FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an alternate publicity shot for 2005’s Aerial/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
2005: Iain Shedden (Weekend Australian)
___________
ONE of the most fascinating albums…
from Kate Bush arrived in the form of 2005’s Aerial. This was her first album since 1993’s The Red Shoes. There was this long speculation when she would release another album and whether would ever see material again from her. Gifting the world with the double album in 2005, there was, naturally, an explosion of press interviews! There are some print examples that are really interesting. The one I want to feature today is Iain Shedden’s with the Weekend Australian. I assume the interview was done by phone. Bush spent a bit of time in Australia early in her life. She has a lot of love for the country. There has always been this firm fanbase in Australia (and New Zealand). I am not going to source everything from the Weekend Australian interview. It is great hearing Bush speak about an album that meant an awful lot to her. A fairly new mother (her song, Albert, was born in 1998), one can feel this sense of new beginnings and an artist reborn. A much different artist to the one we hear on The Red Shoes, Aerial is one of Kate Bush’s masterpieces. Iain Shedden was keen to find out more about a beloved artist who returned to the spotlight after twelve years:
“What we have is a 47-year-old singer and writer content with her lot, eager to discuss every aspect of her complex life and brimming with joy at the success of her renaissance album, Aerial, which has had critics -- some of whom were not born when she first took the world by surprise with Wuthering Heights 27 years ago -- gushing about her timeless art.
"Yes, I am happy," she says from her home outside London, where she lives with her partner, guitarist Danny McIntosh, and their son Bertie, 7.
Her tone is light-hearted, salt-of-the-earth friendly, occasionally mischievous and peppered with self-deprecating humour. If this is the Greta Garbo of pop, she has had a crash course in gregariousness.
"I'm in a privileged position to say that I'm very happy," she goes on. "I'm very lucky. I'm even happier now that the album has been received with such ..." She searches for the right phrase. "I have never been so surprised. It's extraordinary. I was really worried that people were going to forget me."
Well, they could hardly have been blamed for that, could they? Taking a 12-year break between albums is unusual. The fickle world of pop demands that you ride the wave of success until it dumps you unceremoniously on your backside.
Bush, on the other hand, decided after her 1993 album The Red Shoes that the music business could take a running jump. Enough with fame; she was going to have a life.
"I was working very hard trying to be an artist," she recalls of her heyday. "Somehow I just wasn't being seen as who I was. I was being mistranslated. It was very frustrating."
So, after 15 years, a handful of albums and with a string of hit singles including Them Heavy People, Sat in Your Lap and Breathing behind her, Bush said goodbye to the charts, the recording studio and the spotlight to devote herself to things that she believed were more real, such as cleaning the house and, eventually, having a child.
Both these subjects are addressed on Aerial. Bertie gets a few mentions and did the artwork that appears on Bush's recent single, King of the Mountain, while domesticity in the shape of a washing machine gets a full cycle on Mrs Bartolozzi.
It's no accident that these and other quality-of-life issues dominate the two CDs that make up Aerial. Bush wrote some of the material for it in the years immediately following her retirement, when she was looking for something more than artistic fulfillment.
It wasn't the writing that took so long, she explains, more the recording.
"I think a lot of people think I spend years writing stuff," she says. "I don't. It's shockingly quick."
WHAT took her so long to make a comeback was combining her home life with the recording process. She tackled the latter in her spare moments, which became less frequent after the birth of Bertie.
"A lot of my friends couldn't carry on working when they had a child," she says. "They either had to get child care or they had to stop working. I feel very privileged that I was able to do both [working and parenting], but I was also very tired.
"It's difficult to do both. I made a conscious decision early on that my son would come first."
Her record company, EMI, fretted as another year went by and Aerial remained a work in progress. Company executives went to visit, hoping to hear it at last, or at least some part of it. Most often they left, disappointed, after an earful of tea and cakes.
Early this year, however, their patience was rewarded. The headline on Kitty Empire's review in British newspaper The Observer was: "Admit it, guys, she's a genius". For Bush the album's release and the positive reaction to it have been a validation of her methods, but the proof came only after months of worrying about how the public would react.
"When I was most anxious was when there was this huge amount of anticipation starting to build about the record and I hadn't actually finished it," she says, laughing. "It's hard enough trying to keep that creative focus without feeling that everybody's banging on the door going, `Where is it?' Mind you, I've got good soundproofing." Now that it's done, she says, the relief is palpable. Hardly surprisingly, after that period of gestation she hasn't been able to listen to Aerial.
"I always put myself under a lot of pressure. It is not an enjoyable process spending 12 years making a record. Lots of it was fun but it wasn't something I intended to take 12 years to make.
"I'm so fed up listening to it, I can't tell you. The sense of relief at actually having it finished ... that was one of the greatest senses of elation, after all that time. There were so many points where I felt, almost in a religious sense, that I wasn't going to have the strength to carry on."
There is a hint of melodrama in her voice as she says this, but she calms herself when I suggest that she should be grateful for the freedom she has to work at her own pace.
"I have a lot of freedom, but I guess what gives me that freedom, what drives me, is to try and make something interesting musically. If I was driven by the desire to be famous and make lots of money, I would try and bring a record out every year."
BY the age of 16, Bush had written enough material to produce albums every year until she was in her 30s. Growing up in a musical family south of London, she devoted herself to music and in particular to composition. She taught herself piano, wrote 200 songs, then waited.
"I just love sitting at the piano," she says. "Just as some people sit with a piece of paper and doodle, I guess I was doing that at the piano. I used to write one song a day, sometimes two.
"But of course it's so much easier at that age. You have a lot less to do."
She jokes that she was so prolific in her teens because she knew she was going to slow down as she got older. In truth, she couldn't help herself. It was something she was born to do.
"Right from when I was quite little ... the first thing I really wanted to do was make a record. I'm quite lucky that that was my heart's desire. There is a reasonable amount of value in that."
An introduction to Pink Floyd's guitarist Dave Gilmour was the breakthrough. He played her songs to EMI and they signed her while she was still at school. She studied dancing and mime, building and cross-pollinating the skills that became apparent so quickly after the release of Wuthering Heights (and its landmark video) in 1978.
Her debut album, The Kick Inside, confirmed that her originality and talent were not confined to screaming "Heathcliff" in the middle of a field, and that underneath the quirky image lay a complex songwriter and performer for whom sex and sensuality were essential components. Girls wanted to be her. Boys wanted to be her really special friend.
She can look back on that pivotal moment of Wuthering Heights with some amusement, but she also recognizes that the song, so different from anything that was happening at the time, at the tail end of the British punk phase, opened the door to a lengthy career.
"It was something I was carried along by," she says. "Like a big wave picked me up."
Bush released an anthology and two more albums after Hounds of Love, but The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993) were relatively unsuccessful commercially. The latter dealt with issues such as the death of her mother, Hannah, and the break-up with her long-term partner, guitarist Del Palmer.
She revisits her mother's death on Aerial in the song A Coral Room, a piano ballad that seeps emotion from every pore.
"It wasn't difficult to write," she says of the piece. "The bit that was difficult was that I did consider not putting it on the record. I wasn't sure how I would feel having it on there."
Now that the album is out and in the charts, there will be some expectation, from her record company as well as her fans, of another one appearing before her 60th birthday. So will she make one?
"I hope so," she says. "It's not meant to be my last work. Of course I'd really like to make another one."
Nor is she ruling out performing again. She has even returned to dancing after a long break.
"This is the first time in years I've had time to do other things, so I've just started again recently. It's something I've always enjoyed, but it doesn't hold the same importance to me any more. That's the thing about dance, it's such a discipline. You can't have too many airs and graces because it's all about the fragility of the body. It's really hard work. Being a dancer for a living ... I've got so much respect for people like that, being so strong."
Bush has other strengths, however. She has withstood the pressures the music industry can impose on artists to do things their way and has made herself happy in the process.
"There were quite a few times where I found the way I was living my life was more ... I thought it had more value than someone who was living the life of a celebrity," she says”.
I really like the interview from the Weekend Australian. We all know that Kate Bush did return to performing. It would take until 2014 for her to come back to the stage for Before the Dawn. As it has almost been ten years since her last album, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow, there will be similar press fascination and questioning when she does release her eleventh studio album. I love all of Kate Bush’s work, though Aerial stands out as…
SUCH a magical album.