Kate Bush’s problem with Pink Floyd album ‘The Wall’
The worlds of Kate Bush and Pink Floyd are inseparably intertwined. Both were pioneering forces in music who pushed the rock genre to new, exciting and artistic places, and both valued a concept album as they fully invested in an idea, sound or concept. But when it came to Pink Floyd’s 1982 film of their 1979 album The Wall, Bush had a problem with it.
Pink Floyd were instrumental in bringing Kate Bush to the world’s attention. We have David Gilmour to thank for Bush getting her start in the music industry. After being introduced by a family friend, the Pink Floyd guitarist heard a tape of some of Bush’s demos. He was instantly sold on her talent and paired her up with a producer to record properly. He also helped get her music to EMI, who eventually signed her to the label.
From then on, Bush and Gilmour remained close. Bush sat in on a recording session as the band created Wish You Were Here, helping to expand her horizons of what could be made in the studio. Gilmour also co-produced The Kick Inside, Bush’s debut album.
It’s a match made in music heaven, and both artists seem to share a limitless dedication to their craft. When Gilmour joined Pink Floyd in 1967, he helped move the band from their early psychedelic days with Syd Barrett into something more art-rock and high concept. His influence led them to scale up to projects as vast and adventurous as The Wall in 1970.
As an album, The Wall is a concept piece about a figure called Pink, a jaded rockstar who hides away from the world. There are several links between this figure and the band’s old leader, Syd Barrett. When they made the 1982 film adaptation, these ties only got tighter as the movie depicted a bleak life of drug dependency and isolation.
That’s what Bush takes issue with, finding the utter sadness of the adaptation a very limited view of life. It was, however, still inspiring to her as she said, “I’ve been very much influenced by The Wall because I like the way that the Floyd get right into that emotional area and work with sounds as pictures.”
But the pessimism of the film bothered her, adding, “I think the problem with the film though is that, although as a piece of art it is devastating, it isn’t real enough. The whole film is negatively based.”
She continued, “No once during Pink’s life is there a moment of happiness which I know in every human’s life there is. Even if you have the shittiest life of all there is always one little moment where you smile for a second or you fall in love with someone and feel happy – maybe only for ten minutes.”
These glimmers of light are important in Bush’s own work, especially in her concept albums. On Hounds Of Love, during her ‘The Ninth Wave’ concept piece, her protagonist lies in a freezing sea after a shipwreck. While she tries desperately to stay alive and hold onto hope of rescue, it could easily be a totally bleak release. But instead, tracks like ‘Jig Of Life’ and ‘Morning Fog’ scatter the story with moments of joy and euphoria for being alive. Across all of her albums, Bush likes to articulate happy feelings just as much as hard ones.
Maybe Pink Floyd should’ve taken a leaf out of her book as she essentially tells them to cheer up, concluding, “In The Wall there is no compassion and no objectivity at all and I actually think that certain areas of that are destructive.”
