Kate Bush is a British avant-garde pop star and art rocker, an artist who lives and thrives in opposition, constantly balancing classical mastery with aggressive experimentation, femininity and strangeness, and alternative attitudes with pop stardom. This box set explores her career from 1980 through 1985, including her three most arguably boundary-breaking and influential sets of recordings.
The box set includes packaging, three albums, and a catalogue. The system revolves around expressing the dichotomies of Kate Bush, utilizing hand drawn charcoal textures to represent her wavering and dream-like falsetto contrasted by her shrieks, snarls, and screams. Considering herself a “storyteller” Kate never writes music about herself, but rather characters and almost nonsensical stories she creates for each recording; represented by the custom DaDa inspired collages featured through the collection.
The catalogue includes my own writing on Kate Bush’s career throughout the first half of the decade. Utilizing the charcoal and collage, the catalogue also crops the singer in unusual and uncomfortable ways to represent the artist’s relationship with the mainstream.
The book also features inserted “scrolls” to further emphasize Kate’s storytelling, containing lyrics from each of the three albums, which fold in and pull out to 60 inches.