One of my all-time favorite recording artists, British singer-songwriter Kate Bush, celebrates her 65th birthday today.
Happy Birthday, Kate!
Left: Kate performing in her “Before The Dawn” show in 2014. The 22-night concert residency, held at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, sold out within 15 minutes online, 35 years after Kate’s last tour.
To celebrate Kate’s birthday here at The Wild Reed, I share Mojo magazine’s 2014 spotlighting of Kate’s 1986 single, “Hounds of Love.” At the time, Mojo identified this song as Number One in a feature highlighting the “Top 100 Songs of Kate Bush.” In the magazine’s review of this particular track, love and the surrendering to another are deftly explored, to the extent that “Hounds of Love” is declared “an astoundingly vivid, brilliantly concise depiction of a moment when life could change forever.”
And hopefully in a good way.
“Here I go,” indeed!
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Released in May 1985, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms was the first album to sell a million copies on compact disc. There was, however, a more fitting herald of the CD age on the way. That September, the release of Kate Bush’s fifth album marked the elevation of a thoroughly modern pop edifice – shiny, silvered music seemingly made for the new format.
The casual observer, noting the singer’s performance of the title track on Top of the Pops in February 1986 (speeding the song on its way to Number 18 in the UK singles chart) might have wondered if this signalled the assimilation of a free spirit by the earthbound ’80s. Here was Bush wih big hairspray hair, in a double-breasted pants suit offset by a demure red bow, a world away from the eccentric personae – ballet dunce; Aboriginal space woman – she’d assumed to deliver songs from The Dreaming, three years previously. But the casual observer would have been mistaken. Beneath its thin patina of sophistication, “Hounds of Love” is a song that comes surging straight from the hindbrain, propelled by the primal impulse of fight-or-flight.
No matter how refined the circumstances of its creation – built at leisure in Bush’s new 48-track studio – or how newfangled its production -- still tangible in the hi-tech stabs and pads of Fairlight, and the crispness of Jonathan Williams’ cello – “Hounds of Love” is red in tooth and claw, its breathless, atavistic fear of capture mixed with almost supernatural rapture. Love is thundering through the psychosexual woods, hunting down somebody terrified of what it means to surrender to another person.
The song opens with a quote from British horror film Night of the Demon [“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”] but that’s the only moment it feels like theatre. From then on, “Hounds of Love” maintains a dizzying emotional velocity, the relentless double drumming of Charlie Morgan and Stuart Elliott stamping down on the accelerator. Bush’s voice might dip and soften, but those drums are merciless, while the strident backing vocals, like a hunting horn call, goad her on if introspection threatens to slow her down.
In its unstoppable forward thrust, it has the inarguable logic of a dream, although not the way meant by Rolling Stone magazine in its cold review of the album: “Still a precoocious, coddled child at 27, Kate Bush loses herself in daydreams and then turns them into songs.” But it is a mature, womanly voice that rings out of “Hounds of Love,” not a fey or elfin one, and certainly not one that asks to be patronised. Neither is this a song ignorant of the ways of the world. (Coincidentally, the album pushed Madonna’s Like a Virgin from the top of the UK charts, another record named after a single that wasn’t quite as unworldly as it appeared.) The line “I’ve always been a coward / And I don’t know what’s good for me” speaks of experience, but not as much as the delirious cry of “Here I go . . .” uttered in full awareness that the ground is about to give way under her, that is the very second before the falling begins.
This is a woman who’s been here before. She knows what to expect. The Dreaming closed with the complete retreat of “Get Out of My House” – “I am the concierge chez-moi, honey / Won’t let you in for love nor money” – a shutting down, a locking of door, a definitive no. Four years after Hounds of Love, Bush's next album would open with the blissful multiple-yeses of “The Sensual World.” Right in the middle is “Hounds of Love,” torn by competing instincts, trembling on the brink. Here I go. Don’t let me go.
It is part of “Hounds of Love”’s startling power, however, that this is not the song’s only exhilarating emotional drop. It never lets up, every line heightening the pitch, closing the distance between song and listener. “Take my shoes off / And throw them in the lake” might be a ploy to shake the hounds off the scent, but it’s delivered with such guttural, throaty abandon that it’s hard not to feel that it’s a rejection of every trapping of convention. The need for freedom is so great, she’s prepared to run into oblivion: "I’ll be two steps on the water." There’s also the image of a fox, caught by dogs: “He let me take him in my hands / His little heart it beats so fast . . .”
The shout-out to the dead in The Red Shoes’ “Moments of Pleasure” might come close, but this is surely the most instantly, unexpectedly heart-breaking moment in Bush’s work. The tenderness, this moment of compassion amid all the hectic human drama, is incredibly moving – a reminder, too, that tamed creatures can be more savage than wild things. No wonder this bolting, racing, shoe-hurling woman is scared of standing still.
She talks herself around in the end, or so it seems, but the song remains an astoundingly vivid, brilliantly concise depiction of a moment when life could change forever. It ends with a suddeness that makes it seem like she’s hit the ground and you’ve hit it with her, breathlessly waiting for an answer to the question: “Do you know what I really need?” The uncertainly, however, is not reflected in the confidence – the perfect, dazzling completeness – of the song’s execution. On “Hounds of Love,” Kate Bush is going at full pelt, chasing the horizon, running her vision to ground. Not really the hunted, but the hunter all along.
– Mojo: The Music Magazine October 2014
About the song’s music video, which Kate herself directed, Wikipedianotes:
It was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller film The 39 Steps (1935) and a Hitchcock lookalike features in it (a nod to the director’s famous cameo appearances in his movies).
According to The Official Charts Company, Bush is on track for a second week at Number One, followed by Harry Styles’ at Number Two with “As It Was” and LF System’s “Afraid To Feel” at Number Three.
Last week, “Running Up That Hill” was the most streamed track on the planet and reached Number One on both the Spotify charts in the UK and the US after earning 57 million streams in just one week.
As well as being Number One now in the UK, it’s also Number One in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Switzerland. In the US, it’s currently Number Four in the main chart and Number One on the Billboard Global 200 chart, making it Bush’s biggest ever hit in America 37 years after its original release.
. . . The song was written and produced by Bush and featured on her fifth studio album Hounds Of Love, which was released in 1985, debuting at 30 on the Billboard chart, where it currently stands at No 12.
Bush now has the longest-ever gap between Number One singles in Official Chart history, with 44 years between her 1978 chart topper “Wuthering Heights” and 2022’s “Running Up That Hill.”
Bush now also claims the record of longest time taken for a single to reach Number One on the Official Singles Chart, with it being 37 years since the single was first released.
You know, as a longtime admirer of Kate Bush, I’ve always thought there was something of the elemental, the archtypal, the mythic in “Running Up That Hill.” I mean, it’s in the very sound of it, as well as conveyed in its haunting lyrics. So Kate’s choice of words to describe how the song is taking the music world by storm is very appropriate.
Tonight I have some wonderful news to add to this story, and I do so by sharing the following from Nadia Khomami’s Guardianarticle published earlier today.
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Kate Bush has scored an improbable and inspiring No 1 in the UK singles chart, with “Running Up That Hill” reaching the top 37 years after the song was released.
The 1985 track has stormed domestic and global charts after its inclusion in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things last month, introducing it to a new generation of fans.
Bush has broken three UK chart records with her No 1 placing. She is the oldest woman to top the chart, while 37 years is the longest time a song has taken to get to No 1, beating Wham!, whose “Last Christmas” finally made it in January 2021.
Bush also has the longest gap between No 1 singles, with 44 years elapsed since her debut, “Wuthering Heights” (Tom Jones was the previous record holder at 42 years). “Running Up That Hill” reached No 3 when it was originally released.
“It’s hard to take in the speed at which this has all been happening,” Bush, 63, said in a statement on her website earlier this week. “So many young people who love the show [are] discovering the song for the first time.
“The response to ‘Running Up That Hill’ is something that has had its own energy and volition. A direct relationship between the shows and their audience and one that has stood completely outside of the music business. We’ve all been astounded to watch the track explode!” The song is currently at No 4 in the US, her highest-ever placing there.
The UK chart success of “Running Up That Hill” – currently achieving about 575,000 plays a day on Spotify in the UK and more than 6 million a day on the platform globally – was aided by the waiver last weekend of a rule that determines how streams for older songs are tallied, sparking speculation that Bush has opened the gates for more vintage songs to return.
“‘Running Up That Hill’ has itself changed things as we know it,” pop chart analyst James Masterton told The Guardian. “This is the first time in the streaming era that a back-catalogue track has not only been spontaneously resurrected but has maintained its popularity over an extended period.”
While football anthem “Three Lions” hit No 1 again during 2018’s European Championship, “it was gone from our lives a week later as a passing fad,” Masterton added.
“The Kate Bush song has become a genuine sustained smash hit, and for that reason it is appropriate that the rules are waived so it joins contemporary releases on a level playing field. That’s the true game-changer, as it lays down a precedent for other classics to do the same if circumstances merit.”
And here (with added links) is Kate’s response to the latest news about “Running Up That Hill” . . .
The Duffer Brothers have created four extraordinary [seasons] of Stranger Things in which the child actors have grown into young adults. In this latest [season] the characters are facing many of the same challenges that exist in reality right now. I believe the Duffer Brothers have touched people’s hearts in a special way, at a time that’s incredibly difficult for everyone, especially younger people.
By featuring “Running Up That Hill” in such a positive light – as a talisman for Max (one of the main female characters) – the song has been brought into the emotional arena of her story. Fear, conflict and the power of love are all around her and her friends.
I salute the Duffer Brothers for their courage – taking this new [season] into a much more adult and darker place. I want to thank them so much for bringing the song into so many people’s lives.
I’m overwhelmed by the scale of affection and support the song is receiving and it’s all happening really fast, as if it’s being driven along by a kind of elemental force.
I have to admit I feel really moved by it all.
Thank you so very much for making the song a No 1 in such an unexpected way.
As a long-time admirer of the music of Kate Bush, I’m happy to see one of her songs not only currently the most listened to song on Spotify, i-Tunes, and Apple Music, but also topping charts worldwide. Indeed, it’s Number 1 in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Sweden; Number 2 in the United Kingdom; and Number 8 in the United States.
The song I’m referring to, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” isn’t a new recording by the revered and highly influential British singer-songwriter. Rather, it’s a 37-year-old track (and previous hit) from her 1985 album, Hounds of Love. Both the song and the album are topping charts and the playlists of music streaming platforms worldwide due to “Running Up That Hill” being featured in the current season of Netflix’s popular sci-fi/horror drama, Stranger Things.
Even here at The Wild Reed the Kate Bush resurgence is being felt; as currently, this blog’s most popular post, “The Dancer and the Dance,” is one that features the music video for “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” As you’ll see below, this video’s choreography draws upon contemporary dance in a very beautiful and powerful way.
A “positive totem”
Nora Felder, music supervisor for Stranger Things, said she chose “Running Up That Hill” because it resonated with the pain and loss afflicting one of the show’s young characters, Max (Sadie Sink), and “could be very special for its powerful melodic flow and very poignant themes.”
The Washington Postreports that “after getting approval from series creators Matt and Ross Duffer, referred to collectively as the Duffer Brothers, Felder and her clearance coordinator reached out to Bush for permission to use the track. The singer is known to be picky with how her music is used, but turned out to be a fan of the show.”
Earlier this week, Kate made a rare public statement on her website, explaining how Stranger Things had given her iconic track a new lease of life. The series is set in the 1980s and combines high school coming of age antics with a sinister and violent supernatural plot. Music critic Martin Guttridge-Hewitt also notes that the show is “renowned for its 1980s stylisation, and has introduced new generations to seminal synth music by names including Jean-Michelle Jarre, John Carpenter, Giorgio Moroder, and Vangelis, who sadly passed away last month.”
“When they approached us to use ‘Running Up That Hill,’” said Kate, “you could tell that a lot of care had gone into how it was used in the context of the story and I really liked the fact that the song was a positive totem for the character, Max. I’m really impressed by this latest [season of the show].” Kate also shared that she had watched all previous seasons with her family – husband Danny McIntosh and son Bertie.
A truly great album
I was 19 when Hounds of Love was first released, and I bought the album in a record store in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. At the time I was in my second year of college and living at St. Albert’s, a residential college on the campus of the University of New England. I remember the album was playing in the store when I went in to buy it. I’d already heard “Running Up That Hill” as it was the lead single from the album and had been released a month or so earlier. To this day I can recollect that the snippet of then-new Kate Bush music I heard as I made my purchase was the haunting “Watching You Without Me” from Side 2 of Hounds of Love.
Above: Celebrating my 20th birthday in October 1985, a month after the release of Hounds of Love. That’s a framed picture of Kate Bush on the shelf behind me! Yes, I was a big fan back in the day.
I didn’t have a record player at uni and so a girl I knew in my building at Albies let me tape the album using her stereo system. I was already a huge fan of Kate and her music, and Hounds of Love didn’t disappoint. Far from it. It was a tremendous commercial success and was and remains a truly great album. I’m elated that a new generation is discovering Kate and her music thanks to “Running Up That Hill” being used so prominently and powerfully in Stranger Things.
To celebrate all of this, I share tonight two pieces about what can only be described as the Kate Bush renaissance of 2022.
The first is an excerpt from an article by Elise Soutar that serves as a guide to Hounds of Love for those just discovering the music of Kate Bush.
The second is a wonderful piece by long-time fan Liam Hess, whose words about the positive impact of Kate Bush in his life could be my own; in fact, they kinda are! . . . Enjoy!
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An ominous opening synth note fades in, followed by an insistent layer of both live drums and a Linn drum machine that sounds like a call to arms, before a brighter, harsher Fairlight synth melody cuts through. Then, a voice once known for its floaty, elastic soprano range reintroduces itself, demanding rather than requesting: “It doesn’t hurt me / Do you wanna feel how it feels?”
In August 1985, those opening 30 seconds of “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” noted the exact moment that Mark II of British singer Kate Bush’s career began. Though it was the first song written and recorded for Bush’s fifth studio album, Hounds of Love, and had obvious commercial potential while maintaining the haunting quality of her prior output, she had to convince her label, EMI, that it should be the lead single. . . . The song fulfilled Bush’s hopes of reviving interest in her work outside of her home country and devoted cult following elsewhere, peaking at #30 on the Billboard Charts and [thus] earning her her first American hit in seven years. . . . Her mission statement came in the form of a plea for empathy, a desire for gender swap via divine intervention and less of a love song than a call for respect she was due, both from her partner and an industry at large.
. . . Hounds of Love marked a creative rebirth for Bush, striking the most successful balance between experimentation and accessibility in her entire discography. That goes both figuratively and literally, as Bush packed one side with career-defining art-pop hits and the other with a conceptual suite following a drowning woman, chronicling her inner turmoil while she decides whether she wants to fight for her life or just let herself sink. Since that second half might have made you think twice about reading the rest of this (conversely, if it just completely sold you, you’re my kind of person), let’s start with Side A: “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” is followed by the title track, “The Big Sky,” “Mother Stands for Comfort,” and “Cloudbusting,” the album’s other most enduring hit, inspired by philosopher Wilhelm Reich’s relationship with his son Peter and bolstered by a stirring string march that builds to a sing-along crescendo for the ages.
In contrast to “Running Up That Hill”’s last-ditch effort to make a relationship work, “Cloudbusting” remains a transcendent anthem of optimism in even the most hopeless situations, sounding like the beginning of a new world after this one inevitably ends and Bush (singing as the younger Reich, facing his father’s imprisonment) insists that she “just know[s] that something good is gonna happen / I don’t know when / But just saying it could even make it happen.”
Four of the five tracks received elaborate videos, incorporating Bush’s love of dance and visual storytelling that she had honed over the course of her career and sharing the spoils with fans both new and old. It sounds like a product of its time, yet never comes off as dated. Combining masterful arrangements, booming percussion, quirky instrumental choices and career-best vocal performances (all on a self-produced album), Hounds of Love’s first side reintroduced Bush to pop listeners and proved she was a creative force to be reckoned with, something fans and most critics knew all along.
Now that she has your attention, why not turn the record over?
Pulling from styles across European music history, including samples of Gregorian chants and traditional Irish music, The Ninth Wave takes up the entirety of the album’s second side. It marked the first (but not last) time Bush attempted to create a cohesive musical story, its own purely auditory theatrical production with a guide to the action written out on the album’s original inner sleeve, made up of diverse songs that could also stand on their own. In her own words, Bush envisioned The Ninth Wave as “a film, that’s how I thought of it . . . the idea is that they’ve been on a ship and they’ve been washed over the side so they’re alone in this water. And I find that horrific imagery.” Once Bush’s narrator is knocked over the edge and left to freeze (“And Dream of Sheep,” “Under Ice”), she’s forced to reckon with her past mistakes, watch her loved ones in the present worry about her disappearance and argue with her future self, who demands she give herself a chance to live (“Waking the Witch,” “Watching You Without Me” and “Jig Of Life,” respectively), which she eventually does, vowing to be a better person going forward (“Hello Earth,” “The Morning Fog”). It’s a perfect culmination of the bold musical styles Bush had embraced up to that point, marrying her artsy oddball tendencies to a talent for moving storytelling. Can you imagine any of her contemporaries pulling off something similar?
W’ve all been there. It might be a book you read at a formative time in your life, or a film you hold especially close to your heart. Then, whether due to a social media trend or a mention in a hit TV show, that same cultural artifact is suddenly everywhere, with many professing their surprise at just how brilliant the artist who made it truly is. And even though you know it isn’t the nicest thing to feel, your first instinct is: Where have you all been?
So it was for many over the past few days as they realized one of their most beloved musicians – the iconic British singer-songwriter Kate Bush – had become a Gen Z sensation after her 1985 track “Running Up That Hill” was featured on a recent episode of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things. (The needle drop comes in after one of the show’s main characters, Sadie Sink’s Max, realizes that playing your favorite song will ward off one of the Upside Down’s most nefarious monsters.)
Over the weekend, the song shot to the top of the U.S. iTunes charts, with the show’s largely teenage fanbase taking to Twitter and TikTok to post about their new musical discovery from decades past. Others, however – notably long-time Bush fans of a certain generation, who have patiently sat through many decades of radio silence from a musician notorious for taking long hiatuses and doing minimal press – rolled their eyes. “How could you not know about the genius of Kate Bush already?” appeared to be theconsensus from many on Twitter.
A disclaimer: Anyone who knows me knows that I have a borderline pathological obsession with Bush and her music. An important memory for me was seeing the video for her breakout 1978 track “Wuthering Heights,” the piano-led ballad with its allusions to Emily Brontë, bonkers key changes, and infamously acrobatic vocals, while watching a music video channel (remember those?) as a kid. Seeing Bush, who trained in contemporary dance, twirl and wave her arms through a spectral white mist in a floaty batwing dress, her eyes wide with urgency, I was mesmerized.
I would go on to discover the entirety of Bush’s eclectic catalog, from the lyrically complex vignettes of her early albums Lionheart and Never for Ever, to what is arguably her masterpiece, the thrillingly experimental 1982 record The Dreaming. When Bush would deliver one of her rare missives, or announce a new release, I’d scour online message boards to join the conversation and share my excitement. One of my greatest regrets in life – no exaggeration here – was missing the Before the Dawn concert residency at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2014, her first live performances since 1979, and very possibly her last.
All of this is to say, I’d probably be a prime candidate to turn my nose up at the fact Gen Z has discovered the music of one of my heroes through a teen drama – but on the contrary, I’m delighted. We all have to make those discoveries sometime and somewhere, even if that is through a show on Netflix, and gatekeeping our favorite artists serves nothing but our own egos. Plus, where better to start than with one of her greatest songs (and videos) of all, “Running Up That Hill”?
Part of the wonder of discovering Bush is the sense that her various oddities validate your own experiences as an outsider. Given the feelings of recognition I’ve found in Bush’s music over the years – from her tribute to the love of the gay couple living in secret in her apartment building that is 1978’s “Kashka From Baghdad”; to the sheer euphoric rush I feel listening to 1989’s “The Sensual World,” an ode to sybaritic pleasure inspired by Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses; to the dulcet vocals of “This Woman’s Work,” which never fail to bring a tear to my eye – why would I want to deny that to others?
As a teenager who always felt a little different (although, then again, what teenager doesn’t), I found a sense of refuge in Bush’s music; a reminder not just that it was okay not to conform, but that non-conformity is something that could be celebrated, or elevated to the highest levels of art. Even if I loathe the phrase entirely, Bush really did make me feel seen.
So, I’m happy for the Gen Z-ers discovering Bush for the first time. I’m excited for them to dive into all of the richly realized worlds she’s crafted over the years, across 10 records, dozens of music videos, a film, and songs that tell stories of accidentally dancing with Hitler, having sex with a snowman, or pay homage to her washing machine. And may it inspire them too: Lord knows we could use a little more of Bush’s strain of weird and wonderful creative magic in the world right now.
. Kate Bush’s third album, 1980’s Never for Ever, was the first album I ever bought. And I remember the day as if it were yesterday.
Back then, of course, it was a proper vinyl album that I purchased – from Gunnedah Sound Center, the little record store in my Australian hometown. I was fourteen . . . and it was a Saturday, as I remember walking around the corner to the main street and meeting up with some of my high school friends for lunch at the Monterey Cafe. I also remember keeping my purchase in its brown paper bag, as I didn’t want greasy finger prints all over the album’s strange and fantastical artwork!
Like everyone in Australia at that time who wasn’t living under a rock, I’d known of Kate Bush since her spectacular (and wildly original) emergence onto the music scene two years earlier with “Wuthering Heights.” It was my purchase of Never For Ever in 1980, however, that set me on course to being a lifelong admirer of Kate Bush. I soon added her two earlier albums (The Kick Inside and Lionheart) to my collection and from then on would purchase each new Kate Bush album upon its release – The Dreaming in 1982; Hounds of Love in 1985, my second year of college; The Sensual World in 1989, my second year of teaching; The Red Shoes in 1993, my last year teaching and living in Australia; Aerial in 2005, well into my new life in the U.S.; and 50 Words for Snow in 2011.
My most recent purchase has been Kate Bush Remastered – Part 1, a box set of her first seven albums, beautifully remastered and repackaged.
As I write, I have Never For Ever playing, and I must admit I find it hard to believe it’s been 40 years since its release. But there you have it. To my ears, the album remains strangely and compellingly contemporary. Or perhaps better still, timeless.
Ben Hewitt of Quietus has penned a wonderfully insightful appreciation of the album in which he writes that although it’s not Kate Bush’s most celebrated recording, “it might be her most pivotal – the start of her transition from artist to auteur.”
Following, with added images and links, is an excerpt from Ben Hewitt's Quietus piece on Never For Ever.
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Despite being overshadowed by what followed, [Never For Ever is] the start of [Kate Bush's] transformation into a one-of-a-kind auteur, the record that made her later, greater glories possible. Tired of EMI’s conveyor-belt approach to rushing out LPs, Bush assumed more ownership in the studio and changed the way she made music forever. “The whole thing was so satisfying,” she enthused in 1980. “To actually have control of my baby for the first time.” Forty years later, it’s no less significant: Never For Ever isn’t Bush’s best album, but it might well be the most important.
By late 1979, Bush was long used to battling EMI. If the label had gotten its way three years previously, her first release would have been the fun-yet-forgettable ‘James And The Cold Gun’; Bush pushed for ‘Wuthering Heights’ instead, and duly became the first woman to hit No 1 with a self-written single. Still, there were only so many fights a 19 year old could win in a sexist, stuffy industry. After the success of 1978’s The Kick Inside EMI demanded an instant follow-up, giving her only weeks to write new material and forcing her to mostly use years-old compositions. Worse, they then backed producer Andrew Powell’s decision to again replace her group, the KT Bush Band, with session musicians. The patchy Lionheart, released nine months after her debut, left her cold. “Though they were my songs and I was singing them, the finished product was not what I wanted,” she later told Keyboard.
Never For Ever would change all that. Draining as it was, Bush’s gruelling Tour Of Life gave her the chance to co-produce 1979’s On Stage EP with engineer Jon Kelly, convincing her they could handle a full album together. She ousted Powell and combined the session hands with her band members, swapping them in and out like rolling subs and making them record take after take. Bush biographer Rob Jovanovic, estimates she spent an unprecedented five months writing and demoing at Abbey Road, honing new and old ideas alike, while keyboardist Max Middleton [has said that] the sessions were so exacting because of her obsession with finding “something nebulous that was hard to pinpoint.” For Bush the autonomy was worth savouring, no matter how painstaking the process. “It was the first step I’d really taken in controlling the sounds,” she said, “and being pleased with what was coming back.”
Listen now and you can still hear that fundamental shift Bush spoke of, the birth of some new, peculiar magic. It starts with ‘Babooshka,’ in which a paranoid wife impersonates a younger woman to test her husband’s roving eye, and ends up destroying her marriage.
It’s a wonderfully wicked premise: Bush based it on the cross-dressing, happy-ever-after hijinks of the traditional English folk ditty ‘Sovay’, but her revamp is less a cheeky romp than a surreal, bitter farce, pitched somewhere between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tales of the Unexpected. Most startling, though, is the way it sounds, like unearthly Russian folk music: there’s something both archaic and futuristic about its echoey keys, eerie synths and the ethereal strings of her brother Paddy’s balalaika, as uncanny as a Cossack band playing on the Mir space station. Bush sings like two different people, flitting from coy trills to operatic shrieks, and eventually her world comes crashing down in a crescendo of squalling guitars and the Fairlight’s splintering glass.
Then, before the debris has cleared, she drifts into the wispy beauty of ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’, which recounts how Frederic Delius’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby, took down his idol’s compositions from dictation after he was waylaid by syphilis. All the same, if “moody old man” Delius was difficult, there’s no rancour in its shimmering reverie of hazy sitar and bubbling percussion: it hums with the heady buzz of the olde British countryside, and Bush’s vocal has the crisp, bucolic freshness of dandelion and burdock. Both tracks size up the album’s big themes – the push-and-pull of thorny relationships, the constant churn of emotions – but one bursts into thunder, and the other floats on the breeze.
. . . Like ‘Wuthering Heights’, Never For Ever made history: the first No 1 album by a British female solo artist. Yet its significance transcends chart milestones. For the next decade Bush would build on its potential to become, as she joked to Q in 1989, the “shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet.” Whereas her first three albums were squeezed into two-and-a-half years, the subsequent three spanned nine. The next one, the bewildering, avant-garde masterpiece The Dreaming, was the first she produced entirely by herself; soon after, she built a studio-come-sanctuary near her family home and hunkered away to make the flawless Hounds Of Love. Each record introduced new inspirations, new instruments, new collaborators and new methods, all indebted to Never For Ever’s triumph of bloody-minded determination. It doesn’t belong in her imperial period, but that imperial period wouldn’t exist without it.
One of my all-time favorite recording artists, British singer-songwriter Kate Bush, celebrates her 62nd birthday today. Happy Birthday, Kate!
Right: Kate performing in her “Before The Dawn” show in 2014. The 22-night concert residency, held at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, sold out within 15 minutes online, 35 years after Kate’s last tour.
Over at the website Complex, Brianna Holt has an insightful piece that celebrates Kate's music and her influence on other artists "across genres and borders." Following, with added images and links, is an excerpt.
For the last three decades, Kate Bush has been crowned the queen of art-pop without ever winning a Grammy or touring after the releases of new albums. You won’t catch her in the audience at an award show or giving lengthy interviews on a talk show. In fact, it isn’t even certain where she is spending her time, but many fans assume she’s tucked away somewhere in South Devon. With her pioneering legacy of experimental sound, masterful storytelling, and unconventional lyrics and structure, Bush’s influence in the music industry has stretched across genres and borders.
In 1978, at the age of 19, Bush began breaking barriers for women in pop. Topping the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut single “Wuthering Heights,” Bush became the first female artist to reach number one in the UK with a self-written song. Additionally, and equally impressive, she was the first British solo female artist to ever top the UK album charts and the first female artist to enter the album chart at No. 1 [with Never for Ever in 1980]. By her fourth studio album [1982's The Dreaming], Bush gained artistic independence in album production, an uncommon circumstance for women in the music industry during the ‘80s. “The big thing for me, and it has been from quite early on, is to retain creative control over what I’m doing. If you have creative control, it’s personal,” she told Independent in 2016. Her ability to work on her own agenda and release atypical work influenced many younger artists to do the same. . . . Bush is credited for her early-on, revolutionary use of the Fairlight synthesizer, the headset microphone onstage, and exploring controversial themes wrapped into an ultramodern sound.
If you haven’t been as lucky to come across Kate Bush’s music in a film or through the recommendation of a friend, there's a chance you’ve unknowingly grown accustomed to the sounds she pioneered. From FKA Twigs’ Magdalene to Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Bush’s influence — whether direct or not — exists in so many modern pop projects today. Hints of her dramatic vocals carry on through Florence Welch’s delivery and her experimental, futuristic production provided a blueprint for artists like Charli XCX to push pop forward. Her mime-like dance moves coupled with intimate orchestration is echoed in Lorde’s performances. Sinead O’ Connor’s penetrating lyrics in “Troy” and Sia’s roaring vocals in “Chandelier” both conjure the spirit of Kate Bush. Her heirs include other greats like Tori Amos, Björk and Enya. Even electronic artists like Grimes and rock artists like Stevie Nicks have been compared to the UK artist.
. . . Very little is known about Bush’s day-to-day life, and social media doesn’t provide a stance on her political views or evolving taste and perspective. It isn’t even certain when and if another Kate Bush album will ever come, leaving fans with no choice but to be patient with her timeline and dive deeper into music that already exists. Luckily, powerful art coupled with a mystifying personality has left a lot to explore since the release of her debut album in 1978. Maybe that is why Bush has continued to persist over time. After all, an artist who is not yet fully understood can often be the most compelling.
Notes Wikipedia about “The Man With the Child In His Eyes”:
[It] is the fifth track on [Kate Bush's] debut album The Kick Inside and was released as her second single, on the EMI label, in 1978.
Bush wrote the song when she was 13 and recorded it at the age of 16. It was recorded at AIR Studios, London, in June 1975 under the guidance of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. She has said that recording with a large orchestra at that age terrified her. The song was Bush's second chart single in the United Kingdom where it reached number six in the summer of 1978. In the United States the single was released in December of the same year. It became her first single to reach the Billboard pop singles chart, peaking at number 85 early in 1979. Bush performed this song in her one appearance on Saturday Night Live, singing on a piano being played by Paul Shaffer.
The single version slightly differs from the album version. On the single, the song opens with the phrase “He’s here!” echoing, an effect added after the album was released. . . . The song received the Ivor Novello Award for "Outstanding British Lyric" in 1979.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
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