It’s a question many of us have had these past few years: where has Kate Bush gone and what has she been up to?
This morning we received an answer, via an interview with Emma Barnett on Radio 4’s Today programme. Aside from gardening, she has been working on a short film. Little Shrew (Snowflake), uses Snowflake, a track from her 2011 album 50 Words For Snow, and depicts a tiny mammal making its way across a bombed-out city. The aim of the animation is to raise awareness and money for the War Child charity.
In the interview Bush explains how she was moved by the predicament of families fleeing the Ukraine war.
"I started working on it a couple of years ago, it was not long after the Ukrainian war broke out, and I think it was such a shock for all of us," she said (via BBC News). "It's been such a long period of peace we'd all been living through. And I just felt I wanted to make a little animation that would feature, originally, a little girl. It was really the idea of children caught up in war. I wanted to draw attention to how horrific it is for children.”
The 66-year-old added: "I think we've all been through very difficult times. These are dark times that we're living in and I think, to a certain extent, everyone is just worn out. We went through the pandemic, that was a huge shock, and I think we felt that, once that was over, that we would be able to get on with some kind of normal life. But in fact it just seems to be going from one situation to another, and more wars seem to be breaking out all the time.”
And so onto the burning question: has she been working on new material? The answer will disappoint fans: Not just yet, it seems.
She explained that she had been busy on archive work and updating her website. “I’m very keen to start working on a new album when I’ve got this finished,” she said to an audible gasp from Barnett. “I’ve got lots of ideas and I’m really looking forward to getting back into that creative space – it’s been a long time.”
Fans will nod knowingly at those words. Bush hasn’t released any new music for 13 years. There was, of course, her run of shows at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2014 and the accompanying live album Before The Dawn, which came out in 2016. Since then: nothing.
Barnett also brought up David Gilmour’s comments about nudging his one-time protege, gently, about live work once more. “I’ve tried persuading her recently actually,” he had revealed in a recent Guardian reader interview. Bush chuckled at this and said, “I’m not there yet.”
You can listen to the whole interview on the Today podcast on BBC Sounds here.
