Kate Bush: Finally, something for the grown-upsEarly next month, Kate Bush releases Aerial, her first new album since The Red Shoes back in November 1993. Even by the relaxed schedules adopted by pop's more established artists, this is an extraordinary career hiatus - not quite the 20 years separating Steely Dan's Gaucho and Two Against Nature, perhaps, but well on the way there.
Entire pop scenes and musical movements have budded, bloomed and withered in the interim - Oasis's first singles, for instance, appeared in 1994 - but such is the diminutive Kate's enduring artistic stature that the forthcoming double-album has prompted a feverish flurry of record-company attention on its behalf. Some would consider their concern paranoiac - only last week, I was accosted like a shoplifter in the street by an EMI security guard, for the terrible crime of believing that the lyric-sheet I had been given at a playback of the album was mine to keep. Apparently, none shall know of Her words until the two discs are actually brought down from the mountaintop to the record shop. But we'll let that pass.
The more pertinent concern is whether her music remains relevant in a music landscape that has seen Britpop come and go, grunge atrophy into skate-metal, hip-hop conquer the known world, and talent-contest TV reduce chart pop to a production-line of vacuity. Changes flash by ever more rapidly in the modern, computer-assisted music world, and in decoupling from its dizzy progress for a dozen years, Kate Bush runs a serious risk of getting flattened like a hedgehog crossing a motorway upon her return.
Extraordinarily, she manages to traverse both carriageways with only superficial damage to a few spines: indeed, such is the idiosyncratic nature of her work that she could probably disappear for a half-century and still sustain her own unique position in the pop firmament. But then, who else would write about an obsessive-compulsive housewife or attempt a vocal duet with trilling birds, or, in the most courageous of the album's many unusual strategies, sing huge strings of numbers, a gambit that brings new meaning to the old critic's chestnut about being happy to listen to someone singing the telephone directory?
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http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/features/article320996.eceI am SOOOO looking forward to this! :woohoo:
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