You're All Alone on the Stage

A tweet by the excellent Tim Harford led me to this documentary about Kate Bush, made during for the preparations for her first tour back in 1979.

It's worth watching even if you're not a great Kate Bush fan, just to see what we were wearing in 1979 and how dingy our world seemed (I was 19 then and about to up to King's - so I'm really peering into my past).

Sadly I didn't get to see her on that tour, which is a shame as she's one of my pop heroes and she never toured again, something which makes the closing chat with her on the documentary all the more poignant as the interviewer asked her how she sees her future panning out and at that point she was clearly so focussed on her musical career.

It's marvellously sexist by the way: can the imagine an interviewer today asking a female artist if she'll settle down and raise a family?

But actually that's arguably the way it did work out. Although she's continued making music and turning out new albums after The Red Shoes she made a conscious decision to opt for the quiet life while she tried to give her son a normal childhood so she's largely been out of the public view since the early 1990s.

Still we did have the pleasure of Aerial back in 2005 which I loved, despite it getting rather mixed reviews.

P.S. if you want to listen to a more recent interview with Kate I can recommend the Front Row three parter which was done to publicise Aerial. Start here.