Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow

Back in ancient times, during the decade that fashion forgot, or the 1970s to give it its proper title, I’d read all the music press on a regular basis – no mean feat as the amount of paper produced by the music press in those days was considerable – and I’d wonder.  I’d wonder how reviewers could really get under the skin of an LP (for it was LPs in those far off days) after a cursory play or two.  It was my experience that new releases were a minefield of pitfalls (to thoroughly mix metaphors).  You never knew which way it would go.

There were those that would leap off the turntable (an ancient music retrieval system, M’Lud) after a single play, filling you with the certainty that another purchase was going to join your list of great albums only to find after the third play you’d be bored stiff with it and that it was really a tedious sheep in a vibrant wolf’s clothing.  Others, of course were the reverse.  I have many an album that failed at the first hurdle yet, assuming I’d bother to persevere, would sneak up on you and make itself utterly indispensable.  So, I return to my question: how do reviewers know which way to jump after only a short period of acquaintance?

I’m having that trouble with Kate Bush.  Only worse.  It’s her latest offering ’50 Words For Snow’ that is causing all this musing and stopping me from writing an erudite and informed review.  The truth is; I just can’t make my mind up even after more plays than your average reviewer would ever have the privilege of hearing.  At first, I thought it disappointing, then it began to sneak up on me in the time honoured way, but now I’m beginning to get a bit bored with it again – but interspersed with bits where I can’t help feeling, ‘that’s quite good…’.

For those who need to get up to speed, ’50 Words For Snow’ comprises 7 fairly lengthy piano based ‘songs’.  I say ‘songs’ advisedly as one of the problems is the lack of melody.  Each piece seems to comprise a meandering vocal line against a jazz-tinged backdrop.  Each ‘piece’ therefore has a ‘mood’ rather than a melody.  Which is OK, but is very much dependent on the listener’s acceptance of the ambience, which can change from day to day, hour to hour.  You don’t get these problems with melodies.  Either you like them or you don’t.  And there lies the conundrum.  Therefore, my considered opinion is that this is an album that defies traditional review because its impression varies with time (and probably mass as well).  It is more than likely the sort of album that Einstein would’ve enjoyed.  So I’ll hand you over to Prof Brian Cox to tell you whether it’s any good…

Kate Bush - Director's Cut (Part 2)

Previously on Kate Bush – Director’s Cut:

‘But having achieved true originality, it would be a crying shame if she insisted on unpicking it at this stage of the game.’

So having listened to it for a week or so, what’s the verdict?  The short answer is that she has about got away with it by the skin of her teeth – but only just.  I suppose my main criticism of this album is that I didn’t like most of the songs, the majority of which come from ‘The Red Shoes’, to start with, so the process of making a silk purse out of the various sows’ ears was always going to be a problem for me.  Having said that, there are one or two cuts that have been improved.  I don’t think I have listened to ‘Rubberband Girl’ more than about twice, ever, but this new version has been immersed in a classic Rolling Stones chugging rhythm that is difficult to resist.

The other song that I feel has been improved is ‘Lily’ which appears to have been slowed down very slightly and given a vice like groove and excellent new vocal. So far so good.  In fact, the new vocals on every track are remarkably good.  Set in a new lower key to accommodate her more mature voice, each song is sung with real abandon and a lack of self-consciousness that is pleasantly surprising and provides a real link to her younger self captured on the original recordings some 20 years ago.

In the main, these tracks have not been altered radically but rather set free from their 1980s/90s trappings.  Gone are the gated drums and slightly compressed overall sound and in their place are beautifully recorded instruments which have warmth and space.  There is no doubt that in pure sonic terms this album sounds so much better than the originals.

Whilst the more relaxed nature of the songs works for most of the time, I cannot help but feel disappointed with my two favourite songs here.  One is ‘Deeper Understanding’ which has lost its flow completely during the ‘computer speech’ sections where a vocoded/autotuned line of speech by her 12 year old son has been inserted.  So where there was a great surge of harmony we now have a jerky mechanical voice and it just doesn’t work.

The other major disappointment is the wonderful ‘This Woman’s Work’ which in its original form is a real emotional roller-coaster.  But again the vocal has been slowed down and chopped up to a point where the rhythmic integrity has been lost.  In the original, the drama of the chorus is intensified by a quickening of the vocal delivery.  In this version the opposite occurs and all the energy of the piece dissipates.  The underlying electric piano isn’t helping either making the whole thing a bit ‘chicken-in-a-basket’ nightclub fare.

On balance this album is a bit of a curate’s egg.  The de-restriction of the instrumental sound and new vocals are definite plusses but the loss of intensity in the drama of some of the songs is a definite debit.  And I still don’t like many of the songs, overhaul or not and that’s the bottom line with ‘Director’s Cut’.  As I said, all things considered, I think she just about comes out on an even keel.  Let’s see what the new material brings.

Kate Bush - The Director's Cut

Hold the front page!  It’s another Kate Bush album and it’s only been, what, six years since the last one?  What’s the matter with the woman?  The next album isn’t due until 2017.  Ah, but on closer inspection, it turns out to be a compilation.

But Kate being Kate, it’s not quite that simple.  Out on 16^th May and entitled ‘The Director’s Cut’ it comprises a selection of songs from her late period albums, ‘The Sensual World’ and ‘The Red Shoes’ that have been er…‘re-imagined’.  Finally released from her EMI contract, it appears she now has full control over her back catalogue and has decided to re-engineer parts of songs whilst retaining the basic skeleton to give a definitive edition – hence Director’s Cut.

The track listing will be:
1. Flower of the Mountain (The Sensual World with new lyrics taken directly from Ulysses)
2. Song of Soloman
3. Lily
4. Deeper Understanding
5. The Red Shoes
6. This Woman's Work
7. Moments of Pleasure
8. Never be Mine
9. Top of the City
10. And So is Love
11. Rubberband Girl

Hmm.  I have to say that despite being a BIG KT fan, ‘The Red Shoes’ is her weakest album by some margin and ‘The Sensual World’, although much better, does not enter my top three Bush product either so I’m not expecting too much from this.  As a taster, she has already released the re-constituted version of ‘A Deeper Understanding’, a song that I like very much and blogged about over three years ago! Interestingly, its lyrical content about computer dependence and lack of human contact seems even more relevant today than it did when it was first released in 1989.  This 2011 version is interesting in the way that all re-mixes are interesting but I’m not sure it improves on the original.  In particular, it replaces the eerie ‘computer’ voice of the original with a vocoded sample of her son’s voice and this doesn’t work half as well as it chops up the timing of the song.

Quite by chance, I was watching her video for ‘There Goes A Tenner’ on YouTube the other day and it got me to thinking about originality, a word that is bandied about in the media all too often.  It occurs to me that far too many new artists from the last 20 years have been feted as ‘the new Kate Bush’ or compared to her in one way or another, but watching this video just kills all those assertions stone dead.  No one is like her.

In the video her young self looks other-worldly, beautiful, enigmatic, funny and serious, welcoming and aloof.  The song is like no other – a kaleidoscope of melodic fragments, rhythmic shifts, 80s synths, brass bands and a myriad of voices.  The video itself is a concoction of part dance, part drama against set piece backdrops, dripping with imagery.  No one since comes close to creating the wonderfully weird world of music, lyric and presentation that Kate managed (and largely by herself - no teams of writers, arrangers and ‘advisors’ doing the donkey work.)

But having achieved true originality, it would be a crying shame if she insisted on unpicking it at this stage of the game.  (Now read part 2).

The 'Difficult' 3rd Album

Ok, new round, no conferring. What is it that links Siouxsie and the Banshees to Kate Bush?


No, not a shock of black hair, nor the fact that their best years were in the mid-1980s. In fact, you couldn’t pick a more diverse duo. The one, a classically trained Home Counties singer-songwriter given to strangely melodic ballads about Victorian heroines and the other, a band forged in the maelstrom of punk who eschewed virtuosity and created metallic anthems of isolation and horror.

But despite their obvious differences their career path was spookily similar, at least over their first 4 albums. Siouxsie and the Banshees initially produced a stunning debut, ‘The Scream’ largely in the punk tradition of pounding drums and sheets of angular guitar and followed it up with undue haste with a second album, ‘Join Hands’ in a similar style but containing inferior material. By the time the third album was in the melting pot, half the band had left and it was left to Siouxsie and Steve Severin to cobble something together on their own. The resultant release, ‘Kaleidoscope’ was a strange mixture of ambient music and pop songs under the guise of new wave experimentation. Having recruited a new guitarist and drummer who were more than competent players (what punk ethic?) their fourth album, ‘JuJu’ was a monster hit which showcased a newly forged Siouxsie style which would become the norm from then on.

Kate Bush’s first four albums followed a similar pattern. Her first, ‘The Kick Inside’ was a stunning debut of simple yet highly inventive songs. Her second, ‘Lionheart’ followed too close on its heels by order of her record label and was disappointing in as much as the material was a bit underdeveloped and the arrangements too conventional. By her third effort, ‘Never Forever’, Kate had won some hard fought control over her own artistic process and had acquired a state of the art Fairlight sampler. The result is a curious mixture of the type of songs she had written for the first two albums, but arranged in a far more interesting way and the type of songs that she would write later in her career but without the adventurous production. This change of direction culminated in her fourth album, the uncompromisingly left field ‘The Dreaming’ and the rest is well documented.

So the real link is the third and notoriously ‘difficult’ third album. Each of them, and for different reasons, produced an unexpectedly different, slightly hit-and-miss album which is clearly a transitional stage that links the boundaries of a vast chasm between what they were and what they were to become. Not many artists have a massive change in style so early in their trajectory and it is fascinating to have such a clear record of where their two styles clash warily.

Under The Ivy

Generally, I am not an obsessive gadgets person. I don’t mind computers or mobile phones but toys like Satnav are a complete no-no. So, back in 1985, when video recorders had already been around since the late 1970s, I was probably the last person on earth to buy one of the new-fangled machines. The reason for this late change of mind was that a certain TV channel was re-running old episodes of Gerry Anderson’s ‘Fireball XL5’ during the day when I was at work and having been besotted with them the first time around when I was a 7 year old would-be astronaut, I couldn’t bear the thought of missing the opportunity to see them again. So a machine was duly purchased, the timer set and nostalgia reigned.


After the initial burst of recording frenzy, I scouted around for other things to record and music programmes were the main target. In the late 1980s there were loads of music programmes on TV. As well as Top of the Pops, there was The Tube, The White Room, The Old Grey Whistle Test and various other chat shows and Saturday morning extravaganzas. So most of the period between 1985 and 1990 was spent with me having my finger permanently glued to the pause button in case something good should come on.

I still have the original Video Cassette with 3 hours of snippets from all sorts of bands but it is now over 20 years old and having been wound back and forth constantly, it is a little delicate and doesn’t always play properly. Somewhere in the middle is a short clip of Kate Bush at Abbey Road studios playing the piano and singing ‘Under the Ivy’ taken from ‘The Tube’ (and introduced by the late Paula Yates). It is quite enchanting, as I remember, but I daren’t try and find it now for fear of the tape disintegrating.

Happily, some kind soul has posted it on YouTube so I was able to reacquaint myself with it and confirm that it is one of those moments that makes your hairs stand up. ‘Under the Ivy’ did not appear on any Bush album but resided as a ‘B’ side on the ‘Running Up That Hill’ single. Notwithstanding its ‘reject’ status, it is a simple, short and infinitely beautiful song and the live rendition shown in the video shows Kate at her best – just her and a piano. Unfortunately, some bright spark of a TV producer has inserted a load of effects and snippets of her videos which rather spoil the atmosphere but it is still a mesmerising vocal performance from a true artist.

The last few seconds are quite revealing. As the song ends, Kate seems to ‘resurface’ to the real world and gives the camera a dazzling smile. It is almost like she enters an alternate world when she is performing, one which is completely unattached to reality and it takes a few seconds to pass between the two. Magic.

Kate and Joni

If there is one aspect of pop music that really, really gets me climbing up on my high horse, it is the perception that because anything is created under the banner of popular culture, it is automatically labelled as throwaway and worthless.

Whilst I would be the first to admit that there is a fair amount of produce around that fits this category, there is also some that transcends the run of the mill and enters the realm of the timeless. It is the sort of stuff that becomes art history. The difficulty with identifying such art is that by its very nature it becomes very personal and therefore subjective. It is generally the sort of album that speaks directly to the listener and they just know that there is something special about it without necessarily knowing why. And accordingly it is difficult to reach agreement with others as to its objective merits.

As I tend to reserve the highest status for the very best, I only have two such albums that give me that special feeling and they are both by extraordinary women. The first is ‘For the Roses’ by Joni Mitchell and the second is ‘The Dreaming’ by Kate Bush. These are albums that to me drive a coach and horses through the perception that all pop music is lightweight rubbish. These are albums created by massively talented artists at the peak of their powers and just ooze quality. You can almost feel the genius.

In the case of Joni Mitchell, it is the emotional depth of the lyrics that really gets me. The fact that they are allied to more than acceptable tunes is just the icing on the cake. Every song conveys a vivid picture of life that invades your soul and could only come from a true poet. Kate Bush, by contrast brings an almost unrestrained passion, a form of ‘madness’ if you like, to the whole process of music making. The melodies, the use of technology, the voice as an instrument are all right on the edge. It is not an album for the faint hearted and was far too much for the buying public in 1982 who backed away in alarm.

Interestingly, both these albums are the predecessors of what is generally considered the ‘best’ (read; commercial) work of each artist. In Kate’s case it foreshadowed ‘The Hounds of Love’ and in Joni’s, ‘Court and Spark’. This is not an unknown phenomenon as ‘Revolver’ is now considered on a par with ‘Sgt Pepper’ and ‘Off the Wall’ has been cited as at least as good as the following ‘Thriller’. But whatever their place, they are truly great albums.

Just don’t let anyone tell me they are throwaway pop.

A Deeper Understanding

I don’t know about you, but these days I seem to be permanently connected to a computer, whether it be at work, tapping away for hours on end or at home writing this blog or exchanging emails with friends. It is an environment that just seems to have crept up on me and to not have a computer humming away within earshot would now seem untypical. But it certainly wasn’t the case back in 1989 when Kate Bush wrote ‘Deeper Understanding’, a song that ended up on the album, ‘The Sensual World’.

Listening to it recently, the song shows itself to be surprisingly prophetic now. It tells of a lonely person whose computer takes on its own personality after having been loaded with a ‘voice console’ and becomes a friend – a sort of updated version of ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ (this will date you, ‘Sparky’ was originally recorded in 1947!)

Looking through the lyrics, it all becomes a bit unsettling. For example:
‘As the people here grow colder

I turn to my computer

And spend my evenings with it

Like a friend.’

Oh dear! Does she mean me?

Of course, after a brief and passionate affair, it all ends in insanity:
‘I did not eat, I did not sleep,

The intensity increasing,

'Til my family found me and intervened.’

The clever part in the writing is that when the computer ‘speaks’ it is with a beguilingly beautiful melody, backed by the Bulgarian vocal ensemble, Trio Bulgarka, whose control over those slightly grey areas between semi-tones is breathtaking, giving the ‘speech’ an aura of otherworldliness, especially to traditional western ears.

In a wider sense, it seems to me that Kate, intentionally or otherwise, hit obliquely upon a growing phenomenon – that of the virtual community. Today, with the aid of a computer and the Internet anyone can have a global community of ‘friends’ without ever meeting any of them. In the good old days such people were called pen pals but frankly, waiting 6 weeks for a reply from Outer Mongolia doesn’t really compare with the instant response available from email.

With networking sites like MySpace springing up all over the place, a lifestyle based on virtual friends is looking increasingly like a sustainable choice. A sci-fi future of isolated humans, working at home, never leaving their room and communicating only via cyberspace beckons and it’s not that far away!

I suppose the danger that ‘Deeper Understanding’ warns of is that the computer itself becomes the perceived ‘friend’ rather than the people, but we’re all well-adjusted hackers here, aren’t we?

Aren’t we?