Recently, I went to see the superb Kate Bush tribute band Cloudbusting perform. Kate has been one of my favourite artists for around five years and I consider her to be a visionary and genius, both musically and in the visual arts, so I thought I'd share the things I love most about her:
1. Her lyrics
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| From the music video for Experiment IV, 1986 |
Kate Bush writes songs about all the usual topics: love, loss, her life experiences and so on, but she also covers the likes of philosophy, technology, literature and fantasy. Reading into her lyrics can take you on a journey that leads down a Wikipedia hole and suddenly Cloudbusting isn't just a song but a story of a real family and their incredible meteorological experiments.
There are too many fascinating songs that have expanded my world-view to begin to list here (see: Breathing, Deeper Understanding, Experiment IV, Them Heavy People...) but if you haven't sat down and listened to the words, I highly recommend it. There are still songs that I don't fully understand but that somehow still resonate within me; Rubberband Girl is one such example. I'm looking forward to all the little epiphanies ahead of me when each of her songs falls into place.
2. Her innovations
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| Performing on the Tour Of Life, 1979 |
Kate is universally acknowledged as a musical innovator but she's also a pioneer in terms of technology. For instance, in 1979 she became the first musician to use a wireless headset microphone on stage to allow her to sing and dance simultaneously. Thanks to Kate and her wire coat hanger prototype, dancing stars from Michael Jackson to Justin Bieber have been able to wow crowds with this now essential piece of equipment.
Returning to her musical innovations, Kate has always been at the forefront of technology when it comes to incorporating new sounds into her songs - see for instance the sound effects of the brand-new Fairlight synthesiser on songs like Babooshka (1980) and the unsettling vocal effects on 1985's Watching You Without Me.
Finally there are her predictions; those songs that then provided a glimpse into the future but have now become real. I like to joke that Kate Bush invented the internet which isn't quite true but the lyrics of her song Deeper Understanding (released the same year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web) have very quickly passed from fiction into reality, describing a person who has become so attached to their computer screen that they forget to eat, sleep or interact with people outside. Nowadays, if the tabloids are to be believed, people are dropping like flies as a result of sleep deprivation from refusing to leave their video games. Prophetic.
3. Her performances and music videos
Despite her enduring popularity, Kate Bush has only put on two live shows: 1979's Tour Of Life, and, 35 years later, a London residency entitled Before The Dawn. Like a lot of artists who were big in the 70s and 80s, Kate's visual style was carved out by her music videos and appearances on Top Of The Pops.
Her first performance on the latter in 1978 was to showcase her first hit, the haunting Wuthering Heights. Surrounded by glam rock, disco and post-punk, Kate of course stood out with a high-pitched ballad about an Emily Bronte novel. Kate hated her first performance, but luckily she and her piano were asked back to perform the song four more times. As her career progressed she was invited to perform on, and even host, her own shows on the BBC where she was able to showcase her talents in music, dance and theatre - and she didn't hold back. I'm particularly fond of her performance of The Wedding List from December 1979 (below), where she acts out the story of a bride who takes revenge on the man who shot her groom at the altar with smoke, guns, blood and wild dancing.
On a global scale, Kate's music probably reached its largest audience as a result of her music videos, which took her passion for storytelling and transposed it to cinematic levels. I'm sure most people are familiar with the iconic images of Kate in the white and red nightgowns from the two Wuthering Heights videos, or straddling a double bass in a shiny bikni/armour in Babooshka, or the camouflage of Army Dreamers. My personal favourites are Cloudbusting, in which Kate plays the son of inventor Donald Sutherland, and the video for the 2011 re-recording of Deeper Understanding (below), where Robbie Coltrane takes the role of the computer-obsessed protagonist.
4. Her aura of mystery
Kate has been an icon of popular culture for almost 40 years now, yet she's one of those celebrities who never show up in the tabloids or at red carpet events; in fact, she rarely even gives an interview. This means that when she comes out of the woodwork to drop an album or play her first live shows in 35 years, the world gets a lovely surprise - and even when she doesn't bless us with new work for a while, nobody forgets about her or publishes a "where are they now" clickbait piece about her online. We just wait for her to bless us again.
5. Her place in the musical canon
Kate Bush's music is hard to categorise. As I touched on earlier, when she arrived on the scene she was a single weird teenage girl putting out records at a time when the world was gripped by punk rock, disco and Grease. Her work is often described as 'art rock' but I'm not sure that quite covers it - she's an artist without a movement behind her whose influence is worn on the sleeves of four decades of weird teenage girls and beyond.
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| From the Hounds Of Love photoshoot, 1985 |
When speaking of Kate's contemporaries, people point to the likes of Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Elton John, Genesis and so on. One thing that I notice, and perhaps that you noticed too, is the lack of other women on the list. Arguably, Kate Bush is one of a select few female artists revered by men as much as, if not even more than, women. This, to me, goes part of the way in explaining her inclusion on those lists of the 'all-time greats' cranked out by mostly male music journalists (although somehow Rolling Stone neglected to include her in their definitive 100 Greatest Artists Of All Time).
In my opinion, Kate belongs right near the top of any list of the greatest ever musical artists but I'll settle for knowing just how many people around the world are on board with her stories of nuclear war, being lost out at sea, and the doomed love affair of Cathy & Heathcliff.
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