The one band Kate Bush called the best singers ever: “I love everything they’ve done”
Kate Bush was never looking for an ordinary voice in every single singer that she worked with.
She wanted to go against the grain and make the kind of pop music that made people turn their heads the minute they heard it, which probably explains why she ended up working so well with other prog-rock giants like David Gilmour and Peter Gabriel later in her career. But some of her personal favourite singers didn’t have to come from the Western world in order to wow her every single time they performed.
There was so much more to explore once Bush looked out of the traditional pop sphere, and when you look at her albums, she’s always at her best when making a record that didn’t really have the same agenda as everything else. No one else would have been thinking to make an album as eclectic as The Dreaming in the 1980s, and even when she started to conquer the charts with Hounds of Love, most people simply weren’t writing side-long epics that followed a massive narrative structure.
What Bush was doing needed to have a little bit more bite to it, and that’s what she heard out of the other world music that she was listening to. It might have been a hard pill for most people to get on that kind of bandwagon, but when you look at the giants that came before her, none of them were afraid of wearing their diverse influences on their sleeves whenever they made their strange records.
Pink Floyd lived to make music that sounded weird, and George Harrison still managed to get everyone on board with Indian music when he started incorporating that into The Beatles’ repertoire, so why couldn’t Bush manage to do the same thing? Her entire mission was to leave people stunned by her voice, and that meant her trying to accomplish half of what a group like Trio Bulgarka had been doing on the other side of the world.
Admittedly, a trio of the finest singers to come from Bulgaria singing songs that combined different languages wasn’t usually everyone’s idea of a surefire hit or anything, but Bush was focused on the tone of their voices. She knew that they were playing from the heart every single time they sang, and she could sense that they were tapping into something beautiful when she heard the song ‘Snoshti Sem Minal, Kuzum Elenke’.
Not everyone was going to understand it, but Bush felt that no one could listen to their records and not be moved at least a little bit, saying, “My three favourite female singers let rip on this gorgeous song. It was very hard to just pick one because I love everything they have done. When they sing you can hear the air cracking, it is a deeply moving experience, so powerful.” And if she felt they deserved more attention, Bush was going to do whatever she could to raise them up.
After hearing them for the first time, Bush wasted no time in getting them to guest on The Sensual World only a few years after her debut. She was never in danger of being outshone by any means, but when you listen to the way that the singers interact with her voice every single time she sings, you can tell that they understood each other from the first time that they all harmonised together.
These aren’t the typical harmonies you’d find in a Crosby, Stills, and Nash song, but when was Bush ever meant to make tunes that were supposed to sound traditional? She lived to make something strange and let the audience make their own sense out of it, but it doesn’t really take a brain surgeon to realise what made her love Trio Bulgarka. They were blessed with the best voices she had heard, and she would do anything she could to learn from them.
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