UNDERRATED ALBUMS #22

'As with all of her work, the best moments of Aerial are those when the listener feels caught up by the same happy, holy drunkenness that Kate Bush seems to lose and find herself in.'

 Aerial (2005) by Kate Bush
 

When the startling news was announced that Kate Bush would, in the autumn of 2014, be playing her first live dates since her one and only tour way back in 1979, my first thought was to wonder how close she’d be coming to my home town of Leicester. Not very close, was my next thought, because these days most big names swing past on their way to bigger venues in the Midlands.  Then it became clear that these new concerts would - all 22 of them - be held at the same venue, the Hammersmith Apollo, a theatre with a capacity of about  5,000 and that all 80,000 tickets had sold out in a quarter of an hour. Ah, Londonland! The place where it’s at, the only place matters in England, the place where the rich  have been casually shelling out a grand per touted ticket, whilst the rest of us yokels out in the provinces wait for the video. Shame on you, Kate…

By all accounts, the concerts have been multi-media events, as fascinatingly theatrical as one might have expected, although not the greatest hits show some might have hoped for. Some well-known songs plus ‘The Ninth Wave’ suite from Hounds Of Love (1985) and half of Aerial performed with undiminished live power by the 56 years old Bush with a voice largely unchanged since she’d last toured at the age of 20.

Aerial is the eighth of the ten Kate Bush studio albums so far released. Bearing in mind that the first two of these were both issued in 1978 and the last two in 2011, with a gap of fourteen years between the sixth, The Sensual World (1989) and the seventh, The Red Shoes (1993), followed by another of twelve years before Aerial, we can see that Bush’s approach to her place in the market is as unusual and as risky as the music she makes on these records. Consider also that the ninth album, Director’s Cut features only various rehashes of tracks from the sixth and seventh and what may strike you as even more unusual, is the patient indulgence of her record company, EMI, with an artist who has only rarely cracked the American charts*1.

All but one of her albums have gone Top 5 in the UK however (Lionheart (1978) was a #6), where 25
singles have reached the Top 40 although only 7 of them made the Top 10 (which might explain why
there are still some British people who seem never to have heard of her*2). She has also been
consistently successful in most of the other international markets.

There is a general critical consensus that Hounds Of Love is her best album. There is also a critical

consensus that Bush can basically do no wrong. This is because she ticks so many of the boxes that

critics use as their criteria for genius. For instance: expect the unexpected – tick; apparently a bit

mad (‘bonkers’ is a word often used admiringly about Bush in the music press) – tick; goes her own 

sweet way witout caring a whit what the world thinks of her – tick; mysterious (although she has

popped up occasionally in the odd interview and video, she’s generally thought of as an other-

worldly recluse) – tick; and yet ordinary (she lives a quiet family life in the countryside and has been

a homely tea and cake hostess to some of her enchanted visitors – although living in a gated

mansion, keeping herself a stranger to neighbours, sending her son to public school, and

occasionally whisking guests off to her other domicile by the sea via private helicopter may seem like a life less ordinary to those of us who live beyond the bubble of the celebrity  world) – anyway, tick. You get the picture.

Bush Babe

And the picture was a persuasive element too for the critics (most of whom, of course, were and still are male) because Bush was a rare beauty with huge eyes, great bone structure, full lips, a pulchritudinous  shape and a penchant for fabulously sexy outfits*3. Consequently, every squawk and squeal of her colouratura soprano was accepted as further evidence of her outlandish gifts. Of course, I’m as susceptible as the next man and serious music fan when it comes to female charms and a fascination with genius, but I do try to have a measured approach and steer clear of worship. It’s an easy line to cross though, and many critics can’t seem to see any weaknesses in Kate Bush – to them she’s simply a law unto herself…

 

Since reaching her forties and experiencing motherhood, Bush has filled out into a more matronly

On stage, 2014

figure and, when in public, has self-consciously tended to cloak herself in long, dark garments that sensibly conceal rather than reveal (see, for instance, the picture of her in a kaftan from the recent concerts). Her vanity only seems to extend so far though, and unlike numerous more visible celebrities, she appears to have resisted the blandishments of the cosmetic scalpel. The voice, still remarkable, has however, changed since the 1980s, lacking the dizzying range of yore, but becoming a richer, more soulful instrument.

It is this autumnal voice that we hear to such expressive effect on Aerial. A double-CD (although only a quarter-hour longer than the inferior 2011 single disc, 50 Words For Snow*4), the first half is titled ‘A Sea Of Honey’, despite only two of the seven songs being water-themed; the second, ‘A Sky Of Honey’ continues the water theme, linking it to the passage of time during a summer’s day through one dawn to the next. The switchback vocals of much of her earlier work is all but gone here with the more balladic style of songs like ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ and ‘You’re The One’ providing the dominant tones on  Aerial.

In this sense, the album is perhaps a more conventional one, but Bush is never near the middle of the road for long. When we look at her earliest work, for instance, from the lofty peak of Mount Hindsight, those albums may not now sound quite as strange as they did over thirty years ago – but we must remember that the musical map since then has been profoundly influenced by Bush, one of those rare artists most admired by her peers and subsequent admirers. We should also recall that no-one had ever heard singles like those taken from her first albums: brilliantly original records such as ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Hammer Horror’, ‘Wow’, ‘Breathing’ and ‘Babooshka’.

Babushka

Over the years, I’ve frequently found myself experiencing the sound of her songs, without  listening to the lyrics very closely (it wasn’t, for example, until my wife pointed out the dramatic marital scenario going on in the words of ‘Babooshka’ that I had any real notion of what it was actually about). Bush’s writing tends not to offer the listener rhymes with which to peg the sense of her ideas – and this remained the case with Aerial, but because her voice wasn’t cartwheeling and diving all over the place, the words drew me in more persuasively.

‘A Sea Of Honey’ opens with ‘King Of The Mountain’, a windswept meditation on Elvis Presley, which links him with another iconic figure – Orson Welles’ fictional representation of the first great newspaper tycoon, William Hearst, in his film Citizen Kane (1941). Bush wonders why Presley and Kane filled up Graceland and Xanadu ‘with priceless junk’ and hopes that Elvis finds happiness ‘in the snow with Rosebud’, the emblematic sledge of Kane’s childhood (and the most precious of all his vast trove of treasures).  A choppy guitar and, as is so often the case, drums and percussion, drive the rhythm of the track.

The penultimate song on the first disc involves another iconic historical character and is again propelled by drums, this time accompanied by Michael Kamen’s orchestral washes. ‘Joanni’ is a deeply romanticised vision of Joan Of Arc ‘beautiful in her armour’, the virgin soldier with no ‘ring on her finger’ about to go into battle, blowing ‘a kiss to God’.  It’s a memorable image and an irresistibly lovely song, which closes intriguingly with Bush’s earthy humming overdubbed by her own erotic whispering, but there have been plenty of songs about Elvis and the Maid of Orleans.

There have, however, been few if any about the mathematical constant of pi. ‘π’, the second track on ‘A Sky Of Honey’’, is one. Hovering above the pulse of a Hammond organ played by Gary Brooker (who, of course, led Procol Harum and also appears on The Red Shoes), Bush details the relationship between a benign numbers junkie and his specific infatuation with pi. Hushed and entrancing, even the series of seemingly random (but apparently relevant) digits that Bush reverently reels off between the verses sound sexy and natural in the context. The only song I can think of that occupies similarly rarefied territory is the title track to an obscure American album from 1970, Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs, which has gradually and justifiably garnered a reputation as a lost classic.

Bush Baby

Next comes a hymn to Bush’s only child, her beloved ‘Bertie’, a little boy of about 6 or 7 at the time (there’s a photo of him with his baby-teeth in the CD booklet demonstrating his ‘truly fantastic smile’).  An elegant dance set to a baroque guitar and viols, the opening lines suggest that, more than seas and skies, Aerial may actually be an album about the sun and her son: ‘Here comes the sunshine, / Here comes that son of mine, / Here comes the everything.’ It’s very sweet, although the honey will cloy for some listeners, especially when compounded by the following track, which is, primarily at least, about a washing machine…

 

To these ears, ‘Mrs. Bartolozzi’ follows ‘Bertie’ quite logically, but it is the one track on Aerial that has fired up the ‘Kate Bush is bollocks’ naysayers. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best song ever about white goods, although I can understand that it might just try the patience of even seasoned Bushaholics. A solo piano piece, Bush recalls a wet Wednesday when ‘they traipsed mud all over the house’ causing her – in the unlikely role of Mrs. Mop – to clean up and pile the dirty laundry into ‘the new washing machine’. Perhaps because the washer is new and she’s paying more attention to it than usual, she sinks into a reverie, watching the porthole as the clothes tumble around. From herein, the humbly quotidian nature of the story opens out as Mrs. McIntosh (her actual marital title) sensuously  daydreams about ‘[her] blouse wrapping itself around your trousers’ as ‘fish swim between [her] legs’. She then mistakes a shirt blowing in the wind on the washing line outside for someone (husband Dan McIntosh and guitarist or maybe young Bertie?) as it ‘looks so alive.’

So far so disarming – or so alarmingly sentimental - depending on your point of view. Now get a load of this: ‘Slooshy, sloshy, slooshy, sloshy / Get that dirty shirty clean.’ Twee, you say? Well, Bush has never been afraid of being ridiculed, but given that such whimsicality is pretty much par for the course with her, we should consider this: this transcendent song is about family life and domestic routine and who’s to say that she shouldn’t include a verse just for Bertie, given that the last track was ‘a song for him’? As for the identity of Mrs. Bartolozzi *5 – nobody seems to know, other than a theory that the piano playing may be influenced by Chopin, who apparently had a patron by that name. I don’t know about that, but I do know that the piano during the slooshy section is definitely inspired by ‘Crime Of The Century’, the title-track of Supertramp’s 1974 album…(When I realised this link, I was really quite pleased with myself, because identifying Bush’s rock music influences is notoriously difficult. She seems to have been far more conspicuously influenced by art, film, history, literature and classical music. As far as the Rock tradition goes though, she appears to have come almost out of nowhere, notwithstanding her fairly clear admiration for Pink Floyd and the way they utilised sound effects and spoken voice elements)*6.

Ominous guitars run through ‘How To Be Invisible’, a spell of a song about perhaps the less literal trick of maintaining personal privacy when one is famous (a trick Bush seems to have mastered adroitly enough). The final verse is worth quoting in full:-

 

                                                         ‘You take a pinch of keyhole

                                                         And fold yourself up

                                                         You cut along a dotted line;

                                                         You think inside out;

                                                         You jump ‘round three times;

                                                         You jump into the mirror

                                                         And you’re invisible.’

 

Peek-A-Bush

‘A Sea Of Honey’ closes with ‘A Coral Room’, another piano piece in which the playing and singing are not so much synchronised as symbiotic. The scene is set by the ruins of a sunken city webbed by coral’s spider of time’. In a transcendent moment similar to that set off by the washing machine, Bush imagines – or maybe remembers – dragging her hand ‘over the side of the boat’ and is flooded by a sensory recollection of her late mother singing ‘Little Brown Jug’, a C19th song popularised by Glenn Miller’s big band during WWII. In the last verse, Bush hears her laughing and sees her ‘standing in the kitchen / As we come in the back door’ – rather like her own mud-streaked family burst in a few minutes back on the disc – to where an actual brown milk jug would have stood on the table and which survives her mother as a family memento*7.

 

And isn’t this just the way that memories sometimes rush back to us? It’s a wonderful, moving song which reminds us that this artist’s flights of fancy and flashes of surrealism are usually rooted in real life. Herself the product of a close family, Bush has frequently involved her relatives on her records*5. As well as husband Dan and brother Paddy featuring on Aerial, it is light of her life, Bertie’s voice that opens the second disc.

‘A Sky Of Honey’ begins with both a ‘Prelude’ and a ‘Prologue’. In the former, we hear Bertie waking his parents amidst the dawn chorus: ‘Mummy…Daddy…The day is full of birds…Sounds like they’re saying words.’  The birdsong, treated to chime with a five note piano figure, together with the child’s gentle voice, is irresistibly touching (and offers the rare sighting of a lesser spotted Bush rhyme). ‘Prologue’ drifts in to the sounds of a waking day full of promise, the rolling piano taking us into ‘a lovely afternoon’ with cellos humming like bees and a ‘magic / Like the light in Italy / Lost its way across the sea’.  Bush then sings about the light in Italian to the sound of distant gulls as the orchestra swells. It’s a ravishing song which you may feel both emotionally and physically, so affecting is the melody, performance and production.

‘An Architect’s Dream’ although pleasant enough, comes as something of an anti-climax and leads into a slight slump on the second disc. It begins with Rolf Harris*9 murmuring in his ‘Can you see what it is yet?’ mode before orchestral chords similar to those that made Massive Attack’s 1991 single ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ so distinctive. The lyric is a ho-hum description about a painter trying to keep up with the changing light only to have his picture rained upon. It runs into the short next track, ‘The Painter’s Link’ with Harris singing the first few lines, before Bush comes in to tell us that the colours have run into ‘a wonderful sunset’. The meandering ‘Sunset’ is stronger lyrically, but doesn’t really hit its stride musically until the coda when the pace quickens and then blends into the all too brief ‘Aerial Tal’*10 which, picking up on ‘Sunset’s query as to ‘Who knows who wrote that song of Summer / That blackbirds sing at dusk?’, finds Bush joyfully scatting with said birds. Incidentally, when she was once asked by an interviewer who her favourite singers were, Bush replied that they were the blackbird and the thrush. Additionally, the highly effective cover design is a soundwave pattern of the blackbird’s song presented as a sunset horizon with rocks or trees reflected in water.

Madame Kate at Tussauds

‘Somewhere In Between’ is very much a mellow continuation of ‘Sunset’, a blissed-out description of dusk on which Bush is joined by Brooker, Lol Crème (he of 10cc) and brother Paddy on backing vocals (background voices are usually male on her records – and when they’re not they’re usually Bush herself multi-tracked). At the end of this track, there’s a nice little musical pun where Bush bids the sun goodnight and Bertie replies ‘Goodnight, Mum.’ Taking up an earlier melodic trace, ‘Nocturn’, at 8.35, Aerial’s longest track, with its more urgent bass and drums, takes us deep into the night on a naked, moonlit swimming and diving expedition, surfacing as the new dawn reverses the optical effects of the dusk. As the backing vocals again gather around the final verse, the song hurtles to a sudden halt as the string-laden pulse of the new day begins with the album’s title-track.

Following her Atlantic skinny-dipping adventure, Bush – by now laughing herself giddy - is gripped in ‘Aerial’ by the overpowering urge ‘to get up on the roof’ and celebrate daybreak with the birds exhorting us all to ‘Come on, let’s all join in!’.  Her husband powers the song – and the album – to its conclusion with some unstoppable rock guitar riffing and then it’s over, leaving us, inevitably with yet more birdsong.

As with all of her work, the best moments on Aerial are those when the listener physically feels caught up by the same happy, holy drunkenness that Kate Bush seems to lose and find herself in. I’m not at all sure that, beyond music, any other art form can create such a mutual experience between creator and consumer. An aerial is, of course, a receiver and transmitter of signals flying through the air*11 and Bush, at her best, is a prime exponent of this almost mystical process – and the relationship it provides between artist and audience. It may not be her best album, but Aerial is my favourite from her back catalogue – and one of the all-time favourites in my entire collection.      

 

 

N. B.

*1 – Perhaps surprisingly, The Red Shoes is Bush’s highest charting album in the US. At #28, it outdid both her meisterwerk, Hounds Of Love and its lead single, ‘Running Up That Hill’, which both stalled at #30.

*2 – When visiting my local Central Lending Library, I’m often appalled by the ignorance of the staff in the music section when I’ve enquired about fairly well-known records. For example, when I wanted to remind myself of some of the earlier Bush material and asked at the counter for them to do a computer-check on which CDs they had in the archive, I was met by a blank expression and asked to spell not only the artist’s surname, but also the forename. ‘Oh, come on,’ I exclaimed, ‘Everyone’s heard of Kate Bush!’ The middle-aged ‘librarian’ simply shrugged and smiled sheepishly…

*3 – Bush’s early ingenuousness soon faded after EMI exploited some of the more revealing numbers amongst  her gym and stage-wear wardrobe.

*4 -  50 Words For Snow was a disappointment after Aerial. It seemed as if she was almost trying to pull off the same trick twice – with snow instead of sun. With only 7 tracks stretched out over 65 minutes, it seemed to lack the former’s inspiration and melodies and could easily have done without the celebrity sheen of a duet with Elton John and a spoken word part on the title-track for the ubiquitously over-employed Stephen Fry.

 

*5 – Bush can be somewhat slapdash with names – ‘Babooshka’, for instance, is from a Russian word meaning ‘grandmother’ – not an obvious fit for the song’s scenario. As for ‘Mrs. Bartolozzi’, I wondered if it was - like Zanussi - some exotic European name for a washing machine, but the nearest I got, apart from the Chopin possibility, was some C18th Italian engraver…

 

*6 – It is well-known that friend of the Bush family, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd ‘discovered’ Kate and has since done session work for her.

*7 – There are other Bush songs such as  ‘Mother Stands For Comfort’ and the much loved ‘This

Woman’s Work’ which are directly or indirectly inspired by her mother.

*8 – Bush grew up in an English middle-class Catholic family, the daughter of a piano-playing country doctor and his ex-dancer wife. She and her two brothers received a great deal of encouragement to pursue their artistic inclinations. Relatives often appear on her records – and her ex-partner and long-time musical associate Del Palmer engineered Aerial. Her son Bertie, now 16, appeared on stage in the 2014 concerts, credited in the programme as Albert McIntosh. He also does a lovely chorister’s turn on ‘Snowflake’, the opening track of 50 Words For Snow.

*9 – Best now, I think, following his recent trials and tribulations, to trust the art rather than the artist with Rolf Harris. His appearance on Aerial shouldn’t have been all that surprising as he’d played didgeridoo on the title-track of The Dreaming (1982) - something of an homage to his own remarkable 'Sun Arise' #3 hit of 1962. It sounds like he might be on that same instrument at the beginning of ‘A Sky Of Honey’.

*10 – I‘d never encountered the word ‘tal’ before. It’s Jewish for a Passover prayer and Indian for ‘lake’ or ‘rhythmic patterns’ (which seems the likeliest application).

*11 – The title Aerial might though have been partly inspired by James Southall’s painting which forms the centrepiece of the CD booklet. It apparently hangs in the Bush household and shows fishermen pushing out a boat bearing that name.

All pictures courtesy of Google Images

 

C. IGR 2014