FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Iconic Shots
PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
The ‘Classic in Black’ Shot, 2005 (Trevor Leighton)
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THERE are not that many interviews…
from 2005 with Kate Bush. I wanted to use one, just so that I can give some context to a classic photo of hers. I have used a couple in my interview series I ran a bit back. I am going to return to an interview I have used before so that I can give background to the great shot at the top of this feature. I often associate the best Kate Bush photos with the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Whilst there are fewer images of her available since then, the release of Aerial in 2005 meant that we got a few new photos – 2011’s 50 Words for Snow provided even more. I wonder how many people thought that an album like Aerial would arrive when it did. Or at all. It is a terrific double album (her first) that announced a sort of return to the spotlight. For other albums, Bush has been photographed by John carder Bush (her brother), Guido Harari or another photographer. Even though there were not many images taken of her in 2005, one by Trevor Leighton stands out. Bush looks classic in black. It is a mix between a painted portrait and something candid. Bush, who would have been forty-seven, still looks so young! She looks dignified and strong, yet there is something quite alluring and mysterious about her look. Whilst not as enigmatic and fascinating as Gered Mankowitz’s shot of her in a pink leotard from 1978, this is the (slightly) older artist as radiant and engaging as ever! It is a beautiful photo that did have an outtake or two. The photo that we see was given to the National Portrait Gallery by Leighton.
Small wonder something that is like a work of art should make its way into this feature. Trevor Leighton has taken a few photos of Kate Bush. I am going to return to photographers like Guido Harari and John Carder Bush in future instalments of this series. In the 2005 photo by Treavor Leighton, Bush does look content and relaxed. As a new-ish mother (her son, Bertie, was born in 1998), and with a new album out after twelve years, I guess that there would have been this relief and degree of triumph and accomplishment. You can tell by listening to Aerial that Bush was re-inspired and had rekindled a certain desire and genius. 1993’s The Red Shoes, whilst a great album, does show some fatigue or weaker moments. Perhaps Bush was in need of some rest and time away. Aerial is her at her very best. Related to that incredible shot by Trevor Leighton, there is an interview that Bush conducted with The Guardian that provides some background to Aerial. Bush herself shared a certain public curiosity as to whether she would finish and release a new album:
“This is how 12 years disappear if you're Kate Bush. You release The Red Shoes in 1993, your seventh album in a 15-year career characterised by increasingly ambitious records, ever-lengthening recording schedules and compulsive attention to detail. You are emotionally drained after the death of your mother Hannah but, against the advice of some of your friends, you throw yourself into The Line, the Cross & the Curve, a 45-minute video album released the following year that - despite its merits - you now consider to be "a load of bollocks". You take two years off to recharge your batteries, because you can. In 1996, you write a song called King of the Mountain. You have a bit of a think and take some more time off, similarly, because you can.
Two years later, while pregnant, you write a song about artistic endeavour called An Architect's Dream. You give birth to a boy, Albert, in 1998 and you and your guitarist partner Danny McIntosh find yourselves "completely shattered for a couple of years". You move house and spend months doing it up. You convert the garage into a studio, but being a full-time mother who chooses not to employ a nanny or housekeeper, it's hard to find time to actually work in there. Bit by bit, the ideas come and a notion forms in your mind to make a double album, though you have to adjust to a new working regime of stolen moments as opposed to the 14-hour days of old. Your son begins school and suddenly time opens up and though progress doesn't exactly accelerate ("That's a bit too strong a word"), two years of more concentrated effort later, the album is complete. You look up from the mixing desk and it is 2005.
If the outside world was wondering whether Kate Bush would ever finish her long-awaited album, then it was a feeling shared by its creator. "Oh yeah," she sighs. "I mean, there were so many times I thought, I'll have the album finished this year, definitely, we'll get it out this year. Then there were a couple of years where I thought, I'm never gonna do this. If I could make albums quicker, I'd be on a roll wouldn't I? Everything just seems to take so much time. I don't know why. Time ... evaporates."
There was a story that some EMI execs had come down to see you and you'd said something like: "Here's what I've been working on," and then produced some cakes from your oven. True? "No! I don't know where that came from. I thought that was quite funny actually. It presents me as this homely creature, which is all right, isn't it?"
Even if apocryphal, it's a nugget that reveals something about Bush's relationship with a record label she signed to 30 years ago. For a long time now, she hasn't taken a penny in advances and refuses to play them a note of her works-in-progress. In the latter stages of Aerial's creation, EMI chairman Tony Wadsworth would come down to visit Bush and leave having heard nothing. "We'd just chat and then he'd go away again," Bush says. "We ended up just laughing about it, really."
If the completion of Aerial put paid to one set of anxieties for Bush, then its impending release has brought another - not least, a brace of newspaper stories keen to push the "rock's mystery recluse" angle. It seems the more she craves privacy, the more it is threatened. "For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life," she explains. "It's so a part of who I am. It's so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don't know how dishwashers work. For me, that's frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being. Even more so now where you've got this sort of truly silly preoccupation with celebrities. Just because somebody's been in an ad on TV, so what? Who gives a toss?"
A clock somewhere strikes two and the chipper, ever attentive McIntosh arrives with tea, pizza, avocado with balsamic vinegar and cream cake for afters, only to be playfully admonished by his partner, who protests: "I can't eat all this shit!"
If there is perhaps less mystery to Kate Bush than we might have expected, her music remains reassuringly the same ecstatic alchemy of the humdrum and otherworldly. Recalling the hello-clouds wonder of The Big Sky from 1985's Hounds of Love or the frank paean to menstruation that is Strange Phenomena from her debut, The Kick Inside, Aerial finds Bush marvelling in the magic of the everyday: the wind animating a skirt hanging on a clothes line, the trace of footprints leading into the sea, the indecipherable codes of birdsong.
But the one track on Aerial that best bridges the divide between Bush's domestic and creative existences is the haunting piano ballad Mrs Bartolozzi, in which a housewife character drifts off into a nostalgic reverie while watching clothes entwining in her washer-dryer. It's also the one track set to polarise opinion among listeners, with its eerie, unhinged chorus of "washing machine ... washing machine". Bush acknowledges as much.
"A couple of people who heard it early on," she says, dipping a spoon into her avocado, "they either really liked it or they found it very uncomfortable. I liked the idea of it being a very small subject. Clothes are such a strong part of who a human being is. Y'know, skin cells, the smell. Somebody thought that maybe there'd been this murder going on, I thought that was great. I love the ambiguity".
One of the best photographs taken of Kate Bush, Trevor Leighton’s 2005 portrait is one that draws the eye and provokes a range of responses. As I said, Bush doesn’t seemed to have aged since her earliest career days. They say that a picture paints a thousand words. Trevor Leighton’s mesmeric photo says…
EVEN more than that.