Appearing 12 years after her previous album, Kate Bush’s ‘Aerial’ is an inscrutable piece of work. One that is rooted in the minutiae of daily life – one track describes scrubbing a muddy carpet in fine detail – but also reaches such moments of joyous ecstasy: ‘It came up on the horizon’, she coos on the penultimate track, ‘rising and rising’. Indeed, as Graeme Thomson argues, for lovers of music informed by that White Isle in the Mediterranean Sea it’s an undoubted masterpiece. Or, as Bush’s camp might have it, a fine album by a fine woman…

Here’s what we really need to know: Has Kate Bush ever been spotted at Café del Mar? Given her propensity for keeping her private life firmly private, we’ll probably never find out whether Britain’s most enigmatic artist has ever greeted the Ibizan dawn gently buzzing to a chilled Balearic soundtrack. But you listen to parts of ‘Aerial’, her eighth and perhaps greatest album, and you wonder.

Released in November 2005, Bush returned from a 12-year hiatus following the underpowered ‘The Red Shoes’ with an epic meditation on home, motherhood, death, magic, birdsong and the glory of a long summer’s day. ‘Aerial’ is split into two parts: the song-based ‘A Sea Of Honey’ and the conceptual suite, ‘A Sky Of Honey’, the latter performed in 2014 during her Before The Dawn series of shows.

It would be fanciful to claim ‘Aerial’ as definitively club-friendly. A multi-faceted work ranging over reggae, pop, rock, flamenco, renaissance madrigal and icy synthetics, it’s too immersive, too elusive, too damned expansive to be entirely one thing. Yet a unifying ambience threads its way through the music. ‘Pi’ is chill-out prog, with murmuring electronics and a spacey synth wash. ‘Joanni’, with its trip hop indebted beats, squelchy funk groove and trippy strings, nods to the Bristol-centric sounds of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and ‘Man Child’. The beginning of ‘Somewhere In Between’, where the rhythm mimics drum’n’bass, could actually be Massive Attack, with Bush doing a guest turn a la Tracy Thorn or Liz Fraser.

These clues pave the way for the album’s climax, where things turn positively Balearic; albeit, Balearic, Devon-style. In the final 25 minutes of ‘Aerial’, Bush proves that she understands the key tenets of dance music, the upward arc, the competing tensions of build and release. We find her, in her mid-40s, blissed-out, ecstatic, rapturous, climbing to the top of world. As she sings as the album rushes towards its finale: ‘We become panoramic!

 ‘Aerial’ was recorded between 1996 and 2004, mostly at Bush’s home studio, although string overdubs were recorded at Abbey Road in London. Bush and her husband, the guitarist Dan McIntosh, had bought a listed, 160-year-old former mill house at Theale, near Reading, situated on a natural islet on the Kennet and Avon Canal. She installed a studio in a converted garage.

In 1996 she demoed the album’s sole single, ‘King of the Mountain’. A song about fame, isolation and redemption, it suggested that Elvis Presley was still alive, watching from the mountain top, ready to ‘rise again’. A year later she wrote ‘Sunset’ and ‘An Architect’s Dream’, the latter a sweet, sighing song that pulls together the work of a street painter with the meeting of two lovers, both parties engaged in acts of precarious creation. This was disguised autobiography: in 1998, Bush gave birth to her son, Albert McIntosh. “I made a conscious decision early on that my son would come first,” she told The Australian.

In early motherhood, she wrote and recorded in short, stolen bursts, laying down the music on a Kurtzweil 250 keyboard and piano, adding drum loops, click tracks and guide vocals. “A lot of the writing process is really quick,” she told John Wilson on Radio 4’s Front Row shortly after ‘Aerial’ was released. “But then the arrangement of the songs can be incredibly drawn out, long-winded and so frustrating.”

‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ – just voice and piano – was recorded in one whole and complete take. Though its subtext hinted at darker themes, the ‘slooshy sloshy … washing machine’ refrain reflected Bush’s rooted domesticity. “For the last 12 years, I’ve felt really privileged to be living such a normal life,” she told Italian paper La Repubblica in 2005. “It’s so important to me to do the washing, do the Hoovering. Friends of mine in the business don’t know how dishwashers work. For me, that’s frightening. I want to be in a position where I can function as a human being.”

Much of the work on ‘Aerial’ was undertaken by Bush and her trusty engineer, former bass player and ex-boyfriend, Del Palmer (who sadly passed away at the beginning of 2024). McIntosh and bassist John Giblin, who died in 2023, were the other core members of the team. Giblin first worked with Bush in 1980, on her third album, ‘Never for Ever’. Speaking to me in 2015, he was under no illusions about what was required. “Working with Kate for me was always, and still is, about the unspoken: ‘Gimme the energy. Gimme something to move the song on.’ Kate does nothing by halves. Everyone involved knew that.”

Towards the end of 2000 Bush’s small team had made sufficient progress to begin parachuting in guest musicians. One was Peter Erskine, the former Weather Report drummer, who had also played with John Martyn and Joni Mitchell. She picked up the phone and called him direct. Shortly afterwards, Erskine was flown to England.

“There was a bit of secrecy attached to everything, in terms of where the drums would be delivered – there was a protocol that they wanted observed,” says Erskine. “The cases should be labelled in a specific manner so it would not be apparent to anyone handling those along the way where they were going or what the project was. They had a car service that would pick me up [from my hotel] and drop me off at a specific spot and then I’d get through the security gates. But there was nothing disproportionate. That security apparatus is to maintain some normalcy.”

Erskine was there for three days and played, by his estimation, on seven or eight tracks, although he only appears on three: ‘An Architect’s Dream’, ‘Prologue’ and ‘Nocturn.’ It was a leisurely process which encouraged experimentation. He recalls that at first he, Giblin and Bush performed together as an ad hoc jazz trio. “Kate was playing piano. Like: ‘Here’s a new song I’m working on.’”

This working process was mirrored throughout the sessions. Under Bush’s direction, musicians would be invited to play on various tracks. If it worked out, great; if not, no harm done. Working from home, she cultivated an atmosphere of cosy informality. Accordionist Chris Hall was there for a few hours. “Had a chat, drank some tea and ate pizza, met her family, played with the kid, did some recording and went away. Not mystical at all!” Tea was in constant supply. “She was always offering tea,” says Erskine. “The running joke at the session was that Del or John [Giblin] would say, like a British actor in a movie: ‘Ah, you’re a fine woman, Kate.’ That was the motto.”

Steve Sanger, an old friend of McIntosh’s from his session days, came in on several occasions to play drums, bells, shaker and percussion. He played on ‘King of the Mountain’. Bush also asked him to drum along to birdsong on the ferocious title track. “She explained that when this particular birdsong starts that’s when I start playing,” says Sanger. “I did it on an electronic kit, just playing the bass drum. That was a different day! Great food, great fun. It was me and Del and Kate, and Danny popping in and out.”

The idea had evolved to make ‘Aerial’ a double album with two distinct personalities – a little like ‘Hounds of Love’, with its conceptual second side, ‘The Ninth Wave’, but on a grander scale; in interviews Bush referred to it as the ‘Irish Wolfhounds of Love’. The first album features seven individual songs, each about a specific person: Elvis; her late mother Hannah on the heart-breaking ‘A Coral Room’; ‘Joan Of Arc (‘Joanni’); her son (‘Bertie’); the enigmatic and possibly bereaved ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’; and, it’s tempting to suggest, a fractured self-portrait on ‘How to Be Invisible’.

The second album is a conceptual piece tracing the arc of a summer’s day through nine interlinked pieces, from afternoon through sunset and nightfall to the dawn, all soundtracked by birdsong. “I like the idea of these things that are different languages from words,” she told John Wilson. “I think what I find interesting about it, too, is the way that they mark the day, like the dawn chorus. They seem to be very strongly connected with light. That was one of the explorations I was trying to go off on with this; the connection between their song and light and the passing of day.”

Though the album was recorded elsewhere, ‘A Sky Of Honey’ is redolent of Bush’s second base, a cliff-top house on the South Hams peninsula in Devon, with its own boathouse and private beach. This feels like the locus of a suite which moves from a country garden to the shore, to the Atlantic, birdsong running as a thread through it all.

Having spent much of ‘Aerial’ murmuring through a beguiling sun-flecked idyll, Bush begins to shake us awake as the music climbs higher and the day extends. On ‘Sunset’ the sea turns honeycomb, reflecting the sky as the light begins to change. The music at first floats, then pauses, then surges, becoming a kind of Balearic flamenco. ‘Nocturn’ begins as an ambient chill-out track, reflecting a gentle, pastoral hedonism: ‘We tire of the city,’ purrs Bush. ‘We long for something more.’ Then the beat kicks in and the music begins to build. Bush finally lets fly vocally, switching between a keening sensuality and primal chanting. What’s happening? The sun is coming up, that’s what, and ‘all the dreamers are waking!’ It’s utterly electrifying.

‘Nocturn’ bleeds into the title track, less a song, more a stomped trance. Dawn is breaking, and the blackbird is ready to greet the new day. By now, Bush is hyper; manic: ‘I feel I want to be up on the roof!’ she yells. The stomping 4/4 beat recalls Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’. An extended electric guitar frenzy vies with birdsong and cackling laughter, before a sudden, shocking silence. The sun has risen – and so has Bush. She has come up.

Though it has, at best, a tangential relationship with dance music, there’s something ecstatic in Bush’s music which connects to its spirit. She has always been interested in innovative rhythm, unusual sounds and new technology. She listens to hip hop – “It’s a bit like contemporary poetry” – and is beloved of many in that world. Bush has collaborated with Outkast’s Big Boi, who inducted her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year. Tricky is a huge fan.

‘Something Good’ by Utah Saints memorably sampled ‘Cloudbusting’, and The Prodigy sampled ‘Hello Earth’ on ‘Hyperspeed (G-Force Part 2)’; ‘Wow’ was used by several rave acts. There are numerous remixes and reworkings of ‘Running Up That Hill’, not least Ashley Beedle’s absorbing Heavy Disco Edit.

‘Aerial’ strengthened the connection. In 2021, London-based DJ and producer Ranj Kaler reworked ‘Nocturn’, accentuating its Balearic tendencies. “I always loved that track, it had a real Café del Mar kind of feel to it,” he says. “I used to play the original a lot at the beginning of the night. With the remix, I wanted to capture that beachy vibe, going on a journey to the seaside and away from the city. Making it a bit funkier but keeping that melancholic feel.” Does Bush know about it? “I did send a message and I didn’t get anything back!” 

Bush sometimes wondered whether she would ever be finished with ‘Aerial’. In October 2003 she recorded orchestral overdubs at Abbey Road with Michael Kamen, who sadly died of a heart attack shortly afterwards, aged 55. Friends such as Lol Crème and Gary Brooker added vocals and keyboards.

Eventually, Tony Wadsworth, then CEO of EMI, was summoned to Theale to hear the completed album, alongside Bush’s long-term industry confidante, David Munns. No one else was present. She handed each of them a tracklist, set up the machines herself, said: ‘It’s a bit long’, and then sat behind them as they listened.

“She was definitely nervous,” Wadsworth later told me. “We were stunned. Certain things really stood out for me – I don’t think I’d heard the human voice singing with birds before. I thought: ‘My God, still she is doing things that are incredibly original, and yet seemed absolutely right and natural.’ With her you’re getting the pure expression of someone living a home life. Because what ‘Aerial’ is, as a piece of work, is someone obviously speaking about a very private and domesticated life. It’s massively personal. And it wouldn’t surprise you to know that a lot of birds fly into her garden…”

‘Aerial’ pulls off the trick of being intensely evocative of Bush’s day-to-day life without being overly revealing. Singing of her physical environment, her son and her lover, there is a deep sense of joy, tinged with the loss that time brings. Tracing the journey of the sun on ‘A Sky of Honey’, the feeling is of someone returning from a period
of darkness into sunlight. “I got my life back,” she told John Wilson. “It’s very important to me as a creative person, as a writer, which is what I think of myself as.”

‘Aerial’ reached number two in the UK charts and quickly sold more than a million copies, yet as a complex piece of work it felt somehow underexamined in the period immediately after its release.

It came more fully to life almost a decade later, when Bush performed 22 shows in the autumn of 2014, at London’s Eventim Apollo. John Giblin played bass. “From the moment I got the call, I knew that this was going to be something historic,” Giblin told me in 2015. “Kate was under very intense pressure from the off. Every tiny detail was under Kate’s control, always, and as the rehearsals developed, each of the elements would be vying more and more for more of her time. Frustrating for all parties, as only one person knew the answers. That one person had to be there in the room for it to work.”

The results were astonishing, and ‘Aerial’ played a central role. As well as ‘King of the Mountain’ and ‘Joanni’, Bush performed ‘A Sky of Honey’ in full as the concert’s third ‘act’. Accompanied by a rich visual tapestry – a magical forest; a towering Moorish walled city; the vast red sun and pale white moon; masks, black wings and birds in flight – the suite came alive.

At first, the mood was slow, stoned, dream-like. Then the sultry ‘Sunset’ climbed towards a rattling flamenco climax, Mino Cinélu’s percussive power pushing the song ‘all the way up to the top of the night’, setting up the impossibly thrilling climax of ‘Nocturn’ and ‘Aerial’. Amid bells and birdsong, a new tension informed the music. Over an angry squall of guitar and a heavy artillery of bass and drums, Bush wailed about her ‘beautiful wings’ as the music pushed up and up.

It ended with frenzied chanting and what sounded like an explosion. Listeners to the ‘Before the Dawn’ live album might imagine Bush disappearing in a puff of smoke. In fact, she was hoisted into the air, black wings and all, airborne at last.

‘Before the Dawn’ illuminated the full scope of ‘Aerial’ and its resonance has continued to grow. Almost 20 years after its release, the album strikes a powerful chord because it articulates a profound life moment many of us can recognise. Caught between domestic joy and domestic duty, it measures the losses that begin to accumulate with age, the sweet memories and hard regrets, against the fervent desire still to seize the moment, treasure the now, cut loose a little and find the wonder in it all; to head up and seek the light. In time, it may well be regarded as Bush’s masterpiece. For ‘Aerial’ captures not just a single day, but an entire life.

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This article first appeared in the fifth issue of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.