FEATURE:
Kate Bush: Them Heavy People: The Extraordinary Characters in Her Songs
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 2005’s Aerial/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Elvis Presley (King of the Mountain)/Prof. Joseph Yupik (50 Words for Snow)
__________
I am going to pair…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 50 Words for Snow
characters from 1993’s The Red Shoes and 1978’s Lionheart before then moving to 1980’s Never for Ever and 1985’s Hounds of Love. That would mean I have included each of Kate Bush’s studio albums (excluding 2011’s Director’s Cut) twice. I am looking at her latter career for this edition. Two characters that are not named in songs but definitely are relevant. I shall move to a character voiced by a comedy legend in a minute. However, I am going back to Aerial and another great character. In future features, I am going to mention, Bertie and Mrs. Bartolozzi. I will also feature 50 Words for Snow again as there is the Lady in the Lake from Lake Tahoe and Elton John’s character from Snowed in at Wheeler Street (technically the ‘Lover’, though I am not sure how to name him). However, Aerial is relevant as it was Kate Bush’s first album since 1993’s The Red Shoes. King of the Mountain was a hugely exciting moment. I have written about the song before. It is the last video to feature Kate Bush in it., Directed by the late Jimmy Murakami, there was a lot of discussion around the video. Bush was concerned how she looked and self-conscious. Murakami has to reassure her but, after this experience, Bush did not feature in future videos. Aerial was also the first album that did not feature her – or her feet in the case of The Red Shoes – on the cover. This was not Bush’s first song since 1993. She has recorded others and I think the last single or thing she featured on was 1995/1996. However, we are still talking about a decade almost, so this was like a comeback. Appropriate given the main character that is alluded to in King of the Mountain.
Elvis Presley is very much at the heart of this song. There are other characters in the song. “Another Hollywood waitress/Is telling us she's having your baby”. I was going to write about Hollywood, the film industry and this waitress. However, critics were a little ignorant to the relevance of Elvis Presley in this song. Many not knowing that Bush was putting on an Elvis drawl. I have noted this before, but a lot of the lyrics seem to apply to Bush’s situation. Maybe allusions to an artist seen as gone and departed but more to do with Bush’s domestic life and being a mother: “Elvis, are you out there somewhere/Looking like a happy man?”. This idea that Bush was finished or retired: “And there's a rumour that you're on ice/And you will rise again someday”. What is significant is this was the first song written for Aerial. Some might think Bush wrote King of the Mountain in 2005 and she was responding to this absence and press speculation. However, we can date King of the Mountain down to 1996, so this was two years before she became a mother. In 1996, Bush was writing for this new album but also not embroiled in press runs and any pressure. It was not her retiring, but this was a period of her not immersed in making an album to a deadline. You can feel her taking on this idea of a legendary artist who had this career and is now in the mountains or hidden away. Bush herself was living in Theale, West Berkshire and very much building this new life and home. It is fascinating that Bush mentioned Elvis Presley and he was the subject of this mountain-dwelling mystical figure. There are lines that are a little oblique or that have multiple meanings or possibilities: “Could you see the storm rising?/Could you see the guy who was driving?/Could you climb higher and higher?/Could you climb right over the top?/Why does a multi-millionaire/Fill up his home with priceless junk?”.
It is interesting reading into King of the Mountain. After 1993’s The Red Shoes and the short film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve received some negative press, Bush was burned out and she experienced family tragedy and loss, she needed to step back. She wandered out of public view and there was this view in the press that Bush’s eccentricities were more interesting than the music. This is what Graeme Thomson notes in his book, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Tori Amos was new on the scene and being compared to Kate Bush. Her music seemed fresher and more interesting. Björk’s Debut came out in 1993 and she was seen as a more important and complete artist. She is a big fan of Kate Bush and has shouted out to her through the years. Both these artists compared to Kate Bush but seen as more intriguing and better alternatives. Bush was lukewarm towards The Red Shoes. The first time she felt like that since 1978. Maybe overworked or balancing too much, she said she did the best she could at the time. Paddy and John Bush, her brothers, backed away from fanzine contacts and were a bit more detached. The 1994 fan convention was the last one she attended. When dubbing in Cricklewood for The Line, the Cross and the Curve, Kate Bush said she wanted to take time off. She mentioned how she loved being by the sea (she would move to Devon) and get away from the city. Maybe, as Graeme Thomson notes, connecting with her childhood holidays in Birchington-on-Sea. She wanted to be away from the studio. After the death of her mother in 1992 and splitting from Del Palmer (who continued working with her and engineered Aerial), there as reduced activity between 1994 and 2005. Bush had not really grieved her mother. She set up new home with Dan McIntosh and it would not be long until she became a mother herself. There were rumours Bush was living in a cage, castle or gothic retreat. That she changed her name officially to Catherine Earnshaw (the heroine from Wuthering Heights). Considering all of this context, you can read a lot of the lyrics to be about Bush. Using Elvis Presley as someone who died young and was killed by excess and this awful pressure, celebrity life and working himself into the ground. Rather than thinking about him dying young, Bush imagined him as maybe being alive but now being in the mountains and away from the limelight. I see Bush talking about herself and her situation – though I could be overreading it!
IN THIS PHOTO: Elvis Presley
It is the nature of fame and industry pressure. How critics saw her and the fact that she was so busy recording and working that she could not deal with her personal life and changes. Even if there seem to be stronger songs on Aerial that would have made a good lead single – Mrs. Bartolozzi or How to Be Invisible -, King of the Mountain seems to be the most important, relevant and powerful. Del Palmer’s prowling and brilliant bass. Steve Sanger’s punchy drums. Dan McIntosh on guitar and Bush on keyboard. Paddy Bush providing backing vocals. One of the last times he would feature on his sister’s albums (he did not appear at all on 50 Words for Snow). Family old and new on this incredible single. Elvis Presley is also this music idol. I am not sure whether Bush was inspired by him musically. In this case, he was this character in her song. However, Bush did not really mention her music idols much through song. Whereas Elton John actually appeared on 50 Words for Snow and Prince on The Red Shoes (on Why Should I Love You?), there are others that never featured. Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Paul McCartney and so many others never featured on her records. Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour did, so there is a bit of a split. However, Elvis Presxley was an artist who as taken advantage of early on and exploited. A controversial figure for sure – the fact Priscilla Presley was fourteen when they met -, he was a revelation and revolution. However, in terms of freedom, money and a private life, you feel he was not given a moment to breathe. Not that Kate Bush experienced anything as horrible. However, there were times when she was perhaps living unhealthy and really depressed. That she was being taken advantage of slightly in terms of releasing albums quickly or not given enough time early in her career to relax or have some downtime. There are connections and mentions of Elvis Presley. Far Out Magazine published this article, where they highlight an interview from 2006 from Rolling Stone France:
“Despite being a private, shy and retiring figure, Bush remains iconic and beloved by many, but she doesn’t quite understand why anyone would want to pursue a career in music in any other way opposite to how she has always chosen to. Many people often choose not to pursue a career in music for this exact reason, but in Bush’s eyes, those who do go chasing the delights of being world-renowned are destined to find out the hard way that it’s hard to ever escape fame for a little bit of peace.
In a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone France, Bush was asked whether for this reason she would consider someone like Elvis Presley to be her opposite, with interviewer Philippe Badhorn stating: “You work at your own pace; you manage to have a life away from show-business when he stepped out of day-to-day reality.”
Rather predictably, Bush would state that she has no idea why someone like Presley would have actively wished for the fame that he received, and hypothesised that he never truly sought it in the first place.
“I believe he really was a sweet and fun loving nice guy who couldn’t say no,” she argued. “Nobody would want to be that famous. I was already asked if I felt I was like him. Thank god I don’t. I’m not as famous, nobody is, except maybe Frank Sinatra or Marilyn Monroe, but she died because of that sooner than him. It’s hard to have the whole world looking at you”.
I am going to move to this article, that takes a passage from Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. It gives us more of an insight into King of the Mountain and why Elvis Presley is particularly important as a subject. Think of Bush writing King of the Mountain in 1996, I still cannot help think she was reflecting on her career and her desire to get away from everything and escape the pressures of fame. Something she never wanted, it was thrust upon her:
“‘What a horrible nightmare. Particularly for somebody like Elvis. Because the impression I get was that he was fun-loving and just happened to be really gorgeous and sexy and talented. And I think, y’know, partly why people respond to him the way they do – and I really feel strongly about this – is that people [sense] an intention from somebody, whether it’s an actor or a singer. People felt that Elvis was a really genuinely sweet person and that’s why everybody loves him so much. Not that I know a great deal about Elvis, but I thought he was a very beautiful- looking man with a fantastic voice and this fun-loving quality where you see he’s up there kind of taking the piss out of himself.’
I said I’d recently re-watched Presley’s 1970 Vegas-era documentary, That’s the Way It Is, and it had struck me that it often must have been a real laugh being Elvis.
‘Well, I hope it was. What I see is somebody who was a sweetheart in the truest sense, just being eaten alive. To be as famous as he was . . . how could anybody survive that and still be a human being? I see him as being destroyed really by the fact that he was so famous. So I just love the idea of him being alive somewhere, away from all the people and the greed and the wanting to take him over’”.
There is one more Kate Bush/Elvis Presley connection before I flip to Side B and Bush’s latest album. In 2014, when Kate Bush brought her Before the Dawn residency to Hammersmith, she became the first woman ever to have eight albums in the Official Album Charts at the same time. She was behind Elvis Presley in terms of the most albums being in the charts simultaneously, as this article reveals:
“Today, two of Bush's albums are in the top 10 , The Whole Story at number six and Hounds Of Love at number nine, with a total of eight Bush albums in the top 40, the company said.
And 50 Words For Snow is at number 20, The Kick Inside is at number 24, The Sensual World is at 26, The Dreaming is at 37, Never For Ever is at 38 and Lionheart is at 40.
A further three of her albums are at numbers 43, 44 and 49.
Bush is now only behind Elvis Presley, the overall record holder who managed 12 entries in the top 40 following his death in 1977, and The Beatles, who notched up 11 simultaneous top 40 entries with their 2009 album reissues”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Sir Stephen Fry in 2024/PHOTO CREDIT: Elena Ternovaja
If King of the Mountain is very much about Elvis Presley and this real person who died prematurely, 50 Words for Snow is a song that features a fictional character voiced by a real person. Though his full name is not mentioned in the title track of Kate Bush’s tenth studio album, she does mention the name ‘Joe’ in the chorus. She revealed in promotional interviews that the character is Prof. Joseph Yupik. Voiced by Sir Stephen Fry, this is someone who I admired for a very long time. Maybe his legacy and genius has diminished slightly in my heart and eyes. Referring to a previous comment where he said abuse victims, who he saw as self-pitying, need to “grow up”. That was a bit of a blow in terms of how I saw him! However, I am detaching the artist from the art for a moment. He is someone, for the most part, whose heart is in the right place. Whilst he has not spoken out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he has called out Donald Trump as a fascist. Very much concerned with what Trump is doing in America and this almost dictatorship reign Fry is also someone who has appeared in some of my favourite T.V. shows ever. As a main character in two series of Blackadder, Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster, and one half of A Bit of Fry and Laurie, he is responsible for some of my favourite comedy moments. His comedy partners, Hugh Laurie, appeared in the video for Kate Bush’s Experiment IV (1986). It is a shame 50 Words for Snow was not released as a single, as it would have been cool seeing Fry dressed as a professor. I am not sure how I see him now. Balancing some past controversy and issues with his legacy and brilliant work. Also, I did write to him when I was a depressed student and he did write me back. So I have to be thankful for that! An intellect and one of the greatest comic actors ever, Kate Bush naturally turned to Stephen Fry when looking for someone to say out loud these increasingly insane and lobate names for snow!
It is a myth that Inuit and Yupik people have fifty words for snow. Whereas most people know that fact and leave it there, an artist like Kate Bush not only used it and examined that for a song. It is actually the name of her album. I guess King of the Mountain is about mythology and the wild and wind. An atmospheric song set in the mountains. It has so much weather and mystery. Whilst that is quite a propulsive and big song, 50 Words for Snow has this groove and liquidity. In terms of the players, we have Dan McIntosh on guitar again. Offering a different sound and dynamic compared to King of the Mountain. Kate Bush on keyboard again and John Giblin on bass instead of Del Palmer. The legendary Steve Gadd on drums providing this incredible beat. What I want to explore with this song is Kate Bush and numbers. I also want to explore 50 Words for Snow being an underrated album and the comedy connection. However, before that, here is an interview, where Bush discussed this humorous and fascinating title track:
“Years ago I think I must have heard this idea that there were 50 words for snow in this, ah, Eskimo Land! And I just thought it was such a great idea to have so many words about one thing. It is a myth – although, as you say it may hold true in a different language – but it was just a play on the idea, that if they had that many words for snow, did we? If you start actually thinking about snow in all of its forms you can imagine that there are an awful lot of words about it. Just in our immediate language we have words like hail, slush, sleet, settling… So this was a way to try and take it into a more imaginative world. And I really wanted Stephen to read this because I wanted to have someone who had an incredibly beautiful voice but also someone with a real sense of authority when he said things. So the idea was that the words would get progressively more silly really but even when they were silly there was this idea that they would have been important, to still carry weight. And I really, really wanted him to do it and it was fantastic that he could do it. (…) I just briefly explained to him the idea of the song, more or less what I said to you really. I just said it’s our idea of 50 Words For Snow. Stephen is a lovely man but he is also an extraordinary person and an incredible actor amongst his many other talents. So really it was just trying to get the right tone which was the only thing we had to work on. He just came into the studio and we just worked through the words. And he works very quickly because he’s such an able performer. (…) I think faloop’njoompoola is one of my favourites. [laughs]
John Doran, ‘A Demon In The Drift: Kate Bush Interviewed‘. The Quietus, 2011”.
I have written about this song before and my favourite words for snow. Some are better than others, but I love eleven (stellatundra), twenty-two (erase-o-dust) and thirty-one (whippoccino). I am surprised whippoccino is not a type of coffee inspired by Kate Bush. Maybe something with a lot of whipped cream?! Anyway, this song is essentially about numbers. Whereas Bush could have written this title track and sung more generally about Inuit and Yupik people and this myth around them having fifty words for snow, she committed to coming up with possibilities! Maybe backing herself into a corner, it is impressive she came up with so many. Think about π from Aerial and Bush reciting π. Bush recognised how numbers had a language of their own. She was always interested in how everything can be broken down into numbers. It is interesting why anyone would have more than one word for snow, let alone fifty! Stephen Fry has the unique honour of being one of very few high-profile names who have sung/narrated on her albums. Lenny Henry was on Why Should I Love You? from The Red Shoes. Two great comedy actors who Bush brought into the studio. Whilst Hugh Laurie, Dawn French, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Noel Fielding, Steve Coogan and Pamela Stephenson have, in different ways, interacted with her work or been a part of her career, there was not a lot of opportunity for Bush to work with comics and comedy actors she loved. 50 Words for Snow is one of those songs that blends Kate Bush’s sense of humour and eccentricity. If some find it exhausting and tiresome that 50 Words for Snow goes beyond eight minutes, I do think her commitment to this concept and theme is impressive! It is also the bond of Stephen Fry seriously committing to the seriousness of these words for snow. Prof. Joseph Yupik almost delivering this seminar. Having him say “phlegm de neige” and “Zhivagodamarbletash” and asking us to take this seriously is actually quite funny! I don’t think people credit Kate Bush with being a funny writer. She loved comedy and still does. I think that there is a link between comedy and her work. Kate Bush has adopted slightly quirkier personas and definitely injected humour into her work. In 50 Words for Snow, Bush’s role is popping up in the chorus to encourage Prof. Joseph Yupik. Or maybe hurrying him along: “Come on Joe, you’ve got 32 to go, come on Joe, you’ve got 32 to go/Come on now, you’ve got 32 to go, come on now, you’ve got 32 to go/Don’t you know it’s not just the Eskimo/Let me hear your 50 words for snow”. It is comedic in tone but she is also quite gravelled and growling almost. It is a vocal side that I really love!
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional image for 50 Words for Snow
Whilst it is brilliant that Stephen Fry travelled to Kate Bush’s house, was given this list of fifty words for snow very last-minute and the last words were being worked on pretty much as he walked in, he then stood in the studio and rattled them off – first take, I bet! -, he is one of several very diverse and fascinating characters. Even though there are only seven songs on 50 Words for Snow, we get everything from a wild man, a snowman that melts, the ghost of a woman who drowned in a lake, and this sweetheart of Kate Bush’s, where the two are drawn apart through various periods of history. I might also feature Little Shrew (Snowflake) in this feature, as this was Bush taking the album’s opener, Snowflake, and releasing it to raise money for War Child. The video for the song features a little shrew scurrying through this war-torn scene. It is a fascinating additional character to a rich album that never gets the respect it deserves. Bush’s latest album is one where she steps fully away from Pop and its structure and strictures. Graeme Thomson also noted this. How, with 50 Words for Snow, Bush went more int Chamber Jazz. Allowing these longer songs and greater breathing space. It is a very open album where you get so much of the outside. You could say that about Aerial, but that has a lot of different songs and what could more traditional be seen as conventional or closer to Pop. 50 Words for Snow is almost like Bush composing a film soundtrack. More cinematic and off-piste, I think, than ever, she also sort of put the piano front and centre again. Drawing back to her debut, 1978’s The Kick Inside. It will be fascinating seeing what her next album sounds like and whether we get a lot of characters in the songs. I love 50 Words for Snow and Stephen Fry’s Prof. Joseph Yupik. A pity he never made it into a video where he and Bush were int his lecture hall or setting where these words were being read from a parchment or ancient book. However, it is this brilliant song that I wanted to explore here. From a magnificent album one hopes will not be…
KATE Bush’s last.