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Post by Adey on Jan 14, 2005 13:40:16 GMT
I've never heard your Cathy I must say..
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Post by Neo Stella on Jan 14, 2005 15:59:26 GMT
Its all in my book, but I can't resist a little taster here.
I fell in love with Cathy in 1977 when we were studying Wuthering Heights in English at school. This was the year before Kate released the single. At the time I was playing football for Camberley Town FC. We were travelling down to Eastborne for a league match. The colleague I was with put on a tape of Genesis. I absolutely loved the last three tracks so immediately went out and bought the album.
Little did I know the names of the second last two tracks was the last line in Emily Bronte's book. Weird I thought. I then gate crashed a party with a friend of mine, the hostess of the party (I didn't know she was at the time) approached me and with no introductions sat on my knee and started kissing me! She was my image of Cathy I had from reading the book. After kissing for a couple of minutes I asked her her name. When she answered "Cathy" it knocked me for six!
My father had drilled into me, "Never let women interfere with your football" Cathy wanted me to take her out on saturday instead of playing football, the football dream won on this occasion.
A year later on TV there is another Cathy (Kate Bush) singing her song to Heathcliff. Later I found out the house Kate grew up in was almost identical to the house I met Cathy in in 1977.
Kate was born the same day as Emily Bronte, she reputedly wrote the song on my birthday in 1977. The day after my birthday in 1978 it went to no 1 in the charts. The co-incidences were building.
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Post by Al Truest on Jan 14, 2005 19:06:38 GMT
Kate was born the same day as Emily Bronte, she reputedly wrote the song on my birthday in 1977. I don't plan to pee on your efforts anymore NEO. Your case for coincidental occurences may have interest and merit after all. What do I know. However, the line I've quoted might not pass the editing process.
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Post by Neo Stella on Jan 14, 2005 19:57:57 GMT
Thanks Al, this piece is not straight from the book, just a condensed snap of the story from my head today.
You are of course dead right. Kate was born the same DATE as Emily Bronte. However, many years later of couse.
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Post by Al Truest on Jan 14, 2005 21:44:59 GMT
No prob. I would also rephrase the ''reputedly wrote the song on my birthday'' as it sounds as though you're impling her prior knowlege of your birthday, instead of it being fate or coincidence.
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Post by Neo Stella on Jan 14, 2005 21:54:58 GMT
Another good point Al. Perhaps I should get you to read it before it is submitted.
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Post by Al Truest on Jan 14, 2005 21:57:58 GMT
I have some editing experience, albeit just @ University newspaper level. However, I will offer my observations if you'd like.
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Post by Neo Stella on Jan 14, 2005 22:01:26 GMT
Even if it blows you away?
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Sven Golly
Moving
"In the night you hide from the madman you're longing to be"
Posts: 800
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Post by Sven Golly on Jan 14, 2005 22:08:57 GMT
Even if it blows you away? Yeah, and what if it just blows?
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Post by Neo Stella on Jan 14, 2005 22:12:15 GMT
Yeah, and what if it just blows? Then we'll all sleep soundly in our beds.
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Post by kevers on Mar 27, 2005 3:02:13 GMT
I"You had a temper like my jealousy" I'm a bit puzzled over the above line. I can see how she sees Heathcliff as having a temper, but of whom is Catherine jealous? I see it the other way round: Catherine had a temper and Heathcliff was jealous of her marriage to Edgar. I think that Heathcliff's temper resulted from his jealousy. it could be argued that catherine was jealous of teh lintons esp at teh start where her and heathcliff peer into teh window, thats part of teh novel is where she becomes obsessed with teh materialistic values teh lintons possess whilst she loses touch with her and heathcliffs elemental side...so basically she was jealous bacause wuthering heights was a farmhouse whilse teh grange was an estate...for rich people...and she was attracted to that wealth... well in teh original film version of W.H i was cheering for cathys death personally i though she was a bitch that took things a lil far...and i hafta admit teh blk and white version is terrible compared to teh raplh finesse and even teh one with teh guy from james bond was good...... in teh book did anybody else realise that lockwood was supposed to be touching himself before cathys ghost appeared......i lost teh little respect i had for that man at that point....
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mizzshy
Reaching Out
"Oh darling, Make it go, Make it go away..."
Posts: 214
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Post by mizzshy on Apr 21, 2006 19:45:05 GMT
I love this song so much it makes me cry. But when I sing it (I love to sing) it makes me laugh because the notes are so high!
I read the book of Wuthering Heights (when I was 12- after listening to the song), and I've seen the film with Timothy Dalton and some other girl... I don't know her name... she had really blue eyes... and black hair...
Anyway, I thought they were all crazy, especially Cathy, but even more so Heathcliff. I find it quite romantic, but they are so crazy I think they deserve each other (Heathcliff and Cathy, I mean) and I don't know why they had to go and make the Lintons miserable!
But I agree with Kate that the last bit is really nice.
P.S. She died from starving herself and general craziness...
EDIT: This is my favourite song in the entire world!
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mizzshy
Reaching Out
"Oh darling, Make it go, Make it go away..."
Posts: 214
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Post by mizzshy on May 6, 2006 19:56:49 GMT
Cool, I might be going to Haworth!
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Post by tannis on Mar 16, 2008 17:07:29 GMT
Kate on Wuthering Heights
KB: "I developed a kind of fascination with Cathy after I saw the last 10 minutes of the television series where she was at the window and cutting herself with the glass. It always stuck in my brain... It was probably a lot to do with the fact that her name was Cathy--and I was always called that as a child. My feeling about it was so strong that it kept coming back to me again and again. Then I read the book and discovered that Emily Bronte had her birthday on the same day as me, July 30, and I really, really wanted to write a song about it all." TV Week Australia, "The Girl With The Child In Her Eyes... And The Angel In Her Voice" , October 14, 1978 gaffa.org/reaching/i78_tvw.html
KB: "I wrote in my flat, sitting at the upright piano one night in March at about midnight. [Kate's flat was in a house owned by her father in Lewisham, Southeast London, with her brothers as neighbours.] There was a full moon and the curtains were open, and every time I looked up for ideas, I looked at the moon. Actually, it came quite easily. I couldn't seem to get out of the chorus - it had a really circular feel to it, which is why it repeats. I had originally written something more complicated, but I couldn't link it up, so I kept the first bit and repeated it. I was really pleased, because it was the first song I had written for a while, as I'd been busy rehearsing with the KT Band." PHOENIX: EARLY KATE BUSHgaffa.org/phoenix/index.htmlKB: "I felt a particular want to write it, and had wanted to write it for quite a while. I remember my brother John talking about the story, but I couldn't relate to it enough. So I borrowed the book and read a few pages, picking out a few lines. So I actually wrote the song before I had read the book right through. The name Cathy helped, and made it easier to project my own feelings of want for someone so much that you hate them. I could understand how Cathy felt."Kate's KBC article, Issue 1 (January 1979), "Kate's Songs"gaffa.org/garden/kate1.html----- from Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age, and Gender (Whiteley, 2005; pp 70-73)Throughout her career, Kate Bush has explored and celebrated female archetypes and iconography, scouring mythology, history, literature, Arthurian legend and Jungian psychology for provisional identities, and using femininity as a cipher of masks and poses. As Joy Press observes, Bush has discovered that she has her own turmoil, her own demons and even her own version of the Dionysian fire that characterises rock rebellion and its relationship to the Romantic. More specifically, she has discovered both a whole set of alternative images and a compositional style which both confronts and extends the premium of passion, confrontation, urgency and extremity of expression associated with the rock rebel through an emphasis on the imaginary of art-rock and a musical style that is characterised both by its instinctual 'bright colours and deeply felt emotional hue' and, from 1980, her personal expertise as a producer. 'Wuthering Heights' was a hauntingly original composition, but its impact was undoubtedly due to the ethereal quality of the vocal, which resonated with the dementia of Cathy, the star-crossed heroine of Emily Bronte's gothic novel. Although the song can be characterised as a mini-narrative which situates the love of Cathy and Heathcliff within the windy moors of their childhood and the wildness of their adolescent passion, its central axis revolves around the obsessiveness of loss and an erotic longing for her cruel and tempestuous lover which continues beyond death. She is a victim of love, a wild child torn by pain and desire, consumed by the wuthering (literally, wrongful) heights of passion. Its imagery resonates with the sensual longing expressed in the chorus to the song, the vocal line rising and falling like the wind. For Bush, Cathy's need to possess, the sense of being torn between love and hate for her 'one dream', her 'only master', is characterised by a mood of dramatic longing. The eerily-pitched vocal which, like the piano accompaniment, constantly turns in on itself to mirror the obsessive eroticism of desire, is both wispy, wraithlike in its high register, and pleading, childlike in its cry to be recognised. It is as if Bush has chosen a never-ending moment in time. She is caught up in the Romantic obsession with the madness of desire, a love-crazed girl who, like Ophelia before her, had no control over her own fate. Cathy can only find resolution through possession of her lover's soul, when they will be united in death. But the sense of completion is denied. The shock value of the song, the seemingly unnaturally high register of Kate Bush's vocal line, which assumes both childlike qualities in its purity of tone and an underlying eroticism in its sinuous melodic contours and obsessive vocalised femininity, provides the first indication of her ability to create 'a new kind of language, a way of thinking and speaking' that is characterised in Helene Cixous's essay 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1981). Paradoxically, it resulted from a desire to reject the representations and representatives of womankind that she saw in pop. The maleness of progressive rock undoubtedly underpins the guitar solo. However, while 'Wuthering Heights' can be situated within the art-rock genre, the subject matter itself is quintessentially woman-centred. In particular, it draws on the traditional concept of the woman who is punished for her sexuality, her wilder side, so drawing not only on the Gothic, but also on the mythological. Heathcliff embodies the beast, the major mythic figure of masculine potency and is both Eros and the source of Cathy's fantasy fixation. In traditional fairytales she would nurture and tame him. In Bush's interpretation, however, Cathy personifies the female erotic: Beauty stands in need of her Beast rather than vice versa and is forever condemned to 'roam in the night'. Her need of him is part of her own carnal nature and, as such, she invokes the darker side of women's fantasy lives. It is a theme that runs through many of her songs. Like the protagonists in Angela Carter's re-telling of the classic fairytales which conjure young girls' sexual hunger and the lure of the wild, and where monsters and princesses lose their place in the old scripts and cross forbidden lines, Bush metamorphoses into the lioness for her second album Lionheart. The sleeve for the album shows her as a transformed beauty to the lion's beast. Her long red hair mirrors the leonine mane as she drapes herself, catlike in her sinewy body-suit with its fur-like cuffs and tail, beside her sleeping mate. Like Carter, she has re-imagined familiar tales, borrowing elements from Symbolism and pornography, Gothic romance and mythology, to become transformed into a furry, naked creature like him, so demonstrating the erotic nature of the heroine. For Bush, the lion, the lionheart, is also England, and the lyrics to track 5 are handwritten as if to endorse the spontaneous sincerity of the song... ----- Rooksby (2001): It's always fascinating to see an artist re-visit a recording a try to re-do it, as Bush did with 'Wuthering Heights' for the 1986 compilation The Whole Story. She told Q Magazine in 1991: "It sounded very dated to me: my voice sounded so young, the production sounded so Seventies. I liked the idea of taking the song I'm most associated with, and making it me now as opposed to a very young girl, as I was in 1977". But going back a re-recording the vocal was only going to be at best a triumph of technique and self-confidence over fortuitous innocence. What resulted from this revisionist impulse was an assault on her youthful self and her most famous song, which seemed almost (if understandably) resentful. The updating consists of adding more reverb and a new, lower-pitched vocal, which is more up-front in the mix, less integrated with the instruments. She can't quite get the high note at the end of the middle-eight, and her scat-singing of the guitar solo is about as endearing as watching Hello Mum being spray-canned over an Old Master. Ironically, from the perspective of a new century, the 1986 version sound no more contemporary than the original. ----- RUNNING UP THAT HILL... and WUTHERING HEIGHTS...Is RUTH "Wuthering Heights Revisited"? ... A much darker version of her classic original? ... Maybe RUTH is Cathy's ruthless, dual nature teasing Heathcliff! ... It has the perverse cruelty, the tormented passion, the defiant obsession, the torturous disregard, and the eternal love for the Moors... 'It doesn't hurt me' because life without Heathcliff and the Moors is no life! ... The defiant 'won't be unhappy' ... The wicked 'tearing you asunder' ... The eternal longing to 'be running up that hill' ... Her shocking deal even disturbs the dead, unleashing ghostly, purgatorial voices! ... And if she only could, Cathy would have made such a deal for her beloved moors and Heathcliff would have obliged her! see more:katebush.proboards6.com/index.cgi?board=houndsoflove&action=display&n=1&thread=1714&page=2
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Post by Barry SR Gowing on Mar 31, 2008 7:42:10 GMT
Rooksby (2001): ...She can't quite get the high note at the end of the middle-eight, and her scat-singing of the guitar solo is about as endearing as watching Hello Mum being spray-canned over an Old Master. Ironically, from the perspective of a new century, the 1986 version sound no more contemporary than the original. Unfortunately I have to agree. The missed note is the only time I've heard Kate sing noticeably flat on a studio recording. It's almost painful, to me anyway, and shocking because Kate has such good pitch normally. Interestingly, the woman who impersonated Kate singing 'Wuthering Heights' on 'Stars in their Eyes' also had the same problem with the same note. If anything, the 1986 version sounds far more dated than the original. It's got way too much reverb on almost everything and the mix sounds overly bright and cluttered. Fabulous song though. I particularly like how the verses have no definable key: the tonal centre keeps shifting from chord to chord. Even the chorus, which is a bit more tonally stable, is still ambiguous. Plus there's a neat little trick Kate uses to get in and out of the chorus .. essentially shifting down (and then later up) a semitone. Sorry to get all technical on you, but Kate's early stuff is a bit richer harmonically than her later stuff (where she gets more into rhythm and modality and texture) so this kind of stuff intrigues me. I'm thinking of transcribing some of her songs because I see that most of her sheet music is out of print (and it's probably inaccurate anyway). --Paul--
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