50 Words For Kate: #18 - Comic

Kate Bush is a big fan of British comedy, so it is perhaps not surprising that in the early 1990s she became involved with one of the leading groups in the new wave of alternative comedians: The Comic Strip. Kate had asked one of their founding members, Peter Richardson, to direct her video for The Sensual World, realising it would be hard to do it herself when she was in virtually every shot. Kate and Peter hit it off and he asked if she would write the music for an episode of their new series of The Comic Strip Presents...

The episode was called GLC: The Carnage Continues... and was a fictional retelling of the real-life political battle between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London Council (GLC), known in the press as "Red Ken". The Comic Strip reimagined this battle of wills as a Hollywood movie, so the comedians played movie stars playing the real-life politicians. For example, Jennifer Saunders played Brigitte Nielsen playing Thatcher, while Robbie Coltrane played Charles Bronson playing Ken.

Kate created a number of incidental music pieces for the episode, as well as a theme song for the hero of the piece, which she titled Ken. It's fair to say it was a departure from her usual style...

Peter also asked Kate if she fancied an acting role in another episode. She said "yes". Kate appeared in the episode Les Dogs, playing a bride who was having an affair with Peter's character.

It is a highly surreal story, with Peter's character recalling the affair as he clings to life after being involved in a car accident. Here are Kate's best bits.

Kate's final contribution to The Comic Strip was another song. She provided the closing theme for a Christmas special called Wild Turkey, where a turkey that's about to become Christmas dinner takes a family hostage. Being a festive episode, Kate wrote a brief, but heartwarming ditty: Home For Christmas.

I'm sure Kate got a kick out of her work with The Comic Strip. She was able to flex her creative muscles in a different way and leave her small mark on the history of British comedy.



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50 Words For Kate: #19 - Trio

One thing is guaranteed about a new Kate Bush album: you will always hear something uniquely wonderful. Kate has always enjoyed experimenting with older or unusual instruments and styles, many of which stem from folk traditions around the world. Kate's brother Paddy was often the source of these discoveries and it was he who introduced Kate to a singing group from Bulgaria, known as Trio Bulgarka.

Kate was incredibly moved by their music, which sounds completely alien to a Western ear. She wondered if she could find a way to include them in her own music. Here's Kate to explain what happened:

Trio Bulgarka would eventually contribute to three songs on The Sensual World. Kate was seeking to create a female energy on the album, and Trio Bulgarka certainly provided something special in that regard. Their sound is indeed shocking to the unfamiliar, it is like nothing I had heard before. Kate found a way to combine them into the songs so that they become more instruments than voices. It is like spirits breaking in from another dimension. I was completely blown away when I first heard those three tracks and still tingle every time those voices appear.

Kate employed the Trio in a different way on each track. First they were the angelic voice of a mysterious computer program that made you fall in love on Deeper Understanding. Then they underlined the pain of unrequited love in Never Be Mine. Their finest moment has to be on Kate's imagining of what it must be like to be a firework. Rocket's Tail just couldn't exist without the Trio Bulgarka. Kate managed to create a song that perfectly blended the West and the East, creating something simply extraordinary. The combination of these women's voices is a jewel in the history of popular music.

Of all Kate's musical collaborations, none has excited me as much as her work with Trio Bulgarka. It opened my mind and ears to a musical inheritance I might otherwise have never discovered.


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50 Words For Kate: #20 - Sensual

"This is definitely my most personal, honest album. And I think it's my most female album, in that I feel maybe I'm not trying to prove something in terms of a woman in a man's world..."

Thanks to the enormous commercial success of Hounds Of Love, Kate Bush's sixth studio album, The Sensual World, had a huge weight of expectation hanging over it. Again the gap between releases stretched, with four years passing before its release in October 1989. No concept pieces this time, but Kate described the album as being ten short stories. There was also a definite shift in tone from her previous album. It had an air of thoughtfulness and introspection, with the exploration of relationships at the core of many of the songs.

Kate's subject matter was as eclectic as always. We have an accidental dance date with Hitler, an affair with a computer program, and dress as a firework and get launched from Waterloo bridge. In The Fog, Kate sings about the pains of growing up and the inevitable wrench from our parents. With its watery theme it could easily slot into The Ninth Wave as another echo of the past meeting the present. A lot of the album reads like a deep conversation in the early hours of the morning, when we wax philosophical about our lives and loves.

One track though was deliberately created by Kate to lift our spirits. Reaching Out came from a conversation Kate had with someone, where they described a star exploding. Taken with the image, Kate constructed one of her simplest lyrics and most straightforward melodies. The resulting song is no slight thing; it is half lullaby, half anthem. The strings, arranged by Michael Kamen, are just glorious. Many fans thought this an obvious single on hearing the album, but Kate disagreed.

Kate instead plumped for one of the more lyrically and musically complex tracks as the third and final single from the album (the title track and This Woman's Work had preceded it). Kate herself admitted she didn't really know what Love And Anger was about. It was one of the first songs written for the album, but one of the last to be finished. Listening to the track, it does feel a little capricious, but that's the main reason I love it. For me the song is about how sometimes we feel things very deeply, but are unable to express them clearly. Not everything in life can be neatly packaged and tied with a bow.

There was one other element of The Sensual World that was simply extraordinary. I'll tell you about that tomorrow...


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50 Words For Kate: #21 - Yes

It's 1989, I'm 18 and working as manager of an independent record store in my home town of Great Yarmouth. I am living the dream. As we were one of the select stores whose sales fed into the national record charts, we were visited weekly by record company reps plugging their latest new releases. As a music-obsessed teen, if felt like I was standing at the epicentre of the music industry: I didn't need to seek out new music, it came to me. I'd started working there in 1987, so there had not been any major Kate Bush releases as yet. That was about to change.

In August I was invited to attend EMI's autumn preview for record dealers, which went under the title "Power Packed!". I knew there was a Kate release pending, so I took the train down to London filled with excitement and anticipation. The event was very schmoozy and EMI made a lovely fuss over us, but all I wanted to do was see the promised video of the coming releases. Finally the main event arrived, the video ran for an hour and I had to sit politely for 40 whole minutes, through the likes of The Quireboys and Climie Fisher, until suddenly there she was! This is what I saw...

Needless to say, the rest of the event was a blur, but joy of joys, they gave me a video of the presentation to take home with me. The Sensual World was the lead single and title track from Kate's sixth album, set for release in autumn 1989. Kate had wanted to set Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses to music, but permission was denied by his estate. Undeterred, she adapted her idea, imagining Molly stepping out from the pages of the book and experiencing the sensations of the natural world as a living, breathing person. Both the song and the video are, for me, the epitome of Kate's work. Everything about it screams perfection: her voice, the luscious music, that velvet dress, the dancing, the mmmmmmmmm... yes of it all!

A few days later, back in my shop, a regular customer popped in. I'd seen her many times before, but only smiled. I sensed she was a Kate fan, as she always stopped to look at the Kate pictures we had on the walls and to check her albums were at the front of the racks. Desperate to share what I'd been given, I walked up to her and said, "I've got something to show you." She looked a little concerned, as you might expect, but she followed me to the bank of TVs we played videos on at the front of the store. I lined up the tape and pressed play and went and stood beside her. Upon seeing the look of delight and amazement on her face, I knew I had just made a friend for life. Now, 25 years later, Amanda and I are about to see Kate play live together. Her friendship has been one of the joys of my life and I owe it all to Kate.

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50 Words For Kate: #22 - Composing

Given Kate Bush's interest in the visual side of film-making, it is no surprise to find she has contributed to a number of movie soundtracks.

Her earliest dabble was singing The Magician, a Maurice Jarre composition for the 1979 film The Magician Of Lublin. It's a peculiar little number, with a hallmark vocal from Kate.

That same year she turned down the chance to sing the theme song for the latest James Bond movie, Moonraker. I still wake up crying about that one. Then Kate recorded the theme for Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil, a version of the classic Ary Barroso number, with lush orchestration from Michael Kamen. Sadly, it went unused in the film, but later emerged on a re-release of the soundtrack. Kate gives a sultry and poignant performance.

Guest vocals are all very well, but it was clear Kate should be composing music for film. Wuthering Heights and The Infant Kiss are effectively post-dated movie theme songs, based on visual stimuli that inspired her. The first such assignment Kate accepted was to create a song for Nicolas Roeg's 1987 movie Castaway, where Oliver Reed lures Amanda Donohoe to a desert island. The song Kate delivered perfectly captures the sense of two strangers feeling their way into an intimate relationship, knowingly titled Be Kind To My Mistakes.

Kate's greatest movie song is undoubtedly the piece she wrote to accompany the pivotal scene in John Hughes' She's Having A Baby. As Kristy suffers a traumatic labour, her husband Jake paces outside, hoping and praying. and regretting his selfish behaviour. The song Kate wrote, which perfectly captured the emotions onscreen, is considered by many to be her finest composition: This Woman's Work.

Kate's final original song for a movie to date has an interesting evolution. Disney approached Kate, asking if she would write a song for their first computer-animated film, Dinosaur. Kate delivered the song and it was used in the version shown to test audiences, but subsequently dropped. It's thought Disney wanted changes and Kate said "no, thank you". So that was the end of that... or was it?

In 2007, Kate contributed the closing theme for The Golden Compass, the film adaptation of the first part of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The song, an ode to the heroine, Lyra, is a restrained and haunting piece. Kate is accompanied by a very minimal backing track and the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford. Reportedly Kate had very short notice and pulled the track together in just 10 days. How was she able to do that, you may ask? Well it turns out that Dinosaur song didn't go to waste after all. It lately appeared on the internet and turned out to have a spooky resemblance to Lyra.

Given Kate's obvious knack for marrying music and visuals, we can only hope further contributions to the movies are to come. Is it too much to hope that Kate will one day join Dame Shirley and Adele as a Bond diva? Fingers crossed.


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50 Words For Kate: #23 - Cathy

Kate Bush has often spoken with great warmth about her childhood, as the adored kid sister of two older, artistic brothers and with a ma and pa who loved and encouraged her. Thanks to two releases in the mid-1980s, one official, one not, fans were able to catch a wondrous glimpse at Kate when she was just Cathy.

In 1986, Kate's big brother John Carder Bush, who has taken many of Kate's official photographs over the years, released a photography book called Cathy. It contained a selection of photos John had taken of his sister in her childhood years, some candid, others carefully posed. It is immediately clear that Kate's ability to charm a camera began at a very early age.

The book had a very limited print run of 500 copies. I am so thankful I scraped together the pennies to buy one at the time, as they now fetch astronomical amounts when they appear for sale, which is rarely. It is a thing of beauty and a treasure for fans.

The story of how Kate came to be signed with EMI is well-established. David Gilmour had heard a tape of Kate's early demos, provided by a mutual friend, and been so impressed he paid for Kate to record some songs professionally. This helped her get her record deal. Given the necessity to freely share demo tapes early in a career, it is perhaps surprising it took around a decade before some of Kate's first recordings began to surface.

Kate said she had written around 200 songs as a teenager, and to date around 30 of these have found their way into the public domain. Needless to say, as an artist Kate is less than happy that such raw and juvenile material has been exposed, but I think it is forgivable that fans can't help but want to hear them. Although initially they were sold on various bootlegs, the Internet has allowed fans to distribute them to each other for free, so at least nobody is making a buck from them any more.

Some of the tracks are rough, early versions of songs that would later appear on Kate's early albums, but there are many others that only exist in this demo form. Most are simple recordings Kate made sat at the piano with a tape recorder next to her. You can even hear the click of the record and stop buttons.

For me, these are the equivalent of discovering Da Vinci's scrapbooks or Shakespeare's rough drafts. They are both a delight and a dilemma. I know I was never meant to hear them, but they have only enforced my respect and admiration of Kate's talent. I can see them for exactly what they are: a genius at its birth.

Here is my favourite of those early lost songs.

Given how Kate values her privacy, fans know that having access to these photos and songs is a privilege, one which we treat with the respect it deserves. John Carder Bush showed this too in the dedication to his sister in the book Cathy.

To that part of my sister Kate

who is still Cathy

I dedicate this little book.

I couldn't thank you then,

Neither of us would have understood,

but I thank you now

for those poses that have become these photographs.

And a way of seeing

the seeds in the past.

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50 Words For Kate: #24 - Collaborating

One of the more hilarious misconceptions about Kate Bush is that she is some Garbo-esque recluse. The fact that Kate has no interest in being a celebrity, whatever that means, should not be mistaken as aloofness. A simple measure of Kate's gregarious nature is the number of musical collaborations she has under her belt. Apart from the many guest musicians she has used on her own albums, Kate has freely given her time and talents to a broad list of other artists over the years. Her unmistakable voice can be heard backing up everyone from Go West to Prince, Roy Harper to Big Country, Midge Ure to Lionel Azulay.

Kate has also shown her charitable side, popping in to sing a lovely line on the number one cover of Let It Be, organised to support the victims of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. She was also persuaded, I'm presuming at gunpoint, to deliver a rather prophetic line on the well-meaning, but god-awful Spirit Of The Forest, in aid of trees and stuff. The choir is like a "who's that?" of popular music...

One of Kate's rare and fleeting live performances of the last 35 years was also in aid of charity. She appeared at the first Comic Relief live show in 1986, where she sang Breathing and also duetted with Rowan Atkinson on a hilarious song that sought to answer that eternal question, Do Bears...

Of course, Kate's most remembered collaboration was with Peter Gabriel. Kate provided backing vocals to two tracks on Peter's third album and he appeared as guest on her BBC TV Special, but it was a duet on his 1986 album, So, that would forever link their names in pop history.

Peter recently said that he'd wanted Dolly Parton to provide the female voice for Don't Give Up. Now, I love me some Dolly, but I think it would be hard for anyone who's heard Kate sing on this track to accept any substitutes. The video is simple, yet extremely effective, the perfect accompaniment to this heartwrenching ballad, that's become an anthem for many.

So, as you see, Kate is far from trapped in an ivory tower. Whether big or small, her guest appearances are always faultless and can gild a lily, or make a silk purse out of the hoariest sow's ear.



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