How The Beatles inspired Kate Bush “on every level”
Kate Bush never settled for making anything that was simply “ordinary”. That was reserved for the plastic pop stars of the world that only wanted the hit singles, but throughout every single album Bush made, it felt like another glimpse into musical worlds most of us didn’t realise existed yet.
Even before she was out of her teens, songs like ‘Wuthering Heights’ were already setting the template for what people should expect out of her music. From the strange chord progression to her operatic voice, this was pop music done with a prog-rock mentality, and it probably helped to have someone like David Gilmour fostering many of her ideas in the beginning. But Bush never saw herself as a true ‘progressive’ artist.
No one was ever going to find her donning the same kind of capes that Rick Wakeman was wearing or making grand exercises like Robert Fripp was doing in King Crimson. She was certainly able to make something strange, but even her most divisive albums had a more mainstream bent to them. Say what you want about how strange an album like The Dreaming was for its time, but a lot of the best songs are catchy enough to hang with the best hits on the charts.
Whereas most other prog bands considered their songs to be complex exercises half the time, Bush had always had a fascination with pop music that had taken chances. Everyone from Queen to David Bowie was redefining the mainstream’s palette for weird music, but in terms of opening up people’s minds to the possibilities, no one did it better than The Beatles during their historic run.
It was already a cultural shift for most people when they saw them perform in their moptops, but once they took over the studio, every album from Rubber Soul onward was a bold new reinvention. From avant-garde music to the beginnings of heavy metal to nostalgic whimsy, the Fab Four somehow made every one of their tunes feel like a new adventure while still making fans hum along to their melodies.
And when carving out her own career, Bush was convinced that their mentality was what she wanted to do, saying, “Plenty of things I’d like to have written. Lots of Beatles songs, for instance. They were just so beautifully, beautifully written, and they still stand up, and for pop music, it’s so well crafted. On every level: not just the songs but the arrangements and the vocal performances.”
It’s one thing to have a bit of musical influence from The Beatles, but Hounds of Love is the most obvious example of Bush using the Fab mentality. Much like Abbey Road’s second side is constructed like a medley of different tunes, The Ninth Wave, on the flipside of Bush’s magnum opus, takes that mentality one step further by crafting a storyline of a woman lost at sea after her boat crashes.
Bush would never say that she ever bested what The Beatles did by any stretch, but on projects like The Ninth Wave, it was about pushing what they did that much further. They may have been treated like history’s all-time favourite band, but The Beatles didn’t set out to be the gold standard. They wanted to make the music they loved, and hopefully, someone could take what they had done and build on it when they made their own masterpieces.
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