Babooshka (song)
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| “Babooshka” | |||||||||||
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| Single by Kate Bush from the album Never For Ever |
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| B-side | "Ran Tan Waltz" | ||||||||||
| Released | 23 June 1980 | ||||||||||
| Format | 7" single | ||||||||||
| Recorded | 1979 | ||||||||||
| Genre | Art rock | ||||||||||
| Length | 3:19 | ||||||||||
| Label | EMI | ||||||||||
| Writer(s) | Kate Bush | ||||||||||
| Producer | Kate Bush, Jon Kelly, John L Walters | ||||||||||
| Kate Bush singles chronology | |||||||||||
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"Babooshka" is a song by British singer Kate Bush, taken from her album Never for Ever. Released as a single on June 23, 1980 it spent 10 weeks in the UK chart, peaking at number five. The song chronicles a wife's desire to test her husband's loyalty. To do so, she takes on the nom de plume of Babooshka and writes to her husband in the guise of a young, seductive woman -- something which she fears is the opposite of how her husband currently sees her (Hence the barbed lines: "Just like his wife before she freezed on him / Just like his wife when she was beautiful...").
The trap is set when, in her bitterness and paranoia, Babooshka arranges to meet with her husband, who is attracted to the character that reminds him of his wife in earlier times. She thereby ruins the relationship due to her paranoia, according to Kate Bush's 1980 interview [1] with the Australian TV series Countdown.
The music video depicts Bush beside a double bass (a.k.a. contrabass), wearing a black bodysuit and a veil in her role as the embittered wife, alluding to a definition of the word babooshka - a headscarf. This changes into an extravagant, mythlike and rather sparse 'Russian' costume as her alter-ego, Babooshka.
The track features John Giblin on bass and marks the significance of fretless bass sounds as instrumental "male" partners through Kate's music in the early eighties.
The B-Side contains her song "Ran Tan Waltz", her second non-album B-Side.
Babushka is the Russian word for "grandmother" (albeit the stress in Russian falls on the first syllable, not the second), and sometimes indicates in English a garment worn over women's hair, much like a bandana.
[edit] Charts
| Chart (1980) | Peak position |
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| Australian Singles Chart | 2 |
| Norwegian Singles Chart | 4 |
| Irish Singles Chart | 5 |
| UK Singles Chart | 5 |
| New Zealand Singles Chart | 8 |
| German Singles Chart | 14 |
| Dutch Singles Chart | 15 |
