To celebrate 20 years of the Aerial album, we’re putting together a time capsule each day this week leading up to November 7th (the release date anniversary). It’s a daily miscellany of the events, people and objects that relate to Kate’s extraordinary eighth studio album. We can’t believe it’s been two decades, for so many of us this still feels like a “new” album, and the album’s beautiful gifts just keep revealing themselves…
Aerial – Happening of the day
Having seemingly decided that she no longer wanted to conduct filmed interviews to promote her work, the arrival of the Aerial album saw Kate embracing the medium of radio with gusto in 2005. It set a pattern for all her subsequent promotion. As well as selected press interviews, Director’s Cut, 50 Words For Snow, the Before The Dawn live album, the success of Running Up That Hill in 2022 and more recently her Little Shrew animation last year, have all been accompanied by memorable radio chats, most often on her favourite BBC Radio stations.
Sometimes she even rewarded a particularly robust campaign for an interview on behalf of a presenter – we salute you, Mark Radcliffe! As early as August 2004, the BBC Radio 2 DJ had been making constant Kate references ever since somebody picked her record for the Crucial Three feature on his show. Mark, a fan of Kate’s work, duly began a “Bush-o-meter” in studio which he’d appraise listeners of daily (showing how many days he’d been waiting to get a reply from Kate to appear on the show or just call in!).
Eventually, his patience was rewarded. Kate, tickled by his very vocal on-air campaign, gave him an extensive interview which was broadcast as an hour long special, “Talking with Kate“, on the day of Aerial’s release. It was recorded at her house and she treated Mark to a nice cheese flan. You can hear it in full above.
Kate also spoke at length to John Wilson on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme, and she would go on to grant Wilson (and Mark Radcliffe) further interviews for her two 2011 albums also, Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow. In both Aerial interviews you can hear how relaxed and happy Kate sounds, an artist who had nailed exactly how she wanted to conduct her career away from the glare of ‘celebrity’ nonsense. You can hear Kate’s full chat with John Wilson, recorded in the penthouse suite at Abbey Road studios, below:
Kate also gave a radio interview to Hugo Cassavetti on Radio France on November 11th, 2005, on a show hosted by Bernard Lenoir. You can read a transcript of this conversation here. In it she spoke about paintings and the visuals her new music may evoke in a listener:
“I love paintings… I LOVE paintings. I really get a buzz out of seeing a beautiful painting, and it’s something I can’t do. But I suppose in a way, I think of it being more of a kind of moving image…what I do, because it’s connected with the unfolding of time. It’s much more like a movie where, in a lot of ways it is visual for me. I don’t see colours or anything like that. I know some people do. It’s more like… I remember saying this to somebody once… and it sounds so pretentious… but I do think there are comparisons. It’s almost like the lead voice is…the leading actor. And then you got all these other things, that actually sort of become the scenery, do you know what I mean? And actually somebody said that, when they heard the second disc on this record, and it was just about the biggest compliment I’ve ever had… they said “it wasn’t like listening to record, it was like watching a movie or something” and I thought that was so great!”
Aerial – Person of the day
Lol Creme is an English musician and music video director, best known for his work in the band 10cc, known for their signature hit single I’m Not in Love. He was later one half of the pop duo Godley & Creme, with 10cc drummer Kevin Godley. Lol Creme has collaborated with Trevor Horn’s Band. He sings and plays guitar, bass and keyboards.
On the Aerial album Lol sings backing vocals on π (Pi) and on Nocturn. On his fan page in 2005 he wrote: “…as for Kate’s album, I’m on album 1, track 2, singing the chorus on ‘pi’, and on album 2, the end of the track called ‘Nocturn’…I must say I keep the second album going round and round in my car, it’s very easy on the ear…”
Kate had crossed paths with Lol and his collaborator Kevin Godley on a number of occasions – by the 1980s the pair were highly regarded and influential video directors. Kevin Godley told The Guardian how they became a duo: “Lol Creme and I left 10cc at the height of the success because we felt things were starting to become repetitive. We came from an art school background and we were thinking visually. Even at that stage, there were two film-makers waiting to come out.”
Kate worked with Kevin Godley when he directed her video for The Man I Love (her duet with Larry Adler in 1994). She wrote about it on her official site in 2019 when The Other Sides CD compilation was released. “It was released as a single and Kevin Godley directed the video. I loved working with Kevin – so imaginative and great fun.”
“I’d worked with him and Lol Creme when they directed the video for Peter Gabriel’s song, Don’t Give Up. Kevin chose to present the video in a very traditional way which suited the song extremely well. Godley and Creme are huge talents who left their mark not just in the music industry with their intelligence and wit in the band 10CC but also in the visual world with their groundbreaking videos, working with an impressive list of diverse artists.“
For their hit single Cry, Godley and Creme made a famous video where, according to Kevin they “picked loads of faces from a casting book and filmed them all singing (the song). Some said they could lip-sync but couldn’t, but it all looked great in 35mm black and white. This was before morphing, so we used these things called “wipes” which meant one face could dissolve into another. A man might turn into a woman or a punk into an old person, creating an entity that didn’t exist before. It felt magical. Of course, Lol and my faces are in it. Our “plan B” ended up becoming one of the most talked about videos of the 1980s.”
Aerial – Artefact of the day
(Brought to you in association with katebushcollectibles.com)
While sadly for collectors no single sheet music was ever issued for King of the Mountain, a beautifully produced Aerial sheet music book (ISBN 0571525083) was published in the UK for the Aerial album in January 2006 by Faber Music.
It is generously illustrated with album artwork and contains piano transcriptions for all the songs including vocal line and guitar chord boxes. All in all it’s a beautiful companion book to the album – well worth picking up if you can get it for a decent price.
Aerial – Trivia of the day
As part of the bird-themed imagery found in the booklet that accompanies the Aerial album, Kate used a striking image by photographer Randy Olson to accompany the lyrics to her song Nocturn. The image shows a hunter in Pakistan wearing a bird decoy mask, which was featured on the cover of National Geographic Magazine in June 2000 (Volume 197, No.6). Kate liked the image so much that she also made it the cover of her Remastered Part II CD box set in 2018.
In the set of images Olson took, men lure wild birds near them, wiggle their heads to mimic a swimming bird and then capture them by hand. This method was used 3,300 BC as shown on artifacts that show this style of hunting. The Indus river valley maintains some surprising remnants of its ancient culture. A stone’s throw from the largest intact Harappan Site (Mohenjo Daro), Mohanis fishermen use the exact style of flat-bottom boat depicted in terra cotta and stone tablets 4,600 years old, and a group of bird hunters still practice a 5,000-year-old method of catching birds.
Hunters tie pet herons to a hoop in the river, and then submerge to their necks in the water wearing masks made from real bird skins. They wiggle their heads to mimic a swimming bird and then grab any prey that lands nearby. We know this is the ancient method they used to hunt birds because there are artifacts that show bird hunting that go back to 3,300 BC.
Randy Olson is a photographer in the social-documentary tradition. He often works with his wife, Melissa Farlow, and their assignments have taken them to over 50 countries in the past 30 years. Although they are published in LIFE, GEO, Smithsonian and other magazines, they have primarily photographed projects for National Geographic magazine. See more of their outstanding work at their website here.
Aerial – Bird of the day
Name-checked in the gloriously expanded Prologue in Kate’s Before the Dawn shows, the Chaffinch is the commonest finch in Ireland and Great Britain – found in woodland, farmland, parks and gardens. In winter can form large flocks of hundreds of birds, especially in stubble fields and under beech trees. The male’s breast, face and underside are a pinkish orange-brown, becoming a darker, wine shade in winter. The nape and crown are blue-grey.
The upper back is warm brown, while the lower back/rump is a contrasting green tone, usually hidden by the bird’s folded wings when perched. The female is much greyer, with washed out warm grey underparts. Both sexes display large white patches on otherwise blackish wings, both when perched and flying – this makes identification quite straightforward even at some range. Both sexes also have a longish tail, which shows a dark centre and white outer feathers in flight.
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