Bush lead doesn’t hedge views

By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
October 26, 1999

Love them or hate them. But the four musicians in the English rock band Bush don’t want to invoke indifference.

“Most of the bands that I hear don’t generate anything in me,” Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale says. “It’s impossible for everyone to like everyone, so I don’t take any of this personally. There are plenty of people who are regarded as geniuses, and I don’t think they are at all.”

Like, for instance, Smashing Pumpkins’ leader Billy Corgan?

“What?” Rossdale says surprised, in a posh English accent. “I like Billy a lot. I think he’s ridiculously talented.”

Reminded that he told this paper a couple years ago that “Billy is so conceited and full of self importance that it’s just laughable,” Rossdale chuckles.

“Oh, right,” he says. “We have had some differences that kind of spiraled out of control. But the bottom line is he’s really talented. He has about 1,000 songs ready to go. He makes Prince look like a lazy songwriter. And I’d have to say that `1979′ is one of my Top 20 all-time favorite songs. It’s a completely brilliant song.”

After a three-year wait, Bush fans finally have some new music to dissect. The group’s latest album, “The Science of Things,” is in stores today. And so far, the effort’s hard-edge rock songs with the pop hooks – as well as the band’s live performances of them – have received atypical praise from national publications such as Spin and Rolling Stone.

“Yeah, we’ve been getting some good reviews,” Rossdale says, phoning from his New York hotel room. “It’s all good and we’re moving ahead and continually trying to build our career. But just as I didn’t believe the bad press we received, I don’t want to take the stuff being written now too seriously, because when you start to take your own press seriously, well, that’s when you’re in trouble.”

Mocked by some detractors for his model-like features and dismissed by others as fronting a Nirvana clone, Rossdale has heard the worst and says he tries not to let it affect him either way. After all, he jokes, he’s not exactly afraid to make politically incorrect comments about others.

For instance, last week when CNN asked him about the rise in the number of hefty male rock stars, the reed-thin, ganja-loving Rossdale cheekily suggested that perhaps these musicians weren’t doing enough drugs.

One thing Rossdale did take seriously was his band’s legal entanglement with its label, Trauma Records. Bush had already completed recording “The Science of Things” when Trauma filed a $40 million breach of contract lawsuit last March. Trauma alleged that Bush, which is the label’s most profitable group, was shopping around for another label.

The case was resolved out of court and Bush re-signed for a multiyear deal.

“I was just sick and disappointed by the lack of communication between (the band and Trauma) and how crazy it got,” Rossdale says. “That just became a theme of the album, so I think I used that to my advantage. I got to explore that isolation a little further. The most upsetting part about the whole thing is that I felt that what I was doing – making music – was pure. And yet things were so estranged. But you know, it’s OK and resolved now.”