FEATURE:
Scented Letters Received with a Strange Delight
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a photo from the Babooshka cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Babooshka at Forty-Five
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WHEN Breathing…
was released on 14th April, 1980, people got the first taste of this new direction for Kate Bush. Maybe heavier, more political and the introduction of a song where she was in the producer’s chair (with Jon Kelly), it must have been quite hard to decide which single would follow it. Released three months before Never for Ever came out, Babooshka might have felt an obvious choice. Another bold and brilliant song, it is typically one that could only come from Kate Bush! It was released on 27th June, 1980 and reached number five in the U.K. I have written about Babooshka a lot but, as its forty-fifth anniversary is soon, I needed to revisit it. With Garry Hurst and Paddy Bush provided some great background vocals and Bush sprinkling in some Fairlight CMI magic, Babooshka is this timeless and unique song that opens Never for Ever. Maybe one of the more commercial tracks on the album, it will still very different to what was being released in the summer of 1980! Before moving on, I want to highlight an interview, where Kate Bush discussed the background to one of her best-loved singles:
“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)”
Recorded at Abbey Road’s Studio 2 and performed live on several occasions, Ran Tan Waltz was its quirky and bawdy B-side when it was released as a single. Many do not think about hidden depths and different interpretations of Babooshka. Its historical relevance and how it helped to change perceptions around Russians. I will move to a feature that argued that in 2014. Even though the country today is (rightly) being spotlighted for its atrocities, in 1980, there was this stereotypical and maybe regressive vision of anything Russian. Before getting to that, I want to come to an article from Dreams of Orgonon. They make some interesting observations and arguments when it comes to this Kate Bush classic:
“That Babooshka is something of a madwoman is expressed by the song, and particularly its video. Certainly Kate Bush considers Babooshka a pathetic (if pitiful and tragic) villain who hurts her husband. In an interview, she described Babooshka’s motivations as “paranoia [and] suspicions,” and ascribes the husband’s desire to meet his pen pal to her similarity to “his wife, the one that he loves.” Her perspective of the song is damning of Babooshka and de facto absolves her husband. The story is ultimately one of Babooshka’s downfall, where her preoccupation with retaining control of her life costs her the marriage.
Dreams of Orgonon often takes positions on Kate Bush’s songs contrary to Bush’s own. Later this year, I’m going to argue that “The Dreaming” is a hundred miles from the anti-imperialist parable Bush intends it to be. Similarly, “Babooshka” covers more than its titular character’s vanity. I think Bush writes the couple as equal offenders, and that “Babooshka” is two songs at once: it’s a covertly traditionalist song about how women’s preoccupation with their looks hurts their male partners, and it’s a subversive feminist tract about how gender norms destroy relationships.
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”.
I will round off this feature soon. As Babooshka turns forty-five on 27th June, I want to spend a bit more time with it. In 2014, Vanora Bennett argued that Babooshka humanised and reframed Russians at a time when the nation was under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Communist Party and Alexei Kosygin as Premier, with a highly centralised, communist system in place. It is an interesting take for sure:
“As a London schoolgirl studying Russian at the time, I didn’t care at all that Kate Bush pronounced the Russian name with the stress in the wrong place, and clearly had no idea that it meant “granny”. I just remember being gobsmacked to realise that any sort of Russian theme could come up in the charts at all – let alone one that didn’t fit either of the two prevailing Russian stereotypes. In those iron curtain days, to my mind Russians were either Ealing countesses, the children and grandchildren of the dispossessed, impoverished, desperately genteel White Russians who’d escaped from the 1917 revolution with nothing but their titles. Or they were solid, slab-faced politburo men from the newspapers, in solid suits, with hair lacquered into silvery central committee quiffs which always rather reminded me of menacing ice-cream cones.
Then suddenly this weird little fairytale about a love test gone wrong, full of the chirpy yet minor cadences of eastern folk and gypsy music, was on everyone’s lips all over the western world.
The song tells the story of a wife trying to check her husband’s loyalty by sending him notes purporting to come from a younger woman, which she signs “Babooshka”. Her fear that her husband no longer sees her as young and attractive are borne out by the barbed lines conveying his thoughts: “Just like his wife before she ‘freezed’ on him / Just like his wife when she was beautiful”. The trap is set when, in her bitterness and paranoia, Babooshka arranges to meet her husband, who is attracted to her alter-ego character because she reminds him of his wife in earlier times – and so she lets her fears ruin her marriage.
The video featured Bush beside a double bass symbolising the husband, wearing a black bodysuit and a veil in her role as the embittered wife, then changing into an extravagant, myth-like and rather sparse “Russian” costume as Babooshka. It was a kind of mass-culture rethink of some of the themes of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, the Shostakovich opera which had so annoyed Stalin – the plotting, the secretiveness, the centrality of human relationships instead of politics, and that wily female desperation bringing tragedy in its wake.
But at the time the important thing was that Babooshka’s story, with its dancey, faintly eastern-sounding music and the emotional subtlety that toned down its cruelty, helped blow away the cobwebs from what most people then thought they knew about life on the communist side of Europe. It was proof that Russians weren’t all about Pravda and giant factories and dreary rolled-steel statistics, after all. There were real people out there, too: people who liked their wild love songs in a minor key; people with hearts, sometimes broken; people struggling to escape frustrating situations.
This made Babooshka a helpful soundtrack as the vast political changes began, very soon afterwards, on the eastern side of 1980s Europe – changes that would eventually bring the divided continent back together. The song opened millions of western hearts and minds to the possibility that the easterners they were reading about were no longer anonymous foot soldiers in a cold war that was ending, but rather flesh-and-blood folks like them.
Certainly by the time I started reporting on Russia in 1991, it had become standard for kindly mentors to advise young journalists heading for Moscow that the interesting thing there, these days, wasn’t the politicians. It was the human interest stories – the “babooshkas”. They always stressed it Bush’s way, too.
And so, when Kate Bush comes on stage this week to sing Babooshka, to a London which, a generation later, is teeming with people from all over post-cold war Europe, I hope they’ll forgive the nonsense meaning the song gives the word, and the wrong stress. Bush didn’t bring the Iron Curtain down single-handedly it’s true, but her song was certainly part of the evolution in thinking that eventually destroyed barriers and reunited the people of Europe – and could do in these strained times once again”.
Paul Du Noyer of NME Babooshka as "More luxuriant weirdness from sultry songstress with high-pitched voice". That was the general attitude from a lot of critics. After delivering the epic and pulse-stopping Breathing, Kate Bush delivered a song that was both commercial but strange. Something that should have pleased everyone. Babooshka having this hypnotic charm. Lyrics that were unusual and clever. Even though Babooshka was a chart success and Never for Ever went to number one, you do wonder why many critics took against Kate Bush and had this impression of her. Babooshka is not a high-pitched vocal. She is a female artist, so it is going to be a high-pitched vocal compared to men. Babooshka is only weird compared to commercial and routine Pop. The sexism and misogyny Kate Bush faced even when she released music of this quality. However, in years since its release, Babooshka has been met with plenty of love and praise. Last year, when ranking her fifty best songs, MOJO put Babooshka at eighteen: “Russian folk traditionalism inspires modern studio mastery. Inseparable from the promo of double bass-love and warrior-princess-shape-throwing, Babooshka is a tale of paranoid relationship collapse wrapped in a buoyant pop waltz replete with glass-breaking sound effects. Compared to the rest of the often bleak and meditative Never For Ever, Babooshka’s minor-chord intrigue offers three-and-a-half minutes of relatively light relief. Not that it was an easy song to record – even Del Palmer’s bass was deemed an incorrect fit for what would become one of Bush’s biggest singles”. The Guardian, in 2018, ranked Kate Bush’s singles and placed Babooshka in fourteenth: “As straightforwardly pop as Bush ever got, famed for a video that looks like a dream a Dungeons & Dragons-playing pervert once had, Babooshka is still irresistible: its howled chorus unshakeable, the sound of smashing glass presaging 80s sample-mania”. Last year, Classic Pop decided Kate Bush’s best forty songs and put Babooshka twelfth. Turning forty-five on 27th June, the majestic and magnificent Babooshka deserved another write-up. One of my favourite Kate Bush songs, it is a clear example of…
HER distinct genius.