Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU.UUCP (03/04/87)
Really-From: IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu Mark's posting re "mainstream" music has been noted with surprise for its untypical note of anger. What's eating you, Mark? From Hoffman: >I like ragging on Gabriel >in this group just to upset his insufferable (a la IED) fans but I >don't turn off the radio when his songs come on. IED, who is not a real fan, has "ragged on" Gabriel as often as Hoffman, actually; but maybe with a little less haste and carelessness. Now, the first part of Tony Myatt's 1985 interview with Kate Bush. Please be patient with Mr. Myatt; although he asks a few amazingly lame questions, they somehow manage to elicit some fascinating answers from Kate. The interview (with intro) was initially copied from the Homeground transcription, then checked against an audio-cassette of the convention for accuracy. The Convention Interview, Part One The taped interview played at the 1985 Kate Bush Convention was specially commissioned by Homeground for the event. It was conducted by Tony Myatt, a former DJ and now Producer at Capital Radio, London's commercial radio station. It is likely that Tony Myatt was in fact the first DJ ever to play Kate's music on the air: "Wuthering Heights", way back at the end of 1977. He has since then remained a champion of Kate's music, and his interviews over the years may be said to have charted her progress. This interview was conducted in November 1985, and we <Homeground> believe it is one of the best Kate has given on her new album Hounds of Love. Myatt: Let's talk about The Hounds of Love first of all. A wonderful title for an album, but where does it come from? Kate Bush: The title comes from one of the songs, which is entitled "Hounds of Love", and this album for me is like two quite different pieces of work. The A-side is very much five individual songs that are in some way all linked by love, and this seemed to be a title which really did sum up that side. We actually gave a title to the B-side of the album as well, but you can't have two titles for an album, so we just went for the A-side title to cover it all. M: But the "Hounds of Love" thing itself, does it come from a book? Or is it something you made up? KT: No, the "Hounds of Love" are an image, really: someone who's afraid of being captured by love; and the imagery is of love taking the form of hounds that are hunting them, so they run away because they're afraid of being caught by the hounds and being ripped to shreds. M: Are you afraid of being caught by love? KT: Yes, I think so. I think everyone is. When you are in love with someone, you do not want to lose that. It's something that affects you in so many areas. It can be frightening, yes. M: It's not a feeling of being trapped, though, Kate, is it? KT: I think it can be for some people, yes. It doesn't mean that for me, but I think for some people any relationship can be a form of being trapped, and they're afraid of that. M: Just on the lighter side, it's a wonderful cover, the two hounds. Where did they come from? How long did it take to pose that picture? Because it must have taken a long time. KT: It's a very popular question. The two dogs are friends of ours, and John, my brother, who took the photo, had a lot of trouble keeping them under control. He had a very strong word with them and got them to behave, and it was really just a matter of patience, because we'd get the whole scene set up, and the dogs would come in and they'd be walking over me and everything would be totally ruined in five minutes, so we'd have to start again. M: So they behaved themselves in the end, anyway? KT: Yes, to the point where they just went to sleep. M: And they got a little mention on the album, as well. KT: Absolutely, for all that effort. M: This is your first album for quite a while. A lot of people would say that being that amount of time away from any kind of business, let alone the pop business, can be quite tricky. I mean, why was it necessary, that break, as far as you're concerned? KT: Whenever I do something, it's really going in at the deep end of a project, and I do find that things take me longer than I thought. It's not something I plan, it's just that the work takes over and in order to make it better you just have to be patient and spend more time with it. After the last album at the end of 1982, I'd just spent an intense period in the studio doing an album and I wanted to get a break. I felt that I hadn't really had any time to take things in because I'd been working so constantly since 1978 -- and we'd just moved as well, out of London -- so I wanted to spend some time at home, see my friends, take in new stimuli, and try to create a new energy for a new direction that would be different from the album I'd just written. Also, I wanted to get together our own recording studio, which was definitely something which was being pointed at all the way through the other albums -- that it was the thing to do. And I found that just during that time that I was taking off to discover things right, get the studio together, I made some of the most important decisions -- and very beneficial ones -- that I have ever made. And I think it's all good, and I understand just what you mean about that time. In a way you do get scared that you're spending so long away that you won't be able to come back. But the priority -- and again I really did feel that this was what I wanted during this time -- was the work, and not necessarily being successful or famous; the priority was that what I was working on should be the best it could be, at that time. M: Was the business itself getting on top of you? Did you feel you were missing out on things? KT: I don't think I was missing out on things, but I wanted to get away from the exposure -- that being...consumed -- that can start to happen to you if you don't get away. And I think, too, that when I spend so long on projects, I want to get back to that more and more when I'm out doing promotion, because I know that everything takes me such a long time to do. M: So you built the studio. That was a giant step as well, I would have thought. Did you actually physically get in there and help build the place yourself, or was it just... KT: No, I was really involved in the design, and really the inspiration behind the whole project was my father, and he was totally encouraging and really put a lot of it together himself, and he was in there building it and advising on putting the studio together; and so really the studio is very much a lot to do with his efforts and enthusiasm. M: You're very close to the family -- you're a very close-knit family? KT: Yes. M: Are your family supportive so far as your music is concerned? KT: I think they're supportive of me in every area possible. I think I am most definitely a strongly emotionally-based person, and my family are totally integral, I think, to everything I do. They affect me because I love them. M: Do you need that? Is that essential? KT: I think it is essential. I think it's something that has always been there, and that if it wasn't there it would probably be devastating for me, yes. M: What about when you write your songs, though, do you try them out on your family? Do they get a chance to hear them? KT: Yes; yes, they do. There's a small group that is around the family, obviously including Del and a few friends, and they're really the people who hear straight after I've written it and I suppose the reaction is the initial...you see if it's going to work or not, by just the way they react. M: For example, the songs on the Hounds of Love album. How many songs in total would you say you wrote for the album that perhaps didn't make it in the end...or does it not work that way? KT: No, it does. Initially, I write a batch of songs and try to pick the best. So I suppose there would have been a good say four or five songs -- but then to call them songs is misleading, because they weren't complete, and I'd normally find that I'd throw lots of ideas down and then get back to them in a few days and see that they weren't as good as they could be, so I would just leave them and not finish off the track. And the second side of the album had one and a half tracks rewritten, really, because the flow of the side needed to be changed because the whole nature of it kept changing as things were being put on top of the basics. M: Do you ever go back to the songs you rejected? Say, for The Hounds of Love, would you ever go back to them again, or leave them totally aside? KT: It's quite interesting going back to them, and I have done, and I tend to find little pieces that I think can be re-worked and the rest of it is probably rubbish, so I'll put out the bits that seem re-usable. And though if that isn't used itself, it will then spark off something that can be used again, so they do get recycled sometimes. M: Six months you worked on the songs for the album. As far as you're concerned is six months a long time? KT: I think it is a long time, yes, but it's just the way the work takes you. Things can be very fast, and then the next part of the process will slow down dramatically, and each song has a different nature -- its own personality in a way -- and it can be terribly time-consuming to get as many of the right things as you can for each track, and the lyrics can be ultimately frustrating. M: Well, I think lyrics are what make your songs, quite honestly. I love the melodies as well, but I think the lyrics...I mean I have to sit down and read the lyrics as I'm listening to the song, and then the song means that much more as far as I'm concerned. Are the lyrics that important to you? They obviously are. <Derisive laughter from the convention audience.> KT: VERY important. I think the music and the lyrics are the two main priorities in song-writing, and they should be equally good, hopefully. <More laughter.> But for example, when you're writing a song, does the melody come first, or do you year the lyric line? KT: Again, it does really alter from song to song, but generally the music comes first and actually you just get like a riff musically that would have a line, say, connected to it; and that would be the chorus of the song. And you can spend, say, up to ten days or whatever, trying to get the rest of the lyrics around it. M: Can you explain the first single off the album, the "Deal with God"? KT: It's a bit of a cliche at the moment, with so many songs called this, but it is very much about the "power" of love, and the strength that is created between two people when they're very much in love, but the strength can also be...threatening, violent, dangerous as well as gentle, soothing, loving. And it's saying that if these two people could swap places -- if the man could become the woman and the woman the man, that perhaps they could understand the feelings of the other person in a truer way, understand them from that gender's point of view, and that perhaps there are very subtle differences between the sexes that can cause problems in a relationship, especially when the people really do care about each other a lot. M: Every album that you've had out to date, since the very first, has been full of contrast, full of original ideas. Does this create a problem for you, trying to create something that's totally original? Does it become a burden to you? KT: I think the whole process is a form of a burden in that it's really quite tortuous, and it does pull you through so many different feelings and problems and worries. I just think the whole thing creates its own problems and energies that you just have to cope with in order to get what you want at the end. M: You see, the thing is, with a lot of stuff on the new album, would you agree if I said that the first side anyway was probably the most commercial thing you've done to date? Or don't you like that word "commercial"? KT: No, I think especially from your mouth I can accept it...and in some ways I think you're very right: it is, and not necessarily so intentionally as perhaps I thought. I think the development of rhythm in my music is perhaps one of the things that makes it obviously more available to people, and a constancy of rhythm perhaps wasn't always there in previous albums. M: That's exactly what I'm talking about. The rhythm tracks I find on this album are tremendous. Were you totally responsible for that? KT: No, I wasn't. I think a very big influence was Del Palmer, who when I was initially coming up with the songs...I would actually get Del to manifest in the rhythm box the pattern that I wanted. As a bass player I think he has a very natural understanding of rhythms and working with drums, and he could also actually get the patterns that I could hear in my head and that I wanted, so it's through him that we started off with the rhythmic base that was then built upon and was very much what I wanted. M: Here again with the new album there are some songs that are fairly simple in their construction, and other songs that are very complex, as well. <Laughter from audience.> Can you for example tell me about "The Big Sky"? KT: Yes, "The Big Sky" gave me terrible trouble, really, just as a song. You definitely do have relationships with some songs, and we had a lot of trouble getting on together and it was just one of those songs that kept changing -- at one point every week -- and it was just a matter of trying to pin it down. Because it's not often I've written a song like that: when you come up with something that can literally take you to so many different tangents, so many different forms of the same song, that you just end up not knowing where you are with it. and I just had to pin it down eventually, and that was a very strange beast. M: You were happy with the final outcome? KT: Yes, and it was very different from the original song that was written. M: In what way? KT: In nearly every possible way. M: A complete change of song? KT: Yes, and that's very rare as well, but it was just one of those songs. Maybe it's all to do with what the song is about, the fact that it's changing all the time -- the sky, always changing. M: Was it your idea to do something that was very complex and something that was very simple on this album? KT: There were definite areas of simplicity that I wanted to work with musically, particularly in the traditional areas, as also I wanted to move away from certain chord patterns that I'd definitely become very fond of over the last few albums. And though I did move away from them a bit, I definitely hung onto my old favourites. M: That can't be easy to do, because I think most songwriters do have a certain way of writing a song. You wanted to get away from that? KT: I think it's finding the right avenue for the song, and in a way I think you just have to pin down as early as you can exactly what you want to dress the song in -- you know, what colour clothes... It's just like that, and you have to treat it accordingly -- and from the word go the song would then take on an attitude that's maybe completely different from the song next to it on the album. "The Big Sky" is an example of a real freak on the album, in that it consistently changed until we got there in the end, and "Waking the Witch" on side two was totally written through a guitarist. I knew what I wanted, but it wasn't a song that would sound right if it was based around a keyboard -- it had to be written through the electric guitar. So the guitarist came in literally working to just a Linn pattern, and I just told him what I wanted, and it was a very different way of writing. I've never done it like that before, but I think it was very successful. M: What about the idea behind that song. To me it's weird. Do you agree, or not? KT: I'm glad you say that, because I would be disappointed in a way if you thought it was ordinary. I definitely wanted to create a weirdness. It's all part of the story of the second side, that the person's in the water for the night, and they just have to try and keep going until the morning, and at this point they've just woken from a dream and have surfaced on the water, trying not to drown, and it's the horror of then being faced with something that wants to put you straight under the water again, whether you are innocent or guilty. M: From a personal point of view, did you ever feel that was happening to you in the music business? KT: No, not at all! No, I think that's very much something that... M: People have made up? KT: Well, that it is an outside person's view of construing subject matter. I think, very much, this whole thing is tied in with water, and if I was thinking of going under water it wouldn't be to do with the business at all, it would be to do with myself as a person, relationships, and that sort of thing. They're what concern me, that's what would make me go under, I think. No -- I haven't...I don't feel that that is relevant to things in my life because at the time when I took that break, and I was writing these songs, it was one of the most contented, HAPPY periods of my life for quite a while, in that I actually had time to breathe and work creatively. And I think what's interesting is that I've always felt, in the past -- and it's almost a sort of code from certain areas of life -- that in order to write something that has meaning or whatever, that you have to be unhappy, that you should be in some kind of torment. And what was surprising was that for being very happy at this part in my life, I felt I wrote some songs that were saying very different things from that. M: Would you say that "Waking the Witch" is one of the most complex songs on the album, one of the most difficult songs to record? KT: No, I'd say it was one of the quickest, and it's actually one of the simplest in that it's almost one chord all the way through the song, and the whole movement is to do with moods and the people that you're dealing with, rather than musically. The structure of the song is so simple... M: But there's a lot going on in there, that's what I mean. KT: Yes, there is! But I think it's stuff that travels. The whole track is traveling, and if that bit comes up, it will go again, and then maybe come back later. M: So what was the most difficult song on the album to get done? KT: I think..."The Big Sky". That's the only one that from a songwriting point of view actually caused the problems. With all of the others it was just a matter of patience and finding the right things; they were all keyed quite instantly. <That ends the first installment. More to follow.>