Nothing shocking about that today, but things were different then and the world regarded her in a different light. In summer 1980, I was editing Zigzag, the original fanzine, and decided to put Kate on the cover. As she was building to Hounds Of Love and beyond, those boards could wait… until maybe after the next album. Each time, she ponderedĪloud whether her next move should be gigs or an album, then seemed to visualise the time, effort and high-profile stress another tour would involve. I interviewed Kate Bush three times in the first half of the 80s marathon encounters which, heard now, underline how crucial this time was in defining her life for the next 30 years. Maybe she even felt she had finally reached, or at least got close to, that creative nirvana she had always talked about striving for. Both showed her questing spark undimmed and, if anything, more uncompromisingly restless than ever, making many of the copycats who have sprung up in her wake pale into insignificance. Six years after Aerial, Kate released two albums in 2011 on her EMI-affiliated Fish People label, Director’s Cut (which revisited songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes) and Fifty Words For Snow.
Luckily she had sold enough records not to need the money, and had a record company which long ago learned to deal with Kate on her own terms. Now Bertie’s a teenager, maybe Kate felt she could look at life beyond home and the studio where, perfectionist to the point of obsession, she has rarely stopped her ongoing musical experiments and saw no reason why there shouldn’t be a 12-year gap between 1993’s The Red Shoes and 2005’s Aerial. She desperately wanted to give their son Bertie a proper childhood, eschewing the nanny syndrome which has wrecked the lives of so many celebrity offspring. Having successfully avoided the album-tour treadmill, along with other potentially damaging music business pitfalls, her last 35 years have been divided between her studio and family life with partner Dan O’Connell. But away from occasionally sleazy speculation such a below-the-radar public profile always stokes (the tabloids laughably claimed La Bush was 25 stones when she took three years to make 1985’s Hounds Of Love), her return to the stage at the age of 56 shouldn’t be that unexpected. Those decades since 1979’s ahead-of-its-time Tour Of Life have seen Kate become one of the world’s most elusive, mysterious but ever-fascinating artists, her enigma boosted by her self-imposed retreat from the spotlight. Recalling and possibly trumping Bowie effortlessly claiming 2013 by slipping out a new album, the announcement of Kate’s Before The Dawn residency has quite rightly been greeted as a major shock certainly the last thing anyone expected.
The return of Kate Bush to the concert stage after 35 years has been greeted with the kind of hysteria which has already made the 22 shows she’s performing at the Eventim Apollo in London this year’s most scorching ticket.
0 kommentar(er)
