Pics of Kate Bush: John Parder Bush
J W Waterhouse, ‘The Lady of Shallot’.
Kate Bush was always upfront in her literary and artistic influences. She essayed The Brontes of course, but also Tennyson, Shakespeare and John William Waterhouse. Her Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic was unique in a time of punk, prog and so on, but the emerging New Romantics/ Blitz Kids and Goths owe a lot to these influences too, putting together theatrical and literary dressing -up box looks, not found in regular outlets.
As with the other legendary shape-shifter David Bowie, she’d studied dance and mime with the late Lindsay Kemp, whose practice infused much of her early movement choreography. But she continued to draw from many eclectic sources, some quite esoteric.
In her amazing album, ‘Never For Ever’ she drew influence from French film director Francois Truffaut and his film ‘The Bride Wore Black’, for raunchy revenge song, ‘The Wedding List’.
The stratospheric album,’Hounds Of Love’ from 1985, featured the gorgeous, dreamy ‘Cloudbusting’. Donald Sutherland, no less, stars alongside Bush in the beautiful video. It was a reference to ‘A Book Of Dreams’, written by Peter Reich, which was a tribute to his psychoanalyst father Wilhelm who had indeed devised a cloudbusting machine in his shed in a bid to control the weather. It’s extremely poignant, a paean to the loving bond between father and son.
Then there’s ‘The Sensual World ‘ and updated ‘Flower Of The Mountain’, which pulls from Molly Bloom’s breathless soliloquy in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ turning it into a lusty, romantic tangle- and Bloom is in Joyce’s febrile scribblings, a carnal figure of idealised Irish womanhood.
In these iterations, Bush was about as far from rock ‘n’ roll as you can go, carving out a singular presence- one foot in the past, one foot in the future. We’re so lucky to still have her, even if her recent work hasn’t burned as brightly.
She has spawned a slew of female artists, some of whom are wonderful (Sparks; Bjork, Tori Amos, Martina Topley-Bird, Alison Goldfrapp) others, pretty mediocre (Florence Welsh, The Last Dinner Party, Marina, the recent Roisin Murphy albums) but her appeal is timeless.
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