FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Babooshka at Forty-Four
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Her Best and Most Important Album Opener?
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I never need an excuse to speak about…
Kate Bush’s Babooshka. There are a couple of good reasons today. For a start, on 27th June, the single turns forty-four. It reached number five in the U.K. upon its release and Bush produced the song alongside Jon Kelly. They were producers for her third studio album, Never for Ever – Babooshka was the album’s second single. I always think it is interesting when an artist releases singles way before an album comes out. I guess you need to gain momentum. Never for Ever’s first single, Breathing, came out in April 1980. With Babosohka following a couple of months later, it would be three months more before Never for Ever arrived (it was released on 8th September, 1980). There is so much to explore with regards Babooshka. From live performances through to the video all the way to the lyrical meaning, it is a fascinating song from Kate Bush. It’s B-side, Ran Taz Waltz, was premiered (in a magnificently odd way) during Kate Bush’s Christmas special in 1979. I think it is very underrated. Rather than an album track as B-side, we have this song with its own life and purpose. I would love to explore it more one day. I want to argue that it may be her best album opening track. Definitely her most important in my view. Also, as American Songwriter recently wrote about the song, I want to include what they wrote. Before getting to those, we need some background on Babooshka. Including words from Kate Bush abouts its origins. Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for providing details about a truly spectacular and magical track:
“Performances
Kate performed ‘Babooshka’ in various European programmes, including Collaro (France), Countdown (Netherlands) and Rock Pop (Germany). Her performance of the song in a Dr. Hook television special remains the first, and is memorable for the costume she is wearing: on her the right side she resembles a staid Victorian lady in mourning dress; on the left side a glittering, liberated young woman in a silvery jumpsuit, with bright lightning-streaks painted down the left side of her face. Her figure is lit so that only the “repressed” side of her costume is visible during the verses of the song, and mainly the “free” side during the choruses.
Cover versions
‘Babooshka’ has been covered by Astral Prince, Brain Grimmer, Sonia Cat-Berro, Kat Devlin, Eartheater, Goodknight Productions, Göteborgs Symfoniker, The Hounds Of Love, Yuri Kono, Miss Platnum, Mr. Sirius, Oldelaf, the Plunging Necklines, Niki Romijn and Debra Stephenson.
Kate about ‘Babooshka’
‘Babooshka’ is about futile situations. The way in which we often ruin things for ourselves. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)
Apparently it is grandmother, it’s also a headdress that people wear. But when I wrote the song it was just a name that literally came into my mind, I’ve presumed I’ve got it from a fairy story I’d read when I was a child. And after having written the song a series of incredible coincidences happened where I’d turned on the television and there was Donald Swan singing about Babooshka. So I thought, “Well, there’s got to be someone who’s actually called Babooshka.” So I was looking throughRadio Timesand there, another coincidence, there was an opera called Babooshka. Apparently she was the lady that the three kings went to see because the star stopped over her house and they thought “Jesus is in there”.’ So they went in and he wasn’t. And they wouldn’t let her come with them to find the baby and she spent the rest of her life looking for him and she never found him. And also a friend of mine had a cat called Babooshka. So these really extraordinary things that kept coming up when in fact it was just a name that came into my head at the time purely because it fitted. (Peter Powell interview, Radio 1 (UK), 11 October 1980))”.
Like so many Kate Bush songs, Babooshka came from a less-than-traditional source. Few songwriters like her were on the scene in 1980. The fact that she did not know about the Russian word for grandmother. The angle of the lyrics. Aged twenty-one when the song came out, she was writing purely from a hypothetical stance. In terms of relationships and trust, nothing that we hear in the song relates to her experiences. Making it all the more remarkable that she would come up with it! Almost a poet or author in terms of her songwriting. So many peers wrote about love and deceit in very ordinary and cliché ways. Kate Bush was penning amazing songs full of rich imagery and depth. I am going to claim that Babooshka is her most important album opening track – maybe some would argue if it is the best. I was pleased that American Songwriter focused on Babboshka last month. Their article mentions a great 1980 interview. I would hope that, ahead of the song’s forty-fourth anniversary, journalists take the song apart and explore it in more depth:
“A Test of Fidelity
In a 1980 interview on the Australian TV show Countdown, Bush explained “Babooshka” and its origins: “It was really a theme that has fascinated me for some time. It’s based on a theme that is often used in folk songs, which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel that perhaps he’s not faithful. And there’s no real strength in her feelings, it’s just more or less paranoia suspicions, and so she starts thinking that she’s going to test him, just to see if he’s faithful. So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter. And he responds very well to the letter, because as he reads it, he recognizes the wife that he had a couple of years ago, who was happy, in the letter. And so he likes it, and she decides to take it even further and get a meeting together to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her.
“When he meets her, again because she is so similar to his wife, the one that he loves, he’s very attracted to her. Of course she is very annoyed and the break in the song is just throwing the restaurant at him. … He loves her very much, and the whole idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans and how by our own thinking, spinning around in our own ideas, we come up with completely paranoid facts. So in her situation she was in fact suspicious of a man who was doing nothing wrong, he loved her very much indeed. Through her own suspicions and evil thoughts she’s really ruined the relationship.”
The Video
The simple video featured Bush in two guises. During the gentle verses, she’s dressed in a black bodysuit with a veil over her face, portraying the older woman in her song, dancing with a large double bass that symbolized the husband. In the dramatic choruses, she vamps dramatically in a skimpy warrior outfit, her eyes popping wide and cutting a dangerously alluring figure as she represents the temptress that was her own self. It was an effective way to use a low-budget concept. Bush was always a striking performer, exploring different ways to make her videos engaging.
While not a hit in America – she’s only had the one, and you know what it is – the single for “Babooshka” went to No. 2 in Australia, No. 4 in France, No. 5 in Ireland, Israel, Italy, and the UK, and No. 8 in New Zealand. It sold over a million copies in the UK and France, and has racked up 44 million YouTube views and 158 million Spotify listens.
A year and a half before the massive resurgence of “Running Up that Hill,” this Bush song got attention as part of a Tik Tok Challenge around late 2020. Young women (and a couple of men) lip-synched and/or performed to the major verse to chorus transition in the song. Their interpretations varied wildly.
With “Babooshka,” Bush took the familiar themes of distrust and infidelity and spun them into her own unique tale. “‘Babooshka’ is about futile situations,” she told the Kate Bush Club newsletter in 1980. “The way in which we often ruin things for ourselves.” That heartbreak certainly made for a classic song”.
Bringing cinematic and literary references to the fore, Never for Ever was Kate Bush’s broadest and most fulfilling album to that point. Where she was free to produce alone – with Jon Kelly at least; Andrew Powell (who produced 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart) does not feature – and, with it, bring a fuller lyrical and musical paillette to the front. I suspect that there was little room for too much ambition and experimentation on her first two albums. EMI keener for their prodigy to get herself established and then, when things were commercially secure, allow a bit more expansion. Bush was not willing to work with someone who did not share her vision and let her be more involved with production. As such, the opening song to Never for Ever had to be a statement of intent. Some would argue there are stronger opening tracks on her albums. How about Moving from The Kick inside? Surely Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) from Hounds of Love (1985). Even King of the Mountain from Aerial (2005). I would say that, in terms of its impact and freshness, Babooshka might be top. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) is majestic. Though there has been oversaturation. It is played more than any other Kate Bush track. Not that it diminished its impact. I feel it is so over-familiar and almost synonymous with Kate Bush now. Other options like Moving and The Sensual World (from 1989’s The Sensual World) have their merits. I feel there is something extra from Babooshka. In terms of the way it starts this brilliant run of tracks. Delius (Song of Summer) and Blow Away (For Bill) then lead to All We Ever Look For. It starts Never for Ever phenomenally strong and perfectly precedes this run of beautiful songs that give you a flavour of the album. Babooshka has touches of the Fairlight CMI. Some standout Fender Rhodes piano and electric bass. A number two hit in Australia, there is this gravity and heft to Babooshka. The perfect way to open her third studio album. Kate Bush brilliantly bookending Never for Ever with these accomplished and intriguing tracks. The mighty and epic Breathing ends the album.
I would say it is her most important opening track. After two studio albums – Lionheart was not as well received as The Kick Inside - and a tour the previous year, there was this sense of expectation. From critics, maybe they felt that Kate Bush was past her best. After a slightly underwhelming – in their view – second studio album, could she deliver on her third?! I do feel there was a lot of doubt. People who has seen her during The Tour of Life had different expectations. There was this blend of fans’ expectations who were at the tour and those who were not. In any case, there were a lot of eyes on her. Some had gone lukewarm so, when you hear Babooshka, that is confirmation that Kate Bush cannot be written off or counted out! Listen to the opening few seconds. You are instantly hooked by that sound. I feel Kate Bush knew as soon as she wrote Babooshka that it was going to be the opening track. It is the perfect way to introduce listeners to a new phase of her career. Maybe if she had opened Never for Ever with Delis (Song of Summer) or All We Ever Look For, I don’t think it would have made the same impact. Perhaps people feeling it was very similar material on her previous two albums. Babooshka is like nothing else! I would argue it is her most important album opener. A song that very much lets you know what Never for Ever holds in store. I know I have said in the past how there are stronger opening albums tracks from Kate Bush, though I feel Babooshka might steal the title now. Before rounding off, I want to bring Dreams of Orgonon and their excellent feature about Babooshka. Lending weight to the argument that it is among Kate Bush strongest songs:
“Let’s walk back to the beginning of Babooshka’s narrative genealogy, the traditional English folk song “Sovay, the Female Highwayman.” The song (which Bush could have heard from A. L. Lloyd or her social circle of musicians) tells of a maiden who “dressed herself in man’s array,” pretends to be a highwayman, and holds her lover at gunpoint, demanding his treasures. The man gives Sovay his pocket watch but refuses to part with his precious engagement ring. Having seen her fiancé’s loyalty in practice, Sovay departs from him. The next day, Sovay’s fiancé sees her with his pocketwatch and learns the truth. Sovay explains that she only disguised herself “for to know/whether you were a man or no,” darkly adding “if you had given me that ring,’/ she said, ‘I’d have pulled the trigger/I’d pulled the trigger and shot you dead.’” It’s a morbidly funny song that creates a radically subversive woman protagonist (Blackadder the Third arguably homages it,) in a tradition of stories about women who break under the pressure of their partners. Sovay takes a socially unacceptable mode of agency, testing her partner’s dedication to her by literally threatening to rob and kill him. She undergoes a pleasant psychotic break, staging a rebellion against the norms of class society achieved by settling into one of its most despised professions.
Kate Bush is relatively at home in class society. She’s exactly the kind of creative white woman Virginia Woolf writes about in A Room of One’s Own, which posits the ideal writing situation for women as containing an excess of leisure time and a private room. While Bush has written songs about working class people, she’s done so from a skewed theatrical perspective rather than a social realist one. Class dynamics in her stories tend to include heavily exaggerated behaviors and tropes, although they can be accompanied by a subversion of the established social order. In “Babooshka,” Bush switches out Sovay’s bandit for its middle-class equivalent — an adulteress. In her version of the story, the man is complicit in the hoodwinking, as he chooses to go along with this strange woman writing him letters (a bourgeois medium of communication). Rather than simply being outmaneuvered by his lady, he betrays her (in doing exactly what she wanted him to do). There’s a fundamental power imbalance here that, while arranged by one gaslighting partner, relies on unethical predilections from both parties, rather than a straightforward narrative of a gentleman being manipulated by his lady love. Neither “Sovay” nor “Babooshka” reveal the aftermath of their seminal betrayals, but both songs present clear cases of boundaries being crossed.
Now let’s turn to Babooshka’s husband. Bush is largely right when she says Babooshka is responsible for ruining their relationship. She manipulates her husband, lies to him, and connives the situation that undoes their marriage. The song is positioned around her failure to treasure the love and support she has. There are even hints that she turned on her husband long before she conjured up her catfish, particularly in her husband’s observation that the catfish resembles “his wife before she freezed on him/just life his wife when she was beau-ti-ful.” There’s a distressing suggestion that Babooshka is simply no longer attractive to her husband and stopped being beautiful when she stopped paying attention to him. However, Bush fails to account for the fact that Babooshka’s husband cheats on his wife. It can hardly be said this isn’t an emotional affair — he has a correspondence with a woman who reminds him of his wife when she was young (which. Ew) and goes to meet her behind his wife’s back. These activities match any coherent definition of adultery. That the song doesn’t take him to task for this is odd, and suggests Bush’s leniency towards her male protagonists is a tad blinkered (and vindicates Graeme Thomson’s self-assured observation of Bush’s tendency to obviate masculinity’s faults). As major as Babooshka’s transgressions are, the precise nature of them speaks to the complexity of Bush’s gender politics.
Of course, the song’s moral ambiguity is its most interesting aspect. While there’s an almost reactionary slant to the way “Babooshka” perceives relationships, particularly in the way it treats gender along binary and determinist lines, Bush does push against the grain. She often demonstrates a willingness to interrogate the internal experiences of her characters, particularly women characters. Exploring the ramifications of jealousy is crucial to imbuing her characters with interiority. Bush has Babooshka’s husband failing similarly, even if she doesn’t realize it. Most texts are buzzing with suggestions their authors haven’t considered. In the case of “Babooshka,” Bush enacts a complex meditation on how gendered expectations can poison relationships. Babooshka lets her suspicions and preoccupation with re-becoming young and glamorous overcome her life, and her husband lets his treacherous predilections towards young beauty lead him astray. No party comes out morally in the clear, and yet neither is entirely unsympathetic. They’re trapped in an ugly binary where people are programmed to perform in ways incompatible with human psychology. If there’s a way to use the framework of folklore in a thoughtful and modern way, this is it.
As such, “Babooshka” makes the case that Kate Bush’s songwriting can be multiple things at once and create a conflicting hive of meaning, and that Bush’s love for the archaic is hardly blinded by a nostalgic haze. She demonstrates a consistent willingness to interrogate how stories like these work, how human beings act when plugged into myth and folklore, and the ways in which these situations are incompatible with humanity. Some of the most complex women in fiction are characters in Kate Bush songs. Never for Ever’s status as the first studio album by a female artist to reach #1 in the UK remains significant for a number of reasons. If Dreams of Orgonon has a thesis, it’s that Kate Bush is a traditionally-minded person who can’t stop herself from writing feminist songs. Break the glass. Howl “Babooshka, ya-ya!” The 1980s are here, and there’s a new swordmistress of chaos to herald them.
Demoed in late 1979; recorded at Abbey Road Studio Two in January-June 1980. Issued as a single on 27 June 1980 with “Ran Tan Waltz” as a B-side; subsequently included as a track on Never for Ever. Performed on several TV programmes. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano. Stuart Elliott — drums. John Giblin — electric bass. Max Middleton — Fender Rhodes. Paddy Bush — balalaika, backing vocals. Gary Hurst — backing vocals. Brian Bath, Alan Murphy — electric guitars.
Even if some critics in 1980 were dismissive of Babooshka – NME were particularly snotty and short-sighted! -, it is clear that the track has picked up legions of fans. Although Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) is the most-streamed song of hers on Spotify, Babooshka is second. The power and pull of the video is a big reason why it has been viewed so many times on YouTube. With forty-four millions views, it is hugely popular. I hope that 4K version might be released at some point. The world would receive Never for Ever in September 1980. Kate Bush already released one single, Breathing, prior. Perhaps a moment to prove that she was a serious artist who was aware of political avenues and concerns – some (Danny Baker among them) criticised Bush as not being serious or lacking the political edge of her Plunk peers -, Breathing was an understandable first release. The more accessible Babooshka is a perfect album opener. It is accessible yet it is unusual and distinct. Instantly different to what Kate Bush had recorded for her first two albums, it was important that she made a big mark with that opening track. Hooking listeners and showing she was this varied and evolving artist. I think the success of Babooshka a reason why Never for Ever went to number one. In doing so, Kate Bush was the first solo female artist to have a studio album go to number one in the U.K. That sounds like a mistake. It is not! I listen to Babooshka and settle in for this phenomenal experience. One where all the senses are engaged. As it turns forty-four on 27th June, I wanted to mark that. Beyond this, argue the case that Babooshka is her most important album opener. And, yes, her best. A huge moment in Kate Bush’s career, Babooshka helped to cement the fact that this amazing young artist…
WAS here to stay.