FEATURE:
Could You See the Storm Rising?
Kate Bush’s King of the Mountain and Her ‘Return’ with 2005’s Aerial
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I have covered Kate’s Bush’s King of the Mountain…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
in a feature from last year. I was reading an article The Guardian published in September 2005. They were reacting to the announcement that Kate Bush was releasing a new single, King of the Mountain, and a double album, Aerial (though I am not sure we knew it would be a double when the news was announced). It is a bit galling to read how Bush kept being referred to as a recluse or someone who was hiding away:
“She is one of the most reclusive figures in the music business, but next month Kate Bush will break more than a decade of silence by releasing a new single, followed by her first album for 12 years.
Bush, 47, will make up for lost time by unveiling a double album, Aerial, on November 7. Her single, King of the Mountain, was made available for download yesterday, but only in the US and Canada. Her record company, EMI, said it would be available online to British fans by the end of the week. The CD single is released in the shops on October 24.
Long gaps between albums are the stuff of legend in music. Stevie Wonder fans are waiting for A Time 2 Love, his first studio album in 10 years, while Guns N' Roses are still promising fans they will put out their new album next year, a mere 15 years after their last original recording.
Bush's long absence from the charts has only heightened the mystique surrounding the publicity-shy singer since her debut, Wuthering Heights, in 1978, the first solo No 1 hit written by a British woman. The silence since her last album, Red Shoes, in 1993, has even inspired a novel, Waiting for Kate Bush, by John Mendelssohn, about a fan postponing his suicide so he could hear her new record.
Bush, who lives on an island in the Thames in Berkshire and recently bought a clifftop home in south Devon, has been so protective of her privacy that the media did not know she had become a mother for 18 months. Her son, Bertie, now seven, provided the drawing of a king on a mountain for the sleeve of her new single.
"I don't really know why it took so long, other than she took a break, had her child and was getting on with life," an EMI spokesman said.
Bush has proved extremely influential for artists from Madonna to Björk, and even indie rock bands including the Futureheads, who this year had a hit with a cover version of Bush's Hounds of Love”.
I remember the excitement around when King of the Mountain was announced. For Kate Bush fans all around the world, it was an unexpected announcement! It is not quite the case (that Bush) had disappeared after 1993’s The Red Shoes. She was quite busy in 1994 and, until 2005, she was doing the odd thing here and there. The fact she was not releasing albums and promoting them led many to assume she was a recluse and had locked herself away. There is some cheekiness, I think, in making King of the Mountain that lead single. Lyrics about a millionaire hiding away and hoarding junk. Even though the song was, in part, about Elvis Presley, I get some of Bush in the song. Maybe how the media perceived her. I might be over-reading things, but I get this sense of a women (with tongue in cheek) sort of addressing the way she is viewed by some. King of the Mountain was released on 24th October, 2005 (it was the only single from Aerial). The song was first played on 21st September on BBC Radio 2. Written in 1995, I love the fact that the musicians involved had this close connection. Apart from Steve Sanger on drums, you have her former partner and long-time right-hand man Del Palmer on bass. Her then (and current) partner Dan McIntosh on guitar. Her brother, Paddy, provides some additional vocals.
I am going to end with a review for Aerial. There were a few interviews provided (by Bush) when Aerial was released. In pretty much all of them, there was this sense of some mystical creature emerging from the wild after all of these years! In fact, Bush had started a family (her son, Bertie – who inspired a lot of Aerial – was born in 1998) and was working on a double album. Technically, Aerial was a return. I suppose twelve years is a long time. That said, it has almost been a decade since she released 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. Bush never announced her retirement, so we always knew that she would be back at some point. The interviews from 2005 paint a picture of a relatively new mum enjoying domestic life and not missing some of the stress and expectation of the press commitments she had to endure earlier in her career. Coming back to The Guardian, and they were lucky enough to interview her for to promote Aerial:
“Famously, Kate Bush hates interviews - the last was four years ago, the previous one seven years before that. So the prospect of this interrogation, the only one she has agreed to endure in support of Aerial, must fill her with dread. Around us there is evidence of a very regular, family-shaped existence - toys and kiddie books scattered everywhere, a Sony widescreen with a DVD of Shackleton sitting below it. Atop the fireplace hangs a painting called Fishermen by James Southall, a tableau of weather-beaten seadogs wrestling with a rowing boat; it is soon to be familiar as part of the inner artwork of Aerial. Balanced against a wall in the office next door is a replica of the Rosebud sledge burned at the dramatic conclusion of Citizen Kane, as commissioned for the video of Bush's comeback single, King of the Mountain, and brought home as a gift for her seven-year-old son Bertie.
Can she understand why people build these myths around her?
"No," she begins, apprehensively. "No, I can't. Pffff. I can't really."
You once said: "There is a figure that is adored, but I'd question very strongly that it's me."
There is silence. A stare. You did say it ...
"Well supposedly I said that. But in what context did I say it?"
Just talking about fans building up this image of you as some kind of goddess.
"Yes, but I'm not, am I?"
So, do the rumours bug you? That you're some fragile being who's hidden herself away?
"No," she replies. "A lot of the time it doesn't bother me. I suppose I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person and I just find it frustrating that people think that I'm some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world." Her voice notches up in volume. "Y'know, I'm a very strong person and I think that's why actually I find it really infuriating when I read, 'She had a nervous breakdown' or 'She's not very mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature'."
If the completion of Aerial put paid to one set of anxieties for Bush, then its impending release has brought another - not least, a brace of newspaper stories keen to push the "rock's mystery recluse" angle. It seems the more she craves privacy, the more it is threatened. "For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life," she explains. "It's so a part of who I am. It's so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don't know how dishwashers work. For me, that's frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being. Even more so now where you've got this sort of truly silly preoccupation with celebrities. Just because somebody's been in an ad on TV, so what? Who gives a toss?”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
With the immediate, spooky, hypnotic, beautiful and typically Kate Bush King of the Mountain launched into the world, it was actually the last music video to feature her in it. The videos for Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow have either featured other actors or been animated. After twelve years out of the spotlight, the critical celebration that met Aerial put Kate Bush right back in the public consciousness. As we mark sixteen years of Aerial in November, I do wonder whether we will get the same sort of press perception if Bush releases another album. Aerial ranks alongside my favourite albums from her. I especially love its conceptual second disc, A Sky of Honey. Pleasingly, Aerial won a lot of five-star reviews. Rather than this being a reaction to an artist coming back after a long absence, it reflected the astounding quality and visions that run through a hugely compelling double album. This is what The Independent wrote in their review:
“As might be expected of an album which breaks a 12-year silence during which she began to raise a family, there's a core of contented domesticity to Kate Bush's Aerial. It's not just a case of parental bliss - although her affection for "lovely, lovely Bertie" spills over from the courtly song specifically about him, to wash all over the second of this double-album's discs, a song-cycle about creation, art, the natural world and the cycling passage of time.
It's there too in the childhood reminiscence of "A Coral Room", the almost autistic satisfaction of the obsessive-compulsive mathematician fascinated by "Pi" (which affords the opportunity to hear Bush slowly sing vast chunks of the number in question, several dozen digits long - which rather puts singing the telephone directory into the shade), and particularly "Mrs Bartolozzi", a wife, or maybe widow, seeking solace for her absent mate in the dance of their clothes in the washing machine. "I watched them going round and round/ My blouse wrapping itself round your trousers," she observes, slipping into the infantile - "Slooshy sloshy, slooshy sloshy, get that dirty shirty clean" - and alighting periodically upon the zen stillness of the murmured chorus, "washing machine".
The second disc takes us through a relaxing day's stroll in the sunshine, from the sequenced birdsong of the "Prelude", through a pavement artist's attempt to "find the song of the oil and the brush" through serendipity and skill ("That bit there, it was an accident/ But he's so pleased/ It's the best mistake he could make/ And it's my favourite piece"), through the gentle flamenco chamber-jazz "Sunset" and the Laura Veirs-style epiphanic night-time swim in "Nocturn", to her dawn duet with the waking birds that concludes the album with mesmeric waves of synthesiser perked up by brisk banjo runs.
There's a hypnotic undertow running throughout the album, from the gentle reggae lilt of the single "King of the Mountain" and the organ pulses of "Pi" to the minimalist waves of piano and synth in "Prologue". Though oddly, for all its consistency of mood and tone, Aerial is possibly Bush's most musically diverse album, with individual tracks involving, alongside the usual rock-band line-up, such curiosities as bowed viol and spinet, jazz bass, castanets, rhythmic cooing pigeons, and her bizarre attempt to achieve communion with the natural world by aping the dawn chorus. Despite the muttered commentary of Rolf Harris as The Painter, it's a marvellous, complex work which restores Kate Bush to the artistic stature she last possessed around the time of Hounds of Love”.
Ahead of its sixteenth anniversary next month, I wanted to focus on Aerial and its incredible single, King of the Mountain. Causing incredible interest and, frankly, relief in 2005, the thought of knowing Kate Bush was going to release an album was…
SUCH a thrill!