FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of the video for The Big Sky in 1986
1985: Hot Press
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I am not surprised that…
there are a lot of print interviews available from 1985 concerning Kate Bush. It was the year Hounds of Love arrived; there was a lot of interest in her. That had been the case since Wuthering Heights was released in 1978, although Hounds of Love was her most accomplished album to that point. Whilst there are a lot of great interviews from that time, there are some slightly awkward ones – especially when it came to the U.S. press and one or two interviewers being misinformed and lacking any research! The interview I want to source from today was published in Hot Press in November 1985. Thanks to Reaching Out for providing this invaluable resource. The interviewer’s name does not appear (an anonymous journalist), but the questions are a mixture of slightly ‘tabloid’ and those centred around her work. Bush had to deal with the press all of the time. Some interviews are really good; many more are a little painful to read and see – in the sense that Bush was having to field some ridiculous questions and those not really related to her work at all. I selected the Hot Press interview, as there are some great answers from Bush. She kept composed and dignified throughout the exchange. There are a few sections of the interview that I wanted to highlight:
“Kate Bush is notoriously wary of press scrutiny. She last spoke to Hot Press back in 1978 around the time of the release of Wuthering Heights, her first single, which subsequently raced all the way to the number one spot.
A megastar ever since, she's the kind of artist who gives Press Officers nervous breakdowns. We've sought another audience on numerous occasions in the intervening period, but the idea remained interminably in the pending file, awaiting what La Bush might deem the most appropriate moment. During the three years since the release of her superb fourth album, The Dreaming, we've kept in almost constant contact (Jesus, the phone bills!)...
With the impending launch of the next meisterwerk, Hounds of Love, by the summer of 1985, the logic seemed inescapable. We made the case as often as possible and (sweet relief) Kate was convinced. Not that everything is necessarily hunky dory once the interview has been agreed to in principle: that was August, this is November. No wonder the press office remain nervous and apprehensive until the writer is safely dispatched in a taxi to the artist's Elsham rehearsal hideaway...
It all seems so out of context when you finally confront Kate Bush herself. She's warm and wonderfully friendly. And you can see right away why people have fallen in love with those two huge dimples on her left cheek: the beauty is in the blemishes. She's admirably unaffected, too, making a quick cup of tea herself, and downing two chocolate eclairs without batting an eyelid.
When the tea is finished, we settle down to chew some tape up. This is what we find.
I am sure you are fed up answering this question, but the obvious thing people want to know first is why there was such a long gap between your last album and this one.
"Yeah, it really is the question! I wanted to sort out my environment. I was living in the city, and I wasn't happy working in London studios--so we moved to the country and built and equipped our own studio, which we then recorded everything in. Also, I was taking time to go dancing again, to get back into training. Whenever I make an album I just stop completely, and it's those gaps in between when I can throw myself back into it. And things like learning to drive, going to see a few movies--actually I wanted to go to see people. Just to do those things that you don't get time to do when you are so busy. And I think it was all really beneficial. It really was."
The second side of your new album has been described as a "concept" piece. Was there any resistance on EMI's part to releasing a record with that aspect to it?
"I think if they'd heard demos, if they'd heard about the idea of it being a concept before they actually heard the finished thing, I might have had that problem, yes. But because they were presented with the final thing, with all the songs completed and linked together, and it was finished, I think they were accepting it as music rather than having any preconception of 'concept'--of everyone going 'Ooh, no! That's really Sixties!' It did frighten me a lot, just that word, 'concept'. 'Ooh!' You could feel people shuddering just as you said it. But it is what it is, you can't get away from it.
Obviously on one level The Ninth Wave is about somebody nearly drowning. But I was struck by images which suggested that there could be drugs involved. There's the line in And Dream of Sleep [sic]: "I can't be left to my imagination/Let me be weak..." And then there's the mention of poppies.
"Definitely there is the connection, with the poppies. That imagery wasn't really meant to be drug-orientated, but when you think of poppies you automatically get that sense of terrible drowsiness, and I suppose you do connect it to opium."
As somebody who is involved in making records, you are also involved in creating a product and to an extent, Kate Bush becomes a commodity. How do you feel about that?
"Yes, that is something that does scare me. If you want to make records, videos, you have got to have money, and to get that money you have to have albums that are relatively successful. You have to promote them. And that's where I feel the commodity side comes in, because as soon as the personality seeps into it rather than the work, you're making that person vulnerable to the public. I don't like that. I'd much rather work on albums, videos, and explore films and that, without having to promote them. I find it difficult, I feel false. It's very against what I feel is right.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush directing the video for Hounds of Love in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
"I think sometimes the work speaks much better than the person does. I certainly feel mine does. Because I can spend a lot of time trying to say something, and I don't feel that I am good enough at what I am doing now to really warrant doing it, other than for selling my work. And I think sometimes it can go against the work: the personality can almost taint it."
Can you give an example of that?
"Preconceptions can cause problems, and I think, say some of the press I got a while ago was very flippant. And I felt that that, to a certain extent, did work against what I was trying to do. It created an impression of me that wasn't really what I was, and perhaps gave that impression to people who could have seen me in a different way."
You can't escape the fact that this is the century of mass communication, and the whole way in which the media work is through creating resonances off one another. To me, it's part of the excitement.
"I suppose if we start talking about someone else, I can automatically relate to what you are saying. I am curious about what made Sting write Message in a Bottle. But at the same time I can see things that have happened to other people, where it would have been better if that area of their personality hadn't been aired."
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on the set of the video for The Big Sky in 1986
The initial poster promoting your first album was a close-up shot of you in a leotard. That caused quite a bit of controversy at the time. What's your view, retrospectively, of that?
"I didn't really see it objectively at that time, and I think now, when I see it, it's quite embarassing--but I suppose that's because I'm a long way away from it. I don't think it had too many sexual connotations--I thought it was rather nice at the time."
Is there a very conscious root in English culture in your writing? For example, the Tennyson quote you used to introduce The Ninth Wave. And then there was Oh! England, My Lionheart on the second album.
"My patriotic number! Yes, I think there probably was, moreso than there is now. The Tennyson thing is a bit misleading because rather than that inspiring the b-side, I needed a title for all the pieces and there wasn't any line in the songs that really was right. It needed a title that said something, so I was looking through some books, and I found this quote from Tennyson that I though was perfect, so that was it."
Is most of your reading concentrated on nineteenth-century literature?
"I read very little. I'm really terribly ignorant, just like my politics. As a child, I used to read lots and lots, but I just feel guilty now when I pick up books. I think I should be doing something else. It's really an incredible experience--it's so intimate, just you and the book. And you create so much of it. That's what's so nice about it. You are involved with the effort. And I suppose that's why I don't do it much!"
I suppose I got that impression starting off with "Wuthering Heights".
"Right, well it always affects me. Every book I've read has really affected me. It's that special, you do create a relationship, really. And that was such a huge story...Oscar Wilde was one of my earliest influences--his fairy stories. I could still read one of them-- definitely--and cry. Terribly tragic stuff."
So what about the Irish flavour in your music?
"I feel that strongly, being torn between the Irish and the English blood in me, really. And the Irish influence is definitely very strong. My mother was always playing Irish music, and again, I think when you are really young, things get in and get in deeper because you haven't got as many walls up. I just--it's the same as my mother--I watch her, and when the pipes start playing, 'Yahoo!', you know, everything just lights up and it can be so inspiring. It's just emotional stuff. I think I was really lucky to be given that kind of stimulus. It's really heavy, emotionally--the pipes, they really tear it out of your heart."
But do you listen to Irish traditional music at the moment?
"Yeah, I do. It's great. I love it."
What's your reaction to Ireland?
"It's beautiful, totally beautiful. There are so many different kinds of landscapes and beauty. It's so wonderful just hanging around the coast and watching it change. It's always dramatic, stepping back into the last century. It has a real sense of magic. And the people are so fantastic, so warm, so wistful. I really do like Ireland a lot. It's one of the few places apart from England where I'd ever think of living."
Were you ever north of the border?
"No, never."
Would you like to go?
"Yes, I would."
You've no reservations about it?
"I think everybody that's English has hesitations. You can't help but be conditioned. It happens everywhere, and I would very much like to go over, and certainly without having experienced--to understand the reality of it and not the illusion that's created by people”.
I would encourage people to read the whole interview. 1985 was a year when Bush released the masterpiece of Hounds of Love. She was getting new interest from the U.S. This Hot Press interview would have reached U.S. fans and those that were new to her music. I am not sure what impression they would have got reading the interview! Bush comes across really well. I’m not so sure that the interviewer was asking all of the right questions and keeping it all about Hounds of Love – I suppose that he was attempting to do a sweep of her career and present a broad viewpoint of Bush in terms of her work and personal life. I suppose people do want to know about her loves and personal details, though it always makes for slightly uncomfortable reading. There is a section when she is asked about her long-term relationship with Del Palmer (who has worked with her since the start of her career and still does today). They were pictured together when she promoted Hounds of Love at the London Planetarium . Not that it was the cat being let out of the bag. There were people outside of her circle that knew about the relationship. It was Bush being accompanied by Palmer and not wanting to make a big deal of it. Some in the press were too intrusive about the relationship. Regardless, there is a lot from the Hot Press interview to appreciate – that is why I have spotlighted it. At the peak of her creative and commercial powers, Bush was one of the most in-demand artists in the world (although, with the likes of Madonna and Michael Jackson around and storming the charts, she was not the biggest artist around). One can only imagine the sort of exhaustion Bush felt promoting Hounds of Love! As I always say, she always delivered these wonderful and interesting interviews. The one with Hot Press is another example of…
HOW fascinating and professional she is.