October 30, 2005
Doesn't Tour, Hates Attention, Likes Home
By WILL HERMES
The New York Times
POP music has seen a lot of 80's musicians angling for a second act lately - the Pixies, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, among others. Partly this represents a natural cycle: artists rise, peak, burn out, fade away, until the need returns for money and/or limelight, when back they strut. But the phenomenon has been fueled lately by a revival of 80's styles. With so many new bands sounding like Gang of Four or Talking Heads, for example, it's understandable that the originals would regroup to claim what's theirs (as the former did), or at least release a fancy box set (as the latter did).
The adventurous singer-songwriter Kate Bush is another 80's comeback. Her new double CD, "Aerial," will be released on Nov. 8. But she doesn't quite fit the paradigm, since she never quite fit the era. She wasn't "new wave" or "postpunk," and the movement she might logically be identified with, British progressive rock - a near-exclusively male bastion even by rock standards - was well on the wane by the time of her 1978 debut.
While her idiosyncratic music never spawned a cottage industry of clones, it has influenced a remarkably diverse group of musicians. Antwan (Big Boi) Patton of the polyglot hip-hop group Outkast cites the singer as a huge inspiration ("She's my No. 1 musical influence next to Bob Marley," he said); so has the ethereal piano balladeer Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. The innovative rhythm-and-blues singer Maxwell had a surprising 2001 hit covering "This Woman's Work," Ms. Bush's cryptic paean to childbirth. She has also been covered by male-fronted British rock acts like Placebo and the Futureheads, who had a hit last year in Britain with their new-wave version of her "Hounds of Love." And she has been reflected to varying degrees by female artists like Bjork, Sarah McLachlan, Dido, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos interested in exotic vocalizing, intimate piano songs, sexually frank lyrics, electronic composition, world music or studio experimentation.
If not a recluse, as she is often described, then certainly a homebody, Ms. Bush, 47, has been below the radar for more than a dozen years. During a rare recent telephone interview from her home near Reading, England, her son Bertie, 6, could occasionally be heard howling in the background. The singer was upbeat and gracious, despite a late night finishing final production work on the video for her new album's first single, the floaty, reggae-tinged "King of the Mountain" (viewable at katebush.com). She spoke on topics ranging from how Agatha Christie might have fared in the Internet era ("everyone would know who'd done it before they even started the book"), to her love for Elton John's "Madman Across the Water" album, to what she has been up to since releasing "The Red Shoes" in 1993.
"Trying to do stuff other than putting records out all the time," she said of the last topic. "After 'The Red Shoes' I was exhausted, so I figured I'd take a year out, which turned into two. And here we are."
The "stuff" included spending time with friends, seeing movies and raising her son. "It's been important to spend time with him. And I'm pretty slow making records anyway," she said, laughing, adding that she worked on "Aerial" "for the past five or six years."
The hiatus was overdue for a piano prodigy who entered the pop business at 16. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd - a friend of a friend - hired a 30-piece orchestra to help her produce demos for her debut album, "The Kick Inside," a head-rush of precocious artistry and sexuality that, with songs conjuring masturbation, incest-triggered suicide and Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights," still sounds fresh and strange 25-some years later. The record never quite registered in the United States but was a hit in England, prompting a promotional whirlwind that included a rushed second album ("Lionheart") and Ms. Bush's only tour, a 29-date theatrical spectacle in 1979, with choreography by Antony Van Last of the London Contemporary Dance Company.
Exhausted, Ms. Bush slowed her pace during the 1980's, abandoned touring - in part due to a fear of flying - built her own studio and released a series of increasingly ambitious and sporadic records. She also kept to herself, acquiring a reputation as a something of a hermitic oddball; the English music magazine Mojo, for example, ran a cover story without her participation in 2003 - "Kate Bush: The Mysterious Life of a Reclusive Superstar" - as part of a package titled "English Eccentric Weirdfest!"
So might one read her cryptic first single in over a decade, "King of the Mountain," with its references to Elvis Presley and "Rosebud" (the symbolic sleigh from "Citizen Kane") as a wry comment on her own retreat to Xanadu? One might, but Ms. Bush doesn't recommend it. "It's fascinating that people have this fascination with what I do," she said. "The way I see it, you go away, create something, talk about it a bit so people know it's there, and get on with things. I don't live my life in the public eye. Maybe because people are all over television happily promoting themselves all the time, I'm seen as weird."
Ms. Bush, who has no plans to tour, likes the idea of making records as puzzles that listeners complete by interpretation. "So much is so accessible, so disposable, so many experiences are so shallow. I think what's so exciting about life are the great mysteries and questions," she said, stopping to laugh at herself. "And without wanting to sound horribly pretentious, that's something I like to play with."
Like 1985's "Hounds of Love," perhaps her best record, her latest is split between a group of individual songs (the first CD, subtitled "A Sea of Honey") and a suite (the 42-minute "A Sky of Honey"). But where "Hounds" is dense and agitated, busy with sounds created on the Fairlight synthesizer - an early sampling keyboard that Ms. Bush was among the first to master - "Aerial" is expansive and relatively relaxed. Recorded with longtime associates, including Del Palmer on bass, many of the album's songs are arranged simply for voice and piano, like the exquisite "A Coral Room," composed, she said, "the way I used to do, just sitting at the piano writing."
Sometimes "Aerial" is so relaxed, it drifts into smooth jazz territory. But Ms. Bush's voluptuous, slightly alien voice usually corrects by contrast: purring, trilling, cackling, jumping octaves and echoing itself, witchlike, in multitracked choruses. "Aerial" also shows a more overtly classical English influence than her recent records. "Bertie," a love song for her son, features Renaissance period instruments, while "Sky of Honey" invokes Vaughn Williams's "Lark Ascending." "The record has a lot to do with England," said Ms. Bush, who has given Bulgarian choirs and Australian didgeridoos prominent roles in earlier songs. "I wanted to do something more colloquial."
That fits the record's spirit of finding infinite possibility in your own creative backyard - a spirit, it's worth noting, that's surfaced in a new generation of parlor-room musical eccentrics like Joanna Newsom, Antony and Ariel Pink (who has a recent tribute song called "For Kate I Wait"). On "Pi," a song literally about infinity, Ms. Bush tries "to sing numerals with as much emotion as possible," and in the process gives new meaning to that cliché about singing the phone book. "Mrs. Bartolozzi" is a rhapsody to a washing machine that turns cosmic. Also arranged for voice and piano, it's the record's oddest song, but in its wistful, muted eroticism and quiet wonder, maybe the most emblematic.
"I suppose there's an element of me in it," Ms. Bush said. "I spend quite a lot of time doing housework, and it's very important to me - I don't want to be a person unconnected to the basic things of life. And I like the idea of taking something that's very small and quiet and allowing it to just connect, you know?"
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Kate Bush, whose exotic experiments have influenced everyone from Tori Amos to Outkast, is releasing "Aerial," but will not tour. "The way I see it," she said, "you go away, create something, talk about it a bit so people know it's there, and get on with things."
