500-UP

Before I started this blog, I wrote a couple of fragments for my good friend Snowball's blog - slight, ill-informed snippets on Latin American history. I was travelling in Argentina and Paraguay at the time, and I felt rather mixed-up inside. On the face of it, I was unhappy because someone I'd met in Buenos Aires had ditched me, but actually I was embarking on a painful-but-fruitful year of re-discovery. Step 1 on the road to recovery was immersing myself in Kate Bush's Aerial as I travelled.

A few months later, in early 2006, I started this blog (not that you'd wish to, but some of the baffling / baffled reactions to this painful-but-fruitful year make up its first dozen or so posts). Five years later, I have reached a milestone. For this, dear reader, is my 500th post. And waddya know, Kate Bush has got another record out!

I have only listened to it once. I'm not a big fan of either The sensual world or Red Shoes - the former suffers from horrible production, the latter from a paucity of decent songs. Consequently, the beefed-up re-makes of SW's (and she does pick that album's highlights) glitter, where as with RS, well, you know that expression about polishing a turd.

The most radical re-make is of "This woman's work" - RBG found the word for it last night: amniotic. It evades the melody of the original, and Bush's voice is very different (blurred and deeper), but it does make a mockery of the criticism, "what's the point?". Even so, you can't help but compare the two. I have, and I'm not sure of my conclusion yet.

Here are both versions: