FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Tour of Life
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
return and dust off The Kate Bush Interview Archive. This Kate Bush: The Tour of Life takes us back to 1984. I know I have recently focused a great deal on Hounds of Love and that era. I will dip back in briefly because of a very special 1984 interview I don’t think many people know about. It captures a particular (and important) moment in Kate Bush’s career. There are quite a few interviews available from 1985. When Hounds of Love was released. There are not really many from 1983 or 1984. Louder Sound recently shared a feature looking back to 2011 where they featured an interview conducted by Mick Wall. He is one of the world's leading Rock and Metal writers. The same age as Kate Bush (sixty-six), he recalled reaching out for an interview in 1984 but not expecting to hear back. A rare chance for insight into the writing of Bush’s 1985 masterpiece. Bush must have known about Mick Wall and his music tastes. Finding kinship and things in common, it would have been thrilling to be invited to her home to be around someone putting together songs that would appear on one of the greatest albums ever. It seems like they instantly hit it off:
“It all seems like a dream now… but back in 1984, during what was then viewed as a period of unprecedented reclusiveness for a major rock star, I put in a request to interview Kate Bush. Expecting nothing back – she had more or less disappeared since her 1982 album The Dreaming had received such a bashing in the press – I was astonished when the record company got back and said, “She’d love to speak to you.”
It seemed the opportunity to be interviewed by a bona fide rock writer intrigued her. “She likes Def Leppard,” they added, hopefully. Strange to relate by today’s manicured PR standards, but I was given her address and told to pitch up sometime that week. A few days later I was at door of the south London house Kate used as her home-from-home workplace; a space to play piano, dance and listen to records.
She answered the door herself with a big smile and ushered me in. Dressed in an understated way – no make-up, hair brushed but not sculpted, just jeans and top to keep her warm – Kate was 25 at the time, and very beautiful.
She skipped off to make tea and I knelt by the record player, flipping through her albums. I recall seeing Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things, some Pink Floyd, some Bowie, plus some other things I didn’t easily recognise. Classical, maybe? Dance?
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in the studio during the recording of Hounds of Love in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
She returned with tea and biscuits and we sat cross-legged on the floor together. With no new album to promote, I didn’t really know what I should talk about. I hadn’t actually expected to be given an interview. Somehow we got onto the subject of smoking dope, and she giggled and talked of “pinning” – pretending to inhale from a lump of burning hash held up by the unbent pin of a badge.
Kate said she was “very influenced in my writing by old traditional folk songs, handed down by new generations of musicians but with the original atmosphere and emotion still maintained. The sort of music my mother would have listened to and danced to, and used to play for me when I was very little. It’s probably my biggest musical influence.”
…It was her ability to dance so extravagantly that made her live show, which I’d recently caught at London’s Palladium, so enervating and different. “I got so incredibly nervous before I’d go on,” she confessed. “All I’d ever really done in the way of live performance before the tour were TV shows and videos. And the sort of props and ideas for the show we were carrying around with us seemed a bit ambitious, a bit awesome, at first. But I loved those shows. Once I was onstage I had so much fun. I would like to do more of it...”
In another life, could she have made a career out of dancing? “I had people approaching me at the dance class, asking if I wanted to go to Germany and dance in clubs and things, and for a time I really got into the dance thing... But I don’t think I was good enough. I didn’t stand out enough.”
Did she write all the time? “No. I have to be forced to write for an album.” She wasn’t very prolific then? “I used to be. I used to write every day, and if it wasn’t very good keep a little bit and maybe use it in something else. As soon as Wuthering Heights became a hit, though, my whole routine was just blown apart. It was extraordinary how suddenly everything changed.”
Were her dancer mum and musician had worried when she signed to EMI at 16? Sex and drugs etc? “No, not at all,” she smiled. “They had seen it coming for a long time. The original idea was to see if we could sell my songs to a publisher, not that I should be a singer or a performer or anything. We had quite modest, curious aims. So it was gradual and they were always supportive.”
Kate told me she was currently writing songs for a new album – which was to be Hounds Of Love. She explained how she hennaed her hair, crimped it occasionally, and that she had make-up artists and hair beauticians available, as well as costume designers equipped to run off fantasy threads like the still-legendary Babooshka number”.
I am fascinated by this interview because I did not know about it. I can imagine that it would have been hard for Kate Bush to take on too many interviews. As she was making a new album, there would have been this need for secrecy. Now, if there was a new album, she would interview the year it came out. In 1984, she was at a point when Hounds of Love was coming along but not complete. Her home studio was built and it was a really exciting time. Although there would have been stress and some hard days, the production process for Hounds of Love was one where Bush established herself as one of the best. Being invited into her world and getting to soak up the atmosphere around her. I assumed that the Mick Wall interview was at either East Wickham Farm – where she recorded most of Hounds of Love – or the 17th-century farmhouse in the Kent countryside near Sevenoaks she moved into with Del Palmer (her boyfriend and engineer/musician) in 1983. The mention of the South London “home-from-home” seems to nod to East Wickham Farm (in Welling), though it could be a flat that she had in South London. That hospitality and warmth Bush has always exuded. She seemed really relaxed and at a place where she was a lot more at ease. You can see interviews from 1982 where she seems tired or strained. The result of working on The Dreaming. In 1984, Bush was busy in the studio and there was this coming together of some of her most ambitious and remarkable work. This Mick Wall interview gives us a rare glimpse into the psyche of Kate Bush in 1984. 1985 would see her very busy with promotion. I would love to see more photos from Bush recording Hounds of Love and creating this masterpiece album. Maybe we will see that one day. I was keen to make people aware of an interview that really provokes images and warmth. A 1984 chat that finds Bush in a good place. Some assumed Bush had disappeared or was retired because she had not released a new album. It was clear that this was so far from the truth! In 1984, she was busy writing and recording. Little did the world know what she would gift the world…
THE following year.