This is a special piece of film to accompany the release of the live single ‘And Dream Of Sheep’. The vocal was performed live while filming Kate lying in the huge water tank at Pinewood Studios. This was to create a sense of realism, as the character in the song is lost at sea. However it became more realistic than Kate had imagined. She spent so long in the water during the first day of filming that she contracted mild hypothermia. She recovered after a day off and carried on filming. Everyone agreed it had added to the authenticity of the performance. This film was then projected onto a large oval screen which hung above the stage during the performances of her live show.
Tag: Kate Bush
Kate Bush: Before the Dawn (on Nov 25)
Kate Bush announces:
On November 25 the live album “Before The Dawn” will be released on CD (3 CDs) and vinyl (4 vinyl) and digital download. The conceptual heart of the show is reflected in the CD format, which is split over 3 discs centred around the two integral pieces – ‘The Ninth Wave’ and ‘A Sky Of Honey’.
CD1 ends with the pivotal track ‘King Of The Mountain’ which bridges into ‘The Ninth Wave’ suite of songs on CD2.
The album was produced by Kate Bush. Nothing on the record was re-recorded or overdubbed.
Revisiting the 31 UK Singles of Kate Bush
Wow wow, wow wow, you have to read this fun list over at the Telegraph. It starts off like this:
From the moment 18-year-old Kate Bush stepped on to the stage at Top of the Pops and gave a career-defining performance of Wuthering Heights, she has beguiled and baffled with her every unhinged shriek and wild, wide-eyed gesture.
Since that extraordinary 1978 debut, she has released a further 30 singles, despite being anything but your typical singles artist. Bush’s greatest hits – and even those that failed to much trouble the charts – all display a creativity and variety unparalleled in pop music.
Grace Perfecting Nature: A Tenth Anniversary Toast to Kate Bush’s “An Endless Sky of Honey”
Most proggers regard side two of Hounds of Love as Kate Bush’s greatest work. I love it as well, and I have since I first heard it thirty years ago this coming autumn. Who wouldn’t be moved by the invocation of Tennyson’s Ninth Wave, by Kate as an ice witch, and by the observation of it all from orbit? The entire album, but especially side two, is a thing of beauty.
Equally gorgeous to me, though, is Bush’s 2005 album, Aerial, and, in particular, side two, “An Endless Sky of Honey.”
No one, no one is here
No one, no one is here
We stand in the Atlantic
We become panoramic
The stars are caught in our hair
The stars are on our fingers
A veil of diamond dust
Just reach up and touch it
The sky’s above our heads
The sea’s around our legs
In milky, silky water
We swim further and further
–Kate Bush, “Nocturn”
Indeed, let me blunt, it’s not only my favorite Bush song, it’s probably one of my top ten songs of all time. All 42 minutes of it—an examination of the beauties and creativities in one twenty-four hour period.
The song is without a flaw, to be sure, and it’s the interplay of Bush’s ethereal vocals, the adventuresome grand piano, and the tasteful upright bass that makes this song such a gem even with nothing more than a superficial listen. The drumming, too, does much for the music. It’s not varied, it’s consistent in a Lee Harris fashion. In it’s consistency, it allows every other instrument to swirl in a varied menagerie.
But, even more than this, it’s Bush’s use of birdsong that makes this song nothing less than precious in the history of music. If music at its highest reflects the turning of the spheres, as Plato believed, then Bush has mimicked nature with perfection. It’s as though Bush embraced the Natural Law in all of its mysterious rhythms and held the entire delicate thing in a shaft of sunlight, that moment when the twilight sun peers into stained glass revealing not just the spectrum and the mote of light, but the unpredictable oceanic dance of freed dust particles.
Not atypical for prog epics, Bush broke the song in multiple parts: Prelude; Prologue; An Architect’s Dream; The Painter’s Link; Sunset; Aerial Tal; Somewhere in Between; Nocturn; and Aerial. Again, not atypically, there exist no moments of silence between the parts, each part lushly flowing into what follows.
Whose shadow, long and low
Is slipping out of wet clothes?
And changes into the most beautiful iridescent blue
Who knows who wrote that song of Summer
That blackbirds sing at dusk
This is a song of color
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust
Then climb into bed and turn to dust
Every sleepy light must say goodbye
To the day before it dies
In a sea of honey, a sky of honey
Keep us close to your heart
So if the skies turn dark
We may live on in comets and stars
Who knows who wrote that song of Summer
That blackbirds sing at dusk
This is a song of color
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust
Then climb into bed and turn to dust
–Kate Bush, “Sunset”
If side two of Hounds of Love, “The Ninth Wave,” reached deeply into Celtic myth, disk two of Aerial, an “Endless Sky of Honey,” reifies the thoughts of Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas More, calling upon the rigorous reflection of creation itself.
Nature makes nothing in vain, but only grace perfects nature.
In 2005, Kate Bush was that agent of Grace.
Happy Halloween!
Happy Halloween, Progarchists! Enjoy some Kate Bush.
Kate Bush nearly came between me and my wife
Greg Spawton tweets the link to this great story from James Hall:
As a cause of potential marital strife, it was a biggie.
About six weeks ago I received an email from a contact in the music industry. Would I, as an occasional music critic, like to go to one of Kate Bush’s sold-out shows at the Hammersmith Apollo at the end of September as their guest? There was no room for a plus-one, sadly, the contact said, but if I wanted to come alone then I was more than welcome.
Greg’s comment:
KB syndrome is a common issue for men of my generation
Great pop & rock music is NOT dead
I thoroughly enjoyed Brad’s righteous, even rockin’, post earlier this week in response to the “Rock is dead!” crowd. Mankind, it seems, has an innate attraction to the apocalyptic, including in the realm of rock. It brought to mind a piece I wrote in November 2008 on the Insight Scoop blog regarding a number of silly stories about how the Pope (then Benedict XVI) was somehow and in some way embracing and celebrating the music of the Beatles on the 40th anniversary of the release of the “White Album”. That led to a little rant on my part about how stupid it is to say, as did L’Osservatore Romano, the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, that the popular music of the late 1960s was far superior to that of the early 21st century. To that end, I made five points. Here is the post, below the fold (the pic above, by the way, is “The Music Man” painted by Norman Rockwell in 1966):
The Triumph of Kate Bush
Tracey Thorn recounts her experience of the amazing Kate Bush concert in the pages of the New Statesman, namely, the experience of “the ecstatic triumph of a life’s work”:
Six straight songs and then, just as we are relaxing, the stage transforms, and the drama begins: a multi-sensory performance of “The Ninth Wave”, the suite of songs that forms side two of The Hounds of Love (1985). There’s Kate on screen in a life jacket, apparently slipping away from us, singing “And Dream of Sheep”, one of her most beautiful songs.
I should probably write this somewhere more formal – my will, perhaps – but in case I forget, let me say here that I would be happy for you to play this song at my funeral. I weep as she sings it, partly because I’m imagining my own funeral, but also because we are witnessing a struggle between life and death, where a drowning woman yearns to be saved, to return to her beloved family. “Let me live!” she cries a few songs later. Overwhelming and exhilarating as they are, all the special effects – Kate in a tank, a helicopter search beam strafing the audience – are in the service of the songs and the story.
Why is it so moving? Well, because when finally she is brought back it is not just the fictional heroine, but Kate herself who has survived the years, and those cold seas, and returned to us. The two strands, family love and audience love, intertwine as she shows us how both mean so much to her. “D’you know what?/I love you better now,” she sings, as the first half ends and we wipe our tears.
Part two is calmer, more reflective, consisting of one side of the recent album Aerial (2005). Reprieved from death, she now revels in the simple, sensuous pleasures of life. Birdsong on a summer afternoon. The setting of the sun and the rising of the moon. In more conventional hands this could be merely decorous and pastoral, even a little twee, but somehow she has found a way to transform contentment into euphoria. The mood is hypnotic, rhythmic and trancey, and the stage dazzles with images of light and flight; less genteel garden party, more full-on midsummer rave, it could be the ultimate blissed-out headliner of a blistering, sunny Glastonbury.
And her singing voice, which I so worried about? It is a thing of wonder, any youthful shrillness replaced by a richer, occasionally gravelly tone, and with a full-throated power unbelievable in someone who has so rarely sung live. All I can think is that she must have been practising, on her own in a barn somewhere, for the past 35 years. Practising, planning, waiting for all the stars to align – her own desire, the cast of collaborators, the right time and place – in order for this to happen. And it is an ecstatic triumph, a truly extraordinary achievement.
Chartbusting — Kate Bush
Kate Bush’s concert series this year has kicked off a remarkable return to the charts for her. She is now the first female artist ever to have 8 albums in the Top 40. And all of her albums are currently in the Top 50:
Her achievement is only bettered by Elvis Presley, who took 12 places after his death in 1977, and the Beatles, who scored 11 on their remaster releases in 2009.
Bush’s first chart record came when debut single Wuthering Heights made her the first female artist to reach No.1 with a self-written song. Now her 1986 record The Whole Story has made No.6 while Hounds Of Love, from the previous year, has reached No.9. Further titles are placed at 20, 24, 26, 37, 38 and 40, with three more at 43, 44, and 49. That means her entire back-catalogue is in the top 50.
…
Kate Bush album chart placings
No. 6: The Whole Story (1986)
No. 9: Hounds Of Love (1985)
No. 20: 50 Words For Snow (2011)
No 24: The Kick Inside (1978)
No. 26: The Sensual World (1989)
No 37: The Dreaming (1982)
No. 38: Never For Ever (1980)
No. 40: Lionheart (1978)
No. 43: Aerial (2005)
No. 44: Director’s Cut (2011)
No. 49: The Red Shoes (1993)
Progarchy 