The 1972 song Kate Bush called “one of my favourite tracks ever”, and her fascinating cover
I think that if the moon was able to make music, it would come up with a collection of songs that sounded a lot like the works of Kate Bush.
Celestial, cosmic, otherworldly and yet so familiar to us, superlunary and tidally cascading, all of Bush’s best music has got an extra-special extra-terrestrial feeling to it, and at her very best, she can lower the gravity around you and have you walking on air. So it makes total sense that she would have been drawn to such a song about floating amongst the stars as Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’.
“I remember buying this when it came out as a single by Elton John,” Bush has said of the 1972 track, “I couldn’t stop playing it; I loved it so much. Most artists in the mid 70s played guitar, but Elton played piano, and I dreamed of being able to play like him”.
Bush would have been just 13 the first time she heard ‘Rocket Man’, but it wasn’t very long at all until she was following in Elton’s platform-boot footsteps and changing the world with a series of piano-driven ballads of her own. Just as flamboyant and extravagantly outrageous as John at his peak, Bush took the world by storm just a few short years later when playing piano and singing her fantastical songs like ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘The Man With the Child in His Eyes’, ‘Them Heavy People’ and ‘James and the Cold Gun’. We’ve all been in her orbit ever since.
In 1989, Elton John and the songwriter behind all of his best lyrics, Bernie Taupin, were putting together a retrospective cover collection to commemorate their finest work together (and some of the songs that don’t quite fit that distinction, as well), Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin.
On the album, The Beach Boys sing ‘Crocodile Rock’, and Joe Cocker sings ‘Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word’. Rod Stewart sings ‘Your Song’, while Tina Turner took on ‘The Bitch is Back’. Kate Bush was asked to contribute a performance of her own, and there was only one song that she wanted to sing.
“They gave me complete creative control, and although it was a bit daunting to be let loose on one of my favourite tracks ever, it was really exciting”, she said of her version of ‘Rocket Man’, “I wanted to make it different from the original and thought it could be fun to turn it into a reggae version. It meant a great deal to me that they chose it to be the first single release from the album.”
It certainly is an interesting choice to give the song a light and bouncing reggae rhythm, but perhaps that helps to give the track something of a weightlessness akin to stepping out into space. The rest of the production, presumably made by utilising Bush’s faithful Fairlight CMI which had helped produce so much success on her incredible album The Hounds of Love, sounds like it would have fit right in alongside any of her own songs but it is curious, considering how amazed she was by John’s piano playing, that her own piano seems to be entirely absent in the song (although she does play a synth part on the keyboard throughout the song). In the music video, scrapped at the time of recording but eventually released in 2019, Bush can be seen miming a ukulele part, which is, admittedly, not an instrument very much associated with any of Elton John, reggae or Kate Bush’s music.
Bush’s version of ‘Rocket Man’ was released as the lead single from the album and made its way to number 12 on the charts. 20 years later, on Bush’s still most recent release, 50 Words for Snow, she would enlist the help of Elton John as they duetted on her epic ‘Snowed in at Wheeler St’. Her most recent public appearance, in 2014, was at John’s wedding to filmmaker David Furnish.
