How Disney’s ‘Pinocchio’ inspired Kate Bush
The music of Kate Bush often channels the magical and the fictional. Her debut single, ‘Wuthering Heights’, took on the persona of Catherine Earnshaw from Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name. Over glistening instrumentals, Bush’s soaring vocals declare, “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home, I’m so cold, let me in your window”.
This mystical, storytelling element of Bush’s music extended beyond the songwriter’s biggest hits, into the depths of her discography. Almost all of her music contains an otherworldly element, guiding her listeners through sparkling soundscapes and captivating tales. It’s fitting that several of Bush’s songs took inspiration from the cultural purveyors of magic and curiosity, Disney.
More specifically, Bush took inspiration from Pinocchio several times in her artistry, a character who first appeared in Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, but was later adapted to screen in Disney’s 1940 film, Pinocchio. The character’s first influence on Bush was aesthetic – the idea for the album artwork for her debut studio record, The Kick Inside in 1978, was borrowed from Disney’s Pinocchio.
Rejecting her label’s requests to accompany the album with a sexy cover, Bush had other ideas. As Jay Myrdal, the photographer for the artwork, recalls it in a fan booklet: “Kate arrived at the studio with her father and a car full of bits of wood and painted paper from which he constructed the kite as it appears in the photograph.”
While Myrdal used ropes and a metal bar to rig the “rather fragile” kite to the black wall in her studio, Bush was being covered in gold paint. The result was the album cover that fans of Bush will now know well, which sees her hanging from the kite in front of an image of an eye. According to Myrdal, this was entirely Kate’s idea, and she took inspiration from Pinocchio.
The photographer explained: “The image was entirely Kate’s idea and Steve Ridgeway, the art director and I simply did more or less as we were told. The idea had come from the Disney animated film Pinocchio and the scene when Jiminy Cricket floats past the whale’s eye using his umbrella like a parachute.”
Bush’s artistic debt to Pinocchio continued into her sophomore album, Lionheart, which featured a song called ‘In Search Of Peter Pan’. Alongside the beloved children’s character in its title, the song also made reference to Pinocchio in its final verse, which quotes ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’. The song featured in the 1940 film version of Pinocchio, performed by Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket in the film’s opening credits and final moments.
After repeating the line, “Second star on the right, straight on ‘til morning”, borrowed from the directions to Neverland, Bush sings, “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, when you wish upon a star your dreams come true”. In true Kate Bush fashion, it’s equal parts eerie and beautiful.
Storytelling and magic permeate Bush’s discography lyrically, aesthetically, and instrumentally, so it’s fitting that she took inspiration from a fantastical Disney classic.
