You know those moments when you wake up, the night after a party, and as your mind has a carefree skitter over the exchanges of the previous evening it suddenly alights on one where you said [no, you didn't, did you? No!] to [OMG! not to her, of all people] about [oh, Jeez, I need this blanket to turn into a rock and crush me to death NOW!]. I don't know if I ever said this out loud — and happily I can be confident that I was never stupid enough to write it down — but, somewhere in the early eighties, my teenage self entertained the most patronising idea about Kate Bush, then in her early twenties. It was along the lines of, Maybe by the time she gets to 30 she'll drop all the silly trimmings and just do an album where she concentrates on writing and performing well (as with The Kick Inside, before producers would indulge her in the trimmings).
If I were being harsh, and for Pete's sake don't say I said this, I might argue that it actually took her until she was nearly 50. And even then the second disk has a smattering of those annoyingly literal sound effects that I keep whingeing about (1, 2). Some of the things that are good about it: it feels like a proper album; even though it's a double, it doesn't feel too long; it grows on you slowly, and it's still growing; I like the sense of space in some of the songs, particularly A Coral Room. Some odd things about it: close your eyes and How to be Invisible could be Fleetwood Mac (Buckingham Nicks incarnation); one of the things you can guarantee in the age of the Internet is that someone will have cross-checked Kate's singing of π to ensure it's mathematically correct — and it turns out that she "sings the number to its 137th decimal place (though she omits, for an unknown reason, the 79th to 100th decimal places)."
Starting in 2004, Mark Radcliffe started an on-air campaign to get Kate to do an interview with him on his Radio 2 show, embodied in the radio-friendly guise of the Bushometer, "a huge, badly done collage of [Kate] glued on brown cardboard": an extra photo of her got added to it for each day she didn't get in touch. Thanks to the release of Aerial, the campaign came to an end — and the Bushometer was burnt — with only a few hundred days on the clock. (Read all about it in this, gulp, Daily Mail piece.)
I held out from buying it for over two years, able to resist it at a tenner, but when the price fell below a fiver it slipped too easily into my Amazon shopping basket.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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