FEATURE:
The Most Beautiful Sunset
celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Kate Bush’s Aerial. It does not seem like the album came out that long ago, because I remember it so clearly! Very happy and personal memories of listening to the album not long after it came out. Released on 7th November, 2005, in the first of five features ahead of its twentieth anniversary, I want to explore various sides of the album. I am going to start out by sourcing a couple of promotional interviews for Aerial. Some chats with Kate Bush from 2005. I am also going to share some critical reviews/features, and I also want to discuss why Aerial is so spellbinding. I shall give some context. We celebrated forty years of Hounds of Love on 16th September. In many ways, Aerial is similar to Hounds of Love. Released just over twenty years later, like Hounds of Love, Aerial has a conceptual side. Or, as Aerial is a double album, a conceptual second disc. A Sky of Honey is this course of a summer’s day. A full cycle where we get to see this transformation of the light. Basking in the beauty and transcendence. In a later piece, I will discuss what more could come from Aerial. In terms of a book or visualisation. It is a magnificent conceptual suite that is among Kate Bush’s most accomplished works. Bush released The Red Shoes in November 1993. Twelve years later, when many felt she would never release another album, she released something truly unexpected. The Red Shoes is a great album but not considered one of her best. Aerial was this radically different album. Especially in terms of its scope and production. Bush’s production on both albums. The Red Shoes more compressed or tinny. Aerial is this lush, airy and open album.
The first interview I want to source is, I’d imagine, a phone interview with The Toronto Star. After so long since she released an album, a lot of the press and questioning was around her being a ‘recluse’ or ‘weird’. Never able to avoid these descriptions and judgements, she released a masterpiece with her eighth studio album. Although the deepest interview for Aerial were on the radio, there are some interesting print interviews. This one is particularly engaging;
“Cheerful and talkative except when it comes to details of her personal life Bush sounds genuinely at a loss to explain her reputation in the media as a wacky recluse.
"Reclusive, mysterious and weird it's ridiculous, isn't it? Just because I've chosen to live a normal life, and not in the public eye. I've never promoted myself, I'm not a celebrity, I'm a worker, and I don't see a reason to do interviews unless there's something to talk about, a piece of work.
"I don't hide from people. I go shopping, I go to restaurants and movies ... yet somehow I'm made out to be some mad hermit. It's too much.
"I think my cult following got grumpy waiting so long," she laughs.
That all sounds a bit disingenuous in light of the number of high-end European art and fashion photographers whose ubiquitous images of Bush created at least the impression of a showbiz diva between 1978 and 1990, when an eight-CD anthology appeared in the box set This Woman's Work complete with a colour booklet containing nothing but these extravagant portraits.
In lieu of personal appearances erroneous reports of stage fright that have apparently prevented her from touring after 1979 are another bone of contention with her fans have had nothing to fuel their addiction other than Bush's wild, rich and allusive music, and magnificent, stylized graphics.
"I never consciously gave up touring," she explains. "I only did just one, in 1979 and 1980, and I think other people gave up on me. I remember it as a fantastic experience, like being on the road with a circus. We're working on some ideas about doing some shows to promote this album, but it's early days."
And she says she has no regrets about the image she helped create, though Aerial comes unadorned with large and ornate likenesses of her, and instead features realistic images of the ornaments of an ordinary village life washing on the line, a view from the kitchen window, a placid seashore, pigeons in the yard.
"Graphics are important," she adds, by way of explaining the effort that went into designing the honeyed landscape artwork for Aerial. "This may sound pompous, but I'm uncomfortable working with the CD format. I used to work in vinyl, when the artwork was big, and said something significant about an artist.
"And I loved double albums. They indicated that the music was conceptual, too important to be reduced, and you could open up the covers and get lost in the pictures and information inside.
"I liked it when an album was 20 minutes of music a side, with a breathing space in the middle. I think CDs are too long for people with short attention spans, people who are distracted by all the technological tools we have these days."
The Aerial format, she explains, is a respectful nod to the great days of vinyl. The package contains two discs, both around 40 minutes in length, the first a collection of single songs, the second a conceptual piece that unfolds as a musical panorama encompassing the span of a single day, with vast dreams and powerful reminiscences inspired by simple sounds of nature, the words of passers-by and routine chores.
The album lacks the frenetic pace and bluster of her last conceptual effort, 1985's Hounds Of Love, and achieves an almost elegiac, English pastoral grace. Several songs feature just vocals and piano, and expose matters closer to her heart than the turgid melodramas of her earlier work: the joy childhood brings in "Bertie," memories of her late mother in the eerie but strangely comforting waterscape "A Coral Room," the bucolic "Sky Of Honey" with its compelling echoes of Vaughan Williams.
Orchestral charts were written by award-winning composer Michael Kamen, who died of a heart attack at age 55 in 2003. They were recorded just weeks before his death.
"He was a lovely person, very talented and brave," Bush recalls. "I'd worked with him on other albums, and he was never offended if I suggested changes he'd rewrite arrangements on the spot, even with the orchestra waiting in the studio. I admire his work for its visual qualities."
While it's debatable, as acolytes claim, that Kate Bush's impact on Western music and female artists in particular is as profound as Joni Mitchell's, it can't be denied that Bush has attracted more than a fair share of serious attention from new artists in the years since her so-called self-exile began. This includes R&B singer Maxwell, whose reworking of Bush's childbearing chronicle "This Woman's Work" was a hit in 2001, as well as male-dominated British rock acts Placebo and The Futureheads, who scored a hit last year with a version of her "Hounds of Love."
Her beginnings were more than auspicious. Bush was "discovered" at age 16 by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. He who paid for an orchestra to back her distinctive, hyperbolic soprano on demos of several elaborately theatrical, sexually loaded romantic fantasies that would become the core, three years later, of her hair-raising debut, The Kick Inside.
Though she had nothing in common with the post-punk, new wave acts with whom she shared the high end of the charts she was genteel, well educated, and possessed of aesthetic and artistic sensibilities that had less to do with rock than with the progressive side of opera, world music, jazz, musical theatre and epic cinema she became the darling of British prog-rock. Peter Gabriel gave her a nod by recording the moving duet, "Don't Give Up" with her in 1986. Procol Harum member Gary Brooker's organ and vocal contributions anchor Aerial, an exotic two-CD set.
Some pieces on Aerial will remind fans of the daring Kate Bush of old: "Pi" is little more than a series of numbers sung with dramatic extremes of emotion; "King Of The Mountain," the first single, is a contemplation on celebrity and its cost, with direct references to Elvis; in "Mrs. Bartolozzi," a washing machine becomes a sexual allegory in the romantic fantasies of a cleaning woman.
"After seven years with Bertie, I know a lot about washing machines," Bush chuckles. "He keeps me normal. I never wanted to be famous. I just want to create nice music, and I believe celebrity threatens creativity.
"What's important to me is to have a soul and my lovely little boy”.
I am going to come to another international interview. In December 2005, Weekend Australian published a great interview with Kate Bush. Iain Shedden asked the questions. Although I have sourced some of these words before, as Aerial is twenty on 7th November, it is worth coming back. What was being asked in 2005. How Bush responded. After being away from the media’s fascination and scrutiny for over a decade, it must have been odd to be back in promotional mode. Professional, warm and fascinating as ever, few could deny the genius and wonder of Aerial:
“Her tone is light-hearted, salt-of-the-earth friendly, occasionally mischievous and peppered with self-deprecating humour. If this is the Greta Garbo of pop, she has had a crash course in gregariousness.
"I'm in a privileged position to say that I'm very happy," she goes on. "I'm very lucky. I'm even happier now that the album has been received with such ..." She searches for the right phrase. "I have never been so surprised. It's extraordinary. I was really worried that people were going to forget me."
Well, they could hardly have been blamed for that, could they? Taking a 12-year break between albums is unusual. The fickle world of pop demands that you ride the wave of success until it dumps you unceremoniously on your backside.
Bush, on the other hand, decided after her 1993 album The Red Shoes that the music business could take a running jump. Enough with fame; she was going to have a life.
"I was working very hard trying to be an artist," she recalls of her heyday. "Somehow I just wasn't being seen as who I was. I was being mistranslated. It was very frustrating."
So, after 15 years, a handful of albums and with a string of hit singles including Them Heavy People, Sat in Your Lap and Breathing behind her, Bush said goodbye to the charts, the recording studio and the spotlight to devote herself to things that she believed were more real, such as cleaning the house and, eventually, having a child.
Both these subjects are addressed on Aerial. Bertie gets a few mentions and did the artwork that appears on Bush's recent single, King of the Mountain, while domesticity in the shape of a washing machine gets a full cycle on Mrs Bartolozzi.
It's no accident that these and other quality-of-life issues dominate the two CDs that make up Aerial. Bush wrote some of the material for it in the years immediately following her retirement, when she was looking for something more than artistic fulfillment.
It wasn't the writing that took so long, she explains, more the recording.
“I think a lot of people think I spend years writing stuff," she says. "I don't. It's shockingly quick."
WHAT took her so long to make a comeback was combining her home life with the recording process. She tackled the latter in her spare moments, which became less frequent after the birth of Bertie.
"A lot of my friends couldn't carry on working when they had a child," she says. "They either had to get child care or they had to stop working. I feel very privileged that I was able to do both [working and parenting], but I was also very tired.
"It's difficult to do both. I made a conscious decision early on that my son would come first."
Her record company, EMI, fretted as another year went by and Aerial remained a work in progress. Company executives went to visit, hoping to hear it at last, or at least some part of it. Most often they left, disappointed, after an earful of tea and cakes.
Early this year, however, their patience was rewarded. The headline on Kitty Empire's review in British newspaper The Observer was: "Admit it, guys, she's a genius". For Bush the album's release and the positive reaction to it have been a validation of her methods, but the proof came only after months of worrying about how the public would react.
"When I was most anxious was when there was this huge amount of anticipation starting to build about the record and I hadn't actually finished it," she says, laughing. "It's hard enough trying to keep that creative focus without feeling that everybody's banging on the door going, `Where is it?' Mind you, I've got good soundproofing." Now that it's done, she says, the relief is palpable. Hardly surprisingly, after that period of gestation she hasn't been able to listen to Aerial.
"I always put myself under a lot of pressure. It is not an enjoyable process spending 12 years making a record. Lots of it was fun but it wasn't something I intended to take 12 years to make.
"I'm so fed up listening to it, I can't tell you. The sense of relief at actually having it finished ... that was one of the greatest senses of elation, after all that time. There were so many points where I felt, almost in a religious sense, that I wasn't going to have the strength to carry on."
Now that the album is out and in the charts, there will be some expectation, from her record company as well as her fans, of another one appearing before her 60th birthday. So will she make one?
"I hope so," she says. "It's not meant to be my last work. Of course I'd really like to make another one."
Nor is she ruling out performing again. She has even returned to dancing after a long break.
"This is the first time in years I've had time to do other things, so I've just started again recently. It's something I've always enjoyed, but it doesn't hold the same importance to me any more. That's the thing about dance, it's such a discipline. You can't have too many airs and graces because it's all about the fragility of the body. It's really hard work. Being a dancer for a living ... I've got so much respect for people like that, being so strong."
Bush has other strengths, however. She has withstood the pressures the music industry can impose on artists to do things their way and has made herself happy in the process.
"There were quite a few times where I found the way I was living my life was more ... I thought it had more value than someone who was living the life of a celebrity," she says.
"What is amazing about the way people have responded to this record is that I did approach things that way. People get it. It's incredibly freeing."
It's as liberating, perhaps, as Wuthering Heights was to that unknown singer 27 years ago. Does she still see herself as she was in that video?
"I think in essence I am much the same person," she says. "But in other ways I've changed tremendously. I'm glad I have, though. Imagine going through life without any changes at all. How depressing is that!”.
I will look at the songs and various sides of Aerial in future features. Whereas I have now looked at the promotional interviews and the ‘sunrise’, the ‘sunset’, I guess, comes from critical reviews. As there was such anticipation and excitement, it could have backfired. A double album that had filler or was not that great could have had a huge impact on Kate Bush. As it was, she released one of her very best albums. Gaining almost unanimous praise, I think it is up there with Hounds of Love in terms of brilliance and legacy. How Bush releasing her first album of the twenty-first century confirmed her place in history. This pioneering artist who was so consistent and also proved she is one of the music world’s greatest producers.
There are review options to choose from. I want to start with this review from Stylus. They were blown away by an album that, whilst not perfect in their view, was simply stunning and moving. Engaging with a work from an artist that was leagues ahead of anyone else. Someone who releases the most individual, original and wonderful music. So different to anything that was released in 2005. Aerial still sounds epic and truly engrossing twenty years later:
“Kate Bush has been changing the world since before I was born. I am now 26 and Kate is comfortably in her 40s; logic, sense and precedence decree that she should no longer be relevant, that her record releases, like those of The Rolling Stones—hell, like those of U2 and REM—should be treated with a muted fanfare by the industry and certain sections of the press and with glum bathos by everyone else as returns steadily diminish and distant peaks are listlessly recreated in Xeroxed monochrome.
But this is Kate Bush.
It has been 27 years since “Wuthering Heights,” since a 19-year-old girl in leggings danced like a white witch on Top Of The Pops. 12 years since The Red Shoes. It is 20 years since I saw her on Wogan, performing “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” since Hounds Of Love. Aerial comes in two parts—A Sea Of Honey and A Sky Of Honey. The former is 7 songs over 38 minutes, a paean to domestic bliss, to chores and children and Citizen Kane and Joan of Arc and Elvis. The latter is 9 songs over 42 minutes (with some editing, and I’m talking seconds removed, the two could be combined), a day in the life of light from dawn through afternoon and dusk to the monochrome glaze of moonlight. A double song-cycle about bliss mundane and ecstatic, familial and artistic.
Sonically Aerial is a Kate Bush record in the style of The Dreaming and The Hounds Of Love: luscious, experimental, romantic (of course). The palette may be a touch dated in this post-Timbaland, post-Fennesz age, but it is still beautiful. There are huge expanses of piano—the oceanic, mournful swoon of “Mrs. Bartolozzi”—and strange, post-ambient pop grooves for dancing to alone as if immersed in a pagan ritual (“King Of The Mountain”). There is birdsong, and lots of it; there are guitars, dubby basslines, Latinised rhythms, strange and unidentifiable spirals and planes of sound summoned perhaps from synthesizers. And most of all, of course, there is Kate’s voice, a thousand instruments unto itself, delivering words both sublime and ridiculous.
There will be doubts, because Kate Bush’s genius and muse is a female genius and muse and thus utterly different to what we expect from… Mark Hollis? Michael Jackson? Stevie Wonder? Thom Yorke? (Don’t make me laugh.) Jimi Hendrix? David Bowie? Any man, ever. None of them could get away with enunciating words like “Slooshy sloshy slooshy sloshy / Get that dirty shirt clean”; none of them would even dare. Well, maybe Bowie would. We seem to think genius is a male trait. We’re wrong. The candour and honesty with which Kate delivers the lines “You bring me so much joy / And then you bring me / More joy” on “Bertie,” an unashamedly sentimental song about her love for her son, are a broadside to anyone who’s ever shied away from emotion, from love, from the things that make us human and remarkable and which convinced us we must have come from the clouds such is our potential for beauty.
She duets with birds, invites Rolf Harris once again to play didgeridoo (23 years after he first did on The Dreaming), juxtaposes Michael Kamen’s ethereal, modernist strings with bluesy rock guitars and unhurried disco beats, sings of washing machines, mathematics, sex, the sea and spiritual transcendence. She is still relevant because she doesn’t seek relevance—Kate Bush has always been external to trends, to the fluctuating verisimilitudes of popular culture. She has always operated within a world of her own creation, and that is why she will always be enticing, enlivening, fascinating.
Frankly it’s an honour to be on the same planet as her. Because, even after 12 years of laundry and washing the dishes and making fairy cakes and raising a child, she is still absolutely visionary, a creative talent and empathy untrammelled by conceit or time or self-consciousness; she is a genius. Aerial isn’t perfect, but it is magnificent”.
The Guardian awarded Aerial five stars. They noted how the release of this album was like an event. In some ways, you can look at major artists today whose album release is this event and huge occasion. A real sense of this music royal gifting the world with something truly magnificent. Even though Kate Bush was not someone on social media and doing lots of T.V. interviews, there was rightful buzz. Even though EMI did not spend a load on promotional and everything, the fact this was a new Kate Bush album was special enough:
“In the gap since 1993's so-so The Red Shoes, the Kate Bush myth that began fomenting when she first appeared on Top of the Pops, waving her arms and shrilly announcing that Cath-ee had come home-uh, grew to quite staggering proportions. She was variously reported to have gone bonkers, become a recluse and offered her record company some home-made biscuits instead of a new album. In reality, she seems to have been doing nothing more peculiar than bringing up a son, moving house and watching while people made up nutty stories about her.
Aerial contains a song called How to Be Invisible. It features a spell for a chorus, precisely what you would expect from the batty Kate Bush of popular myth. The spell, however, gently mocks her more obsessive fans while espousing a life of domestic contentment: "Hem of anorak, stem of wallflower, hair of doormat."
Domestic contentment runs through Aerial's 90-minute duration. Recent Bush albums have been filled with songs in which the extraordinary happened: people snogged Hitler, or were arrested for building machines that controlled the weather. Aerial, however, is packed with songs that make commonplace events sound extraordinary. It calls upon Renaissance musicians to serenade her son. Viols are bowed, arcane stringed instruments plucked, Bush sings beatifically of smiles and kisses and "luvv-er-ly Bertie". You can't help feeling that this song is going to cause a lot of door slamming and shouts of "oh-God-mum-you're-so-embarrassing" when Bertie reaches the less luvv-er-ly age of 15, but it's still delightful.
Aerial sounds like an album made in isolation. On the down side, that means some of it seems dated. You can't help feeling she might have thought twice about the lumpy funk of Joanni and the preponderance of fretless bass if she got out a bit more. But, on the plus side, it also means Aerial is literally incomparable. You catch a faint whiff of Pink Floyd and her old mentor Dave Gilmour on the title track, but otherwise it sounds like nothing other than Bush's own back catalogue. It is filled with things only Kate Bush would do. Some of them you rather wish she wouldn't, including imitating bird calls and doing funny voices: King of the Mountain features a passable impersonation of its subject, Elvis, which is at least less disastrous than the strewth-cobber Aussie accent she adopted on 1982's The Dreaming. But then, daring to walk the line between the sublime and the demented is the point of Kate Bush's entire oeuvre. On Aerial she achieves far, far more of the former than the latter. When she does, there is nothing you can do but willingly succumb”.
I wanted to start out with this overview. Some interviews and reviews. A sense of how the album was being talked about and what critics were saying. In future features, I am going to look at the songs and the legacy of Aerial. How it still has life left in it. On 7th November, we mark twenty years of this double album that is an undoubted masterpiece. The awe-inspiring Aerial from Kate Bush is…
ARGUABLY her best album.