Talk:Babooshka (song)

"In this brief interview on YouTube, Kate Bush explains what the song is actually about, which may surprise those who seem to view this with a sort of feminist "revenge" slant."

Can somebody please transcribe what she says as the YouTube video might go down. I-baLL 15:40, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Transcript of Talking Babooshka
Transcription of 1980s interview with Kate Bush entitled "Talking Babooshka" from this youtube recording (here is a truncated copy)

Title: COUNT DOWN
 * Announcer: Cheryl Wright caught up with Kate Bush in London.

(00:05 video zooms towards Kate in the Babooshka outfit)


 * Cheryl: Can you tell us how you came to write Babooshka?


 * Kate: How I came to write it? Yes, it was really a thing that's
 * fascinated me for some time.

(00:16 video fades to Kate sitting on sofa; titles: KATE BUSH)


 * It's really based on a theme that's used a lot in folk songs,
 * er which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel
 * that perhaps he is not faithful - and there's no real strength
 * in her feelings, it's just more or less her paranoia, suspicions.
 * Umm, and so she starts thinking that she's going to test him.
 * To see if he's faithful.


 * So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens
 * to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter, and he responds very
 * well to the letter because as he reads it he recognizes the wife
 * that he had a couple of years ago who was happy, in the letter.
 * And so he likes it.


 * And she decides to take him even further and get a meeting together
 * to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her.


 * And when he meets her, again because she's so similar to his wife,
 * the one that he loves, he's very attracted to her.


 * And err, of course she's very annoyed, and the break in the song
 * is really her just throwing the restaurant at him, so
 * there's like cutlery, vases, phwwwwit, (Kate mimes throwing objects)...


 * Cheryl: because he's actually being unfaithful ...
 * Kate: ... going straight across the room ...


 * Kate: No, he's not, he's not, he loves her very much. And the whole
 * idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans
 * and how by our own thinking and swimming around in our own ideas
 * we come up with completely paranoid facts.
 * So in her situation she was infact suspicious of a man who was doing
 * nothing - he loved her very much indeed.
 * And through her own sort of suspicions and evil thoughts she's really ruined
 * the relationship.


 * Cheryl: Babooshka is a Russian word though, isn't it?


 * Kate: Yes, it is. In context to the song though, um I just popped
 * the name in because it felt right. And I presume that I picked the name
 * up from a fairy story or something when I was a kid.
 * But infact it is a Russian word for grandmother.
 * That's something I didn't realise at the time.
 * It just felt like a really good name for the lady.


 * Cheryl: You do your own choreography. Did you do the choreography
 * on the video-clip of Babooshka?


 * Kate: Yes, yes I did.
 * That's another thing that I enjoy, and I think probably
 * why I can do it is because I actually write and create the songs.


 * Cheryl: Do you do the costumes as well?


 * Kate: Well no, I didn't actually make them, I've got a fantastic
 * costume lady called Pammy, who erm, comes around and we discuss what
 * the character is going to be like. Because, again, and this is
 * the thing, once the song has been written, whoever's singing
 * that song isn't necessarily me anymore: it becomes the character.


 * And in the video it's very much two people: it's the wife;
 * and it's the wife really zapped out (or up) to be Babooshka.

(02:59 screen fades to Kate in black costume with the double bass)


 * And so, we had to get the contrast, that's very important, and in
 * the video what I was trying to do was to make the wife very bare,
 * very black, very sinister and geometric.

(03:12 video shows Kate in black roughly swinging her arm and hip to and away from the double bass)


 * And using the double bass symbolically as the husband.
 * And manipulating him and pushing him away and being very cold.


 * And in the choruses she's Babooshka, completely free, and wild and mad.

(03:33 video, now showing Kate in the Babooshka costume sans bass, slowly fades back to Kate on sofa)


 * And so it was really trying to get the contrast between the two
 * characters, and using the double bass as the symbolic, umm, gesture
 * ... of the husband. Yeah.


 * Cheryl: You used to play violin, and you also play piano I believe.


 * Kate: Yes I do. Violin, uh, I haven't touched for years, I learnt it
 * as a child, and it was very useful for me, actually, I really did get
 * some good things like music theory, that was very important for me.

(03:55 video shows Kate playing the piano)


 * Kate: The piano is my instrument, that's the one I really play.


 * Cheryl: Do you write the songs with, on the piano?


 * Kate: Always, always with the piano.
 * I've never written a song without the piano
 * - we write songs together. He's my partner.


 * The thing about arrangements is that, although you can
 * actually control the arrangements at the - ultimately,
 * so much of it is to do with what the musicians
 * are giving you. Often, session musicians will not be shown
 * what the song is about. They just come in and they play
 * "G C-minor A" and they go away.


 * Well, what I wanted was to get them emotionally involved,

(04:35 video returns to Kate on the sofa)


 * I think it's very important, because music is emotion, it's feeling,
 * it's flying, it's spirit.
 * And what they did was they allowed me to give them the song with
 * the lyrics, with all the thoughts that had gone into writing it,
 * and I think the end product has really benefitted from them putting
 * their feelings in as well their very good technique.


 * Cheryl: Can you, are you having trouble coming up with new ideas
 * for songs, are you running out of inspiration?


 * Kate: No, no in fact it really got good again.
 * It's so easy that when you've found a formula of how to write a song,
 * you stick to it, and there's so many people that have fallen into
 * the trap that if they've got a formula of A-minor G-C and from
 * there on every song will be A minor G-C because they know it works.
 * But I feel, good artists, people like Bowie, er, Cliff Richard,
 * you know the real biggies, they keep moving. And that's the important
 * thing about, I think, art, you don't remain stagnant, you keep
 * moving, and pushing.

(05:32 video zooms back from Kate in the Babooshka costume)


 * Announcer: Kate Bush. Hey now it's back to the Romantics ...
 * Announcer: Wake up fellows.
 * Wally Palmar: Oh. Eh Rich, what did you think of ...

(interview video clip ends) -Wikianon 08:57, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I've cleared up the unclear words and made minor fixes in the above transcript and links - the figures in parentheses mark the time in minutes and seconds.-Wikianon (talk) 02:30, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Babooshka single.jpg
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BetacommandBot (talk) 04:17, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Cover versions
there is a German cover version quite famous: done by artist Miss Platnum. The style ist between Balkan Pop and Hip Hop. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.196.45.163 (talk) 10:34, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Movie/Soundtrack
Part of the song can be heard, quite unexpectedly I would say, in the background of a dialog between two characters in the Moroccan movie A Thousand Months (2003) by director Faouzi Bensaïdi. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.233.221.135 (talk) 19:20, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Reverted Karl Pilkington
I reverted back to the revision of 438162510 dated 2011-07-07 02:17:58 by Vladwin because the addition of the Karl Pilkington material was unsourced, of low relevancy, and partly put in the wrong section. -84user (talk) 01:19, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Before coming to this talk page, I had a terrible feeling some poor soul would have tried to add some Karl Pilkington material at some point. Bless them. C.harrison1988 (talk)

External links modified
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Fairlights
I’ve tracked down one article: that reminded me of something I’d seen floating around for sometime.

That the smashing glass effects at the end of the song are provided by a Fairlight.

I’m not sure if it was one of the first songs to use one: but believe it’s possibly one of the first hits in the UK to use sampling technology.

Is it possible to get that verified, or otherwise?

Or, at least, mentioned in the article?

Cuddy2977 (talk) 19:59, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Song length
Someone changed the length by 2 seconds. Their other changes were vandalism - so I wonder if this is correct or not.

-- Beardo (talk) 04:58, 14 February 2019 (UTC)