Back in the early 90s, when Tori Amos first appeared (we’re not counting that whole “Y Kant Tori Read” debacle), a lot of people compared her with Kate. Not surprisingly since both are headstrong female singer/songwriters who play piano. IIRC, Kate plays several other instruments.
I see Kate as more, for the lack of a better term, “girly” where Tori is “grrrly”.
I like Kate’s voice more than Tori’s most of the time.
The Kick Inside is on my Top Ten Albums list. Her voice is absolutely amazing on that one.
I’ve been a Tori fan since Little Earthquakes (I actually owned YKTR and played “Etienne” on my radio show, but didn’t care for the rest of it) so it pains me when Tori and Kate fans carp at each other. There’s a lot of overlap in the fandom, but there are always a few loudmouths who make life difficult. Tori is a classically-trained pianist, wheras Kate was self-taught, so Tori will always be superior there. Point that out to some Kate fans and you’d think the world was coming to an end. It’s only a few who are like that though.
Kate doesn’t play any other intstruments, well. She dabbles. I’ve never heard of her picking up an acoustic guitar. She taught herself how to play electric guitar for some song, I forget which (“Big Stripey Lie” maybe) but other than that her talent is all in her imagination, songwriting and singing ability and very decent keyboards. She’s pretty good at studio wizardry too.
My husband read this read and pointed out that Kate played, or looked like she was playing, the ukelele in the video of “Rocket Man.”
He also mentioned that the Kate Simmons shoot was in Penthouse, not Playboy, and only appeared in the European edition. No, we’ve never bought it. That’s taking collecting a bit far.
Three days ago, I got for a dollar the video Kate Bush Live at the Hammersmith Odeon- decent condition, as I found out two hours ago, watching with a friend who didn’t care for Kate but admitted she had a good body. Even I have to admit a lot of Kate’s 1981 dancing antics were kinda painful to watch- but oh, those eyes & oh that voice!
Re Kate Simmons & Penthouse, google both those terms & open at the heading of Hugh’s Personal Pages. Close to KB but not that close- NOT SAFE FOR WORK
I love Kate, too (mutual Kate fandom was one of the things that first brought my wife and I together). But overall, I think Joni Mitchell may have had a greater influence on subsequent generations of female musicians.
Kind of a hijack… but is it really a given that a classically-taught musician is superior to a self-taught musician? I don’t buy it. I’m too busy at the moment to go searching for cites, but I’d be willing to bet that there’s plenty of self-taught musicians who have achieved a level of expertise as good as or beyond school-trained musicians.
As far as whether Kate or Tori is the better pianist, I don’t know. It’s just that the comment about classically-trained vs. self-taught caught my eye.
A few weeks ago, I discovered the joys of mp3 downloading and I was absolutely amazed at the amount of Kate Bush songs just two mouseclicks away. Many, many songs I didn’t know from the albums. Duets, interesting covers, B-sides, live songs, etcetera etcetera. Man, I felt rich.
All right, here’s a question (from someone who’s owned The Dreaming and Hounds of Love for years now, and even brought back a PAL tape of her music videos on a trip to London and had it copied to NTSC): what’s with many of the internet Kate fans spelling her name with the weird capitalization (“KaTE”)? I used to see it a lot, but lately, not so much (thank goodness).
This might be a silly question since I asked it in another thread about Kate Bush and it wasn’t answered but–outside of her own projects–has Bush ever tried acting? From what I’ve seen of her, she has an interesting presence that I think would work well in movies. I’m curious whether she’s had any offers.
When Kate was a teenager, before her first album, she played in a band with her brother Paddy, playing in pubs and whatnot. They called themselves the KT Bush Band. I’m not sure why the spelling of Kate as “KaTe” started, but people on the late*, great mailing list (Love-Hounds)/Usenet newsgroup (rec.music.gaffa) started spelling it that way because of the KT Bush Band reference. It took on a life of its own for some reason.
I’m sure you’re right, there must be some, especially since classical training doesn’t teach you the emotion of the music, as Tori well found out and is why she left school (or at least, didn’t try to get back in after she was kicked out for being a pain in the ass who wanted to play Hendrix instead of Beethoven), but I was specifially talking about Tori and Kate, and Kate’s no match for Tori on the piano. Not even close. Saying that Tori was “clasically-trained” is an easy way to indicate that Tori’s better than Kate on the piano. Tori’s even better at getting the piano to show emotions. Kate’s just a straight-ahead player. Good, very good, but not special. To this day, unless she’s taught herself in the past few years, Kate still doesn’t read music.
I thought of Joni when I wrote that, so I’m not surprised to see her name come up. Joni certainly inspired Kate. When I said “modern” I really meant artists who have come up in the last 10-15 years, and Joni’s been absent from the musical stage for most of that time. She’s still made music, good music, but it didn’t have the impact on other artists that her early work inarguably did.
I’m sorry, I meant to get back to that question and forgot about it. Besides her videos and The Line, The Cross & The Curve (a collection of music videos that tell a specific story, starring Kate, Miranda Richardson and Lindsey Kemp) she played “The Bride” in a TV show called The Comic Strip, an episode titled “Les Dogs.” Miranda Richardson was in that too, playing the Mother of the Bride. All she really had to do in it was look beautiful, which wasn’t hard. She’s the object of a stranger’s obsession on her wedding day, when she’s marrying an uncouth lout. It’s very surreal, with a gun battle breaking out between the bride’s and groom’s families, played for laughs. She only had a few lines in it. I’d link to a picture but Gaffaweb seems to be down at the moment.
She said in an interview once that she had gotten scripts but they were mainly playing vampires and witches, not something she was interested in. She’s a perfectionist, and she tends to not like doing something unless she can do it well. I think she was a bit embarrassed by her acting in TLTCTC and Les Dogs, though she’s never said anything specific. I think that if acting had really appealed to her and was something she wanted to persue outside music, she probably would have taken acting classes in an attempt to be the best she could be.
I know she loves movies and has great taste in movies (I know she loves Brazil, The Hidden Fortress and Don’t Look Back), but maybe her experience with Les Dogs (not to mention being around the great Miranda Richardson) made her think she just didn’t have the talent. I don’t know. It’s all speculation.
*Love-Hounds/rec.music.gaffa are still around, but they were nearly destroyed by a troll in the late 90’s and early 00’s who started countless flame wars and drove away most of the best long-time posters, so it’s only a shell of its former self. The Usenet newsgroup rec.music.gaffa was started in 1985, and was mirrored into a mailing list (Love-Hounds) for those who couldn’t access Usenet, which is why I refer to them together. They’re one and the same.
Same here. It’d be fun to see, and I’ll bet she would have done it if Terry Gilliam, someone she adores, had asked, but I’m not disappointed either.
I’ve mirrored the pictures section of Gaffaweb, which is still down. We had a full copy on backup CD but I couldn’t get to it when I posted before, and here’s what Kate looked like in Les Dogs. That name, btw, came from the French band who played at the wedding reception in the program. They were called Les Dogs and spent the reception hiding behind monitors while they played and sung, because bullets were flying everywhere. I told you it was a weird show. One of those surreal I-can’t-believe-that’s-happening funny shows, rather than a belly-laugh funny show. Kate as The Bride (though she kicked no asses)
She’s never been a bride herself (she’s had 2 long-term relationships, is not a boy-hopping serial dater, and has been in her 2nd relationship for several years now) so I’ll bet she had a blast dressing up in all that frippery.
I hope people aren’t starting to think I’m creepy, knowing all this kind of information. I don’t seek it out, it just comes to me from the fandom, reading articles and interviews.
Btw, if anyone wants to see what she looks like now (at 47), there was a recent promotional picture at an Italian web site. It was taken down (maybe they got hammered by Kate fans who haven’t seen Kate in years and were dying to know what she looked like) but I grabbed a copy and uploaded it.
Apparantly this and others from the same photo shoot will begin surfacing. It’s good, because every article that’s talked about her new single/album has used older, sometimes really bad, pictures.
12 years!? Man, that’s beyond Chinese Democracy territory.
Am I reading this right?
She made demos of over 200 songs between the age of 16 and 18? :eek: Can the ‘Phoenix Recordings’ be downloaded legally?
I gotta check me out some Kate Bush! I only know Wuthering Heights and the Gabriel songs. Seeing as how there is no “Greatest Hits” package, and I don’t want to fork over the dough for the boxed set, which studio album would you recommend?
After Equipoise, I am the SDMB’s second most rabid KaTefan.
She did release a greatest hits package of sorts in 1986: The Whole Story. It’s a cross-section (not in chronological order) of some of her best-known singles. It also includes a new vocal on “Wuthering Heights” (and the overall, tight 70s pop sound has been tinkered with to sound more atmospheric), and a new song, “Experiment IV”.
I agree some of it’s silly, but you have to keep in mind that no one was really doing those kinds of rock shows then, with dance and mime and a magician (!), the songs either being sung/acted/danced as mini-stories, or strung together cohesively. At the time, everyone - critics and audiences alike - were blown away by her live show.
