner. Less imaginative. I think Bush’s favourite director was Terry Gilliam (whom she approached to direct the video for Cloudbusting, that was eventually directed by Julian Doyle). The more I research about Kate Bush’s character fascination and her need to embody them fully and realise them wholly, I found archived interviews where she discussed her favourite films and ambitions to go into film (she was offered roles in films, including 1986’s Castaway, but wisely turned them down). Bush is clearly a massive film fan:
“My plans for the future... Well, I want to get into films. And I want to do more on stage. I love staging my own shows, working out the routines, designing the whole package, and using every aspect of my creativity.
What kind of films would she like to make?
My favourite is Don't Look Now. I was incredibly impressed by the tension, the drive and the way that every loose end was tied up. I get so irritated by films which leave ideas hanging. (1982, Company)
Being stuck there could be an idyllic time. I've enjoyed working alone, even as a kid, and I can collect all my thoughts together then. But the prospect of being there with my favorite films is exciting, because I love the cinema and rarely get the chance to visit it because of my work. So I'd go to town on my selection. Kagemusha.
Not a lot of people have heard of this one, but it's by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. I just happen to think that this is one of his best. It was a toss up between this and his Seven Samurai, which is a tremendously atmospheric picture. However, I think this one wins the day. Psycho.
This is the kind of film that'll be around for years - like the Disney ones. When Terry Gilliam and Michael Palin of the Monty Python team got together on this they must have been inspired, because it appeals to kids and adults alike. The story is so original and seems to incorporate just about everything from pantomime, fairy tales, drama... the whole show. Don't Look Now
Marvellous Hitchcock stuff. Really vintage and one of the classics with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. It's that buildup of mystery that fascinate me. Pinocchio
But more than other pop musicians or authors, miss Bush said movies have inspired her. Among film makers, she said she most admires Alfred Hitchcock, Nicolas Roeg and Terry Gilliam.
Their work has spoken to me as directly as that of any other kind of artist. Many of my songs I think of as very filmic. (1985, The New York Times)
Bush - who also produces her albums and plays piano and synthesizer - came close to going beyond four-minute videos when she flirted with the idea of making a film based on the ninth wave, the intriguing conceptual second side of the hounds of love.
What I wanted to do was turn that into a half-hour film integrating music with visuals. When I was writing it, I was really thinking visually. It was just unfortunate that by the time I had the opportunity to make the film I was just too tired. I did not have the energy. (1990, Los Angeles Times)
So many films touch you,even if it's only the atmosphere you're left with. There was The Innocents (ADAPTED FROM HENRY JAMES'S GHOST STORY The Turn Of The Screw AND DIRECTED IN 1961 BY JACK CLAYTON, STARRING DEBORAH KERR AND MICHAEL REDGRAVE) which I saw when I was a kid. It was so strong, and years later I wrote ``The Infant Kiss'' There's an old horror film called Night Of The Demon (ADAPTED FROM THE M.R. JAMES SHORT STORY ``CASTIN THE RUNES'' AND DIRECTED IN 1957 BY JACQUES TOURNEUR, STARRING DANA ANDREWS AND PEGGY CUMMINS) and that very much inspired `` Hounds Of Love'' (1990, Q Special)”.
There is more to explore when it comes to connecting Kate Bush’s film love and background to the way she approached her songwriting. I don’t think Bush consciously chose to create all these characters to avoid discussing herself. She does write personal songs. However, as she did not want to be famous and did not think people would be interested in her, she instead inhabited these compelling and distinct characters. So fully and enthusiastically involved in getting ‘into her part’. Again, it makes me wonder whether any artist ever had such a filmic approach. Does David Bowie come close? Who else comes to mind? Is Kate Bush the ultimate songwriting auteur and filmic-minded writer?! I have been listening back through all of Bush’s albums and approaching the songs like film scenes. A totally different listening experience! It is amazing how Bush is almost like this versatile actor. Thinking about it simply…
DROPS the jaw.