A new cover version of Running Up That Hill by the techno group Distance has been released in The Netherlands as a 2-track CD single featuring a 3’34 radio edit and a 4’15 trance mix released on Blueprint, a Dureco label, cat. no. 1107442. It is described as an interesting version featuring a real Digeridoo!! (thanks to Marcel Rijs in The Netherlands).
Category: Other artists
The Chicago based independent record label Brown Star Records have given me more details about the upcoming Kate Bush Tribute Album. The album is officially titled:
“I WANNA BE KATE: The Songs Of Kate Bush”
There are a total of 17 tracks on the CD (which is running at a generous 74-78 minutes) taken from all of Kate’s seven studio albums and the following is the final running order:
- L’Amour Looks Something Like You by The Aluminum Group
- The Sensual World by Susan Voelz
- Hounds Of Love by The Moviegoers
- The Man With The Child In His Eyes by Syd Straw
- There Goes A Tenner by The J Davis Trio
- The Saxophone Song by Nora O’Connor
- You’re The One by Justin Roberts
- Coffee Homeground by Mouse
- Jig Of Life by Catherine Smitko
- The Kick Inside by Victoria Storm
- Running Up That Hill by The Baltimores
- Home For Christmas by Diamond Jim Greene
- Suspended In Gaffa by My Scarlet Life
- Kashka From Baghdad/Babooshka by The Plunging Necklines
- Love And Anger by Trinkets Of Joy
- And Dream Of Sheep by Thomas Negovan
- Not This Time by Tom Dunning & Your Boyfriends
All the musicians are very active in the vibrant Chicago music scene. The most prominent participant is probably Syd Straw (Mercury recording artist), who’s debut album “Surprise” featured Michael Stipe of REM among others. She formerly sang vocals for the Golden Palominos and she has also acted for television including Tales Of The City. Another track of note is Coffee Homeground, produced and recorded by Bob Weston, the man who engineered Nirvana’s IN UTERO album and a member of Steve Albini’s band Shellac. The executive producer, Thomas Dunning, informs me that the album is currently at the mastering stage. At the moment a June release is looking likely. You will all be able to read much more about the making of this record in Part Two of the interview with Thomas Dunning on my website coming soon…..for now you can read part one here.
In the April issue of the German music magazine Musikexpress, Tori Amos talks about her CD collection. Included in her 10 choices are; David Bowie, Marvin Gaye, The Cure and Kate’s Hounds Of Love. Tori has this to say about the album: (thanks to Rolf Peukert for the translation)
“I love the second side of this album. I was in Los Angeles when I heard this record for the first time. I was hanging out in the rock chick scene. Thigh-high boots, gigantic amounts of hairspray, and everything. I had encountered nothing but rejection for months, nobody liked my piano stuff. And I was in a band that did something completely different. Then I found this record, and put it on, listened to side one, liked it OK, listened to side two, listened to side two again, and again, and again and again (sings): “You can’t hear me, you can’t hear what I’m saying, you didn’t hear me come in, you won’t hear me leaving.” This turned me inside out. It changed my life. I decided to leave the man with whom I shared an appartment; I left the man I was living with because of this record.”
Further to the above article, Tori is also interviewed by Tom Doyle in the May edition of Q Magazine (no.140):
If the songs on Little Earthquakes served to heal the emotional scars of their creator, then the reviews for the album threw up one recurrent comparison: Kate Bush. The debt’s there in the song’s skewed perspectives on the world outside, and the singer’s contortion of certain vowels.
“I’ll never forget the first time I heard about Kate,” Amos recalls. “I was playing in a club, I was 18 or 19 and somebody came up to me, pointed their finger and said, Kate Bush. I went, Who’s that? I wasn’t really familiar because Kate didn’t really happen in the States until Hounds Of Love. I was shocked because the last thing you want to hear is that you sound like someone else. Then people kept mentioning her name when they heard me sing, to the point where I finally went and got her records. When I first heard her, I went, Wow, she does things that I’ve never heard anybody do, much less me. But I could hear a resonance in the voice where you’d think we were distantly related or something.”
So you were never influenced directly by her?
“Well . . . . I must tell you that when I heard her, I was blown away by her. There’s no question.”
Did you sing along with the records?
“Absolutely. But I knew that I had to be careful, so I didn’t voraciously learn her catalogue. I left the records with my boyfriend at the time, because I didn’t want to copy her.”
A US Kate Bush tribute album will be released in the next few months by a group of Chicago based musicians. It features cover versions of many of Kate’s well known, and lesser known tracks. You can read all about the album in an interview I have conducted with the album’s executive producer Thomas Dunning in the Articles section.
At the 1998 Grammy awards, the gong for Best New Artist went to Paula Cole. Paula, who has been compared to Kate by the music press, thanked Kate for being an inspiration and later on MTV said that Kate’s “visionary” album, Hounds Of Love, had been very inspirational to her. Paula also thanked Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder. In the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, Paula comments that she was inspired by Hounds Of Love because Kate showed it was alright to be “audacious, bizarre and passionate” in music.