November 7, 2005, somewhere around 4pm. Here on CD, its cover depicting a mysterious waveform, a beautiful, honeyed backdrop and a typeface that reminded me of Emirates Airlines, was Aerial, Kate Bush’s first album release in a dozen years.
Twenty years have mellowed that feeling of utter improbability in holding a new Kate Bush album in my hands – but only a little. The intervening years have since brought us more improbabilities – two albums in one year (2011’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words For Snow), a handful of public appearances and, most improbable of all, a return to the live stage with 2014’s triumphant Before The Dawn residency in London.
But it was the perceived ‘wait’ for Aerial – a wait that inspired John Mendelsohn’s novel/non-fiction hybrid Waiting For Kate Bush, a wait built up to grandiose proportions by a British press eager for any glimpse of this apparently reclusive icon – that her fan community so keenly and acutely remembers. The days before social media, when any tiny detail – a tantalising report of an Abbey Road recording session in 2003 on a fan forum, a rare sighting at a Buckingham Palace reception – was pored over, dissected, analysed. Of course, for Kate Bush herself, in her embrace of the domesticity of motherhood, she was running towards the real world, not away from it. But the mysteries abounded as she lived a quieter life with her husband and son in their home in Berkshire with its own recording studio. To paraphrase Tom Waits, what was she building in there?
Giving her audience their money’s worth following its long gestation period, Aerial arrived as a fully-formed double album – expanding on the model of 1985’s landmark Hounds Of Love with a disc of seemingly unrelated songs (one would struggle to call Aerial’s first disc, A Sea Of Honey, ‘pop’ in the way you might the first side of Hounds Of Love) and a second disc made up of a conceptual suite. A Sky Of Honey, like The Ninth Wave, tracks a period of time towards daybreak – but, where The Ninth Wave is a dark, nightmarish vision of isolation and fear, A Sky Of Honey delights in the beauty of nature in an altogether more pastoral environment of contentment.
It is telling that an artist with such a keen, critical eye, an artist on a constant quest to “[find] the right atmosphere, the right emotional quality” chose to perform, in their entirety, these two contrasting song suites – terrifying seascape and sun-kissed elegance – as part of Before The Dawn, an artist revelling in bringing to live performance two of her most fully-realised creations.
Aerial, then, clearly cut the mustard in Bush’s esteem. Contemporary reviews were largely positive – “a remarkable surprise” (Entertainment Weekly), “it isn’t perfect, but it is magnificent” (Stylus), “it is filled with things only Kate Bush would do” (The Guardian) – but some critics missed the point somewhat and contributed to a vague perception of Aerial as a record about, and generated by, the mundanity of everyday life – of school runs, hoovering the house, washing your husband’s socks. It was as if Bush, known for songs of such supernatural extravagance as ‘Wuthering Heights,’ for singing about illicit gay love (‘Kashka From Baghdad’), nuclear fallout from the perspective of an unborn foetus (‘Breathing’), or obtaining emotional nourishment from a computer program (‘Deeper Understanding’), had settled into a disappointingly dull malaise, the shrinking of a world where she now sang about washing machines – literally – and her lovely son.
Reductive seems too mild a word for such an interpretation – anyone familiar with the Kate Bush oeuvre will know she was always one for finding beauty in the everyday, that gleam of light in the ordinary used as a jumping-off point (“you bump into a friend you haven’t seen in a long time,” she sang on ‘Strange Phenomena’), She always recognised and celebrated the beauty in simplicity, and elevated it with complex arrangements, daring melodies, and subtle poetry. The domesticity of motherhood and home life of course informs (and even enhances) Aerial – to disregard it as inessential or lesser because it lacks the perceived vigour and intensity of vision of prior works is demeaning.
If anything, the more homespun feel of Aerial beautifully illuminates its themes of birdsong, daylight, and the natural world. For all Bush’s perceived perfectionism, there is a relaxed, unfussy feeling to the material – some of the vocal takes are audibly imperfect in comparison to some of her past recordings and you get the sense of that search for the “right emotional quality” taking absolute precedence. She told Rolling Stone France in 2006 that she “[doesn’t] believe in perfection. For instance, in ‘Mrs. Bartolozzi’ the voice plays with the piano. There’s a part I really hate. But as part as the whole song, I couldn’t get the same emotional quality on the other takes. This version is a bit out of tune, I don’t pronounce the words the way I wished but the emotion I was looking for is there.”
‘Mrs. Bartolozzi’ is one of the songs on the first disc, A Sea Of Honey, and one of its most divisive. It’s the one with the repeated chorus of “washing machine” that so troubled some critics two decades ago; far from being a song about a washing machine, though, the washing machine is a device through which Bush can explore ideas of lost identity, the renewing properties of water, and the power of daydreams to break through the humdrum mundanity of daily life. “What I wanted to get was the sense of this journey, where you’re sitting in front of this washing machine, and then almost as if in a daydream, you’re suddenly standing in the sea,” she told the BBC in 2005.
Is ‘Mrs. Bartolozzi’ herself the “washing machine”? She drifts off into a reverie with the “slooshy-sloshy / get that dirty shirty clean” segment, which always reminded me of a ‘50s radio advert, or the mopping scene in Disney’s Cinderella. Is she not only getting lost in the everyday but trying to erase it? “Clothes are such a strong part of who a human being is,” she told Mojo in 2005. “Y’know, skin cells, the smell. Somebody thought that maybe there’d been this murder going on, I thought that was great. I love the ambiguity.”
In ‘Mrs. Bartolozzi’, Bush captures the bridge between dream and reality, the everyday and the extraordinary, that has always been such a core part of her work.
She does the same on the album’s other solo piano piece, the exquisite ‘A Coral Room’, a profound rendering of an underwater city “draped in net,” as she contemplates the loss of her mother Hannah. There is so much space in the song, so much raw beauty and emotion; it’s one of the purest evocations of memory, grief, and love in the Bush catalogue. “It wasn’t difficult to write,” she said. “The bit that was difficult was that I did consider not putting it on the record. I wasn’t sure how I would feel having it on there.”
It’s a boon for listeners that it is. The haunting “little brown jug” section (“my mother and her little brown jug / it held her milk / and now it holds our memories”), complete with Michael Wood’s counterpoint vocals, is another example of something she does so well – bringing in a male voice as a contrasting element that can be variously menacing (‘Leave It Open’), demonic (‘Get Out Of My House’), elegiac (‘Hello Earth’), or kindly (‘The Fog’).
The other songs on A Sea Of Honey are awash with synth textures, unusual percussion, and vocal experimentation – ‘King Of The Mountain’, Aerial’s first teaser, builds with intensity as it locks into a reggae groove with increasingly penetrating drum crashes as the “whistling wind” blows louder and louder. The strange, slowly hypnotic ‘Joanni’ and ‘π’, with its rubbery bass line, are textural mood pieces and, particularly in the case of the latter, boasting of a strangely keening melody as Bush takes singing the phonebook to its next logical phase – singing pi to its 78th decimal place, then from its 101st to 137th. “I really like the challenge of singing numbers,” she told Mark Radcliffe in 2005. “Because numbers are so unemotional as a lyric to sing. It was really fascinating singing that. Trying to sort of put an emotional element into singing about a seven you know, into really care about that nine.”
‘How to be Invisible,’ surely a lost second single, has all the spookery of a Stevie Nicks Fleetwood Mac classic, while ‘Bertie,’ far from being saccharine, uses its Renaissance madrigal arrangement to beautiful, elegant effect as Bush sings of the pure joy of motherhood. “I wanted to try to give it an arrangement that wasn’t terribly obvious. So I went for sort of this early music,” she said.
A Sea Of Honey is strange, elegant, melodic, and beautiful in all its uniqueness – everything you would want a Kate Bush album to be. If Aerial had only been made up of these seven songs, that ‘wait’ would still have been worth it. But, fortunately, more was still to come.
For some artists, concept pieces can end up as a bit of a millstone round the neck but for Kate Bush the arc of a concept allows space for further concentrated experimentation and an impetus to try something new – just as the narrative of The Ninth Wave generated the blunt neo-classical ‘Under Ice’ or the traditional Irish music of ‘Jig Of Life,’ A Sky Of Honey, far from bucolic mundanity, brings us the flamenco/jazz hybrid of ‘Sunset,’ the dubby, bats-in-flight ‘Somewhere In Between’ (surely the most perfect evocation of dusk?) and, in ‘Aerial,’ a weirdly pulsating four-to-the-floor leaving-the-club-at-6am-to-raucous-birdsong prog opera. Perceived mistakes – a theme in ‘An Architect’s Dream’ – can lead to exciting avenues: “I think in a lot of creative processes,” she said, “that’s the best thing can happen to you… is to make a mistake, and it’s something you would never have consciously thought of, and it just happens. And it gives you somewhere to go off to that is far more interesting than something you would’ve thought of.”
As always, Bush brings the themes of her work – in this case, the conflation of birdsong, light, and language – to life with the unique interplay between the acoustic and the technological. Grand piano sits alongside birdsong and a romantic string arrangement (‘Prologue’), the beautiful bass, such a hallmark of her work, wraps around euphoric vocal harmonies and guitar (‘Sunset’), maniacal laughter morphs into birdsong and throbbing percussion (‘Aerial’) in a way that communicates something so eloquent about the common thread linking different forms of language, the community of a shared world even if it may not be articulated in conventional words. Bush takes it to another level by imitating birdsong herself on the curiously beautiful ‘Aerial Tal’, which also formed the basis of the album’s promotional TV advert. It all goes back, again, to her quest for the right emotional feeling.
One of Bush’s most powerful skills is to capture the essence of a particular period of time in musical form – the autumnal The Sensual World a prime example – but don’t ‘Prologue’ and ‘An Architect’s Dream’ just sound like a sunny afternoon in the garden? Doesn’t the oceanic pulse of ‘Nocturn’ (“a sea of honey, a sky of honey”) capture that chill of a moonlight night? Isn’t the ebullient joy of ‘Sunset’ evocative of those burning colours, “where sands sing in crimson, red, and rust,” the poignant pull of an ending and a beginning all at once?
“What kind of language is this?” Bush asks towards the climax of ‘Aerial,’ merging human laughter with the approaching dawn chorus. The language of Aerial is rapture at the beauty of nature, the extraordinary in the everyday; its musical language is as broad, diverse, and beautiful as its subjects would suggest.
“I suppose I was just kind of playing with the idea of how could human language connect with birdsong,” she said. “It is just the natural rhythm.”
Bush’s own natural rhythm led to the twelve-year wait for Aerial; in a remarkable example of our morphing perceptions of time, that gap is now two years shorter than the one since Bush’s last LP, 50 Words For Snow which, to me, at least, feels fairly recent. “I think I did worry about there being such a long gap,” she told Mark Radcliffe in 2005. “I was worried that… without wanting to sound sentimental, I was worried that people would forget about me.”
Not likely – Aerial stands strong in the firmament of the very best Kate Bush records. And surely the only record that could possibly make me think of Kate Bush every time I hear a pigeon cooing (and I know I’m not the only one). There is a real artist’s confidence in its lambent quality, its mature elegance, that rewards repeated listening and, two decades on, still reveals new surprises. So yes, it was definitely worth the wait and I will be playing it again today. “What a lovely afternoon…”
