FEATURE:
"Keep Falling, I’ll Find You"
IN THIS ILLUSTRATION: ‘Little Shrew’
25th October, 2024: A Date to Remember
_________
THIS is a feature split into two parts…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for 2011’s 50 Words for Snow
and there is a lot to get through! Like so many Kate Bush fans, my head and heart exploded when I woke up yesterday (25th October). We suspected something was coming, as the Kate Bush News social media channels posted a screenshot from Kate Bush’s official website. They posted this tweet which set people’s minds on fire. Why was Snowflake being reissued as a four-minute radio edit? I was going to write a Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts feature on Snowflake. It is a song from Bush’s most recent studio album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. I think the fact the song has been trumped and sort of buried by the news and excitement around it and what it is being used for means that the original is perhaps not interesting in that sense. In any way, I shall get to Snowflake and some words from Kate Bush about the song. This is a useful archive that has gathered new relevance and layers:
“When I wrote the song it was something that I wrote specifically for him and for his voice, and I guess there was a very strong parallel in my mind between the idea of this transient little snowflake and the fact that Bertie at this point… still has a really beautiful high, pure voice which soon he will lose… there seems to be this sort of link between the brief time that his voice will be like this and the brevity of the snowflake.
I think his performance on this is really powerful, and obviously I’m quite biased because I’m his mother. But it’s interesting how many people have reacted so powerfully to his performance, it’s, you know, I think it’s really something.
“Joe Tiller, ”50 Words For Snow’: How Kate Bush Made A Wintry Wonder Of An Album. Dig! website, 11 December 2022”.
Many of us had our own thoughts when all we knew was Snowflake was available digitally and was this four-minute edit. A radio edit. Would it be used as a Christmas ad? Some supermarket using it? The fact we got this illustration of a shrew, paired with the tone of Snowflake, suggested something Christmas-like. Many felt it was sort of going to be Kate Bush making money or heading towards the commercial. That would be okay, as anything from her is great. However, the reality of the relevance of Snowflake was highlighted. I am going to end the first half of this feature with a review of an animated film that Bush has wrote and directed. Another article that wax lyrical about Bush’s ability to make children of us all. There was so much chatter and excitement when it became apparent what Bush had released into the world! I spent most of yesterday trying to take it all in. Whilst not an announcement of a new album – though, as the second part of this feature makes clear, that is something that has firmly been put on the table! -, this is a really exciting and noble thing. Bush not merely using her music for an album reissue or an advert. To raise awareness and money for War Child.
The brilliant and authoritative Kate Bush News put into words everything that happened yesterday. The reason so many people are joyful and really blown away. Nobody expected any of what was announced and has been released into the world. Kate Bush giving us this wonderful film, doing something incredible for charity and, in the process, making us cry and smile at the same time! If that were not enough, she seems to have cleared some space to consider plotting her eleventh studio album. More on that in the second half:
“Wonderful, wonderful news this morning! Kate has given an interview to Emma Barnett on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme (listen back to it here) to announce the launch of a new short film she has written and directed to raise money for children affected by war. She also talks about her plans to make a new album. The black-and-white, four-minute animation, called Little Shrew, is set to her 2011 track Snowflake and aims to raise money and awareness for the charity War Child. (be sure to read the story of Little Shrew on Kate’s official site)
Little Shrew is released on Kate’s official website today. It is free to watch, but Kate encourages viewers to support organisations helping children in conflict. Kate says: “I would like to ask that if you watch the animation, please make a donation to War Child, or to another charity that aids children in war.” War Child are accepting donations at their site here. The short film, which Kate worked with illustrator Jim Kay to create, was partly inspired by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “I started working on it a couple of years ago, it was not long after the Ukrainian war broke out, and I think it was such a shock for all of us,” Kate explained.
“It’s been such a long period of peace we’d all been living through. And I just felt I wanted to make a little animation that would feature, originally, a little girl. It was really the idea of children caught up in war. I wanted to draw attention to how horrific it is for children.
IN THIS IMAGE: Little Shrew early concept sketch by artist Jim Kay
“And so I came up with this idea for a storyboard and felt that, actually, people would be more empathetic towards a creature rather than a human. So I came up with the idea of it being a little shrew.” Reflecting on the impact of conflict on children, Kate said: “I think war is horrific for everyone, particularly civilians, because they’re so vulnerable in these situations. But for a child, it’s unimaginable how frightening it must be for them.”
The radio edit of Snowflake is now out as a digital single.
Kate added: “I think we’ve all been through very difficult times. These are dark times that we’re living in and I think, to a certain extent, everyone is just worn out….We went through the pandemic, that was a huge shock, and I think we felt that, once that was over, that we would be able to get on with some kind of normal life…But in fact it just seems to be going from one situation to another, and more wars seem to be breaking out all the time.”
Thank you so much to @KateBushMusic and the team for making this moving short film to draw attention to children affected by conflict.
— War Child UK (@WarChildUK) October 25, 2024
Please do consider donating if you can.
🔗 Watch the full film at: https://t.co/O2NzOonZnd pic.twitter.com/nDrc9cuBzw
War Child are accepting donations at their site here
About her next music, Kate adds that she is “very keen” to start working on new music. She said there are “lots of ideas” she wants to pursue, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space, it’s been a long time.” BBC report.
Splash page from Kate’s site teasing the short film last nightArm tattoo belonging to our fan friend Thomas Dunning – his mother’s handwritten lyric! He’s obviously very excited by the news!
In 2022, with war breaking out in Ukraine, I decided I wanted to make an anti-war animation. In particular, I hoped to draw attention to the children caught up in war.
I based the storyboard around the song, Snowflake, which was sung by my son when he was a child. I think his performance is extremely moving and although I‘d originally written the song to capture his beautiful descant voice before he entered adolescence, it has taken on a haunting new meaning within the context of this animation.
I knew I wanted the featured character to be a child caught up in war, so I made a very rough, off the cuff story board.
Although I’d initially thought to make the character a human child – a little girl – I settled on the idea of a Caucasian pygmy shrew (Ukrainian shrew): a tiny, fragile little creature. I felt that people might have more empathy for a vulnerable little animal than a human…
This little shrew would take a journey on a moonlit, winter’s night through a war-torn city, initially unaware of what was going on around her in this land of the giants. She can sense that she’s being called by a kind of spiritual presence… HOPE.
She starts to search for HOPE. Sometimes hope is all there is to hang on to.
War Child are accepting donations at their site here (and be sure to read the story of Little Shrew and all the talented people involved on Kate’s official site)”.
50 Words for Snow was released in November 2011. Almost thirteen years since we have heard new work from Kate Bush. Of course, she has not been idle all this time. Between a residency (2014), its live album (2016), releasing a lyrics book. How to Be Invisible, reissuing that and also reissuing her studio albums more than once, there has been a lot of work. Much design, fine-tuning, hard work and dedication. Although this clip/video is not new music, it is new work. That is important to understand. This is like Bush filming a video for And Dream of Sheep for 2014’s Before the Dawn. Proving a visual to something that previously did not have one. Not in the form of an official single that got its own spotlight. Rather than this being tied to any creative project or album introduction, this is a reaction to the atrocities she and all of us have witnessed around the world. Especially the warfare affecting children in Ukraine. The unimaginable and biblical suffering children have bene subjected to elsewhere. It is a quintessential Kate Bush gesture! Rather than post about how upsetting it all is, she has reacted with something beautiful, sobering and inspiring. Helping to raise money to help people affected by violence. Unsurprisingly, social media has been frantic with words of adoration, surprise and positivity! Of course, Snowflake has turned into an avalanche. The idea to use a song with one particular vision and distinction and reimagine it in this new context is hugely moving. The tale of Little Shrew (its animation by Nicolette Van Gendt) and landscape of rubble, loss and war has reduced so many people to tears. Not least Ben Beaumont-Thomas in his review for The Guardian:
“All of Kate Bush’s sense of wonder, and how she tempers it with not just melancholy but outright sorrow, is threaded through her devastatingly moving new animated short film, Little Shrew.
Bush hasn’t performed live in a decade, or released new music since 2011 – and there’s an initial twinge of disappointment on discovering that this film isn’t built around a piece of new music. (In a BBC Radio 4 interview promoting it, she hinted that she will begin writing new material again soon.) Instead, it’s soundtracked by an edit of Snowflake, the opening song from that 2011 album 50 Words for Snow – a duet between Bush and her son Bertie.
Bush has long wrung stunning material out of family dynamics. Cloudbusting is full of the boyish admiration sons have for their fathers long after we become men; This Woman’s Work, about a crisis amid childbirth, is so stricken with awe at new life; Aerial was full of this material, from the maternal study of A Coral Room to a wonderfully guileless song about Bertie himself.
Snowflake continues that tradition, as Bertie takes the form of a snowflake, whirling in the night, and Bush hopes to catch him: “The world is so loud / Keep falling / I’ll find you.” Once again it gets to the heart of parenthood: its bewilderment, and how desperate it makes us to shelter our children in the world’s blizzard, snowblinded by love. There is perhaps a hidden wisdom, too, unspoken in the song – if we grip our children too hard, they could melt away from us.
It always felt bigger than Kate and Bertie, but Bush adds a terrifically powerful new dimension by making it, in Little Shrew, a lament for children affected by war, particularly in Ukraine (the film was made in collaboration with the charity War Child). As Bush says of Bertie in an accompanying essay: “I think his performance is extremely moving and although I’d originally written the song to capture his beautiful descant voice before he entered adolescence, it has taken on a haunting new meaning within the context of this animation.”
Bush writes and directs the film, storyboarded from her own sketches. These were drawn up by Jim Kay, the illustrator best known for Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls (which inspired Bush) and pictorial editions of the Harry Potter series, and then animated with the studio Inkubus.
Little Shrew follows a Ukrainian pygmy shrew, captivated by a ball of cosmic light emanating from deep in the solar system. The creature scurries out of its cosy spot in the top pocket of a coat – and the animation coolly pans back to show that this is the corpse of a soldier sitting against a tree. The shrew makes its way through a war-torn landscape, and into the melee of Russian strikes, fired from under the chillingly blank face of an unmanned drone. Bush dwells on the gaping maw of a bombed building, animated from a photo by Maksim Levin, a Ukrainian photographer killed in the conflict.
Bush writes that she originally considered a child as the protagonist, and some might find this exquisitely adorable mammal, nose twitching with worry, to be a sentimental and even nauseatingly cutesy choice. But for me it allows Bush to actually intensify the horror. Watching its sinewy little body, twisting in fear and rent by the force of an exploding bomb, is close to unbearable; a similar sequence of a child could have felt exploitative or overdone.
And as a symbol for children caught in the conflict, the shrew has such potency: children move through wars with the confusion and vulnerability of animals, often without even having language to give shape to the trauma of hearing explosions or seeing corpses. They are as innocent as shrews, too – and, as both Ukraine and Gaza have shown, as unheeded by the aggressors.
Bush undermines the sentimentality all the more by writing an ambiguous ending. She herself is perhaps that orb of light, asserting once more: “The world is so loud / Keep falling / I’ll find you” – a moving reminder to the children of Ukraine that they are not forgotten, intensified by this song suffused with such ardent, active love for her own son. But the shrew is seen tumbling through blackening space, never landing. Bush underlines there is no end in sight for children affected by war, except for an ending forced on them. This film made me weep for every one”.
The second half of this feature will be a lot shorter than this one, don’t worry! Helen Brown, writing for The Telegraph, reacted to the Kate Bush activity. How, even though the tone is quite serious regarding her mission and new work, it is impossible not to be captivated and feel child-like with wonder and joy. With tease that, finally, Bush is open to starting work on her first new album in well over a decade, it makes you stand still and gasp:
“Her eccentric, genre-busting vision has been embraced by Gen Z – inspiring younger artists such as Chappell Roan and The Last Dinner Party. This trend accelerated when Running Up That Hill was featured in Netflix’s Stranger Things causing it to reach a billion Spotify streams in 2023. It also provided Bush with her first number one single in 45 years. Today, the news of Bush’s possible comeback has knocked reviews of Lady Gaga’s cool gothic new actual single way down music news feeds.
Unlike her pop peers who put on a show of acting more sexy and sophisticated than they were, Bush never pretended she was doing anything other than play-acting. The videos and photoshoots she insisted on devising herself have always been deliciously am-dram affairs that allowed her to rummage through her dressing up box and kit herself out as a lion, a bat, a knight, a princess, a Russian sexpot and a clown.
She was a great comic and there was always something endearingly homespun in her style that tapped into a very English tradition of Kenneth Grahame and AA Milne breathing a rich emotional life into their tatty old toys. Bush was the brilliant, powerful, sexy incarnation of every child wearing a tea towel in a primary school nativity play, proving that it just took one more leap of the imagination to really feel it.
I write as a Gen Xer who grew up feeling creatively expanded by the possibilities of her music. I’d lie on the roundabout of our local suburban park with my Walkman and let the exhilaration of her Fairlight synths combine with the centrifugal force to whip me into the alternate universes she created on The Dreaming (1982) – an album on which she sang from the perspectives of a cockney bank robber, an aboriginal experiencing dreamtime, Houdini’s wife and an Irish smuggler pilot.
That last – Night of the Swallow – was my favourite. Loaded with melodrama, the song accelerated by a skirling squall of Irish pipes, fiddle, bouzouki with an effect that sounded like a rope being swung in wide circles as she sang of taking off “in a hired plane, with no names mentioned… There’s no risk/ I’ll whisk them up in the moonlight…” I can still recall the act of fierce will I felt, pushing my school shoe into the concrete beside that roundabout to make the sky spin above me until the fantasy took flight and I was at the controls of that plane skimming the waves and evading the law.
Notably for girls of my generation, Bush sang about love and sex in a new way. Comedians of the 1980s who mocked her for dancing around in skimpy clothes weren’t listening to lyrics in which she celebrated female pleasure and made space for men to be adored for their beauty and vulnerability. She did this throughout her career, but you can hear the best examples of it on The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993). “Not only women bleed,” she sang on Eat The Music.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush attends a champagne reception at the 60th London Evening Standard Theatre Awards at the London Palladium on 30th November, 2014 in London/PHOTO CREDIT: David M. Benett/Getty Images
On Aerial she’d breathe magic into the domestic drudgery of motherhood, celebrating her son Bertie with a harpsichord melody named after him and even finding transcendent romance in watching the soggy rotation of laundry on a song called Washing Machine. Just like the younger woman who’d seen adventure in the glow-in-the-dark yoyo she celebrated on Cloudbusting, now she found eroticism in the swill of dirty clothes: “My blouse wrapping itself in your trousers/Oh the waves are going out/ My skirt floating up around my waist…Oh and you’re standing right behind me.”
As the dates of those albums reveal, Bush is no recluse. She’s been putting art into the world fairly steadily since she was 17. She just prefers doing her work to playing the celebrity game. She took a break to raise her son and appears to have lived a refreshingly regular life as a wife and mother on this side of the wardrobe door.
Sensibly, she doesn’t think her fans should have any access to or interest in that. But when she has time and space to visit her Narnia then she sends us postcards that can still reignite our imagination-connection and make us smile, laugh, cry and gasp. Maybe it’s not Bush being elusive, but our own childhood energy. We yearn for the intensity she gave us and her return promises a rekindling of that.
I watched her Little Shrew video in my pyjamas first thing this morning while my own children were still asleep. I’d read it was inspired by children affected by the war in Ukraine and when that war broke out I’d helped a British friend travel to Poland to rescue children whose parents (as police officers) had to stay and fight.
Bush told Barnett she felt that audiences might, alas, have more empathy for an animal than a child and so picked a Caucasian pygmy shrew (native to Ukraine) as her heroine. I watched the little rodent make its way through the rubble of a housing estate, crawling out of a soldier’s pocket and over his lifeless hand. His corpse nods back to her 1980 single ‘Army Dreamers’ which lamented the “waste” of military-mad young boys to the percussive click of a gun loading.
The new film’s soundtrack is a shortened version of the song Snowflake from her last album, 50 Words for Snow (2011) – a song that captured her son’s voice before it broke. The black and white artwork is all by Jim Kay whose work Bush had first seen in the YA book A Monster Calls. It’s tender. A little childlike in its very basic premise that vulnerability must cling to hope. Watch it with your adult mind and you can shoot a million holes through its sappiness.
But watch it with your child heart and you can also feel its truth. As a long term Bush fan, as I watched the shrew curl its soft back against the blast of a bomb I felt echoes of the video for Breathing in which she sang from the perspective of a foetus in utero, fighting for life in the wake of an atomic detonation. In the hammy video for that single, Bush curled into a plastic ball. I laughed when I first saw it and yet the image is lodged. So maybe she wins the last, hollow laugh there.
Little Shrew doesn’t pack a punch on that bonkers level. It is more cutely muted. But the film’s tenderness does snag the heartstrings if you let it. I was more moved after learning that the sketch of the bombed out city is copied from a genuine photograph taken in Ukraine from a drone flown by Maksim Levin.
Levin was killed two months after capturing the image. On her website, Bush writes that “He was a brave man. I wanted to use his powerful photograph as part of a sequence that would step outside of the drawn animation, to open a door into reality for just that brief moment, before returning to the world of animation.” A rare reversal in the work of a woman more used to opening doors in reality to show us fantasy. I love the reassurance that Bush has kept her child-flame burning through her 60s. Like Barnett, I’m excited to know she’s preparing to wave her wand again”.
IN THIS PHOTO: BBC Radio 6 Music’s Matt Everitt
I will keep this second half to fewer than a thousand words, promise! One half of this historic day (yesterday) concerns Snowflake, this Little Shrew and War Child. How the combination is helping to raise vital funds to help those in dire need. To also look at the atrocities and genocide in a new way. If fans of Kate Bush have an early Christmas, those who are in a perilous state and are being bombarded by war are very much pulling into focus the realities and relative struggles in our lives. How things have been put into perspective. I have now donated to War Child and have watched and rewatched Little Shrew (Snowflake). How inspired the visuals and story is. Hearing Kate Bush discuss it with Emma Barnett. Bush mentioning how she is keen to release a new album. It brings to mind two names: Matt Everitt and Mark Radcliffe. Radcliffe interviewed Bush extensively when she released Aerial in 2005. This ‘return’ – Kate Bush can never disappear! – was twelve years after The Red Shoes. The excitement from Radcliffe as he introduced the extensive chat. In many ways, whether a new album comes next year or several – Bush is fast to write but slower to record, so who knows -, it will have the same sense of anticipation. In a future feature, I will write and speculate about what direction a new album might take in terms of themes, sounds and possible concepts. I would imagine Mark Radcliffe will get an interview with Bush when she does release a new album. Matt Everitt spoke with Kate Bush in 2016 when she released the live album for Before the Dawn. That is the most recent properly in-depth audio conversation since 2011. I would also hope Matt Everitt gets to chat with Bush if she does indeed follow through with a new album.
Rather selfishly, the unbearably tantalising potential for a new Kate Bush album has sparked something in me. Many of us felt an eleventh studio album would be so far-fetched. Earlier this year, her long-time friend, musician, former sweetheart and engineer Del Palmer died. He engineered 50 Words for Snow. Many felt his death would mean Bush’s days in the studio were done. Someone she trusted more than anyone with her music and whom she had a wonderful bond with. Would she even want to continue?! I think the fact she has been reissued and revising her work and has done a lot of retrospection has cleared a path. Made her hungry to do something new. Similar to how 2014’s Before the Dawn was a new project after two albums in 2011 – Director’s Cut came out May of that year -, she has now got to a point where she wants to indulge and fulfil some creative ideas that could make their way onto a new L.P. Imagine that! The chances of me interviewing or meeting Bush are astronomically long though, with possible promotional opportunities coming in the future, I have been wondering whether there is a chance, however slim, of at least contacting her. Whether it is somehow getting a letter to Murray Chalmers PR to pass to her – which is probably something they would not do – or some other way. Regardless of my own dreams and ambitions, Kate Bush talking about new material and wanting to move into this territory is a big deal!
IN THIS PHOTO: A Palestinian telecommunications company destroyed by Israel in October 2024/PHOTO CREDIT: Mohammed Taletene/picture alliance via Getty
Whether you like the fact she has spent so much time in retrospective and reissue mode or not, many people have been crying out for new music. Even if an album might not materialise for a couple of years, we at least know that Bush has it on her list. We all look forward another huge day when the eleventh album is announced and we get the first (and probably only) single from it! Yesterday was a massive day that saw a new visual from Kate Bush. With 50 Words for Snow’s Snowflake at the centre and War Child being spotlighted, it is a hugely impressive (and typically generous) move from Kate Bush. How she is putting those less fortunate first! Not just people less fortunate. Children who have been caught up in some horrific violence. Let’s hope that Little Shrew (Snowflake) helps to raise thousands of pounds for War Child. Hearing her talk to Emma Barnett about the future and discussing her work, it has stirred so many emotions in fans. We ended the week with a treat we never thought we’d get. What a magnificent surprise from someone who you can never predict! As we head towards the end of the year, we have a lot to digest and be thankful for. A music icon who has given us so much. Who is promising so much to come. Fans around the world are reflecting and celebrating at the same time. We owe a huge amount of love and respect to…
THE divine Kate Bush.
