Kate Bush’s five weirdest songs: “An entity unto itself”
Everyone remembers the first time they heard Kate Bush, right? There are precious few artists out there whose discovery feels like finding a portal a whole new world. MF Doom is one, Tom Waits another, FKA Twigs and Florence and The Machine are getting there but Bexleyheath’s finest is a cut above all of them. That unmistakeable keening voice the thread leading you somewhere more romantic, more ethereal, and sometimes downright weird!
Bush’s uncompromising artistic vision can lead to places of genuine pop bliss, as ‘Running Up That Hill’s Netflix-assisted dominance of 2022 showed with aplomb. Once you get past the dog-whistle pitch of her voice, ‘Wuthering Heights’ is one of the greatest British pop songs ever made. At no point, though, does this sound like anything that came before it, and in a career as thrillingly varied as hers, sometimes you’ve just got to go further out there than anyone else.
Bush is a legend on the British Isles and has cultivated a cult following that loves her hits and revels in the deeply dark and sometimes strange areas of her bursting discography. It is Bush’s ability to deliver both that has made her an icon.
Here are five tracks where she felt the need to go off the deep end, and you can’t imagine many fairweather Stranger Things fans being too keen to stick around!
Kate Bush’s five weirdest songs:
‘Coffee Homeground’
We kick off with the penultimate track from her second album, 1978’s Lionheart. If the dancing, vocals, and storytelling didn’t tip you off, Kate is a theatrical soul, and ‘Coffee Homeground’ is a thrillingly weird piece of Kurt Weill-inspired narrative songwriting. Inspired by a bizarre encounter with an intensely paranoid cab driver, Bush tells the story of a poor soul convinced that someone is trying to poison them.
Doing away with any Nick Cave-style narrative intensity, Bush plays the whole thing for laughs. She sings most of the song in an “’Allo ‘Allo!” quality German accent and revels in the dramatic punctuations the orchestra backing her leaves in her wake. It’s bonkers, but she has a hell of a lot of fun with it.
‘Get Out Of My House’
It turns out that Kate Bush and I have something in common. We’ve both sat there with The Shining open in front of us, too scared to turn the page. She turned the experience into the closing track for one of her most bonkers albums, which is where the similarities end.
Specifically, she turned the house into a human being which, in her words, “has been shut up – locked and bolted, to stop any outside forces from entering. The person has been hurt and has decided to keep everybody out.” She also begins and ends the track braying like a literal donkey which is, y’know, a choice.
‘Waking The Witch’
I very nearly based this list entirely around the second half of ‘Hounds of Love’ because sweet baby James does it go places. Especially after the incredible first half which, lest we forget, begins with ‘Running Up That Hill’, continues with the title track and ends with ‘Cloudbusting’. Bloody hell.
The second half, a suite entitled ‘The Ninth Wave‘, is based on what the mind does when confronted with something truly terrifying and threatening. Something like a horrific demon screaming the word “Guilty!” over you over and over again. Why so specific? It’s exactly what happens in ‘Waking The Witch’. Pour one out for anyone who’s ever had a nap with this album playing cos this track’s gonna end it.
‘The Dreaming’
‘The Ninth Wave’ is all well and good but it is only the second half of the album. The Dreaming is that weird the whole album and you can tell because it’s the record with the dubious honour of finding two tracks on this list! Not only that, but this was the second single from the album!
You’ll find more comedy accents in this track, this time Australian. The problem is that this is a song named for a concept in Aboriginal mythology about a very serious topic: how their land was ransacked and mined for uranium by the Australian government. There’s more than a little ‘Land Down Under’ in this truly bizarre misfire, no matter how much Kate’s heart was in the right place.
‘Big Stripey Lie’
It’s always great when you hear about a song that confounds its own writer, and the last word on this track from 1993’s ‘The Red Shoes’ probably comes from Kate herself. She was asked in an interview to say a few words on each track of the album, and her segment on ‘Big Stripey Lie’ begins with her saying the song “is an entity unto itself that nearly didn’t make the album.”
Based around a drum machine loop and featuring guitar and bass played by the woman herself, ‘Big Stripey Lie’ is swathed in angry feedback, angrier vocals and Nigel Kennedy’s sawing, seething violin.
