Category: Kate Bush news Page 1 of 69

In January this year the katebushnews.com website turned 25 years old! In this episode of The Kate Bush Fan Podcast Seán celebrates this hard-to-believe milestone by asking some fan friends to cherry-pick their choice of news stories, both obscure and momentous, from the site archives which date back to 1998! An enjoyable, eclectic chat with guests Dave Cross, Paul Thomas and Darrell Babidge! Here’s links to the news stories that we chose from the archives:

You can subscribe to the Kate Bush Fan Podcast on iTunes or Spotify or on any podcast app you happen to use, such as Stitcher or Tunein or listen below on Soundcloud.

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Kate has donated a number of signed Running Up That Hill CD singles to the annual Cabaret vs Cancer charity music auction. Cabaret vs Cancer was set up in 2016 and raises money through cabaret and burlesque shows as well as themed online auctions to help people coping with the effects of cancer. Kate has donated signed items for the previous two music auctions. Dave Cross from HomeGround Magazine is a patron of the charity, and last year organised a Kate themed cabaret fundraiser at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London. The music auction also includes signed items from Kim Wilde, Belinda Carlisle, The Pet Shop Boys, Stormzy, Taylor Swift, Joan Armatrading and many limited edition vinyl and CD collectibles. Please do check out the auction online here, a wonderful cause – thanks Dave!

Today marks 45 years since the release of The Kick Inside, Kate’s brilliant debut record! It sounds as beguiling today as all those years ago. This album is a companion for life. Below you can hear Kate in 1978 talking about the songs on the album from the US “Self Portrait” radio special promotional disc.

As we celebrate, don’t forget our news archives have lots of features about this album and its legacy: like the time the entire album was played live by Cloudbusting for the 40th anniversary of the album when Del Palmer played Kate Bush songs on stage for the first time in decades…or this detailed look at the creation of the famous ‘Kite’ cover…don’t forget to listen to the recent BBC Radio feast of programming to mark the 45th anniversary…not to mention the many, many news features we have ran about the album’s worldwide hit single, Wuthering Heights! And do check out all those The Kick Inside collectibles…

It’s hard to believe, but on this day, 25 years ago, I launched the Kate Bush News & Information website on the 25th January 1998. I had no training in HTML or web design or photoshop (could you tell?!!) but I was driven by a need to put something on the web that I felt was sorely lacking at the time – a site that told the world that, despite a 5 year absence (at that point) Kate was still a contemporary and very influential artist and there was still PLENTY of Kate-related news to report and get excited about. Basically…I wanted to make a website that I could browse myself and enjoy (and weirdly I often found myself doing just that!) It was a different online world then – no Google, Facebook, Youtube or Twitter, and it was a lot of hard work gathering news and doing updates without the luxury of things like WordPress – it was a labour of love.

Luckily the site rapidly gained in popularity and fans became very generous and helpful informing me of all kinds of news from all over the world. Five years later, in April 2003, I launched the site forum which became a thriving meeting place for all manner of discussion and debate among Kate fans. My friends in HomeGround even agreed to have their home here on the site and we have enjoyed many exclusive stories and announcements over the years – like when Kate wanted to tell her fans about her son’s birth through the site or when we were the first place anywhere in the world to officially announce the Aerial release after 12 long years between albums! More recently we’ve had the most extensive coverage anywhere of Kate’s massive global success with Running Up That Hill in the summer of 2022.

I’m very proud of the fact that this site is still the highest ranked dedicated Kate Bush site on Google searches for “Kate Bush” after Kate’s own official site. As we continue to do what we do, here on the main site and across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and on our Kate Bush Fan podcasts, I’d like to thank you all so much for all the support and goodwill you’ve shown this site over the last two and a half decades. Special thanks to Peter, Krys and Dave from HomeGround, to Paddy Bush, John Carder Bush and Del Palmer for their warm support, to Brian Cloughley for so much amazing graphic work over the years, to Paul and Darrell for their Bush Telegraph podcast series, to Mike Wade for steering the forum through all kinds of drama during the early years, and to my family and friends who must have often thought I was a bit mad. And of course to Kate for making the extraordinary music that has brought us all together. You’ve been great – THANKS! – Seán x

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The one that started it all. Kate’s breathtaking debut single, Wuthering Heights, was released 45 years ago today on January 20th 1978! Music writer Sam Liddicott has put together a new podcast episode to celebrate. You can hear Seán talking about Wuthering Heights [Seán is at 1:02:15 but this special also includes DJ Mark Radcliffe, performer Sarah-Louise Young and the music writer Tom Doyle] Thanks, Sam!

Here is what Kate herself had to say about the song in a 1979 Kate Bush Fan Club newsletter:

Well, I wrote it in my flat, sitting at the upright piano one night in March at about midnight. There was a full moon and the curtains were open, and every time I looked up for ideas, I looked at the moon. Actually, it came quite easily. I couldn’t seem to get out of the chorus – it had a really circular feel to it, which is why it repeats. I had originally written something more complicated, but I couldn’t link it up, so I kept the first bit and repeated it. I was really pleased, because it was the first song I had written for a while, as I’d been busy rehearsing with the KT Band.

I felt a particular want to write it, and had wanted to write it for quite a while. I remember my brother John talking about the story, but I couldn’t relate to it enough. So I borrowed the book and read a few pages, picking out a few lines. So I actually wrote the song before I had read the book right through. The name Cathy helped, and made it easier to project my own feelings of want for someone so much that you hate them. I could understand how Cathy felt.

It’s funny, but I heard a radio programme about a woman who was writing a book in Old English, and she found she was using words she didn’t know, but when she looked them up she found they were correct. A similar thing happened with ‘Wuthering Heights’: I put lines in the song that I found in the book when I read it later.

I’ve never been to Wuthering Heights, the place, though I would like to, and someone sent me a photo of where it’s supposed to be.

One thing that really pleases me is the amount of positive feedback I’ve had from the song, though I’ve heard that the Bronte Society think it’s a disgrace. A lot of people have read the book because of the song and liked it, which I think is the best thing about it for me. I didn’t know the book would be on the GCE syllabus in the year I had the hit, but lots of people have written to say how the song helped them. I’m really happy about that.

There are a couple of synchronicities involved with the song. When Emily Bronte wrote the book she was in the terminal stages of consumption, and I had a bad cold when I wrote the song. Also, when I was in Canada I found out that Lindsay Kemp, my dance teacher, was in town, only ten minutes away by car, so I went to see him. When I came back I had this urge to switch on the TV – it was about one in the morning – because I knew the film of Wuthering Heights would be on. I tuned in to a thirties gangster film, then flicked through the channels, playing channel roulette, until I found it. I came in at the moment Cathy was dying, so that’s all I saw of the film. It was an amazing coincidence.

Kate bush 1979

If you’re planning to go see the new Tom Hanks film, A Man Called Otto, listen out for Kate’s song This Woman’s Work which is used to score a big emotional set-piece in the film. Directed by Marc Foster, here is the film synopsis: “When a lively young family moves in next door, grumpy widower Otto Anderson meets his match in a quick-witted, pregnant woman named Marisol, leading to an unlikely friendship that turns his world upside down.” We are hearing that fans who have seen the film have been particularly moved by the sequence featuring Kate’s classic song.

In this new Kate Bush Fan Podcast episode, Bush Telegraph duo (Darrell in the States and Paul in the UK) continue to discuss Kate’s fourth album The Dreaming, in their second installment celebrating the 40th anniversary of this iconic album. As school friends, they bought the album on the day of its release, and the next day met Kate at the album signing in London. We hear more snippets of their experiences in 1982, but the major part of this podcast is Darrell’s interview with Teri Reed, senior engineer at Odyssey Studios. Teri talks about his collaboration with Kate, as Odyssey was one of the studios she used for The Dreaming. We find out, not surprisingly, what a generous and warm colleague she was, as well as the extraordinary levels she went to, to get the right sound for a track. For example, why was Teri coaxed into a car park to find a specific sound she needed? All will be revealed. That, and a whole lot more. The final and third episode to follow will be an interview with Nick Launay, another collaborator with Kate. Enjoy!    

You can subscribe to the Kate Bush Fan Podcast on iTunes or Spotify or on any podcast app you happen to use, such as Stitcher or Tunein or listen below on Soundcloud.

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Today we wish our friend, Del Palmer, a very happy birthday as he celebrates his 70th! We hope you know how much you are loved and respected by all the fans, Del, and how thrilled we are for the success you shared in this year with Running Up That Hill taking over the world – you can be so proud of your work with Kate, truly astounding.

With love and hugs from, Seán, Krys, Peter and Dave xxx

We’ve been celebrating the 40th Anniversary of The Dreaming on our Facebook page with videos of the 5 singles from Kate’s incredible 1982 album. It was released on September 13th 1982. I wrote about it in the special new 40th Anniversary Issue of HomeGround Magazine (available free here). Also coming this month is a two-part Bush Telegraph podcast episode all about The Dreaming album with some very special guest interviewees. Here’s some of what I wrote:

“Earlier this year I was contacted by the editor of one of the UK’s major music magazines, asking to pick my brains about a Kate Bush cover article they were hoping to run. For a change, they were mulling over doing a cover feature on The Dreaming album, 2022 being the 40th anniversary of the album’s release (almost impossible to believe). As we have seen over the last decade, having Kate on the cover of a music monthly can shift a healthy amount of magazines but typically those feature articles will focus on Kate’s very early career, the live 1979 tour or the perennial favourite album – Hounds of Love.

I was emphatically enthusiastic about the cover idea and reeled off a list of reasons to the editor why Kate’s extraordinary, ground-breaking fourth studio album still deserved every bit as much attention from the music press as the beloved Hounds of Love – it was indeed time for them to recontextualise this darkly complex, astonishing record. It was the first album Kate produced entirely by herself and of course many of you reading this still regard it as her greatest masterpiece out of a triumvirate of her most acclaimed works that includes Hounds of Love and Aerial. The daring, complex experimentations within are not fumbling towards something more accomplished, they are often more startling than those on Hounds of Love itself. The complexity and inventiveness are insane. In the wider world, The Dreaming is normally mentioned as the album she had to make in order to go on to create her “true” masterpiece, Hounds of Love, but many fans feel it mightily holds up all by itself. This is the one that meant she had “broken free of pop stardom’s strait-jacket, to infiltrate the ranks of art-rock aristocrats” as The Quietus put it. It was Never For Ever that was surely the essential transitional work – The Dreaming was her arrival at an amazing new place in her career, a seismic shift.

There’s so much fascinating drama and intensity around this particular record’s creation and reception. Kate was only about 22 when she wrote the songs and 24 when she released it, but she still had the guts to produce it herself – she was utterly driven to do that. Years after release we still get insights into the making of the record from some of those that were there – Graeme Thomson did a good job in his Under The Ivy biography getting new insights from studio types like Hugh Padgham, Nick Launay and Paul Hardiman. I imagine what it would be like to have been a fly on the wall during the concentrated experimentation of those sessions across expensive London studios like Townhouse, Abbey Road and Advision on Gosfield Street (hence the “Gosfield Goers” credit) as Kate figured out the new technology and sound possibilities at her disposal – the Fairlight, gated reverb drum patterns, the undeniable influence of Peter Gabriel’s studio work. Crafting layers of utterly new, and to some listeners, baffling soundscapes to press forward her post-Never For Ever ambitions. “I was using different instruments, and everything was changing; and I felt that really the best thing to do would be to make this album a real departure – make it completely different. And the only way to achieve this was to sever all the links I had had with the older stuff”

“Game changer”. “Jarring”. “Cinematic”. “Pulsating”. “Obsessional”. “Thunderous”. “Sonic Assault”. Wading through the word salad that exists to try to describe The Dreaming album makes one thing clear – forty years later, this remains a record you can’t be apathetic about….

…the Uncut magazine cover feature that eventually surfaced in February this year was, refreshingly, not a re-hashed archive article – a considerable line-up of people involved in the creation of Kate’s dark masterpiece are interviewed by writer Peter Watts, including Preston Heyman, Paul Hardiman, Richard Burgess, Brian Bath, Roy Harper, Hugh Padgham, Dave Lawson, Howard Gray, Danny “Dan Dan the Sushi Man!” Dawson, and Teri Reed…

In 2014 on a BBC documentary Del did finally reveal the truth behind the mystery man on the cover of the record, the ‘Harry Houdini’ that Kate is passing the key to – yes, it was Del himself. A great rehearsal shot of Kate (with key on tongue) and Del in the same pose (Del donning a fetching knitted jumper) appears in the stunning book of photographs Kate: Inside the Rainbow by John Carder Bush. John described the final shot thus: “A slightly cloudy day outside in the kitchen garden at the back of our parents’ house. Apart from Kate looking very beautiful, the ivy behind her is wonderfully textured and full of hidden spaces and shadows amongst the glossy leaves themselves. Ivy may look wonderful, but it likes to slowly strangle any tree it lives on. It’s not poisonous, and in ancient times a poet’s crown was made of ivy.”

…it’s interesting to wonder how Kate feels about The Dreaming album now, from this perspective. In the intervening years she’s been asked far more frequently about Hounds of Love, and it’s obvious that her follow-up to The Dreaming is one she’s very pleased with. No song from The Dreaming was performed live on stage in 2014, although an understanding of how the show came to be structured mostly explains that omission. Guitarist David Rhodes let us know that yes, Kate did initially want to do Sat in Your Lap for Before the Dawn but then this got switched out for Top of the City and, sadly, her 1981 single never made the rehearsal stage – we can only imagine. In the 90’s she recalled looking back at that record “and it seems mad. I heard it about three years ago and couldn’t believe it. There’s a lot of anger in it. There’s a lot of ‘I’m an artist, right!’” With that in mind it’d be fascinating to know how Kate felt relatively recently, listening back to the sparkling new version of The Dreaming she worked on with James Guthrie for her 2018 Remastered project. It remains, a very special treat for our earholes – and in this 40^th anniversary year in particular we just need to remember to “Play it Loud”

Full unedited article available in the free HomeGround 40th Special Issue

Filmmaker Mary McCartney has debuted her film about the legendary Abbey Road Studios, If These Walls Could Sing, at the Telluride film festival. The documentary includes interviews with members of Pink Floyd, Elton John, Kate, Ringo Starr and Mary’s father, Paul McCartney. From classical to pop, film scores to hip-hop, “If These Walls Could Sing” explores the breadth, diversity, and ingenuity of Abbey Road Studios. Intimate interviews with leading artists, producers and composers paired with vivid archive footage and session tapes give exclusive access to these famously private studios. From Elton John to Jacqueline Du Pre to Jimmy Page, from Kate Bush to Paul McCartney to Celeste, all found their musical language in Abbey Road Studios. Audiences will experience the creative magic that makes it a revered and sacred space that still produces many of the most recognised records today and makes Abbey Road the most famous and longest-running studio in the world.

Variety writes: “Kate Bush makes a rare modern appearance in the documentary, albeit audio-only. “It’s amazing having Kate in there because she produced her third album there, directed her video in there… I kind of made contact with her. I know she doesn’t do interviews, but I know she feels real affection for Abbey Road, so over time she kindly agreed to do an audio piece that she wrote and sent to me. Just having her voice talking about the space is pretty special as well.” In the Variety review of the film, they note that “resurgent star Kate Bush talks about the studio’s historic reluctance to repaint, lest even the slightest alteration affect the sound…”

If These Walls Could Sing will be streaming on Disney+ at a date to be announced