Kate Bush
 

Nearing her 50th birthday, Kate Bush remains one of Britains most talented and beautiful artists yet possessed with rare intelligence and an enigmatic persona. Rising to fame at the tender age of 19 after a little help from Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour, her eight albums have spanned twenty years and what she lacks in quantity is eclipsed by sheer quality.

Her music has a strong Piano based criteria, yet she has dipped her toe in Rock, Pop, Jazz, Folk as well as Neo-Classical and never sounds out of her depth. Her music has been described as the aural eqivalent of contemporary theatre and many of her lyrics have big themes and ideas yet there is always a touch of English melancholy that runs through her music that endears her to a wide range of genre fans.

Quixotic, sexual, heart wrenching, baroque and at times damn surreal. kate Bush is a true original and a highly influential artist who makes music by her own rules.

From her most recent album:


A classic pop song from her '85 release 'Hounds Of Love':

Wow...I haven't heard a single thing from her but I've heard her name being dropped more times than I can remember. I simply can't believe a thread hasn't been made in all this time...well done Lee. :)

I'll download some albums one of these days...

I was surprised that there was no thread either. A good place to start would be 'Hounds Of Love' which is smack in the middle of her output and then backwards or forwards chronologically. She has never made one bad album. A few forgettable tracks maybe but her output is fairly consistent and always listenable.

I used to love the song "Wuthering Heights", until I read the novel. Then I realized what a poor take on the novel the song actually is.

Come on. Where is the love?

Yeah, I couldn't get into her at all....sorry. :\

Umm, I liked Hounds Of Love. Her debut was quite good as well. Love her ghostly kinda voice. Definitely need to get more!

I've only really heard Running Up That Hill, which I like, but it wasn't really enough to make me go looking for more.

Another on a very long list of artists I've been meaning to get into. My brother's a huge fan, and I do admire her work that I've heard a lot.

Hell, it's been a slow day. Might as well get my hands on Hounds Of Love a bit later

Whether it's a good take on the novel or not, "Wuthering Heights" is a hell of a pop song, IMO.

Wow, I'm so happy I found this thread. I adore Kate Bush, she is one of my heroes, and I grew up learning her songs on piano when I was a kid. Same with Tori Amos, who I also love.

Kate Bush is amazing, influential, and incredibly inspiring for me :)

Kate Bush is an artist I've been meaning to get into for ages - she seems to garner a lot of respect from you, PMO and Molecules.

I love Kate Bush so much although she can scare the hell out of me at times. Wuthering Heights is amazing.

I saw the comment that someone left about not liking Kate Bush. I was there, 23 years ago, wondering what all the hubbub was about. Then, in 1987, I purchased "THE WHOLE STORY", which may be a good starting place for someone who is new to Kate's work. It has some of her most popular work, as well as some of her most beautiful ballads. I understand that it isn't a complete "work of art", as the full length albums are, but it is a good place to ween yourself into her work.

For me, after listening to that album repeatedly (some of it harder to digest, than other parts), I was able to unleash myself on to the entire boxed set that was released after "The Sensual World". Great stuff.

Another great bit of trivia, for those that may not know. Apart from her connection to David Gilmour, a couple of her band members on the early albums were also core members of the Alan Parsons Project.

I should've known about this thread earlier. I guess I'm a fan of Kate Bush, I mean .. I bought a T-Shirt at least and I do wear it in public every now and then.

What I appreciate most is her earlier albums, mostly the three first. Her sound is a bit more accessible for me on those, but I still have favourites from her later albums. I've yet to listen to Aerial, though.

Title track from her latest album (Aerial 2006):



I still do not understand why she does'nt get more credit. Tori Amos, Sarah Mclachlan etc owe a huge debt to her.

I LOVE her, inside and out. She brings out my nutty side like no other and I'm worried I'll turn out to be the living B-side of Mark Chapman should my obsession with her reach pathological realms. Breathing is so amazing, I breathe in and out as I listen to it.

She's one of my heroes. She has four straight-out masterpieces (The Kick Inside, The Dreaming, The Hounds of Love and The Sensual World) and even her weaker albums have at least one really great song on them.

I mean, FFS:

Personally I think those four are great albums but the masterpieces are "Lionheart" and "Never Forever" two of my all time fave albums.

Kate Bush makes me all kinds of wiggly down there. Awesome singer, great pure unrestrained talent.

The Kick Inside, Never For Ever and The Hounds Of Love are my favourites, but Kate is so diverse and talented that it's not surprising people are picking out different albums as her masterpieces. Hounds is generally regarded as her finest, but I could never single one out.

I never knew there was a Kate thread. Thank God.

Kate = :love:

Gaws, I can't stop watching this video. And to think this music Goddess does her own choreography, so young and oh so tender.

Not sure how I'd survive if Hounds Of Love album didn't exist.

My favourite albums is her early three. I know Kate's full artistic control of her own music was not achieved until The Dreaming, but that album is a little dark and dense for me. Similarly, while I like Hounds of Love, this album and later lacks some of that simple, pure and powerful beauty of Kate just singing songs behind her piano which is something she does more on her earlier albums. I also think her later 80s albums suffer a bit from a very 80s production.

This is all relevant though. There's not a weak album here :) It's Kate Bush after all, the most interesting female artist ever in the history of popular music. The first time I heard her music and saw her videos, I didn't know how to react. Was it beautiful or silly? Was it brilliant or ridiculous? The brilliant thing about Kate, at least early Kate, is that it's a little bit of both. She's so hard to define, for example how she manages to be a young, potent sex symbol who's completely unafraid of being herself with all her weird (and beautiful) faces while being an incredibly gifted and sophisticated artist and songwriter. The complexity of her personae coupled with the uniqueness and beauty of her voice made me fall in love with her almost instantly as soon as the initial confusion was laid to rest.

One of the most brilliant artists ever!

I see people here typically recommend starting out in the middle of her career. I would say start out with The Kick Inside, her first album, and work yourself up from there. Kate has made one of the most impressive debut albums in history so why not just start with that? To grasp the enormity of this album, she was signed by EMI at the age of 17. A couple of years later, she releases The Kick Inside. Those who are familiar with the album know that for a teenage girl to make such an album is nothing short of amazing.

From there onto Lionheart, but more so Never For Ever, there is a real sense of development. The Dreaming and Hounds of Love are radically different from the early works. There's an interesting stoy underlying all this as, initially, England and the rest of the world doesn't know what Kate is either. Is she a pop singer, sex symbol and a singles maker or is she a serious "album artist"? Why does she make music? So, start from the beginning and see how she develops through her career would be my recommendation :)

Here's one of my favourites from her debut (done for a TV show) :



edit :

She had a lot of help for the choreography for Wuthering Heights actually .. But yes, she is mesmerizing. Both in this and the "original" video :D

I got Hounds of Love first, and I dug it but it didn't blow me away. Then I listened to this song... it might be my new favorite. It gives me chills every time I listen to it. I totally feel the love you have for her now Jackhammer :o:

I think I like the white dress video even more (done for the British release), nicely done music video. The song was appreciated in Europe and Australasia, but apparently not so much in America.

I've always liked Wuthering Heights from when I first heard it in the late 70s on the radio, it's hard to forget when you first heard it maybe. It has a very expressive yearning quality, which is maybe particularly feminine. While it has a nostalgic feel for me I like it because I think think it is just high quality music. Other superb melodies from that period include The Man with the Child in His Eyes, In Search of Peter Pan, The Infant Kiss and The Kick Inside.

Happy birthday Kate.

60 today.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...bout-kate-bush

Let's enjoy all things Kate Bush in this thread.

When Sherri was really young she could ape Kate to a tee. I wish I had an MP3 of her singing "The Man with a Child in his Eyes". Your minds would be blown.

Mike also has a great voice. He'd have to turn his back when he sang but he could do Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah" so incredible it would bring tears to your eyes.

Kate's music is really good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xckBwPdo1c

She's awesome. And a bit weird. But mostly awesome.

Probably be a new album soon.

You think so? I'm assuming there will never be another one, but I'd love to be wrong.

Yeah, she did that tour not that long ago. She seems to have been more active in the past three years or so. Released something the other year I think.

I'm sure there'll be another album. Any reason you think there will never be another one?

She did that big show that got released as a 3 disc set a few years ago. No new songs since 2011. And before that, it was 2005 and 1993 respectively. Those are some long gaps between albums! She's not getting any younger, and that tour with all those old songs had a sort of retrospective feeling over it.

I don't know... she might do a new album. I just wouldn't be surprised if she didn't. But you never know. I had also resigned to the expectation that Suzanne Vega would not do any more new music a bunch of years ago. Then she suddenly came back out of nowhere and released two new albums a couple years apart.

I guess that, if an artist starts taking so long between albums, I feel like they maybe don't have much left to say.

I was convinced Bowie wasn't dropping any new music before Where Are We Now came out.

Kate will not disappoint :cool:

Glen Matlock and Billy Idol at 2:38

You think so? To me it captured the spirit of the book pretty well. Cathy is a creep. Kate voice gives me the creeps. (in a good way)

Kate Bush
 

Kate Bush is often portrayed as otherworldly and ethereal .., she is one of the best songwriters and performers of the era.
In 2011, Kate Bush told Interview Magazine, “My desire was never to be famous. It was to try and create something interesting musically if I could.”
Big-time artists like St. Vincent and Adele have publicly expressed how Bush’s music influenced their own work. Prince noted her as his favorite lady. Even Tupac was a Kate Bush fan. Big Boi, a longtime stan of “Running up That Hill,” shared that he would listen to the song everyday on his bike ride to and from school.