Kate Bush, The Whole Story (1986)

Where bought? I think I got this off the market in Worcester for a fiver. Don't usually go in for hits collections but I made an exception here.

This is fairly unimpeachable stuff really. 11 hits and one new composition (the worst thing on here, but it's fine). 'Wuthering Heights' has a newly-recorded vocal that I don't think beats the original, but it isn't wildly different in any fundamental sense ie. she phrases it much the same, adds a little bit of improv in the lovely string outro.

When you're confronted with a classic artist and their greatest hits, it can be very hard to say anything original or of great use to anyone at all. What I will do instead of trying to write new prose to sum this up is this: I will quote myself from a thread I took part in where the denizens of a forum I use went week-by-week on Kate Bush's albums. I'll keep it just to bits that are relevant to songs on this compilation.

On the first album The Kick Inside and 'Wuthering Heights'.

In the annals and written histories of pop there is a lot of talk of the delicate feminine wiles of our ethereal songstress subject, a feminist rebuke to the dinosaurs of the 1970s and perhaps even something that is punk-adjacent if not actually "punk". But if you look down the credits of her records there are a lot of Alans, Brians, and Mikes. Which makes sense here because what Bush is basically doing is the eccentric ghostly frosting on a cake of solid English prog lifer music.

But what is art rock but prog rock with discipline? This kind of stuff is laid bare all over the record but I'd like to direct the reader to two particular moments on this record:

1. The outro to Wuthering Heights. A lot is made of Bush's performance - and we'll cover that in due course - but as her vocal drops out the song is revealed to be syncopated AND in a strange change of time signatures. I just pulled up the official sheet music and there's key changes and shifts between 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4.
   

 And on the same record, as a response to someone who said they felt moved by the album:

It's possibly strange to say but I didn't feel particularly 'moved' by anything on TKI, if anything it felt like a very talented 19 year old doing an exercise really well and I was excited by that. If you want to be unkind you could say Wuthering Heights is incredibly precocious "look at me I read a book" track that could be the centrepiece of a musical (like a lot of these songs, there is a strain of musical theatre in them).  

On 'Wow' and a little bit of Lionheart:

'Wow' (Partro medley notwithstanding) and 'Kashka From Baghdad' (nice piano melody but offset by sound that sounds like a badly encoded MP3) are songs that should/would have made the cut on The Kick Inside

On the three singles from Never For Ever:

On nearly every level this kicks sand into the weakling eye of Lionheart. There are twice as many A+ bangers: Babooshka is the famous one but the other three are all better in completely different ways. Theory here that Bush and The Stranglers were smoking the same thing given their predilection for both referencing North Africa and the Middle East but also turning toward medieval-esque formalism - Army Dreamers is like a sister to Golden Brown in some ways. Breathing is the sweeping and magisterial outro track she'd gunned for before and failed - it's a bold leap into the soft synthism that marks her future as well as the ACTUAL future, only with a better song.

I wasn't terribly kind to The Dreaming but I didn't mention any of the songs that appear here. However, on Hounds of Love I said this:

Side A is five back-to-back bangers: Running, Hounds, Big Sky, Mother, Cloudbusting. The latter is one of the 20 best pop songs ever written. The title track perhaps drags more than I'd remembered (I think the Futureheads version actually suggested dynamics in the song that aren't in the original!) but we're in all-timer territory for runs of tracks that marry artistry with pop sensibility and have also been famous. Not a lot new to say here except that The Big Sky is as good as the more famous ones.

That more-or-less covers it. This is an excellent hits compilation, though there's plenty of good stuff on her early albums run to make you consider not bothering.