Love-Hounds-request@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (12/29/86)
Really-From: Mark Katsouros <KATSOURO@UMDD>
I'd just like to say that I thought Nancy's friend, Kevin, had a lot of
intelligent things to say regarding Kate. But Kevin, you have to understand
that many of us here (perhaps especially Andy) are quite obsessed with her,
and, hence, may tend to go a bit overboard at times. (Did someone say
"overboard"? "Get out of the water"!)
I first heard Kate's music when a friend mailed me a copy of "Never For
Ever", and I liked it upon my very first listen, having never even heard of
Kate Bush, except for my friend's mention of her. It seems, though, that a lot
of her followers didn't start out even slightly liking her, and I have to admit
that the first time I heard "The Dreaming" (my second Kate LP), I had doubts.
But I soon came to realize that it was a masterpiece. Actually, between the
first time I heard TD, and realizing just how wonderful it was, I acquired
"Hounds of Love", which was probably the LP that enabled me to really enter
Kate's curious world for the first time. I heard things in HoL that I had not
heard in any music before, things that stretched my imagination wide open, at
which time, I returned to TD. I'll tell you the truth, I was initially
intrigued by TD because of it's splendid album cover. Well, I soon found
myself wrapped up in the world of TD, unable to escape it's amazingly textured
sound. To this day, I have found no music that can capture me like TD did. I
did finally pick up "The Kick Inside", and "Lionheart", and fell in love with
the "little girl" singing on both of those LP's as well. I was also amazed at
how widely varied Kate's albums were. It was almost as if they'd been done by
different (but all brilliant) artists, except for Kate's inescapable, lovely
voice. Anyway, I'm sure you've heard enough rantings from us foam-mouthed
love-hounds, so I'll shut up now. Below is one of my favorite interviews with
Kate, done between TD and HoL. I think you'll find it interesting.
A Girl For All Seasons
A converted MICK WALL explores the (dream) world of KATE BUSH.
IT WAS a night, cool and replete, like any other night. I was bedded down
in my fox-hole, my day-ticket all turned in and chewed over, gliding on a
cushion of ozone into the calmer tonic waters of sleep release. In the
distance. . . a sound.
Darkness surrounded me in opaque chiffon veils which were lifting
casually, layer after layer, from the sweet night ground scented with earth
beneath my bare feet.
Oh yes, now I could see; I was standing in a square by a gate. Before me,
its menacing grey spires cutting deep incisions into the intestinal sac of the
night sky, was an unlit church. I stood transfixed before the altar of my own
confusion for an uncertain length of time, listening all the while for the
sound, mellifluous in its steadily increasing velocity.
Suddenly, the heavy oak doors of the church swung open and a regiment of
children carrying ochre candles aloft moved with their own dancing light into
twilight view, humming and cooing the ancient songs of their fathers, heretical
choruses all. Breath left me in translucent plasmic gasps. Time stopped.
In the centre of these columns of glittering child-light stood a woman.
She was quite, quite breathtakingly beautiful. Her face a constellation of
feline expression, ancient hieroglyphic image, a saucerful of secrets. The
woman, accompanied by her honour guard of tiny laughing folk, moved elegantly
up the footpath from the church doors, past where I was standing agape, and
forward into the dark velvet forest that trimmed the hills to the North. She
was singing. It sounded like:
*"Ninny ninny nacky poo, nacky poo, nacky poo. . ."*
And it moved me in a way no other singing voice could; it was a delicious,
indulgent moment of unspoilt pleasure, a caress that tickled me behind the ears
and laid one finger on my groin. My heart was an open wound which would never
heal.
With the urgent balletic step of one who is possessed, I ran to join the
mad procession of twinkling human light, ascending the slopes of impossible
desire, praying for the Autumnal Heavens to spill with naked gifts. And all
the while the woman sang. . .
Ineffably spellbound, I followed the voice . . . the face . . . the
slender moment. And thus it would have remained had not the inexplicably cruel
hand of fate touched my shoulder. A second more and I would surely have been
lost for eternity, left to walk the oatmeal carpet of stars that connects this
world with. . . another. Instead. . .
I woke up!
WELL, WELL, only a dream and nothing more. So some might say, but I know
better. The realm of dreams is the ultimate reality and one you would be wrong
not to take seriously. It cuts time to ribbons, scuffs it up and sends it
rolling into the open sewer, and it tells of the future and of the past, and it
speaks in tongues of that most inexplicable of all puzzles -- *the now!*
I wasn't dreaming of Kate Bush so much as wandering through the white
Winter world of her songs. Sleigh-bells and wasteladen trains in a merry
Easter march, with night and his army approaching. . . slowly. Kate Bush tells
me that:
"I'm very influenced in my writing by old traditional folk songs, ballads
handed down by new generations of musicians but with the original atmosphere
and emotion still maintained. The sort of music my mother, who's Irish, would
have listened to and danced to, and used to play for me when I was very little.
It's probably my biggest musical influence; I really like that feeling folk
music has -- classical music, too -- that timeless feeling you experience from
the joy of just playing."
Kate Bush has an astonishing talent for writing songs and an unmistakable
singing voice, unique in its intensity and pitch. Her dancing is a more recent
acquisition. Though her mother was a prize-winning dancer, Kate began taking
classes as late as her seventeenth year, a little over 12 months before her
first ever single release, 'Wuthering Heights', reached Number One in the UK
charts.
She is also the star of a dozen or more lavishly produced videos, the
allure of which continues to titillate the jaundiced palate of TV audiences the
world over. In their glamorous wake has come a chain of film and TV offers
which up till now she has consistently declined.
All of which affords the lady a globe-wide reputation as one of the
classiest, most outstandingly talented (not forgetting most *successful*)
female pop performers of the last six years.
Simply, she's the best!
Mind you, and I'll be perfectly straight here, I only discovered the truth
gradually. By stages. Three, to be precise . . .
I'D BEEN writing for *Sounds* for about three months off and on when one
day a call comes through. The voice says:
"You are reviewing the singles this week." Just like that. And me, being
the tail-wagging, keen as a witch's breath asshole I was in those days, I said:
"Oh, wow!" Just that.
I started playing the first of the 250 or so singles that had been
released that week at about eight o'clock in the evening, scribbling down notes
and silly bits and pieces like that. By four the next morning I had about 40
left to go and I was *panicking*, so wiped out with boredom I was beginning to
hallucinate an early suicide. It was then that I spotted a single in a full
colour pic sleeve -- a luxury for an unknown artiste even today -- called
'Wuthering Heights'. A woman, vaguely oriental in appearance, posed erotically
on the cover. For a second, I thought this one might even be good, or at least
a bit good. I played it. . .
I still shudder at the memory of the occasion! I *hated* it. The
sinister attack of the opening vocal lines carved my senses into lead shavings
all over the floor. Do you know pain? Well, that's what it was for me, that
first time.
I pasted the record with a virulent vitriol refined into an almighty
sneer, pronouncing it dead from the neck up. Three weeks later it was Number
One in the charts.
Stage two commenced with the release of 'Man With The Child In His Eyes',
taken from her first album, 'The Kick Inside'. That whole album, but more
particularly the second single, opened my eyes wide to the remote hinterlands
of youthful imagination and populist conceit that must surely make up a large
part of the artistic nature of the author of such a sweetly motivated pop
single. It also finally rid me of those stinking prejudices I'd had about her
voice. She sang like an angel. . . the woman with the child in her voice.
Kate Bush wrote her second hit single when she was 14.
The last stage began when I was invited by a friend to go and see Kate
Bush on her first tour. She was appearing at the *London Palladium*. Live!
Oh, what a night! An evening drawn in exotic inks across the canvas of my
mind, an illicit confection of sensations.
On a totally professional level, the lights, the complex choreography made
to appear simple and careless, the dancing flesh, evoked an atmosphere that
oozed pleasure, that reeked of shameless beautiful entertainment enjoyed from
both sides of the footlights. Indeed, when I remind Kate Bush of that night I
forget for a moment that she was the bearer of such *insouciant* warmth and I
merely the receiver. We speak of our (shared) memories of the occasion with so
obvious and touching a mutual delight you would swear we had gone to the show
together, sat next to each other in the stalls . . .
"I get so incredibly nervous before I go on," she admits. "All I'd really
done in the way of live performance before the tour were things like TV shows,
and videos. I'd never done a big tour. . . and the sort of props and ideas for
the show we were carrying around with us seemed a bit ambitous, a bit awsome,
at first, but I loved those shows. Once I was onstage I had so much fun. I'd
like to do more of it."
From there on in, Doc, I was hooked. And my habit keeps creeping up,
getting bigger all the time.
HER LAST album, 'The Dreaming' is her best, to quote a cliche.
Self-produced, self-written songs, she even picks the ideas for the sleeve
graphics, and that's *before* she sits down to think about what she wants to do
with the new video. . . damn, I don't mean this to be a love letter, I jes
wanna wake y'all up to washapp'ning.
Own up, you lather over the videos, right? Something in your head says
'swim' when you hear her on the radio, yes? Then follow me down to Kate Bush's
dance studio where she's sitting cross-legged on the floor, bundled up in wool
against the icy January breath of Jack Frost, a tray of tea and biscuits laid
in neo-Chinese ceremonial fashion between us, your arse and mine parked on the
only cushion available, and we'll smoulder away the chill afternoon
together. . .
*Before you studied dance did you ever feel you might have a natural
aptitude for dancing, performing?*
"No. Never. Within the first two weeks of trying -- I went to this dance
school up in London where, you know, you can just go along part-time -- I
thought, there's no way I can do this, this is just ridiculous, I'm useless,
and it's going to take me years and years. . . I really thought that after
about a year I'd be a really great dancer.
"But I got hooked and started going up to London every day. Suddenly, I
became a human being -- just learning to move!"
*Do you emply a choreographer?*
"No. The only time I've ever used one really was on the tour, though it
can be almost impossible to work at dancing by yourself, you *need* a teacher.
When I'm working on my classes I tend to go up to London because my teacher
can't travel. She's too busy."
*In another life, could you have made a career out of dancing?*
"I don't know. There was a time, when I'd been dancing for about a year
and a half, and I was never really sure if an album was going to manifest
itself, that I thought, if you want to be a dancer you should do it *now*.
Because I had people approaching me at the dance class, asking if I wanted to
go to Germany and dance in clubs and things, and for a time I really got into
the dance thing much more seriously than I thought I would. But I don't think
I was good enough. I didn't stand out enough."
*Do you write all the time?*
"No. I have to be write for an album."
*You're not very prolific then?*
"I used to be. I used to write every day and if it wasn't very good I'd
keep a little bit and maybe use it in something else. As soon as 'Wuthering
Heights' became a hit, though, my whole routine was just blown apart, it was
extraordinary how suddenly everything changed.
"I had such a routine going. It was like, get up, play the piano, go
dancing, come back, play the piano, write songs all night, then go to bed. It
was like that every day."
*Were you very happy then?*
"Yes, I was. I think it was one of the happiest times for me as a person.
I'd just left school and I was beginning to find myself as an individual. It
was very exciting, but I wanted more than anything in the world to make an
album, just to see that piece of plastic. And then it happened, and it was
instant, you know, round the world in 50 days sort of thing, it's frightening.
I don't know how I did it. I couldn't do it now."
*DO YOU come from a particularly artistic family?*
"Well, my mother's a dancer, she won a lot of prizes cleaning the floor
with the opposition, and my father's a musician."
*I know your family are involved in your business, but were they behind
you when you signed to EMI at 16? Did they freak out? Sex and drugs and
writers etc. . .*
"No, not at all. They had seen it coming for a long time. The original
idea was to see if we could sell my songs to a publisher, not that I should be
a singer or a performer or anything. We had quite modest, curious aims. So it
was gradual and they were always supportive."
*Did you ever have singing lessons?*
"Yes."
*Did your teacher try to get you to sing in a lower voice?* (stupid
joke).
"No, not at all. I used to go for about half-an-hour a week and the guy
would get me to practice my scales and my breathing or something and then ask
to hear my new songs. So I'd sing them for him and he helped me more that way.
He was really good."
*Do you get self-conscious when you're making a video?*
"I get very nervous before I do anything. I feel I have to work at songs
for days before I start to produce anything interesting. Before I perform, I'm
always worried that we didn't spend enough time getting this or that together."
*You never cover other people's material. Why? Don't you see yourself as
The Interpretive Singer? A touch of the Rod Stewart's?*
"Actually, I love singing great songs written by other people, it can be
fun discovering how beautiful some composer's work is. But I've felt happier
recording my own numbers. I regard myself primarily as a songwriter and I
don't want to cop out of writing. I get guilty enough as it is when I'm not
writing for lengths of time."
Kate Bush and I carry on talking while the sun goes down behind my back.
We talk and she tells me she is currently writing songs for a new album
scheduled for the Autumn. How appropriate, thought I. Do you like the Winter?
"I like *all* the seasons. They each have something to bring," she replies
enigmatically. God, this is getting wistful!
She tells me that she hennas her hair, crimps it occasionally, and that
she has make-up artists and hair beauticians available as well as costume
designers equipped to run off fantasy threads like the 'Babooshka' number --
guaranteed to dry your throat, boys!
She says that she finds it hard to read a book without turning it into a
song, and she informs me that Oscar Wilde is probably her favourite author.
She is especially fond of his childrens' stories which can still make her cry.
All I can say is . . . well, yeah. Me too.
Happy holidays everyone,
Mark Kat(e)souros
"Four strings, across the bridge, ready to carry me over..."