FEATURE:
The Kate Bush Interview Archive
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
1989: Phil Sutcliffe (Q)
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AS it was Kate Bush’s…
yesterday, I am doing more features about her than usual. In the latest part of the interview series, I have found one from Q from 1989. Thanks to this essential site - they are brilliant when it comes to highlighting Bush’s incredible interviews through the years. In future parts, I am keen to go back to 1982. Now, I am in a year when Bush released her sixth studio album, The Sensual World. It is a tremendous album. There were some great interviews conducted around the time. I feel Phil Sutcliffe’s interview is among the best. It is a deep interview that sort of guides us through Bush’s career. I am not going to bring in the whole thing. It is worth selecting quite a few sections:
“Although signed at the tender age of 18, Kate Bush stoutly refused to be "the record company's daughter." She's quietly become her own manager, producer, publisher, and video director, retreating to the strife-free sanctuary of a home studio to agonise over her complex recordings and cautiously contemplate trips to the outside world. Phil Sutcliffe encounters "the shyest megalomaniac you're ever likely to meet".
"It felt like a mission," says Kate Bush. "Even before I'd had a record out I had a tremendous sense of conviction that my instincts were right. You know, *This is it!* There could be no other way.
"I remember so well sitting in an office at EMI with some very important people who were saying that James And The Cold Gun should be the first single. For me this was just *totally* wrong. How could it possibly be anything other than Wuthering Heights? But they were going, Defintely not. Look, you don't understand the market. So we went on saying the same things to one another for a few more minutes -- I was being politely insistent, I usually am in an argument, I'm not good at expressing anger, that's still hard for me.
"Then a guy called Terry Walker, another executive, came in with some papers in his hands and put them on the desk. He looked around, saw me and said, Oh hi Kate, loved the album! Wuthering Heights *definitely* the first single, eh? And he walked out again. If he hadn't come in at that moment, well, I don't know what would have happened. It was so well-timed it was almost as if I'd paid the guy to do it. They obviously thought of me as just a strong-willed girl, but they trusted his opinion."
After Wuthering Heights had spent four weeks at Number 1, these same execs -- most of whom, a contemporary recalls, had groaned "What is *that*?" when they first heard it wailing round the corporate corridors -- began to view this stubborn kid (all five feet three and seven stone of her) with a mixture of guarded respect and superstitious awe. Kate Bush was on her way to taking control of her working life and, as she puts it, becoming "the shyest megalomaniac you're ever likely to meet".
Constantly putting in 15-hour days, she stood up to it because she was in Olympic shape from her dance training. But the shows, two-and-a-half hours long with 17 costume changes, took her to unforgettable depths of fatigue -- such that the 28 nights in Britain and Europe remain the entire concert career of Kate Bush, give or take a Secret Policeman's Ball. "The idea is so unattractive when I think about what the tour took out of me," she says. "I haven't wanted to commit myself since." And, being the overreacher she is, she simply can't contemplate the straightforward band set that suffices for other pop stars.
It was the same with TV. Later that year she conceived a half-hour special for BBC2 with more elaborate set-pieces including a dramatised version of Roy Harper's Another Day with Peter Gabriel. But that was the last time she tried it.
Which left video as her only active visual medium. "They're so cliched and narcissistic," she says. "Most of what I've done makes me cringe, though I liked Army Dreamers, because it was a complete little film, not too grand and not clouding the issue. And Cloudbusting too (featuring Donald Sutherland and the rain-making machine). That's probably the best I've ever done. But Experiment IV was the first one I directed myself. I was so keen to do that because I actually knew I would be making a video while I wrote the song, so I was thinking visually from the start. But then it nearly killed me, the hours it took, directing and acting in it. Two weeks non-stop. It was too much for me..."
Perhaps it's only in the sound studio that she can truly encompass what she strives for. Once Novercia was set up it was clear that, before long, she would be producing herself and, after co-producing her 1980 album Never For Ever with Jon Kelly, the engineer on her first two albums, she was ready. Setting out on The Dreaming, she remarked with tact and a touch of steel that, "Jon wanted to keep working with me, but we discussed it and he realised that it was for the best."
This time round, apart from dancing and running, the panacea was the garden at the house she and Del moved into three years ago in Eltham, Southeast London (brother Jay and family live next door; her parents' home still only half an hour away). "I sometimes I think I might as well just be a brain and a big pair of ears on legs, stuck in front of a mixing desk," she says. "But when I took that break from The Sensual World I really got into gardening. I mean, it's literally a very down-to-earth thing, isn't it? Real air. Away from the artificial light. Very therapeutic."
Another renewable source of inspiration has been exotic instrumentation, usually provided by a visit to Dublin and various members of the staunchly traditional folk troupe, The Chieftains, or by turning to brother Paddy (who specialised in making medieval instruments at the London College of Furniture and will knock out the odd koto or strumento de porco as and when). But for The Sensual World she's leavened the Celtic skirl with a bit of Balkan. She first heard the Trio Bulgarka in '86 and was suitably astonished. A year later it dawned on her that their full-throated harmonies might suit her songs. Connections were made through Joe Boyd of Hannibal Records, their UK label, and Kate flew out to Sofia for an entrancing experience of world music.
"They couldn't speak a word of English and I couldn't speak a word of Bulgarian," she says. "Everything went through translators and it didn't matter at all. Lovely working with women, and especially them, they're very affectionate. We tended to communicate through cuddles rather than words. In fact, we could get on perfectly well without the translators. At one point we were talking away in the studio when the translator walked in and we all shut up because she'd suddenly made us self-conscious about what we were doing." The Trio can be heard on three tracks, including the strikingly unlikely setting of Deeper Understanding, a very modern-world song about an alienated woman and her relationship with her computer.
"This is definitely my most personal, honest album," she says. "And I think it's my most *feminine* album, in that I feel maybe I'm not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man's world -- God, here we go!" She seems to be wary of provoking a heavy debate about feminism. "On The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, particularly from a production standpoint, I wanted to get a lot more weight and power, which I felt was a very male attitude. In some cases it worked very well, but.. . perhaps this time I felt braver as a woman, not trying to do the things that men do in music."
The Fog is a brave song. It co-stars Kate's dad on spoken vocals intoning with fatherly/doctorly reassurance, "Just put your feet down child/'Cos you're all grown-up now".
"I started with the idea of a relationship in deep water and thought I could parallel that with learning to swim, the moment of letting go," she says. "When my dad was teaching me to swim he'd hold both my hands, then say, Now, let go. So I would, then he'd take two paces back and say, Right, swim to me, and I'd be, Oo-er, blub, blub, blerb. But I though it was such a beautiful image of the father and child, all wrapped up in the idea of really loving someone, but letting them go, because that's a part of real love, don't you think, the letting go?"
So it's personal about Kate and her father then. It sounds as though it might be personal about her and Del too.
"Yes, it does, doesn't it?" She laughs, really amused by her professionally evasive reply. "Have you ever watched Woody Allen being interviewed? Obviously his films are very personal and when the interviewer asks him the 'Has this happened to you then?' question, he's all.. ." She cowers back into her chair, crosses and uncrosses her legs, thrashes about like a speared fish. "Then he'll say, Uh, well, no, I'm just acting out a role. It's ironic, but it's much easier to speak about very personal things to lots of people through a song, a poem or a film than it is to confront the world with them through someone asking questions. Maybe you worry because it's going to be indirectly reported."
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
Kate Bush leads a quiet, fairly limited life so her options on subject matter my be relatively restricted. Although she has ventured into political issues with Breathing (nuclear war) and The Dreaming (Aborigine rights), she generally declares her own ignorance and refrains from writing songs that would only prove it. But she will often borrow a story and make it her own -- from books (Wuthering Heights, obviously, and Cloudbusting, from Peter Reich's memoir of his father called A Book Of Dreams), TV (Pull Out The Pin was inspired by a documentary about the Viet Cong), or films (the idea for Get Out Of My House came from The Shining).
The Sensual World is a song that translates the old ache to a different level -- with the invaluable help of James Joyce. "I had a rhythm idea with a synth line I took home to work on one night," she says. "While I was playing it this repeated *Yes* came to me and made me think of Molly Bloom's speech right at the end of Ulysses -- which I *have* actually read all through! I went downstairs and read it again, this unending sentence punctuated with 'yeses', fantastic stuff, and it was uncanny, it fitted the rhythm of my song." (The last lines of Molly Bloom's great stream of consciousness read: "then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.")
Although to Kate "it felt like it was meant to happen", when she applied through "official channels" (presumably the Joyce estate) for permission to use it, she was refused. But she wasn't to be deflected. "I tried to write it like Joyce," she says, smiling in self-mockery. "The rhythm at least I wanted to keep. Obviously I couldn't do his style. It became a song about Molly Bloom, the character, stepping out of the page -- black and white, two-dimensional, you see -- and into the real world, the sensual world. Touching things." She declaims exaggeratedly. "The grass underfoot! The mountain air! I know it sounds corny, but it's about the whole sensual experience, this wonderfully human thing. . ."
And lines like "his spark took life in my hand"?
"Yes, it is rather saucy. But not nearly as sexy as James Joyce." She looks concerned again. "I'd be really worried -- there's nothing I can do about it now because it's all part of the process -- but I would be worried if people felt this ambiguity between sensual and sexual.
"I definitely *became* a person when I left school and suddenly took control of my life," she says. "I felt like that was the first time I'd really been there. Do you.. .? It was the beginning of my life really.
"Now I think I get a tremendous amount of security from my work, through being able to write songs. Though perhaps I'm very insecure except when I'm working. There again I work so much.. . I'll have to think about this. I'll be thinking about it all day now. What I'm looking out for is to let go of being so damned obesessive about work that I just get sucked into it. It's important for me now for there to be some kind of, er, *lightness* about it.
"You know, it's only an album. That is what I keep saying to myself”.
There is a lot to love about the interview. There are a few short interviews around the time of The Sensual World’s release. Q ad Phil Sutcliffe were pretty thorough! Of course, all these years later, she did get the permission from the Joyce estate to use his words on The Sensual World’s title track – Bush renamed it Flower of the Mountain and included it on her 2011 album, Director’s Cut. I will continue with the interview series for as long as I can. I was keen to feature one from 1989, as I don’t think I have spent too much time with The Sensual World and what was happening with Kate Bush around that time. Go and read the full Q interview from 1989. As you will read, it is one that contains…
PLENTY of revelation.