Waffle

This 2009 version of "Cloudbusting" by Gemma Hayes would make a good pairing with Eivør's version of "Hounds of Love". Similar type of voice, similar toned-down version that still retains traces of the original beat in the background. Nice, eerie synth sounds, too. I like this.

Prolific Belgian rocker Mauro Pawlowski doing a minimalist version of "Babooshka" with just his gravelly voice and electric guitar. Dunno if I like this one just yet. Don't know exactly when this was recorded either, but I'm guessing 2009.

(Note: visuals in this video are Kate Bush's original promo; audio is a cover version.)

Aaand we've got the first non-English cover version of a Kate Bush song. "Shem Baeven" by Mazi Cohen is "Army Dreamers" translated into Hebrew. Alienating as the effect is, the cover works well musically; Cohen has kept the tempo the same but changed the instrumentation to something more dependent on backing/harmony vocals. Her timbre is also different enough from Kate's not to fall into copycat territory.

And it's from the 1980s! This song appears on her eponymous 1987 debut album. That makes Cohen's one of the earliest in the series.

To be honest, I don't really like what Brazilian Power/Sympho Metal band Angra have done with Wuthering Heights":

It's technically all very well and the singer does a decent job, but to do the job, he has to use a rather unattractive falsetto register. What's worse is that it doesn't add anything to the original. There's faithful covers, and there's slavish covers, and this, to me, falls in the latter category.

It is noteworthy, though, for being from the 1990s. The way I remember it, very few Kate Bush covers were produced before the year 2000. There was Pat Benatar's version of "Wuthering Heights" from 1980, China Drum's version of the same song from 1996, and this. I'm sure more covers from before 2000 will show up, and in any case I haven't checked the dates on many of the previous 18 entries all that thoroughly, but one of the reasons I wanted to do this series was because it seemed to me that the musical landscape had changed since the turn of the century, so that Kate Bush was transformed from an influential artist that few dared to tackle directly, to one who was... I don't know. Perhaps she is now slightly less revered. Or perhaps more people are realising that it's her writing, not her voice, that gives her her staying power. The voice either draws people in or repells them, but it's the songs that create the lasting impression.

Anyway, back to this. I think in theory, the idea of a metal cover of a Kate Bush song, especially an early one, could work, and if anyone can recommend a good one to me, I'd very much like to hear it. Like Within Temptation's cover of 'Running Up That Hill', this version just doesn't do it for me, though

This demented cover of 'Babooshka' by Rumanian/German singer Miss Platnum is a balkan hip-hop take on Kate's transitional hit single from 1980. I'm a sucker for brass sections anyway. A very nice surprise to be linked to, courtesy of the Kate Bush forum.

Please note the YouTube video above is a repost - the original, official version is not available in some countries, including my own. But arbitrary restrictions are there to be routed around, right?

A faithful and not at all riotous cover by American indy rockers Ra Ra Riot. The vocals take some getting used to but I enjoy what they've done with the electric cello part. We'll be seeing them again in a while.

This live acoustic cover of "Hounds Of Love" is a bit rough around the edges, both in terms of sound quality and a few hairy notes from performer Lisa Redford, but it's still utterly charming. Like the Futureheads, she's added chords to the accompaniment.

A video for the new version of "Deeper Understanding" was released on Monday. Like the new recording itself, it made me want a stiff drink, for pretty much the same reasons. Luckily, the comments at Kate Bush News included one from a musician and filmmaker from the Faeroe islands linking to a fanvid he had made featuring clips from his own short film "Mit Rúm", which does not make me want a stiff drink. It's not a literal translation of the lyrics into film, it's got real cinematography, it does not waste a third of its length to get to the point and it has the original version of the song on it. I wonder if as a musician, he's ever done any Kate Bush covers?

I also wonder if he's ever worked with Eivør Palsdottir. Only about 50,000 people live on the Faroe islands, so the odds that two people of the same age there, with similar interests and working in the same field know one another are very strong.

If you are curious about Kate's own new video for "Deeper Understanding", get within reach of a very strong drink and go here.

So... I've had a not very good day, starting with a medical checkup that had to be aborted because I could not tolerate the procedure even under sedation, and ending with me waiting an hour for the train home from work because an accident further down the line meant that several trains were canceled. Also, while I normally schedule these Kate Bush covers a day in advance, I was very tired yesterday and hadn't got around to it. So to catch up, I thought I'd just put up Michael Aaron's cover of Running Up That Hill even though I had already featured a Kate Bush cover by him a little over a week ago. But then I thought, nah... it's a little too early to start featuring artists twice, so once again I checked the YouTube sidebar and found ... well, two new versions that I hadn't heard yet. One of them I want to look for another source for, because the one I got had terrible sound quality, but the other is this lovely jazzy one by MPHO, who I know nothing about, but boy is this version pretty.

Also featured on Songpeople's tot 10 Kate Bush covers so instead of my private resolution not to feature the same artist twice in a short period, I'm breaking my publically stated resolution to stay away from the covers featured in that list until much later in the series. Bah, sod it, I've had a crappy day and this version is balm to the soul.

German-born composer and vocalist Theo Bleckmann takes "Running Up That Hill" into a tense, atmospheric direction as part of his Hello Earth project, due for release this year. I like this version a lot, though the entrance of the guitar at 5:14 is a bit disruptive. A minor fault, to my ears, and probably in fact something that they thought about for a long time.