Babooshka

Album: Never for Ever (1980)
Charted: 5
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Songfacts®:

  • "Babooshka" is about futile situations and how we often ruin things for ourselves. In the song, a man is tested by his wife when she starts sending him anonymous scented letters. Seeing his reaction, she takes it further by arranging a meeting with her in disguise. Not knowing it is her, he is reminded of his wife when she was younger and more amorous.
  • The word "Babooshka" is Russian for grandmother. It's also the name of a type of headdress. The title was chosen through a series of coincidences: Kate turned on the TV and someone was singing about Babooshka; looking through a magazine she came across an opera titled Babooshka, and a friend had a cat named Babooshka. Kate has always been fascinated by the concept of synchronicity, which inspired her earlier track "Strange Phenomena."
  • Peter Gabriel was the first UK owner of a Fairlight Series I digital synthesizer, the Rolls-Royce of early samplers. He introduced Kate Bush to the newly available instrument when she sang backing vocals for him on "No Self Control" and "Games Without Frontiers".

    Among other things, Gabriel used the sampler to capture the sound of breaking glass – a trick Bush repeated on this song. By the time of Bush's albums The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, the Fairlight CMI synthesizer had become her primary writing tool.
  • The song reached #1 in Australia, #3 in France, and cracked the Top 10 in Canada and Ireland. >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Lee - Ottawa, Canada, for all above

Comments: 4

  • Nickb from Brum@Jason from Ibiza - I'm sure that's what the article meant I read how they made a mess in Abbey Road Studio 2 breaking glasses and things recording the best ones on the Fairlight to use for that track.
  • Garry from Darlington, EnglandThere is actually a grammatical error in the lyrics. "She couldn't have made a worst move" should be "she couldn't have made a worse move"! Fantastic song though!
  • Dylan from Port Orange, FlMy dad was an exchange student in Finland in 1986, and he says that Kate Bush is very popular there for some reason.
  • Jason from Ibiza, SpainThat's a cute thought about the crockery, but the sound is actually sampled and comes from the Fairlight CMI synthesiser used exhaustively by Kate on this and, especially, The Dreaming albums. This album, Never For Ever, made Kate the first british female solo artist to reach Number One, and remains, to date, her only LP without a title track.
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