For 12 years it seems Kate Bush has existed only as a pervading musical influence. But now she's back, singing in harmony to birdsong on her new album, writes Brian Boyd
January 1978. Some whirling dervish with a preternaturally high-pitched voice and a big box of theatrical tricks was keening dramatically about a gothic Victorian novel. Kate Bush was on Top Of The Pops. Aged 19, she had just had her first number one single with Wuthering Heights and nobody quite knew if this was some sort of one-off gimmick (she sounded like she had been at the helium balloons) or a new form of intricately intelligent pop music that came complete with interpretative dance movements.
Over the years she answered the question by tearing up the pop/rock rulebook, transcending ephemeral musical genres, and creating a formidable body of work which continues to inspire. She argued with her record company about artistic control - and won. She built her own studio, produced her own work and refused, demurely, to jump aboard the media-go- round for each new album release.
Lyrically, she was a revelation. She sang about the Big Things. Coming across like some freaky amalgam of Angela Carter and Emily Brontë, she dropped references to, among others, James Joyce, Wilhelm Reich and Gurdjieff into her songs. And she also worked with Rolf Harris.
Since her Red Shoes album in 1993, however, she has been dormant. Sometimes it seems that there has been a rumour for her absence for each of the past 12 years. She had "lost it" or had become the "Greta Garbo of pop" and vanted to be alone. Her two closest friends in the music business, Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour and Peter Gabriel, would routinely have to field questions about her whereabouts and state of mind. It's understood that executives in her record label, EMI, journeyed down to her country house every 18 months or so to see if she had recorded anything new - they invariably returned to London reporting that Kate had baked them cakes.
She existed, it seems, only as a pervading musical influence. Tori Amos and Bjork spoke about her in reverential tones and the current batch of female stars from Joss Stone to KT Tunstall to Dido were quick to single her out as a lodestar. Earlier this year, one of the newest art-rock bands on the block, The Futureheads, had their biggest ever chart success with a cover version of her Hounds Of Love song.
In his just-published workmanlike biography of the singer, Rob Jovanovic talks about how a few words written by Bush on her website in December of last year had an almost seismic effect on the musical world. Amid the pleasantries, Bush had written "the album is nearly finished now and will be out next year".
Jovanovic writes: "Such startling news caused pandemonium . . . 'The Return Of Pop's Great Recluse' exclaimed the Daily Express; 'Comeback Kate' led the Evening Standard. The Daily Mail pointed out 'her Miss Havisham-like existence behind the high walls of a mansion'. The Sun shouted 'This could be the biggest comeback since Lazarus'."
Bush's eighth album, Aerial, will be released on November 7th. Already, an awful lot is known about it: the first single, King Of The Mountain is about Elvis Presley and Citizen Kane (a Bush in-joke about the themes of disappearance and mystery); the entire second disc (it's a double album) is taken up by a song-cycle which features Bush singing in harmony to birdsong; there's a song called Mrs Bartoloozi which is a rhapsody about a washing machine and on another song she addresses the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter - the song is called Pi. On the latter, Bush can be heard singing out strings of numbers - which puts a whole new spin on the old adage about singing out names from the telephone directory.
Those fervent Bush fans seeking to decode the subtexts will have to do all the work for themselves. Kate Bush is not doing any interviews, whatsoever, to promote the album. It's as if she knows that the questions will be skewed toward the inevitable "What have you been doing for the past 12 years?", which is not something she wants to talk about. There is no mystery about what she has been doing - there was no breakdown, no drugs, no particular creative blockage. All that happened was that a number of people close to her died and a long-term relationship broke down.
She had a child (a boy, Bertie, now aged eight) with her present partner who is a musician. People forget that even at the peak of her fame, she always strictly demarcated her working and her private life. In fact, it was only a slip of the tongue by her friend Peter Gabriel that led to the news that she had a child, who was then two.
Not even her record company knew. In an interview back in the early 1980s she explained her reticence with the media: "I think creative control is so incredibly important. I became quickly aware of the outside pressures of being famous affecting my work. It seemed ironic that I was expected to do interviews and television which took me away from my work."
It's highly unlikely she will tour Aerial. She has only ever done one tour, in 1979. She always felt that tour was "misunderstood" in that she practically killed herself (and almost bankrupted herself) on getting the dance/drama aspects of the show just right - remember she did train under mime master Lindsey Kemp. Audiences wanted her to bang out the hits and cut out the ethereal theatrics. The tour was hit by tragedy when her lighting director fell to his death on stage during a concert in London. The event traumatised her.
The fascination surrounding the release of Aerial is not just because it marks the return of a stunningly original creative talent, it also has a lot to do with how much the concept of the "pop star" has been recast in the past 12 years. Whereas for Bush, the music is primary and everything else a "distraction", today's pop freaks are encouraged to parade their relationships, break-ups, and rehabs all over the pages of glossy magazines and tabloids. The most mundane pop star behaviour is now captured on photograph and captioned with hyperbolic prose.
Bush's insistence on leading a normal life and refusing to disclose every intimate detail of her existence puts her at an automatically mysterious remove from her contemporaries. She has turned down millions of pounds to license her songs out for advertisements, to make personal appearances, to tour, to launch, to endorse.
When she signed her record deal with EMI she was just 16. The label gave her three years to finish her schooling, take dance and music lessons and develop before Wuthering Heights (a song she wrote when she was 14) was released. Bush is of that generation where artists were developed over time - not given the make or break by a public phone-in on a prime-time talent show.
To put all this in context, go back to a 1985 interview. At the time, there had been a three-year gap between her The Dreaming album and the release of the Hounds Of Love album. When pressed about this "huge gap", she replied: "I've just been living a normal life". And that is the same answer you would get today.
