26 Jul A Star In A Strange Way
I can’t be any more precise about the date other than it was probably late 1981 or early 1982. I do remember the place, though: Budget Tapes & Records in Albuquerque. I was 21 or 22 at the time and I’d been working in record stores for a couple of years. There were two Budget stores in Albuquerque: One right across the street from the University of New Mexico at the corner of Central and Harvard, and the other one way the hell up in the Heights in a strip mall at the intersection of Eubank and Candelaria.
By all rights, the store across from UNM should have been the hip one, what with its built in collegiate clientele, but it was an aggressively uncool establishment. The store was company-owned and its inventory was therefore restricted to whatever bland swill was available via the Budget corporate order book from the Budget corporate warehouse in some corporate business park somewhere. Very dull, milquetoasty and mainstreamy stuff: Styx, REO Speedwagon, Journey, Heart, Kenny Rogers, Lionel Richie, the Oak Ridge Boys, Huey Lewis & the News—whatever musical plaque was clogging up the Billboard charts at the moment. I worked at Budget with the Goof and together the two of us waged a subtle insurgency against the middlebrow aesthetics of the place, bringing in our own records from home—ones that Budget would never stock—and playing cassettes of our own original recordings when management wasn’t on hand to shut us down.
The NE Heights Budget store was locally owned and the owners, while not musical aesthetes by any stretch, were cooler than the corporate bollards at the Central Avenue location. The Heights store was free to stock the racks from whatever distributors it saw fit and therefore had access to a wide selection of esoteric material and hard-to-find imports. That said, most of the specialty stuff they stocked was metal (Anvil, Dokken, Iron Maiden, the Scorpions, Ynge Malmsteen—pick your Poison) but not exclusively. Eventually, my refined sensibilities could abide the Central Avenue store no longer and I started working at the Heights location exclusively, even though it was a long haul from my student ghetto apartment. There was an Arthur Murray Dance Studio next door and we took special orders from the slinky, heavily made-up girls that worked there. Budget Tapes & Records has long been consigned to the shitecan of history, but the Arthur Murray studio still abides. Go figure.
Gentle Reader(s), I can feel you out there thinking, ‘All of this is more than adequately fascinating, Humble Narrator, but get to the goddam point already.’ Patience, patience—I’m getting there.
It was at the NE Heights Budget Tapes & Records in Albuquerque that I first became acquainted with the miracle made flesh that is Kate Bush. Perhaps I read some small mention in Rolling Stone, or saw a promo photo somewhere, but it was pretty much love at first sight. I recall marveling over the cover art of ‘Never For Ever’ and thinking ‘Now this looks interesting.’ And interesting it was.
Kate exploded on the British pop scene in 1978 with her first single ‘Wuthering Heights.’ The youngest child of a musical and artistically inclined family, she was self-taught on piano and violin. David Gilmour (yes, that David Gilmour) met 16-year-old Kate through a family acquaintance and, suitably impressed, financed a professional three-song demo tape that landed her a recording contract with EMI. ‘Wuthering Heights’ went straight to number one on the British charts (as well as in Australia, Italy, Ireland, New Zealand and Portugal)—an accomplishment that made Kate the first female U.K. artist to have a self-penned number one hit. Not a bad introduction to the world.
Kate always had an undeniable mystique about her which, back in those pre-internet days, was enhanced by the mystery of her origins and her extraordinary talent. She seemed to have arrived on the scene essentially fully formed—all five feet, three inches of her—from out of nowhere (Bexleyheath, Kent, to be precise). Her instrumental gifts and and compositional genius beggared belief and, ohmygodohmygodohmyGAWD, she was soooo BEAUTIFUL! If someone had made her up—that hair, that face, that bod, those huge brown eyes, that genius—no one would have believed it. And that voice—that yelp-y, swooping, glissando helium baby doll voice—either it drove you out of your mind or you surrendered totally and fell in love with it. I went with the latter.
The first two albums (‘The Kick Inside’ and ‘Lionheart’—both released in 1978) had some great songs (‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’, ‘Them Heavy People’, ‘Wow,’ ‘Hammer Horror‘) but I never got into them as deeply as those to come. These are great records, but Kate was still very young (19 when ‘The Kick Inside’ was released) and she had written some of the songs on the first two records when she was as young as thirteen. Her abilities were already extraordinary but she was still developing as an artist.
Kate truly began to come into own with 1980’s ‘Never For Ever,’ her third album, co-produced with engineer Jon Kelly. By that time the first wave of punk had crested, so-called new wave music was gathering momentum, hair metal was ascendant, Michael Jackson was in the process of conquering the world… and then there was Kate. She was unique—utterly unclassifiable. Her music was unabashedly eccentric, atmospheric, jazz inflected, classical curious, often densely layered, sometimes minimal, but always intimate, deeply emotional and intensely personal. It was pop music, of a sort, but from somewhere so far out in left field that it essentially constituted a genre unto itself. What pigeonhole do you put a song like ‘Babooshka’ into? Besides Emily Bronte some of her reference points included G.I. Gurdjieff, Wilhelm Reich, J.M. Barrie, Hammer Studio horror films, Henry James, Francois Truffaut, Frederick Delius, Harry Houdini, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicolas Roeg, Orson Welles, James Joyce, and Stephen King, to name but a few. Not exactly Pat Benatar, this girl.
Kate’s evolution was recognized and rewarded by her fans: ‘Never For Ever’ became her first number one album in the U.K. and the first album by a female solo artist ever to top the U.K. charts. The album spawned three top 20 singles: ‘Breathing,’ ‘Army Dreamers,’ and ‘Babooshka.’
Kate’s magic did not, however, translate well across the pond. ‘The Kick Inside’ sank like a sarsen stone in the U.S. and, as a result, EMI—probably considering Kate too quintessentially British to be comprehensible to the colonials—did not bother to release either ‘Lionheart’ or ‘Never For Ever’ stateside. The albums remained available only as imports until 1984—something which added to Kate’s mysterious appeal. Her absence from the American market and lack of touring meant that she received little coverage from the U.S. music press. One of the few glimpses American audiences had of Kate in the flesh was a December 9, 1978, appearance as the musical guest on ‘Saturday Night Live.’
Much to its credit, the NE Heights Budget Tapes & Records store stocked both the scarce imports of Kate’s albums and the British music mags that lavished attention and praise upon her. And they had a television mounted on the back wall with that new phenomenon, MTV, playing all day long. The rare occasion of one of Kate’s videos coming through the cable sent me rushing to the back of the store to goggle at her weird, wonderful concepts and captivating beauty. This, I believe, is the point.
In 1979 Kate took the material from her first two albums on the road. Subsequently dubbed the ‘Tour of Life,’ the tour comprised 24 concerts over the course of six weeks in England, Scotland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. It was a highly ambitious, elaborately staged production that was, in many ways, years ahead of its time. The wireless headset microphone was essentially invented for the express purpose of allowing Kate to sing and dance simultaneously for the show. Every one of the dates sold out. Thereafter, Kate performed sporadic one-off gigs on special occasions but, despite the evidence of her confidence and charisma as a performer, she never toured again.
In 1982 Kate released ‘The Dreaming,’ which she referred to as her ‘She’s lost her mind’ album. She had built a 24-track home studio and produced the sessions herself. She had befriended Peter Gabriel and through him had become familiar with the groundbreaking Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer, which she had first employed for a few tracks on ‘Never For Ever.’ The Fairlight was a significant factor in shaping the sound of ‘The Dreaming,’ but more than utilizing it simply as a fancy sound effects device, Kate exploited it fully as a compositional tool, which brought a whole other dimension to the album. Her voice had begun to change and she began to explore her mature, lower vocal range.
‘The Dreaming’ is probably her weirdest, angst-iest, most idiosyncratic recording and it is my favorite. It’s so strange and so beautiful and so imbued with that passion that is so uncompromisingly Kate. If one views the first two albums as twin expressions of Kate’s youthful precocity and ‘Never For Ever’ as a transitional effort, then ‘The Dreaming’ is the album in which she began to occupy the fullness of her genius. Not surprisingly, it didn’t sell as well as its predecessors, though it did make it to number three on the U.K. charts. It was also the first of her releases to crack the Billboard Top 200 in the U.S.
‘The Dreaming’ reveals itself over time, but the sense of mystery and the undercurrents of anxiety and spiritual longing are of the open-ended variety. The songs characteristically contain more questions than answers and that’s part of what makes it such a lastingly great album. This album is a consummate slow burn, a masterpiece of willful obscurity. The title track unfolds in a progression of surreal snapshots:
Bang-a goes another kanga on the bonnet of the van
(See the light ram through the gaps in the land)
Many an aborigine’s mistaken for a tree
Til you near him on the motorway and the tree begins to breathe
(See the light ram through the gaps in the land)
Coming in with the golden light
(In the morning)
Coming in with the morning light is the New Man
Coming in with the golden light is my dented van
I mean, what kind of weird-ass stuff is that to have in the title track of your mega-selling pop album? With its odd kangaroo-loping rhythm, didgeridoo drones and breathy overlays it’s so supremely weird and cinematic, like the soundtrack for a film that exists only in the collective unconscious of Kate, Nic Roeg, Peter Weir and David Gulpilil. And you and me, of course.
And then there’s a quirky, oddly comic song about a robbery gone wrong, a song about Houdini’s widow trying to contact her late husband via seance, a song about wanting to attain enlightenment but not having the discipline to pursue it, a terrifying song about a haunted house (the Overlook Hotel from ‘The Shining’?) and just what the heck is ‘Suspended in Gaffa’ about anyway?
Throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s Kate remained the perfect cult hero for her American fans such as myself, closely held and much beloved by a small, fanatically devoted following who pored over the available catalogue, dissecting the songs, studying the artwork for clues and messages. Kate was an early exponent of the music video, pre-dating the1981 launch of MTV, and she made them for most of her singles. In stark contrast to the lock-step ensemble dancing that became de rigueur with the ascendancy of Michael Jackson, Kate’s videos frequently featured her flowing, expressive Isadora Duncan/Martha Graham-esque choreography and mime-inspired moves, best exemplified in the video for ‘Running Up That Hill.’ (She had studied with Lindsay Kemp, the acclaimed British movement artist who had also trained David Bowie. Kate and Kemp appeared together in Kate’s 1993 film ‘The Line, The Cross and the Curve.’). Kate’s beguiling weirdness is in full flower in her videos, particularly the early ones. They manifest an earnestly arty dorkiness, by which I mean that Kate doesn’t concern herself much with trying to be cool—she pursues her muse sincerely, unapologetically, and the devil take the the hindmost.
In 1985 Kate released ‘Hounds of Love,’ the album which is universally considered to be her masterpiece. By now fully in command of her studio chops and with a formidable arsenal of state of the art technology at hand (the Fairlight, of course, now augmented by the digital Linn Drum sampler), Kate composed, performed and produced one of the great recordings of the era. The A side featured rhythmically propulsive gems like ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’, ‘The Big Sky,’ ‘Cloudbusting,’ and the wonderful title cut (containing one of my favorite Kate oddball couplets: ‘Take my shoes off and THROW them in the lake—and I’ll be two steps on the water’), while the B side comprised a suite of lush, atmospheric vignettes and weird sound collages dealing with sleep, water, ice, the cosmos and rebirth. It’s a beautifully conceived and executed album that has the structure, pace and cohesion that define a truly great recording. As great as the individual songs are in ‘The Dreaming’ and ‘Hounds of Love,’ this is music that I need to listen to in context—in the context of the album—because it was created to be experienced in that way. Much has been said and written about ‘Hounds of Love,’ a considerable amount of it just recently, so I won’t belabor it, but for me, ‘The Dreaming’ and ‘Hounds of Love’ together comprise one of the pinnacles of modern popular music. Desert island stuff, all the way. I need to have these records in my life and have never been without them since they first arrived.
Kate followed up the huge success of ‘Hounds of Love’ (number one on the U.K. charts, top ten in nine other countries, number 30 on the Billboard album chart) with two more excellent records—‘The Sensual World’ in 1989, and ‘The Red Shoes’ in 1993. Both albums are full of great songs and beautiful music with contributions from guest artists such as Jeff Beck, Prince, Eric Clapton, Gary Brooker, Eberhard Weber, Mick Karn and the world music sensations Trio Bulgarka. Both albums rose to number two on the U.K. charts and managed to crack the top 50 on the Billboard charts in the U.S.
And then… silence.
What happened? Where did Kate go? What was she doing? Had she lost her muse? Had she lost her mind?
Kate didn’t go anywhere, of course. She was simply at home, living her life, raising her son, dealing with the joys and heartbreaks that we all face over the course of time. In the first 15 years of her career she had accomplished more than many artists do in a lifetime, having transformed her meteoric rise into sustained critical and popular success. She had initially planned a well-deserved one-year hiatus, but the one year turned into twelve.
Whatever mainstream momentum Kate had built up in the U.S. with ‘Hounds of Love’ began to steadily dissipate but her stateside faithful remained steadfast. Through the long years of Kate’s sabbatical her legend seemed only to grow amongst the true believers, of which I was one. Perhaps the one person I know who is a more passionate Kate devotee than myself is my longtime primo gal pal and sporadic musical collaborator, Teri Lynn. A supremely talented, operatically trained vocalist in her own right, TL has been known to perform a version of ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ that would undoubtedly make Kate herself swoon in ecstasy. Teri Lynn has kept the flame over the years, absorbing every inflection, every nuance of her favorite songs, and when we get together long sessions poring over Kate’s videos on YouTube often ensue.
Then, finally, in 2005, Kate broke the silence. ‘Arial’—a double album, 16 new songs, 80 minutes of magnificent music—revealed that she had long been at work in the studio. She was back, not having missed a step. 21st century Kate was mellower, less theatrical, but as brilliant, introspective and idiosyncratic as ever. The howling ferocity of ‘The Dreaming’ and the pounding drive of ‘The Hounds of Love’ had (mostly) given way to quieter, perhaps deeper waters—undeniably different, but still uniquely Kate. The second track, ‘π,’ features Kate delicately singing the number pi to its 137th decimal place. That’s our girl. ‘Arial’ made it to number three on the U.K. charts and, again, just broke the top 50 in the U.S.
Ever the perfectionist, in 2011 Kate followed up ‘Arial’ with ‘Director’s Cut’—an album of remixed/revisioned and partially re-recorded versions of songs from ‘The Sensual World’ and ‘The Red Shoes.’ The album made it to number two in the U.K. and just barely broke the top 200 on the Billboard charts—the Yankee nut was remaining resolutely difficult to crack. Then, later the same year (!!), Kate released ‘50 Words for Snow,’ a beautifully frosty/warm winter album that immediately became my go-to listening for dark, snowy evenings at home in Santa Fe. Atmospheric, extended explorations of hyperborean ambiance are to the fore on ’50 Words’: The shortest song is just shy of seven minutes and the rest are between seven and 13 minutes-plus. The instrumentation is often minimal—primarily Kate’s voice and piano augmented by backing vocals, bass, drums, a bit of guitar, and some orchestral textures—and there is none of the dense digital layering of the ‘The Dreaming’ and ‘Hounds of Love.’ The album received near universal acclaim (some reviewers took issue with the ‘hammy’ Elton John cameo on ‘Snowed in at Wheeler Street’, but it’s a minor quibble) and made it to number five in the U.K., number 83 on the Billboard charts.
And then—most remarkably of all—word emerged that Kate was returning to the stage. This was something truly unprecedented, unexpected, epic, mind boggling, nigh on miraculous! The last time that she had been onstage for more than a few minutes Jimmy Carter was the president, we were still in the depths of the Cold War, gasoline cost .86 cents per gallon, Kanye West was not yet two years old, and Your Humble Narrator was painting houses in New Orleans for a living.
Rather than a tour, the concerts were to take the form of an extended residency at the Hammersmith Apollo—the storied London venue that Kate had performed at back in 1979 and where, in 1973, David Bowie’s final ‘Ziggy Stardust’ show had taken place (a concert attended by the 14-year-old Kate). Tickets for all 22 nights sold out in 15 minutes. Teri Lynn and I never had a chance.
The performance was titled ‘Before the Dawn’ and the set list was essentially of 1985-onwards vintage, with the primary focus on ‘Hounds of Love’ and ‘Arial.’ There were two songs from ‘The Red Shoes,’ and one from ’50 Words for Snow,’ but none from Kate’s other five albums. ‘Wuthering Heights’ was definitely not on the list. Much in the manner of the 1979 ‘Tour of Life,’ ‘Before the Dawn’ was an elaborate, highly visual production that incorporated dance, puppetry, 3D animation, pre-filmed video segments, costumes, theatrical set pieces and an illusionist. The band included Peter Gabriel stalwart David Rhodes (guitar) and former Miles Davis sidemen Omar Hakim (drums) and Mino Cinelu (percussion). The reviews were rapturous and the resurgence of interest resulted in eight of Kate’s albums re-entering the U.K. charts in the top 40—yet another record for a female artist. The album documenting the ‘Before the Dawn’ performances was released two years later, and although the performances had been filmed there remain no known plans to release the video.
So there you have it: Our girl Kate conquers the world yet again. It’s an amazing trajectory, from the precocious 16-year-old to the iconic artist/goddess of the current day—an extraordinary career by any standard. But then along came NetFlix and ‘Stranger Things,’ season four, episode four.
I’m not going to delve into anything deep as regards the pros and cons of the Duffer Brothers sci fi/dork epic, but I readily admit to having watched the entire series. Eighties nostalgia is not my jam but when Max was trapped in the Upside Down, on the verge of being possessed and murdered by the evil Vecna, and the cassette of ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ got slammed into that Walkman, it was undeniably a fantastic moment. What other song could possibly save humanity from armageddon, not least Max Mayfield and Hawkins, Indiana? Of course it had to be Kate.
Reportedly, the Duffer Bros’ decision to use ‘Running Up That Hill’ was the result of a subtle, long-running pressure campaign by series star Winona Ryder. Well, bless her pointed little head! Winona gets a permanent ‘atta girl!’ from me for services above and beyond the call, and that’s in addition to huge props for dumping Johnny Depp’s slimy ass. (For a bit of context on the whole ‘Stranger Things’ phenomenon, consider that Sadie Sink, the 20-year-old actress who portrays Max Mayfield, had never heard of Kate Bush prior to ‘Stranger Things’ series four.)
The inclusion of ‘Running Up That Hill’ in ‘Stranger Things’ proved to be the tipping point for Kate. The song re-entered the U.K. singles charts in June of this year, eventually attaining number one—two positions higher than it had reached in 1985. With this accomplishment Kate set a U.K. record for longest gap between number one singles—her previous number one having been ‘Wuthering Heights,’ 44 years earlier. The song re-entered the Billboard charts in June at number eight, eventually climbing to number three—her first U.S. top ten single. ‘Hounds of Love’ re-entered the Billboard album charts at number 21—her highest ever.
Now that is some truly extraordinary shit. An article in today’s ‘New York Times’ about the return of Joni Mitchell to the Newport Folk Festival this past Sunday pegged ‘Running Up That Hill’ as a ‘legitimate contender for song of the summer.’ Wow. Just… wow.
Those of us who have been with Kate all along can feel proud that we recognized the light of her genius from the beginning. There is no one like her. She has been stunning from the very first. She has influenced countless others but a short list of the Children of Kate can certainly include Tori Amos, Beth Orton, St. Vincent, Björk, PJ Harvey, Regina Spektor, Sharon Van Etten, Elizabeth Frazer, Annie Lennox, Florence Welch and Fiona Apple. Big Boi of OutKast, Marianne Faithful, Tupac Shakur, J.K. Rowling, Elton John, Rufus Wainwright, John Lydon and, obviously, David Gilmour have been among her many outspoken admirers. God help us all, Boris Johnson loves her too. Now in the 45th year of her career she has yet to release anything that has been less than stellar and there’s absolutely no reason to think that she ever will.
So, bless you, Catherine Bush, CBE. You are an incomparable gift and we love you. Shine on, you crazy diamond.
