MUSIC: "Moments Of Pleasure" by Kate Bush
For those people who don't know who Kate Bush is
and completely forgotten who she may have been,
she is the waif-like singer and songwriter who had
an enormous hit with her first eerie single, Wuthering Heights.
# Out on the wily, windy moors
# We'd roll and fall in green. #
She was an original, a rarity in the pop world,
where so many performers look and sound much the same.
# She signed the letter "All yours"
# "Babooshka, Babooshka
# "Babooskah, ya, ya". #
- Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it a tree? - No, no, no, it's a Bush.
Ladies and gentlemen, Kate Bush.
MUSIC: "Wow" by Kate Bush
- PRODUCER: Kate Bush. - Kate Bush.
# Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow-ah! #
Just like fire, you know? It's all just, like, coming out of her mouth.
MUSIC: "Army Dreamer" by Kate Bush
She has made her performances into something of an art form,
mingling dance and mime and all kinds of theatre.
SONG: "Sat In Your Lap"
I mean, they're not normal songs. None of her songs have been normal.
# I see the people working. #
She's just who she is. She's unique, she's a mystery.
She's the most beautiful mystery.
There were moments of, like, hairbrush in the mirror,
like, Running Up That Hill and dancing round the lounge.
# And if I only could
# Make a deal with God. #
The music speaks for itself,
but liking her makes you feel a bit clever.
# We're running up that road. #
Hours I've been in my room by myself, through good times
and bad times, and listened to her on headphones
and her taking me away from my stress.
# I'd be running up that hill. #
Let me tell you a story.
When I had my civil partnership nine years ago in 2005, and Kate,
we invited Kate.
We didn't think she'd come but she came with her husband Danny,
and there were a lot of very famous people in that room.
There was, like, 600 people,
and all anybody wanted to meet was Kate Bush.
I mean, musician, anybody,
they couldn't believe Kate Bush was there.
She's kind of an enigma.
I don't think she's ever particularly wanted to play
the game, has she?
But I think when you've done great work like she's done,
and then you retract from the public,
people almost have to make up their own version of you, don't they?
You can hear one note of a Kate Bush song,
or one note of her voice, even, and know immediately what it is,
and that is the biggest feat of any artist,
especially when you consider all the roads that she's gone down.
SONG: "Wuthering Heights"
# Out on the wily, windy moors
# We'd roll and fall in green. #
When Kate Bush came along, sort of '78, I was in The Slits,
and I remember, I was sitting in a van outside our singer's house,
waiting to go and do a gig,
and Wuthering Heights came on the radio, and I was like, "Huh?
"What's this?!", and I kept waiting for the melody to repeat,
because at that time,
pop music was very much, you know, Radio One was repeating melodies
very quickly, and this melody meandered on in this high
pitched voice, warbling and dropping, but I was absolutely spellbound.
# Wuthering, Wuthering Heights. #
When I first heard it, I thought it was extremely challenging.
The vocal was almost hysterical, and so up there, the register.
But it was absolutely fascinating.
I know at the time a lot of my friends couldn't bear it.
They just thought it was too much, but that's exactly what drew me in.
# Bad dreams in the night
# Told me I was going to lose the fight
# Leave behind my
# Wuthering, Wuthering Wuthering Heights
# Heathcliff... #
Look! I can see Wuthering Heights!
Well, I saw a series on the television about ten years ago
and it was on very late at night, and I caught literally the last
five minutes of the series, where she was at the window trying to get in.
Who are you?
- DISEMBODIED VOICE: - I'm Catherine Linton.
Oh!
I've come home.
And it just really struck me. It was so strong. And I read the book.
You read the book later?
Yeah, I read the book before I wrote the song,
because I needed to get the mood properly.
I'd never heard anything like it before. It was like banshee music.
# Too long I roam in the night. #
This absolute otherworldly voice, singing about a book.
# To Wuthering, Wuthering
# Wuthering Heights
# Heathcliff... #
As a bookish kid, I was always fascinated by anything,
any music that seems to be inspired by books.
For that to have come out of someone's brain, period,
is a remarkable feat.
For that to have come out of someone's brain at 17 years old,
this incredible song. Incredible song.
# I'm coming back, love
# Cruel Heathcliff
# My one dream
# My only master. #
There aren't that many amazing pop songs that have two or three
key changes in them, and I'm not talking modulations,
I'm talking, like, "OK, now we're in the key of Q." You know,
it's like, "What?!", but it's so brilliant, it's so memorable.
I always karaoke that song if I drink enough.
# Heathcliff...
# It's me-ah, Cathy, I'm come home. #
Wuthering Heights was not your normal type song.
But that's why it was so brilliant.
It was great to hear something out of the norm.
When things like that come along, they don't come along very often.
I mean, when does the next Kate Bush come along after Kate Bush?
There hasn't been one.
MUSIC: "Aerial Tal" by Kate Bush
- Now, let's get back to the beginnings. You're 19 now. - 20. - 20?
- Yeah, just. - And you're from Kent. - Yeah. - Is Kate Bush your own name?
- Yes, it is. - Now, you're father's a doctor. - Yes. - Is it a musical family?
My brothers are very musical.
They were really responsible for turning me
on to it in the first place.
They were always playing music when I was a kid.
Her brothers were a big part of it.
They were very much, in her early days, her formative years,
particularly people like Paddy.
I mean, he was having all these musical ideas coming in,
he had all these strange musical things that he was into,
lots of strange musical instruments and various forms of music,
and he would run those past her and lots of it would stick.
What do you call it?
It's called a strumento di porco, that's it's real name.
- You're Kate's brother, aren't you? - Yeah, afraid so.
- Is it a sort of a family business, really? - Well, yes and no.
I mean, Kate and I have been making music together for years and years.
On different levels, but there's always been music in our family.
When I was young, it was really the music that my brothers played,
and I'd picked out the stuff that I liked and listened to it with them.
What kind of music did they play?
They were into King Crimson at that time,
and Pink Floyd and Blind Faith, Fleetwood Mac, that sort of thing.
When you went to visit the family house, East Wickham,
it sort of reminded me of my parents' house in some ways.
It was a comfortable, middle class doctor's house with a nice garden.
Yet, out of that had grown this strange creature that was
doing wonderful things.
- When did you start writing songs? - I must have been 11 or 12.
When did the music men come to hear about you, and how?
That was quite a gradual process.
When I was about 14, there was a friend of my brother's called
Ricky Hopper, who was in the business
and he knew a lot of people,
and he acted as a friend to try
and get the tapes across to people,
and after some trying,
there was no response,
and he knew Dave Gilmour from the
Pink Floyd, and Dave came along
to hear me, because at that time, he
was scouting for struggling artists.
I had a listen. I was intrigued by this strange voice.
I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent,
and she played me, God, it must have been 40 or 50 songs...
on tape, and I thought I should try and do something.
# I hear him
# Before I go to sleep
# And focus on the day that's been
SONG CONTINUES THROUGH SMARTPHONE
# I realise he's there
# When I turn the light off. #
Dave Gilmour put up the money for me to make a proper demo with
arrangements and selected songs and we took it to the company.
We were making, Pink Floyd, that is,
were making the Wish You Were Here album, and I think we had
the record company people down at Abbey Road in number three.
# And suddenly I find myself... #
And I said to them, "Do you want to hear something I've got?"
And they said, "Sure", so we found another room
and I played it to them, The Man With The Child In His Eyes,
and they said, "Yeah, thank you, we'll have it!"
# He's here again
# The man with the child in his eyes
# Ooh, he's here again... #
The Man With The Child In His Eyes is still one of those things
that right from the get-go, has its own life
because it's just a great song
and she has, you know, for all the time that she or I or anyone spent
decorating and creating moods,
it's actually the key element of what you're saying, the melody
and the chords and the rhythm
that still speak louder than all the stuff around on a great song.
RECORDING: # Ooh, he's here again... #
It is absolutely beautiful, isn't it?
And it's sort of over two years
before any of the other recordings she did,
that is her singing at the age of 16
and having written those extraordinary lyrics
about...whatever they're about.
The thing is with me, I only like extreme talent,
that's the only thing I can listen to, and I like originators.
Where does Kate Bush come from? You can't hear her influences,
you know, it's like Billie Holiday, when I first heard Billie Holiday,
I'd never heard anything like that in my life.
The same with Kate Bush. I can't figure out musically, artistically,
who her mother and father is.
MUSIC: "Hang On To Yourself" by David Bowie
# Well, she's a tongue-twisting storm She'll come to the show tonight
# Praying to the light machine
# She wants my honey Not my money... #
- PRODUCER: - Somebody told me that she was at a '73 gig at Ziggy Stardust.
I'm like, "Are you sure?" Everybody seems to have been at that gig.
Yet, we were there.
# We've really got a good thing going... #
It was a great gig. He's one of those people
that have had an influence on her in a weird sort of way, you know.
It's not obvious, but you know, people do.
# Make me a deal And make it straight... #
She was aware of Roxy Music, Brian Eno and people like that, you know,
she was aware of a lot of people.
A lot of people had an influence on her.
# I hope and pray He don't blow it cos
# We've been around a long time
# Trying, just trying, just trying to make the big time
# Take me on a roller coaster... #
Kate, having seeing me,
probably, yeah, the first time working with Bowie,
I mean, she wanted to be a performer like that,
nothing like Bowie but to move like that.
And, of course, she had seen Flowers,
as had everyone at that time.
I went to see a show,
and it was Lindsay Kemp
and really, I'd never seen anything like it before,
and what he was doing was,
he was using movement without any sound at all,
something I had never experienced, and he was expressing so much,
probably more than most people would express with their mouths
and it suddenly dawned on me that there was a whole new world
of expression that I hadn't even realised.
I was teaching at the Dance Centre in Covent Garden.
Kate turned up dressed very properly in her ballet tights and things
and her hair scraped back, looking very, very professional indeed,
very, very serious student,
but as timid as hell,
and of course, she took a place at the back of the class
and I had to coax her forward.
I mean, she was extremely shy, extremely timid,
and of course, the first thing I had to do
was bring her out of herself, give her courage.
I have to say that once Kate actually started dancing,
she was a wild thing. I mean, she was wild.
One day, some months after knowing her,
I got back to my home in Battersea
and there was an LP pushed under the door, The Kick Inside,
and there, dedicated to me, was this beautiful song, Moving.
# How I'm moved
# How you move me
# With your beauty's potency... #
I didn't know she had any aspirations to being a singer.
She never talked about herself.
# Here come old flattop He come grooving up slowly
# He got juju eyeball He one holy roller... #
I met her for the first time in the spring of '77
and we went around to her brother's house to meet her
because we wanted to get a band together to do some pubs
and the idea was, we'd get his sister to sing because
we might be able to get a few more gigs if we had a girl singer.
MUSIC: "James and the Cold Gun"
And so we got that band together, we had a few rehearsals,
we did lots of covers but we did things like James and the Cold Gun,
Heavy People, all that kind of stuff,
we did embryonic persons of those.
# James, come on home... #
- PRODUCER: - The first time you sang in public, do you remember that?
Yeah, that was about two years ago in a pub in Lewisham.
And I was so scared, I really was.
And I knew from day one,
I knew, there was no way this girl's not going to make it.
She's going to be a huge success,
there is no way, because she was so driven for it
and her enthusiasm for it was infectious.
APPLAUSE
Now we have a young person, Basil Bush's sister,
who, as you know,
was responsible for that great hit, Withering Tights.
Kate Bush and the Bushwhackers.
- # Rolling the ball - Rolling
# Rolling the ball to me... #
The early vocal style is really acrobatic, isn't it?
It's very, almost sort of vocal gymnastics, isn't it?
Jumping around all over the place.
She's almost still finding her... finding her style a little bit.
It's quite kooky and strange.
# They made me look at myself
# I saw it was... #
'When I first started singing, I had an incredibly plain voice.'
I mean, I could sing in tune, but that was about it.
I mean, I really wasn't that good,
and really, all I did was sing every day. Because I was writing songs,
'I would sing them, and I was concentrating much more on my writing
'and therefore my voice came through that.'
# Them heavy people hit me in a soft spot... #
You can sort of understand the experimentation of her music
through thinking about what she does with her voice
and she uses it as a kind of fabric
to sort of pull and push and almost tear apart
and she's sort of stretching the fabric,
not just of her voice but of the whole kind of pop form, I think.
# Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow
# Unbelievable... #
There are lots of layers to that song,
but what she's doing with her voice is just going, "Wow, wow, wow..."
It's very hypnotic, it's a bit like a siren,
and then it whoops up to a very high register.
It's like a child,
it's like a kind of just revelling in what her voice can do.
# We're all alone on the stage tonight... #
It's sort of about her own melodrama, isn't it? About the...
About the actor, about the sadness of vanity.
# We know all our lines so well...
# Ah-hah! #
That's what you wanted!
# We've said them so many times. #
Listening to this on a record player in suburbia,
and you're taken, it's like she takes you by the hand
and you fly off through the sky like The Snowman or A Christmas Carol.
# He's too busy hitting the Vaseline... #
"He's too busy hitting the Vaseline."
I don't know whether that's a gay reference or not. It's a bit rude.
# We'd give you a part... #
You'd give me a part, my love.
# But you'd have to play the fool... #
But you'd have to play the fool.
# Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow!
# Unbelievable!
# Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow
# Unbelievable! #
Of course, she's a gift for satirists.
Of course, it's easy, because dull artists, especially in pop music,
are very difficult to satirise.
MUSIC: "Wuthering Heights"
# I'm so cold, let me in at your window... #
It was all there on a plate, really, wasn't it?
# I'm running up that road
# I'm running up that hill
AUDIENCE CLAPS ALONG
# No problem
# Rolling the ball... #
'It's about misinterpreting what she meant, you know,'
"It's me, I'm Cathy, I've come home now,
"so cold, let me into your window,"
and I think he goes, "Let me into your window, whoa-ho-ho!"
Heathcliff!
'As if it's sort of cheeky and sexy and not about the angst of love.'
# So co-o-o-o-o-old, let me into your window!
# Oh-ho!
# Heathcliff! #
'It was fun to do, people laughed'
and Kate Bush came to the last night of my show to see it
'when we performed in the West End.'
She said, "It's so nice to hear all those songs again."
That's what she said!
# We're all alone on the stage tonight... #
In early January this year, Kate Bush had never performed
before an important live audience. In a sense, she was a media singer.
When she took the decision to go on tour,
no-one doubted how important it could prove to her career.
MUSIC: "Kite"
Her early shows were so sensational,
the one she did at the Palladium, for example,
were the benchmark for people's shows in the future.
MUSIC: "James And The Cold Gun"
Aurally, she was who she was,
but visually, she created a new standard for people.
APPLAUSE
- Did you enjoy the show? - It was lovely. - Did you?
- Are you really happy? - I'm knocked out. I can't believe that audience.
Now that it has worked so well,
I gather you were a bit worried beforehand that it would all be OK,
now it has proved to be so successful, do you think
you might do a more extensive tour later in the year?
That really depends.
So much depends on energy
because it can become very tiring,
with the travelling. I don't know, we have to wait and see.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
I hope she doesn't mind me saying this
but it's about 14 years ago, I had a long, long phone call with her
because I wanted her to do something
and she wouldn't do something live with me, or do some song with me,
and she rang me to tell me why
and it turned into a long, long conversation
about performing on stage and how terrifying it can be,
and how she hadn't done it for a long, long time
and she felt a little bit,
just a bit scared by the prospect of going out there again.
I think her early stuff was her kind of still finding her way.
I don't think that she quite found herself.
Lots of artists need to find their way
and all of that early stuff with her dancing around in a leotard...
# They've got the stars for the gallant hearts
# I'm the replacement for your part... #
I don't know, it was all a little bit am dram, wasn't it?
Some people would have thought,
you know, it looks like she's come straight out of drama school
and she's learned how to wave scarves around
and that sort of thing. But to me, it wasn't really about that.
It was kind of about the whole package
and the sound coming out of her was just so incredible
that kind of blew every other, you know...
problem, if you like, away. People didn't really care
if she looked a bit naff. She just sounded amazing.
# Outside
# Gets inside, ooh
# Through her skin. #
Breathing is a foetal song.
It's a song of a reincarnated foetus coming around again,
terrified of a nuclear war,
terrified of the radioactivity outside,
terrified of the idea that we won't be able to breathe.
# Keep breathing... #
Nobody writes songs like that.
It's utterly political and it's utterly female.
# Breathing
# Breathing my mother in
# Breathing
# My beloved in
# Breathing... #
It's almost like a reminder how important women are.
I've had a funny thing, my mother committed suicide
and my whole career has been based around my mother.
All around my mother cos I didn't know her,
and you know, just like, "Keep breathing, breathing my mother in",
that lyric there could be my whole career and this is what it means.
I'm a kid from a council flat,
I'm a mixed-race guy who grew up in a white ghetto,
totally different life to Kate Bush,
but that lyric, "Keep breathing my mother in",
my whole career is based on that.
# What are we going to do?
# Breathe... #
It was like a little symphony.
It had the male choir, like this call and response,
"What are we going to do?"
And then she's like, "Breathing!" The way she's singing,
I was just like, "Oh, my God, what's this woman on?"
- # Are we going to die without... - Leave me something to breathe... #
This is a whole universe I can dive into
and for me, it was very avant-garde and expressive and kind of...
from a complete different planet
to everything else that you see from the '80s, like you say,
Duran Duran, you know, on a boat in Rio!
She was definitely out there on her own.
It's funny, nobody ever applies the term "progressive rock" to Kate Bush
but to me, it's prog,
you know, it's everything I love about the best prog.
It's like, the really sort of brash stuff which is about
people showing technical ability, I have no interest in,
but the experimental dreamy stuff
that sort of came from lots of different places at once, you know,
I sit her stuff next to...
well, next to Genesis, the obvious comparison as well
because of her story with Peter Gabriel.
# Jeux sans frontieres
# Jeux sans frontieres... #
One, two, three, four.
SHATTERING
Gabriel used a computerised instrument called a Fairlight.
Any sound can be fed into it, stored and played back on its keyboard.
What was so exciting was that
you could take any sound in and then manipulate it.
See, if I pick up this mike, for an example,
and press S for sample,
we can put in the sound, I hope.
"Mummy!"
Over here, we have the waveform, and it should be up on the keyboard.
- AT VARYING PITCHES: - 'Mummy! Mummy!'
Every kid can do that with their phone nowadays,
but at the time, it was absolutely unique and suddenly opened up
these whole sort of continents of new sound texture.
# All yours, Babooshka, Babooshka
# Babooshka-ya-ya
SHATTERING
# Babooshka, Babooshka, Babooshka-ya-ya
SHATTERING
Well, she did give me a credit on one record for opening her windows.
I had actually cleaned the windows,
but I'm very happy to get any acknowledgement.
- # Babooshka - She wanted to test her husband
# She knew exactly what to do
# A pseudonym to fool him
# She couldn't have made a worse move
# She sent him scented letters
# And he received them with a strange delight
# Just like his wife... #
The video is so kind of classic Kate Bush
because she does this thing, whenever she's performing,
which is that she's one version of herself,
and then often when the chorus kicks in...
# She signed the letter
# All yours, Babooshka... #
..she becomes this other version, which is a kind of crazier version
and her eyes get very wide and the camera zooms in
and she's sort of performing this kind of crazy, unhinged woman,
and that's clearly a side to her that she brings out in these songs.
# Shout it out, I'm all yours
# Babooshka, Babooshka, Babooshka-ya-ya! #
Babooshka's one of those songs
you just can't get out of your head, can you?
You know, how she's able to take a word
and then you start seeing images and pictures
to a word that maybe you haven't used,
it's not as if you're saying, "Je t'aime." It's Babooshka.
And how she's turned that into, though, an emotion.
That's just how she's able to use a combination of a word
and a combination of a melody and the rhythm of that,
and it creates a new language.
# Babooshka
# She wanted to take it further
# So she arranged a place to go... #
The first song I heard was Babooshka
and like, you know, with the bass
and this amazing relationship she had with that bass.
No-one had done anything like that before
and like, the dance moves that she was doing
were not things that you would learn in a dance academy
and the music was not something you'd learn in a kind of rock school
or a conservatoire of music academy.
What I love about her music is that it's so innate,
the talent she has is so innate but perfect, fully formed music.
I read an interview with her one time,
where she was asked something along the lines of,
"Why do you write from the perspective of a lot of characters?"
And she said, very simply and eloquently,
"Because they are more interesting than I am."
MUSIC: "Army Dreamers"
# Army dreamers... #
She seems to have an endless kind of ability to put herself in
and empathise with different characters and viewpoints.
# What could he do? Should have been a rock star
# But he didn't have the money for a guitar... #
Army Dreamers is a maternal point of view, you know,
you've got this song about young squaddies dying.
And the person singing it, you know, somewhere,
understands what it's like to be a mother and to lose a son.
# Army dreamers
# Oh, what a waste of
# Army dreamers... #
Byron once said of Keats,
"Keats writes about what he imagines.
"I write about what I live."
And most rock'n'roll people
write about their lives in some way,
and Kate Bush is more like Keats,
in that she writes about what she imagines.
# I see the people working
# And see it working for them
# And so I want to join in
# But then I find it hurt me
# Some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap... #
My favourite album by her is The Dreaming,
and I think she produced that one herself.
And that got a lot of criticism.
But I loved it, it was overloaded with textures and tones
and all manner of things.
It's a record that I still can play to this day
and still hear new things.
I mean, obviously, it's not number one on the dance floor,
but then, all music shouldn't be.
Well, seemingly, it's you, holding on to some bloke's ears,
- with something in your mouth, it looks like... Is it a key? - Yeah.
It's a key. Ah-ha!
Well, if you listen to the album, and especially to the song Houdini,
then you'll know all about it.
Well, it's "With a kiss, I'd pass the key."
Do you know who the man is that she's kissing? It's me!
You can only see my right ear, but then again, who wants to see me?
Kate has spent the last 14 months holed up in various studios,
recording her new LP, The Dreaming, and the resultant noises include
helicopter rotor blades, didgeridoos and a chorus of fake sheep.
# Bang goes another kanga on the bonnet of the van... #
But on that track, you employed, I think,
- Percy Edwards to supply the kind of synthesised jungle backing? - Yes.
Well, I knew that in the choruses, we wanted to create a feeling
of the landscape, and obviously there are a lot of Australian animals,
and the sounds are very reminiscent of the environment.
And of course, Percy could come along and give us
a selection of at least 10 different Australian animals.
HE COOS
I'm not sure which song is the one where she's, like, donkey braying!
There's one where she's like, "Hee-haw!"
When I first heard it, I almost had to bend my ears round,
to be able to understand the sounds that were coming at me.
And I found it really...
Again, I was 11 or 12, so I found some of it really scary.
# I must admit
# Just when I think I'm king... #
The direction I'm going in with my art is the way I want to go,
because for me, it's a little bit deeper, it's got more meaning,
it's not so poppy, I suppose.
But of course, maybe that won't be so widely accepted,
especially in the singles chart.
# We got the job sussed
# This shop's shut for business
# The lookout has parked the car but kept the engine running
# Three beeps means trouble's coming... #
She came out with this record that people were just, like,
"What?" They couldn't grasp it.
But the greatest thing that happened was,
after that, The Hounds Of Love,
which was one of her most complete works, was created.
I think, only through pushing through those boundaries
and exploring the deepest recesses of production could she then
come through and create something like The Hounds of Love.
You went away on your own terms to make this LP, didn't you?
Yes, I wanted to make sure that we
got our own studio together,
that was the next move, really.
I spent a lot of time on the last album moving from studio to studio,
and now we've got our own place
and everything is brilliant, it makes such a difference.
When we set up the mastering studio for Hounds Of Love, I think
that really did get rid of the last of the chains that she had,
that she felt she had.
And it did set her free, in a lot of ways.
MUSIC: "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)"
Now, though, a timely burst from a lady who hasn't graced
the turntables with a new record for two years.
It's nice to have her back.
I just remember pulling aside - I was driving -
and I heard it on the radio, in the States.
And she didn't get played a lot on the radio in the States,
until that song.
That really got played a lot.
# It doesn't hurt me
# D'you want to feel how it feels?
# D'you want to know Know that it doesn't hurt me... #
I remember, I had to pull over and listen to it.
Because I had never heard anything like it.
# And if I only could I'd make a deal with God
# And I'd get him to swap our places
# Be running up that road... #
I think the choreography,
the fact that there was suddenly a Kate Bush who was completely
owning, you know, the aspect of dance, even not singing,
you know, she wasn't even lip-syncing, she was just dancing.
On top of that, it was a way of dancing that
was at the time not at all popular.
It wasn't a type of dancing that you would have from, I don't know,
artists like Michael Jackson or Janet Jackson or Madonna,
you had somebody who was bringing in a style of dancing
that was like a marginal way of moving in a modern dance.
# Tell me we both matter, don't we? #
This is, like, one of my all-time favourite songs.
Music is supposed to evoke emotion, you know what I'm saying?
It makes us feel a certain way, you know?
That's what the vibrations are,
it's not stagnant,
it's not just plain or whatever,
every time you listen to it,
it just touches you, strikes a chord.
# And I'd get him to swap our places... #
# Be running up that road, be running up that hill... #
'I was introduced to the music by my Uncle Russell,
'he was kind of like the weirdo of the family,
'he was a skateboarder and all kind of things, so I was'
sixth or seventh grade and I used to ride my bike to school and just listen to it and I just got deeper
and deeper into it, you know, that's one of my biggest musical influences, I love it.
# If I only could Be running up that hill. #
If you look at her work from The Kick Inside
and how it evolves through things like Never For Ever
and stuff like that, into, you know, the zenith, which is
Hounds Of Love for me, you know, it's a beautiful evolution
and the songs are kind of becoming more sophisticated,
even though they've always been sophisticated, even from the start,
they're just developing a kind of calm sophistication.
And I think she just always kept people guessing.
Here with the title track of her bestselling LP,
in the studio at number 18, Kate Bush with The Hounds Of Love.
'It's in the trees! It's coming!'
# When I was a child Running in the night
# Afraid of what might be
# Hiding in the dark Hiding in the streets... #
She starts the song with that quote from Night Of The Demon.
And it's a little bit scary.
# The hounds of love are haunting me
# Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh-ooh
# I've always been a coward
# Ooh ooh ooh ooh... #
It's like this repressed sexuality, so sensual and sexual,
and it's so honest as well, I'm a coward and I'm frightened,
you know, to state "I'm a coward" in the song is quite a brave thing to do, actually.
# Here I go
# It's coming for me through the trees... #
It is like she's on a leash,
it's like the whole song is on a leash and you're tugging it back,
but you know it's just going to escape and burst and run free.
# Take my shoes off and throw them in the lake
# And I'll be... #
I'm convinced that as great as that record sounds,
if you had anyone else sing it, you know,
anyone else try to kind of weave and make it kind of do that thing where
it burns like wildfire and it comes alive, no-one else could do it.
# I found a fox caught by dogs... #
It's incredible, the way she brings this kind of cold,
Arctic atmosphere, it's just like fire, you know?
It's all just like, "Aah!" coming out of her mouth.
# Here I go
# Don't let me go... #
Everything's doubling up now, you've got twice the amount of cellos,
so everything's doubled.
# It's coming for me through the trees... #
The Fairlight synthesiser...
That's the wash, which is what she wrote the song with.
What we had done is, we had set up a pattern in the Fairlight,
put that to tape so she had that pattern to play along with,
and then, she used the Orchestra 5 sound as a wash,
to actually write the song with.
Which is what you hear all the way through,
that kind of washy synthesiser sound that's underneath it all.
Then, all the cellos just dance over the top of it.
Virtually no backing vocals at all.
I think that's the strength of the song,
the fact there is very little to get in the way of that lead vocal.
# And throw them in the lake... #
And now I'm replaying the song in my head. She's like...
# Do you know what I really need Do you know what I really need?
# Need la-la-la-la
# Yay, yo, yay, yo, your love... #
I find it really hard to separate images from the music,
once you know the music is brilliant, and of course,
I associate this image with some of my favourite songs...
..that I know in my life.
# Little light, shining... #
The second half of The Hounds of Love,
that's really where the magic is, for me.
I mean, the first half is a collection of the singles,
almost, isn't it?
But the second half is an incredible sort of series of songs -
And Dream Of Sheep, which is so beautiful.
# I tune into some friendly voices
# Talking 'bout stupid things... #
"I tune into some friendly voices, talking about stupid things
"I can't be left to my imagination
"Let me be weak, let me sleep and dream of sheep."
# Let me be weak... #
I love that lyric.
# Let me sleep and dream of sheep... #
The way it kind of goes the stranger songs, like Waking the Witch
and things like that, where it's just, it's just these odd
little, uncomfortable little musical moments...
ECHOING PIANO AND VOICES
I think The Ninth Wave was the piece of music that affected me
the most when I was little, because it terrified me.
It's about witches and being stuck under ice
and, you know, floating adrift in a sea of nothingness,
and all those kind of dream elements, subconscious themes,
and very kind of English, ancient storytelling.
It seems like, on that piece of music,
she captured that moment between waking and sleeping.
HAUNTING CHORAL VOCALS
I've spent many, many,
many hours listening to that 30 minutes of music,
it's an incredible piece of music,
and I advise anyone who has never heard it to go
and listen to it, because it's one of the great pieces of music.
Creativity comes from the freedom to fail.
And the freedom to fail comes from, you know, experimentation,
and that's what gives something its individuality,
and, you know, I think her courage, which is
the positive way of interpreting it, or bloody-mindedness, which is
the negative, is part of what gives her real value as an artist.
# In this proud land We grew up strong
# We were wanted all along
# I was taught to fight Taught to win
# I never thought I could fail... #
It's extraordinary what that song has been used for,
but I think a lot of people who have got into trouble have attached
themselves to that song, and I think a lot of it is that Kate's
wonderful voice is there in a sort of reassuring and loving way.
And just makes them think that perhaps there is going to be
that type of love out there for them.
# Don't give up
# Cos you have friends
# Don't give up
# You're not the only one... #
The record she did with Peter Gabriel
was one record that saved my life.
That record helped me get sober.
So, she played a big part in my actual downfall and, um,
rebirth, as it were. That record helped me so much.
I never told her that, but it did.
# Don't give up
# Cos I believe there's a place
# There's a place where we belong... #
One of the things that I love about Kate Bush is her absolute ability
to take things, to pluck things that you would never expect to see
on a rock album and put them there and make them work.
# Mm, yes
# Then I'd taken the kiss of seedcake back from his mouth... #
'James Joyce's Ulysses,'
one of the greatest passages
in all of English or Anglo-Irish literature
is Molly Bloom's glorious soliloquy
ending in a sequence of yes's.
Yes, he said, I was a flower of the mountain, yes,
so we're all flowers, a woman's body, yes.
# Mm, yes
# He said I was a flower of the mountain, yes
# But now I've powers over a woman's body... #
It's about embracing the world of the senses,
embracing yourself, embracing sex, embracing love,
embracing the future, embracing all possibility.
# Into the sensual world... #
And it goes all the way back for me to Wuthering Heights.
This is somebody who's not afraid of books.
This is somebody who's not afraid of reading,
somebody who's not afraid of writers
and who's not afraid of translating,
being an intermediary,
being a door between the world of books and the world of rock.
I still remember going to the CD store and buying Sensual World
when I was 16 and the cover
and there's a rose in front of her mouth that has bloomed.
She's got big wide eyes and I remember, you know,
putting it in the shitty car stereo on the way home
and, you know,
and my life was forever changed.
# Oh... #
I really thank Kate because these touchstones like This Woman's Work,
that kind of song is, it's celebrating everything
that's so wonderful about being a woman and being...
nurturing and intuitive and emotional
and gentle and sensual and just like really intimate.
# I should be crying but I just can't let it show... #
People don't put their hearts on the line in that vulnerable way
very much and it's really, as an artist myself, it's helped me
to not be frightened to show all, as much as my vulnerability
as a woman as I can and in that be powerful.
# And all the things that we should have said that we never said
# All the things we should've done that we never did
# All the things that you needed from me
# All the things that you wanted for me... #
It's as if within her voice, there's everything.
Every possible facet of human experience is there
under her surface
and her work as a writer is to constantly draw that out
and not just the particularity of her experience as a female body
but her experience as a person
which is to be prey to all kinds of forces and sensations.
What about your lyrics? Yours are very passionate and provocative.
Do you get inspiration anywhere?
I think it is illusive stuff
but I think really the biggest inspiration is people.
I think people are just so inspiring, they're fascinating
and wonderful and I think, you know, that nearly every idea that
a person has had is probably at some point come from another person.
I think The Red Shoes, without going into too much detail,
is a very personal album.
You know there was a lot of very personal stuff happening
at that time and I think it shows in the music.
I mean, basically a lot of the music on that album
is about break up of relationships.
You know, "I'll come round when you're not in
"and I'll pick up all my things." And all that kind of stuff.
# It's all right, I'll come round when you're not in
# And I'll pick up all my things
# Everything I have I bought with you... #
'It's such a desperate song
'and she really finds a way to convey despair.'
The despair of, you know, missing the person
or a break up that you know will never come back together again.
I don't know quite how to put this but obviously, you know,
you've had a professional/personal relationship with Kate
for a long time
and The Red Shoes was an expression of some of the things
that may have been happening between the two of you
- and yet you were still working together. - That's exactly it.
Well, because the working relationship was never a problem.
We always worked together reasonably well, you know?
We always argue, we always have and we always will, I guess.
I've always argued with Kate, she's always argued with me
but I guess that's just the way it is, you know?
So I feel I'm emotionally involved with it all to a great extent.
Much more so than most people would imagine.
Not only did we have a personal relationship when I worked with her,
I really love her music, I really do.
To the point where I've virtually worked with nobody else
because nobody else comes close.
# Some moments that I've had
# Some moments of pleasure
# I think about us lying
# Lying on a beach somewhere... #
I was just really sad that suddenly someone who was making work
that was accessible to me, suddenly became inaccessible
because, you know, because of circumstances, personal choices
or whatever but I always blamed the critics.
# And I can hear my mother saying
# Every old sock needs an old shoe
# Isn't that a great saying?
# Every old sock needs an old shoe... #
The fact that she took time off to raise her child and disappear
and give Bertie a wonderful life,
the humanity in her is so great and
she wasn't interested in anything except, you know, raising her child
and being happy.
I don't think what Kate Bush did was like a weird thing at all,
to kind of withdraw to bring up a child,
if that's indeed why she did withdraw.
Maybe she just withdrew because she
was sick of the whole bloody lot of them wanting to know about her life
and I can really understand that.
For me to get to get into that creative process,
I have to have a sort of quiet place that I work from
and if I was living the life of, you know,
somebody in the industry as a pop star or whatever,
it's too distracting.
It's too to do with other people's perceptions of who you are
and what's important to me is to be a human being who has a soul
and who hopefully has a sense of who they are,
not who everybody else thinks you are.
# Elvis, are you out there somewhere?
# Looking like a happy man
# In the snow with Rosebud
# And the king of the mountain... #
John Harris, there's been some anticipation over this,
someone even wrote a novel called Waiting For Kate Bush
about the long wait. Has it been worth it?
I think there's probably less anticipation in the real world,
in quote marks, than there is in certain circles of the media.
I think people will get themselves in a tizz about this record
because there's still an element of we are not worthy about Kate Bush.
But deeply eccentric...
It's not, that's the point, it's not eccentric.
You can tell this is someone who's not been near the music business
for 12 years and it sounds like the sort of thing that would blast
from shopping malls in about 1989,
there's a bit of kind of Tears For Fears about it.
What I like it's not self-conscious eccentricity, I think she's making
this record for herself, she's pleasing herself with her music.
MUSIC: "Prelude" by Kate Bush
The Aerial album,
my favourite on that album is actually that song called Prelude.
It's just the sound of some cuckoos
and the sound of a child's voice
and she just manages to combine these very, very prosaic,
pure elements and turn them into magic.
She's always been able to find, let's say the language of nature.
She would be able to make you hear words within, you know,
the sounds that birds would make,
you would actually hear that they're saying something.
Kate Bush makes a record
then you don't hear from her.
And you play the stuff that she's made already
and you listen to it and one day, you are surprised
and she brings out something else and she's been quietly working away
on it for however long she wanted to work on it.
And I love that, I love the willingness to be quiet
until it's time to speak
which is something that she does over and over.
# You're not a langur monkey
# Nor a big brown bear
# You're the wild man... #
50 Words For Snow,
my favourite track on that is where her little son, he sings,
# I am sky. #
You know, that amazing like choral boy pure voice was like,
it was just so lovely to hear the generations coming through
and that they're making music together.
# I am sky... #
I was called by my agent who said,
"Would you like to record a track with Kate Bush?"
To which there is only ever one possible answer.
"As long as it's not me singing."
I said, "She does know I can't sing..
She said, "No, no, it would be voicing and saying words for snow."
Oh, no, it's not, is it?
I just still can't quite believe it says Kate Bush/Stephen Fry.
It's wonderfully atmospheric, isn't it? It's just something about it.
# Drifting
# Two
# Three... #
These phrases and epithets are hers and some of them obviously exist
like whiteout and some of them are just sort of poetic force poetry.
Almost like what Anglo-Saxon poetry is known as a kenning
where you just put things together.
She has a very intense poetic mind.
# Come on, Joe, you've got 32 to go... #
That's what makes it. That voice that comes in.
# Come on, Joe, you've got 32 to go... #
The intention is to tell a story,
to create a sonic world for us, a sonic painting for us to walk into
without having to see her.
She's transcending that.
She's choosing to transcend that and that's a very powerful thing to do.
You don't ever get the sense that
she is making music to pander to anyone.
I think you always get her absolute best attempt at her true vision
whenever you get a Kate Bush record.
The word coming to my mind is national treasure
but that means kind of like an almost dead person, doesn't it?
Or something.
She's become a legend not just because she's been absent
but because she's important to musicians
as much as she's important to the British public.
She's one of those people that has got a muse over her head,
she's got this special way to tap in to the energy and reality of music.
She takes you somewhere else.
You know there are other artists, they're of a genre, aren't they?
And you can sort of jump between them,
I don't think you can do that with her, I think you have to...
fully submerge yourself in...
I was going to say the Bush but I better not.