The 1993 project that crushed Kate Bush: “Completely blew it”
If there’s one artist who ought to be held up as one of the finest examples of how to make a career through doing things in your own individual way, it’s Kate Bush.
Emerging as a formidable talent with her debut album, The Kick Inside, while she was only a teenager, and quickly capitalising on the attention that had come her way with a number of hits in the UK, you’d think that someone so young would have had at least a little help getting to where she ended up. Very few people are able to make it to the top at such a young age by relying solely on their own instinct, and while the talent may be there, it will need a little bit of nurturing to get there.
The thing is, aside from having David Gilmour as an assistant producer on the debut, and working with a couple of other co-producers on subsequent albums, Bush was, for all intents and purposes, doing things all by herself. She was a completely different breed from most other precocious youngsters who had managed to gain attention at the same stage of their lives, and she was desperate to prove that to the world.
The music was grandiose and showed a sense of maturity far beyond her years, and it was both fascinating and alarming to see her develop at such a rate throughout the early part of the 1980s, with albums like Never For Ever and The Dreaming showing a considerable amount of daring and growth.
She’d arguably hit the most astonishing creative peak in 1985 with Hounds of Love, but from this point onwards, she began to take a considerable amount more time between releases, noting how intensely she used to work on projects as a major factor that inspired this decision.
It’s not like she was busy touring either, as she famously removed herself from the world of live performance at a young age, but she was putting painstaking effort into each and every record she made, fussing over the final details to ensure that all of her albums could eclipse the last one in terms of its adventurousness.
However, it was her 1993 album, The Red Shoes, that seemed to have the most painstaking process, taking a total of four years to complete, but instead of choosing to take a well-earned break after completing the record, she opted to immediately get to work of The Line, The Cross & The Curve, a film that was intended to be a visual companion piece to the album she’d just finished. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but upon reflection, diving straight into another intense project completely broke her.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” she later revealed to Q Magazine in 2001. “I was so tired. I’m very pleased with four minutes of it, but I’m very disappointed with the rest. I let down people like Miranda Richardson, who worked so hard on it. I had the opportunity to do something really interesting, and I completely blew it.”
Bush, understandably, ended up taking a 12-year break from releasing music after the release of the album and film; a fully deserved break by all accounts. She did eventually make up for her lengthy hiatus by returning with a double album in Aerial in 2005, though, and it seemed as though the rush and attraction of putting her heart and soul into elaborate projects was too hard to resist.
