Kate Bush Says She’s ‘Very Keen To Start Work On a New Album’
Kate Bush has given a rare interview and teased the prospect of new music.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Friday morning (Oct. 25) the pop icon said that she has ideas and desires to make a start on a new album. Bush released her last studio album 50 Words For Snow in 2011 .
When asked if she was working on new material currently, Bush said: “Not at the moment, but I’ve been caught up doing a lot of archive work over the last few years, redesigning our website, putting a lyric book together.
“And I’m very keen to start working on a new album when I’ve got this finished. 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.”
When presenter Emma Barnett asked if it was a hope she’d had for a while, Bush responded: “Yes it is, really. Particularly [in] the last year, I’ve felt really ready to start doing something new.”
Bush was appearing on the program to promote a new short film that she has created called Little Shrew, which is soundtracked by her 2011 song “Snowflake.” The four-minute short film, which you can watch below, was created by Bush and an illustrator to help raise awareness and funds for the charity War Child, which supports young people caught up in conflicts.
Speaking on the film, Bush said she “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.”
“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.
“And so I came up with this idea for a storyboard and felt that, actually, people would be more empathetic towards a creature rather than a human. So I came up with the idea of it being a little shrew.”
The British artist broke through in the late 1970s and her hits include “Hounds of Love,” “Babooshka” and “Wuthering Heights.” In 1980, she became the first solo female British artist to top the U.K. Albums Charts with her third album Never For Ever. Bush’s creative work in recent decades has been sporadic, and in 2014 she shocked the music world when she announced a return to the stage for a residency in London, her first live performances in decades.
In 2022, Bush’s 1985 single “Running Up That Hill” featured heavily in the fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things and saw a flurry of interest and streams in her back catalog. The song peaked at No .3 on the Billboard Hot 100, bettering its placement of No. 30 upon its original release, and topped the U.K. Singles Chart for three weeks to give Bush her second No. 1 single. In 2023, the song topped 1 billion streams on Spotify.
Thomas Smith
Billboard