replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Both from albums of electronicized versions of Holst's The Planets released the same year - 1976.
Wonder which came out first and who was the more pissed off?
Tomita's has the edge I think for its frolicking stereophony and shimmery reverb
Gleeson's sound palette is a bit flatter and duller
Tomita's flickers are that much more scintillating and well, mercurial, darting hither and thither .... tickling your ears in an almost ASMR-y way
Strange because if Gleeson had done something as far-out as his contributions to Herbie Hancock's Sextant, than he would have won the battle.... perhaps having to be tied to the score held him back?
Used to love listening to Holst's Planets as a boy, "Mercury" was a favorite, but my ab fav was "Neptune".... so eerie and oneiric... I used to listen to it sprawled on my parents's bed half-swooning into the mystic mist billowing out of the old-fashioned sideboard-style radiogram
So let's compare electronorenditions, shall we?
Again, Tomita the clear winner.... the machine Gleeson is using is a cruder and clumsier instrument than his rival's
But where I think the Tomita electronic rendering brings out dimensions to "Mercury" not available to Holst, when it comes to “Neptune, the Mystic” think the original orchestral template creates a diaphanous, elusive quality that electronica makes too clear and bright...
Here's a whole playlist of orchestral interpretations of "Neptune"
Songs about bees, or from the perspective of a bee
It's wonderful to be alive
To be a bee in this beehive
It's tough as nails, it's smooth as silk
It's milk and honey, without milk
I work with flowers, it's my work
From this, there's no way that I can shirk
No-no-no-no-no, there is no complex philosophy
It's just because I'm a bee
Unlike the skunk, I do not smell
But I have a thing and it stings like hell
As heroes go, I'm unsung
But step on me and you'll get stung
You'll get stung
The cutest bee I've ever seen
Is our own big, fat sexy queen
It's true she hasn't got such great legs
But you should see the girl lay eggs
It's wonderful to be a bee
Although there are billions just like me
This hive of mine, I call it home
There is no place like comb sweet comb
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Busy bee
Buzzing all day long
What's the hurry?
There's surely something wrong
I can't rest while the sun and the stars are so bright
'Cause your friends are picking flowers
Take away all my light
But you see busy bee
It's all for love
People pick them
You lick them all for love
Lalalalala...
She was a virgin, of humble origin
She knew of no sin
Her eyes as bright as the stars without light
We spent all the night
Prototype versions
I always associate Tintern Abbey with their contemporaries The Virgin Sleep, whose "Secret" , I just noticed, contains a reference to "the queen of the bees" - alongside many other creatures of the field, all hip to some kind of pantheistic-pastoral gnosis that the singer's sworn not to disclose.
Partly it's the "virgin" thing as in "she was a virgin of humble origin / she knew of no sin", but also the general bucolic-psychedelic vibe and the connection to children's storybook anthropomorphism (Wind in the Willows, Dr. Doolittle et al).
The willow tree by the wishing well
Saw the fireflies dance but he won't tell
It's a secret he'll keep but he knows very well
I know
The field mouse runs from his nest by the road
To tell the news to the friendly toad
They think they're the only ones that know
But I know
I know 'cause I was there
Having my tea with a teddy bear
I won't tell, I wouldn't dare
'Cause I promised
Dragonflies tell it to the trees
Butterflies hear it in the breeze
They go tell it to the queen of the bees
Now she knows
Ask the wizard or the wise old owl
Or the badger though he's not in the crowd
They don't know anyhow
But I do
I know and so does the swan
He knows what's going on
He won't tell you just as long
As I'm here
The blackbirds talking in the trees
Tell the seagull who flies the seas
The sparrow hawk knows but then he sees
Everything
Spider spinning his web of silk
Watching the ducks down by the mill
He'll keep the secret
Until he's ready
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A "setting" of a poem by Larry Beckett
I am a bee out in the fields of winter
And though I memorized the slope of water,
Oblivion carries me on his shoulder:
Beyond the suns I speak and circuits shiver,
But though I shout the wisdom of the maps,
I am a salmon in the ring shape river.
Composer's Notes. Harmonic structure: a set of horizontal vocal lines
is improvised in at least three ranges, the vertical effect
of which is atonal tone clusters and arhythmic counterpoint.
Performance: the written melody is to be sung, after which
the lines of lyric are to be reordered at will and sung
to improvised melody, taking advantage of the opportunity
for quartertones, third note lengths, and flexible tempo.
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That Tim Buckley voicescape is one of my absolute all-time gobsmacking mind-blown forever favorites.... Don't know why it's not more celebrated or talked-about. Easily the equal of equivalent things done at this time by your Nonos and Parmegianis.
(In a class I did on experimental vocals, I played "Stairsailor" and another song from the album - "Jungle Fire" or maybe "I Woke Up" - plus the most unloosed erotomanic-glossalalic sections of "Get On Top" and "Devil Eyes" from Greetings from LA. This class was the prototype for a whole course I later did called "The Elastic Voice". I really thought the students would be utterly blown away by Buckley but they reacted oddly - seemed to find his voice grating. One said they felt his singing style wasn't properly "supported" - i.e. he'd never had formal instruction in how to use his voice properly and safely, and consequently was audibly damaging his vocal cords, would soon get nodules. This what made them feel uncomfortable, as trained singers themselves - they could feel what it would mean physically to produce such sounds)
Tintern Abbey... again, one of my favorites pieces of music ever. Just the cymbal sound alone - it always makes me picture pollen motes in a woodland clearing, irradiated by sunlight streaming through the leafy canopy. Now which Brit invented that style of broken drumming? Does it come from Ringo on "Rain" and "Tomorrow Never Knows"? Love the Wordsworthreference of the group's name - a foundational poem of English Romanticism and pastoral pantheism. Kinda amazing that Tintern Abbey never made it, during that long moment of "Itchycoo Park" and "Hole In My Shoe". Astounding also that "Bee Side" was the literal B-side (good joke!) of "Vacuum Cleaner", another sublime Britpsych classic (if oddly titled - I have no idea why!). I believe this was Tintern Abbey's sole single. Indeed the group's only release during their own lifetime. Much much later an album of bits and bobs - unreleased recordings - came out in 2021 with the title Beeside: The Complete Recordings, but sadly nothing else really approaches the heights of "Bee Side" and "Vacuum Cleaner".
Loudon Wainwright III - I remember him being a Peel favorite, sticking out like a sore thumb amidst the postpunk and the outright punk-punk and the reggae etc.... but amusing / intriguing even then. Somehow I've never got around to "doing" him until now. "Bee Side" is a clever, droll, imaginative tune. But not as clever, droll, imaginative or consternating as "Rufus Is A Tit Man". What can it be like walking around as a performer/singer-songwriter yourself and knowing your Dad wrote that about baby you?
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Not really a song about bees
Great guitar playing, beamed straight across time from San Francisco circa 1968
Decided not to dial back the saturation on this image, as the dingy yellow-brown seems to convey the already-curdled-even-then aroma of this three-day event.
Old Wavest of the Old Wavest here must surely be Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance. Only two rungs below last night headliner Bad Company
A whole day - as buffer zone? - between that and the opening night's appearance of the Steve Marriotts All Stars
Climax Blues Band, Steve Gibbons Band, Barclay James Harvest, John Miles, Baker Gurvitz Army, Nazareth, Status Quo
But who the hell are Jack the Lad and Snafu?
For total hang-overs of the Sixties, you got Pretty Things and Procol bleedin' Harum
The issue contains a Special Souvenir Supplement of pieces based around the Great British Music Festival line-up - including cover stars Bad Company.
Hark at that zip, made of leather laces. With the leather stitchwork, it fairs screams LOOK AT MY LOINS. In this photo, there's also a weird sort of pube-tinged camel toe effect. Talk about "cock rock".
Plus Sounds writers predictions for '76
Roogalator! Kokomo! Boxer! John Bennett Band! Graham Bell! Mr Big!
A few New Wave-ish names poking in there, though - Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman, Dictators, The Tubes (attitudinally if not sonically), Motorhead (attitudinally but also a tiny bit sonically), Chris Spedding (well, as a gun for hire - he'd been a Womble - but "Motorbiking").
Last Exit is Noo Waver Sting's first, extremely Old Wave entity, a fusion-ish outfit
But that whole issue of Sounds can be delectated over here at this amazing repository of Old Wave (and pre-Old Wave) music papers and trade periodicals
Snide coverage of the Great British Music Festival from New Musical Express - "but where was the great?"
Ah looking at the ticket the first night is on the last day of 1975 - New Year's Eve - a Wednesday, so that issue of Sounds would have come out, in London if not the provinces, on that very day (the Sounds issue date is the Saturday - Jan 3 - as was the norm with the weekly music papers, but you could get hold of them a few days before the official publication date)
Imagine spending New Year's Eve in the Olympia suffering through that lineup.
Well, there's Thin Lizzy - and bottom of the bill Doctors of Madness. But still...
Now wait a minute - I don't know if there was a GBMF in '77, but there was one in '78, with a New Wave made-over line-up
Not completely made-over - Quintessence of Old Wave Hall of Famers Lindisfarne headline the middle night, there's also Frankie Miller, Bernie Torme, Bandit, Slade, and old trooper John Miles plugging away. And David Essex.
But the first night prominently showcases the next generation.
I had literally never heard of the Great British Music Festival in any of its iterations - clearly t's not entered the annals of fondly remembered Old Wave fests, even to the extent of Bickershaw Pop Festival of 1972 or Deeply Vale Free Festivals 1976 onwards
But otherwise there is a surprising dearth of documentation or reminiscence about TGBMF
Except Doug in Comments points to a usage of a photograph taken at the first festival of a well known "idiot dancer" infamous for dancing in the nude although not here
As used on the cover of The Chemical Brothers's 1999 album Surrender
I remember Ed from Chemicals telling me (when I interviewed the groop aroundSurrender) that what he liked about raves - as opposed to nightclubs - was the "sexless uniformity" of the mass experience, nobody posing or trying to look chic. So an event like GBMF or Knebworth or Reading probably be in that continuum... the opposite of the in-crowd, the mod / Northern Soul / New Romantic / rare groove continuum
Oasis at Knebworth would be a merger of the rock festival and the rave unity vibe.... as had been Stone Roses at Spike Island earlier
The crowd slumped on the concrete floor of the Olympia reminds me a bit of what people said of the ambience at the Futurama festivals in Leeds.... indeed the NME reviews of those festivals described as drear returns to the festivals of the pre-punk Underground era.... a nouveau hippiedom.... the New Wave reverting to Old Wave.
The three iterations of Skunk Baxter's guitar solo in Steely Dan's "My Old School" - but especially the second run-through at 2.27 - distil Old Wave's quintessence in all its glory. There’s a blend of flash and feel, sophistication and funk,
that's irrecoverable and out-of-reach for guitarists who came up
through the New Wave. (Not that they’d even want to reach for this type and level of lickmanship,
of course)
The full length studio version with the third solo at 4.45 included, Baxter wringing every last drop outta that riff
In the TV appearance, I like the way that during the second astonishing bit o' pickin' Fagen seems so riveted he almost forgets to carry on playing the piano. I also enjoy the nonchalant nose wipe Skunk does when he’s finished showing off. (Of course it could be nasal drip, nudge nudge wink wink).
The only places this kind of flash/feel combo pops up its hairy head during the postpunk
era is Old Wavers Disguised as New Wavers (John Turnbull in The Blockheads - check this for sheer flash-for-flash's-sake). Or just Old Wavers Carrying On being Old Wave Despite the New Wave and its Strictures and Edicts. (In which category would fit Old Wavers At Heart Who Happen to Be New in the Marketplace – Mark Knopfler)
Rest of “My Old School” is fairly dispensable to me - the hot horns, the chick backing singers, Fagen’s true-life tale of getting
busted while at college thanks to some uptight female student grassing him to
the cops. But I keep replaying that second solo. I’m surprised no one has isolated it
and just looped it endlessly.
Getting into the nitty gritty of it with a guitar expert who
asks, "Is this Steely Dan's’s greatest guitar solo?"
He points out that one of the reasons the solo is so exciting is that it is essentially rhythm-guitar-as-lead.
Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter is ubiquitous in the Old Wave world –
playing on records by sundry West Coast and elsewhere superstars (I did not
know he appears on Hissing of Summer Lawns) but also leaving Steely Dan and joining
The Doobie Brothers for their most sustained stretch of suckcess.
Baxter was
instrumental in the recruitment of Michael McDonald so we have him to thank
indirectly for “What A Fool Believes”.
Via Phil in comments, a brand new Beato interview with Skunk Baxter on the Steely-Doobie years, off the back of that Yacht-Rock-doc
He also facially looks Quintessentially Old Wave.
Skunk joined Spirit in the 1980s, which is about as Old
Wave Will Never Die a thing to do as imaginable.
Goodness me, he played in Ultimate Spinach before any of the
famous work.
But here’s an interesting thing – while continuing to play with
all sorts of legends to this day, he also opened up a second career front: as defense consultant,
“Baxter fell into his second profession almost by accident.
In the mid-1980s, his interest in music recording technology led him to wonder
about hardware and software originally developed for military use, specifically
data compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices. His next-door
neighbor was a retired engineer who had worked on the Sidewinder missile
program. This neighbor bought Baxter a subscription to Aviation Week magazine,
provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile
defense systems in particular. He became self-taught in this area, and at one
point wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based
anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system. He gave
the paper to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his career
as a defense consultant began. Baxter received a series of security clearances
so he could work with classified information. “
He ends up on the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic
Missile Defense, gets consulting contracts with the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency and
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, serves similar sort of roles for the US
Department of Defense, US intelligence, the
NASA Exploration Systems Advisory Committee, and various military-industrial complex
corporations in the aeronautics field. “He
is listed as "Senior Thinker and Raconteur" at the Florida Institute
for Human and Machine Cognition”
Baxter is respected in the defense and intelligence
community for his ability to think outside the box.
Baxter: "We thought turntables were for playing records
until rappers began to use them as instruments, and we thought airplanes were
for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as
missiles. My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other
ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be
what terrorists are incredibly good at."
That’s a pretty wild tangent, for someone of that generation!
It’s also a good example of the opposite syndrome to Wiki Fizzle,
which I have teased at various points and one day will unpack thoroughly, with numerous examples. The gist is that it's to do with the way that thanks to Wikipedia, nowadays you can find out about the
career-peak aftermath of musicians, actors, entertainers, writers, film directors etc. Whereas pre-Wiki / internet, they would essentially disappear from view - unless you really tracked them through periodicals in the public library - and even then the spoor would get thinner and thinner as they grew less noteworthy, less noticed. As far as general public consciousness, their career profile would dip to near-invisibility. But thanks to Wiki etc, you can now see what they've been up to since they stopped having hits or being in the public eye. What you often find is that they have kept surprisingly busy - even immensely busy - with all kinds of business ventures and artistic projects, attempts at reinvention, dabbles in unexpected fields e.g. writing a musical, career diversification, or just slogging away making record after record. But for all the persistence and productivity, the unmistakable
bathos of decline hangs over the arc as detailed in the Wiki entry. The career fizzles, fecundly (perhaps because if you ever had big success, people are more likely to indulge your reignite-career attempts, or fund your later pipe dreams?)
Conversely, Baxter's Act Two would represent Wiki Flourish if anything.
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Tyler reminds, in Comments, that Skunk did the Astounding Lickmanship on Donna Summer's rock-ified "Hot Stuff"
Until recently I have confused Skunk Baxter and Waddy Watchtel in my head as West Coast axeman-for-hire
I've observed before that Kate Bush - now a national treasure, hip reference point, influence on a whole 21st Century phalanx of female artists etc etc - was deemed thoroughly uncool during her peak years of popular success.
Some reviews from that time gathered below indicate her general standing and credibility levels in the afterpunk schema.
New Wave people - critics, fans, musicians - saw her as an Old Wave throwback (her famous friends and supporters like Dave Gilmour and Peter Gabriel certainly helped in that perception).
As would the music itself, especially the second album Lionheart, and the videos.
And things like this 1979 TV Christmas special, whose existence I didn't know about until a few weeks ago.
It's really quite frightfully unwatchable stuff - except one bit that is less mime and modern-dancey, indeed it's completely static and subdued - which is when Kate and Peter Gabriel duet on a version of "Another Day" by Roy Harper (another Old Waver)
[text version]
Kate Bush
Lionheart
NME, 1978.
by Ian Penman
These are the seductive voices of the year.
There's a lot of swooning, but not enough choice. Ms. Sioux,
yeah, but Ms. Bush especially – she seems destined, anything from Ritz to Rolling
Stone could conceivably process this coy, clean, photogenic prodigy
into appealing copy. Is ours or hers a convenient age, or what?
Ritz probably is Rolling Stone,
actually, and the readership could do with a new "accessible",
"intellectual" pin-up. Kate Bush fits snugly, somewhere on a line
from model agency cheek bones through a young Joni to Janis Ian at 17:
manageable melancholy.
She got the mime troupe tuition, the Gurdjieff teaching, the
vegetarianism, the beauty that stops nicely before being out of reach, and what
this adds up to, as has been remarked, is the ability to "cover
markets". What can stop her?
She plays cute, pastel-doldrums piano; she looks 'good'
on Lionheart's cover, although a pernicious phenomenologist could
question the presentation of Woman as Object or as Mystery Object – or,
further, as Child Mystery Object.
All these themes run through her lyrics and this,
presumably, acts as some kind of justification for the cover photosnap of our
Kate crouching seductively atop a (costumer's?) crate in an empty, dusty attic.
She is wearing a fancy dress lion's outfit, the head of which rests on the
floor. There are songs called 'Oh England My Lionheart' and 'In The Warm Room',
'Hammer Horror' and 'In Search Of Peter Pan'.
I look at the photo and I see an object...and
this, more than anything, is the David Bowie (both taught by Lindsey Kemp, mime
artist) connection, as it indeed is with the pantherish, pale, prima(l) donna
Banshee. And, like Sioux, Kate is sometimes rather clumsy when it comes to
hanging lyrics on the image (or is it the other way round?).
Lionheart starts with words which could easily
slot into The Scream: "Blue on the walls, Blue out of
my mouth" ('Symphony In Blue'). But where a Banshee might follow
that up with, say, "Blood on the walls. Blood out of my
mouth", Kate goes for "The sort of blue between clouds
when the sun comes out", and thereby covers the markets.
She can even get away with "When that feeling
of meaningless sets in" – that, and "The more I
think about sex/The better it gets/Here we have a purpose in life".
I hate quoting lyrics, but when they're printed on the
sleeve it must be for a reason – usually that the singer in question thinks of
himself as a songwriter, a communicator of meaningful messages, and as such is
up for discursive analyses from the scurvy, common likes of I and you.
Kate's trick is the way she clings to thoughts of Innocence
(capital Me) and Better Times, at the same time hinting that, you know,
she knows and has known more than she's letting on. 'Mature' lyrics sung in
that twee, irritating schoolgirl-siren voice. I know you can't help your voice,
dear, but then I can't help being irritated by it.
Actually, most of the time she's nearer a vague British
lineage – Barbara Dickson to Lindsay De Paul – than any Joni/Janis wonderland.
It's the 'up' side of melancholy: muted, mellifluous piano backed by a lame,
loveless cradle of pristine and processed acoustic/electric guitar, drums,
subtle synthesiser, bass and varied additions where necessary, harmonium,
recorder and harpsichord in the tree top. Her musicians add little or nothing
to most of the songs, and her own piano playing is too 'nice' to merely be the
prop it mostly is.
The songs range from 'In Search Of Peter Pan' ("I've
been told, when I get older/That I'll understand it all") to 'In The
Warm Room': "She prepares to go to bed/She'll let you watch her
undress/Go places where your fingers long to linger/In the warm room/You'll
fall into her like a pillow/Her thighs are as soft as marshmallows."
Now, for all I know, that last lot might well be an attack
on traditional, mythical ideas and ideals about the mysterious, silent,
seductive woman who somewhere waits for you and you only. But
nothing in the way it is presented and nothing in the way Ms. Bush presents
herself in the glossy, glazed photographs suggests that this is indeed the
case.
Other cameos and scenarios flirt with the exotic ('Kashka
From Baghdad') and historic ('England My Lionheart', 'Coffee Homeground')
without really saying much, mostly metaphors for dewy
romanticism, the pleasures and pains thereof.
Nothing wrong with that?
The Sirens, too, sing that way. Trying to disguise that which pressed them into
their fame and fashion but allowed them to feel nothing but function. They
lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so
beautiful.
(Poetic, huh?)
[text version]
Kate Bush
The Palladium
NME, April 28 1979
by Charles Shaar Murray
Two memories: recalled first are the days when rock and roll was swamped with failed classical pianists and violinists who knew that they could make it in rock and roll because certain strata of the rock audience have an inferiority complex about Real Culture and no standards by which to judge it.
Recalled second are all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era. Successfully shoved under the cerebral carpet by the passing of time and the ghosts of all those dynamite gigs, it only takes a whiff of Kate Bush's tour programme and the haughty condescension of the little notes from the Kate Bush Club that you find on your seat when you arrive to bring it all back.
No photographers. Stay in your seats and worship, you dumb bastards!
The Kate Bush show that's been wowin' 'em (as in "Wow, wow, wow, wow, we think you're unbearable") all over the country is a tribute to hard work, lots of money and the old-style ideology that defines the relationship between artist and audience as purely that between worshipper and worshipped. Described (elsewhere, natch) as some kind of apex in the mating of rock and theatre, it is simply the most complicated and expensive extant collision between theatrics (there is a difference between 'theatre' and 'theatrics', but if Kate Bush is aware of it, she certainly isn't letting on) and MOR pop.
An endless stream of sets, costumes, pantomine-conjuring special effects, back projections sound effects (ranging from wind and rain to her brother's awful crypto-poetry read in a portentous, echoing elocution-competition voice to audible sniggering from people who hadn't paid the statutory fiver for their tickets) and things that would be described as 'gimmicks' if they occurred in the course of a performance with less lofty ambitions as this one, the KATE BUSH (she prefers capitals) experience is an exercise in the time-honoured art of battering an audience to death and making them like it.
Ms Bush herself is the evident product of an awful lot of strenuous self-improvement. One can only imagine all those years of ballet training, mime classes, piano lessons...she is Supergirl: the range of her skills aspires to be breathtaking and the end result is that she is capable of doing enough things passably to convince large numbers of people (only a few of whom are equipped to know better) that she is doing them brilliantly.
Her piano playing is competent but characterless: unlike Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell – whose work she evidently admires – the style is neither distinctive nor expressive. Her songwriting hints that it means more than it says and in fact means less: she hints at mystery and uses it as a cloak whereas true mysteries always stand naked. Her singing is at least unusual: her shrill, self-satisfied whine is unmistakable.
Altogether, a lightweight talent with one good song ('Wuthering Heights') to her credit.
Her dancing is more perspiration than inspiration: completely lacking in sensuality or funk, it relies instead on a supple, well-exercised frame and enough ballet moves to impress people who know nothing about ballet just as the Emersons and Wakepersons of yesteryear were able to bullshit people who knew nothing about classical music.
Her mime is elegant sham: great mime expresses everything, good mime expresses something and bad mime expresses nothing other than somebody's been to mime classes.
Backed by a cast of a dozen (seven musicians, two dancers, two singers and the real star of the show, illusionist Simon Gray), Bush twirled and skittered and trilled her way through a series of tableaux vivants which almost disguised that if it had actually been performed and staged as a straight concert it would have been tedious in the extreme.
For the climax – centred around 'James And The Cold Gun' – she dressed up in cowboy togs and methodically shot Gray and the two dancers, complete with fake blood, rimshots and dry ice, before retreating to the stylised womb at the back of the stage from which she had originally emerged, shooting at the audience. It was the first time that she played direct to the crowd and the only emotion expressed was hatred.
It has been pointed out that she's terribly young and oh, so talented. She certainly works hard: the show runs over two hours and except for when she's seated at the white piano, she's in constant motion, using a radio mike on a kind of telephonist's headset so that she can move freely the whole time. The trouble is that she's completely entranced with the idea of her own stardom and the concept of presenting an almost superhuman facade.
Tony DeFries would've loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago maybe I would've too. But these days I'm past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself.
Sure, what you do takes talent, but it ain't the kind of talent I respect.
Enjoy your success.
Kate's fluctuations in critical standing is one of the main things (see also Graham Parker) that led me to the concept of Drops Away Syndrome (and it's less common counterpart, Rises Up Syndrome)
However I guess in Kate's case it's a critically speaking Dropped From the Start, and then Rises Up
Drops Away Syndrome is more about figures who are deemed (by critics and hipsters, the rock intelligentsia) to be central and crucial but with time that just completely erodes away, and you are left scratching your head a bit (G. Parker classic case, especially in America)
More Kate being utterly Old Wave even as the New Wave raged and rearranged around her
The big live comeback residency thing Before The Dawn some years ago was a giant volcanic eructation of this kind of thing
Here's what my friend Samantha had to say about it
"What a monumental disappointment. The show was little more than a prog rock Jackanory, wish I had never seen it and had saved ourselves the best part of 300 quid."
"My heart sunk right at the beginning when Kate and co 'conga-ed' onto the stage like some waifs and strays from an office party. Still, I tried to rally and remain optimistic. As things went on it seemed like the show was a vehicle for middle aged release, as I looked around the audience, everyone obediently in their seats, it struck me that some of these folk needed to get out more often. Was it a collective amnesia about what really comprises a great gig?.... . In the second half, I cast a glance at [my 15 year old daughter] who was falling asleep.
"Kate felt the need to plug her son, tell us all how much she loved him, 'more than anything else in the world'. Son, Bertie had been given a lead role in the excruciating panto. It did strike me that Bush had seen War Horse a few years ago and had been hopelessly influenced by it.
".... I never want to hear Aerial again...am so disappointed, she was such a heroine, wish this concert had never happened to us."
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