FEATURE:
In the Snow with Rosebud
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton
Kate Bush’s King of the Mountain at Twenty-One
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IN terms of seismic…
single released, few were as big as Kate Bush and King of the Mountain. 1993’s The Red Shoes was her previous album. Aerial came out in November 2005. On 24th October, 2005, King of the Mountain arrived. It reached number four in the U.K. I think it is among her best singles. Though you feel songs like How to Be Invisible or Mrs. Bartolozzi could have been great singles, King of the Mountain was perhaps the most appropriate. Because it was written back in the 1990s and was the first thing on the album Bush wrote, maybe getting it out there after all those years was important. Also, its lyrics discuss Elvis Presley and this king of the mountain. The ideas that he is alive and is hidden away somewhere. It is about celebrity and fame. Bush theorising whether Presley is alive and has retreated from the spotlight. It is one of those great conspiracy but, alas, Presley did die in1977. Bush herself stepped away from the spotlight and started a family. Her son Bertie was born in 1998. The illustration you see on the single cover for King of the Mountain was by him. It is a fascinating and typically Kate Bush song. As it is twenty-one soon, it makes me wonder about her next single. King of the Mountain came out twelve years after The Red Shoes was released, but Bush had released music after 1993. Though this was a new single after such a long time. Now, it has been nearly fifteen years since she released a single. If you don’t count the recent Little Shrew (Snowflake). 50 Words for Snow’s Wild Man came out in October 2011. I don’t think a new Kate Bush single will feature her in it. King of the Mountain is the last time we will see her in a video. Bush was self-conscious and worried about her appearance. She is magnetic in the video, though I don’t think it was the most comfortable experience. Even so, the single and video was received with huge warmth. BBC Radio 2 gave it its premiere on 21st September 2005.
I recall when King of the Mountain came out. It was this massive moment. People not quite sure exactly when and if any new stuff from Kate Bush would arrive. It was also one of this song included in Bush’s 2014 residency, Before the Dawn. I am going to bring in some articles I may have sourced before, but there is very little written about King of the Mountain. This article takes from Tom Doyle’s book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. He interviewed Kate Bush in 2005 in promotion of Aerial:
“Aerial began with ‘King of the Mountain’, the first song Kate had written for the album. Its lyric explored the idea that Elvis Presley was alive and well and living in some remote, snowy, elevated location. More significantly, it was someone who’d had myths built around her, writing about another individual who’d had even greater myths built around him. It was essentially a song about fame.
‘There’s only three or four people who’ve been as famous as Elvis,’ Bush reckoned. ‘You’ve got Elvis, you’ve got Frank Sinatra . . . even Marilyn Monroe, I think it probably happened more after she died. But Sinatra and Elvis lived these lives that . . . I mean . . . I can’t imagine what it must have been like.
‘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”.
That idea that Elvis Presley was innocent and sweet and got eaten by fame. Maybe we forget some of the controversy and darker sides of him. Though he was hugely respected and undeniably brilliant, there were aspects that cannot be ignored or put down to the pressures of fame. Even so, he was one of the biggest artists ever and would have felt manipulated. Pressured and almost forced to keep recording, performing and being in films. I do wonder whether Kate Bush recognised some similarities. Not to the same extent, though she did have a hectic career. So much attention came her way, she would have been uncomfortable with some of it. Consciously stepping away from music for a bit to focus on herself and family, you can see some autobiography in King of the Mountain, even if Kate Bush rejects that notion. MOJO placed King of the Mountain thirty-sixth in a list of Kate Bush’s best songs: “The first song written (and partially recorded) for Aerial, in 1997, and the song that announced its completion eight years later, is an atmospheric meditation on the possibility that Elvis lives on in some iconic hinterland, sledging on Kane’s Rosebud. The slinky marimba groove, tough drums and skanky guitars (by Bush’s husband Dan McIntosh), provided an early clue this album would be unlike anything she’d done before, albeit reassuringly compelling and eccentric”. The Guardian said the following about King of the Mountain. They judged it as her eleventh-best single: “Comeback album Aerial wasn’t exactly overburdened with obvious singles. Perhaps the beautiful, sunlit Somewhere in Between might have worked out of context of the Sea of Honey song-suite, but instead Bush plumped for a song that involved her impersonating Elvis and knowingly ruminating on the benefits of withdrawing from the public eye”
There was so much anticipation. King of the Mountain released on 24th October, 2005. Then Aerial came out on 7th November. That period between getting this new Kate Bush single - the first in a while -, and then this double album. I wonder whether she considered releasing any other songs as singles. At this point, I feel Bush was more about albums. Rather than release multiple single, she wanted people to get the album and experience it as a whole. That is why she only released one single from her two albums after that (Deeper Understanding from 2011’s Director’s Cut and Wild Man from 50 Words for Snow, also 2011). I was not in Hammersmith at any of the twenty-two dates in 2014 to see this live. Though I can tell from the live album how atmospheric a performance it was. The crowd awe-struck by this song. It is among my favourites from Kate Bush. Twenty-one years after its release, there is now this wait once more. We have heard from Kate Bush fairly recently, so she is not hiding away. And yet, she is an artist that has so many fans and is loved around the world. I am not sure that she has the same stress and weight on her shoulders as she did in 1993 leading up to 2005. You do have to wonder what the next single will be about. Whether she will release one at all. She may just put an album out and that will be it. Twenty-one years after its release, King of the Mountain is still played on the radio. One of those songs that was huge in 2005, in terms of its significance, it also meant that Bush was still relevant and adored. Number four single and a number three album, that was some achievement, seeing as she had not released anything for a while. King of the Mountain, this wonderful and epic song from…
THIS music queen.