FEATURE:
Letters and Numbers
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Lichfield
Recognising Kate Bush’s Enormous and Ongoing Significance
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I am going to…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2011
source from a couple of articles that I have used before. There are a couple of things that are notable when you think of Kate Bush today. Firstly, the sheer number of social media posts I see every day concerning her music is amazing. Although not surprising, one is stunned to realise how far and wide her music has spread! An artists who is being talked about passionately by people in their teens and twenties, she is someone who is adored by a huge demographic. Even though it is more than a decade since fresh material came from her, her body of work is endlessly being shared and extolled. The second thing that I notice is how Bush is not as prized and honoured as she should be. I have raised this before. I wrote a feature a while back where I asked when Bush would be made a Dame. Whilst some dislike honours like this and feel uncomfortable, I do not think Bush has that issue. She is a CBE, though she is more than deserving of being a Dame. In terms of music awards, she has won her fair share through the year. That said, she has not been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Again, there are artists who hate award shows and any sort of ceremony. Whatever form it takes, I feel the sheer size of her legacy and the popularity she has means she deserves more. We have just started 2022. I look around and can see artists covering her songs; others are definitely influenced by her. In addition to compelling new acts, she is someone who has influenced everyone from Tori Amos to Big Boi.
Regardless of what comes from Bush in the coming years, she is someone who is as relevant now as ever. I have spoken to some people who ask whether Bush is significant now. Does visibility and prolificacy equal relevance and popularity? Look at the adoration Bush and her music received on a daily basis, and one can definitely say she is popular. The fact she is inspiring generations and touching those of all genders, races and walks of life means she is massively relevant! The same is true when it comes to the musical landscape. Not hogging the charts, being played massively on Radio 1 or appearing on the red carpet, it is the fame and modern-day view of celebrity that confuses people. Bush was never like that, nor has she ever sought fame and that sort of exposure. Regardless of whether she does get any further prizes or honours, that takes nothing away from her or the music. Having inspired a few great albums over the past few years, Bush’s influence and important today is huge. I want to start by going back to an article from COMPLEX. In 2020, Brianna Holt wrote about the widespread influence of Kate Bush. She also remarked how her lack of social media activity is refreshing and could account for her popularity:
“For the last three decades, 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. “Kate Bush has always been a typewriter in a renaissance," Boy George explained. "She appeared out of nowhere at the tail end of punk and sort of embodied the punk spirit by just being completely herself. She blew things apart with things like ‘Running Up That Hill’ because it defied the classic logic of pop.”
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.
Music critics often award talent to musicians who effectively create songs that are transformative and albums that generate a different vibe than the previous. In 2011, Kate Bush told Interview Magazine, “My desire was never to be famous. It was to try and create something interesting musically if I could.”
She is highly praised by her peers, too. Big-time artists like St. Vincent and Adele have publicly expressed how Bush’s music influenced their own work. Prince noted her as his favorite lady. Even Tupac was a Kate Bush fan. Big Boi, a longtime stan of “Running up That Hill,” shared that he would listen to the song everyday on his bike ride to and from school. During a phone call earlier this month he told us, “I fell in love with her songwriting and how her songs would tell stories. It was deep. From there she became one of my two favorite artists." The connection he formed to Bush's music grew so deep that he spent a week in England trying to pin her down while he was in town for press meetings.
For fans, it can be quite frustrating to admire someone who is so distant, especially in the digital age. 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”.
It is true that Bush’s output and visibility in the mainstream has dwindled since the 1990s. In 1993, at a particularly stressful and hard time, there was a real need for her to take a step back. It would take until 2005 until another album arrived from her. I want to finish by quoting from a New Yorker feature from 2018.
“In “Under the Ivy,” the music journalist Graeme Thomson’s smart and respectful biography of Bush, from 2010, the author describes how, early on, reactions to Bush often condescended to her as a child of privilege. She was a doctor’s daughter from Kent, raised by an affectionate, mildly oddball family in a rambling old farmhouse (I kept thinking of the Weasleys from the Harry Potter series), where she was kindly listened to and afforded time and space in which to play the piano and write songs. It was a house full of hidden corners and secret-garden nooks, a portal to the imagination almost as good as a magic wardrobe. The family was Catholic, and Kate, the youngest of three, attended convent school; home, meanwhile, was vibrant with the Celtic singing and sayings of her Irish mother. The twin influences of mystical Irishness and Roman Catholicism bequeathed an atticful of imagery to Bush’s songwriting. Her two older brothers, John Carder and Paddy, were early creative collaborators who became lifelong ones, introducing her to prog rock and the pre-Raphaelites, and, in Paddy’s case, playing a startling array of instruments. Her mum and dad loved her songs, even the ripe ones about adolescent sexual longing. “Our father bought a good reel-to-reel tape recorder,” John Carder writes in his book “Kate,” “and we assiduously recorded all her songs, typed out the lyrics, catalogued them and then posted the tapes to ourselves in registered envelopes—the simplest way of preserving copyright.” Later, a college friend of John Carder’s got David Gilmour, the guitarist for Pink Floyd, to come listen to young Kate play at home, and Gilmour, impressed, arranged recording sessions for her at a London studio.
Thomson contends that, at a time when musical camps were more fiercely armored than they are now (remember when people had to choose, absurdly, between punk and disco?), Bush got a bad rap from some music journalists for being a dreamy middle-class girl rather than an angry working-class bloke. There was grumbling about her tweeness, her witchy, unapologetic femininity. “Most of her records,” the jazz critic Richard Cook, writing about Bush in Sounds magazine, complained, “smell of tarot cards, kitchen curtains and lavender pillows.” That said, John Lydon—a.k.a. Johnny Rotten—loved her music. In a BBC documentary about Bush, from 2014, he allows that “a lot of my friends at the time couldn’t bear” Bush’s high-pitched, passionate warbling on “Wuthering Heights” and other early songs. “They just thought it was too much”—and, indeed, Bush is the high priestess of too much. “But that,” Lydon said, “was really what drew me in.”
In the nineties, when Bush’s output slowed and her public appearances dwindled, the British tabloids seized on another archetype for her: she was a “mythical recluse,” as Thomas writes, a rock-and-roll Miss Havisham. It’s a persistently alluring reversal-of-fortune story—the celebrity, especially one who blazed early and prodigiously, fading away, vain and lonely, ideally in a mansion. (See narratives stretching from “Sunset Boulevard” to the 2017 podcast “Looking for Richard Simmons.”)
But her real story doesn’t conform all that well to the fable. She was most productive between 1978 and 1994, when she made seven albums, but in the years since, she’s put out two critically acclaimed albums of original material plus a live album and a collection of some new versions of her old songs. She’s raised a son, Albert, who’s now in his late teens, with her partner, the musician Danny McIntosh. In 2014, she put on “Before the Dawn,” a twenty-two-night residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, in London, that combined theatre, puppetry, film, and music in a spectacle that critics found occasionally ridiculous and genuinely, almost unbearably moving. Tickets for all twenty-two performances sold out within fifteen minutes online”.
Someone who is a national treasure in the U.K. and admired enormously around the world, I do think Kate Bush deserves more awards and honours. Not only has Bush amazed and influenced with her music. Through the years, she has donated to and worked with charities. During the pandemic, she has shown her support for the NHS and commended the frontline workers. That patronage is another reason why Bush should be commended. I have heard no news of any forthcoming honours, though you…
CAN never say never!