[LINK] "Back before Gaga and Beyoncé, there was Kate Bush"

[rfmcdonald]

Now that her son is growing up, it looks like iconic songstress Kate Bush is becoming active again. Partial proof can be found in her interview with the Times' Will Hodgkinson, an interview I posted last night gaffa on account of its thoroughness.

An interview with Kate Bush, whatever form it takes, is exciting enough to cause heart problems in otherwise healthy music journalists. She is a genius: Every album she has released has been something of a reinvention. She is elusive: She has toured only once and she last came into view six years ago for the release of her album Aerial, even then doing only one interview. She is hugely influential: Everyone from Lady Gaga to Beyoncé owes a debt to the woman who invented the idea of the female pop star as performance artist.

“She was the first female singer that wasn’t a songstress,” says Lindsay Kemp, the legendary dancer, actor and mime artist who taught David Bowie and Bush, and who was a key influence on her. “Much as I adored Dusty [Springfield], Kate was something else; a chameleon, really, and very cultured, with a great imagination.”

It is 33 years since Bush, with her debut single Wuthering Heights, became the first woman to have a U.K. No. 1 hit with a self-written song. Now she is emerging ever so slightly from her castle of domesticity in Berkshire co-habited by her guitarist husband, Danny McIntosh, and her 12-year-old son Bertie, for the first time in six years with a reworking of two of her albums. And she has agreed to talk about it.

Director’s Cut revisits The Sensual World from 1989 and The Red Shoes from 1993, either rerecording the songs entirely or tweaking them into new forms. She won’t do an interview in person, and she will talk only about the new album; any questions straying toward the personal will be ignored. But with Bush you take whatever you are given. So the first question is: why would someone so forward thinking and original want to go over old ground? “I’d wanted to revisit some of the songs from these two albums for a while now,” she replies. “I think there were some quite interesting songs on there, and I wanted to see how I could make them sound at this point in time. I’ve tried to allow the songs to breathe more by stripping a lot of the production out and lengthening some sections, but keeping the best performances from the original tracks.”

You can’t imagine Bush looking back much. “I don’t listen to my old stuff very often at all,” she confirms. “But when I’ve heard bits and pieces from these albums I felt some of it sounded a bit dated, some of it a bit cluttered. I approached them as if they were newly written songs. To me it sounds like a new album.”

It's a wonderfully long and complete article. Go, read.