Kate Bush
English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer; sister of John Carder Bush.
Mother stands for comfort.
Mother will hide the murderer.
Mother hides the madman.
Mother will stay mum.
What am I singing?
A song of seeds
The food of love.
Eat the music.
Who is that girl? Do I know her face?
Like it or not, we keep bouncing back,
Because we're woman.
Mother, where are the angels? I'm scared of the changes.
Casual listeners will miss the depth of the music. You must sit down with the lyric sheet and find out what's going on. All the vocal acrobatics and weird sounds click into place when you know what ideas, stories and situations they are expressing. In most rock and pop, the music and words may be linked, but are basically separate. Kate creates, more and more, a fusion between the two — the sounds directly expressing the subject. This is a throwback to Wagner's music-drama, with its leitmotifs, turning music into an idea. The Beatles revived the technique, and bands of the hippy era like Pink Floyd carried the banner. . . Kate is fast becoming a master in the use of this sonic montage, perhaps because the ideas she is using are far more complex, have more "resonances", than those of her contemporaries.
Feel your hair come tumbling down
Feel your feet start kissing the ground
Feel your arms are opening out
And see your eyes are lifted to God
With no words, with no song
I'm gonna dance the dream
And make the dream come true...
We hang on to every line,
And walk straight down the middle of it.
I don't know if I'm closer to Heaven but
It looks like Hell down there.
These streets have never been paved with gold.
They took the game right out of it.
When I am a man
I will be an astronaut,
And find Peter Pan.
Just one thing in it:
Me or him.
Just one thing in it:
Me or him.
And I love life!
The fine purple
The purest gold
The red of the Sacred Heart
The grey of a ghost
The "L" of the lips are open
To the "O" of the Host
The "V" of the velvet
The "E" of my eye
The eye in wonder
The eye that sees
The "I" that loves you.
We let it in
We give it out
And in the end
What's it all about?
It must be love.
I feel so sorry for you,
Believing because they control.
And of all the guardian angels
They chose me to save your soul!
Oh, I'm just trying to explain,
I'm a disbelieving angel.
After a thousand songs on the theme of boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl or Thatcher's Britain, exposure to her music comes as an imaginative release as we go giddily flying into the limitless possibilities of the poetic viewpoint. Here is talk of whales, of Peter Pan, kites, Houdini, mysticism... Acquaintances have observed, "She lives in a world of her own." But it's a world that lives within all of us, and her songs shine light into neglected areas of our minds.
Let's change things.
Let's danger it up.
We're crazy enough.
I just can't take it.
We dive deeper and deeper
Could be we are here
Could be in my dream
It came up on the horizon
Rising and rising
In a sea of honey, a sky of honey.
My terrible fear of dying
No longer plays with me,
for now I know that I'm needed
For the symphony.
Ooh, their breath is warm
And they smell like sleep,
And they say they take me home.
Like poppies heavy with seed
They take me deeper and deeper.
For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life. 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?