FEATURE:
A Renewed, Reborn Artist
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Kate Bush’s Aerial at Seventeen
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BECAUSE Kate Bush’s…
eighth studio album, Aerial, is seventeen on 7th November, I am writing a few features about the double album. I will concentrate on various songs from it. To start off, this feature is about how Bush returned with this wonderful record. I have talked about 1993’s The Red Shoes and how this was the last album before Bush took a well-earned break from music. That album is also celebrating an anniversary next month. I have just written my final features about that too. When it comes to Aerial, I want to explore how it is Kate Bush in a renewed and rejuvenated headspace. She would go on to release two albums in 2011 – Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow (whose anniversary it is next month) – and come back to the stage in 2014 for Before the Dawn. It was a creative and fertile period where Bush released some of her best work. Work on Aerial started in the 1990s, but I think it was necessary for her to take the time to create an album that was right and as good as could be. She had her son, Bertie, in 1998. I think prioritising personal life and creating some space was pivotal. I think, if she tried to release an album too soon after The Red Shoes, it might have meant she’d burn out or quit. You can hear this refreshed and reinspired artist on Aerial. Similar to Hounds of Love in 1985, Aerial has two distinct sides.
The first, A Sea of Honey, has a selection of songs that mix fantasy, the personal and traditional ‘Kate Bush’. Bertie is a paen to her new son, A Coral Room references her late mother, and King of the Mountain seems to be autobiographical. The second side, A Sky of Honey, is the course of a summer’s day. One of Kate Bush’s most accomplished pieces of music, there is this sense of wonder and revival that runs through. Whereas there is some tension and fatigue on The Red Shoes, Aerial always sounds like it is from an artist starting again. A Sky of Honey is such a remarkable work that you listen to and are engrossed by. I wanted to bring in an interview from 2005. This was a big moment for the media and Kate Bush fans. There was this doubt whether she would return. I guess she would always release music, but would there ever be an album, and what would it sound like? Nobody was expecting a double album, not least one that is among her very best work. Aerial’s greatest strength is the distance between albums. A very different sounding and feeling album, this is almost like Bush pushing away from the past and taking more control. Bush set up her own label, Fish People, in 2011. A year where she was no longer reliant on EMI and tied to the label (even though there was still some relationship with them). Aerial was the first album where Bush was starting to enter this phase of her career where her welfare and the quality of her life were very much at the forefront. I feel the years 1978-1993 were a blur when she was grinding away so much and not able to take a break and reflect!
Even though Bush was starting anew and there was this sense of a happier and calmer artist enjoying music more than ever, the press still speculated. There has always been this impression Bush is a recluse and she hides away. Living this weird life. If an artist is not seen to be touring and releasing music all of the time, then they are written off as too private or weird! With Bush’s music being so original and not like anything else, she has suffered more than most. Aerial absorbs all the past tragedy and loss and couples that with new life and someone more settled in her own skin. Tom Doyle interviewed Bush in 2005 for The Guardian. Whilst Bush realised that it had been a long time since she released an album (twelve years), we get the sense of someone charmingly down-to-earth and domestic. An artist who can release this extraordinary music but be grounded and normal:
“This is how 12 years disappear if you're Kate Bush. You release The Red Shoes in 1993, your seventh album in a 15-year career characterised by increasingly ambitious records, ever-lengthening recording schedules and compulsive attention to detail. You are emotionally drained after the death of your mother Hannah but, against the advice of some of your friends, you throw yourself into The Line, the Cross & the Curve, a 45-minute video album released the following year that - despite its merits - you now consider to be "a load of bollocks". You take two years off to recharge your batteries, because you can. In 1996, you write a song called King of the Mountain. You have a bit of a think and take some more time off, similarly, because you can.
Two years later, while pregnant, you write a song about artistic endeavour called An Architect's Dream. You give birth to a boy, Albert, in 1998 and you and your guitarist partner Danny McIntosh find yourselves "completely shattered for a couple of years". You move house and spend months doing it up. You convert the garage into a studio, but being a full-time mother who chooses not to employ a nanny or housekeeper, it's hard to find time to actually work in there. Bit by bit, the ideas come and a notion forms in your mind to make a double album, though you have to adjust to a new working regime of stolen moments as opposed to the 14-hour days of old. Your son begins school and suddenly time opens up and though progress doesn't exactly accelerate ("That's a bit too strong a word"), two years of more concentrated effort later, the album is complete. You look up from the mixing desk and it is 2005.
If the outside world was wondering whether Kate Bush would ever finish her long-awaited album, then it was a feeling shared by its creator. "Oh yeah," she sighs. "I mean, there were so many times I thought, I'll have the album finished this year, definitely, we'll get it out this year. Then there were a couple of years where I thought, I'm never gonna do this. If I could make albums quicker, I'd be on a roll wouldn't I? Everything just seems to take so much time. I don't know why. Time ... evaporates."
There was a story that some EMI execs had come down to see you and you'd said something like: "Here's what I've been working on," and then produced some cakes from your oven. True? "No! I don't know where that came from. I thought that was quite funny actually. It presents me as this homely creature, which is all right, isn't it?"
Even if apocryphal, it's a nugget that reveals something about Bush's relationship with a record label she signed to 30 years ago. For a long time now, she hasn't taken a penny in advances and refuses to play them a note of her works-in-progress. In the latter stages of Aerial's creation, EMI chairman Tony Wadsworth would come down to visit Bush and leave having heard nothing. "We'd just chat and then he'd go away again," Bush says. "We ended up just laughing about it, really."
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?".
Aerial album sold more than 90,000 copies in its first week of release. MOJO named Aerial their third-best album of 2005, and it received a BRIT nomination for Best British Album in 2006. Bush was also nominated for Best British Female in the same year. In fact, I am not going to source another interview. There was not a lot in print in 2005. Bush did some radio interviews, but she would do more promotion for albums like 50 Words for Snow. I think there might have been some wariness about the questions she’d be asked. Perhaps trying to transition into being an artist in the spotlight again. Bush, clearly, was setting new rules when it came to promotion and how much she’d be engaging. Not wanting to burn-out as soon as she came back, she recognised how much time the creative and promotional duties too. Aerial came together over a number of years and, whilst she was excited to have it out there, she was not about to go on T.V. shows, do a load of interviews and repeat a pattern of the past. I am glad Bush brought Aerial’s conceptual suite to the stage for Before the Dawn. She has named Aerial the favourite of her albums on more than one occasion. You can tell how much it means to her! Of course, a new partner (Danny McIntosh) and son is a big reason for that. After losing her mother in 1992, Bush now had a new family. There has been almost eleven years since her last album. I wonder whether Bush is recalibrating again and planning something for next year. She is definitely taking her time and does not have to be as full-on and meet demands of the label anymore. This all started with Aerial. Although there was still expectation, she would not be rushed! Breaking from a stressful and tiring period of her life, Bush is revived through Aerial. It is no wonder critics love the album and she ranks it so highly! Previously needing to step back after a hard time in her life, Bush stepped back and delivered one of her best albums. This was an iconic and legendary artist doing things…
ON her own terms.