Find­ing this short doc­u­men­tary on “Queen of British Pop” Kate Bush was a treat for me, I must con­fess, not least because of the always enter­tain­ing pres­ence of John Lydon (John­ny Rot­ten from the Sex Pis­tols). Hav­ing nur­tured a deep love for Bush’s music in my youth as a sort of guilty plea­sure, it’s only in my adult­hood that I decid­ed it’s ok to say, dammit, I think Kate Bush is just absolute­ly bril­liant and I don’t care who knows it. It’s prob­a­bly the case that with age, all guilty plea­sures just become plea­sures (or should, any­way). Alright, she may have sin­gle-hand­ed­ly inspired every melo­dra­mat­ic 80s teenag­er in a the­ater club to put on gauzy, home­made dress­es and twirl around war­bling and swoon­ing, but what, I ask, is wrong with that? There are worse things birthed by pop trends, that’s for sure, and it’s arguable, real­ly, how much of Bush’s music can be called “pop,” any­way, since she includes so many British and inter­na­tion­al folk influ­ences in her reper­toire.  And yes, it’s true, some peo­ple, like Lydon’s moth­er (whom he quotes above), think her singing sounds less pop star and more like “a bag of cats”–a reac­tion that seems to thrill him–but she cer­tain­ly made an impres­sion on David Gilmour, who passed her demo on to EMI and helped launch her career. In addi­tion to Lydon, Kate Bush: Queen of British Pop includes inter­views with Lily Allen, her ear­ly pro­duc­ers, and her broth­er, John Carder Bush, dis­cussing her song­writ­ing process as a young teenag­er.

It wasn’t long after her ear­li­est writ­ing efforts that Bush was signed to EMI at the age of 16 and set about record­ing her first album The Kick Inside. While she’s typ­i­cal­ly remem­bered for hits from her 1985 Hounds of Love—includ­ing “Cloud­bust­ing” and “Run­ning up that Hill” (and their incor­po­ra­tion into sev­er­al dance­floor hits of the 90s)—Bush’s first sin­gle “Wuther­ing Heights,” released when she was just nine­teen, hit num­ber one on the UK and Aus­tralian charts in 1978. Bush insist­ed that this be the first sin­gle from her album, despite the fact that, well, it’s an incred­i­bly bizarre song for a pop release, in its arrange­ment and its sub­ject matter—Emily Bronte’s 1847 goth­ic nov­el. But it works in a way that only Bush could get away with (cov­ers of the song are gen­er­al­ly ris­i­ble and uncon­vinc­ing). She some­how man­ages to per­fect­ly encap­su­late the novel’s chill and its poignan­cy, alter­nate­ly plead­ing and threat­en­ing in the voice of Cathy’s ghost, implor­ing the haunt­ed Heath­cliff to let her in again. (For a tru­ly haunt­ing expe­ri­ence, see this video of the track slowed down to an ethe­re­al 36-minute crawl). No one else could pull off this almost-pre­ten­tious bal­ance between the sub­lime and the ridicu­lous, com­bined with her inter­pre­tive dance and rolling eyes, with­out get­ting labeled as some sort of a nov­el­ty act, but as Lydon puts it, her “shrieks and war­bles are beau­ty beyond belief” to many ears, and she was tak­en seri­ous­ly and award­ed an icon­ic sta­tus. Or, in anoth­er one of Lydon’s lit­tle gems: “Kate Bush and her grand piano… that’s like John Wayne and his sad­dle.” I already warned you I’m a fan. You may just hear a bag of cats.

After the release of The Kick Inside, Bush embarked on her first and only tour in 1979. The video below is a per­for­mance of “Wuther­ing Heights” from a Ger­man appear­ance:

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, she would nev­er tour again and only per­form live spo­rad­i­cal­ly. This is in part due to her desire to con­trol every part of her career, from writ­ing and pro­duc­ing, to per­form­ing and pro­mo­tion. In “Queen of British Pop,” her broth­er describes her frus­tra­tion with the world of talk shows and mag­a­zine inter­views, which tend­ed to triv­i­al­ize her music and ask con­de­scend­ing ques­tions about her love life and hair styling. Any pop sen­sa­tion should expect this, I sup­pose, but Bush resent­ed the way she was objec­ti­fied by her label and the press. She con­sid­ered her­self a seri­ous artist and set out to prove it by focus­ing exclu­sive­ly on her work, not her­self, as the prod­uct, a deci­sion that earned her a rep­u­ta­tion (not entire­ly unde­served) as a “weirdo recluse,” but also enabled her to retain com­plete cre­ative con­trol, make a series of remark­ably eclec­tic and per­son­al records, and become a pio­neer and a pos­i­tive fig­ure for dozens of female artists after her. She did make the occa­sion­al for­ay onto tele­vi­sion and film after her retreat from the lime­light. A mem­o­rable exam­ple is this sil­ly duet with Rowan Atkin­son (in char­ac­ter as a sleazy Amer­i­can lounge singer) for a 1986 Com­ic Relief con­cert.

Bush won high praise from crit­ics and peers last year for her return to “sub­lime and ridicu­lous” ter­ri­to­ry with lat­est album 50 Words for Snow. A 1993 doc­u­men­tary called “This Wom­an’s Work,” avail­able free here, presents a longer explo­ration of her work, with sev­er­al inter­views with Bush.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Clas­sic. And if you’re not famil­iar with the ref­er­ence — Miles Davis’ 1970 exper­i­men­tal jazz album, Bitch­es Brew — you can catch it on YouTube, or snag a copy online.

H/T Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Child’s Intro­duc­tion to Jazz by Can­non­ball Adder­ley (with Louis Arm­strong & Thelo­nious Monk)

‘The Sound of Miles Davis’: Clas­sic 1959 Per­for­mance with John Coltrane

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learn­ing to Play Jazz & The Cre­ative Process

It’s hard to imag­ine him as an old man, but Joe Strum­mer would have turned 60 today. Strum­mer was the heart and soul of the leg­endary punk group The Clash, the rea­son many peo­ple called it “The only band that mat­ters.”

He was a man with a Bob Dylan-like instinct for self-inven­tion. Born John Gra­ham Mel­lor on August 21, 1952 in Ankara, Turkey (his father was in the British diplo­mat­ic ser­vice), he changed his name to Joe Strum­mer in the ear­ly 1970s while play­ing in a rhythm and blues band called the 101’ers. When the Sex Pis­tols opened for the 101’ers, Strum­mer was so impressed with the band’s take-no-pris­on­ers atti­tude that he threw him­self into the punk move­ment, accept­ing an offer from gui­tarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonon and man­ag­er Bernie Rhodes to join what would even­tu­al­ly become The Clash.

With the Clash, Strum­mer helped move punk beyond the self-absorbed nihilism of its ear­ly days to embrace polit­i­cal and social aware­ness. After the band dis­in­te­grat­ed in the mid 1980s, Strum­mer spent over a decade in semi-retire­ment before return­ing in the late 1990s for what he called his “Indi­an sum­mer,” with a pop­u­lar BBC radio show and a new band, The Mescaleros. But just as he was regain­ing his old momen­tum, Strum­mer died unex­pect­ed­ly of heart fail­ure on Decem­ber 22, 2002, at the age of 50.

In the video above, Strum­mer sings the title song to the The Clash’s 1980 album Lon­don Call­ing, which Rolling Stone ranked  Num­ber 8 on its list of the 500 Great­est Albums of All Time. “Record­ed in 1979 in Lon­don,” writes the mag­a­zine, “which was then wrenched by surg­ing unem­ploy­ment and drug addic­tion, and released in Amer­i­ca in Jan­u­ary 1980, the dawn of an uncer­tain decade, Lon­don Call­ing is 19 songs of apoc­a­lypse, fueled by an unbend­ing faith in rock & roll to beat back the dark­ness.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Clash: West­way to the World

The Clash Star in 1980’s Gang­ster Par­o­dy: Hell W10

Mick Jones, The Clash Gui­tarist, Sings ‘Train in Vain’ at the Library

“No one knows why exact­ly Son­ny Rollins, the tenor sax­o­phone colos­sus, hasn’t record­ed a good stu­dio album since the 1960s,” writes New York Review of Books blog­ger Christo­pher Car­roll. “Yet any­one who has seen Rollins per­form on a good night knows that, even at eighty-one, he is still capa­ble of play­ing with the same bril­liance that first made giants like Char­lie Park­er, Miles Davis, and Thelo­nious Monk take an inter­est in him in the 1950s.” “I haven’t heard every note that Rollins has ever record­ed, but I’ve heard lots of them,” writes New York­er film blog­ger Richard Brody, “and if I had to car­ry just one record­ed per­for­mance of his to the here­after, it would be one from Copen­hagen, from 1965.” You’ll find a clip of this very show above, 45 min­utes that might give you a sense of just what Rollins enthu­si­asts like Car­roll and Brody are enthus­ing about.

As Brody describes the full show, “Rollins plays almost unin­ter­rupt­ed­ly for near­ly an hour, pick­ing up heat and whim­sy as he goes along. His full, hearty sound is excep­tion­al­ly sculp­tured, bluff, and pli­able; the notes of the ris­ing phrase in the open­ing num­ber, ‘There Will Nev­er Be Anoth­er You,’ seem to hang in the air like bal­loons. Daw­son sets a brisk, light tem­po, Rollins makes room for [bassist Niels-Hen­ning Ørst­ed] Pedersen’s solo, and then sidles over into the har­mon­ic wilds and lets fly cas­cades of notes and bro­ken, mod­ernistic tones while trad­ing fours with the drum­mer, before end­ing with a suave solo caden­za.” For a more recent show­case of Rollins’ musi­cal pow­ers at work, see also the video just above, a 1992 per­for­mance from his sex­tet in München, Ger­many. Some­times well-respect­ed jazz play­ers spend long stretch­es in the artis­tic wilder­ness — Rollins in par­tic­u­lar hav­ing been “irrepara­bly dam­aged by years spent exper­i­ment­ing with funk, dis­co, and fusion in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies,” in Car­rol­l’s words — but you can nev­er real­ly take your ears off them.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Son­ny Rollins’ New York City Bridge Sab­bat­i­cal Recre­at­ed in 1977 Pio­neer Elec­tron­ics Ad

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.