Kate Bush reveals plans to make new music

Kate Bush has spoken of her plans to start working on new music.

In a rare interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to promote the new short animated film she’s written and directed, called Little Shrew, she clarified that she wasn’t currently in the studio or writing new material, having spent the last few years focusing on archival releases for her past music, including vinyl reissues of her full album catalogue.

However, she added: “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.”

Asked if it was something she had been hoping to do for a while, Bush said: “Yes it is, really. Particularly the last year, I’ve felt really ready to start doing something new.”

Referencing a recent comment by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour which saw him reveal he’d been trying to persuade her to perform live again, she said: “I’m not there yet.” Bush’s last live performances took place across a 22-date residency at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2014, for which tickets sold out in minutes.

Little Shrew, Bush’s new short film, is set to her 2011 track ‘Snowflake’, lifted from her album ’50 Words For Snow’. The black-and-white animation aims to raise money for the charity War Child. Though it’s free to watch now on Bush’s website, viewers are encouraged to donate funds to War Child and other charities supporting children affected by war.

“I started working on it a couple of years ago,” Bush said of ‘Little Shrew’. “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.

“I think we’ve all been through very difficult times. These are dark times that we’re living in and I think, to a certain extent, everyone is just worn out. We went through the pandemic — that was a huge shock — and I think we felt that, once that was over, that we would be able to get on with some kind of normal life. But in fact it just seems to be going from one situation to another, and more wars seem to be breaking out all the time.”

Revisit DJ Mag’s 2021 piece on how Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’ influenced the evolution of electronic music here.