Ask anyone to
name a teenage pop music sensation with a wild mane of dark hair and an offbeat
artistic vision, and these days the answer you most likely will hear is
“Lorde,” the 17-year-old New Zealander of “Royals” fame. But decades before
Lorde, there was English singer-songwriter Kate Bush, whose rather reclusive nature and infrequent recording output
eventually took her largely out of the public eye – until recently, when she announced
her first series of live performances in 35 years.
The quiet,
contemplative Lorde, whom Acculturated has discussed before, seems wise beyond her years and more
serious about lyrically elevating pop music than are some of her well-known,
corporately-packaged peers. With only one album under her belt – Pure Heroine – she’s already made her
transformative mark with her whole career ahead of her.
She hasn’t publicly
counted Kate Bush among her influences, which interestingly seem as literary (American
short story writer Raymond Carver, for example) as they are musical (Fleetwood
Mac’s Rumours). But pretty much every
artsy female recording artist since Bush has
been influenced by or compared to her: Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Bjork, Sinead
O’Connor, Alanis Morissette, all the way up to Florence and the Machine, Lady
Gaga, and even Shakira. Kate Bush is the spiritual and artistic mother of them
all and countless more.
By the time she was
in her early teens in the 1970s, the musically self-trained Kate Bush had written
a boatload of songs and caught the attention of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, who
helped her fashion a professional demo to take to record company EMI. With an
eye toward cultivating a long-term career, and fearing she was too young to
handle either success or failure, EMI kept her under wraps for two years while
she honed her songwriting and performing skills – much like Lorde’s record
company Universal, which signed the promising songwriter at 13, and gave her
time to develop her material and try out different producers.
Bush’s first
single, “Wuthering Heights,” went to number one in England in early 1978, and
the wildly and uniquely talented Bush shot to fame. She subsequently had top 10
singles in her homeland with “Man with the Child in His Eyes,” “Running Up That
Hill,” and others including a moving 1986 collaboration with Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Give Up.” She
had less success in the States, partly due to the lack of touring (more on that
below), but largely because, as a record exec put it, her music wasn’t easily categorized
for American radio.
Her fey beauty, eclectic
and experimental music, ballet-and-mime-trained dance performances, video
spectacles like the Grammy-nominated The Sensual World, and historical and literary lyrical
content made her a uniquely fascinating and creative figure. Whereas Lorde’s
music (so far) is focused on capturing the essence of teenage experience,
Bush’s surreal and melodramatic songs ran a bizarre gamut of topics that often
stemmed from outside herself and her
personal experience. As one critic put it, “As a
songwriter, she has the ability to take intriguing subject-matter – yes,
Wuthering Heights, Houdini, Henry James’s The
Turn of the Screw, aspects of war, anything from aborigines getting mowed
down by trucks to soft-porn – and condensing it into song.”
Kate Bush’s last
round of shows was 1979’s Tour of Life, a stunning fusion of music, dance and
theater which finished up when she was only 20. Though she continued to release
albums (10 in total, but only 2 of new material in the last 20 years), she never
toured again, reportedly due to a combination of the fear of flying, her perfectionism
about the live performances of her carefully crafted studio recordings, and the
traumatizing accidental death of her lighting director at one of her concerts.
But now she’s
back. Bush will present a concert series at London’s Hammersmith Apollo called “Before
the Dawn” that will run from the end of August to the beginning of October. Tickets
to all 22 dates – some of which went for upwards of $1,600 – sold out in less
than 15 minutes. Kate Bush may have disappeared from the public eye, but
apparently not from the public’s hearts and minds.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 4/11/14)
