Kate Bush has spoken of her plans to start working on new music in a new interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Appearing on the show to promote Little Shrew, a new animated film that she wrote and directed, Bush was asked about whether she was working on new material. She clarified that she hadn’t yet begun writing or recording anything having spent recent years focusing on archival releases of her back catalogue, including vinyl reissues last year of all of her albums.
Bush added, however, that she was “very keen” to start working on a new album when those archival projects and the promotion of Little Shrew are fully finished. “I’ve got lots of ideas and I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space – it’s been a long time,” she said. “Particularly the last year, I’ve felt really ready to start doing something new.”
Fans shouldn’t expect a return to live performance soon from Bush though, as she said “I’m not there yet” in reference to comments made recently by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour that he was trying to persuade her to do live shows again. Bush’s last gigs were a 22-date residency at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2014.
Little Shrew, Bush’s new short film, is set to her 2011 track ‘Snowflake’, which appeared on her album 50 Words For Snow. The black-and-white animation aims to raise money for the charity War Child and is free to watch now on Bush’s website. Viewers of the film are encouraged to donate funds to War Child as well as other charities supporting children affected by conflict.
“I started working on it a couple of years ago,” Bush said of Little Shrew on BBC Radio 4. “It was not long after the Ukrainian war broke out, and I think it was such a shock for all of us. It’s been such a long period of peace we’d all been living through. And I just felt I wanted to make a little animation that would feature, originally, a little girl. It was really the idea of children caught up in war. I wanted to draw attention to how horrific it is for children.
“I think we’ve all been through very difficult times. These are dark times that we’re living in and I think, to a certain extent, everyone is just worn out. We went through the pandemic – that was a huge shock – and I think we felt that, once that was over, that we would be able to get on with some kind of normal life. But in fact it just seems to be going from one situation to another, and more wars seem to be breaking out all the time.”
Listen to Bush’s appearance on the Today programme here.
