FEATURE:
The Queen of Tea
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Kate Bush’s Aerial, and the Preparation and Release
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I am flicking back…
through Graeme Thomson’s Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. I am revisiting it to get ideas for new features. There is a lot written about Aerial. This is Kate Bush’s 2005 double album. On 3rd November, Del Palmer would have turned seventy-four. He sadly died in 2024. He worked on every Kate Bush album in some form. Reading about him in the book lets you inside some of the magic. He performed on Aerial, but his biggest role was engineer. He worked so closely with Kate Bush. Even though they were in a relationship and split in the 1990s, they remained very dear friends. Palmer being one of the only people Bush could work closely with. He would turn up early and get to work. It is wonderful because Kate Bush got a little bit of loving mockery from Del Palmer and others in the studio because she kept offering tea! I think we associate The Beatles with tea when it comes to artists. There is a whole website and discussion around photos of them drinking tea. I think Kate Bush might be the ultimate tea-drinking artist. She drank a lot during Aerial and would offer it all the time. Legendary hospitality! In 2006, when Tom Doyle interviewed Bush to mark twenty years of Q magazine (which unfortunately is no longer around), she was asked what she is going to do after the interview. She said going to the toilet, because of all the tea she had drank! I wonder what her bag of choice is?! I feel it is Yorkshire Tea, as that is the only answer you should give! Though you feel she has these special teas and goes a bit deeper. I would love to know what she has as her tea. The working of the studio did not differ much from the earliest days. During Hounds of Love in 1985, Bush’s mother, Hannah, would offer tea and supplies. I think Kate Bush was also pitching in.
If musicians were probably being ferried about by her husband, Dan McIntosh, and he would go and pick up takeaways – or was this done more for later albums -, Bush was always making sure everyone has enough tea inside them! Graeme Thomson notes how the air of hospitality had not changed much from East Wickham Farm. Kate Bush now the mother figure. I think it helped where she was living. Not shuttling between studios and in a very happy space, she gave birth to her son, Bertie, in 1993. She was a literal mother and had that responsibility. Though she was also looking after the musicians and those around her. There was a feeling of collaboration. Musicians improvising and, if something worked that was great, but if not then no issues. That was very different to how things would have been before. Some of those involved with Aerial note how they met a very young Bertie, drank tea, had some pizza and saw the house. In the middle of this familial pleasantness was a hugely ambitious album coming together. EMI must have been nervous they would never hear an album. King of the Mountain, the only single released from Aerial, was written around 1995. So a decade since she wrote the first bits of Aerial, it was released to the public. Unlike The Kick Inside or one of her earliest albums, this one was packed with musicians. I think there are about fourteen musicians (including Kate Bush) who play on The Kick Inside. Around twenty-two on Aerial. These people coming in and out. There must have been a mountain of tears, biscuits and cakes on hand! Aerial is a bit of a pun. Though Bush has never said specially what Aerial refers to, it could be the washing powder. Its standout song, Mrs. Bartolozzi, is about a woman washing and scrubbing the floors. Maybe Bush as this new mother, there are erotic elements to the song. Was Bush thinking about that song when titling Aerial? Graeme Thomson writes how Tony Wadsworth of EMI felt King of the Mountain jumped out and was an obvious single. If Bush fought EMI and won to get Wuthering Heights released as her debut single rather than the more conventional James and the Cold Gun, there were no fights now.
How to Be Invisible was suggested at one point. I do wonder why only one single was released. How to Be Invisible and Mrs. Bartolozzi would have been popular singles. Though King of the Mountain was the final video to feature Bush in. Maybe conscious about having been away for a while and conscious about how she looked. Or not wanting to be on camera. Thomson is cold about King of the Mountain and feels the vocal is uncommitted and it is flat I guess it is propulsive and works as a single, but Mrs. Bartolozzi or even Nocturn would have made for a more intriguing single. In any case, there was not a massive hoopla regarding promotion. Today, major artists have to do the online thing and post videos, teasers and promote endlessly. There is a generous assortment of interviews, though I don’t recall there being this build-up and sense of anticipation. Instead, we got the first single in October 2005 and Aerial arrived the following month. When celebrating twenty years of Aerial last year, The Quietus observed this: “But it was the perceived ‘wait’ for Aerial – a wait that inspired John Mendelsohn’s novel/non-fiction hybrid Waiting For Kate Bush, a wait built up to grandiose proportions by a British press eager for any glimpse of this apparently reclusive icon – that her fan community so keenly and acutely remembers. The days before social media, when any tiny detail – a tantalising report of an Abbey Road recording session in 2003 on a fan forum, a rare sighting at a Buckingham Palace reception – was pored over, dissected, analysed. Of course, for Kate Bush herself, in her embrace of the domesticity of motherhood, she was running towards the real world, not away from it. But the mysteries abounded as she lived a quieter life with her husband and son in their home in Berkshire with its own recording studio. To paraphrase Tom Waits, what was she building in there?”. Aerial reached number three on the U.K album chart and Bush performed the second disc, A Sky of Honey, in its entirety for her 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. It is one of her most popular albums. For all its immense and amazing production (by Kate Bush), I think about Bush serving tea and the atmosphere recording it. How musicians came ands went but there was this looser feel. A real convivial and communal aspect. Bush guiding rather than dictating. John Giblin and Del Palmer tickled by Bush always offering tea. It seems like one of her happiest recording experiences. Many compare it to Hounds of Love because of that. To think, as we speak, musicians might be at Kate Bush’s house wiring on an album with her. Will it be as packed as Aerial, or slightly more slimmed-down when it comes to personnel? Who knows! What is guaranteed is that Bush will deliver something incredible, be this amazing host and, no doubt, serve up…
PLENTY of tea!