Kate BushAerial (EMI) Hit the ground running and there’s only one way you can go. Slower and slower, until eventually, you stop. In recent years, many of us wondered whether Kate Bush, now 47, had stopped. After five albums in the first seven years of her recording life, the ensuing 20 years have yielded just two. That’ll be three when Aerial appears next month, concluding a 13-year wait for new material. What could she possibly have been doing in that time? In the fiercely protected world of Kate Bush, the rumour mill yields little, but we’re told that the onset of motherhood in 1999 had its inevitable effect on the creative process. Having spent the previous two decades answering to nothing but her own artistic whims, Bush, then 41, finally succumbed to a greater imperative.
Three songs into Aerial she tells us as much. Named after her son, Bertie is a mother’s mad love alchemised into song. “Sweet kisses/ Three wishes,” she sings, “Lovely, love-ly Bertie.” Over and over again, repetition reduces the two words into tongues of adoration. And what instrumentation do you choose when trying to do justice to the greatest love of all? Why, Renaissance-era strings of course.
Over a typically concept-heavy double album, there are few moments with the immediacy of that three-minute eulogy. Arguably, the new single King of the Mountain is one. But elsewhere, the days when Bush pulled songs fully-formed out of the ether are long gone. She may never have a thunderbolt of inspiration quite like the one that brought her Wuthering Heights in one evening. And perhaps you need to be 13 (as she was) to conjure out of thin air something as otherworldly as The Man with the Child in his Eyes. However, hard work isn’t to be underestimated. Bush’s obsessive attention to detail did, after all, give us her two most satisfying beginning-to-end listens, the ripe, autumnal poetry of The Sensual World and Hounds of Love — an album almost totally preoccupied with surrendering to love and understanding death.
She’s not one to shirk the big themes, and there’s a similar sense of trying to grasp at intangibles on Aerial. Indeed, on the first CD, A Sea of Honey, the approach yields a brace of songs that are among her best. Mrs Bartolozzi is like a postcard sent from the most delirious depths of mourning. Laundry duties give way to a walk into the waves, and with it the low wheeze of a single cello — the song’s two halves joined by Bush repeating a phrase. Not just any phrase, but the phrase “washing machine” . Twice.
The same themes of loss seem to recur on A Coral Room. Here, her woozy depiction of “the spider of time . . . climbing over the ruins” of a city comes into stark, startling focus when the singer’s dead mother is invoked through a single item, a favourite brown jug (Bush’s mother passed away in 1993). “It held her milk,” she sings, “And now it holds our memories.”
When she presents her music like this — so far beyond the perimeters of anything happening in pop today — Kate Bush seems at her most comfortable. When she doesn’t, the results are harder to love. A case in point is Pi — which takes as its subject matter a “sweet and gentle and sensitive man” in thrall to the transcendental number of the title. “Oh he love, he love, he love/ He does love his numbers,” runs the chorus over a brisk percussive gallop. Hats off to her for being the first auburn-haired pop spookstress to address the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
But, as with the work of her chum Peter Gabriel, the song seems burdened by its own conceptual weight and its author’s quest for sonic perfection. It’s an identical story with Joanni (seemingly about Joan of Arc) and How to be Invisible — the two most musically uninteresting songs on Aerial.
In the past this never used to be a problem because you sensed that Kate Bush knew a vaguely contemporary production when she heard one. However, scoot to the penultimate track on the second CD, A Sky of Honey, and it’s not certain that this is the case any more. Recalling Mike Oldfield’s recent attempts to rebrand himself as the clanging harbinger of “chill out”, Nocturn, a New-Agey hymn to the imminent dawn, is as unpleasant as it is unexpected. It seems inevitable that within nine months every backpacker in Goa will have adopted it as their own. They’re welcome to it.
Thankfully, nothing else on either CD comes close to plumbing such depths. With nine tracks that variously revolve around birdsong, the change from day into night (and back again) and a painter attempting to capture the scene before him, A Sky of Honey coheres more readily than its “commercial” counterpart. An Architect’s Dream and The Painter’s Link have Rolf Harris (who, lest we forget, also contributed didgeridoo on The Dreaming) and Bush duetting over a spare string and piano arrangement. As his painting falls victim to a sudden downpour, he wearily exclaims, “what has become of my painting?” But she’s enraptured: “See the colours run . . . See what they have become/ A beautiful sunset.” And so to the pagan abandon of Sunset, which has Bush offering herself to the dying light of the day over a deluge of flamenco guitars.
As day makes way for night and restraint into catharsis, Somewhere in Between has Bush once again chasing intangibles and emerging with the album’s unquestionable highlight: a life-affirming chorus of hushed harmonies and whispering rhythms with more than a hint of the sexual languor that gave The Sensual World of 1989 its knee-weakening frisson.
To these ears, A Sky of Honey makes more sense if you skip the next track — the dreaded Nocturn — and head straight for the album’s tumultuous closer. The final, eponymous, song on Aerial is also its most ambitious. A redemptive paean to the new day in which its creator joins the birds in their endless song — but not before a mid-song breakdown of hysterical laughter and trilling has ushered in a barrage of free-styling rock guitar.
If this is the point at which her lifelong artistic deceleration finally grinds to a halt, it won’t be a bad way to remember her. Up on the roof, throwing herself open to the elements, while, down below, we wonder just what it’s like to see the world as Kate Bush does.
Page 2: Five great Bush moments ()
Five great Bush moments
Babooshka
Executed, as always, with an assurance beyond her years, this 1980 single tells of a woman who tests her husband’s fidelity by sending perfumed letters signed Babooshka — which also happens to be the Russian word for grandmother.
Another Day/Don’t Give Up
Two very different duets with Peter Gabriel. The first, performed by the pair on Bush’s BBC Christmas Special, had the pair stonily intoning their lines as bored husband and wife over the breakfast table. The video for the second song — from Gabriel’s So album — had them locked in tight embrace.
The Sensual World
Drawing together Middle Eastern, Celtic and East European influences, the Joyce-inspired title track of Bush’s sixth album was rewritten after she was refused permission to use Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.
Wuthering Heights
Talking to Michael Aspel in 1993, Bush confessed that she hadn’t read Wuthering Heights when she got the idea for song: “It was a television series they had years ago and I just managed to catch the very last few minutes . . . I didn’t know what was going on, and someone explained the story . . . I read the book to get the research right and, wrote the song.” The single was released only after a tearful Bush, then 19, confronted her label boss after he insisted it would “hit a wall”. She stood her ground, A year later, her boss bought her a £7,000 Steinway by way of apology.
Cloudbusting
One of her best songs and most memorable videos was inspired by the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose son Peter claimed that his father had devised a rain-making machine. In the video Bush played Peter while Donald Sutherland was Wilhelm. “I didn’t know who she was, so (initially) I refused,” recalled Sutherland, “Next thing I knew there was this knock at the door and it’s her. She was so funny.”
