Happy Birthdays

Happy 35th Birthday this week to two seminal early 1980s albums:

Architecture & Morality 

by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

and

Tin Drum by Japan 

also a Happy 30th Birthday to

Brotherhood - New Order 

and

Electric Café - Kraftwerk

Compilation albums which were also released in early November 1986:

Kate Bush - The Whole Story 
The Police - Every Breath You Take

Kate goes Wild

Kate Bush will publish her new single next week. Wild Man will also be previewed on Radio2's Ken Bruce Show on Monday 10th October. The release comes ahead of the new album 50 Words for Snow out in November, when it might even snow. List of international pre-order sites here, although too bad if you live in Burkina Faso.



As a tie-in to our I Love 1981 series let's remember how gorgeous Kate was thirty years ago in this little number .. in the song Sat In Your Lap, I mean.

'snow joke

..this time it's for real.

Kate Bush has a new album ready. It's due out in November.
'50 Words for Snow' features seven brand new songs, all about falling snow. 65 minutes. Wow. 


snow-info

Kate Bush has at last revealed why she's been dressed like this all summer.

Kate's cut

A rather cunning headline from The Quietus spotted on twitter had us trembling in our seats for about ten seconds last week. The "new" Kate Bush album will in fact be a re-working of two previous albums The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, which are incidentally two of four Bush albums which begin with 'The'.
The album entitled "Director's Cut" will be out in May while a re-worked "Deeper Understanding" from Red Shoes has been chosen as lead track, or single as it is sometimes known, in April.

A bit of a disappointment as Kate has oft said that she never wanted to go back on her past material, and lack of de-luxe re-issues or remasters with demos, live tracks etc. would testify that philosophy, save perhaps from the re-recording of Wuthering Heights for The Whole Story in 1986 (yes that's 25 years ago folks) and the box set anthology This Woman's Work in 1990, and quite frankly we were expecting brand new material this year...
But never mind, Director's Cut (crap title and crap cover btw) will give us a chance to get a, er, deeper understanding of two of her lesser known albums.

The question does arise though: is the enigmatic Kate working 'backwards' to cover all her back catalogue? Answers on a postcard...

I Love 1980 - 17

Kate Bush - Babooshka

There's not much more to be said about this Kate Bush mega-hit from 30 years ago apart from the fact that it was the one which, perhaps even more than Wuthering Heights, made her a star and which people will most probably remember the most.

So let's let Kate do all the talking this time, thanks to this Australian TV interview from 1980, and anyway I could sit and listen to her all day and all night if necessary and never tire of her voice. The sort of girl you'd always wanted to marry if you'd been a bit posher, a bit richer and maybe even a musician. Oh well..perhaps next time.

Listen: Kate Bush - Babooshka
Babooshka chart stats

Kate Bush - Never Forever
Just a quick PS about the ensuing album Never Forever which opens with Babooshka and contains the previous and successive hit singles Breathing and Army Dreamers tucked away at the end. I mention the singles becuase they're all just so brilliant and, well for the usual reasons I didn't 'discover' the album until much later. It's a meister-werk of course and in my mind even better than the debut and the commerically successful Hounds of Love of a few years later. I love the relative simplicity of it although Kate is already dabbling in sampling, drum machines and various electronic effects. Quite rightly it went straight into the charts at number one and gained Kate so many 'firsts'. Amaaaazing! Surely due for a remastered deluxe edition?

Listen: Kate Bush - All We Ever Look For
Never Forever chart stats

I Love 1980 - appendix 1

As a sort of an offshoot of the I Love 1980 series I'll start with an 'appendix' series too, mostly to show the influence of music from that year over the decades to come and particularly the up-to-date stuff the "kids" are listening to these days.

I was particularly surprised to ocme across this track by Italian rap group Club Dogo, who have clearly been listening to a bit of Kate Bush and, who knows, may even have spotted the LIM post of a few weeks back...wooooooooowww amaaaaazing.

I Love 1980 - 8

Breathing - Kate Bush

Now trying to get chronologically back on track there's a bit of a lull in good 1980 single territory at the mo (the calm before the storm...) although I did notice that this single by Kate Bush was in the charts at this time of year thirty years ago.
And pretty 'wow amazing' stuff it was too; our Kate comes back from the luke-warmly received second album Lionheart with a slow, complex song ("my little symphony") about a foetus, and the perils of smoking and nuclear fallout. Wow.

Musically it's far from catchy let alone danceable or radio-friendly (over five minutes long) and in complete contrast to a lot of the pop pap that was going around (think Johnny Logan, Nolan Sisters) and even the post-punk pop of, say, Blondie, Undertones et al. Its chart success however just shows how well established Ms Bush' fan base was, and although Breathing hardly makes for easy listening the single is a classic in its own right and is a testament to Kate as a unique and 'who gives a toss about the rest' recording and performance artist. Released a full three months ahead of the Never Forever album (more of that later, readers) Breathing reached an amaaaazing number 16 on the British charts.



Kate Bush: "um, my next song is about a foetus and nuclear fallout. Sing along if you like.."

Women of quality and distinction

Thank you to the Kate Bush tribute myspace for highlighting a soon-to-be aired BBC documentary entitled Queens of British Pop, featuring among others our Kate, Siouxsie Sue, Suzie Quatro and many many more. The link given is not valid but the BBC press blurb is as follows:

Queens Of British Pop Ep 1/2
New series
Unplaced
Day and time to be confirmed BBC ONE

Queens Of British Pop is a two-part series which celebrates 12 female singers and icons who have influenced British pop music from the Sixties to the present day. The series features new interviews with iconic stars including Sandie Shaw, Suzi Quatro, Siouxsie Sioux, Annie Lennox and Leona Lewis.

In the first programme, narrator Liza Tarbuck takes viewers back to the early Sixties and on to the cusp of the Eighties, exploring the lives and careers of Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, Marianne Faithfull, Suzi Quatro, Kate Bush and Siouxsie Sioux. They are all female artists who pioneered some of Britain's defining musical movements, from the Swinging Sixties through to glam rock and punk.

The programme features new interviews with Sandie Shaw, Marianne Faithfull, Suzi Quatro, Siouxsie Sioux and contributions from friends and fans, including Sir Tom Jones, Lulu, Burt Bacharach, John Lydon, Martha Reeves, Nancy Sinatra, Mark Radcliffe, Henry Winkler, Marc Almond, Peter Gabriel, Claire Grogan, Jarvis Cocker, Kiki Dee and Adele. They give an insight into the constraints and obstacles these pop icons have had to overcome, how they have defied and defined contemporary opinion and changing notions of pop femininity over the years and how their journeys helped shape and influence the next generation of female pop stars.

This celebration of British female pop stardom concludes next week, as Liza takes viewers from the early Eighties to the present day, completing the odyssey by looking at the impact made by Annie Lennox, Alison Moyet, Kylie Minogue, Geri Halliwell, Amy Winehouse and Leona Lewis.


Kate Bush : "oi..who you calling eccentric? I'm a pop queen me!"