sosgemini said:

I know...it hurts my eyes, MY BEAUTIFUL EYES!!!

Sorry, being serious- I'm dyslexic aswell, so you can imagine the pain, but you get the general idea? x

extract of MOJO interview in The Guardian today:
'I'm not some weirdo recluse'

After more than a decade in the wilderness, Kate Bush is back. What has she been up to all this time? The singer reveals all to Tom Doyle

Friday October 28, 2005
The Guardian


'I'm a very strong person' ... Kate Bush.

We have been waiting for Kate Bush. For 12 years, she has been missing, Garbo-like, from public life, leaving tabloid reporters to rattle up frothing reports, and patient fans to gratefully absorb every molecule of drip-fed information. Until very recently, EMI Music's directors were chewing their nails down to their elbows wondering if their most elusive signatory would ever finish making her eighth, long-gestated record, Aerial. The rest of us could rely on nothing but whispered rumour, adding to an already towering myth.

Article continues

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Yet here, in Kate Bush's home, there is a 47-year-old mother of one, the antithesis of the mysterious recluse, dressed in a workday uniform of brown shirt, jeans and trainers, hair clipped up in practical busy-busy fashion, all wary smiles and nervous laughter. We shake hands, tentatively. She seems tiny (five foot three-and-a-half inches) and more curvaceous than the waif-like dancer of popular memory.
Famously, Kate Bush hates interviews - the last was four years ago, the previous one seven years before that. So the prospect of this interrogation, the only one she has agreed to endure in support of Aerial, must fill her with dread. Around us there is evidence of a very regular, family-shaped existence - toys and kiddie books scattered everywhere, a Sony widescreen with a DVD of Shackleton sitting below it. Atop the fireplace hangs a painting called Fishermen by James Southall, a tableau of weather-beaten seadogs wrestling with a rowing boat; it is soon to be familiar as part of the inner artwork of Aerial. Balanced against a wall in the office next door is a replica of the Rosebud sledge burned at the dramatic conclusion of Citizen Kane, as commissioned for the video of Bush's comeback single, King of the Mountain, and brought home as a gift for her seven-year-old son Bertie.

Can she understand why people build these myths around her?

"No," she begins, apprehensively. "No, I can't. Pffff. I can't really."

You once said: "There is a figure that is adored, but I'd question very strongly that it's me."

There is silence. A stare. You did say it ...

"Well supposedly I said that. But in what context did I say it?"

Just talking about fans building up this image of you as some kind of goddess.

"Yes, but I'm not, am I?"

So, do the rumours bug you? That you're some fragile being who's hidden herself away?

"No," she replies. "A lot of the time it doesn't bother me. I suppose I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person and I just find it frustrating that people think that I'm some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world." Her voice notches up in volume. "Y'know, I'm a very strong person and I think that's why actually I find it really infuriating when I read, 'She had a nervous breakdown' or 'She's not very mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature'."

This is how 12 years disappear if you're Kate Bush. You release The Red Shoes in 1993, your seventh album in a 15-year career characterised by increasingly ambitious records, ever-lengthening recording schedules and compulsive attention to detail. You are emotionally drained after the death of your mother Hannah but, against the advice of some of your friends, you throw yourself into The Line, the Cross & the Curve, a 45-minute video album released the following year that - despite its merits - you now consider to be "a load of bollocks". You take two years off to recharge your batteries, because you can. In 1996, you write a song called King of the Mountain. You have a bit of a think and take some more time off, similarly, because you can.

Two years later, while pregnant, you write a song about artistic endeavour called An Architect's Dream. You give birth to a boy, Albert, in 1998 and you and your guitarist partner Danny McIntosh find yourselves "completely shattered for a couple of years". You move house and spend months doing it up. You convert the garage into a studio, but being a full-time mother who chooses not to employ a nanny or housekeeper, it's hard to find time to actually work in there. Bit by bit, the ideas come and a notion forms in your mind to make a double album, though you have to adjust to a new working regime of stolen moments as opposed to the 14-hour days of old. Your son begins school and suddenly time opens up and though progress doesn't exactly accelerate ("That's a bit too strong a word"), two years of more concentrated effort later, the album is complete. You look up from the mixing desk and it is 2005.

If the outside world was wondering whether Kate Bush would ever finish her long-awaited album, then it was a feeling shared by its creator. "Oh yeah," she sighs. "I mean, there were so many times I thought, I'll have the album finished this year, definitely, we'll get it out this year. Then there were a couple of years where I thought, I'm never gonna do this. If I could make albums quicker, I'd be on a roll wouldn't I? Everything just seems to take so much time. I don't know why. Time ... evaporates."

There was a story that some EMI execs had come down to see you and you'd said something like: "Here's what I've been working on," and then produced some cakes from your oven. True? "No! I don't know where that came from. I thought that was quite funny actually. It presents me as this homely creature, which is all right, isn't it?"

Even if apocryphal, it's a nugget that reveals something about Bush's relationship with a record label she signed to 30 years ago. For a long time now, she hasn't taken a penny in advances and refuses to play them a note of her works-in-progress. In the latter stages of Aerial's creation, EMI chairman Tony Wadsworth would come down to visit Bush and leave having heard nothing. "We'd just chat and then he'd go away again," Bush says. "We ended up just laughing about it, really."

If the completion of Aerial put paid to one set of anxieties for Bush, then its impending release has brought another - not least, a brace of newspaper stories keen to push the "rock's mystery recluse" angle. It seems the more she craves privacy, the more it is threatened. "For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life," she explains. "It's so a part of who I am. It's so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don't know how dishwashers work. For me, that's frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being. Even more so now where you've got this sort of truly silly preoccupation with celebrities. Just because somebody's been in an ad on TV, so what? Who gives a toss?"

A clock somewhere strikes two and the chipper, ever attentive McIntosh arrives with tea, pizza, avocado with balsamic vinegar and cream cake for afters, only to be playfully admonished by his partner, who protests: "I can't eat all this shit!"

If there is perhaps less mystery to Kate Bush than we might have expected, her music remains reassuringly the same ecstatic alchemy of the humdrum and otherworldly. Recalling the hello-clouds wonder of The Big Sky from 1985's Hounds of Love or the frank paean to menstruation that is Strange Phenomena from her debut, The Kick Inside, Aerial finds Bush marvelling in the magic of the everyday: the wind animating a skirt hanging on a clothes line, the trace of footprints leading into the sea, the indecipherable codes of birdsong.

But the one track on Aerial that best bridges the divide between Bush's domestic and creative existences is the haunting piano ballad Mrs Bartolozzi, in which a housewife character drifts off into a nostalgic reverie while watching clothes entwining in her washer-dryer. It's also the one track set to polarise opinion among listeners, with its eerie, unhinged chorus of "washing machine ... washing machine". Bush acknowledges as much.

"A couple of people who heard it early on," she says, dipping a spoon into her avocado, "they either really liked it or they found it very uncomfortable. I liked the idea of it being a very small subject. Clothes are such a strong part of who a human being is. Y'know, skin cells, the smell. Somebody thought that maybe there'd been this murder going on, I thought that was great. I love the ambiguity."

The shiver-inducing stand-out track on Aerial, however, comes at the end of the first disc. A Coral Room is a piano-and-vocal ballad that Bush admits she first considered to be too personal for release, dealing as it does with the death of her mother, a matter that she didn't address at the time in any of the songs on The Red Shoes.

"No, no I didn't," she says. "I mean, how would you address it? I think it's a long time before you can go anywhere near it because it hurts too much. I've read a couple of things that I was sort of close to having a nervous breakdown. But I don't think I was. I was very, very tired. It was a really difficult time."

Kate Bush begins to tidy up the plates and cups and get ready for Bertie's arrival home from school with his dad. Before I go, however, there is one last Bush myth to bust. Apparently, when she attended a music industry reception at Buckingham Palace this year, she asked the Queen for her autograph. Is that true? Instantly a grin spreads across the face of the Most Elusive Woman in Rock. "Yes, I did!" she exclaims, only half-embarrassedly. "I made a complete arsehole of myself. I'm ashamed to say that when I told Bertie that I was going to meet the Queen, he said, 'Mummy, no, you're not, you've got it wrong' and I said, 'But I am!' So rather stupidly I thought I'd get her to sign my programme. She was very sweet.

"The thing is I would do anything for Bertie and making an arsehole of myself in front of a whole roomful of people and the Queen, I mean ... But I don't have a very good track record with royalty. My dress fell off in front of Prince Charles at the Prince's Trust, so I'm just living up to my reputation."

· This is an abridged version of an exclusive 16-page interview with Kate Bush that appears in the next issue of MOJO magazine, on sale on Wednesday November 3





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DUTCH FANS!

Na 12 jaar wachten is het op 7 November zo ver: "Aerial" het nieuwe album van Kate Bush zal op die dag uitkomen. De eerste single "King Of The Mountain" bewijst al dat het wachten beloond wordt. Maar dit was bij de échte fan natuurlijk al bekend.

Om het allemaal voor de liefhebber nog wat specialer te maken willen we je al op woensdag 2 November uitnodigen voor een speciale Aerial launchparty in de Fame Megastore op de Kalverstraat 2 in Amsterdam. Niet alleen kun je dan het album in zijn geheel beluisteren, je kunt dan ook als eerste ter wereld "Aerial" kopen!!!!

Een echte primeur, exclusief voor de fans dus. Vanaf half 8 's avonds ben je welkom bij Fame. Je moet je hiervoor wel even aanmelden. Een simpel "Ik kom" mailen naar marketing@fame.nl is dan genoeg. Geef dan ook op of je alleen komt, dat je nog iemand meeneemt.

Tot woensdagavond!!

Which basically means that on the 2nd of november there's a listening party at Fame Music in Amsterdam, where you can purchase the album too instead of having to wait until the 7th...

Mmmm
I'll be there!

Ooh! Just got an email from "Kate Bush" and it had links to some trippy animation. I think it's an advert for the album's release...

Real Player High
Real Player Low
[Edited 10/30/05 3:32am]

Taken from the BBC news website:


Review: Kate Bush's Aerial
By Darren Waters
BBC News entertainment reporter


Kate Bush releases her first album in 12 years next week but has it been worth the very long wait?

When EMI invites a group of journalists to the Royal Academy of Music, in London, for a one-off listen to Kate Bush's new album, they are sending a clear signal - this album is not to be dismissed lightly.

Aerial is in two distinct halves - the first side, A Sea of Honey, is a collection of distinct, highly personal, sometimes impenetrably personal, songs.

Side two, A Sky of Honey, is an old-fashioned concept album - complex, layered, perhaps pretentious, but also a dazzling aural masterpiece.

A Sea of Honey has seven wildly different songs which touch on aspects of her daily life, both public and personal.

Single King of the Mountain opens the album full of swelling synthesizers and pounding beats and with its almost cryptic lyrics sets the tone for side one.

All of the songs have a swirling, almost uncontrolled creativity as if Bush has had these songs bottled up for more than a decade.

Her voice escapes, rather than emerges, in that familiar part-piercing, part-haunting tone that uniquely can carry across consonants and vowels with seductive ease.

Folk melody

Bertie, about her young son, has a simple, pleasing folk melody but lyrically feels slightly mundane.


Fans have waited a long time for the album

She sings: "Here comes the sunshine, here comes the son of mine. Here comes everything, here comes a song for him."

"You bring me such joy. Then you bring me more joy," she recites, almost unconvincingly.

How to be Invisible is side one's stand out track, with a real sense of menace in its driving beat.

"I found a book on how to be invisible. On the edge of the labyrinth," she sings.

Strangest song

The strangest song on the whole album is Mrs Bartolozzi, a plaintive wail seemingly about domestic chores.

"Washing machine, washing machine, washing machine," she cries. Listening to this, I felt like I was trapped inside the washing machine on the spin cycle.

The final song of side one, A Coral Room, is a deeply moving elegy about her mother's death that is so private it feels almost intrusive to listen in.

Seven songs in and it seems a poor return on a 12-year wait. It also gives little clue to the sheer majesty of side two.

Lyric poem

A Sky of Honey is, in a sense, a lyric poem set to music. Full of lush, fecund melodies which swing from jazz to rock, it is threaded through with bird song and chatter and feels distinctly organic and earthy.

There is also a painterly quality to the nine linked songs, a feeling which is enhanced by the appearance of Rolf Harris who both speaks and sings - thankfully briefly - on two tracks.

Side two is the album Pink Floyd might have made if Kate Bush had been their lead singer and lyricist in 1979.

Many people will hate the concept album feel to the songs and it is an acquired taste but is both sonically and lyrically a fine achievement.

It takes the listener on a journey - from a young boy's innocent statement of "Mummy, daddy, the day is full of birds" to a dynamic conclusion more than 40 minutes later where Kate Bush herself seems to have become the birds and takes flight.

Reaction

"I want to be high up on the roof," she sings.

Often playful, Bush seems aware of the reaction some listeners will have.

"What kind of language is this? Tell me are you singing?" she asks.

Musically the nine songs of side two - which are parts of a whole rather than distinct tracks - are splashes of piano, bass and drums, layered with 1980s synthesizers which give the album a retro quality.

It is a very English album, with the rural feel of a John Betjeman or AE Houseman poem.

'Laughing'

"All of the birds are laughing. Come let's all join in," she sings as her voice emerges from the sound of birdsong.

A Sky of Honey is a celebration of song itself, which has a child's joyful lack of inhibition about it - Kate Bush is heard laughing freely towards the end while a young child, possibly her son, is heard several times.

Wild guitars, pounding drums, dashing across the left and right channels of speakers, carry the album to its conclusion where both bird chatter and the sound of a cuckoo rise and then fade away.

It is difficult to know how successful the album will be - certainly it is not for the iPod generation - but Aerial stands alongside The Hounds of Love and The Kick Inside as her finest work.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/h...386346.stm

Also, there's a 9 page article in this month's Record Collector magazine!

Album by album analysis, a review of Aerial and collector's items.

Enjoy!

http://www.nytimes.com/20...ERMes.html

King Of The Mountain in at no.4 in the UK.

It'll probably sink like a stone next week (most singles do in England these days) but still... It's her third biggest hit here, so...

Did anyone read the review in yesterday's Oberver? WOW!

I don't have it to hand but, unless it's posted in the meantime, I'll type it up tomorrow.

The title was: 'Face it guys, she's a genius'.

gypsyfire said:

Thanks gypsyfire!

Here's the article:


Doesn't Tour, Hates Attention, Likes Home

By WILL HERMES
Published: October 30, 2005


Pop music has seen a lot of 80's musicians angling for a second act lately - the Pixies, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, among others. Partly this represents a natural cycle: artists rise, peak, burn out, fade away, until the need returns for money and/or limelight, when back they strut. But the phenomenon has been fueled lately by a revival of 80's styles. With so many new bands sounding like Gang of Four or Talking Heads, for example, it's understandable that the originals would regroup to claim what's theirs (as the former did), or at least release a fancy box set (as the latter did).

Kate Bush, whose exotic experiments have influenced everyone from Tori Amos to Outkast, is releasing "Aerial," but will not tour. "The way I see it," she said, "you go away, create something, talk about it a bit so people know it's there, and get on with things."

The adventurous singer-songwriter Kate Bush is another 80's comeback. Her new double CD, "Aerial," will be released on Nov. 8. But she doesn't quite fit the paradigm, since she never quite fit the era. She wasn't "new wave" or "postpunk," and the movement she might logically be identified with, British progressive rock - a near-exclusively male bastion even by rock standards - was well on the wane by the time of her 1978 debut.

While her idiosyncratic music never spawned a cottage industry of clones, it has influenced a remarkably diverse group of musicians. Antwan (Big Boi) Patton of the polyglot hip-hop group Outkast cites the singer as a huge inspiration ("She's my No. 1 musical influence next to Bob Marley," he said); so has the ethereal piano balladeer Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. The innovative rhythm-and-blues singer Maxwell had a surprising 2001 hit covering "This Woman's Work," Ms. Bush's cryptic paean to childbirth. She has also been covered by male-fronted British rock acts like Placebo and the Futureheads, who had a hit last year in Britain with their new-wave version of her "Hounds of Love." And she has been reflected to varying degrees by female artists like Bjork, Sarah McLachlan, Dido, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos interested in exotic vocalizing, intimate piano songs, sexually frank lyrics, electronic composition, world music or studio experimentation.

If not a recluse, as she is often described, then certainly a homebody, Ms. Bush, 47, has been below the radar for more than a dozen years. During a rare recent telephone interview from her home near Reading, England, her son Bertie, 6, could occasionally be heard howling in the background. The singer was upbeat and gracious, despite a late night finishing final production work on the video for her new album's first single, the floaty, reggae-tinged "King of the Mountain" (viewable at katebush.com). She spoke on topics ranging from how Agatha Christie might have fared in the Internet era ("everyone would know who'd done it before they even started the book"), to her love for Elton John's "Madman Across the Water" album, to what she has been up to since releasing "The Red Shoes" in 1993.

"Trying to do stuff other than putting records out all the time," she said of the last topic. "After 'The Red Shoes' I was exhausted, so I figured I'd take a year out, which turned into two. And here we are."

The "stuff" included spending time with friends, seeing movies and raising her son. "It's been important to spend time with him. And I'm pretty slow making records anyway," she said, laughing, adding that she worked on "Aerial" "for the past five or six years."

The hiatus was overdue for a piano prodigy who entered the pop business at 16. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd - a friend of a friend - hired a 30-piece orchestra to help her produce demos for her debut album, "The Kick Inside," a head-rush of precocious artistry and sexuality that, with songs conjuring masturbation, incest-triggered suicide and Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights," still sounds fresh and strange 25-some years later. The record never quite registered in the United States but was a hit in England, prompting a promotional whirlwind that included a rushed second album ("Lionheart") and Ms. Bush's only tour, a 29-date theatrical spectacle in 1979, with choreography by Antony Van Last of the London Contemporary Dance Company.

Exhausted, Ms. Bush slowed her pace during the 1980's, abandoned touring - in part due to a fear of flying - built her own studio and released a series of increasingly ambitious and sporadic records. She also kept to herself, acquiring a reputation as a something of a hermitic oddball; the English music magazine Mojo, for example, ran a cover story without her participation in 2003 - "Kate Bush: The Mysterious Life of a Reclusive Superstar" - as part of a package titled "English Eccentric Weirdfest!"

So might one read her cryptic first single in over a decade, "King of the Mountain," with its references to Elvis Presley and "Rosebud" (the symbolic sleigh from "Citizen Kane") as a wry comment on her own retreat to Xanadu? One might, but Ms. Bush doesn't recommend it. "It's fascinating that people have this fascination with what I do," she said. "The way I see it, you go away, create something, talk about it a bit so people know it's there, and get on with things. I don't live my life in the public eye. Maybe because people are all over television happily promoting themselves all the time, I'm seen as weird."

Ms. Bush, who has no plans to tour, likes the idea of making records as puzzles that listeners complete by interpretation. "So much is so accessible, so disposable, so many experiences are so shallow. I think what's so exciting about life are the great mysteries and questions," she said, stopping to laugh at herself. "And without wanting to sound horribly pretentious, that's something I like to play with."

Like 1985's "Hounds of Love," perhaps her best record, her latest is split between a group of individual songs (the first CD, subtitled "A Sea of Honey") and a suite (the 42-minute "A Sky of Honey"). But where "Hounds" is dense and agitated, busy with sounds created on the Fairlight synthesizer - an early sampling keyboard that Ms. Bush was among the first to master - "Aerial" is expansive and relatively relaxed. Recorded with longtime associates, including Del Palmer on bass, many of the album's songs are arranged simply for voice and piano, like the exquisite "A Coral Room," composed, she said, "the way I used to do, just sitting at the piano writing."

Sometimes "Aerial" is so relaxed, it drifts into smooth jazz territory. But Ms. Bush's voluptuous, slightly alien voice usually corrects by contrast: purring, trilling, cackling, jumping octaves and echoing itself, witchlike, in multitracked choruses. "Aerial" also shows a more overtly classical English influence than her recent records. "Bertie," a love song for her son, features Renaissance period instruments, while "Sky of Honey" invokes Vaughn Williams's "Lark Ascending." "The record has a lot to do with England," said Ms. Bush, who has given Bulgarian choirs and Australian didgeridoos prominent roles in earlier songs. "I wanted to do something more colloquial."

That fits the record's spirit of finding infinite possibility in your own creative backyard - a spirit, it's worth noting, that's surfaced in a new generation of parlor-room musical eccentrics like Joanna Newsom, Antony and Ariel Pink (who has a recent tribute song called "For Kate I Wait"). On "Pi," a song literally about infinity, Ms. Bush tries "to sing numerals with as much emotion as possible," and in the process gives new meaning to that cliché about singing the phone book. "Mrs. Bartolozzi" is a rhapsody to a washing machine that turns cosmic. Also arranged for voice and piano, it's the record's oddest song, but in its wistful, muted eroticism and quiet wonder, maybe the most emblematic.

"I suppose there's an element of me in it," Ms. Bush said. "I spend quite a lot of time doing housework, and it's very important to me - I don't want to be a person unconnected to the basic things of life. And I like the idea of taking something that's very small and quiet and allowing it to just connect, you know?"

onenitealone said:

You mean this one?

Re: The Observer Sunday 29th Oct
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Admit it, guys, she's a genius

Kitty Empire
Sunday October 30, 2005
The Observer


Kate Bush
Aerial
(EMI)
£14.99
Kate Bush means a lot to a lot of people. There are gay men who thrill to her rococo sensibilities, who repay her early endorsement of their sexuality with worship. There are straight men who fancied her in her 1980s leotard and found the songs fetching, too. For me, Kate Bush was always a trump card when the tiresome 'question' of female artistic genius came up.

There are many male music fans out there - and just a smattering of male music journalists - who believe quite matter of factly that Damon Albarn wrote Elastica's first album; that Kurt Cobain penned all Courtney Love's songs; that artistic production is self-evidently a guy thing. Before disgust stopped me getting dragged into these skirmishes, I had a ready arsenal of Girl Greats - Patti Smith, Bjork, Nina Simone, Delia Derbyshire, Polly Harvey, and so on. And yet, there would often be some caveat why genius eluded my candidates (ripped off Dylan etc). Until we would get to Kate. Female genius? Kate Bush. End of.

Aerial, the first Kate Bush album in a young lifetime (12 years), re-establishes the fact. It is extraordinary - jaw-dropping, no less. It's also tearjerking, laugh-out-loud funny, infuriating, elegiac, baffling, superb and not always all that great. Her beats are dated, for instance; unchanged since the Eighties. For a technological innovator with the freedom of her own studio, Bush's whole soundbed really could do with an airing. And there's a sudden penchant for heady Latin rhythms here that sits a little awkwardly, even for this enthusiastic borrower of world music.

More problematically, however, Bush's whimsies have never been quite so amplified. If you thought the young Bush prancing around to Bronte was a little de trop, this album is not for you. There's a song about a little brown jug and one about a washing machine (both, though, are really about other things). There are several passages where Bush sings along to birdsong, and one where she laughs like a lunatic. Rolf Harris - Rolf Harris! - has a big cameo.

But Aerial succeeds because it's all there for a reason. And because the good stuff is just so sublime. 'King of the Mountain', Bush's Elvis-inspired single, is both a fine opener and a total red herring. Bush's juices really get going on 'Pi', a sentimental ode to a mathematician, audacious in both subject matter and treatment. The chorus is the number sung to many, many decimal places. It's closely followed by a gushing ode to Bush's son, Bertie, that's stark and medieval-sounding. The rest of disc one (aka A Sea of Honey) sets a very high bar for disc two, with the Joan of Arc-themed 'Joanni' and the downright poppy 'How to Be Invisible' raising the hair on your arms into a Mexican wave.

Disc two, subtitled 'A Sky of Honey', is a suite of nine tracks which, among other things, charts the passage of light from afternoon ('Prologue') to evening ('An Architect's Dream', 'The Painter's Link') and through the night until dawn. Things get a little hairier here.

The theme of birdsong is soon wearing, and the extended metaphor of painting is laboured. But it's all worth it for the double-whammy to the solar plexus dealt by 'Nocturn' and the final, title track. In 'Nocturn', the air is pushed out of your lungs as you cower helplessly before the crescendo. 'Aerial', meanwhile, is a totally unexpected ecstatic disco meltdown that could teach both Madonna and Alison Goldfrapp lessons in dancefloor abandon. It leaves you elated, if not a little exhausted. After the damp squib that was The Red Shoes, it's clear Bush is still a force to be reckoned with.

The problem, though, with female genius - for many men at least - is that very frequently it is not like male genius. And with its songs about children, washing machines going 'slooshy sloshy', Joan of Arc, Bush's mother, not to mention the almost pagan sensuality that runs through here like a pulse, Aerial is, arguably, the most female album in the world, ever. There's an incantation to female self-effacement that rewrites Shakespeare's weird sisters: 'Eye of Braille/ Hem of anorak/ Stem of wallflower/ Hair of doormat'. Even the one about maths is touchy-feely. But the artistry here is so dizzying, the ambition and scope so vast, that even the deafest, most inveterate misogynist could not fail to acknowledge it. Genius. End of.

Cloudbuster said:

You memorised all that??!

Yes, that one. I like it.

7 days and counting...

onenitealone said:

Sure.

Clever boy.

onenitealone said:

Just returned from lunch...

with this month's MOJO magazine, featuring the Kate interview!!!

The album gets a 5 star review, the interview uses the headline: "Weak? Frail? Mentally unstable? F*** off!".



Can't wait to read this!

Ooh, I forgot - bought this month's Q magazine too -

4 out of 5.

Have heard tracks from AERIAL-
Radio 2 and 6 in the UK have been playing album tracks the last couple of days...
with an introduction by KATE herself!!!
So far I have heard "PI" and "JOANNI"- they are both fantastic.
"PI" has a beautiful vocal from Kate, she really draws out the words and when she recites the numbers, at first it's quite funny- not negative, but just that someone has written a song using this subject matter-
then it hits you just how beautiful these numbers sound...
"JOANNI" sounds alot like Radiohead's track "There, There"- it's quite ambitious,
with lyrics about clashing swords and kisses to God! Fantastic guitaring and it finishes with Kate gruffly humming, which sounds strange, but she does it over and over until you are humming along aswell- never has humming sounded so intense!!!
Trying not to listen to any more as I want Monday to be as exciting as it can be.
It's in the trees, it's coming...

Because I love you all, here's the MOJO review:


AND IS THERE HONEY STILL FOR TEA?

Her first album in 12 years is a two-disc epic, enthuses Jim Irvin

Kate Bush - Aerial 5/5

To sum up: Kate Bush is the greatest living British artist in song and this is her masterpiece.

Regular readers may appreciate that I'm not one to traffic in hyperbole, but I can't put it in weaker terms. Those are the facts.

To give the latter some context: I was granted two complete listens to this lenghty work in EMI's newly installed review suite. I dislike - and resent - having to review music under such conditions and was dreading the ernvironment colouring my opinion of the music. But the coffee wasn't bad, the biscuits were good, and there was just me and the guy who sits in the room to make sure you don't upload the album with specially adapted spectacles or anything. A few minutes into the second run-through my eyes closed, all outside stimulus was forgotten and I caught myself thinking: "Maybe this music is all I need". Because, for the duration of Aerial at least, it is Kate Bush's world and you just revel in it.

Aerial is a double album. Disc 1 is a collection of seven songs under the title 'A Sea Of Honey'. Disc 2 is a seamless suite divided into nine parts under the title 'A Sky Of Honey'.

Aerial is not flawless. None of her records are. Kate takes chances, and her worldview is so particular she cannot hope to please everyone all the time. But where, for example, The Sensual World and The Red Shoes might be considered spotty collections with frequent flashes of staggering beauty, Aerial seems less vertiginous in its highs and lows, more consistently engrossing in the manner of Hounds Of Love. Yes, there's the odd moment of audacious silliness, one should expect no less. But if you still believe she's the ululating fruitcake they mocked on Not The Nine O'Clock News, well, she left all trace of that behind at least five albums and 20 years ago.

So what does Aerial sound like? Don;t expect a rock'n'roll record.There's no chaos. It's all exquisitely sung, played and judged. Any loucheness is more Noel Coward than Velvet Underground. Any bombast is more Elgar than Radiohead. You'll gather, therefore, that her trademark misty Britishness is present, stirring some long-dormant musical sense of heritage, in the same way Pink Floyd or Genesis might once have done. Aside from, perhaps, Ray Davies, Kate is the sole trader left in such a market. But Aerial is neither prog rock, Brit pop nor folk music; it is pur Kate, in all her wonky splendour, invoking parquet floors, washing lines and skylarks, Brief Encounter on Sunday afternoon tv, wood pigeons and crumpets. Cricket pavilions of sound, if you like. Sure, there's something middle-class about it, slightly fusty; something arcane glimpsed through a leaded window, but also something bizarrely avant-garde, refreshingly out of step with the booty-proferring noughties. I love the idea of that fervent Kate Bush fan, Big Boi out of Outkast, digging this music that's as curious and colloquial as Battenburg cake, finding Kate's wack world as compelling as others find his.

A Sea Of Honey flows in on 'King Of The Mountain', the single, in which Kate, in a quivering voice (a homage?), wonders if Elvis is still alive in some snowbound realm where mysteries dwell, happily sledging down on a mountainside on Kane's Rosebud. She lets that happen over an opaque membrane of sound, which is later embellished with some skanky guitars. The drums arrive late and loud. 'King Of The Mountain' suggests that Aerial will be pleasingly spare. Indeed it is, much of it simply piano with orbiting atmospherics akin, again, to Hounds Of Love. The baggage which spoilt The Red Shoes - the 90's clatter, the lashings of fretless bass, Lenny Henry - has left the building.

Track two is called 'Pi'. Guess how the refrain goes? That's right: "3.141592635897932..." (to 112 decimal places. Genius). 'Bertie' - arranged as a sort of gavotte - is a touching tribute to Kate's son, now seven years old, a reason, maybe, for both Aerial's tardiness and its palpable love of life. The beauitful 'Mrs Bartolozzi' is one of Kate's signature portrait songs, its central figure a woman duty-bound to clean a house, who slips into hymn-like reverie over a new washing machine. 'How To Be Invisible' is a great song with a possible hint of His Dark Materials, describing a secret recipe for not being seen. (It involves a pinch of keyhole, eye of Braille and hem of anorak). Spooky backing vocals resemble wind whistling through a 30's Hollywood soundtrack. 'Joanni' appears to be a foot soldier's love song to Joan of Arc - though I can't be sure - and features a serene string arrangement by the late Michael Kamen, ine of his last assignments.

Anyone who has sat transfixed by 'This Woman's Work' or 'Moments Of Pleasure' will shudder with bittersweet trepidation as they hear the opening chords to 'A Coral Room', ushering in Kate's uncanny gift for reporting from the emotion-boggling frontier where love and grief embrace. So few artists go there. Or, more precisely, take you there. 'A Coral Room' requires you pack a big hankie.

And so few artists reward themselves the freedom to roam around their imagination in the way Kate Bush does. Her vast, innate sense of romance and drama is perfectly measured throughout these songs. There's even better to come.

'A Sky Of Honey' does everything a Kate fan requires. A pastoral whimsy about, I think, God creating a Summer's day - with God as a painter (Rolf Harris, cast to type) - while two lovers tryst again like they did last Summer. Something like that; there's a pervading sense of nostalgia, weather, simmering desire and warm evening colours, anyhow. The song of blackbirds inspires the great lyric to 'Sunset': "Who knows who wrote that song of Summer/That blackbirds sing at dusk/Where sun sets in crimson red and rust/Then climb into bed and turn to dust". The song slips unexpectedly out of its jazzy robe into a racy flamenco outfit, the soothing coo of pigeons mutates into "The sea of honey, the sky of honey!", and the album slides into the stunning final sequence with the shivery duet 'Somewhere In Between', the sexy, transcendent 'Nocturn' and the title track, wherein the lovers arrive in nirvana on a guitar solo.

It was quite a way to pass an Autumn afternoon. The first time, I was charmed, intrigued, a little perplexed. The second time, I was thrilled, moved, ravished. What does that remind you of? I can't wait to try it again.


Fact sheet:

~ Aerial is Kate Bush's first album since The Red Shoes in 1993

~ Guest vocalists include Lol Creme of 10CC and Procul Harum's Gary Brooker

~ There are cameo appearances by Kate's son Bertie and didgeridoo player Rolf Harris, in a speaking role. Rolf also contributed to The Dreaming in 1982.


Key Tracks:

~ Pi
~ A Coral Room
~ Sunset
~ Nocturn

Q Review:


MOTHER SUPERIOR

Twelve years on - still unique, still having watery sex by Mark Blake

4/5


How disorientating musical life must be for Kate Bush. Twelve years since she last made an album and over 25 since she toured, has any other chart-topping pop star ever remained so remote from their audience, their record company and even the world?

Perhaps she has us all fooled, but now that it's finally here, Aerial sounds as if it was created in monastic isolation and that Bush hasn't listened to another modern rock album since making 1993's The Red Shoes. The romantically inclined might imagine it being crafted in a cobwebbed stately home, when our heroine wasn't dashing about, brandishing a candelabra, looking for fairies. Left alone to do what she wants, when she wants, Kate Bush enjoys a freedom unrivalled by her peers. There's not another songwriter in this world that could have made a record like this. They wouldn't have been allowed.

You could have built one great Kate Bush album out of the best parts of The Red Shoes and 1989's more thematic The Sensual World. Aerial is far removed from the former's grab-bag of disjointed songs; reassuring, as few do barmy concepts as well as her. Disc one includes seven songs under the main title of 'A Sea Of Honey', while disc two's 'A Sky Of Honey' is given over to one marathon composition. Seas, skies, sugary comestibles... committed Kate-watchers can wehile away the Winter nights joining the dots between Aerial and some of her previous albums. It's all here (again): cities under water, the harnessing of sexual energy, the elemental power of Mother Nature; lots of watery, windswept shagging, then.

'King Of The Mountain' rallies the troops in a leisurely march heavenwards, name-checking Elvis in a voice less mannered than of old. The song smoulders and the same trick workd again on 'How To Be Invisible', all bare musical bones rattling behind lyrics touching on some never quite specified fear waiting "at the end of the labyrinth".

The Red Shoes closed with 'You're The One', a morbid-sounding chronicle of a failed relationship. Life seems to be better now, thanks in part to the birth of her son Bertie, celebrated here in a song of the same name. There's a sense of unself-conscious joy exploding out this rather stately madrigal, but the sweet lyric is akin to being forced to look too long at other people's baby pictures.

When real life creeps in elsewhere, it gets a welcome twist. 'Mrs Bartolozzi' takes a washing machine and its mundance contents, subverting domestic drudgery into a metaphor for something more exciting. By the song's "swishing, swoshing" spin cycle, Bush has tumbled Alice In Wonderland into the Hotpoint and ended up "wading into the surf" where "fish swim between my legs". Earlier, on 'Pi', she counts down numbers against spidery keyboard fills and an elastic bassline, sounsing like a female-fronted Talk Talk or a telephone sex line for kinky mathematicians.

Jazz drummer Peter Erskine is among those on the payroll here, but those with a dog's hearing may spot the odd electronic drum around the place. Nevertheless, 'Joanni' is the only song that sounds as if it began life in the '80's, with the ghost of Peter Gabriel III haunting its verses. On the first disc's closing track, 'A Coral Room', though, Bush proves she can excel with just her voice and Gary Brooker's piano as tools. Here, she spins a tale of an Atlantis-style sunken city into the memory of, presumably, her late mother. It's a spellbinding performance and the equal of anything on 1985's revered Hounds Of Love.

For everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thrills, though, there is still the nine-part 'A Sky Of Honey'. Bush embarks on another quest, pulling the listener under water and up mountains, this time with twittering birdsong, children's voices, maniacal laughter, a jazz rumba, and even a spoken-word turn from Rolf Harris, building in the manner of vintage Kate Bush - Cloudbusting, The Big Sky, Breathing - into an overblown, spine-tingling denoument; this time with Danny McIntosh playing a guitar solo that will put most in mind of Bush's menot, Pink Floyd's David Gilmour.

"Could be we are here, could be in my dream", she declares as the piece winds to its explosive conclusion. And it's a statement that encapsulates the Never-Never land invented on Aerial. The worl is a better place with Kate Bush in it. She really should do this sort of thing more often.



Recommemded Tracks:

~ King Of THe Mountain
~ Pi
~ Mrs Bartolozzi
~ How To Be Invisible
~ A Coral Room
~ A Sky Of Honey


They also suggest other albums to puchase, if you like Aerial:

~ Pink Floyd - The Wall
~ Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden
~ The Blue Nile - Hats
~ Peter Gabriel - Us
~ Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain
[Edited 11/1/05 9:52am]

There's going to be an interview on BBC Radio 4's Front Row show on Friday.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/h...397270.stm

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/...e2340.html



Kate Bush, Aerial (EMI)
By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Published: October 31 2005 02:00 | Last updated: October 31 2005 02:00

Kate Bush's new album, her first since 1993's The Red Shoes, does her reputation as one of pop's great eccentrics no harm. On one song she recites pi to the 114th decimal place. Another track hinges on her repeatedly singing the words "washing machine". Elsewhere she duets with birds, communes with Joan of Arc and invents a spell for invisibility. Oh, and Rolf Harris performs a guest turn as an artist whose painting is ruined by rain.

This is indeed a strange brew. But we do Bush's music a disservice if we simply revel in its unusualness. Ever since she imprinted herself on the public mind as a leotard- wearing teenager singing "Wuthering Heights", it has been easy to exoticise her as otherworldly and enigmatic: a child-woman with an uncanny voice and curious aversion to celebrity. Her reclusive nature (she rarely gives interviews and gave up playing live after her first tour in 1979) and the long hiatus since her last album encourage us to imagine her as an obsessive, lonely genius, as does the mystique surrounding Aerial, whose appearance has been the subject of much hearsay and anticipation.

The true circumstances of its making appear more mundane. Bush's retirement from music after The Red Shoes was partly due to motherhood: her new songs are enraptured with themes of domesticity and family life. Also, The Red Shoes wasn't terribly good: for the first time in her career Bush sounded dated, like someone stranded in the 1980s. Perhaps she needed time to rediscover her talent for making music that was ambitious, literary, sensual and deeply singular. Or was that talent irrevocably lost, as so many pop stars discover in middle age?

Thankfully Aerial proves otherwise. At first listen - which was all I was allowed as pre-release exposure to the album has been strictly rationed - it comes across as richly satisfying and brilliantly conceived.

Split into two sections, the first, "A Sea of Honey", opens with a song cautioning against the cult of celebrity, "King of the Mountain", in which Bush sings about Elvis Presley. "How To Be Invisible", the closest the album gets to straightforward rock, makes explicit her distaste for fame, though a desire for privacy hasn't inhibited her from writing songs about her personal life. "Bertie" is a faux-Elizabethan ditty in praise of her son: a curio, but touching. "A Coral Room" refers to her mother's death.

The centrepiece of Aerial's first section is "Mrs Bartolozzi", a song about washing clothes whose lyrics move with astonishing deftness between domesticity, intimacy and eroticism. Piano-led, it pushes to the fore the 47-year-old's voice, which sounds as fluidly distinctive as ever. Her vocals may have lost some of their old wildness (and with it the air of melodrama that used to hover over her music), but they have also become fuller, more mature. The music, too, is contemplative: piano and vivid string arrangements predominate.

"A Sky of Honey", the album's second suite of songs, opens with dawn birdsong and young Bertie piping up to tell his parents that the birds sound like they're speaking. The following tracks develop this theme of nature and culture (this is when Rolf, the painter with the rainy canvas, appears), set within the context of the passing of a day. The music ebbs and flows; the mood of the lyrics is celebratory.

Having begun with her son speaking, it ends with a track welcoming sunrise. Thumping beats, hazy guitars and joyous singing, including peals of laughter, make this Aerial's most upbeat song. It is an album about renewal: the daily renewal of the sun and her own renewal by her son.

BinaryJustin said:

Thanks!

Id say ima bit dissapointed with the Elvis dedication thing. I dont know why. It killed the excitement for me

LightOfArt said:

Don't let that put you off, man. The album is a true gem.

just got my hand on then album!

I'm listening now to "Pi"!

finished Bertie...WOW!

So medieval!!!!

Apart from the single, I haven't heard any of the album yet and it'll stay that way until next Monday.

But... after reading the MOJO magazine, I can't begin to describe how excited I am about Aerial. I was laughing out loud reading it, crying almost - my housemates were, like,



You just get the sheer sense of artistry that Kate has reading the interview. She is a 100% original. And - as I've said before - I haven't been this excited about any album in ages.

I think I'll die and go to heaven next Monday.

If you see the magazine - whether you're a fan or not - you must read it. Every music fan should.

onenitealone said:

Page 88. The colour picture in the middle.

How much I'd like to wake up next to that every morning.