Irgendwo in der Tiefe, gibt es ein Licht

Kate Bush, 2005.

The elphin's back
We all know the descriptions: she was 'weird', she was 'mysterious', she was a child prodigy who topped the charts. Yet she was always out of fashion, incomparable to anyone else in the music business, so un-cool, extremely un-hip and very un-pop, a musical and lyrical genius... She never liked fame, and then she disappeared without a trace.
Now Kate Bush is back with her first single in more than a decade, and her first album in twelve years. Since 1993, when her last album 'The Red Shoes' was released, there has been virtual silence, punctuated by sporadic public appearances, such as receiving a lifetime achievement award from Q in December 2001. In January 2002, she performed live for the first time in almost 15 years singing 'Comfortably Numb' as David Gilmour's special guest at his Royal Festival Hall concert. Kate also received the Ivor Novello award for Outstanding Contribution To British Music By A Songwriter in May 2002. For most of the past years, however, my Katie has kept out of the public gaze completely.

Her long absence from the charts has only heightened that so often mentioned 'mystique' that supposedly has always surrounded her. The silence since 'The Red Shoes' has even inspired a novel, Waiting for Kate Bush, by John Mendelssohn, about a fan postponing his suicide so he could hear her new record. Twelve years without producing a record would be a catastrophe for most popular artists - and their record companies. But the allure of Kate Bush has only increased since. She's on a different level, alone and ahead. Her creative absence merely reinforced her credibility, particularly when 'Hounds of Love' was covered by The Futureheads earlier this year, and even became a bigger chart success than Kate's original single.

Grande dame
It's hard to imagine Kate Bush has been around in music for almost 30 years now, and was a star when Madonna was still an unknown disco dancer, when Dido had just stopped wetting her bed (no pun intended), when Robbie Williams was still in kindergarten and when the boys of Westlife weren't even born yet. Kate was an overnight sensation. Her fame was instant, immediate and huge. Inspired by the plot of an Emily Bronte novel she had never actually read, her debut single 'Wuthering Heights', which topped the British charts in February 1978 and was a worldwide hit single, showcased Kate's original singing voice and her taste for the unusual. The teenage daughter of a doctor from Kent could have hardly made a more contrasting impression against the 'angry young men' in punk bands, who thought it was cool to know only two chords and to shout instead of sing.

As her album 'The Kick Inside' also raced up the charts, her record company immediately pressured her to record a follow-up album, ‘Lionheart’, released only eight months after her debut album. Then, Kate embarked on her first major concert tour – an exhausting tour de force across Europe. That first tour was also her last. What possibly contributed to her reluctance to tour afterwards was the death of her lighting director, who fell to his death on stage the night before a concert at the Hammersmith Odeon. Lost in a whirl of TV appearances, promotional interviews and the champagne lifestyle expected of fast-rising celebrities, Kate realised to her horror that she was despising every moment. Then, still only 21, she simply turned her back on fame. Embittered by the pressure of it all and the distractions from making music, she blamed the record company: "They took me away from everything familiar and I figured out then that music was a priority, not publicity, and that completely changed my life. I stopped doing all the things that were expected." She has held on to that ever since.

Reality check
Personally, I think Kate is much less 'mystical' than is usually presumed. My impression of her as a person is that she is probably rather ordinary and down-to-earth, intelligent and sensitive. Having a rich mind and making brilliantly unique and innovative music means just that, that you're a highly talented person, not some kind of evil witch. I'm convinced the key to her reclusiveness is very prosaic. For all the 'eccentric this' and 'esoteric that' cliches that surface in many newspaper articles about her comeback, could it just be Kate wants to be left alone and make music? That's how British singer-songwriter Roy Harper, a friend of Kate's, sees it. He was one of Bush's formative influences and collaborated with her in the 1980s and 1990s. In The Guardian, Harper is recently quoted saying: "She is lovely to work with, a true musician. There is no need to tell her what to do, she has already done it and she is ahead, making suggestions. She is very honest and very gentle, bright and full of creativity, the kind of girl you should've married, really. She is very private and family orientated now. When you are that good a person, the danger is that everybody takes the piss. The cure for that is to keep yourself out of the public eye."

Roy Harper: "Kate's the kind of girl you should have married."

Told you so. Kate herself has said: "The reclusive thing is because I don't go clubbing and I don't do a lot of publicity." (don't you love such an answer?!) "I'm a quiet, private person who has managed to hang around for a few years. Ridiculous, really. I didn't think it would be like this." For what we do know about Kate's private life, it seems that she has indeed been occupied by other, more pressing personal matters than dancing at the full moon out on the wiley, waiting for inspiration. After coping with the death of her mother, she split from her long-term partner, Del Palmer, a musician. She then began a relationship with guitarist Danny MacIntosh and in 1998, gave birth to a son. Kate saw no reason to announce the birth of Bertie, at least not until the press found out 18 months later. Not surprisingly, his mother has never allowed him to be photographed in public.
In a recent piece about Kate in The Daily Mirror, someone referred to as 'a friend' says: "In her ideal world Kate would simply release the record, people would enjoy the music and never think about her at all. But she knows life is not like that. She utterly loathes the showbiz aspect, and to say she's not looking forward to it is the understatement of the century. But Kate still has a compulsion to make music. In some ways, she wishes she didn't."
The agonies of her childhood she has mentioned in earlier interviews , maybe go some way to explaining Kate's almost neurotic hatred of public scrutiny: "My father has told me I used to dance to music on the telly. I was completely unselfconscious and I wasn't aware of people looking at me. One day some people came into the room, saw me and laughed - and from that moment on I stopped doing it. I think I've been trying to get back there ever since."
At school she discovered that she simply didn't fit in: "School was a very cruel environment and I was a loner. But I learnt to get hurt and I learnt to cope with it. My friends sometimes used to ignore me completely and that would upset me badly. I wasn't an easy, happy-go-lucky girl because I used to think about everything so much - and I think I probably still do.” Who knows, maybe this shyness still haunts her in middle age (she turned 47 this summer).

For a shy person, she has managed quite well though: her home, a £3 million 200-year-old red-brick mansion on a secluded island in the Thames in Berkshire, is surrounded by high walls, forbidding wooden gates and dense forest. I can't help but think of great 18th and 19th century British novels and envision Kate as a very English Duchess. She certainly has the kind of money that could afford her being a Duchess: her personal fortune is estimated £25 million, which would make her the second wealthiest British female singer ever, after Annie Lennox. When life's problems knock at your door, it's a safe idea that at least you don't have to worry about money, right?

My life with Kate
As a child and way up into my teen years, I never really liked popular music. Since I had a classical piano training and, unlike many others, actually enjoyed it, my interests in music were never really pop to begin with, except for ABBA of course. Pop was flat, loud, boring, simplistic and just plain stupid. It fell pale in comparion to the depth and richness of classical music. Kate however, was a different story. I was 15 years old when 'Running Up That Hill' was released, and I remember being immediately enchanted by its powerful, hypnotic melody and relentless, obsessive beats, that strange voice that seemed like a force trying to creep under your skin. The video was brilliant, with Kate not lip-synching the song and performing an amazing choreography with a very handsome, hot dancer. The follow-up single 'Cloudbusting' was a very sad and gripping story based on "A Book Of Dreams" by Peter Reich. The video featured Donald Sutherland as an inventor of a machine that can make rain, and Kate playing his son, a little boy, who sees his father kidnapped by the government.


On my sixteenth birthday, at the end of the summer of 1986, I bought the album from which these songs were taken as singles: 'Hounds Of Love'. Since that day, I've been hooked line and sinker. What I experienced when I first listened to that album, was mind boggling. It seemed like Kate exploded inside my head. The music set into motion a landslide of emotions and dreams. All the barriers I had myself surrounded with...this record crushed them in one huge blow. What was this strange music? Who was that strange and fascinating lady? How could this experience be joyful, intensely frightening, spooky, wonderful, tempting, strengthening, weakening, happy, moving, touching, sensitive, cruel, angelic, dark, twisted, truthful, all at the same time? I don't know the answer, but I decided to let it in. It was a life altering experience. In fact, few things I've encountered so far match that nuclear experience called 'Hounds Of Love'.

Over the period of a year or so, I bought Kate's back catalogue, in those days still on LP (CD's were around already, but too expensive for me). Each album was unique in itself, they all had an entirely different energy/atmosphere about them. I guess it was 'The Dreaming' I had most difficulty with to comprehend and 'Lionheart' I thought was the least appealing. 'The Dreaming' is a very angry and haunting record, and some songs, like the title track and 'Get Out Of My House' gave me the creeps. When I was about 19, and confused and insecure about my homosexuality, Kate in the meantime had made me a wonderful new record: 'The Sensual World'. It was gentle and sweet. Many songs on that album deal with trust, letting go and being truthful in relationships. I was in the middle of coming out and songs like 'Love And Anger', 'Walk Straight Down The Middle' and 'The Fog' gave me courage to finally tell the truth to my parents.

In 1991, I was on holiday in Ireland, which is the most beautiful country I've ever seen. I've been to many other countries before and after that, but the magnificence of Ireland is still unmatched for me. In some record store in a small alley somewhere in Dublin I found a cassette with 26 demo songs, recorded somewhere in 1976/1977. They had been circulating among fans for years but it was new to me. The recording itself is poor quality, but the melodies and lyrics of these songs are brilliant. Most of them appear to be recorded as home demos, with Kate just playing piano and singing. Some are recorded with a band. Maybe 10 or 11 tracks are early versions of songs that appear on Kate’s first three albums. The rest, however, consists of unreleased songs. I’ve been playing that tape endlessly for months after returning home from holiday. Around Christmas 1991 there was a single that’s not been released on any Kate Bush-album: ‘Rocket Man’, which appears on a tribute album with cover-versions of songs by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. And from that point on, there were still another two years in the wait before ‘The Red Shoes’ was released.

To many fans, 'The Red Shoes' was a disappointing record. Someone I know even called it 'the laziest effort in the history of popular music'. OK, he was grumpy then and had a little too much to drink, but I must admit it is not her strongest effort. Some songs go on too long, some express a kind of fake relaxedness ('Rubberband Girl' and 'Eat The Music' don't convince at all). What struck me most about 'The Red Shoes' was that it really is sort of a dark record, there's a lot of despair and like the title track it deals with losing control, it's about someone drowning in life's grief. The record was my comfort, because its subject matter uncannily matched in many ways my own life at the time. I watched Kate's last TV-performance to date, on Top Of The Pops in November 1994: 'And So Is Love'. She stood on stage stoically, nearly motionless. Her face expressed great fatigue, and at that moment I realized that wasn't part of the act, but instead her personal reality and that she would be away for much longer than four years. Intuition. And I was right.

During the long absence, I had backcatalogue-Kate periods occasionally. Those were spent reading countless of interviews, reviews and background information, or doing research on Kate's songs. The internet gave me easy access to loads of information. Many interesting details, so far unknown to me, gave me a deeper appreciation of her work. Through Napster, I downloaded every single missing track, mostly collaborations with other artists. An interesting tribute-CD was released in 1998: "I wanna be Kate: the songs of Kate Bush". Many terrific interpretations. Her unannounced live performance of 'Comfortably Numb' in early 2002 proved she still had her voice. In December 2004, Kate announced her new album for somewhere in 2005. This time, there's not an inch of her oeuvre not in my possession.

Which brings us to today. I've decided to indulge in being a devotee for the last time in my life. I know at my age I should know better. But I can't deny being very excited that we finally can enjoy new material from Kate. It will be a full-circle experience. And closure too.