FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty
IMAGE CREDIT: Avalon Cafe
Looking Ahead to a Special Night at Avalon Cafe
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I am going to end with a couple of reviews…
for Kate Bush’s 2005 masterpiece, Aerial. I don’t think that word is ill-placed and hyperbole. Even though many would argue it would come say, fourth or five in her ‘best albums’ list – behind Hounds of Love (1985), The Dreaming (1982) and maybe even The Sensual World (1989) -, I do think that Aerial is one of her finest works. In terms of production, it may be her very best example. That genius at work! I have written about Hounds of Love a lot lately, as it turned forty in September. I am also comparing Aerial and Hounds of Love a bit in this series of anniversary features. How family is very much at the heart of both albums. How nature and the natural world enforces their conceptual suites. On Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave it is water. On Aerial’s second disc – as it is a double album -, there is water involved. I would say the sky is more prominent. The expanse and beauty of what is above, rather than the terror and unknown of what is beneath the sea. Also, both albums were regarded during high points. Very happy times. Hounds of Love was a period where Bush changed her lifestyle and built a home studio at East Wickham Farm. She followed up one of her most challenging albums (1982’s The Dreaming) with her most acclaimed work. Aerial was released seven years after she gave birth to her son, Bertie (Albert McIntosh). As a new mother, you can feel her contentment and sheer joy come through. Especially on the first disc of the album. I feel the decision to have A Sky of Honey be about a summer’s day from its start to its end was also reflective of her new life. Perhaps based around her own English garden with new family, Bush took us much further and wider – to the Balearic-infused final stages of the suite, complete with a beach fantasy and as close as she has come to full-on Rave and Dance!
I cannot do full justice to Aerial in this feature! I am going to explore and dissect it more as I run through the series. The main reason for this feature is that I will be co-hosting an event on 6th November (a day before Aerial’s twentieth anniversary) in London. Here are more details:
“Kate Bush’s “Aerial” is turning 20. On the eve of the album’s 20th anniversary, join us at Avalon Cafe for a celebration of Aerial and all things Kate Bush 💃🏻
We’ll not only be listening to the album’s second disc, A Sky of Honey - a 40 minute experimental suite and ode to the rapture of summer - but will also be pausing midway for a discussion and Q&A with @leah.kardos and @liddicottsam. Kate tunes to be played throughout.
Released after a 12-year hiatus, traversing a multitude of themes and sounds, Aerial is the work not only of Kate Bush, the artist, who fashioned a truly experimental sound into something universal and refined, but also that of Kate Bush: mother, daughter, lover.
Over 16 tracks and two discs, Bush declares that she has not only made peace with life’s grief and loss, found untold love in motherhood, and ascended to certain domestic bliss - but that she remains, as ever, capable of teasing out the sensuality, sublimity and weirdness that exists in everyday life.
Join us Thursday 6th November at Avalon Cafe as we celebrate this incredible album”.
It is exciting that A Sky of Honey will get a full airing. Even though the first disc will not get a spin, we can discuss that at the event. I especially want to dive into my favourite Aerial song, Mrs. Bartolozzi! Even so, I don’t think Aerial will get the same press and attention as Hounds of Love when it turned forty on 16th September.
Even though I feel both are comparable masterpieces, Hounds of Love is more known and played. Its first side especially gets regular radio airplay. Aerial in contrast maybe has King of the Mountain (its sole single) played and, perhaps, one or two other tracks now and then. It is definitely not as written about and covered as Hounds of Love. The fact Hounds of Love is twice as old as Aerial is not the reason. I do feel like some see Aerial as having a few weaker moments – Bertie, Pi and Joanni are brought up in reviews as being ‘lesser’ tracks -, though I don’t feel there are any weak moments. I love the maternal bliss of Bertie and perhaps the most Kate Bush song ever, Pi. I would say Mrs. Bartolozzi is the most Kate Bush track ever, though a song where she recites Pi (incorrectly at one point) is so her! Also, Joanni is this fascinating and beautiful song that I feel is more about Kate Bush and motherhood. In fact, I feel like motherhood and mothers weave into so many songs on the album, including A Coral Room and How to Be Invisible. Even King of the Mountain, I feel, is about Kate Bush seen as a recluse and mystical figure when, in fact, she was starting a family! I want to try and help dispel some myths around Aerial and so-called weaker or less essential songs. That the album is up there with her very best and warrants more love and inspection. Also, that the production throughout proves that Kate Bush is a genius and one of the finest producers of her generation. It is good that I get to speak with Leah Kardos. I would consider her to be one of the great Kate Bush authorities. If I were to set up a dinner party of Kate Bush experts and superfans, I would have her there. The fine folk of Kate Bush News, Graeme Thomson, Tom Doyle, Laura Shenton, the brilliant and dedicated minds behind Gaffaweb, together with some high-profile Kate Bush fans (maybe Guy Pierce would be in there!). I heard Kardos speak about Hounds of Love at London’s The Horse Hospital on its anniversary. It was powerful and insightful. Hearing the album in full and her speak about the album. She wrote a book for 33 1/3 series. I think this is the only time a Kate Bush album had been included in the series.
I have a dim memory of The Dreaming being written about, though I am not sure it is available. As The Kick Inside is fifty in 2028, I would be tempted to throw my hat in the ring for that pitch! It is amazing that Kate Bush was so underrepresented. Leah Kardos’s insights, analyses, expertise and writing is brilliant. I know she loved Aerial so much and I do think this is an album that should also be included in the series. As I write in another feature, maybe she will take on the task or someone else will. Aerial is so fascinating and has so much history. The twelve-year gap from The Red Shoes and everything leading up to 2005. The impact of the album and how it took six years for Bush to release another album (2011’s Director’s Cut). Also, as we have waited almost fourteen years for another Kate Bush album – since 2011’s 50 Words for Snow -, there is a modern relevance to Aerial. I will be hot-footing it from my job in Covent Garden on 6th November to Avalon Café in Bermondsey to be part of a very, very special night. Go and get your ticket here. I think Leah Kardos will have more insight into the musical and production detail and its brilliance. I think we are of a similar age, so we have that generational perspective. Also, I have said how Aerial’s A Sky of Honey should have a cinematic release. Something built around it. Whilst Kate Bush mounted it for 2014’s Before the Dawn residency in Hammersmith – Leah Kardos caught one of the dates; I did not get a ticket -, there is an argument to revisiting it. So why get excited about coming to a night where we discuss Aerial and play A Sky of Honey?! Well, on its twentieth anniversary on 7th November, fans will share their memories. I know Kate Bush will remember the album fondly. Critics were definitely awe-struck and affected in 2005 when Aerial arrived. I am going to wrap up soon, but not before dropping in a couple of ecstatic reviews for arguably Kate Bush’s finest (double) album.
I am going to move to a review from The Guardian. Even though critics felt this was a Kate Bush return, the actual truth is that she never went away. Instead, she was busy making music and enjoy new responsibility as a mother. Anyone expecting something like an updated The Red Shoes were in for a shock! This was a sublime, expansive and beautifully realised album of ambition and incredible beauty:
“Why do so many pop performers produce their best work when they are in their early-to-mid twenties? A simple answer is that pop is essentially a juvenile form, the expression of a certain youthful worldview and rebellious sensibility, and the more the musician matures and learns about music, the greater can be the desire to complicate and to experiment with what once felt so natural and spontaneous.
Few artists experiment more than Kate Bush - often to thrilling effect. Her first single, 'Wuthering Heights', was a huge number one hit in 1978, when she was just 19. After that surprise, EMI allowed her near-absolute artistic control. Since 1980 she has produced and written all her own material and, as the wait for each new album has grown longer and longer, she has become the musical equivalent of a celebrated novelist who refuses to be edited: she has the freedom to do whatever she wants and at whichever speed she desires. If she wants to combine the orchestral string arrangements of Michael Kamen with uninhibited rock guitar, as she does here, she can. If she refuses to play live, as she has done for more than 20 years, no one will try to force her to change her mind.
Twelve years is a long time to wait for a new record from any artist, even from one as consistently inventive as Kate Bush, but at least Aerial offers value. It's a 14-track double album, and the more experimental of the two records is 'A Sky of Honey'. It begins not with music but with the sound of birdsong, the wind in the trees and the voice of a child calling for her parents. What follows is a suite of seven unashamedly romantic and interconnected songs taking us on a long day's journey into night and then on through to the next morning when birdsong is heard once more and the whole cycle starts all over again. There are similarities here with the second side of the remarkable Hounds of Love (1985) and to the song sequence 'The Ninth Wave' that took us into the consciousness of a drowning woman (the sea, in her work, has long been a source of inspiration and of threat). That album, memorable for its daring, its imaginative use of sampling, and its erotic intensity, was, like much of Bush's work, preoccupied with memory - and with how we are never entirely free from the voices and sounds of childhood. It remains her best album.
'A Sky of Honey' is music of pagan rapture - songs about acts of creation, natural or otherwise; about the wind, rain, sunlight and the sea. Sometimes it is just Kate alone at her piano, her voice restrained. Sometimes, as on the outstanding 'Sunset', she begins alone and softly, but soon the tempo quickens and the song becomes an experiment in forms: jazz, progressive rock, flamenco.
There are weaknesses. At times, Bush can be too fey and whimsical, especially on 'Bertie', which is about the joy of motherhood, or on 'Mrs Bartolozzi', a rhapsody to nothing less than a washing machine: 'My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers... slooshy sloshy/ slooshy sloshy.' And the bold, musically adventurous second album is a little too insistent in its 'hey, man' hippyish sensibility, with Kate running freely through the fields or climbing high in the mountains. She did, after all, once dress up as a kind of white witch for the cover of Never For Ever (1980), on which she is portrayed flying through the air, like a giant bat.
'What kind of language is this?' Kate Bush sings, self-interrogatively, on the title track, the last of the album. It's a good question, to which she offers a partial answer on 'Somewhere in Between', which in ambition and content is where most of the songs on this album are suspended - somewhere in between the tighter, more conventional structures of pop and the looser, less accessible arrangements of contemporary classical and the avant-garde; somewhere, in mood and atmosphere, between the lucidity of wakefulness and the ambiguity of dream; between the presumed innocence of childhood and the desire for escape offered by the adult imagination; between abstraction and the real. Even when she escapes her wonderland to write songs about actual figures in the known world, she remains attracted to those figures such as Elvis ('King of the Mountain', the album's first single) or Joan of Arc ('Joanna') that, in death as indeed in life, have a mythic unreality.
So, again, what kind of language is this? It is ultimately that of an artist superbly articulate in the language of experimental pop music. But it is also the language of an artist who doesn't seem to want to grow up. Or, more accurately, who has never lost her child-like capacity for wonder and for pagan celebration and who, because she is sincere and can communicate her odd and unpredictable vision in both words and through sumptuous music, occupies a cherished and indulged position in the culture. There is no one quite like her, which is why, in the end, we must forgive her excesses and eccentricities. We are lucky to have her back”.
Among the highlights of Aerial is Kate Bush singing along with a blackbird (Aerial Tal most explicitly) and her putting on an Elvis Presley drawl (King of the Mountain). A Sky of Honey is especially detailed and arresting. So many highlights. Aside from the black mark that is Rolf Harris featuring (his vocal parts were replaced on a later release, where Bush’s son took his parts), Aerial is this near-perfect album. AllMusic provided their take on the sublime and truly captivating Aerial:
“Fierce Kate Bush fans who are expecting revelation in Aerial, her first new work since The Red Shoes in 1993, will no doubt scour lyrics, instrumental trills, and interludes until they find them. For everyone else, those who purchased much of Bush's earlier catalog because of its depth, quality, and vision, Aerial will sound exactly like what it is, a new Kate Bush record: full of her obsessions, lushly romantic paeans to things mundane and cosmic, and her ability to add dimension and transfer emotion though song. The set is spread over two discs. The first, A Sea of Honey, is a collection of songs, arranged for everything from full-on rock band to solo piano. The second, A Sky of Honey, is a conceptual suite. It was produced by Bush with engineering and mixing by longtime collaborator Del Palmer.
A Sea of Honey is a deeply interior look at domesticity, with the exception of its opening track, "King of the Mountain," the first single and video. Bush does an acceptable impersonation of Elvis Presley in which she examines his past life on earth and present incarnation as spectral enigma. Juxtaposing the Elvis myth, Wagnerian mystery, and the image of Rosebud, the sled from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Bush's synthesizer, sequencer, and voice weigh in ethereally from the margins before a full-on rock band playing edgy and funky reggae enters on the second verse. Wind whispers and then howls across the cut's backdrop as she searches for the rainbow body of the disappeared one through his clothes and the tabloid tales of his apocryphal sightings, looking for a certain resurrection of his physical body. The rest of the disc focuses on more interior and domestic matters, but it's no less startling. A tune called "Pi" looks at a mathematician's poetic and romantic love of numbers. "Bertie" is a hymn to her son orchestrated by piano, Renaissance guitar, percussion, and viols.
But disc one's strangest and most lovely moment is in "Mrs. Bartolozzi," scored for piano and voice. It revives Bush's obsessive eroticism through an ordinary woman's ecstatic experience of cleaning after a rainstorm, and placing the clothing of her beloved and her own into the washing machine and observing in rapt sexual attention. She sings "My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers/Oh the waves are going out/My skirt floating up around your waist...Washing machine/Washing machine." Then there's "How to Be Invisible," and the mysticism of domestic life as the interior reaches out into the universe and touches its magic: "Hem of anorak/Stem of a wall flower/Hair of doormat?/Is that autumn leaf falling?/Or is that you walking home?/Is that a storm in the swimming pool?"
A Sky of Honey is 42 minutes in length. It's lushly romantic as it meditates on the passing of 24 hours. Its prelude is a short deeply atmospheric piece with the sounds of birds singing, and her son (who is "the Sun" according to the credits) intones, "Mummy...Daddy/The day is full of birds/Sounds like they're saying words." And "Prologue" begins with her piano, a chanted viol, and Bush crooning to romantic love, the joy of marriage and nature communing, and the deep romance of everyday life. There's drama, stillness, joy, and quiet as its goes on, but it's all held within, as in "An Architect's Dream," where the protagonist encounters a working street painter going about his work in changing light: "The flick of a wrist/Twisting down to the hips/So the lovers begin with a kiss...." Loops, Eberhard Weber's fretless bass, drifting keyboards, and a relaxed delivery create an erotic tension, in beauty and in casual voyeurism.
"Sunset" has Bush approaching jazz, but it doesn't swing so much as it engages the form. Her voice digging into her piano alternates between lower-register enunciation and a near falsetto in the choruses. There is a sense of utter fascination with the world as it moves toward darkness, and the singer is enthralled as the sun climbs into bed, before it streams into "Sunset," a gorgeous flamenco guitar and percussion-driven call-and-response choral piece -- it's literally enthralling. It is followed by a piece of evening called "Somewhere Between," in which lovers take in the beginning of night. As "Nocturne" commences, shadows, stars, the beach, and the ocean accompany two lovers who dive down deep into one another and the surf. Rhythms assert themselves as the divers go deeper and the band kicks up: funky electric guitars pulse along with the layers of keyboards, journeying until just before sunup. But it is on the title track that Bush gives listeners her greatest surprise. Dawn is breaking and she greets the day with a vengeance. Manic, crunchy guitars play power chords as sequencers and synths make the dynamics shift and swirl. In her higher register, Bush shouts, croons, and trills against and above the band's force.
Nothing much happens on Aerial except the passing of a day, as noted by the one who engages it in the process of being witnessed, yet it reveals much about the interior and natural worlds and expresses spiritual gratitude for everyday life. Musically, this is what listeners have come to expect from Bush at her best -- a finely constructed set of songs that engage without regard for anything else happening in the world of pop music. There's no pushing of the envelope because there doesn't need to be. Aerial is rooted in Kate Bush's oeuvre, with grace, flair, elegance, and an obsessive, stubborn attention to detail. What gets created for the listener is an ordinary world, full of magic; it lies inside one's dwelling in overlooked and inhabited spaces, and outside, from the backyard and out through the gate into wonder”.
I am looking forward to being at Avalon Café on 6th November. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Aerial, I will be joining Leah Kardos – and hopefully a full and willing audience – to discuss Aerial and have a chat. Listening to A Sky of Honey will be a highlight, as Kate Bush always intended it to be heard in a single go, rather than handpicking tracks. As a suite, it is one of her greatest achievements. Nearly twenty years after it was released, Aerial is a staggering…
WORK of brilliance.