Written by In the summer of 1990, during the European leg of his Nude Tour, Prince played 12 sold-out shows at London’s Wembley Arena. Learning that Kate Bush was to be in attendance at one of the shows, Prince arranged for a note to be passed along expressing his admiration for her work. And in doing so, the seeds were sown for one of the most intriguing musical collaborations of the decade.
The following year, Bush got in contact with Prince at Paisley Park and asked if he would play guitar and add vocals to a new song, Why Should I Love You?, that she’d been recording at Abbey Road. When Prince’s engineer Michael Koppelman asked Bush if she’d be coming to Minneapolis to work on the song, Bush told him ‘No’, but promised to send over the tapes from Abbey Road so that Prince could add his contributions.
“We’d spoken but we hadn’t met,” she told Musician magazine. “It was like working with a musical penpal.”
“I think he’s so talented,” Bush told Melody Maker in 1993, saying that the idea of collaborating via sending tapes back and forth appealed to her sense of humour. “It was a bit of a whim, I was writing the song and I thought, Who’d be nice to play guitar?”
“There was, of course, no disco on it before Prince got his hands on it,” Michael Koppelman stated in 1995. “We essentially created a new song on a new piece of tape and then flew all of Kate’s tracks back on top of it. Prince stacked a bunch of keys, guitars, basses, etc, on it and then went to sing background vocals.”
There was one vocal section which Prince didn’t actually do and Kate was so pissed
Del Palmer, producer
Bush’s engineer / producer Del Palmer was somewhat bemused when he heard what Prince had done with the song, as he admitted to Sound On Sound magazine in December 1993.
“He’d looped a four-bar section from the chorus of the song that Kate had written,” he revealed, “and just smothered 48 tracks with everything you could possibly imagine: guitars, keyboards, drums, voices. I sat there and thought, Well, this is great, but what are we going to do with it? So, I made a general mix of the whole thing, gave it to Kate, and she puzzled over it for months. We kept going back to it over the course of a couple of years, and eventually, with a lot of editing and work on her part, she turned it back into the song that it was.”
“I don’t feel his presence overshadows the track,” Bush told Musician, “it’s still a song I wrote – although there is a feeling of both energies, which was really important to me.”
“There was one vocal section which Prince didn’t actually do,” Palmer revealed, “and Kate was so pissed with this. Then, one day she hit on the idea of getting in Lenny Henry…”
Having broken into the spotlight via his appearance on kids TV show Tiswas, and then established himself as a mainstream entertainer through sketch show Three Of A Kind, Dudley-born Lenny Henry was one of Britain’s best-known and most-loved comedians, with his own BBC1 show in the ’80s, and a regular gig hosting the BBC’s annual charity drive Comic Relief. He was also, as Bush knew as a result of their friendship, a more than competent singer.
“She sent me a tape and I dutifully learnt my parts,” Henry recalled in a 2016 Guardian interview. When I arrived at the studio, I said: It’s really weird but the guitar on this sounds so much like Prince – was that what you were going for? Kate said: ‘It sounds like Prince because it IS him’… I couldn’t believe it.”
Prince was one of Henry’s musical heroes. The comedian had met him a couple of times, but was still in awe of him, as he confessed to The Guardian, discussing a night where he’d hung out with the American superstar in London at a birthday party for singer Chaka Khan: “I was in shock,” Henry admitted. “I couldn’t really join in the conversation because I was having an out-of-body experience.”
Henry said that when recording his parts for Why Should I Love You? he “sang my heart out”, gushing “I was performing on a song with two of my heroes.”
“It was very exciting. Kate was incredibly patient and made egg sandwiches,” Henry revealed to much laughter when appearing alongside Bush on a June 1993 episode of British talk show Aspel and Company. “She said, ‘Go on son, give it some!’ So I did.”
“I think Lenny is a really good singer,” Bush added.
Why Should I Love You? was sequenced as the penultimate track on Bush’s The Red Shoes album, released on November 1, 1993. The album reached number 2 in the UK, and peaked at number 28 on the Billboard 200. Perhaps surprisingly, the Bush/Prince collab was’t chosen as one of the five singles released from the record.
Bush clearly retained a great fondness for Prince. Following the news of the singer’s death on April 21, 2016, she posted a personal tribute online.
“I am so sad and shocked to hear the tragic news about Prince,” she wrote. “He was the most incredibly talented artist. A man in complete control of his work from writer and musician to producer and director. He was such an inspiration. Playful and mind-blowingly gifted. He was the most inventive and extraordinary live act I’ve seen. The world has lost someone truly magical. Goodnight dear Prince.”
