What kind of language is this?

Kate Bush - 'Aerial' (Aerial - 2005)

Firstly, a little bit of admin. I consider the title track the last song on Kate Bush’s 2005 album Aerial, as that is how I was first exposed to it on release. I am aware that when the album arrived on streaming services, the whole of the second disc, Sky of Honey, was presented as one 42-minute-long suite of one track called ‘An Endless Sky of Honey’. I am focusing on the last eight minutes, the ninth section - ‘Aerial’.

Aerial is an album many people had been waiting for; it was 12 years since 1993’s The Red Shoes, almost to the day. The album was announced in late August of 2005, giving about two months’ notice that the reclusive¹ singer was releasing a double album. The single, ‘King of The Mountain’ debuted on BBC Radio 2 in late September and was released two weeks before the album. I remember the excitement building, magazine coverage - both weekly and monthly, radio, and message boards - when a bonafide legend comes back after over a decade, the build-up, whether it is David Bowie and then My Bloody Valentine in 2013, D’Angelo in 2014, Steely Dan after 20 years or Aphex Twin after 14, is exciting.

When it is a double album, with songs about Elvis Presley, washing machines and rattling off π to many decimal places, it is a lot to chew over. The second disc is undoubtedly ambitious. It was no surprise that Kate Bush’s 2014 residency at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in September 2014² saw her showcasing not only The Ninth Wave suite from 1985’s Hounds of Love but A Sky of Honey as the vast majority of the set lists’ run time. In the show, Bush portrays a bird-like woman observing the activities of a 19th-century painter³, as you do.

The bird-woman is observing a day and a night, hence the title of those 2014 shows, Before The Dawn. Much like another beloved English act who found fame in the late seventies and peaked artistically towards the middle of the eighties, we are dealing with an album exploring a day.