Kate’s official site at www.katebush.com now has the following holding page:
Update: Kate’s official Facebook, Twitter and Youtube pages also feature filmstrip imagery…
We’ve set up a Facebook page today – this’ll help you to keep track of our updates here at the site. Click on the “like” button here and tell your friends! 🙂
Today in Paris the Fall Winter collection by Miuccia Prada for Miu Miu was set to an edited soundtrack of Kate songs, namely The Infant Kiss, Breathing, parts of Hammer Horror and L’Amour Looks Something Like You and In Search of Peter Pan.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”390″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hZIcUae9uQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Kate’s official Youtube channel was announced today on her official Facebook page. We’ve seen this being put together over the last few months with good quality videos being constantly added – worth checking out here. Kate’s new Twitter profile can be viewed here. The latest tweet heralds the Youtube debut of King of the Mountain in hi-def!
Audio Fidelity, the US company that remastered Kate’s Hounds of Love album last year (in a popular gatefold vinyl edition) is releasing a limited edition 4-track 10″ vinyl Hounds of Love EP, with tracks chosen by Kate, on April 16th. Pressed on pink vinyl, Side 1 features The Big Sky and Cloudbusting and Side 2 features Watching You Without Me and Jig of Life. Audio Fidelity tell me that Kate also personally selected the cover art. Click on the image to go to the Audio Fidelity site for more info. This release is to coincide with Record Store Day 2011. Support your local independent record shop!
While this release features remastered tracks from both sides of the Hounds of Love album which are previously released, this is nonetheless (I think!) Kate’s first 4-track vinyl release since the UK 12″ of Love and Anger in 1990, and possibly her first official release in the 10″ vinyl format. Email me if you know different of course. EP cover photo is by John Carder Bush. EP priced at $14.99, limited run of 1,000 copies. Audio Fidelity will be offering this title only to their subscription club members and through independent retailers. Online retailers, such as Amazon, will not be able to carry this special title.
From the Audio Fidelity subscriber email:
“On Saturday, April 16th, the music community comes together and honors the independent record retailers on RECORD STORE DAY.
This is a one day event and last year 1,400 retail outlets around the world participated in this special day.
Audio Fidelity will be participating this year with a special 10″ colored vinyl Collector’s Limited Edition of Kate Bush’s “Hounds Of Love”.
This 10″ colored vinyl will have 4 tracks and will retail for $14.98. As this is a special collector’s limited edition, with Kate’s blessing, we will only be manufacturing 1,000 copies. Once those are gone, we will manufacture no more.
You will be able to purchase only one (1) copy per club membership should you choose to purchase this title.
We need to have your order in ASAP to reserve your limited edition collector’s copy. As I mentioned, we are only making 1,000 copies and the demand from retail far surpasses that number.”
www.audiofidelity.net for more…
A personal dream come true for me, the wonderful comedian Noel Fielding (The Mighty Boosh) has danced to Wuthering Heights in the BBC charity programme “Let’s Dance for Comic Relief.” The studio panel has rightly voted Noel’s performance as Kate through to the final on March 12th! We will be providing voting links for the final when they happen. There’s not much more to say except: enjoy the clip and please consider donating to Comic Relief, one of Kate’s favourite charities, here.
And here is Kate’s message to Noel:
“Hi Noel, it’s Kate here. I really love your work and I just want to wish you luck for tonight. Break a leg. Well, actually no, no… don’t break a leg. Just win baby, WIN!”
Sadly the Youtube clip of Kate’s message seems to have disappeared: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UZ49nvm364
Press already: Metro, UnrealityTV, Chortle.
As an apparent consequence of this, Wuthering Heights is now at no.2 in the iTunes Rock Songs Chart for 28th February 2011.
Here’s a longer clip with intro and judges comments:
Regular visitors to this site give us much feedback on our promotion of the creative work of not just Kate but also those closest to Kate; Paddy, John and Del. One of the of the most interesting connections that we’ve picked up on in the last few years has been the journey of Syd Arthur – a band based in Canterbury, England, that features Kate’s nephew Raven (John Carder’s son) on fiddle. With a very distinctive sound the band have built on earlier successes and are justifiably proud of their impressive new Moving World EP. Pre-order it here. We recommend you get it.
Here’s a taster of the EP:
Moving World EP Teaser by Syd Arthur
The band is four Canterbury-based devotees of sound immersed in the simple pleasures of songwriting, performance and their abilities for exploratory improvisational musical interplay. Live, the band has been together since 2006. On record, it all starts from here.
Syd Arthur’s intricate, high-energy live sets have been what the band are founded on, and over the past 5 years they have created a large following on the underground scene across the South of England, Europe and beyond. Festival veterans, the band have played from Glastonbury to the Secret Garden and back. Summer solstices and green gatherings number against self-funded UK tours and trips to pretty much every country in Europe. With the level of live recognition so far to simply pigeonhole Syd Arthur as an underground act is something of a mistake. This is an accomplished live band looking to make a further stamp on a music industry there for the taking.
As with all great live bands, capturing a definitive take on record is always a challenge, one that up until recently the band have neglected to take on. But in 2009 the band began the task of setting up Wicker Studios, their own self-funded studio space on the outskirts of southeast London. Greatly inspired by the sonic pioneers of the late 60s and early 70s, they patiently learned how to engineer, produce and mix themselves, using an innovative hybrid of analogue and digital techniques.
Not alone in their plight, the band have found themselves at the heart of an exciting new music scene bubbling away in the Canterbury area. United by an encouraging spirit of cooperation and mutual support, together with a shared love of (among others) Soft Machine, electric Miles, Eno, Can, Zappa, Beefheart, Fela Kuti, King Crimson and Sun Ra, several bands have developed strong ties. The `Furthur Productions’ collective, of which Syd Arthur have been an integral part, has provided the ideal platform for this scene, forging a uniquely `organic’ aesthetic and experimenting with immersive audio-visual environments and hybrid analogue lightshows. Several of these new Canterbury bands were also brought in to record at Wicker Studios. And so a record label was born. On 28th March 2011, the Dawn Chorus Recording Co. will release its first creation, Syd Arthur’s Moving World EP.
Recorded in an intensively creative week at the end of 2010, the tracks on Moving World represent the most powerful possible expression of the band’s potential up to this point. To liken Moving World to the original `Canterbury scene’ artists like Soft Machine, Caravan, and Hatfield and the North is an easy starter, but this is what the Canterbury Sound artists might have come up with had they grown up with an extra 30-40 years of music history culture, WOMAD festivals and the entire world’s musical output at their fingertips rather than just blues, jazz and R&B records. Here, Syd Arthur exhibit a genuine merging of worlds, rather than a forced or contrived `world fusion’ music.
Raven Bush
And this is just the beginning! Syd Arthur’s debut album is currently being recorded. Dawn Chorus Recording Co. plans to release an album a month from artists including Zoo For You, Rae and The Boot Lagoon from April onwards. And each of the bands have their own busy live schedules to promote. The time for Syd Arthur to rise up and be taken notice of is now!
Facebook / Twitter and Myspace links at: http://www.sydarthur.co.uk/
A very good round up of the performance of Kate’s singles and albums in music charts around the world can be found on Music Chart Heaven
This is where you find that Aerial and King of the Mountain did better in Sweden (no.2) than in the UK (no.3), The Kick Inside did better in the Netherlands than in the UK (same chart positions), that The Man With the Child in His Eyes was no.1 in France, and many other strange and interesting things.
Kate Bush: Enigmatic chanteuse as pop pioneer
by Holly Kruse, University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign
In the early 1970s record industry executives noticed that adventurous musicians could actually make money. Kate Bush was one of the artists to profit. In 1974 EMI made an unusual move and gave Bush some money “to grow up with,” and she spent three years continuing her dance studies, honing her vocal skills, and developing a more mature songwriting style. In 1977 she recorded her first album, The Kick Inside, and the first single, “Wuthering Heights”, reached the number one spot on the British pop chart just one month after its release in early 1978. However, though Kate Bush has been a best-selling artist in the U.K. for almost ten years, she stayed virtually unknown in the U.S …
Soundscapes.info November 2000. Read the full article here
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory
Deborah Withers’ book is not a biography of Kate Bush. Instead, says Sian Norris, it is a treasure map to the theories underpinning the cultural icon’s work.
Having been a huge Kate Bush fan from a young age, and very impressed and excited by Deborah N Withers’ recent book Self Publishing and Empowerment I was really looking forward to reading her cultural theory explorationAdventures in Kate Bush and Theory. And I wasn’t disappointed. This book is a superb exploration into the gender, queer, post-colonial and cultural theory that lies behind the music of singer, dancer and cultural icon Kate Bush. It is a joy from start to finish, taking you on a journey from the 1970s to the present, as Withers comprehensively and wittily uncovers the theoretical intricacies in the work of Kate Bush. If you are looking for a biography of Kate Bush then this isn’t the book for you. Instead, it is a biography of music, visual art and three decades of the character Withers calls the “Bush Feminine Subject” or the BFS. This is the female subjectivity that inhabits Bush’s world, a subject who sings, plays and acts out the questions, theories and problems in Kate’s work. Withers argues that as listeners we need to separate out the singer Kate Bush and the BFS when exploring the theory of her work …
The f-word January 2010. Read the full article here
Kate Bush: Performing and Creating Queer Subjectivities on Lionheart.
Deborah Withers
In her second album, Lionheart, Kate Bush continued the process of exploring gender
roles through music, performance and dramatization that began on her debut, The
Kick Inside. From early on in her career, Bush was conscious of how heteronormative,
patriarchal gender roles can delimit restrictive boundaries and designate permissible
sites from which the female sexed subject can speak or sing. From her perceptive
comments in interviews, it is clear that she was aware of stereotypical cultural notions
of femininity circulating within pop music in the late 70s that, I would suggest, only
allowed narrow roles for women singers: to be genteel, emotional and reflective.
Understandably, Bush wished to distance herself and ultimately break free from these
constructions and often spoke of how she identified with male songwriters and styles
as they allowed for more experimentation …
Nebula September 2006. Read the full article here
Kate Bush’s Subversive Shoes – Bonnie Gordon
If you know the lurid details of hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Red Shoes,” then Kate Bush’s song of the same name presents a fascinating twist. A dance tune with pulsating rhythms and haunting effects, it encourages and celebrates dance. The song begins with a girl who wants to dance. She gets to dance and along the way takes her listeners for an experience that borders on ecstatic frenzy. Sending a very different message, the 1848 didactic tale positions dance as both sin and punishment. In the story a pretty but very poor orphan girl named Karen falls in love with a pair of red shoes made of shiny patent leather. After tricking her blind but pious benefactor into buying them, she makes the near-fatal mistake of wearing them to her Confirmation and Communion. As punishment for her vanity and excess she must endlessly dance; even when she is lifted off the ground her little feet keep on dancing through the air, totally escaping her control. She wants to go left, they go right; she wants to go home, they dance out into the street, where all can see her terrible state. An angel makes her fate painfully clear: “You shall dance in your red shoes until you become pale and thin. Dance till the skin on your face turns yellow and clings to your bones as if you were a skeleton. Dance you shall from door to door and when you pass a house where proud and vain children live, there you shall knock on the door so that they will see you and fear your face. Dance, you shall Dance …
Women and Music volume 9 2005. Read the full article here
Never for Ever, a Kate Bush tribute band that operate in the northwest of the UK have been adding new gig dates for the 2011 season. (see our gigs listing here). The highlight is a potential slot at this years Glastonbudget festival. To make it through, one of their gigs is also an audition for the festival. It takes place on Saturday 26th February at 9pm at The Shed in Leicester. It’s a single 45 minute set, half the band’s usual set length. They’d love as many Kate fans to come along as possible to enjoy the gig and help make the audition successful! We have more on Never For Ever – including the show setlist here.
Joe Hendry: “Painting kate Bush, it has to be said, for me is a similar experience to painting Debbie Harry. I completely lose myself whilst I am painting and usually listen to the music of the subject of the painting.
This celebrity art is oil on board and I became quite obsessive in my approach to painting this portrait of Kate. I wanted to keep smoothing it out and making the face as slick as possible. The odd thing was, as I was listening to her song “An Architect’s Dream” (which features Rolf Harris no less), the line about her favourite piece being the mistake in the artist’s work. At that point I decided that this portrait was perfect …”
Read the full article and comments here
Derek Erdman on The Stranger writes: “In 2002 I met a bunch of really tough guys. Not guys that were going around beating people up, they were more like ultra-crusties that ate garbage food and slept in boxes outside. They moved into an abandoned house near my house .. they burned newspaper logs in barrels for warmth and grilled pots of vegetables to eat. The pots were just full of vegetable slop that they kept adding garbage produce into, with hot sauce. .. One guy was called VV because he was from West Virginia .. He and I were the closest, we talked a lot about life and music because we both had similar childhoods and both worked in record stores .. He tried so hard to get me into Kate Bush, but for some reason I just never really liked her music. He’d play me records and tell me about her life and how she wrote her songs, he was totally obsessed with her. For some reason I never got it …”
Read the full article and comments here
“The critical reflex for such singers who appear vaguely “kooky” – Bat For Lashes, Alison Goldfrapp, Florence Welch – is to compare them to Kate Bush. Denny is more seldom invoked, which seems unfair, as she was the one who opened the way for others to follow .. She died – aged 32, of a brain injury resulting from a fall – in 1978, the year Kate Bush, the most iconic, unconventional and self-reliant female artist of the 1980s, released her first recordings (Bush namechecked her on Never For Ever)” Guardian 8th January … “Three Potential Royal Wedding Singers who may not be considered, but should be include Kate Bush, Dido and Annie Lennox” Pam Gaulin Celebs 11th January … “Guy Pearce admits he loved working with Kate Winslet on the Depression-era drama Mildred Pierce because he has a bit of a crush on most Kates: “Ahhh Kate Bush, still is in fact [my biggest crush] – it’s her voice, how she looks, just the strange unique creature that she is!” Guy insisted” PA 16th January … “The overall effect is so gripping, so chilling even, that it wouldn’t be remiss to mention this song in the same breath as another great anti-war lament by a British female genius – namely, Kate Bush’s ‘Army Dreamers'” Nick Levine on The Words that Maketh Murder by PJ Harvey Digital Spy 17th January …
“The press release further cites the band’s musical influences as including Morbid Angel, Emperor, Darkthrone, Neurosis, and…Kate Bush? Kate Bush? I guess that’s cool…? I mean, my mom likes Kate Bush. Oh wait, no…she doesn’t. So not even my mom likes Kate Bush. My mom is more metal.” Chris Harris on Dark Meditations in Monastic Seclusion the new album by Shroud of Despondency Gun Shy Assasin 21st January … “Many years ago, while up a hill with the Kate Bush Fan Club eating magic fudge, Zoe stumbled upon the secret of inner peace. Just live life and be happy” Preview of Zoe Lyons ‘Clownbusting’ show Liverpool Echo 21st January … “When you like everything from Dethklok to Kate Bush, I figure there has to be some sort of unifying theme. And I think it’s this: I don’t like music that feels ungrounded. You can’t kick me in the ass if you don’t have a foot on the floor. I don’t like wimpy music. (This one is hard to explain. I’ll have to try to expound on it in future entries.) I don’t like jangly guitars. I don’t like music that feels unwieldy or feels as if it’s floating in the ether. Even though Kate’s stuff is somewhat ethereal, her songs have a certain…insistence…to them that keeps them grounded” Beth Spencer Digital Artist 21st January …
“ISR: Where do you see yourself five years from now? TAIO – I would love to be having lunch with Kate Bush” interview with Break-our new wave band Kites Indie Soup 21st January … “Gemini gets a U.S. release in February with the cover of Cloudbusting the “expansion”. Wild Nothing’s dreamy, shoegaze-type sound is a perfect fit for this interpretation of the Kate Bush song and Wild Nothing, essentially a one-man show, renders it in a heavenly, ethereal manner that is quite delightful” Review Grounds for Appeal 22nd January … “Mila Soldatic is singing Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. Mila sings this operatic song well, although not sure how many people will remember this song when it comes to voting. She is draped in a gold skirt. She has a bit of a scary gaze when she looks into the camera” Report on Croatia heat for Eurovision 2011 Oikotimes 22nd January … “The first gig I ever had was engineer on Kate Bush’s first album. We used to go out for a joint every morning, and I would spend the rest of the day trying to pretend I wasn’t stoned out of my box. I used to blush whenever I spoke to her, she was that good-looking. I was only nineteen” Ian Maclean now head of A&R somewhere The Fantastic Hope 22nd January … Kate Bush vs Prince mashup Vicious Imagery 23rd January … Dinosaur Dinosaur’s cover of Running Up That Hill Silent Shout 23rd January …
“The record features .. a clutch of cover versions, including a faithfully high-pitched take on Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights” Nick Bond’s review of Robyn Loau’s second solo album Sydney Star Observer 24th January … Just in case you missed it I Love Kate Bush – a blog … and the Kate Bush Appreciation thread on Digital Spy … “What I’m going for is to make music that’s emotional and honest. I mean, I grew up listening to Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, singing songs about making deals with God and all that. It doesn’t all have to be about falling in love, meeting the right person, being in a club and being rich and dancing around!” Natalia Kills Boston Pheonix 26th January … The Old Cheeser reviews Graeme Thompson 29th January … and another Kate Bush blog Babushka Kate Bush … the Bronte Blog spots new cover versions of Kate’s first single 31st January … and Cat Party are having a Kate Bush appreciation week.
Tim Wakefield – Soundwaves print of the Kate Bush song Aerial – signed by the artist and Kate Bush
Kate has chosen the title song from the Aerial album to be interpreted by UK artist Tim Wakefield in one of his highly collectible “Soundwaves” artworks. The resulting prints, described as stunning artworks created from digital images formed in the recording process, sample a section of the song. Wakefield listens to the music, the lyrics and the tempo of the song to decide what colours and shapes he’s looking for before presenting them to the music artist. He has devised a technique to enlarge and customise these images, transforming them into lar
Dimensions: Print Size 660mm X 660mm Medium: Archival Digital Print On Paper Limited Edition: 50 Worldwide (Please note: the actual prints do not feature the ‘Soundwaves’ watermark as seen above)
The prints are available to purchase from St Pauls Gallery here. The gallery is exclusively offering our site visitors a 10% discount. The discount code is WTOYT154 (case sensitive). Interested buyers can put this code in the ‘get discount’ box then press ‘recalculate’ at check out. This will apply the katebushnews.com discount.
There is a limited run of 50 ‘Aerial’ prints worldwide, each one hand-signed by Kate and Tim Wakefield, and individually hand-numbered. They are sold in co-operation with the Nordoff Robbins charity, which brings music’s transforming power to children and adults in need, through the delivery of music therapy services, music and health projects and community music projects, as well as education programmes and research. Other artists who have taken part in the Soundwaves charity project include Sir Paul McCartney, George Michael, Pink Floyd, The Bee Gees, The Killers, Tina Turner and Kings Of Leon. Recently, all four members of Abba signed Soundwaves prints based on their music.
Jazzonline writes: “We recently ran a post about jazz singer Theo Bleckmann and his brilliant concert of the songs of underrated British pop artist & songwriter Kate Bush. Our partner site boomitude.com also ran a similar post on this colorful project. Working in conjunction withboomitude, we contacted Theo and asked him to share the evolution of his amazing project which he eloquently does on the podcast below. Listen as Theo speaks of his inspiration which only further illustrates the beauty of these special works…both his and hers.” Read the full article here.