FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Babooshka at Forty-Three
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during a performance of Babooshka in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Adrian Boot
Her Most Intriguing Character?
_________
THIS this feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
sort of follows on from my recent piece about Kate Bush’s songs and the various characters that appear in them. She has a way of drawing these original and incredibly fascinating figures. Whether they are named, like James from James and the Cold Gun, Joanni, Mrs. Bartolozzi, or Lily, or anonymous and mysterious, it is clear she has a fascination for all sorts of human beings. I think that is one of the things that defines Bush’s work. Perhaps less personal than other songwriters – in the sense she does not put herself/her problems in the songs -, I do love how we get to meet these wonderful and different figures. One of the best alter egos/characters is in Babooshka. The song consists of a husband and wife. The wife disguises herself as ‘Babooshka’ to try and fool him. Thinking he is unfaithful; she uses this pseudonym to try and make him slip up. Whether you refer to her as ‘The Wife’ or ‘Babooshka’ – or, indeed, both -, I think that this is one of Bush’s most interesting characters. Someone who feels very real, I wanted to explore Babooshka, as the song was released as a single on 27th June, 1980. From Bush’s third studio album, Never for Ever, this was the second single. Breathing was released on 14th April, 1980. I will talk about that album to end. Babooshka is about a wife disguising herself as a younger woman, to test her husband’s faith. The fact is that her husband is attracted to this younger version. In essence, she is a victim of her own paranoia and mistrust! It is a wonderfully original theme to explore in music; something hardly surprising when you think of Kate Bush’s catalogue and how she approaches people and relationships. Rather than it being personal to her, Bush invents these characters that feel well-drawn and rich. You end of sympathising with the wife and wondering how the story ends – and whether the two go their separate ways.
Before carrying on, the Kate Bush Encyclopedia collated interviews where Bush spoke about Babooshka. I kind of like how the song’s title’s second syllable is similar to ‘Bush’. Is there anything of the songwriter in the song?! Maybe she was in a relationship before and was unsure whether her boyfriend was faithful. Wanting to test the strength of the relationship. It makes me wonder how someone in their twenties could come up with something so different and unconventional! It is incredible how Bush’s creative mind works:
“Apparently it is grandmother, it's also a headdress that people wear. But when I wrote the song it was just a name that literally came into my mind, I've presumed I've got it from a fairy story I'd read when I was a child. And after having written the song a series of incredible coincidences happened where I'd turned on the television and there was Donald Swan singing about Babooshka. So I thought, "Well, there's got to be someone who's actually called Babooshka." So I was looking through Radio Times and there, another coincidence, there was an opera called Babooshka. Apparently she was the lady that the three kings went to see because the star stopped over her house and they thought "Jesus is in there".' So they went in and he wasn't. And they wouldn't let her come with them to find the baby and she spent the rest of her life looking for him and she never found him. And also a friend of mine had a cat called Babooshka. So these really extraordinary things that kept coming up when in fact it was just a name that came into my head at the time purely because it fitted. (Peter Powell interview, Radio 1 (UK), 11 October 1980)”.
“It was really a theme that has fascinated me for some time. It's based on a theme that is often used in folk songs, which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel that perhaps he's not faithful. And there's no real strength in her feelings, it's just more or less paranoia suspicions, and so she starts thinking that she's going to test him, just to see if he's faithful. So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter. And he responds very well to the letter, because as he reads it, he recognises the wife that he had a couple of years ago, who was happy, in the letter. And so he likes it, and she decides to take it even further and get a meeting together to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her. When he meets her, again because she is so similar to his wife, the one that he loves, he's very attracted to her. Of course she is very annoyed and the break in the song is just throwing the restaurant at him... (...) The whole idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans and how by our own thinking, spinning around in our own ideas we come up with completely paranoid facts. So in her situation she was in fact suspicious of a man who was doing nothing wrong, he loved her very much indeed. Through her own suspicions and evil thoughts she's really ruining the relationship. (Countdown Australia, 1980)”.
Kate Bush performed Babooshka for different European programmes, including Collaro (France), Countdown (Netherlands) and Rock Pop (Germany). The standout performance is from the Dr. Hook television special. That was the first live performance. It is notable for a number of reasons, but the costume she wore stands out. It is a wonderful combination: on her the right side she resembles a staid Victorian lady in mourning dress; on the left side a glittering young woman in a silvery jumpsuit, complete with bright lightning-streaks painted down the left side of her face. Her figure is lit so that only the ‘repressed’ side of her costume is visible during the verses of the song, and mainly the ‘free’ side during the choruses (thanks again to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for that information, which I have paraphrased here). I think that Babooshka is Bush’s most confident song to that point. You can hear that throughout Never for Ever. In fact, two of the hardest-driving and most atmospheric tracks bookend the album. The magnificent Breathing ends the album. As co-producer (with Jon Kelly) on the album, you can feel this sense of new freedom and experimentation. Her sound was broader than on her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart (both 1978). One of her best singles ever, Babooshka spent ten weeks in the U.K. chart, peaking at number five. Oddly, it was even more successful in Australia, where it was the twentieth-best-selling single of the year. Her second top five hit (after Wuthering Heights), it is no surprise that she wanted to put this out into the world. I think the three single choices – Breathing and Army Dreamers being the others – signalled a more serious Kate Bush. Maybe affected by press criticism and prejudice about her voice and music, Never for Ever is a big and assured statement from an artist who was not going to be defined or pigeonholed.
I really love Babooshka! With one of her most memorable videos accompanying it (directed by Keef (Keith McMillan), this is a song that will endure and amaze for generations more. Aside from the unnamed heroine that features through Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave, I think that Babooshka/The Wife is her most interesting character. You are caught between sympathising for her plight, but also a little sympathetic towards her husband. Almost trying to trap him and catch him out, you get these two sides to the woman. As a wife character, she seems quite ordinary (if bored and frustrated). She really comes to life as this younger alter ego. I am not sure why Bush chose that title and name - yet it seems perfect for the song. Never for Ever is full of these arresting songs with wonderful characters and stories. Ahead of its forty-third anniversary on 27th June, I wanted to revisit Babooshka. One of her finest album-opening songs, it remains one of the most popular of Bush’s singles. You can see why people love it! With the peculiar, delightful and quite explicit Ran Tan Waltz as the B-side (Bush explained how she felt the sun was good, silly, naughty fun), no wonder it was a successful single! The lyrics and story is among Bush’s best. Filled with so many great lines and suspense. My favourite verse is this: “She sent him scented letters/And he received them with a strange delight/Just like his wife/But how she was before the tears/And how she was before the years flew by/And how she was when she was beautiful/She signed the letter…”. Whereas Babooshka’s lyrics state that the wife in the song, when going incognito and trying to trick her husband, could not have made a worse move, the fact that Bush released this incredible single that was a successful chart entry meant that she…
COULDN’T have made a better move.