Kate Bush
The Dreaming
So we were walking past the doctors surgery in Edinburgh, we were going somewhere new to drink, sometime early on and Veronica linked my arm and we walked on ahead and she told me about a Kate Bush album she’d just heard about all based on dreams, some good, some bad. She was discovering Kate Bush just a couple of steps ahead of me and oh how excited we felt to think about it. This is this.
Apparently this is the album that fully made people view Kate Bush as a freak, weirdo, kooky, however else such women are described. A bizarre opening song certainly, the weird backing, the fucking odd video as she sits, ballet-dressed performing a weird tribal dance surrounded by minotaurs on roller-skates and Ku Klux Klan members. She looks like Susie in the middle section. What is the song about? I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a scholar but I really can’t be bothered. My cup shall never over-floweth, it is I that moan and groaneth. We drew a cartoon with Steve Norrie as Kate Bush. We said the video was Dada. The song about the botched bank job. I love it – this is the first complete album of hers I love. Jen was paying back Veronica some money once and V was delighted to hear her say There goes a tenner, hey look, there’s a fiver. I’m having dreams about things not going right.
How long until we worked out track three was about hand-to-hand combat? Indigenous tracking and hand-grenades. I have heard Kate Bush mentioned so often by feminist artistic friends, does she count as a feminist? Or is hers just a particularly feminine way to write about issues of warfare etc? I’ve read about the Greenham Common protests and how the feminist movement coincided so well with the anti-nuclear stuff of the early 1980s and the focusing on continuation of life as opposed to strategies, which is apparently a traditional male dominion. I’m not sure I agree with that argument though, surely it’s just more of a humanist standpoint? Not necessarily feminist. We’re not ones for busting through walls, but unless we can prove that we’re doing it, we can’t have it all – can I have it all now? Between you and me, she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere.
Leave it open: I remember forgetting this from early listens to this album, but it’s amazing, so strange and freaky. That weird flanger effect on the voice. So noisy and painful, reminding me of that weird “radio edit” version of Hyperballad that knocked me over for so long.
When Veronica made me a random CD of random Kate Bush stuff (Pull of the Bush she called it, after a bit of backing from this song), she included a backing-only version of this song (The Dreaming). Sadly, it was too late for me to consider pulling it out at Yo Sushi to fuck with the hen-party diners who expected Son of a Preacher Man, Fame and Puff the Magic Dragon as they choked down Udon and Ramen, maki and nigiri. I would have loved to have done this, just to say I had done it (in the same way, being able to revel in the memory, if not the artistic product of myself and Kirsten rapping to Play that Funky Music White Boy in hayseed Scottish accents), but it’s another damn weird song, I’ll never pretend to understand it or even like it that much, the voice of the face buried in the sand at the end, in truth, scared me a little. The strange bridge section which glues together this and Night of the Swallow is a thing I love very much though. Night of The Swallow is incredible. I remember when we “got” it, and latched on the “Give me something to show for my miserable life” – you can hear the Celtic stuff coming to the fore, but it’s not in an overblown way, just in the clashing of sticks.
The first time I died was in the arms of good friends of mine – that was a lyric that stabbed me at the time, but it feels churlish to mention it now, now that those things get further and further away. This is another one of those stop-and-start songs, the Danny Thompson bass keeps it in the wandering style. Houdini always stayed very beautiful and full of love, but images of young men hitting the water freaked me out, even though I thought of myself in no way like Rosabelle. I could see the séance, all dark furniture and reflected candles.
And of course, Get Out of my House (which we sang as we went to Ikea, never dreaming it was such a long taxi ride away). It’s like a dark film, all twisted and angled, running with the camera, unflattering lighting and badly-built sets. I sang it as I helped unpack glasses at the new-look Bentleys, all cocktail glasses and leather seating – my home, my joy are barred and bolted. The idea of oneself as a diseased property seemed beautiful, but the stains were not for moving. I can hear the spite and joy of neglect and the importance of retaining mistakes (oh, like Bright Eyes again, are mistakes wrapped in glass necessarily errors?) In refusing entry, she is more controlled and sane than she has been when cataloguing her misfortunes. Her “change into the mule” is so much more demented than his, and more terrifying for it. He retains a tune and fits with the music – where he is embroidery and she is a weird potato-stamp that matches nothing she is more effective and memorable. The voices meld into Indian drum-talk as they disappear and you can imagine that the dust has gathered arms and assembled itself along the sidelines to watch.
The Dreaming
So we were walking past the doctors surgery in Edinburgh, we were going somewhere new to drink, sometime early on and Veronica linked my arm and we walked on ahead and she told me about a Kate Bush album she’d just heard about all based on dreams, some good, some bad. She was discovering Kate Bush just a couple of steps ahead of me and oh how excited we felt to think about it. This is this.
Apparently this is the album that fully made people view Kate Bush as a freak, weirdo, kooky, however else such women are described. A bizarre opening song certainly, the weird backing, the fucking odd video as she sits, ballet-dressed performing a weird tribal dance surrounded by minotaurs on roller-skates and Ku Klux Klan members. She looks like Susie in the middle section. What is the song about? I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a scholar but I really can’t be bothered. My cup shall never over-floweth, it is I that moan and groaneth. We drew a cartoon with Steve Norrie as Kate Bush. We said the video was Dada. The song about the botched bank job. I love it – this is the first complete album of hers I love. Jen was paying back Veronica some money once and V was delighted to hear her say There goes a tenner, hey look, there’s a fiver. I’m having dreams about things not going right.
How long until we worked out track three was about hand-to-hand combat? Indigenous tracking and hand-grenades. I have heard Kate Bush mentioned so often by feminist artistic friends, does she count as a feminist? Or is hers just a particularly feminine way to write about issues of warfare etc? I’ve read about the Greenham Common protests and how the feminist movement coincided so well with the anti-nuclear stuff of the early 1980s and the focusing on continuation of life as opposed to strategies, which is apparently a traditional male dominion. I’m not sure I agree with that argument though, surely it’s just more of a humanist standpoint? Not necessarily feminist. We’re not ones for busting through walls, but unless we can prove that we’re doing it, we can’t have it all – can I have it all now? Between you and me, she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere.
Leave it open: I remember forgetting this from early listens to this album, but it’s amazing, so strange and freaky. That weird flanger effect on the voice. So noisy and painful, reminding me of that weird “radio edit” version of Hyperballad that knocked me over for so long.
When Veronica made me a random CD of random Kate Bush stuff (Pull of the Bush she called it, after a bit of backing from this song), she included a backing-only version of this song (The Dreaming). Sadly, it was too late for me to consider pulling it out at Yo Sushi to fuck with the hen-party diners who expected Son of a Preacher Man, Fame and Puff the Magic Dragon as they choked down Udon and Ramen, maki and nigiri. I would have loved to have done this, just to say I had done it (in the same way, being able to revel in the memory, if not the artistic product of myself and Kirsten rapping to Play that Funky Music White Boy in hayseed Scottish accents), but it’s another damn weird song, I’ll never pretend to understand it or even like it that much, the voice of the face buried in the sand at the end, in truth, scared me a little. The strange bridge section which glues together this and Night of the Swallow is a thing I love very much though. Night of The Swallow is incredible. I remember when we “got” it, and latched on the “Give me something to show for my miserable life” – you can hear the Celtic stuff coming to the fore, but it’s not in an overblown way, just in the clashing of sticks.
The first time I died was in the arms of good friends of mine – that was a lyric that stabbed me at the time, but it feels churlish to mention it now, now that those things get further and further away. This is another one of those stop-and-start songs, the Danny Thompson bass keeps it in the wandering style. Houdini always stayed very beautiful and full of love, but images of young men hitting the water freaked me out, even though I thought of myself in no way like Rosabelle. I could see the séance, all dark furniture and reflected candles.
And of course, Get Out of my House (which we sang as we went to Ikea, never dreaming it was such a long taxi ride away). It’s like a dark film, all twisted and angled, running with the camera, unflattering lighting and badly-built sets. I sang it as I helped unpack glasses at the new-look Bentleys, all cocktail glasses and leather seating – my home, my joy are barred and bolted. The idea of oneself as a diseased property seemed beautiful, but the stains were not for moving. I can hear the spite and joy of neglect and the importance of retaining mistakes (oh, like Bright Eyes again, are mistakes wrapped in glass necessarily errors?) In refusing entry, she is more controlled and sane than she has been when cataloguing her misfortunes. Her “change into the mule” is so much more demented than his, and more terrifying for it. He retains a tune and fits with the music – where he is embroidery and she is a weird potato-stamp that matches nothing she is more effective and memorable. The voices meld into Indian drum-talk as they disappear and you can imagine that the dust has gathered arms and assembled itself along the sidelines to watch.
posted by Rouselle Rousseau @ 11:16 am
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