FEATURE: “She Knew Exactly What to Do” Kate Bush’s Babooshka and a Bold Evolution

FEATURE:

 

“She Knew Exactly What to Do”

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush’s Babooshka and a Bold Evolution

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TO defend myself against those who will say…

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush’s music had taken a leap before Babooshka was released as a single; to be fair, I take that point, but this was another big step from an artist who had made strident and significant leaps since The Kick Inside, her debut album, in 1978. The reason I am returning to Bush’s third album, Never for Ever, is that it turns forty on 7th September. I will focus more on the rest of the album a little later down the line, but I wanted to focus on its opening track and second single: the beguiling and bewitching Babooshka. Not too long ago, I penned a feature celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Breathing. This was the first single from Never for Ever, and it was released on 14th April (1980). Although Babooshka does not turn forty until 27th June, I have seen a few social media posts recently concerning Babooshka. There is a cool video – that I cannot see on YouTube – where Bush sings the song with an array of weird backdrops. Her dancing is fantastic, and it has given me a new love for a song that, until recently, I have not played much. I love all of Bush’s work, but I have been listening to other tracks on Never for Ever. Kate Bush has always been masterful when it comes to opening tracks, but I think Babooshka is one of her very best. It gets the album off to a flyer and, when you listen to the track and watch the video, we see this artist in a new light.

The first single from Never for Ever, Breathing, was a political song about a foetus observing nuclear war from inside the womb. Bush, as I have said before, did not dabble too much with political observation too much prior to 1980, and Never for Ever was a big development in terms of lyrical scope and confidence. Kate Bush produced the album alongside Jon Kelly. It was the first time she had co-produced one of her albums – she and Kelly co-produced the On Stage E.P. the year before. Babooshka reached number-two in the Australian charts; it got to number-five in the U.K. How many people could have seen Babooshka coming so soon after her debut album?! Whilst Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside) and Wow were big hits and were/are unlike everything else, Babooshka remains one of Kate Bush’s most immediate and bold songs. Never for Ever is an album, as I will explain at some point, that gets overlooked and not written about in terms it deserves. Breathing is a phenomenal song, and it sort of blows you away with its emotion and heaviness. Army Dreamers, the third single from Never for Ever, was another political number (about young men being led to war); the reason Babooshka gets to me is the vocal delivery, the composition and video. I will explain more in a bit, but here is a bit of information on the song from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia: 

“Song written by Kate Bush. Originally released as a single on 27 June 1980 and subsequently included on the album Never For Ever. According to Kate, the song chronicles a wife's desire to test her husband's loyalty. To do so, she takes on the pseudonym of Babooshka and sends notes to her husband in the guise of a younger woman - something which she fears is the opposite of how her husband currently sees her. In her bitterness and paranoia, Babooshka arranges to meet her husband, who is attracted to the character who reminds him of his wife in earlier times. The relationship is ruined only because of her own paranoia.

Kate performed 'Babooshka' in various European programmes, including Collaro (France), Countdown (Netherlands) and Rock Pop (Germany). Her performance of the song in a Dr. Hook television special remains the first, and is memorable for the costume she is wearing: on her the right side she resembles a staid Victorian lady in mourning dress; on the left side a glittering, liberated young woman in a silvery jumpsuit, with bright lightning-streaks painted down the left side of her face. Her figure is lit so that only the "repressed" side of her costume is visible during the verses of the song, and mainly the "free" side during the choruses”.

I think one of the reasons Babooshka was such a success is that it has the rawness and immediacy of a track like Breathing, but there is a lot of beauty and intrigue. To me, the composition is made by adding Fairlight CMI and balalaika. The balalaika adds a sense of the exotic and foreign, whilst the introduction of the Fairlight was a big revelation. At this point, Kate Bush was becoming firm friends with Peter Gabriel, who owned a Fairlight. She was fascinated by its potential. The breaking glass sound adds something strangely romantic and unique to Bush’s work. She would use the Fairlight extensively from Never for Ever on, but Babooshka is the first time it is really heard and takes her music in a new direction. With terrific backing vocals (by Paddy Bush and Gary Hurst), wonderful electric bass from John Giblin, and Bush commanding at the front, there is such richness and story right through Babooshka. I think Babooshka is one of Bush’s most assured and accomplished vocal performances to that date. She teases and beautifully moves through the verses; portraying so many emotions and bringing the lyrics firmly to life. Prior to Never for Ever, we heard a bit of Bush’s more guttural vocal side; Breathing was the first track where it really came to the fore. Listen to the chorus of Babooshka and that lovely growl and gravel that kicks the chorus right through the gears.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Phillips

After a chaotic 1978 and 1979 – two studio albums, constant promotion, a live tour and live E.P. among Bush’s duties -, she gained more production control on Never for Ever. Her work was becoming broader and more adventurous, and Babooshka is the sound of an artist reborn and truly inspired. Kate Bush talked to Countdown Australia in 1980 and discussed the song in more detail:

“It was really a theme that has fascinated me for some time. It's based on a theme that is often used in folk songs, which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel that perhaps he's not faithful. And there's no real strength in her feelings, it's just more or less paranoia suspicions, and so she starts thinking that she's going to test him, just to see if he's faithful. So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter. And he responds very well to the letter, because as he reads it, he recognises the wife that he had a couple of years ago, who was happy, in the letter. And so he likes it, and she decides to take it even further and get a meeting together to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her. When he meets her, again because she is so similar to his wife, the one that he loves, he's very attracted to her.

Of course she is very annoyed and the break in the song is just throwing the restaurant at him...  (...) The whole idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans and how by our own thinking, spinning around in our own ideas we come up with completely paranoid facts. So in her situation she was in fact suspicious of a man who was doing nothing wrong, he loved her very much indeed. Through her own suspicions and evil thoughts she's really ruining the relationship”.

I love the lyrics and the fact that it is not an ordinary love song or something commercial – something many of Bush’s peers were guilty of. This tale of deceit and suspicion is riveting. The composition sounds very male. Apart from a few higher-pitched notes, there is this lower-pitched vibe. The electric, fretless bass and the backing vocals firmly pushes away from the much more female and ethereal sounds of Bush’s work on The Kick Inside and Lionheart. Bush’s voice, indeed, seems more matured and lower than it did as recently as a year or two before Babooshka came out. It is the video that really takes the song over the top. Prior to Babooshka, Bush had already released these arresting and beautiful videos – Wuthering Heights, The Man with the Child in His Eyes and Breathing among them -, but Babooshka stands as one of my favourite videos from her.

In the video, Bush plays the role of the embittered and more timid wife; dressed in a black veil and standing beside a double bass (which represents her husband). She turns and plays with it, but when the chorus bursts through, Bush is transformed into this almost warrior-like character. The costume is sparse – a mix of the risqué/racing and empowered -, and her eyes are alive and bright. I think eyes, oddly, are part of Bush’s weaponry. Look at how open and expressive they are in the videos for Wuthering Heights and even Them Heavy People (from The Kick Inside; the track was released as a single only in Japan). In Babooshka, Bush’s facial mannerisms and her peerless eyes add their own dimensions and truths. That visual transformation from the verse into the chorus still shocks and amazes to this day. Almost forty years ago, this incredible video was being played, and I can only imagine how people reacted the first time they saw it! Although Bush would write better songs and more memorable videos, I think Babooshka was a bit of a watershed moment. Not only because we get to hear the Fairlight take flight: Babooshka (and the Never for Ever album) found Bush covering new ground and pulling more towards the sort of sound we would hear on The Dreaming (1982). In June, it will be forty years since Babooshka was released as a single – a few months after that, the public received Bush’s marvellous third album. To this very day, Babooshka remains…  

A staggering and truly important moment in her career.

FEATURE: From Gurdjieff to Molly Bloom's Soliloquy: The Literature and Cinema of Kate Bush

FEATURE:

 

From Gurdjieff to Molly Bloom's Soliloquy

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush shot in 1993 whilst filming The Line, The Cross & the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

The Literature and Cinema of Kate Bush

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EVERY article relating to Kate Bush…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and crew checking the rushes for The Line, The Cross & the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

is pretty special and appealing to me. What I try to do when I approach her is to investigate a new angle or something that has not often been covered. Today, though, I want to focus on a theme that has been documented before by others. Although artists through time have sprinkled literary references in their music, one does not really hear too much of it today. Kate Bush is someone who, from her debut album of 1978 (The Kick Inside) was dipping into the pages of classic literature and philosophy alike. Kate Bush, obviously, has a deep passion for literature and the written world and, whilst some artists merely allude to literature in their work, Bush can weave herself. inside these age-old narratives, or simply add a few familiar references here and there. Look at Flower of the Mountain from Director’s Cut – it is a reworking of The Sensual World (from the album of the same name). Flower of the Mountain uses only words taken from Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses. Wuthering Heights, whilst inspired by the Emily Brontë (only) novel of the same name, was actually sparked by Kate Bush catching the last ten-fifteen minutes of a T.V. adaptation. This sort of brings me to the second wonderful strand of Bush’s work: the cinematic and televisual. I will investigate this a bit later but, no lie, I sort of first got hooked on Kate Bush because of the literary sides of her work.

The first song that really opened my eyes was Wuthering Heights. Not only did the video transfix me but, as a child, the fact an artist was referencing a classic work of literature was both strange and intriguing. I am not saying it was an education, but it was a revelation for someone who was more used to listening to songs about love and, as it was the late-1980s, having fun – remember those days?! The first video I saw of hers was for Them Heavy People (both Wuthering Heights and Them Heavy People are from her debut album, The Kick Inside). As Bush was a prolific writer of poetry at school – and she was published at school – and devoured the written word, it is not a shock that she would take a different approach to songwriting compared to her peers. Them Heavy People references Gurdjieff (she also mentions the teachings of Jesus in the song), and I was staggered by the originality of the song. I had never heard of people like George Gurdjieff – who was a was a mystic, philosopher, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent -, and I have actually been compelled to investigate him (and others) down the line based on Kate Bush’s words. Whether she was merely nodding to philosophy in Them Heavy People or transposing herself into the ballad of Lizzie Wan - the heroine (called variously Lizie, Rosie or Lucy) is pregnant with her brother's child. Her brother murders her. He tries to pass off the blood as that of some animal he had killed (his greyhound, his falcon, his horse), but in the end must admit that he murdered her. He sets sail in a ship, never to return – in The Kick Inside, Bush was using literature and tales of all kinds to dazzling effect from the start – all the more impressive considering she was a teenager when The Kick Inside was released.

I am going to brings in a few articles to illustrate how literature and cinema have been key focuses for Bush through her career but, as Never for Ever is for forty and September and Hounds of Love thirty-five (also in September), both these albums once more take us inside literature and the written word. The Infant Kiss from Never for Ever is the story of a governess who is frightened by adult feelings she has for a young male; it was inspired by the 1961 film, The Innocents which, in turn, was inspired by Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. A case of Bush combining literature and cinema in one song! Film was passionately on her mind when she wrote The Wedding List, which draws François Truffaut's 1968 film, The Bride Wore Black. Delius (Song of Summer) was inspired by the 1968 Ken Russell T.V.-movie, Song of Summer, which portrays the last years of the life of English composer Frederick Delius. Hounds of Love’s Cloudbusting was inspired by the 1973 memoir, A Book of Dreams, which Bush read and found deeply affecting. The song is about the close relationship between psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Reich, and his young son, Peter, told from the point of view of the mature Peter. It tells of the boy's memories of his life with Reich on their family farm where the two spent time ‘cloudbusting’: a rain-making process which involved using a machine designed and built by Reich – a machine called a cloudbuster – to point at the sky.

The first article that I want to draw from takes us back to her debut single: the beguiling Wuthering Heights. I never thought about the song’s video and Bush’s movement too much and how her physical interpretation of the song takes the novel to new places. Although one cannot ignore Robin Kovac and the important role she played in helping to choreograph the video, it is Bush’s transfixing movements and facial gestures that blend both the original novel with the BBC T.V. adaptation of Wuthering Heights into Bush’s work:  

“If you haven’t watched them yet, be prepared to be hypnotized because Kate’s body movement are not easy to forget. In both videos, the performance is expressive and theatrical both in the scenes, in the colors and in the eye-catching, sinuous movements. These two videos put into perspective her well versatility  and innovation as an artist.

Besides acknowledging her remarkable voice, we need to add that she writes, composes and choreographs most of her songs, creating multidisciplinary and intertwined works of art and  performances. Bush defines herself as  “the shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet” and surely she was not supposed to be forgotten as she published  the most literary hit single in history. Wuthering Heights was the catalyst of an incredible career in the music industry and, in hindsight, she was right to insist for it to be her first release despite pushback from her record label; it gained her the title of first female performer to ever have a self-written number 1 hit in the U.K.

PHOTO CREDIT: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images

Bronte’s book Wuthering Heights is a traditional Victorian realist novel mixing an accurate realistic depiction of setting, language and values of the Yorkshire moors with the ghost story genre typically associated with the “Heights” and the wild nature of the moors that Bush’s recalls in the song with “Out on the wiley, windy moors, we'd roll and fall in green”. The ghosts belonged geographically and historically to the moors and their folklore. The supernatural was still widely believed by lower classes, making ghosts an element that added to the realism rather than turn it into simple “fantasy”. Moreover, Catherine’s ghost after death allows the love story between her and Heathcliff to shift to a deeper level; a spiritual spiritual love”.

PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

One fascinating and hugely detailed article I will source from a few times talks about the two different videos for Wuthering Heights and their different styles. The U.K. version features Bush in a white dress, dancing in the mist, her eyes wide. The Americans found this video a bit out-there and strange. There are interesting observations as to how the white and red dress versions differ, and the cinematic language and techniques employed:

“The red dress video is overwhelming, shot in 4:3 and comprised almost entirely of medium shots to accentuate the visual language coming from the entirety of Bush’s body. Where the white dress video uses flashier techniques to evoke a very specific luminescent feeling, here the cinema is coming completely from her interpretive dance, as she uses the entirety of her body as sign language to emphasize the lyrical and tonal content of the song. The dance is note for note the same as the one in the white dress video, but the camera almost never pulls away here beyond the occasional close-up shot of Bush’s own facial acting, which in and of itself is also presenting the narrative of the song through her expressive, maximalist acting.

The video evokes an almost mythic, idealized England of deep greens, where ghosts and ghouls roamed the land alongside the living. It’s a land of beautiful old gardens, and cottages (much like the one she grew up in), but the beauty is unnerved by a cerebral pull towards death, and in “Wuthering Heights,” that very nature is in the soul of the video. It’s set in an old forest, intensely green, but beset with fog, and Bush breaks the image with her stark, loud crimson dress. The wider framing allows us to see exactly what she’s wearing and how she moves. The medium lensing is reminiscent of many of Jacques Rivette’s high fashion pictures like Duelle, Noroit, and ironically enough his own adaptation of Wuthering Heights, where the outfit was always presented in full from head to toe and worked as an extension of the characters”.

The sublime way Bush paired dancing to music not only captivated the viewers and sent them into a dream world; it also is interesting to see how Bush translated her studio songs into videos – so many new emotional and visual elements come to the surface. This is true of all her songs, but I have extra fondness and attention for those tracks where she dipped into literature and cinema – sometimes both were combined in the song number. This fascinating article details how gothic horror films, especially, were a source of influence:

“Movies – specifically gothic horror movies – have had an acknowledged influence on Bush’s back catalogue. ‘Hammer Horror’, named after the British production company, tells of a death and subsequent haunting on the film set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. One of her most unnerving tracks, ‘Waking the Witch’ from Hounds of Love, imagines the drowning of a woman accused of sorcery and seems indebted to Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968). Sutherland was cast in the ‘Cloudbusting’ video following his appearance in Don’t Look Now (1973), and she borrowed the choral section of ‘Hello Earth’ – the Georgian folk song ‘Tsin Tskaro’ – from Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu (1979).

We’re dusting off our vinyls to revisit some of the gothic highlights from Bush’s remarkable career, and explore the films that helped inspire them”.

I want to quote from the aforementioned article. The writer, Alex Davidson, mentions a few of Bush’s tracks inspired by cinema and how she adapted the original source in her music:

“The Red Shoes (1948) – inspired ‘The Red Shoes’, available on The Red Shoes (1993):

The film

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s visually ravishing Technicolor masterpiece, a young ballet dancer is torn between the demands of love and art.

The song

Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes didn’t just inspire a Kate Bush song (the highlight of the eponymous album). It heavily influenced her featurette The Line, the Cross and the Curve (1993), directed by Bush and featuring Miranda Richardson as a monobrowed ballerina who ensnares poor Kate into putting on her red shoes, dooming her to dance forever, and Lindsay Kemp in the Robert Helpmann role of the ambiguous cobbler. Bush, rather unfairly, later dismissed it as a “load of old bollocks”.

I will actually spend a bit of time mentioning Bush’s biggest directorial challenge with The Line, the Cross and the Curve later, but it is clear that The Red Shoes was hugely important to Bush.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 2011’s Director’s Cut/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

“Night of the Demon (1957) – inspired ‘Hounds of Love’ from Hounds of Love (1985)

The film

A sceptical American doctor comes to England to investigate a satanic cult who may be responsible for a murder – but could he be the next victim?

The song

“It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” Although this classic line is shouted in fear when the demon is spotted approaching, Bush transforms the fearful cry into an excited exclamation of the daunting thrill of falling in love. The music video, directed by Bush herself, was inspired by another film – Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935)”.

“The Shining (1980) – inspired ‘Get Out of My House’, available on The Dreaming (1982)

The film

An aspiring author works as the winter caretaker at the Overlook hotel with his family, but murderous insanity begins to take hold.

The song

The final song on Bush’s initially misunderstood fourth album is as frightening and puzzling as the book and film that inspired it. Borrowing the themes of intruding evil (“I hear the lift descending, I hear it hit the landing”) and a terrified woman in peril, it’s one of her most brilliant and unsettling songs”.

Thinking about a song like Get Out of My House…and it kind of makes me sad a video wasn’t made from it – one can only imagine what Bush could have done! The same can be said for another evocative song on The Dreaming, Houdini. There are these album tracks that almost begged for videos; a few lost examples are James and the Cold Gun (The Kick Inside); Kashka from Baghdad (Lionheart); The Wedding List (Never for Ever; though she did make a ‘video’ for her 1979 Christmas special); The Ninth Wave (the suite on songs on Hounds of Love’s second side was never fully adapted to film; though Bush did film a video for And Dream of Sheep for 2014’s Before the Dawn); Heads We're Dancing (The Red Shoes); Mrs. Bartolozzi  and How to Be Invisible (Aerial).

Into the 1980s, Bush dove more and more into cinema; some of her most arresting and memorable videos were more short films than conventional videos. Willow Maclay talks about Bush’s video output in the 1980s in fascinating details. She makes reference to Breathing. The song turned forty earlier this month – the album it is from, Never for Ever, has a big anniversary later this year:

“In the video for “Breathing,” Bush represents a fetus, begging and pleading to be given a chance to live and be with her mother in the outside world in the wake of nuclear annihilation. It’s a song that has deep ties to maternity, childbirth, and pregnancy, and when compared with the majority macho considerations of science fiction, it becomes something complex and unique within the genre. The video is matter-of-fact in its simplicity, but deeply moving in what the images convey about the lyrics. Once again, it’s mostly shot on a soundstage, where Bush is inside of a plastic orb, with deep amber lighting underneath her frail frame. She’s wearing a sheer outfit with white trim to portray the relative innocence of the fetus, and she spends the majority of the video either in the fetal position or pushing the orb back and forth to represent the kicking or pushing a mother may feel while pregnant. The words “Breathing my mother in” are a gently affecting and deeply harrowing sentiment when set against the context of nuclear war, and the video becomes a barrage of dissonant images.

Our greatest possibility for love (giving someone life) and our greatest possible evil (the nuclear weapon) collide to create a pure statement on the human condition. When the mother’s water eventually breaks and Bush leaves the womb, what follows is a slow-motion dip into experimental imagery of one girl, bathed in shadow, peaking out from underneath a cloudy image reaching towards the reds, oranges, and bright lights of what she hopes will be a welcoming world. Only here she’s greeted with an atomic explosion that sinks into the earth in the shape of Kate Bush’s silhouette”.

I just want to quote the final section from Maclay’s article about Bush and her cinema of sound, where she makes an interesting final observation: how Bush’s body manages to project cinematic images:

“Kate Bush’s music video library is epochal, constantly rewarding in its zealous fusion of artistic forms, and her fundamental understanding that cinema, movement and dance are intertwined. When watching feature films, we tend to point out whenever a scene has great music accompanying it, whether it’s Claire Denis’ use of “The Rhythm of the Night” in the disco denouement of Beau Travail or the montage set to “Layla” in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but why are music videos so vastly ignored when we canonize movies? If there’s to be a music video canon, then it’s important to understand what makes a music video cinema in the first place. Through dance, rhythm, and movement, music videos truly find their identity in the lexicon of cinema, and with Kate Bush in particular, she immerses her entire body into that very idea. Stop Making Sense is widely considered the greatest concert film of all time, thanks in part to Jonathan Demme’s understanding of rhythm and how he captured the jittery quality of David Byrne’s dancing. If the same can be extended to the work of music videos, then the entire world of images bursting out of Bush’s body time and time again must be holy and it must be considered cinema”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Rasic/Getty Images

I am not going to take a chronological approach to Bush’s songs and how they connect with cinema and literature but, as I am discussing the subject of Bush and a cinema of sound, I found another brilliant article whilst researching. DAZED discuss how Bush approached adapting a film or piece of cinema into her music/videos:

“Discussing her approach to adaptation, Bush would say that “whenever I base something on a book or film I don’t take a direct copy. I’ll put it through my personal experiences, and in some cases it becomes a very strange mixture of complete fiction and very, very personal fears within me.” Her unique method of interpretation evolved over the years, initially adapting from film to song, then sometimes adapting the same song back to a new form of film. Eventually, she was being asked to write music for specific segments of films. Bush also expressed a desire to create forms within the film medium that did not yet exist, like shorter films built around music she composed for a specific filmic purpose. In the past, Bush explained how songwriting naturally brings visual concepts to her because it requires imagining the perspective, place and atmosphere that the song’s character finds themselves in at the time”

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush looking on intently whilst directing/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Although, up until Hounds of Love in 1985, Bush was working with other directors, she definitely wanted to have more direction regarding her videos. Hounds of Love’s title track saw Bush marry performance with directing – where she crafted her own visual aesthetic and narrative style:

“Hounds of Love, Bush’s most acclaimed album, was created in a studio she built to allow herself maximum freedom with her music’s production. The newfound control over she was able to exert over her art was mirrored by a heightened level of involvement with her videos: the clip for the album’s enduring classic title track was also her first self-directed music video. The video is an homage to Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, while the song opens with a quote from Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 horror film Night of the Demon: “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!”

Meanwhile, the poignant “Cloudbusting” was made in collaboration with one of her favourite filmmakers, Terry Gilliam, and his team. Time and money limits on videos led to Bush’s continual frustration with the end results, but regardless of their outcome, she said that “what I really like about videos is that I’m working with film. It gives me the chance to get in there and learn about making films, and it’s tremendously useful for me, because one day I might like to make films myself.” Increasingly, she wished to be behind the camera rather than in front, exploring the relationship between music and image. She even developed specific ideas, such as making the second side of Hounds of Love into a half-hour film integrating music with visuals. “When I was writing it, I was really thinking visually,” she said”

Some might saw all artists write songs from a visual perspective, though how many artists reference cinema so broadly and consistently? How many artists can create such diverse and rich videos time and time again? I think Kate Bush is in her own league and world in that sense. I am going to end with Bush directing and turning her hand to film so, before I come back to that, I want to return to literature and how Bush managed to blend some truly incredible works with her own unique and spectacular way with words. I have not really talked too much about The Sensual World (from the 1989 album of the same name). In 2018, The Opiate discussed the literary references in this song:

“The album that Bush would choose to close out the 80s–1989’s The Sensual World–with is, what’s more, a very deliberate homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses (we will forgive her this because she’s not a white man), rounding out a decade in which she herself was cast in the novel of her own extravagant, laden-with-semiotics videos. In fact, a video collection just for the album would be released to tie together all the Ulysses-oriented motifs. That Bush was given no choice but to write her own interpretation of Molly Bloom’s illustrious soliloquy (thanks to Joyce’s non-avant garde Estate refusing to let her use the original for the song) only further gave her listeners insight into just how much a woman of letters she herself is. Being that the record was the most unapologetically “female” of Bush’s career, it only made sense to centralize the theme of the content around the most sensual of all women, Bloom”.

“It only takes two lines for Bush to deftly rewrite the sentiment as, “He said, ‘I was a flower of the mountain, yes/But now I’ve powers o’er a woman’s body, yes.'” Flush with the evocativeness that is a sensual woman, the title track remains one of Bush’s most redolent, particularly when paired with the video in which she takes on the persona of this more contemporary incarnation of Bloom, cavorting through the woods with that karate-tinged choreography of hers in a velvet, Shakespeare-approved frock. Not one for devoting something entirely to Joyce, Bush also makes room to allude to Romantic poet William Blake with the line, “And then our arrows of desire rewrite the speech, mmh, yes.” Appropriate, considering how many other writers’ speech Bush has managed to rework as her own”.

It is clear that the heroes and heroes in literature and film gave Bush a stimulus that was missing from the music she grew up listening to; a more fascinating take on the world, and a much richer vein of inspiration:

“…She is not, after all, the girl who asked, “Do I look for those millionaires like a Machiavellian girl would?/When I could wear a sunset, mmh, yes,” so much as a woman very much in the vein of one of the Brontë sisters’ or Austen’s upright, endlessly noble characters. As such, she will not put out work unless it is itself as literary as the novels and poems she so admires. Which is precisely why she once said of the songwriting process, “It’s hard to find something that feels sincere. The more electronic pop music becomes, the harder it is to say meaningful things about relationships, especially since the same things are being said so trivially in pop. Pop is a trivial art form. I want to say things clearly and somehow be compassionate with all this technology.” That she has, that she has”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the video for Running Up That Hill in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

I have missed out a few missing literary references, and I have been aided by an article from The Irish Times. When they were writing about Bush’s book of lyrics, How to Be Invisible, in 2018, they mentioned a couple of literary references that many might have missed – either because the song is lesser-known, or the literary source is a little obscure:

“One literary character that dwells in her second album, Lionheart, is Peter Pan. The children’s character appears in two songs on the album. On one track, In Search of Peter Pan, she sings about a boy who dreams of becoming an astronaut and finding the boy who never grew up. On a promo cassette tape from the time, Bush said the book was “an absolutely amazing observation on paternal attitudes and the relationships between the parents”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for The Sensual World/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

In Search of Peter Pan is not the only place on the album that the children’s character appears. He also features in Oh England My Lionheart, a track on which Bush sings about the things she associates with England, which include Peter Pan and Shakespeare.

The second side of Hounds of Love, called The Ninth Wave, is a concept album that tells the story of a woman lost at sea. The story is firmly Bush’s own work, and moves through different stages of a woman’s experience of being stranded in the water.

While the story is her own, the title comes from a poem by Alfred Tennyson. The Coming of Arthur, from Idylls of the King, provided Bush with the name for the conceptual side of the album. She even features the quote on the back of the album, which reads: “Wave after wave, each mightier than the last / ‘Til last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep / And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged / Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame”.

I want to end by talking about the most explicit and personal marriage of music and cinema for Kate Bush. Bush was not exactly a stranger to directing videos, as she directed eight videos before The Line, the Cross & the Curve in 1993. Although the film gained some harsh reviews – and Bush later dismissed it as not one of her finest moments -, that desire to direct and to create film was instilled in Bush as a youngster. As this article details, Bush pioneered new ways of combining music and movement right from the earliest days of her career:

“From the very beginning, Kate Bush’s career has been defined by her pioneering synthesis of music and movement. Signed to EMI at just 16, she spent two years honing her craft by enrolling in dance and mime lessons with Bowie collaborator Lindsay Kemp before releasing any music at all; on her first (and only) tour she instructed her sound technicians to develop the first ever microphone headset so she could dance and sing simultaneously, changing the possibilities of live concert performance forever.

I have a lot of affection and respect for The Line, the Cross & the Curve, and it contains many beautiful moments. Before 1993, there had not been too many causes of artists producing a suite of songs into a short film – rather than doing single music videos. Bush felt that so many artists were not using videos to truly express themselves and use dance and movement in an interesting and bold way:

The Cross was produced in support of 1993 LP The Red Shoes to little fanfare: Bush herself lamented the rushed production schedule and limited budget, later hilariously deeming the film “a load of bollocks”. Partly due to her implicit disowning of the project and the 13-year career hiatus she took immediately after its release, the film sunk into obscurity, becoming a collector’s item for only the most devoted acolyte. Rare copies of the original VHS still fetch hundreds of dollars on fan forums and resale sites.

Now uploaded to YouTube, everyone can experience this delightfully bizarre trip through Bush’s singular imagination. Beginning in a rehearsal studio, she dances in a straitjacket and plays with a yo-yo to Rubberband Girl, before a power cut leads to a meeting with Miranda Richardson in ballerina drag, gifting her a pair of cursed dancing shoes. A fantasy sequence follows that includes Lindsay Kemp dancing on skulls to an Irish jig, Bush rolling around in fire as her legs flail wildly independent of her body, a procession through a snowstorm flanked by angels, and a Caribbean bacchanal in which she stamps across a cornucopia of fruit.

It’s also a remarkable testament to the power of dance to explore our most primordial frustrations: sex, death, desire, and most movingly here, Bush’s grief. Only two years before, her mother Hannah had passed away suddenly, and along with the recent death of her guitarist and a romantic break-up with a close collaborator, she used both album and film as a means of processing these losses — most movingly in the sequence that accompanies Lily, as Bush rests her head in the lap of a kindly looking old woman.

So too in The Cross the most powerful sequence is the most simple: Bush pirouetting slowly as if flying through outer space, singing album highlight Moments of Pleasure directly to camera with a sheet of silk billowing behind her. While her lyrics are known for their esoteric references, here the song itself is an uncharacteristically straightforward exploration of heartache and bereavement: “Just being alive / It can really hurt / And these moments given / Are a gift from time”. Whirling gently, she begins to smile, as if the sheer joy of moving her body is giving her the impetus to carry on. Despite its flaws, Bush’s belief in the therapeutic power of dance gives the film a memorable resonance, and it’s worth watching merely as a rare insight into the interior life of a fiercely private icon”.

I have not even mentioned the almost cinematic elements of her 1979 Tour of Life and her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn, and how Bush’s live sets and performances took her from the realms of the confined and traditional and into an almost filmic dimension. I think The Line, the Cross & the Curve, whilst flawed, inspired artists like Beyoncé. Look at an album like Lemonade and how Beyoncé made a series of videos/films for that album; taking Lemonade from the audio to the visual in a very stylish and cinematic way. I think we can trace a line from Beyoncé back to Kate Bush. This interview Kate Bush conducted with FADER in 2016 brings up The Line, the Cross & the Curve, but we also learn how Bush embodied different personas and characters in her videos. Whereas so many artists play themselves in every video, Bush inhabited these different roles:

“She’d shift from playing a steely seductive warrior in “Babooshka” to donning military fatigues for “Army Dreamers,” as at ease with folklorish fantasy as post-Vietnam social commentary. In the ultra-conservative Thatcher/Reagan era of the 1980s, her embrace of theatrics made Bush a beacon of individuality for LGBTQ people, art freaks, and anyone who didn’t like their culture served straight-up. Three decades on, our political leaders still hate what is “other,” which often makes watching a Kate Bush video feel like an affirming few minutes of self-care.

Contemporary artists who’ve probably done just that include FKA twigs, Solange, and Christine and The Queens, all of whom don’t use movement as an adjunct to their music, but as a core expression in itself.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Miranda Richardson in The Line, The Cross & The Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

For me, one of your most impressive visual works is The Line, The Cross, & The Curve.

Oh!

These days, artists like Beyoncé are releasing full-length films to accompany their albums, but you were perhaps the first. What made you see the potential of that medium?

I really love film, I think it's just a fantastic art form. I started to really enjoy making the visual accompaniments to the tracks — it was a very challenging and exciting [evolution] from making the music to then making visuals to go with it. And I suppose in some ways it felt like a sort of natural progression to try and make something that was more like a film.

The whole process has gradually evolved for me, where I've become able to creatively work in these different mediums. Initially, I was really somebody who wrote songs, and then it developed into becoming more involved in all the processes that went with that”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the make-up chair during the filming of The Line, The Cross & the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Whilst albums like Aerial (2005) and 50 Words for Snow (2011) contained fewer literary and cinematic references compared to The Kick Inside (1978) – The Red Shoes (1993), it is clear that, through every stage of her career, the pull of literature and the diversity of cinema have spoken to Bush as loudly as affairs of the heart and the allure of passion and sex. Here is an artist who, even when she was writing about attraction and desire, was doing so in a much more literary, beautiful and cinematic way. From Wuthering Heights, through to Hounds of Love, through to The Sensual World, the always-inspiring and unique Kate Bush has taken us…

INTO her world.