FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush was suspended for six hours in a tank of water at Pinewood Studios filming visuals for And Dream of Sheep on The Ninth Wave (for her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn)
2016: Andy Gill (The Independent)
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WHILST the vinyl…
IMAGE CREDIT: Fish People
is quite expensive, I think that every Kate Bush fan should have a copy of Before the Dawn. I have spoken about the live show before. Performed to sell-out audiences in Hammersmith in 2014, it was the first major commitment Bush undertook since 1979’s The Tour of Life. The album release of the residency is a fantastic listen. Credited to The KT Fellowship, it was released on 25th November, 2016 through Bush's label, Fish People. I was not lucky enough to get a ticket to see one of the shows, so the album is a way (sort of) of being in the audience. It sounded like an absolute once-in-a-lifetime experience that I hope she repeats one day. Bush said in interviews how she was nervous about the show and being out there again. Persuaded by her young son Bertie to go back on the stage, Before the Dawn is this hugely exciting and ambitious set that ties together two of her suites of songs. Bush united Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave with Aerial’s A Sky of Honey. In a way, we get a sea and a sky mixing together. The former suite is quite dark and tense, whilst Aerial’s is lighter and nature-embracing. Alongside these suites are songs from other studio albums (no songs from her first four studio albums appeared). You can discover more about the 2014 residency. I have said how there is not a lot of Kate Bush’s live work on streaming sites. It is very rare to come across any live recordings here (if any at all!).
I have also asked whether will get a full set from 1979’s The Tour of Life on vinyl. There is the Live at Hammersmith Odeon VHS and C.D. which includes a set (or most of one)- and we get to see her in full flight. I am not sure whether there will be a vinyl version. That was released in 1994. There would be a call from fans to own The Tour of Life on vinyl. I wonder whether you could have a double-vinyl set with photos and notes about The Tour of Life and transfer the VHS recording to a DVD or Blu-Ray. That would be a treat for fans! Regardless, as we have some form of The Tour of Life on C.D., one cannot gripe too much. I am turning my attention to the Before the Dawn album. Bush conducted interviews around its release. I want to focus on one she gave to Andy Gill at The Independent. I am not sourcing the entire interview. There are sections that I want to bring in:
“Kate Bush and I are chatting about girls. I’m telling her about my new favourite group Let’s Eat Grandma, two 17-year-old girls from Norwich blessed with an exploratory interest in spooky, unusual music. They may not be the only ones, Kate suggests. “I heard this thing where they were saying that young girls are very influential in how language is taken forward,” she says. “They tend to lead the way with new phrases and slang terms.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features
It wasn’t always the case. For decades, girls were effectively second-class citizens of the pop subculture, shadowy companions of ebullient male partners, until things changed towards the end of the Seventies. Punk was one liberation, but in another direction, Kate Bush herself freed female pop from its largely tear-stained, lovelorn constraints, by singing about things like art, philosophy and death, and by giving voice to a huge array of characters beyond the natural worldview of teenage girls.
She certainly brought new language to pop, and has continued to do so throughout her career – one thinks of the inventive feat of her (literal) 50 Words For Snow, and of her musical realisation of 'Pi' to 80 places. And not just human language, either. On Before The Dawn, the new 3CD live album of her extraordinary shows of 2014, there’s a passage in the suite A Sky Of Honey, from 2005’s Aerial, where she imitates the frolicsome chatter of birds.
“I’ve always loved birdsong,” says Kate, “and I suppose that was the starting point for that piece on the record, speculation about whether it’s a language. The key idea was this connection between birdsong and light, that singing seems to be triggered by the breaking of light, and in the absence of light, they stop singing.” She pauses. “Though there’s a few exceptions – nightjars, reed warblers, blackbirds. And of course, the owl!”
In that suite, an artist appreciates the changing light from sunrise through sunset into night, a progress musically evoked in green and golden tones and timbres. It’s balanced in the show by another suite, The Ninth Wave, from 1985’s Hounds of Love, which presents the drifting ruminations of a woman slowly drowning, alone in the ocean at night. The extraordinary staging for the work involved the skeleton ribs of a boat’s hull, a floating buoy, a helicopter, and a Caligari-esque room of odd angularity, while a huge back-projection of a life-jacketed, singing Kate presented her and her crew with one of the production’s more difficult challenges.
“We shot it in a deep water tank at Pinewood Studios,” she explains. “I’d never worked in water before, and we didn’t know, purely from a technical point of view, if we could find a microphone that could cope with being submerged. So a lot of research went into that. Also, lying on your back, it’s a different way to sing, and we weren’t sure we were going to achieve what we wanted, certainly from an audio point of view. What was probably most difficult, particularly on the first day, was that I was in the tank of water for so long that I actually got really cold. Hour by hour, it was becoming more realistic!”
“Sometimes it was frustrating for some of the band, but I genuinely had to spend a lot of time out in the stalls, watching it, so I could check it all works,” she says. “It was like putting a huge jigsaw puzzle together, and it took a long time to get it all put in place. It was probably about 14 months from deciding to do it, to the first night.”
It must have been quite difficult, then, to return to live performance after such a time away from the stage?
“Yes, I was very nervous,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if I would be any good, that was my concern. I knew that I would enjoy putting the show together – in a lot of ways, I approached it as if I was making a really long video, because a lot of my visual work is quite theatrical, so this theatrical work would be quite filmic, it would be a natural progression. But I was very nervous about going onstage and performing. But the response was just beyond anything I could have wished for, every night, the audiences were so excited and so responsive.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Ken McKay/Rex Features
The shows, of course, were a huge success, and fans – especially those unable to acquire tickets – keenly awaited the release of some visual record. But sadly, there are no such plans beyond the new CD package.
“People are surprised that there’s no DVD of the show,” says Kate, “but I’d like to mention this live album that Elton John put out, 17-11-70, which was something that I loved so much. To have an album where you could imagine what the show was, I found that incredibly exciting, and in a way, this live album is almost more representative of what it was like to be at the live show.”
“I really like the idea of work being allowed to continually evolve,” she says. “I’m not sure you’re ever really happy with something you create, you try and do your best, and there’s always certain constraints, whether it’s energy or whatever, but you can only do your best at the time. I just think it’s really great to have situations where you can open it up again if you want to.”
Not that she’s planning any more revisions in the foreseeable future.
“No, I don’t think so,” she says. “I’ve been tied up with this project for such a long time. Now I’m really keen to do something new”.
Few people expected to see Kate Bush back on the stage in a show like Before the Dawn! Whilst I would love to see a new release of The Tour of Life, it is wonderful that we get to hear Before the Dawn on vinyl. One can tell how much Bush and her team worked on the mix and make sure it sounded right. For those who could not get to see her, this is an invaluable way of connecting with and experiencing that performance! I love the interviews she gave in 2016. These are among the most recent ones. Bush indicated that she was doing something new. Her fans would love to her new music from her…
VERY soon.