Under The Ivy: updated paperback edition

The updated paperback edition of Under The Ivy is now out. The original text has been revised, and there is a new chapter covering the period between early 2010 and early 2012. In all, nearly 15,000 new words, new interviews, and full coverage of the making of Director's Cut and 50 Words for Snow. Find the paperback at: Amazon UK, Waterstones, Play.com. Pre-order in the US at: Amazon USA, Barnes & Noble, Powells

Director's Cut review, Word, June 2011

I have also reviewed the record for The National

Look What The Cat Dragged In...

Director's Cut

I've written about the new/old Bush album, Director's Cut, for the Guardian. Released on May 16, the album "revisits a selection of tracks from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, re-recording some elements whilst keeping the best musical performances of each song".

You can read my thoughts here. Some of what I wrote was adapted for yesterday's news story about the album, and a few things were edited, so I've included the full text below:

So the rumours are true. Kind of. We’ll have to wait patiently – is there any other way to wait for a Kate Bush record? - for an album of new material, but the news that Bush will release Director’s Cut on May 16, an album of new versions of songs originally included on The Sensual World (1989) and The Red Shoes (1993), provides plenty to ponder.

Director’s Cut is a typically atypical Bush curveball: risky and potentially very exciting, but perhaps most of all surprising, because she has rarely spent much time raking over her past moves. Although her music is frequently defined by a haunting, mossy nostalgia and repeat excursions to the shadowy dream country of childhood, in her attitude to her work Bush has always been resolutely forward-facing.

There has been only one rather cursory greatest hits album in 33 years, reluctantly released in 1986 to capitalise on her greatest commercial triumph, Hounds of Love.

She hasn’t toured since 1979. She has chosen not to release her Live at Hammersmith Odeon video, recorded on that tour, nor her collection of groundbreaking videos, Hair of the Hound, on DVD. Deluxe editions of her albums, freshly scrubbed and featuring bonus discs of outtakes and rarities, have been notable by their absence.

For an artist as fully in control of her career as Bush, these are conscious creative choices. She once said: “I can’t possibly think of old songs of mine because they’re past now. And quite honestly I don’t like them anymore.”

Director’s Cut might well suggest a softening in this attitude, but it’s telling that, in finally looking back, she has chosen not to simply disinter but to reinvent: to build something new on the skeletons of her old songs.

Rather than The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, we might have expected her to revisit her earliest records. On her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart, she wasn’t in control of the production process and the results often felt to her like a compromised, overly polite version of the sound she heard in her head. The Whole Story included a version of "Wuthering Heights" with a new vocal and a beefed up sound, but few would claim that it improved on the original.

However, since 1980’s Never for Ever, and certainly by The Dreaming in 1982, she had been a driven, obsessive, autonomous presence in the studio, spending months and later years building self-contained musical worlds entirely to her own exacting specifications. Her back catalogue is generally agreed to be one of the finest and most carefully cultivated in pop, but it’s not flawless, and the fact that of all her records she has chosen to revisit The Sensual World and The Red Shoes makes sense: the former has some fabulous songs but in places sounds oddly flat and somehow squeezed, while The Red Shoes is her most predictable album, recorded at a time of personal upheaval and which too often fails to soar. Bush has in the past been critical of both.

Director’s Cut will keep some elements of the original recordings of a selection of songs – I haven’t yet seen a track listing - from these records while introducing new ones. It will be fascinating to hear what she has chosen to change, and add, and whether these will be radically revised interpretations or mere tweaks. Her voice, deeper and more resonant these days, will certainly be one point of difference, while production techniques have altered beyond recognition since these albums were made.

Should we worry that this news is evidence of a songwriter in decline? I don’t think so. Her last album Aerial, released a little over five years ago, was evidence of a muse in rude if unhurried health, while we are told she is working on new material which the grapevine suggests will be released before too long.

If Director’s Cut is perhaps anti-climactic for those waiting for new material, here’s one final thought which falls somewhere between sobering and thrilling: this release may be the closest we ever get to hearing Bush do something which most other artists regard as routine, which is to reinvent and reappraise their songs by performing them on stage. She may have no desire to play live or be the dazzling visual presence she once was, but this is the first time since her tour in 1979 that Bush has made an effort to reinterpret and recontextualise her back catalogue. Not a tour of life, perhaps, but a significant reimagining nonetheless. Unusual, unexpected, a little bit strange, Director’s Cut is a classic Bush move. I can’t wait to hear it.

Graeme Thomson is author of Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush (Omnibus Press)

NME's Top Ten Books of 2010

Also some kind words from the excellent The Anti-Room

New Album Rumours

There's been some rumours flying around today about a new Kate Bush album coming out this year. This from a well-placed source:

“Right to be cautious. These rumours always surface this time of year and there's no reason to think this is any different. We're hopeful that a new record may emerge this year, but I was saying the same to people in Jan of 2010 so who knows... only Kate herself. Let's keep fingers crossed!! I'm feeling optimistic."

So: It's either "as you were" or "reasons to be cheerful", depending on your outlook. Crossing our fingers can't hurt though, can it?

EDIT: News today (20.01.11) from David Munns of the reissue of four albums - The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, Sensual World and Red Shoes - later this year, presumably with extra tracks, but still nothing concrete about the nature of any new material that might be arriving in 2011, or indeed firm confirmation that something will definitely be coming this year at all, or whether it will be released through EMI. I feel certain there will be more news on those fronts soon.

Uncut review, January 2011

Vintage Rock also reviews the book here

Mojo review, December 2010

Also, the current issue of Classic Rock magazine comes with a free book which includes an extract from the 'Tour Of Life' chapter in 'Under the Ivy'.

FT, 14/08/10

‘Under The Ivy’ has been reviewed in the Financial Times as part of a long, discursive essay on “druids and dreamers” by their pop critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney. It examines five recently published books that - to varying degrees - engage with artists who make or made quintessentially English music, those in search of some pre-industrial age Arcadia. It’s interesting stuff, and you can read it here.

Irish Times review, 06/08/10

“The best music biography in perhaps the past decade”.

Read the full review here

The National, 11/08/10

There’s a nice combination of Kate Bush career profile, interview (with me) and review of 'Under the Ivy' over at The National, the quality English language broadsheet for the UAE. You can read it here.

Classic Prog Rock review, July 2010

And a review from the Live From Mars e-zine here

Record Collector review, August 2010

Read it online here.

Q review, August 2010

Classic Rock review, Summer 2010

Jim Moray

I interviewed the excellent English folk singer Jim Moray for the Uncut feature on Hounds Of Love, but sadly his thoughts fell victim to the word count. I’ve been feeling vaguely guilty about it ever since. Moray’s song ‘Longing For Lucy’ echoes the ‘Let me be weak / Let me sleep’ line from ‘And Dream Of Sheep’, and here he explains why:

"It took many, many years for anybody to pick up on the reference to ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ in ‘Longing For Lucy’. Maybe I’m talking myself into a lawsuit here, but that second half of the Hounds Of Love references so much other stuff as well, I don’t feel out of order to be borrowing one line. The line was very deliberately placed there for a specific reason. It’s about a real person, she was the one who got me into Hounds Of Love.

I first heard it in a Halls of Residence student party, it was 'Jig Of Life', of all tracks. The idea was, ‘You’re into folk music, have you heard this?’ Just incredible. I listened to the album all the way through from start to finish, and I thought it was just mind-blowing. I had The Red Shoes, it came out just when I was getting into pop music, and I was aware of people like Tori Amos, PJ Harvey and Bjork, who all name-checked her, and I was a huge Peter Gabriel fan through my dad’s records; I loved 'Games Without Frontiers'. So I was aware it was something I would like but I hadn’t found an entry in.

Ever since, Hounds Of Love has been my late night, walking home, can’t get to sleep record. I listen to it from start to finish on headphones and disappear into it. It’s such a complete piece of work, and it spans both listening experiences: it’s got some great singles you can pick out, or you can embrace the whole thing.

It stands up to repeated listening remarkably well, and I’m still trying to figure out as a producer and musician how you do that. I’ve still got no idea how to make something be that solid and tangible, that doesn’t change depending what angle you look at it. That’s really hard. It's a record with so many disparate parts where everything fits. I’ve read since that she wishes she’d brought in male singers to sing the male parts but I love the fact that she uses a really primitive pitch shifter to do all the vocals herself. And the idea of using the Medici Quartet as this marching, rhythmic thing.... Genius! The record was obviously written from the rhythms up, which is a great way to write pop music, but it’s still got that arty thing, too. Really it’s a mystery to me. I wish I knew how to do it!"

Newstalk Interview

Click here, scroll down to Tom Dunne and click again, then select Tuesday, June 15, Part 3 and head for the 43:00 mark. Also, some blog reviews of Under the Ivy here, here, here, here and here

Metro review, 26/05/10

Guardian, 14/05/10

On this day, 31 years ago, Kate Bush played her last full concert. More here

The Word review, June 2010