The 1961 song Kate Bush called her all-time favourite: “Beautiful”
The word ‘ordinary’ didn’t really belong anywhere near Kate Bush whenever she was making her records.
She often gravitated towards the kinds of songs that had something to say beyond the typical love song format, and there was no way that she was going to try to make music that sounded like everyone else once she came out with ‘Wuthering Heights’. There were worlds of music out there that no one had ever heard, and Bush was going to do her best to sample everything that she could.
But that didn’t mean every single one of her songs was going to be easy to understand, either. It took her a long time to get a handle on what she was doing, and while she wasn’t often cut out for the live stage whenever she played, it made much more sense for her to lock herself away in the studio and create some of the best songs that she could and find out if she wanted to perform after the fact.
Because when you think about it, Bush is like a painter in a lot of respects. She spends years trying to tweak pieces of her masterpiece until they are as perfect as they are ever going to be, and even if it is a bit jarring when one of her records comes out, it’s hard to think of them being any more finished than they are. She wanted to take her music to the nth degree, but sometimes the greatest songs that she ever heard were based on making things simple.
Not everything needed to have a massive arrangement around it to sound great, and even when Elton John hit on a song like ‘Rocket Man’, it wasn’t out of the question for Bush to disassemble the whole thing and make something entirely different when she did her toned-down version of the song on ukulele. But that all comes from her thinking outside the box, like her heroes did when they made records.
She wasn’t afraid to talk up some of the less-remembered artists as her favourite musicians, and when she talked about her favourite tunes, she felt that a song like ‘Sun Arise’ was just as important as John’s best work. The tune was meant to be a more lighthearted tune, but that touch from George Martin behind the production made the Rolf Harris tune irresistible to her when she was a kid.
The song wasn’t the most thoughtful tune in the world, but that didn’t matter so long as it captured a feeling, with Bush recalling, “This is beautifully produced by George Martin, sung and composed by Rolf himself and also featuring him on the didgeridoo. Rolf is such a multi-talented man, this song is full of atmosphere and is still one of my all-time favourite tracks. Rolf is heard on The Dreaming as well as Aerial, where he pops up briefly in the persona of a pavement artist.”
And it’s not like Bush was the only one who saw what Harris was going for on the song. Of all people, Alice Cooper managed to do a fairly decent version of the tune on his album Love It To Death, but whereas the original had a more hopeful attitude, Cooper was willing to bend it in every single direction to make it sound sinister, just like Bush would do with some of her songs later on.
Bush already had a wealth of material to draw from when listening to some of her favourite artists, but sometimes a song as simple as this actually works wonders for teaching people how to write music. Nothing has to be complicated to be good, and even when Bush made her best songs, it was always about holding onto the melody that was at the centre of the tune rather than everything around it.
