Yep, but I too doubt very much if she’ll ever tour again.
KaTe was, for a long time, the center of my musical existance. I first heard of her in 1979, but didn’t buy an album until her fourth, The Dreaming, in 1982. My dedication (obsession?) with her peaked the couple years after Hounds of Love came out. For many years, some of my best friends were a core group of people who were in on the secret. And it really was a secret: her first album was released in the US, but not promoted. It flopped, although it was a hit everywhere else in the world (she was huge in Japan–to coin a phrase–and she was a media phenomenon in England). Her US record company didn’t even bother releasing her second and third albums, so that, when The Dreaming came out (it was a very intense, very angry album, and the suits at EMI America thought it stood a better chance among the college set; it did), I was forced to do all my catching up in imports. And boy did I: I bought every seven inch, every ten inch, every twelve inch album, single, and e.p. I ever came across; every box set, every picture disc, etc. Then of course had to go through it all over again when CDs hit (my first CD was Hounds of Love).
For many years I was a KaTe evangelist. Me, to random strangers at parties: “Have you heard the music of Kate Bush?” I played The Ninth Wave, “frame by frame,” for my sound class; I annotated it for my Lit class.
My voice became recognizable to the DJs at WXRT as the guy who always tried to get them to play Kate Bush (they refused to for years)–even going so far as to buy a copy of The Dreaming to give to the program director when I found out he was going to be at a public event (“We already have this album.” “Then play it!”) and hounding Terri Hemmert whenever she bought rabbit food at the pet shope where I worked.
One of my lifelong best friends I met because she was wearing a KaTe pin at a Jane Siberry show, then we get to talking and come to find out I had already all but met her: another KaTe friend of mine knew her and had driven to KC to dub copies of her accumulated 24 hours of KaTe video material (including Kate as a celebrity guest on a cooking show: “There’s a lot in veg’tables!”; Kate on the nightly news cutting the ribbon at a new shopping mall; Kate being interviewed about her hair by Kenny Everett: “Lots of carbolic soap, and just leave it messy,” and Kate Solid-Gold[sup]tm[/sup] dancing while the hostesses of a Japanese variety show sang her song for her, etc.), and she (back to the friend I met at a Sib show) had a radio show “celebrating female vocals” (this was ten years before Lilith Unfair) called–get this–Suspended in Gaffa. She’s no longer doing her radio show, but she does occasionally play host to weary world travellers for KaTemas, the celebration of Kate’s birthday. She and her husband met through personal ads that mentioned KaTe at a time when NOBODY knew about Kate.
It really was like being in on a great big secret. I got a job a record store in 1983 because the bag I checked behind the counter contained an import twelve inch and the heavy metal hair dude behind the counter had paper cut scars all over his body from a letter he’d gotten from Kate in reply to a fan letter he’d sent her.
I feel like I could go on and on and on. But I’ll end here with this: I am deeply committed to a lifelong crush on KaTe’s brother, Paddy, who will someday marry me.
