Other songs by Kate Bush that should be #1

I just adore Kate Bush. Hounds of Love was the first ever CD I bought (well, someone else actually bought it for me). But I have followed her since Wuthering Heights. She’s also one of the nicest people in the music biz. Her brother Paddy is also really cool too, and a fantastic musician in his own right.

But another cool band from my mis-spent youth is Utah Saints. They’re big Kate fans; and have done some really interesting takes on her songs.

I had to explain to somebody at work on Friday that Bush is not a “one-hit wonder.”

I keep telling people that if they want more 80s stuff they should watch Pose. It also has Kate Bush. And a more sober look at some of the underbellies of the 80s.

My Kate Bush story. My college had a music listening and lending library that had slowly morphed into a comic books library. It had full runs of many hundreds of comics and got me into the Indie comics. But they still had an older stereo system. Most of the records were old, but someone had donated Kate Bush’s album with “Running Up That Hill” on it. It was on near endless repeat while I read a ton of those comics. It was also the place I met my D&D campaign players. Our campaign had Vecna as the main antagonist. So, Stranger Things having this music was perfect for me.

Nobody’s yet brought up one that stands as a poignant and chilling SF story in its own right?

@Alan Robertshaw:

Speaking of Wuthering Heights, there’s an old farmhouse on Haworth Moor called Top Withens. That’s often claimed to be the original Wuthering Heights. But there’s a wonderfully passive aggressive sign making it clear it isn’t.

You mean…writers are allowed to have imaginations? And aren’t constrained to producing transcripts and tidy one-for-one correspondences of the surrounding environment? And aren’t obliged to provide official geographical pilgrimage sites?

(I’m recalling an essay of similar exasperated tone, where the writer takes issue with the idea that Thomas Gray sat down one day in Stoke Poges, quill in hand, perhaps perched jauntily atop a headstone, and proceeded to catalogue line-of-sight scenic features. Between a succession of apartment floodings and a major move, I’ve long since lost the source—but you’re the sort of guy who might be able to place it.)

Apparently, the locations in Daniel Pinkwater’s works, which most readers assume he’s making up, are often thinly-disguised versions of real places in the Chicago of his youth (1950s and 1960s).

@Alan Robertshaw:

As I think I’ve mentioned previously, the Rumpole stories were based on my old chambers. I have had the rather spooky experience of reading a passage describing the room that I was reading the book in.

I don’t know whether Lovecraft had a particular piece of historical architecture in mind, but I was obsessed as a tween with “Dreams in the Witch-House”, the whole idea of the geometry (and chronometry) of dimensions beyond the third, and the specific point that it was the oddly-angled ceiling of the protagonist’s garret room that gave him the sudden insight necessary to practice psionic spacetime travel. You don’t even want to think about how much time I devoted to contemplating Escher posters, models of tesseracts, and Jetsonian architecture (a <a href=>neighborhood</a> <a href<example</a>), in pursuit of that instant of comprehension that ought to have been attainable With My Intelligence™, since I Could Do Anything If Only I’d Apply Myself™.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGjP_nHNkR4&ab_channel=MrMarrs

I am unspeakably in love with Kate Bush and have been since I was 19 years old. There is a KB song for every occasion. David has linked a lot of her old songs but her recent songs are also of note.

The first tattoo I gave myself, before I got my kit, was on my left thumb and it was Kate Bush in “Japanese”, with a sewing needle and boiled ink. I had a collection of Japanese LPs of Kate’s and jabbed the kanji on my hand. “Are you sure that says Kate Bush and not Capitol EMI?” my friends asked. I was not.

In 1990, a delivery driver to Tower Records Castro (where I worked) asked me if my name was Kate. “It says ‘Kate-o Boosh’ on your hand.” I wanted to kiss him! He had been stationed in Japan after WW2.

My very first love, Jackie, and her (our) best friend, Joette, and I were all obsessed with Kate Bush. We still speak in Kate Bush-isms. Kate is our way of life, really. We were all lucky enough to see her in 2014 at Hammersmith Odeon with my (current and forever) clueless Russian gf, Nikol.

Tickets went on sale online and I and Joette tried our asses off, without success. I cried and Nikol didn’t get it but two weeks later more tickets went on sale and Nikol was very invested in helping me. I immediately got four tickets, sixth row center. Joette (in Edinburgh), Jackie (in San Francisco) and Nikol and I were going to London to see the love of our lives, Kate Bush! Nikol had no visa, so I wrote a letter to the British consolate saying, “As you know, Kate Bush is having her first concert in London and I have a ticket!” in Nikol’s name and she got a visa the next day because Kate has that kind of power.

When we arrived at Heathrow, the passport control person asked why Nikol was in London and she said, “I have ticket Kate Bush!” and held up her ticket. The passport control woman came out of the booth and took a selfie with Nikol. “I had no idea Kate had Russian fans!”

Nikol is not a fan of anything (except me, perhaps ;)) so she was shocked at my wanting to buy All Of The Things at the swag counter. I bought all of the things, and still have all of them, unwrapped. “None of this says Kate Bush,” Nikol commented (Nikol only speaks Russian). I pointed out the fish skeletons on all of the swag and said, “Kate fans know.”

The concert was supposed to start at 19:00 and nothing happened then. At 19:15 it was broadcast that there were electrical issues and we may have to go to the front counter for refunds of our tickets. Jackie, from SF, and we, from Saint Petersburg, Russia, were freaking out. Joette, an American who has lived in Scotland since the 90s (with two gorgeous Scottish daughters) has always been a grounding human in my life and she said, “Kate will go on.” EVERY one in the audience was holding their breaths, including my non Kate fan gf.

At 20:00, Kate did go on and it was magical. Nikol fell into a deep Kate obsession. “She is tiny. Her hair is like a wild woman of the forest! Her voice is like nothing I’ve ever heard!”

Kate Bush is unspeakably life-changing. There is a Kate quote for every life circumstance.

@Alan Robertshaw When I was a DJ in San Francisco in the late 90s I used to play this Utah Saints song all the time!

With respect to ‘based on a real location’… one of the more famous instances here in Canada was the fictional town of Mariposa in Stephen Leacock’s book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town being based largely on the town of Orillia where Leacock lived at the time. Much of it was just ‘generic small town archetypes’ but a lot of it was close and/or specific enough to make things rather awkward in town for Leacock for a few years after the book was published, despite his insistence that Mariposa wasn’t a particular town so much as bits of seventy or eighty of them.

Of course, for Escherian architecture, there’s always the climactic scene of the movie Labyrinth…

Someone, with excellent taste, posted this to David’s twitter.

@ Krasnaya

Aww, thank you. I like your set list by the way. Think I would have enjoyed that club!

(“Chaka Khan….Chaka Khan….Let me rock you Chaka Khan…” Top choon!)

In unrelated news, as mentioned we lost our Happy the Elephant case in the NY Supreme Court.

However there were two very strong dissenting judgements. And the history of jurisprudence is that eventually the dissents become the settled law. So here’s hoping.

https://www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/Decisions/2022/Jun22/52opn22-Decision.pdf

We’d put in an amicus brief in support of the case; and we’re quite chuffed that we got a specific shoutout in one of the dissents.