FEATURE:
These Prints of Our Feet, Lead Right Up to the Sea
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
The Balearic and Dance Influences on Kate Bush’s Aerial
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I am not sure how many…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Kate Bush fans picked up a copy of Disco Pogo, where Graeme Thomson brilliantly wrote about Kate Bush’s Aerial. I want to source from that. Thomson is the author of the brilliant biography, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. He reached some points that I never thought about before. When we consider Kate Bush, of course she is this innovator. The sounds she pioneered and the incredible music she leaves us with this rich and strong legacy. What will the future hold in terms of her career and new albums? 2005’s Aerial is rightly heralded as this masterpiece. Of course, we look at the album and can hear this domestic bliss. Bush, as a fairly recent mother (her son Albert was born in 1998), and responsibility. The details of the day. The joys of being a mother are in there, so too are reflections on her own mother. Her childhood. Domestic chores sitting alongside fantasy. What many people overlook is the rapture and energy heard through the latter stages of the second disc, A Sky of Honey. A song-cycle charting a summer day, it is the ‘night’ and breaking dawn that offers new sides to Kate Bush. Her tracks have been remixed by Dance acts and her music has been sampled. However, when we listening to songs on A Sky of Honey such as Aerial and Nocturn, they do reveal something under-discussed. How there is this strange but beautiful Balearic quality! Tracks and sounds that could feature at Café del Mar. This Ibiza landmark is not one that people would associate with Kate Bush. However, even though she is unlikely to have visited herself, the sort of ecstasy and beats you hear in the final phases of A Sky of Honey connects you to that place. The kind of sounds one might hear emanating from that space. It is interesting, so I wanted to dig deeper.
In his feature for Disco Pogo, Graeme Thomson notes how it would be a stretch to call Aerial a danceable album. One that is primed for the clubs. There are so many styles and different textures to be experienced. However, there is an ambience to be discovered. Kate Bush clearly has a connection with or at least an appreciation for Hip-Hop. Huge fans like Big Boi are in her life and she definitely has listened to Hip-Hop a bit. There are even Trip-Hop beats on Joanni. That song appears on the first disc of Aerial, A Sea of Honey. One might summon images of Portishead or Massive Attack. Think about the overall sound of 1993’s The Red Shoes. Perhaps a little over-produced and not natural-sounding, Aerial does sound more immersive, expansive, fresh and natural. Because of that, when you hear the beats on Joanni, the amazing musicianship and production allows the song to connect harder. The Massive Attack associations grow stronger listening to Somewhere in Between. It is surprising that Bush has never been asked to do a guest vocal for a group like Massive Attack. You could hear her providing an epic vocal for one of their songs. If many define Kate Bush’s sounds as piano-heavy or connected to the Fairlight CMI, it is clear that each album has its own skin and sound. The blend of Trip-Hop, Dance and Balearic colours. Thomson also notes how Aerial’s climax provides this arresting and phenomenal sensation. The final twenty-five minutes or so of Aerial see Bush take us down to the beach by the sea. Perhaps the distance sound of Balearic club music from a bar. She “understands the key tenets of dance music, the upward arc, the competing tensions of build and release”. In her mid-forties, the listener finds Kate Bush “blissed-out, ecstatic, rapturous, climbing to the top of the world”.
Following calmer waters and observations of nature and the wonder of seeing the light rise and a new day blossoming, one might feel the darkness and the following dawn might appear sleepy or more reserved. However, Bush takes us from an English garden to somewhere warmer and perhaps a little more exotic. In 1996, Bush demoed Aerial’s sole single, King of the Mountain. A year later she wrote An Architect’s Dream and Sunset. Albert born in 1998. Early motherhood shaped the way she would write and the perspective she would take. Domesticity and the simple pleasures of new life and responsibility weighing heavy. Bush understood that her son came first. She wrote in short bursts but it was the realisation of the songs and the recording that would take a very long time – a frustratingly long time. Bush was leasing a relatively normal and private life and she was very grateful for that. It meant that she could focus on motherhood but also channel that new inspiration and pleasure through an album. Aerial is perhaps her most uplifting and joyful album. That is especially true when we experience the building rapture through A Sky of Honey. The blending of the natural world of home and a beach and water somewhere far away. Maybe Ibiza. Kate Bush was planning on writing a song with Peter Gabriel called Ibiza many years ago. Perhaps that place has always been on her mind. I lover the images and energy of Aerial’s title track: “All of the birds are laughing/All of the birds are laughing/Come on let's all join in/Come on let's all join in/I feel I wanna be up on the roof/I wanna be up, up on the roof/Up high, high on the roof/I feel I gotta be up on the roof/I feel I need to be up on the roof/Up, up high on the roof/High, high on the roof/In the sun”. For Aerial, things started out with the core team of Kate Bush, her husband Dan McIntosh, Del Palmer (her engineer and former partner sadly died last year) and bass player John Giblin (who died in 2023). Towards the end of 2000, other musicians were parachuted in. A lot of secrecy around the album, so it was this gradually unveiling and creation.
Musicians would be invited to play on various songs and if things didn’t work out then there was no harm. The sessions were pretty informal. A lot of chat, pizza, tea and playing with Bush’s young son. Aerial’s second album was threaded through with birdsong. Kate Bush spoke to John Wilson in 2005 and said how she liked “these things that are different languages from words”. How birds are especially fascinating. The fact that they can mark the dawn with this beautiful chorus – “They seem to be very strongly connected with light”. A Sky of Honey does not specifically keep us in a single place in the same way as The Ninth Wave does on Hounds of Love (1985). That sees a heroine adrift in the water. The songs do move us to different places in the form of dreams, imaginations and the shift of perspective from in the water to above Earth. However, A Sky of Honey has this more itinerant feel. If we start out in a garden or modest paradise at the start, by the time we get to songs like Sunset (the fifth track on A Sky of Honey). There is, as Graeme Thomson notes, this “Balearic flamenco”. Nocturn starts out an ambient and chilled-out song. “We long for something more” Bush sings. Tiring of the city, there is this desire for a different sky. Maybe a beach or a wide open space. The busyness of the city and its clutter. Bush’s voice swells and swoops. The dreamers are waking and there is this sense of rebirth or revitalisation. Nocturn is this amazingly captivating song! It is almost Trance-like. I know artists like Björk are influenced by Kate Bush. I listen to a Björk song such as Big Time Sensuality and connect it to Kate Bush. Nocturn. Maybe not as giddy and high-octane, there are similarities. The lyrics are so compelling: “Could be in a dream/Our clothes are on the beach/These prints of our feet/Lead right up to the sea”.
Kate Bush has always been interested in Hip-Hop and its innovative spirit. Likening it to contemporary poetry, Bush herself has long been interested in new technology, rhythms and unusual sounds. D.J. and producer Ranj Kaler remixed Nocturn in 2021 to emphasise its Balearic and Café del Mar connections. Tony Wadsworth, the then-CEO of EMI, and David Munns were summoned to Bush’s Theale home to listen to the completed Aerial. Wadsworth was especially blown away by how Bush, in her forties, was still ahead of everyone else. Doing something genuinely new. How she was duetting with birds! When Bush brought Aerial’s second disc to life for Before the Dawn in 2014, everything was under her control. The power and beauty of the songs being brought to life. Thomson noted how, when see performed Nocturn and Aerial, “a new tension informed the music”. Bells, birds and this rich visual tapestry. The Flamenco climax of Sunset heightened and defined by Mino Cinélu’s percussion. Graeme Thomson wrote how Aerial’s A Sky of Honey didn’t so much as chart a single day as a whole lifetime. It packs so much in! It is the Balearic tones and moods that shake and snake their way through the soil and bones of tracks like Nocturn and Aerial. This euphoria and Café del Mar-inflected fire and bliss. I never really considered it before though, when passing back through A Sky of Honey, you feel and hear this building tension and joy! Whether Kate Bush had Café del Mar in her mind when writing some of the tracks on A Sky of Honey or not, her music definitely…
TAKES you there!