'It's hard to think of a novelist, let alone another singer-songwriter, who takes on such diverse narrative viewpoints with Bush's aplomb'
Kate Bush transforms me into a deranged fan. I don't know where to begin to explain it: there's her Bront�esque precocity (how does a 13-year-old compose "The Man With the Child In His Eyes"?); her voice, or rather voices (swan-necked soprano, bass-deadpan, banshee wail, pure as snowmelt); or her firsts (first British solo woman to write and sing a No 1 single, to top the album charts and to enter the album charts at No 1). Of her six mature albums released between 1980 and 2005, four are near-masterpieces while two (1985's Hounds of Love and 2005's Aerial) are masterpieces.
Her musical vocabulary is vast: trance, Renaissance, reggae, flamenco, orchestration, percussive, Irish jigs, Bulgarian vocal, sampling, Fairlight synth-driven, didgeridoos and blackbirds are just the beginning. Yet where one grand piano is all that is needed (the sublime "A Coral Room"), that's what you get. And her lyrics! Her songs read like scenes from short stories, or the stories themselves (odd ones). It's hard to think of a novelist, let alone another singer-songwriter, who takes on such diverse narrative viewpoints with Bush's aplomb: a foetus during nuclear war ("Breathing"), a weather-machine inventor's daughter ("Cloudbusting"), a suicide bomber ("Pull Out the Pin") or a dancer whose partner turns out to be Hitler ("Heads We're Dancing").
In "Pi", Kate Bush sings to 137 decimal places, rapturously, yet her singular lyrics are anchored by her southern English diction: she writes as unpretentiously as she speaks. Not that she's often heard speaking: Bush hasn't toured since 1979, and enters into the PR media circus only when a new recording is out. Literary, intimate, ground-breaking, comic, sinister, idiosyncratic, pavonine, pastoral and bonkers, Kate Bush is a great English artist (with Irish blood). If I harbour an occasional pang that I didn't turn out to be her man with the child in his eyes, well, I wouldn't want her to be any different.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead Piper Perabo Anna Kournikova Esther Cañadas Kate Beckinsale
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