FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Purple Reign
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993
Prince and Our Queen
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THIS is the second feature…
IN THIS PHOTO: Prince in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith
in a row where I am taking from Tom Doyle’s brilliant book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. There is a section that caught my eye. Maybe some Kate Bush fans do not realise Kate Bush and Prince worked together. Bush was featured on Prince’s 1996 album, Emancipation. That was a rare occasion where Bush featured on another artist’s album. She had done earlier in her career. Featuring alongside the likes of Peter Gabriel, Big Country, Roy Harper and Go West. However, by the 1990s, it was quite rare for Bush to feature on any other artists’ work. Her and Prince had a kinship. Even though they were collaborating remotely and did not see each other often, there were similarities between them. In terms of how they worked and this idea they were both slightly reclusive and strange. Press perceptions round Prince and Kate Bush. However, when they did work together for Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, the result was not brilliant. I have spotlighted Why Should I Love You? before. I have also mentioned how, when Prince and Madonna worked together for her 1989 album, Like a Prayer, the song they collaborated on was underwhelming. That was Love Song. The two briefly dated in the 1980s and they had a complex relationship. However, there was a more straightforward relationship between Prince and Kate Bush. What could have been a wonderful and harmonious collaboration – think Bush and Peter Gabriel’s duet, Don’t Give Up – instead was an overloaded and messy. On 21st April, it will be nine years since Prince died. Only fifty-seven, Kate Bush was among those who paid tribute. When promoting the live album of Before the Dawn in 2016, she talked to Matt Everitt and shared her memories of Prince. It was a huge loss for the music world.
It is great that he and Kate Bush worked together. Although separated by technology, the two did get to share some recording space together. Tom Doyle argues how the two don’t seem to have much in common on paper. Prince was this showman who was not averse to publicity and loved the stage. He was fine with fame. Bush, someone who was more private and never wanted to be famous seemed to be an opposite. However, the two shared common ground then it came to the record studio. Both wanted control over their music. Bush got that in 1982 when she produced The Dreaming. Prince found it earlier when 1978’s For You came out (two months after Bush’s debut, The Kick Inside). Both were both in 1958. Prince born seven weeks after Kate Bush. These musical prodigies, there was this connection. Think about their work in the 1980s. Prince’s When Doves Cry has no bassline and the bass Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). Both have vocal choirs and LinnDrum beats. Idiosyncratic synth lines and brilliantly deployed and stacked vocals. When Doves Cry arrived in 1984. A year later, Bush released Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). It was not until 1990 that the two met in person. She was there for one of his dates during his Nude Tour. It was a more stripped-back (no pun intended) tour compared to the Lovesexy Tour of 1988 and 1989. Bush said how Prince was the most extraordinary and innovative live performer she had seen. Prince told his engineer Michael Koppelman that Bush was his favourite woman. Prince and Bush met backstage. The idea of them working together was floated. After Prince returned to the U.S. after the Nude Tour completed, he and Kate Bush spoke on the phone. Bush had this song – Why Should I Love You? – that she felt would benefit from having Prince’s vocals on backing. Listen to the demo of Why Should I Love You? and it sound vastly different to what would appear on 1993’s The Red Shoes. What is on the album is a reduced and cutdown version of what Prince sent back to Bush. The seven-minute-long version (which leaked online) that Bush intended for The Red Shoes had some similarities with tracks like When Doves Cry. Understandable why it might appeal to Prince.
Rather than Prince adding his vocal and it being this long and interesting song that could end The Red Shoes, Prince took it apart. He “tore it apart, rebuilding it entirely”. As Tom Doyle notes, Prince looped “a four-bar section from the chorus of the song, he engulfed it with an avalanche of ideas, filling up two 24-track tape reels, adding new drums, playing guitar, bass, keyboards and, almost as an afterthought, singing the actual vocal hook”. Michael Koppelman had to point out to Prince that he had sung a part wrong. The line, “of all the people in the world” he had recorded “all of the people in the world”. This possible dream collaboration had gone slightly awry! Prince rather confidently said he and Bush spoke about it and she was okay with him changing the words. Koppelman arrived at the studio one day to find Prince cutting up his vocal takes and sampling them to rearrange the words. Perhaps Prince realising he had made a mistake but not admitting it! The master tapes were sent back to Kate Bush and nothing was changed. She called the studio in the U.S. and was informed Prince was working on the track. A month after that, Prince’s tapes arrived at East Wickham Farm. Del Palmer (Kate Bush’s engineer and former boyfriend) told Sound on Sound how Prince had covered forty-eight tracks with everything you could imagine Not a complete disaster, he and Bush went over the song time and time again to get it into shape. Puzzling what to do with it, the version on The Red Shoes is closer to Prince’s overloaded version than Kate Bush’s more retrained original. It is one of those what-if moments. If Prince has reigned it in. If Bush had not asked him to feature and released her version. Their relationship working on that track was remote. They never met and instead would send each other stuff. Pre-Internet (or it was in its infancy), this was tapes mainly sent in the post. A bit of a letdown, it was perhaps impossible to meld these two incredible artists satisfactorily.
Listen to Bush’s backing vocals for My Computer on 1996’s Emancipation. A song that examined online relationships – Bush was ahead of the curve and sung similarly about technology’s grip for 1989’s Deeper Understanding -, you can barely detect Bush’s voice. For two artists that admired one another so much, it is a shame there is not a good, clear and clean example of the two in harmony. One can blame Prince for letting his ego take control. However, maybe he was not able to work with another artist and hone things in. Similarly, when Bush has worked with other artists since, she has called the shots and not allowed anyone else to control its direction and sound too heavily. When Prince died in 2016, she commended his artistry and control he has over his output. I can picture the two meeting in 1990 when Bush went to see him perform during the Nude Tour at Wembley Arena. I can imagine they were both quite nervous. Bush admired Prince so that opportunity to work with him was a must. Even if the final result was not as she’d imagine, she can at least she had Prince on one of her studio albums! I often wonder too if they would collaborate again if Prince were still with us. You can imagine they would be nodding to each other. It is such a tragedy that Prince died. As Prince died on 21st April, 2016, I wanted to use this feature to talk about the time he and Kate Bush met. Working together first on Why Should I Love You? Bush featuring on his My Computer. It is credit to Kate Bush that Why Should I Love You? was not one of the songs she reworked for 2011’s Director’s Cut. That album saw Bush reapproach songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Maybe she considered Why Should I Love You? but wanted to honour Prince and not change it. It was clear then as it is now that Prince has a very…
DEAR place her heart.