“Best of the Other Sides”
Hard to think of a less interesting release (of course I have the original compilation which was nevertheless incomplete)
A new album release from Kate Bush
by 35 Comments
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
All the best to her etc. etc. I have the 2018 set too. Why not just not delete The Other Sides?
I’m reading vol 2 of the Elvis Guralnick biography and the Colonel and RCA are madly scrabbling around for studio offcuts and ideas for repackaging existing content in the early seventies as they can’t get Elvis to record any new material. So looking forward to ‘Fun with Kate Bush onstage’
When was the last time she released anything of note?
Sorry but for me she has become a non-artist.
Her back catalogue includes some astonishing songs but she stopped being relevant years ago.
Well the last 3 studio albums of new material were:
The Red Shoes 1993
Aerial 2005
50 Words for Snow 2011
Loved Red Shoes and Aerial but 50 words for snow was self indulgent twaddle.
I concur. Anything that involves Stephen Fry can get in the bin.
Amen to that. I remember a review which said something like ” you’d think you would be safe from the omnipresent Stephen Fry whilst reviewing a Kate Bush album, but apparently not”.
Except the film Wilde. He was good as Oscar.
He’s become more and more unbearable over the intervening years as he’s disappeared further and further up his own arse.
It has been argued that Kate Bush’s entire output (in fact her modus operandi) is self-indulgent twaddle. It’s a question of whether you’re prepared to engage with it – and where your personal limits lie…
After all, shouldn’t all artists be “self-indulgent”? Follow your muse and create something which pleases and satisfies you – and if the buying public also like it, that’s a bonus. (Mind you, I like prog – and that goes with the territory).
Acts may say that but generally they want to sell records, have some hits, make a living. I think they are being disengenuous. They want to be seen as ‘artists’ but usually have an eye on showbiz as well. Bush was very much commercial and professional in many ways despite the twee element for which there is clearly a market. 50 Words fits in with the rest of her oeuvre quite easily.
Not sure that I agree. The Blessed Kate – consciously commercial? Which of her LPs was written to cater for a perceived market?
And disingenuous? Surely not? You’ll be calling her pretentious next! 🙂
I thought parts of it were really lovely. In fact I prefer it to The Red Shoes which is the album of her’s I like least. To her credit she went out on a limb and tried something completely different and there is a lot of beauty in there.
She’s among my favourite artists, and Hounds of Love is in my top 3 albums, but this seemingly endless stream of largely pointless reissues is a bit wearing.
Vinyl of a slightly different colour, or with new (very expensive) packaging? I have zero interest in vinyl, so I’m happy to pass on that. Now we also have slightly tweaked versions of a couple of tracks? No thanks.
Given her stature and success, especially given the boost to her profile from Stranger Things, I don’t see the point behind such fiddly little changes or reissues. Where, for example, is the bells-n-whistles box set for HoL, with Steven Wilson surround mix, all the mixes and videos, etc.? Surely that would be an instant money-spinner.
Each time I read “new Kate Bush release” I get my hopes up, only for them to be dashed again. Obviously this couldn’t be more of a first-world problem and she’s free to release (or not) whatever she wants, but her reissue programme leaves a lot to be desired when compared to, say, that of Jethro Tull or Marillion. I know we can’t get CDs and DVDs of KB live shows over the years, and she’s not keen on interviews/documentaries, but I’d happily pay good money for some nice box sets.
I have no idea why fans would buy the same pressings of albums at hugely inflated prices with hideous new artwork. We had the live album and then the original Other Sides album with one unreleased track was a cautious step in the right direction, but since then nothing of interest to me
I still hope for at least one more new studio album and there have been a few rumours that it could happen.
I honestly speed-read that as “Give her her statue”, and thoroughly agreed with the sentiment.
I read that right, yeah, £23 for ‘one’ CD?
I take that as a yes… or maybe a case of Wow.
So that’s what that song was all about.
The 4 CD set that previously came out cost 20 pounds. She signed a new distribution deal a few years ago with a new company and these subsequent inflated prices seem to be a result of that. Everything is also probably being produced in smaller quantities for physical media so they need higher prices to recoup any additional costs.
When the Rolling Stones had been going 25 years, Charlie Watts said “it was 5 years of work, and 20 years hanging around”. Bored in the next 5 years, he had a brief heroin habit to fill in the time before their later Stakhanovite schedule emerged.
Kate Bush? Well, she did have Albert 27 years ago, and parenting does take time – though with her wealth, things may be somewhat easier. We don’t know what Kate does in her private life, or any health / personal struggles she may have had. if she wanted to produce, she could, and she could easily distribute and sell this to an appreciative market wanting some new music, and presumably her record company is very frustrated by not cashing-in on this.
The gigs were by all accounts a success, and what I’ve seen on YT looked great, but were very much in the “play two classic albums” style of heritage bands – though what else could they be? No DVD release for them, and some say this is because of her anxieties about having a more mature form – though much of the audience is likewise cushioned by prosperity, and she still looked lovely , as far as I was concerned: I’m not the young Jim Morrison I was once likened to, either.
At the bottom of this, I suspect Kate Bush’s muse is now a lot more selective, she has become impossibly self-critical, or she was so alienated by the music corporation machinery, and depressed by how music is now, that she reasonably decided to get out of the industry, but decided it was better not to say this explicitly.
“Cushioned by prosperity”… sounds positively lovely. I will be adopting that in future..
I was at one of the shows. It was superb, overwhelming, moving. She did play material from 4 of her 5 previous albums, that went back to 1985 though *. The opening 6 tracks were a mixture of those played straight live before concentrating mainly on (parts of) 2 albums after that in a much more theatrical presentation. To be honest I was never particularly interested in a DVD (or more likely a Blu-ray), because the event could never truly be captured in that way.
* the missing album from those 5 was The Sensual World which did have a track on the live album (Never Be Mine) but she didn’t play it in front of an audience because of time constraints
I still think that her coming onstage to the pealing bells and then launching into The Sensual World would have been a wonderful statement opening of the BTD show.
Mmmm … yes
Excellent @dai
I don’t think anyone could legitimately say that she became alienated by the music corporation machinery. Perhaps in the very early days up to the promotion of Lionheart she may have had to
acquiesce to the company’s suggestions/wishes (although she was pretty much indulged as a prodigy from way before The Kick Inside), but from 1980 onwards, she has increasingly dictated the terms of her own creativity and marketing and has now reached the stage where she is literally her own CEO. So I think that, sadly, after the epochal experience of the Before The Dawn project, she has either just become disinterested in making new music; she is not in physical good health; or she has observed the growth in popularity of vinyl and the associated endless variants, bundles, special editions, and thought ‘that’s easy money’. The latter doesn’t really sound like the persona she has projected over the years (although she is forever unknowable), but I think all these latest marketing initiatives are beneath her.
She was a teenager or in her early 20s during her first peak of success. I suspect that it left deep scars even if she then had an unusual degree of control following that. Her first (only) tour also affected her deeply especially as a lighting engineer lost his life right at the start. There may also be personal issues, stage fright, writer’s block to consider. I like to think she lives a happy life with occasional phone calls from record company promising her a few 100K pounds for basically doing nothing.
I am reminded of an old Q interview with Enya, who said she found it incredibly difficult writing, performing and producing new music, and hated the whole experience, but every few years, someone from Warners would show up at her front door with a massive advance cheque, and she figured, “oh, what the hell”…
I love Enya’s music, but every single album follows the exact same template.
At the time the box sets were announced, I leaned on the counter of my local record shop and between me and Bill (behind the counter), we came up with a tracklisting for a Hounds Of Love SDE in about 10 minutes.
Kate, if you’re reading this, Bill and I are both still available for private consultancy work.
The first CD version I bought was from 1997 and it somehow slipped out with 6 bonus tracks. I suspect she was not too pleased about this:
The Big Sky” (Meteorological Mix)
Running Up That Hill (12″ Mix)
Be Kind To My Mistakes
Under The Ivy
Burning Bridge
My Lagan Love
That edition was released as part of EMI’s 100th birthday celebrations.
I loved the first two albums but became less interested once she got the Fairlight and the albums became very dense.
That’s when she got going, Never for Forever, The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, The Sensual World, what a run of superb albums, and I add Aerial to that as an encore.
Can’t disagree with that.
Whilst most regard HOL as her masterpiece (and I won’t argue with that), I often feel that Aerial is my favourite – that whole second side suite is simply sublime.
Second album suite. Which I never really got into until I saw her do it live