Kate Bush



""Well, when I was about seventeen, I was playing clubs and people would come up to me and say, 'You sound like Kate Bush.' And at the time: seventeen, that was ... thirteen years ago, and I would say, 'I don't, I don't know that, but I've heard of her.' So eventually, of course, I got her record, and I didn't really think I sounded like her. But maybe there're moments--there're moments -- who knows what my great-great-great-great-grandfather was doing back there, you don't know where the genes go. I, I do admit that there are moments of 'God, that's uncanny.' I mean, I guess if somebody was going to do, like, you know, 'Is it live or is it Memorex?', we could probably do each other and nobody would know, unless you really have a good ear. But, um, she smokes a little more weed than I do, so I'd have to catch up. Just a little more.""

- Tori Amos, on Kate

Kate Bush is one of the most unique musicians on the planet. Besides her eccentric music, she is known for her unforgettable voice. At first, it was high-pitched. Her voice got deeper (and arguably better) over the years. Her music cannot be shoehorned into one category. Usually, people just label her as "art rock" or "alternative" and call it a day. She has touched many genres, including pop, electronic, jazz, flamenco, rock, waltz, Renaissance, and disco-funk. Her lyrics are another unique aspect of her music. They are often based on history & literature, such as her signature song "Wuthering Heights".

Kate was a musical prodigy. She was signed by EMI at the age of 16 after being recommended by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, who was amazed by her voice and talent as a pianist. In 1978, at age 19, she topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut song "Wuthering Heights", becoming the first woman to have a UK number-one with a self-written song. She later released her debut album The Kick Inside, which proved that teenagers are capable of releasing quality music.

The success of The Kick Inside forced her to make a quick follow-up album (Lionheart,). It contains one of her most well-known songs, "Wow". She followed up with her first and last tour, called the Tour of Life, which she was very involved in creating. It was quite theatrical. Kate had a costume change after virtually every single song, and she danced and moved gracefully on the stage with a few dancers and mostly eschewed playing piano. Even though it was filmed, only an edited version is available. One-and-a-half hours were left out, so it could be shown on TV. It's highly unlikely that the full concert will be released. Fortunately, some performances can be found on YouTube.

While she liked the experience of touring, it was very exhausting to her, and it detracted from her making new music.

When she was making her third album, she was exposed to drum machines & synthesizers (especially the Fairlight CMI), which became a part of her sound. In 1980, she released it under the name Never for Ever. It included the hit "Babooshka". It was the first album she co-produced. She took complete control of the production in her next album The Dreaming. It was very loud, percussive, and aggressive; a drastic change from the relatively calm music she was known for. It was initially not well-received, but it has been Vindicated by History as one of her masterpieces.

In 1985, her most famous album Hounds of Love was released. It was quite a revolutionary album. It made her famous in America, and it is considered one of the best albums released by a solo female artist. Its lead single "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" was deservedly a major worldwide hit. The album was ahead of its time, and is still influential. The next year, she released her Greatest Hits Album The Whole Story, which is her best-selling album.

Kate continued to make unique music with the release of The Sensual World & The Red Shoes. The latter was accompanied with a short film called The Line, The Cross and the Curve. Kate then took a 12-year hiatus. She took that time to raise her son, and to record her comeback album Aerial, which was very well-received. It sold 1.5 million copies, despite little promotion from Kate. After a contribution to the soundtrack to The Golden Compass, Kate dropped out of the public eye yet again until May 2011, in which an album full of re-recorded songs originally on The Sensual World and The Red Shoes was released. An album of brand new material, entitled 50 Words for Snow, was released on November 21, 2011.

Kate remains one of the most influential female artists ever. If Joni Mitchell paved the way for female musicians, then Kate paved the way for eccentric female musicians. Kate has since passed the torch on to people like Tori Amos & Bjork, ensuring that the world will always have creative, eccentric music and musicians. In 2002, her songwriting ability was recognised with an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music.


 * The Kick Inside (1978)
 * Lionheart (1978)
 * Never for Ever (1980)
 * The Dreaming (1982)
 * Hounds of Love (1985, which contains the sidelong concept piece The Ninth Wave)
 * The Sensual World (1989)
 * The Red Shoes (1993)
 * Aerial (2005, a double album)
 * Director's Cut (2011, which consisted of re-recordings of songs from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes)
 * 50 Words for Snow (2011)

"He's an utter creep and he drives me 'round the bend To alleviate the boredom, I sleep with his friends"
 * All Love Is Unrequited: "Never Be Mine".
 * Anti-Love Song: She once performed a duet with Rowan Atkinson, "Do Bears...?"

""After the flash a fireball can be seen to rise, sucking up under it the debris, dust and living things around the area of the explosion, and as this ascends, it soon becomes recognisable as the familiar mushroom cloud.""
 * Atomic Hate: "Breathing" is about the moment that follows a nuclear strike. "After the blast, chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung..."

"Offer me a chocolate, No thank you, spoil my diet, know your game! But tell me just how come they smell of bitter almonds? It's a no-no to your coffee homeground."
 * Bitter Almonds - "Coffee Homeground," which seems to resemble the Roald Dahl story "The Landlady," has the singer-as-protagonist rejecting kindly offers of tea and sweets out of a conviction that it's a plot against them:

"Interviewer: Which of your old songs make you wince? Kate Bush: My God, loads. Absolutely loads. Either the lyric's not thought out properly or it's just crap or the performances weren't well executed. But you have to get it in context. You were doing it at the time and it was the best you could do then. You've got to live with it. Some of those early songs, though, you think, 'What was I *thinking* about? Did *I* write that?'"
 * Brother-Sister Incest - "The Kick Inside"
 * Brown Note - Experiment IV: "But they told us All they wanted Was a sound that Could kill someone from a distance."
 * And in the video, the scientists deliver; although the sound does not manifest anything like what might have been expected. (The video is also notable these days for featuring the then-virtually-unknown Hugh Laurie in a cameo role!)
 * Call-and-Response Song - "Constellation of the Heart"
 * Camp Gay - Gay characters feature in many of Kate's songs, in particular "Kashka from Baghdad" (and the even less subtle early demo, "Eddie the Queen"). The song "Wow" - about theatre types - features the immortal line He's too busy hitting the vaseline... - in the video, Kate pats her backside while singing that line.
 * Cloudcuckoolander
 * Concept Album - Hounds of Love. Side one is a collection of songs loosely arranged around the nature of love. Side two is more cohesive - a story about a woman lost at sea (and arguably dying) who has a dream flashback to a previous life and a visit from her future self.
 * The newly-released 50 Words for Snow is, of course, centred around snowscapes, and the titular song features Stephen Fry listing fifty words for snow.
 * Concept Video - Kate Bush used to love making weird mini-movies for her songs in the 80s. Notable examples include:
 * "Experiment IV", a horror movie pastiche in which a bunch of government scientists in a spooky military facility, including Dawn French and a pre-House Hugh Laurie, create an unstoppable sonic weapon. As you expected it might, the weapon, played by Kate Bush in a ghost outfit, rampages around and kills everyone horribly. Hoorah!
 * "Cloudbusting" - this one is based on the life of Wilhelm Reich. The reclusive scientist pursued by naughty government types is played by Donald Sutherland, Kate Bush plays his eight-year old son (in a hilariously unconvincing child costume) and the design of the very cool rain machine (Cloudbuster) was inspired by H.R. Giger.
 * "Hounds of Love" - a pastiche Hitchcock thriller.
 * The Line, The Cross, And The Curve, a 1993 short film based on her album The Red Shoes, starring herself, Miranda Richardson, and Lindsay Kemp.
 * "Running Up That Hill": Largely an elaborate dance piece done as a Take That at those critics who slammed the "Wuthering Heights" video.
 * "This Woman's Work": A renarration of the Movie "She's Having a Baby"
 * "Misty": an animation about a woman who sleeps with a snowman and wakes up to find that he's melted.
 * Contemptible Cover: The U.S. cover for The Kick Inside was changed to this for obvious reasons.
 * Creator Backlash - In this interview, she reveals that she hates a lot of her older songs:

"And at first with the charm around him, mmh, yes, He loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts He'd rescue it, mmh, yes, And his spark took life in my hand..."
 * Did Not Do the Research - Her 1980 "Babooshka" is about a woman who adopts the identity of a sexy Russian to entrap her cheating husband. "Babushka," the name she choose and which forms most of the chorus, is Russian for "grandmother."
 * Could actually be Fridge Brilliance. "Babushka" also refers to the headscarf that is commonly worn by older women, but it would also serve as a disguise.
 * Downer Ending - Kate usually ends her albums with a negative song. Notable examples are:
 * The Kick Inside - the title track. Brother-Sister Incest + Driven to Suicide = Tear Jerker
 * Never for Ever - "Breathing", a song about a fetus wanting to stay alive during a nuclear fallout.
 * The Dreaming - "Get Out of My House", a song based on The Shining, which according to Allmusic is "Part ghost story, part nervous breakdown, part rage in the face of violation."
 * Aerial: A Sea of Honey - "A Coral Room", one of her most beautiful and poignant songs, about the death of her mother.
 * Averted on Hounds of Love with the very upbeat "The Morning Fog."
 * Driven to Suicide - "The Kick Inside", "The Wedding List"
 * Executive Meddling: "The Sensual World" was originally based on Molly Bloom's monologue in Ulysses, but James Joyce's heirs wouldn't let her use the text and she had to rewrite it. After the copyright on Ulysses expired, it was released with the original lyrics as "Flower Of The Mountain" on Director's Cut.
 * Gainax Ending: "There Goes a Tenner". Possibly.
 * Improbable Age - Most teenagers wouldn't write a song based on a 19th-century novel ("Wuthering Heights"), or a song based on an 18th-century English/Irish folk ballad about a girl, Lizzie Wan, who falls in love with her brother and then kills herself while carrying his child ("The Kick Inside").
 * In the Style Of - According to Kate herself...
 * "Kite" is in the style of Bob Marley.
 * "Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake" is in the style of Patti Smith.
 * Indecipherable Lyrics - Kate Bush's "Leave It Open", in which the vocals are distorted to the point of incomprehensibility because Kate played the original recording backwards, did her best to imitate the sounds she heard, and then played the resulting recording backwards for the final song.
 * People claim that she's saying 'we let the weirdness in'.
 * Intercourse with You - "Feel It" reminds us that love & lust can go together - and it was released when she was only 19! Another song, "The Sensual World", has these lyrics:

"Rowan: I met her in the first class lounge of a jumbo jet It was love at first sight, Romeo and Juliet Kate: He looked pretty rich and I was down on m' luck So I charged him a fortune for a flying fu...
 * "Running up That Hill" involves the two lovers in question switching bodies and then finding out what sex is like for the other.
 * "Symphony In Blue" doesn't even try to be implicit. "The more I think about sex, the better it gets!"
 * Kangaroo Court - The jury in "Waking the Witch" who chant "Guilty!" in unison give this impression.
 * Lotus Eater Machine - "A Deeper Understanding"
 * Mile-High Club - From the song "Do Bears" by Rowan Atkinson and Kate Bush (originally performed at Comic Relief 1986 and later included on one of the Not the Nine O'Clock News albums):

Rowan: ...for crying out loud!"

"Miranda Richardson: We have a lot in common, you and I. It took me years to be rid of those shoes! You are so weak. So stupid. So...
 * Mouthful of Pi - She wrote a song called "π", about a mathematician who's fascinated with the number, and some verses consist of her singing a few hundred digits
 * My Future Self and Me - "Jig of Life" from The Ninth Wave has the protagonist encounter her future self, who begs her to "let [her] live" by not dying.
 * Near-Death Experience - "The Ninth Wave" (the B-side of Hounds Of Love) is about a woman's frightening night in the water.
 * Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly - her music sounds so "out there" to most of the general public that only genre that most people can agree that she is the very broad genre of "alternative rock", or "art rock".
 * It becomes especially obvious on her album The Red Shoes with songs like "And So Is Love" "The Song of Solomon" and "Lily" practically sounding like their own genre.
 * New Sound Album - The Dreaming, which is more loud and aggressive than her previous albums.
 * Not So Different: Basically the point of "Pull Out The Pin".
 * Ominous Latin Chanting - "Waking the Witch" has a chorus of female voices in the background praising God. And it is creepy.
 * One-Woman Wail
 * Reclusive Artist
 * Sampling: One of the first artists to make heavy use of the technology with the Fairlight CMI.
 * Scare Chord - "Waking the Witch".
 * Self-Backing Vocalist - Many of her songs feature multiple overdubs of Kate's voice.
 * Shut UP, Hannibal - In The Line, the Cross and the Curve, toward the end:

Kate Bush: You're scared. You're scared, because you know you're losing your power over me."

"Oh thou, who givest sustenance to the universe From whom all things proceed To whom all things return Unveil to us the face of the true spiritual sun Hidden by a disc of golden light That we may know the truth And do our whole duty As we journey to thy sacred feet"
 * Signature Song - "Wuthering Heights", "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)"
 * Sleight of Tongue - Kate Bush depicted Houdini's trick in her song "Houdini" and on the cover of her album [[media:kate_bush_the_dreaming_1982.jpg|The Dreaming]]. Take a good look in her mouth.
 * Snow Means Love - Used in the Flashback sections of the video for "This Woman's Work".
 * Soprano and Gravel - Kate Bush used it in 1985 with "Waking The Witch". In this case she provided both voices: one track is her natural voice, the other is a drastically slowed down demonic growl.
 * Also to some extent in "Don't Give Up", her duet with Peter Gabriel.
 * Spoken Word in Music
 * "Hounds of Love" opens with a sound clip from the film Night of the Demon: "It's in the trees...It's coming!"
 * There's a long, eerie instrumental break near the end of "Breathing" with a recording of a man describing the effects of a nuclear bomb.
 * "Houdini:" "Rosabelle, believe!"
 * "Lily":


 * "The Fog" opens with Kate Bush saying "You see, I'm all grown up now." Then her father says "Just put your feet down, child, 'cause you're all grown up now."
 * "50 Words for Snow" also prominently features Stephen Fry reciting 50 words for snow.
 * Two-Person Love Triangle - "Babooshka" is this gone very, very wrong.
 * Vocal Evolution - Kate Bush had a tendency to use the upper range of her voice in her early work, but shifted to a more natural singing style later on. Compare the version of "Wuthering Heights" on her debut to the one on her Greatest Hits Album The Whole Story.
 * Wild Hair

Works, people, and other things that inspired Kate songs:

 * Wuthering Heights
 * Hammer Horror
 * The Innocents - "The Infant Kiss"
 * Elvis Presley - "King of the Mountain"
 * Joan of Arc - "Joanni"
 * The Shining - "Get Out of My House"
 * Peter Pan - "In Search of Peter Pan"
 * The Red Shoes
 * Ulysses - "The Sensual World"
 * The Vietnam War - "Pull Out the Pin"
 * Harry Houdini - "Houdini"
 * Houdini's most famous trick was the Chinese Water Torture Cell. In the song she is Houdini's wife/assistant, and she passes him the key to the locks via a kiss just before he goes into the tank. The line right before that one is, "With a kiss I'd pass the key, and feel your tongue teasing and deceiving..." The tone is foreshadowing Houdini's death during the trick later in the song, which unfortunately is not doing the research -- Houdini died of peritonitis.
 * The 1953 film Houdini starring Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, does however, end with Houdini dying in the Chinese Water Torture cell and not of peritonitis. If we assume that Kate saw the movie then she most definitely *did* do the research.
 * The Bride Wore Black - "The Wedding List"