Three weeks ago, one of the world’s greatest living songwriters returned to live performance after thirty five years of silence. Kate Bush is in the midst of a run of shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, the very venue where she last performed at the conclusion of her one and only tour, way back in 1979.
 

When Bush initially made a splash, at age nineteen, much of the media attention focused on her precociousness, her wide-ranging and sometimes shrill voice, and her elaborate, passionate dancing and sometimes wacky choreography. But in the decades since her debut, long after her peers have ceased to be relevant, after her beauty and even her fiery voice have weakened, it is her songwriting that remains her most remarkable trait, among many remarkable traits.

Like Emily Bronte before her, young Kate Bush was a fantasist. While her first three albums have thrilling moments, the truly remarkable aspects are her performances, and her work as a vocal and musical arranger. Her songs, on the other hand, are notable chiefly for how good they are for having been written by someone so young, with presumably so little life experience. They are best when they stay in the realm of the fantastic (“Violin,”), when they are overtly theatrical and over the top (“James and the Cold Gun,”), or coyly smart (“Them Heavy People,”) or lyrically vague enough to not draw attention away from the soaring, swooping melodies or the complex arrangements (“Wuthering Heights,” her first and biggest hit.)

When the songs move into the realm of the observation, such as “L’Amour Looks Something Like You,” the effect is something akin to a precocious teenager playing dress-up. No matter how compelling the melody and the arrangement, the scene is somehow distanced from reality, without the pleasure of the overtly fantastic.
 

I’m hanging on the Old Goose Moon
You look like an angel
Sleeping it off at a station
Were you only passing through?
I’m dying for you just to touch me
And feel all the energy rushing right up-a-me
L’amour looks something like you

But, really, this is comparing Kate Bush to herself. What teenager penned better songs? Who, exactly, were her peers as a songwriter?

In my estimation, Kate Bush’s fourth, fifth, and sixth albums, The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, and The Sensual World, stand as some of the greatest achievements in songwriting in the last half century. Unlike performers who step on the performance treadmill and run for as long as they are able, Kate Bush said goodbye to the stage in 1979, and said hello to self-production, self-direction, her own recording studio, her own goals, on her own time.

And presumably, the time off from performing and the increasing time between recordings meant time to live and to grow as a person.

“Mother Stands for Comfort” is a bit of an oddity on 1986’s Hounds of Love, sandwiched in between songs of greater length and complexity. But the streamlined lyric makes a useful comparison to the poetry-class noodlings of “L’Amour.” To the accompaniment of programmed drums, samples of breaking glass, grand piano, and a throbbing, alien fretless bass, Kate whispers and shakes her way through the oblique narrative.
 

She knows that I’ve been doing something wrong,

But she won’t say anything.

She thinks that I was with my friends yesterday,

But she won’t mind me lying,

Because

Mother stands for comfort.

Mother will hide the murderer.

The exact scenario isn’t clear from the lyrics. Is there a literal murder? An abortion? The narrative might not be forthcoming, but both the feelings and the dressings are explicit and real. The song is at once mournful and warning, cold and comforting.

It’s an oddity amongst the pulsing grandeur of the rest of the album, a breath between plunge and ascent, but for that it is no less great. Kate Bush takes this intimacy further on her follow-up album, 1989’s The Sensual World, an album full of songs that ramp up the fantastic and the mystical with the mundane details of a real life in the real world. In “Heads We’re Dancing,” it’s not just any charming manipulator she finds herself dancing with at a party– it’s Hitler. In “Rocket’s Tail,” two lovers walk along a bridge at night… I want to describe the story of the song, but the words do it so well themselves, conversational and clear and fitted to stunning unaccompanied singing by Kate and the Trio Bulgarka.

That November night, looking up into the sky,
You said,

“Hey, wish that was me up there–
It’s the biggest rocket I could find,
And it’s holding the night in its arms
If only for a moment.
I can’t see the look in its eyes,
But I’m sure it must be laughing.”

But it seemed to me
the saddest thing I’d ever seen,
And I thought you were crazy,
wishing such a thing.

I saw only a stick on fire,
Alone on its journey
Home to the quickening ground,
With no one there to catch it.

I put on my pointed hat
And my black and silver suit,
And I check my gunpowder pack
And I strap the stick on my back.
And, dressed as a rocket on Waterloo Bridge–
Nobody seems to see me.
Then, with the fuse in my hand,
And now shooting into the night

And then, silence.

After 1993’s disappointing The Red Shoes, it seemed as though Kate Bush’s recorded output might have met the same fate as her live performance, abandoned due to stress or personal needs or even disinterest. But after twelve years of silence came 2005’s Aerial.

It’s a difficult album to evaluate on its own merits, a sprawling mess of songs that go on too long and others that should have been cut completely. But amongst it all are some of the most ambitious songs I’ve ever heard.

The highlight of the album is the stunning “Mrs. Bartolozzi.” Dread and grief and remembered intimacies, all at a distance, as the couple’s clothes tumble in the spin cycle. Like “Mother Stands for Comfort,” the central fact of the song, the tragedy at the heart, is off-stage, this time never mentioned in the song itself.
 

I watched them go ’round and ’round
my blouse wrapping itself around your trousers
and oh the waves are going out
my skirt floating up around my waist
as I wade out into the surf
oh and the waves are coming in
oh and the waves are going out
oh and you’re standing right behind me
little fish swim between my legs

“Mrs. Bartolozzi” reaches a peak that few songs ever even aspire to, beautiful and ugly, both soothing and thrilling, explicit and mysterious. It’s a song that took Kate Bush a lifetime to write, even if the basic skills required were with her almost from the very beginning.

I don’t know who exactly reads these things, what your motivation might be for making it this far. If you’ve heard these songs and really listened you probably don’t need convincing. If you haven’t heard these songs, I don’t think it’s very likely you clicked through in the first place.

But sometimes, when you see something spectacular, you need to tell someone else, if only to affirm to yourself, yes, I saw that spectacular thing. I saw it and it burned up as it shot across the sky and we were there to see it then, weren’t we?

Thanks Kate for the lifetime of music, and thanks to all of you for making it this far.

Kate Bush discography

The Kick Inside 1978
Lionheart 1978
Never for Ever 1980
The Dreaming 1982
Hounds of Love 1985
The Sensual World 1989
The Red Shoes 1993
Aerial 2005
50 Words for Snow 2011

This post is part of a series called Panoptisongs, focusing on multi-dimensional analysis of songs and song craft.