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This article is about the singer/songwriter. Kate Bush is also a character in the Japanese anime television series, Victory Gundam.

Kate Bush (born Catherine Bush on July 30, 1958 in Bexleyheath, London, England and attended St. Joseph's convent school in Welling) is a British singer-songwriter who has acquired a large number of extremely devoted fans since her debut in 1978 with the surprise hit "Wuthering Heights", which was number 1 in the British music charts for 4 weeks.

Biography

Early Career

In her early teens, Kate Bush caught the attention of David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, who helped fund her first demo sessions. She signed a contract with EMI when she was 16. However, in the first two years of her contract, Bush did not release an album, but instead completed school and took classes in dancing, mime, and music. During this time, Bush wrote and made demos of close to 200 songs, which today can be found on bootleg recordings (often known as the Phoenix Recordings). She also performed at various small venues in and near London under the name KT Bush Band.

Her first album, The Kick Inside, was released in 1978, and featured songs she had written during the previous two years, including the single "Wuthering Heights," which topped the UK charts and became an international hit.

File:Kate Bush The Dreaming Cover.jpg
Cover of 1982's The Dreaming

The Albums

Never For Ever

Never For Ever saw Kate's first foray into production, aided by the engineer of her first two albums, Jon Kelly. Andrew Powell's production of the first two albums had resulted in a definite sound which was evident in every track, with lush orchestral arrangements supporting the live band sound. The range of styles on Never For Ever is much more diverse, veering from the straightforward rocker, The Wedding List, to the sad, wistful waltz of hit single, Army Dreamers. It was an accomplished debut for Kate as producer and her first album to reach the top of the charts. In fact, she was the first woman ever to have a Number One album.

Bush's literary and cinematic influences were at work once more. The Infant Kiss was inspired by 1961 film ''The Innocents'', starring Deborah Kerr and Michael Redgrave, which in turn had been inspired by ''The Turn Of The Screw'' by Henry James, while The Wedding List drew from François Truffaut's 1968 film ''La Mariée était En Noir''.

The Dreaming

While Kate Bush's most widespread success came with her first album, most of her reputation as a unique force in the music world comes out of the two albums she produced in 1982 and 1985: The Dreaming and Hounds of Love.

The Dreaming was the first album Bush produced herself. With her newfound freedom, Kate Bush experimented with production techniques creating an album that features a very diverse blend of musical styles.

The Dreaming met with a mixed critical reception at first. Many were baffled by the dense soundscapes she had created. For the first time in her career, Kate was producing music that went far beyond the superficial, not only lyrically but musically too. The album was not considered to be a commerical success, although it still reached No. 3 in the album charts, and with the exception of the first track to be released, Sat In Your Lap, which predated by the album by several months, the singles taken from it bombed. Over time, however, it has come to be recognised as a masterpiece which still, more than twenty years after it was made, sounds fresh, intriguing and like nothing else.

Kate was only in her early twenties when making the album and tended to look outside herself for sources of inspiration. She drew on old crime movies (There Goes A Tenner), a documentary about the war in Vietnam (Pull Out The Pin), the plight of the Australian Aborigines (The Dreaming), the life of Huodini (Houdini) and Stephen King's The Shining (Get Out Of My House).

Hounds of Love

Hounds of Love is no less experimental from a production standpoint. Not only did she produce it herself, but for this album, stung by the huge costs she had run up hiring studio space for The Dreaming, she built a private 48 track studio near her home where she could work at her own pace, unhurried by thoughts of cost. Kate has admitted that this was a very happy period in her life and this is reflected by a newfound maturity and confidence to her lyrics, which were often more personal. She writes about the problems two halves of a couple have in communicating properly (Running Up That Hill, the fear of being overwhelmed by love (Hounds of Love) and the frustration of the artist being continually questioned by critics who have no understanding of the creative process (The Big Sky).

The Sensual World

The increasingly personal tone of her writing continued on The Sensual World with songs about unrequited love (Love And Anger, Never Be Mine), modern relationships being subject to outside pressures (Between A Man And A Woman), and being wracked by self-doubt (The Fog). Deeper Understanding showed a remarkable prescience in its portrait of a person finding solace in a computer when human company is difficult to find while Rocket’s Tail (dedicated to her pet cat, Rocket) spoke of the joys of indulging in someone else’s fantasy. The quirkiest track on the album, touched by Kate’s trademark black humour, was Heads We’re Dancing, which spoke of a woman who spends the night dancing with a charming stranger only to find out that he is Adolf Hitler. The title track took its inspiration from ''Ulyses'' by James Joyce. Kate realised that passges from the closing chapter of the book, a monologue by Molly Bloom, fitted the musical track she had created but the Joyce estate refused permission to reproduce the text and so the song became about Molly stepping out from the pages of the book to revel in the real world, while closely echoing the original text. Bush even included a reference to ''Jerusalem'' by William Blake in her cheeky reference to the song's gestation ('And my arrows of desire rewrite the speech') to double the literary influence.

The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes takes its title from the film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; the story of the film, and the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen which in turn inpsired it, concerns a dancer possessed by her art who cannot shake off the eponymous shoes and find peace. It seems that Kate wanted to shake off her own 'red shoes' at this time, a 12 year creative silence would follow the album's release, and the result is an oddly disorientating album which, superficially, is her most accessible work for some time but which, on further lsitening, is to revealed to have a dark and weary heart.

The musical style was far more simple and direct than on any album since Never For Ever. The initial plan had been to take the songs out on the road and so Bush deliberately aimed for a live band feel, with less of the studio trickery that had typified her last three albums and which would be difficult to recreate on stage. The result alienated some her fan base who enjoyed the intricacy of her later compositions but others found a new complexity in the lyrics and the emotions they expressed. There was an unusual honesty to the songs on The Red Shoes and the only song which explicitly drew on an outside influence, the title track, was still deeply personal. Gone were the stories and character pieces of her earlier work to be replaced by a set of songs that are almost like a diary. This was a troubled time for Kate. She had suffered a series of bereavements, including the loss of her favoured guitarist, Alan Murphy, and, most painfully, her mother, Hannah. Many of the people she lost are honoured on the ballad, Moments Of Pleasure. Her long-term relationship with Del Palmer had also broken down, although the pair continued to work together and many of the songs on the album are about the break-up, most searingly You're The One. Despite the fact that Kate's pain and grief are obvious throughout the album her trademark sense of humour was still in place, notably on the quirky disco-shanty Constellation Of The Heart and the lead single Rubberband Girl; comedian Lenny Henry even provided guest vocals on Why Should I Love You?, a track that featured significant contributions from Prince.

Musical Style

Even in her earliest works where the piano was a primary instrument, she wove together many diverse influences, melding classical music, rock, and a wide range of ethnic and folk sources, to produce a uniquely impressive amalgam, and this has continued throughout her career. More than one reviewer has used the term surreal to describe much of her music, for many of the songs have a melodramatic emotional and musical surrealism that defies easy categorization. It has been observed that even the more joyous of the pieces is often tinged with traces of melancholy, and even the most sorrowful have elements of a unique vitality struggling against all that would oppress it. The unapologetic use of her voice as an instrument to convey a broad range of emotional intensity and subtlety is one thing that characterizes nearly all that she does.

Kate Bush has tackled sensitive and taboo subjects long before it has become fashionable to do so; Kashka From Baghdad is a song about a gay male couple; Breathing explores the results of nuclear fallout. Her lyrics are highly literate and reference a wide array of subject matter, often relatively obscure, such as Wilhelm Reich in Cloudbusting, or G. I. Gurdjieff in Them Heavy People.

The lush arrangements, complex production and intelligent, thoughtful lyrics can sometimes mask the fact that Kate Bush is a peculiarly witty writer and that comedy is not only a big influence on her - she has cited Monty Python, Woody Allen, Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones as particular favourites - but also a significant component of her work.

Bush dropped out of the public eye in the mid 1990s, though her name occasionally cropped up in the media in connection with rumours of a new album release. There were also unconfirmed reports that she had suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1999, she gave birth to a baby boy, Bertie, fathered by guitarist Danny MacIntosh.

On August 31, 2005, EMI put speculation to rest and confirmed that Kate's eighth studio album Aerial will be released on double CD on November 7 2005 internationally and November 8 in North America, after a single release "King of the Mountain" on October 24. The song will be available for download on September 27 on all major Internet pay-for-download services including Napster, Rhapsody, and iTunes.

Live Performances

Bush's only tour took place in early 1979 (April 3 - May 10 see details below), after which she gave only the occasional live performance. A number of reasons have been suggested as to why she abandoned touring, among them her reputed need to be in total control of the final product, which is incompatible with live stage performance, a rumour of a crippling fear of flying, and the suggestion that the death of 21 year old Bill Duffield, severely affected her. Duffield, her lighting director, was killed in an accident during her April 20 concert at The London Palladium when he fell twenty feet through an open trap door on the stage. Bush held a benefit concert on 12 May, with Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley at London’s Hammersmith Odeon for his family. Bill would be honoured in two later songs: Blow Away on Never For Ever and Moments Of Pleasure on The Red Shoes.

During the same period as her tour, she made numerous television appearances around the world. She appeared in Germany: Bio's Bahnhof on February 9, 1978; in the United Kingdom: Top of the Pops on February 16, 1978; in the United States: Saturday Night Live on December 9, 1978. She also made appearances on Japanese Television.

Video Projects

Kate Bush made many music videos to accompany her albums. Some of her most well known videos are the videos for "Cloudbusting", "Running Up That Hill", "Babooshka", "Breathing", and "Wuthering Heights".

In 1993, Bush directed and starred in the short film, The Line, The Cross and The Curve, a musical co-starring Miranda Richardson and featuring music from Bush's album The Red Shoes which was inspired by the classic movie The Red Shoes.

In 1994, Kate Bush provided the music used in a series of psychedelic-themed television commercials for the soft drink Fruitopia that appeared in the United States. The same company placed ads in the United Kingdom, but the ads appearing in that country featured Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins instead of Bush.

Influence On Other Musicians

While her range of styles does not appeal to everyone, Bush is nevertheless widely respected by many musicians, and has been noted as an influence and inspiration by artists as diverse as Placebo, Liv Kristine, Jewel, Tori Amos, Björk, Suede, Paula Cole, Sinéad O'Connor, Pat Benatar, Happy Rhodes, Maxwell, (who famously covered Bush's "This Woman's Work") The Utah Saints, Big Boi of OutKast, The Futureheads (who have made a cover of the Kate Bush song - Hounds of Love) and others. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s it became almost standard for individualistic female singer-songwriters to be compared to Bush by the media. The trip hop artist Tricky has stated her work has been a significant influence on him and that she should be treasured more than the Beatles. Though many outside of Europe remain unfamiliar with her work and its profound intensity, others in her profession are willing to declare her works as those of great genius. Even the iconoclastic punk rocker John Lydon (Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) has declared her work to be "fucking brilliant" and has labelled her "a true original". Suede front-man Brett Anderson has stated that "Wuthering Heights" was the first single he ever bought.

Collaborations

She has worked with Peter Gabriel on two of his albums, most notably on the hits Games Without Frontiers and Don't Give Up, (the latter a duet); and his appearance on her 1979 television special. Their duet of Roy Harper's Another Day was discussed for release as a single, but this never came to pass. Harper is another frequent collaborator, appearing on her song Breathing and her on his albums HQ, Once (both also featuring Gilmour) and The Unknown Soldier.

She has appeared in duets with Midge Ure, Big Country and others on their albums. A wide diversity of respected artists have worked with her on some of her more recent albums ranging from the rock guitarist Jeff Beck, the legendary guitarist Ian Bairnson, jazz/rock drummer Stuart Elliot, the classical guitarist John Williams, the folk artists The Trio Bulgarka, and Prince.

Discography

Studio albums

  1. The Kick Inside (1977), UK #3
  2. Lionheart (1978), UK #6
  3. Never for Ever (1980) UK #1
  4. The Dreaming (1982), UK #3, US #148
  5. Hounds of Love (1985) UK #1, US #30
  6. The Sensual World (1989), UK #2, US #43
  7. The Red Shoes (1993) UK #2, US #28
  8. Aerial (2005) - scheduled to be released world-wide on November 7 2005 (but November 8 in North America); the first single from the album, entitled "King of the Mountain" is scheduled to be released on October 24.

Compilations

  1. The Whole Story (1986) (includes a new rendition of "Wuthering Heights") UK #1, US #78
  2. This Woman's Work 1978-1990 (1990, rereleased in 1998) (a boxed set of her six albums to date, also including two discs of rare b-sides)

Videos

  1. Live at the Hammersmith Odeon (1981)
  2. The Single File (1983)
  3. Hair of the Hound (1986)
  4. The Whole Story (1986)
  5. The Sensual World (1989)
  6. The Line, the Cross and the Curve (1994)

Live albums and Extended plays

  1. Live at the Hammersmith Odeon (1989)
  2. On Stage - 4 Live Tracks ( EP ) (1979)

Singles

Year Title Chart positions Album
US Hot 100 US Modern Rock US Mainstream Rock UK
1989 "Love and Anger" - #1 (3 weeks) - - The Sensual World
1990 "The Sensual World" - #6 - - The Sensual World

The Tour of Life 1979

  • Concert House, Stockholm, Sweden (24 April)
  • Falkoneer Theatre, Copenhagen, Denmark (26 April)
  • Congress Centrum, Hamburg, Germany (28 April)
  • Carré Theatre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (29 April)
  • Liederhalle, Stuttgart, Germany (2 May)
  • Circuskrone, Munich, Germany (3 May)
  • Guerzenich, Cologne, Germany (4 May)
  • Theatre de Champs Elysees, Paris, France (6 May)
  • Rosengarten, Mannheim, Germany (8 May)
  • Jarhunderthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (10 May)
  • Hammersmith Odeon, London, UK (May 12) Benefit concert. Recorded as Live at the Hammersmith Odeon


External links

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