Another BBC curio from the vaults, here we have Kate Bush talking about her favorite vegetarian dishes on the TV show Delia Smith’s Cookery Course in 1980. Smith is a bit of a legend of British broadcasting, having hosted cookery shows since the early 70s, That doesn’t stop the food in this clip looking a bit, well, bland I’m afraid, but Bush aficionados will be glad to hear the story of how she turned vegetarian, and overjoyed to have this first hand peek into her eating habits:
 

 
Thanks to Philip McEachen!

After the jump, the video for Bush’s 1993 single “Eat The Music”...

 
By heck, Christmas is getting earlier every year. It may be Rosh Hashanah, but the good citizens of Heywood, Lancashire, England, have their sights on Christmas, and have already lit up the town with their flickering festive lights.

Bah humbug, maybe, but I found it difficult not to share this freshly uploaded winter treat - the whole of Kate Bush’s Christmas Television Special from 1979. Filmed in October of that year, the show stars the beautiful songstress, together with her band and Peter Gabriel. While we have shown one song from this before, we have never managed to find the whole program online until now - and it’s been worth the wait. Enjoy.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
I hated Kate Bush the first time I heard her voice warbling “Wuthering Heights” on the radio, early one cold, winter morn. It was exam time, and in my annoyance suddenly understood why old people hate the music of the happy-go-lucky young. You see, I was prematurely middle-aged. It didn’t last, of course. A week or so later, and I was, like every other schoolboy, smitten by this delicate, pre-Raphaelite beauty, with the powerful, ethereal voice and her wayward, drama school dancing. I became a fan and her records were added to the collection and played with the reverence of a love-sick Montague.

Alas, I never saw her one and only tour On Stage in 1979, by then I was writing poems for undeserving girls, who preferred boys in leather with B.O. and bikes and a liking for Gong. Therefore I’ll always be grateful Kate’s performance at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, was recorded for posterity on May 13 1979. O, what joy is that?

Find out for yourself, and check the track listing:

01. “Moving” 
02.  “Them Heavy People” 
03. “Violin” 
04. “Strange Phenomena” 
05. “Hammer Horror” 
06. “Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake” 
07. “Wow” 
08. “Feel It” 
09. “Kite” 
10. “James and the Cold Gun” 
11. “Oh England My Lionheart” 
12. “Wuthering Heights” 
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Although I’ve always been a big Kate Bush fan, I can’t lie to you and tell you that I find her music videos and TV appearances (for the most part) anything other than totally laughable, at least the performances from the earlier part of her career. I mean, come on! Even her staunchest fans would have difficulty defending goofy clips like this one.

Noel Fielding from The Mighty Boosh obviously feels this way, too. Witness his spot-on “interpretive” parody of Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” last night on the BBC’s Let’s Dance for Comic Relief and compare it to the original.

One YouTube commenter wrote “I would go lesbian for Noel Fielding.” Another quipped “It really looks like this is something he does every Saturday regardless of comic relief.”

Well, practice makes perfect…
 

 
Via Oh Have You Seen This?

 
Kate Bush was only sixteen when she signed to EMI Records in 1975, on the recommended of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. Over the following eighteen months, Kate prepped, wrote and recorded her first single, “Wuthering Heights”, which went to number one in the UK, and her debut album The Kick Inside, which hit No. 3 in the UK charts.

Following on from her chart success, Kate Bush presented The Tour of LIfe, her first and

ever tour, consisting of twenty-eight shows across Britain during April and May of 1979.  The BBC’s quirky news and features series, Nationwide (previously responsible for a fascinating insight into David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust… tour), made this 30-minute behind-the-scenes special of the tour and Kate’s preparation for it.
 

 
Bonus documentary on Kate Bush plus original live TV performance of ‘Wuthering Heights’, after the jump…
 
Previously on DM

 
With thanks to Damien Smith
 

 
To jolly us along with a festive feel, here’s Kate Bush singing a live version of “December Will Be Magic Again” from her 1979 BBC Christmas Special.
 

 
With thanks to Misty Roses
 

I have to admit the question of why humankind is so hairless compared to most other mammals has crossed my mind, but it never occurred to me that Science itself would not actually know:

For most of the past century it was assumed that the problem had been solved. Raymond Dart, the anthropologist who recognised the significance of the famous Taung baby’s skull in 1924, began promoting the idea that while the apes’ ancestors stayed in the trees, our ancestors moved onto the open plains. There the males became hunters, got overheated in the chase, and shed body hair to cool down.

The problem with that theory is that no other mammal has resorted to this method of cooling down. Hair insulates animals against the sun by day as well as against the cold by night. The hominid females are not thought to have become overheated hunters, so they would merely have suffered the downsides of hairlessness - being cold at night, more prone to abrasions, and having no fur to provide a handhold for infants to cling to. Yet they ended up even more hairless than the males.

Dart’s solution, while the front-runner for more than 50 years, failed to win everyone over. In 1970, Russell W. Newman from the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine argued in Human Biology that hominids could never have evolved on the plains with their “unique trio of conditions: hypotrichosis corpus, hyperhydrosis, and polydipsia”. In other words, too little hair, too much sweat, and a need to drink little but often. Newman’s paper ran counter to contemporary beliefs and was largely ignored.

William Montagna, the most indefatigable student of primate skin of his generation and then at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, regretfully reported in 1972 that after years of research his investigations had “failed to explain the unique feature of man’s skin - his almost complete nakedness. We are left with the major objective… unattained.”

And it keeps going. Many intelligent people and big name scientists have come up with plausible sounding theories and they all get shot down, sooner of later. The fact is, they really don’t know!

Speaking of Naked Apes, here is zoologist Desmond Morris interviewing Kate Bush on his BBC talk show in 1980:

New Scientist: Why are we the naked ape?