FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982
1982: Paul Simper (Melody Maker)
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I was going to give this feature up…
but there are a few other interviews I want to cover off before wrapping it all up. One interview I have not included before is Kate Bush’s interview with Melody Maker in 1982. Paul Simper was the man charged with interviewing her. Published in October 1982, a month after The Dreaming was released, this was a stage of Bush’s career that was a shock for many. In terms of what people expected from an album and the sound coming from it. I love interviews from 1982, as it sees Kate Bush in a very interesting period. Immersed in various studios working insane hours putting an album together, this was her first time producing alone. As such, what she was making was more layered and ambitious than any album that came before. Her fourth studio effort, The Dreaming is still one of her most underrated works. I think that the album should get more recognition and airplay. Maybe Sat in Your Lap gets played on the radio, though the rest of the songs are largely overlooked. Finishing with two of her best tracks, Houdini and Get Out of My House, there is great need for people to check out this remarkable album:
“To some people Kate Bush has almost ceased to exist. Usurped on the bedroom walls young upstarts like Clare Grogan and Kim Wilde, she is now a much more private lady who rarely goes out and seems quite content to concentrate on her singing and dancing.
It's been two years since her last LP, Never For Ever, and though the single that followed "Sat In Your Lap", reached number 11, the recent commercial failure of "The Dreaming" has seen the undertakers beginning to shuffle and murmur impatiently.
Was the title track the actual cornerstone of the LP?
"No. The thing about all my album titles is that they're usually one of the last things to be thought of because it's so difficult just to find a few words to sum the whole thing up.
"I've got this book which is all about Aborigines and Australian art and it's called The Dreaming. The song was originally called 'Dreamtime', but when we found out that the other word for it was 'The Dreaming' it was so beautiful - just by putting 'the' in front of 'dreaming' made something very different - and so I used that.
"It also seems to sum up a lot of the songs because one of the main points about that time for the Aborigines was that it was very religious and humans and animals were very closely connected. Humans were actually living in animal's bodies and that's an idea which I particularly like playing with."
Have you ever been to Australia?
"Yes, but not recently. I have contact with a few Australians and it seems that at the moment Aboriginal art is becoming very fashionable so the young Australians are starting to take a lot more serious notice of what's happening to them. Also, happily, the Aborigines seem to be growing in number again."
The Dreaming is an LP that mutates at an alarming rate. One minute you're playing walkabout in the outback, the next it's Vietnam and you're fighting for your life. But through the images are diverse and at times oblique, the sound - principally driven by menacing, pounding drums - is more consistent. It certainly owes much to Peter Gabriel's third LP which housed such resounding nightmares as "Biko" and "No Self Control".
"I'd been trying to get some kind of tribal drum sound together for a couple of albums, especially the last one. But really the problem was that I was trying to work with a pop medium and get something out of it that wasn't part of that set-up."
"Seeing Peter working in the Town House Studio, especially with the engineers he had, it was the nearest thing I'd heard to real guts for a long long time. I mean, I'm not into rhythm boxes - they're very useful to write with but I don't think they're good sounds for a finished record - and that was what was so exciting because the drums had so much power."
Another influence you're quoted before is Pink Floyd's The Wall, did you see the film?
"Yes. I've been very much influenced by The Wall because I like the way that the Floyd get right into that emotional area and work with sounds as pictures. I think the problem with the film though is that, although as a piece of art it is devastating, it isn't real enough. The whole film is negatively based. No once during Pink's life is there a moment of happiness which I know in every human's life there is. Even if you have the shittiest life of all there is always one little moment where you smile for a second or you fall in love with someone and feel happy - maybe only for ten minutes.
Listening to The Dreaming and Never For Ever the night before my interview with Kate the two LPs gradually revealed many lyrical similarities - the anti-war theme of "Breathing" and "Army Dreamers", which is continued on "Pull Out The Pin", for instance. One track, though, left me utterly bewildered - "Suspended In Gaffa"...
"Lyrically it's not really that dissimilar from "Sat In Your Lap" in saying that you really want to work for something. It's playing with the idea of hell. At school I was always taught that if you went to hell you would see a glimpse of God and that was it - you never saw him again and you'd spend the rest of eternity pining to see him. In a way it was even worse if you went to purgatory because you got the glimpse of God and you would see him again [??? but you] didn't know when. So it was almost like you had to sit here until he decided to com back.
"I suppose for me in my work, because it's such a sped up life and so much happens to you and you analyse yourself a lot, you see the potential for perhaps getting to somewhere very special on an artistic or a spiritual level and that excites me a lot. And it's the idea of working towards that and perhaps one day, when you're ready for that change, it's like entering a different level of existence, where everything goes slow-mo... it's almost like a religious experience. That's basically what the song's about."
Are you very religious or do you simply have a strong belief in yourself?
"I think I very much believe in the forces and energies that humans and other things which are alive can create. I do feel that what you give out sincerely then karmically you should get it back."
Time seems to have changed your thirst for knowledge. While in "Rolling The Ball" [sic - "Them Heavy People] you were overbrimming with the joys of gathering wisdom, on a track like "Sat In Your Lap" you appear a lot more impatient - "I want to be a lawyer. I want to be a scholar./But I really Can't be bothered, ooh just/Gimme it quick..."
"I think it's also about the way you try to work for something and you end up finding you've been working away from it rather than towards it. It's really about the whole frustration of having to wait for things - the fact that you can't do what you want to do now, you have to work toward it and maybe, only maybe, in five years you'll get what you're after.
"For me there are so many things I do which I don't want to - the mechanics of the industry - but I hope that through them I can get what I really want. You have to realise that, say, you can't just be an artist and not promote. If you're not a salesman for your work the likelihood is that people won't realise that it's there and eventually you'll stop yourself from being able to make something else. There's no doubt about it that every album I make is really dependant on the money I made from the last one."
Do you do a lot of reading?
"No, not really, because I just don't get the time. But whenever I do it really sparks things off in me. The last book I read was The Shining and it just blew me away, it was absolutely brilliant, and that definitely inspired "Get Out Of My House" because the atmosphere of the book is so strong”.
There are a lot of interesting interviews with Kate Bush from 1982. It might have been hard for journalists to get their mind around The Dreaming and what to ask. It is fascinating reading Bush discussing her most unusual and innovative album. If you are someone who has avoided it or only heard a track or two, I hope the interview above gives you impetus to explore it in more detail and depth. It is an album that needs to be celebrated and properly listened to. It has been a pleasure going back to 1982 again for another instalment of The Kate Bush Interview Archive. The Dreaming is a treasure that…
DESERVES more love and attention.