Kate Bush,
50 Words For Snow /”Wild Man“
In interviews Kate Bush can be disarmingly warm, amiable and friendly – just enough to throw interviewers off the scent. Truth is, no-one has really got to the bottom of the oddness of Kate. She puts forward an image that is so… natural and normal most of the time. A deliberate ploy, I feel, to stop anyone getting close, to stop anyone uncovering just what is going on in Kateworld. Good for her, I say.
50 Words For Snow, as you know, is made up of songs built around the theme of winter and snowbound places. Songs about blizzards and ghosts, about luckless lovers, and – with usual Kate bizarreness – about snowmen climbing through windows to have a trysts with sleeping women – which deviates somewhat from Raymond Briggs’ boring yearly bit of animation, and definitely one with more innuendo (“I can feel him melt in my hand” indeed). Then there’s the excellent single, “Wild Man”, which must shoot into everyone’s top 100 songs that are about the Abominable Snowman – and can we get a ‘first’ for the use of the word “rhododendrons” in popular song?
The seven unhurried songs here form an album – a real album – of luxuriant prettiness which may be Kate’s consistent best since The Sensual World (not that I’m saying that 2005′s Arial isn’t a masterpiece, just one that isn’t as easily giving as 50 Words is), though the reviews of it have been somewhat lukewarm when they should have been luke-hot – especially for the caramel smooth duet with Elton John. Maybe this needs more time to thaw in the conciousness in this age of instant gratification.
Yeah whatever…
