Kate Bush News

A new Kate Bush studio recording dropped unexpectedly today? Well, kind of, yes! As we saw in her recent Christmas message, the challenges and concerns posed by AI technology are not far from Kate’s mind of late and in a letter in today’s UK Times newspaper she joins many prominent artists and writers in a protest at the UK government’s AI copyright proposals. Many media reports single out Kate’s involvement in their headlines this morning. A similar campaign has paid for prominent wrap-around paid advertising on all major UK print newspapers this morning with the slogan “Make it Fair“.

The letter states “There is no moral or economic argument for stealing our copyright. Taking it away will devastate the industry and steal the future of the next generation.” It is signed by Simon Beaufoy, Barbara Broccoli, Kate Bush, Stuart Camp, Matthew Dunster, Sam Fender, Helen Fielding, Rachel Fuller, Sir Stephen Fry, David Furnish, Dame Pippa Harris, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Sir Elton John, Paul King, Simon Le Bon, Dua Lipa, Alastair Lloyd Webber, Lord Lloyd-Webber, Sir Paul McCartney, Martin McDonagh, Sir Michael Morpurgo, Lucy Prebble, Sir Simon Rattle, Philip Ridley, Michael Rosen, Dame Hannah Rothschild, Ed Sheeran, Sting, Sir Tom Stoppard, Pete Townshend, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Matthew Warchus, Jeanette Winterson, Andrew Wylie.

As part of this campaign, a new “silent” album, called “Is This What We Want?” has been released today on streaming platforms including here on Spotify. The album includes contributions from Kate, Damon Albarn, Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Pet Shop Boys, Billy Ocean, the Clash, Hans Zimmer, Imogen Heap, Cat Stevens, Max Richter, and many other names. Kate has written about the project on her official site:

Over one thousand musicians are jointly releasing this album today to protest the UK government’s planned changes to copyright law.

If these changes go ahead, the life’s work of all the country’s musicians will be handed over to AI companies for free. None of us have a say in it.

The UK is full of pioneering, highly creative and imaginative artists. The government’s willingness to agree to these copyright changes shows how much our work is undervalued and that there is no protection for one of this country’s most important assets: music.

Each track on this album features a deserted recording studio. Doesn’t that silence say it all?

I’m very happy to have contributed a track to this project and to join the protest.

Please help protect the music makers and our heartfelt work. We make it for you, not for it to be taken and used against us.

In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?

Kate

The recordings of dormant music studios and performance spaces, represents the impact on artists’ livelihoods if the government pushes ahead with its plans, according to Ed Newton-Rex, the British composer and former AI executive behind the idea. He warns that livelihoods are under threat from these proposed changes to copyright law. According to an article in The Guardian today, “…the album contains 12 recordings with more than 1,000 artists credited as co-writers, with the individual artist behind each of the dozen “silent” tracks uncredited. However, it is understood that Kate Bush has recorded one of the dozen tracks in her studio. Bush said: “In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?”

The 12 track titles spell out the following sentence: The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies. And we note that the final silent track 12, “Companies” does faintly feature the birdsong of a dawn chorus, a lot of cat purring sounds and what sounds like the sipping of hot tea (at the 3 minute 10 second mark)!! So, do we think this is Kate’s contribution to the project? Listen and see what you think.

Kate’s tradition of sharing a most-welcome Christmas message this year lands, appropriately, on Christmas Eve. As many of us prepare to spend time with family, today she has shared a Christmas Eve message on her official site that, while acknowledging the global strife and war that led to her creating her acclaimed Little Shrew animation, reflects on the possibilities of brighter revelations ahead for all of us.

A Monet Christmas Eve to All!

It’s been really exciting to see the wonderfully positive feedback to the Little Shrew animation. Thank you so much to all of you who made a donation to War Child. They have been absolutely delighted with the response.

Little Shrew will be getting a bowl of especially delicious earthworms this Christmas morning.

It’s been another year of exceptionally dark news. It just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?

The wars keep raging. We helplessly stand and watch as those poor people are caught up in the horrors of it all and of course there are the children…

It’s hard not to focus on the worry we all feel about these conflicts and the massive changes that are happening around us, but I’d like to try to find something positive to say for this Christmas message:

Happy Christmas Eve! My favourite day of the year. When I was a child, it used to have a special feeling. It even had a sort of Christmas Eve smell… a mixture of smoking coal fires and damp leaves, all bundled up in a drizzly English frozen fog. If I really work on it, I can still summon it up on the day. I’m working on it now…

I went to see the Monet exhibition. Twenty one paintings in two rooms – all featuring the Thames in the smog. They were incredibly atmospheric. The fact that they were all of the same environment made you feel like you were there yourself, wrapped up in a mysterious smog of muddy sulphurous yellows, sun-starved pinks, car-sick greens.

You could only make out vague, blurred shapes through the etherial, swirling veils…a majestic bridge here, a wispy boat there… these paintings were completely mesmerising. They transported you to London at the turn of the last century.

Monet thought that the smog was beautiful and that London would’ve looked utterly uninteresting without it. For him it was the smog that created the magic of the place.

I imagined him ready at first light, stood at his easel spluttering and coughing as he peered through the polluted air, with no choice but to gasp at its beauty.

It made me smile to read that although he sketched them while he was in London, he took them home and finished them off in France. Ha ha! So all is not as it seems – that sun-starved pink was actually lavish Giverny pink.

Is that us? Standing in awe at the dawn of AI, the symbol of modernity, as smog was for Monet at that time in the newly industrial London? Do we only see the twinkling light of the new invention, which so often catches the eye of our imagination… and what are those vague, dark sardonic shapes we can see in the background, behind the theatrical gauze?

It’s hard to make them out, but could they be our human pods, like those from the Matrix, being readied for us by eager, playful digits? Or maybe they are freshly painted bridges – robust, and lovingly built to carry us all into a much longed-for new age of healthy thinking?

All will be revealed when the smog begins to clear.

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope it’s a really joyful one for you all.

Happy new year.
Kate