How did that change the way you performed? One of the inventions for your first tour was the headset mic. I wonder if, as I was exploring a technique of dance, I was also sort of exploring a technique with my vocals as well. It was very much a phase that went with when I was working in dance. The more you work, the more a certain type of character evolves. It's a bit like how you develop a certain style as a pianist: It's just something that gradually evolves. You have a very distinctive phrasing and intonation to your singing. Considering that this was one of a very small handful of interviews she’s done in the past 25 years, it’s no surprise that she never gave up control. In our hour-long conversation, her responses were thoughtful yet precise (she politely deflected enquiry into the personal motivations behind her music). When I reached her by phone on a drizzly November day, she spoke in warm tones while reflecting on her storied career. Two years on, Bush is releasing a live album, Before The Dawn, that captures the magic of those shows. Bush threw herself into elaborate theatrics, in a virtuosic show which finessed theater, pop, and performance art. Titled “Before The Dawn,” the show brought her best-loved hits and most innovative compositions to life. That all changed in 2014, when she put aside a deep embedded fear of live performance for a 22-night run at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. Her one-off 1979 “Tour Of Life” was described by Melody Maker as “the most magnificent spectacle ever encountered in the world of rock,” but for many decades it was the only time Bush translated her bold visuals to the stage. One area in which she fell behind her peers, however, was in live performance. Later, she retreated from London to the countryside to create her 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love, which contained her most iconic pop epics as well as her most accomplished experimental work with Side B’s cinematic song suite, “The Ninth Wave.” Buoyed by the creative control afforded by her Fairlight synth sampler - first used on 1980’s Never For Ever - Bush produced all of her albums herself starting with 1982’s progressive The Dreaming ( a Björk favorite). As an artist, she’d inked an EMI deal at 16 as a piano prodigy, and by the early ‘80s Bush’s hands-on hunger for new sounds led her to double down on the production of her music. Her work behind the scenes was just as pioneering. In the video for her indelible baroque pop debut single “Wuthering Heights” she traversed the Yorkshire moors with ecstatic fluidity, while the “Running Up That Hill” video is modern dance at its most powerful. Unlike the stiff-hipped rigidity of the punk singers that had been Britain’s alternative icons before her, Bush’s seemingly elastic body found strength in sensuality. From the very beginning of her career, as a 19-year-old from the London suburbs with two years of dance training under her belt, Bush used the whole of her body to express her art. Three decades on, our political leaders still hate what is “other,” which often makes watching a Kate Bush video feel like an affirming few minutes of self-care.Ĭontemporary artists who’ve probably done just that include FKA twigs, Solange, and Christine and The Queens, all of whom don’t use movement as an adjunct to their music, but as a core expression in itself. In the ultra-conservative Thatcher/Reagan era of the 1980s, her embrace of theatrics made Bush a beacon of individuality for LGBTQ people, art freaks, and anyone who didn’t like their culture served straight-up. She’d shift from playing a steely seductive warrior in “Babooshka” to donning military fatigues for “Army Dreamers,” as at ease with folklorish fantasy as post-Vietnam social commentary. In her most prolific period - from ’78 to ’86 - these rivalled the visual innovations of David Bowie and Prince. Her press engagements are few and far between, and for the last four decades she’s chiefly communicated through dazzling self-directed music videos. Like today’s most powerful stars, Bush has always rejected the idea that pop artists had to pander to the media. Unfazed by a lack of precedent to her visions, Bush’s genre-spanning music didn’t just push pop forward with its embrace of avant-garde styles, her work also left the tools for other artists to do the same. For her debut tour in 1979, she helped invent the headset mic, which allowed her to move onstage with the same freedom as her distinctive high-register vocals. Long before anyone had ever swiped right, her late-’80s song “Deeper Understanding” detailed the erotic pull of technology. Two decades before Lemonade, the British pop auteur wrote, directed, and starred in the first-ever visual album, 1993’s The Line, The Cross, & The Curve.
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