Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  Text © Graeme Thomson

  This edition © 2010 Omnibus Press

  (A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

  Cover designed by Fresh Lemon

  Picture research Jacqui Black

  ISBN: 978-0-85712-322-0

  The Author hereby asserts his / her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Information Page

  Introduction – “You Never Understood Me. You Never Really Tried.”

  Chapter 1 – All The Love

  Chapter 2 – Somewhere In Between

  Chapter 3 – Room For The Life

  Chapter 4 – Pull Out The Pin

  Chapter 5 – Rocket’s Tail

  Chapter 6 – The Tour Of Life

  Chapter 7 – Breathing

  Chapter 8 – Into The Dreaming

  Chapter 9 – A Deal With God

  Chapter 10 – “Put Your Feet Down, Child. You’re All Grown Up Now”

  Chapter 11 – An Architect’s Dream

  Chapter 12 – How To Be Invisible

  Epilogue – Under The Ivy

  Acknowledgements

  Notes & Sources

  Selective Bibliography

  Selective Discography

  For my father

  Introduction

  “You Never Understood Me. You Never Really Tried”

  IT starts with a question. Two questions. The absolute shock – was this art-rock, pantomime, musical theatre, novelty or left-field genius – of hearing and seeing ‘Wuthering Heights’, feeling the perceptible thud of its instant impact upon popular culture, was immediately followed by these simple queries, heard in offices and pubs, in schools, shops, cafes and building sites, spoken over breakfast tables, in front of televisions and from behind crackling newspapers: My God, who is she? And where did she come from?

  Good, enduring demands. This book doesn’t promise to supply all the answers so much as revelin the act of delving deeper inside them. The truly tantalising thing about Kate Bush is that the whole has always been somehow greater, more dazzling, more mysterious, than the sum of her many parts.

  Who is she? Every time you look you get a different answer.

  She is the 19-year-old who fought EMI General Manager Bob Mercer tooth and nail in order to ensure that the stupendously strange ‘Wuthering Heights’ would be her first single rather than his preferred choice – the more orthodox ‘James And The Cold Gun’ – and won.

  She is the astute million-selling rock star and reluctant sex symbol who knocked Madonna off the top of the album charts in 1985, who has successfully controlled every aspect of her career and who once called herself the “shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet,”1 admitting “I’m probably quite calculating behind my creativity.”2

  She is the Celtic spirit-child who sings of witches and phantoms, who has been known to give her friends sealed jars containing ‘essence of the day’: some air, a few twigs, some grains of earth, a flower; and she is the relentlessly tenacious studio artist, playing the same piece of music over and over and over again as though lost in some Shamanistic ritual, cajoling, caressing, chipping away at the chrysalis of her art until the longed-for butterfly of emotional truth emerges. “She would do lots and lots of takes and I could never understand why,” says Max Middleton, who played organ on Never For Ever. “Normally with other musicians we’d do it again because it was too fast or slow or you’re playing the wrong chord – something very definite – but she was looking for something nebulous that was hard to pinpoint. She wasn’t doing it again out of sheer belligerence. She was looking for something [that no one else could see].”

  She is the unguarded young woman who once walked down a south London street and saw a lady waving at her from some distance away, through the window of a first floor building. Smiling and waving back as she continued down the street, Bush finally reached the house and realised that the woman was, in fact, cleaning her windows.

  She is the visualicon, an inspiration for countless creative artists for more than three decades; and she is the reluctant pub singer, performing The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’ and The Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’ in a Putney pub to a bunch of heroically inebriated Scottish football supporters who were, according to her old bandmate Brian Bath, “playing catch the whisky bottle, throwing it at each other, climbing up the pylons. They were getting up on stage. Some guy was all over Kate….”

  She is the powerful multi-millionaire who flew the director of the ‘King Of The Mountain’ video, Jimmy Murakami, by helicopter from London to her summer home in Dorset for lunch and then promptly flew him back again afterwards.

  She is the down-to-earth den mother, bustling around making cups of tea for her family, her musicians and producers, phoning out for curry and pizza when hunger strikes; the fearsomely loyal woman who has frequently helped out her friends financially and who is described by her former Abbey Road engineer Haydn Bendall – echoing a sentiment shared by almost everyone interviewed for this book – as “very sensitive and aware and gentle and loving. It’s an intoxicating mixture. I’m ashamed that she isn’t regarded more as a national treasure.”

  She is the artist so ruthlessly dedicated to her vision that she is prepared to exist within strictly defined physical parameters in order to explore fully the vastness of her interior landscape. She is both the semi-mythical ‘recluse’ of tabloid lore who lives on an island – and in her head – and the very model of sanity in a world where celebrities accumulate children from around the globe and subject them to the full glare of the media machine, delegating their ‘management’ to a well-drilled team of nannies, minders, publicists, dieticians and private tutors, and for whom nothing in their life is deemed real or worthwhile until it is observed by millions of strangers and projected back at them.

  She is all and none of these. And she is more. There are several parts of her we will never be permitted to see: the “ferocious mother”3, the lover, the composer, cocooned in silence and solitude. Each fractured snapshot captures a portion of her, some more revealing than others, but none are defining. Piecing them together to form a single picture often feels like trying to complete a jigsaw when some of the pieces are missing, or simply don’t fit.

  “Let Me In-A Your Window!” Given the decades of rumour and steady retreat, it’s worth recalling the moment of arrival. Bush started her career in full flight, already airborne at 19, pitched headfirst into the kind of unforgiving spotlight that can leave much of the world beyond its glare dark, shadowed and forever changed. Rarely has any artist made such an immediate impact upon public consciousness. Within a month of releasing her first single in January 1978 Bush was as famous as she ever would be, her image plastered on buses, tube station billboards and TV shows, her songs – one in particular, so precocious it practically dared you to ignor
e it – all over the radio, her somewhat gauche pronouncements to the media printed in every variety of magazine and newspaper, her breasts a topic of national debate.

  Her life, such is the way of instantaneous fame, was subjected to a brutal and entirely unexpected coup d’état. The ferocity of the success of ‘Wuthering Heights’ took everyone by surprise. Buffeted off course, blown into the wider pop slipstream, Bush didn’t really locate her artistic true north until the early Eighties, while those observers who attempted to define her through the rather limited critical vocabulary of the pop lexicon were usually stumped, opting for either fawning hagiography, open hostility, or a kind of benign patronisation.

  Little wonder. Many of the misunderstandings that have grown up around Bush could be better addressed by absorbing the implications of the following exchange, undertaken during an interview in 1993.

  Q: “What’s the worst thing about being a musician?”

  A: “I don’t think of myself as a musician.”

  Q: “What then?”

  A: “As a writer, I suppose.”4

  Or, to boil the question down to its essence: Who and what are you? Her answer (“A writer,” the “I suppose” tacked on to signify her reluctance to describe herself as anything in such concrete terms), is not primarily meant to signify the form and content of her work – which is clearly musical, with significant leanings towards poetry, dance and film – but, instead, it reveals how she perceives what she does and, more particularly, the way in which she chooses to do it.

  In terms of her overall aesthetic, her creative instincts, her work ethic, her attitude to fame, as well as the way she insists on living her life, Bush has always been far closer to a poet or novelist than a pop musician. She began by writing poems. When she embraced the piano – privately, passionately – it was not in order to perform in a band, or master her favourite pop songs to impress her friends, or to play a technically complex solo. It was purely a writing tool, a conduit for self expression. It was her pen. Later, technological advances made the Fairlight, the earliest form of digital sampler, her word processor, allowing her to cut and paste sounds, to transcribe more accurately the murmurs in her heart and head. Despite her obvious musicalgifts, she has never made a serious effort to learn to play any other instrument. She has sufficient skills to facilitate her needs.

  Bush writes in sound. For her, the creative act lies not in the initial seed of songwriting. That is simply the beginning of the compositional process, containing the germ of the idea; in the studio, she drafts and redrafts, plots a path, finds new stories and edges towards something definitive. Every piece of work is laboured over in private for years, hewn slowly into shape, and then handed over to posterity. She returns again and again throughout her career, with decreasing frequency, to this one primary purpose: to create a single artefact, fixed, tangible and everlasting. It is her statement to the world but, more pertinently, to herself.

  As far as the audience is concerned, there is no work in progress. She carries within her the remnants of intense self-consciousness – few are permitted to watch her creative struggles. She is no Icarus, striving publicly and failing heroically. Instead, her work simply appears, like Zeus’ thunderbolt.

  And there is no epilogue. Since 1979 there has been virtually no later revision of her work in the form of live performance, nor has she embraced the increasingly prevalent culture of reissues, deluxe packages and endless compilations. Her career is largely without retrospectives. Like the witch-woman celebrated in Bob Dylan’s ‘She Belongs To Me’, Bush is “an artist, she don’t look back”. She creates, and moves on. She has a novelist’s wish for the final full stop, the definitive ending, which is almost unique amongst her peers.

  Where did she come from? In plain biographical terms, too, it’s striking how little common ground Bush shares with the archetypal rock star who is, we often find, propelled by a degree of rage, their childhoods typically characterised by disruption and domestic instability, perhaps a combination of parental loss, pain, poverty and frequent uprooting, the urge to make music motivated by a sense of frustration, anger and rebellion against family, against authority, against the social and political mores of the age.

  There is very little of that impetus in Bush’s background. She did not start creating music in order to confront some deep fissure in her upbringing, or to rebelagainst her socialconditions. Comfortable and permissive, filled with love, unfailingly polite, not a little eccentric and unapologetically devoted to artistic expression, her childhood is closer to that of Jane Austen – another pioneering female writer from a close-knit, progressive brood, with elder brothers, particularly James and Henry, who inspired and encouraged her – than a Lennon, Bowie or even a Bono. ‘Art for art’s sake’ could have been the Bush family mantra.

  “It was a very bohemian upbringing,” says Charlie Morgan, who played drums in the latter stages of the KT Bush Band and has appeared on many of her albums. “A bit like Virginia Woolf, like a modern day Bloomsbury group. Bohemian but with this kind of underlying normality. The life you led was fairly mundane and middle class, but it was what you were thinking about – your philosophical and artistic and emotional thoughts – that was incredibly creative.”

  It brought undeniable privileges. Bush has never had to make a living away from music; she has never experienced the standard rites of passage of slogging from town to town to sustain her career, fathoming out what songs will work in front of a disgruntled, drunken crowd on a wet Wednesday in Wigan; her one tour to date was an organically realised theatrical production, a million miles away from the spit and sawdust of the Hope and Anchor or the quasi-Messianic stadium rock experience. Even that proved too formulaic for her taste and has not, to date, been repeated.

  But although she has never had to bow down to the inescapable logic that drives most music careers – studio, album, press, tour; studio, album, press, tour – her art has never been a luxury. A compulsion rather than an elective, her music comes from a sense of “poetic necessity,”5 and her material comforts and domestic stability have simply enabled her to be as adventurous as she wishes in her imagined life, the wild world of her musical forays. Her music acknowledges precious few conventions. Unable to confine it within standard pop formats, she has stretched the form to suit her own needs rather than shrinking or compromising her vision to fit into existing templates. She has rarely adhered to orthodox song shapes, there are no clichéd three-chord rock tricks, very few blues-based notes, indeed almost no trace whatsoever of any American influence in the structures, themes, chords or harmonies. When she does tune into a specific genre it usually comes from somewhere out on the margins: the soft reggae of ‘Kite’, ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘King Of The Mountain’; the Balearic smudges of ‘Nocturn’; the Weimar melodrama of ‘Coffee Homeground’; the Madagascan sway of ‘Eat The Music’; the hard, Hellenic folk rhythms of ‘Jig Of Life’.

  Lyrically, she has rarely leant on the standard singer-songwriter crutch of confessional autobiography, preferring sly humour, knockabout slapstick, child-like wonder, unbuttoned sensuality, impressionistic storytelling, unconventional philosophising and a taste for horror and the supernatural. As a singer, she has constantly pushed her voice into uncompromising shapes, disdaining melisma and button-pushing over-emoting in order to use her vocals as another instrument, never simply plumping for conventional beauty when something more interesting, primaland challenging might be available. She has sung in Australian, Irish, French and German accents, she has impersonated a donkey, a witch, a bird and an enchanted house. She has an aversion to drawing straight lines.

  She exists entirely and gloriously outside the orthodoxy of the rock lineage. Many artists – from Tori Amos and Bjork to relative newcomers such as La Roux, Bat For Lashes and Florence & The Machine – have been likened to her, but such comparisons are unfair and unflattering to others. Her music simply sounds like Kate Bush, some wondrous alchemy of musique concrete, folk roots, post-punk, world music,
progressive rock and an ancient, long forgotten siren call. She is unafraid to make mistakes, but her willingness to seem ridiculous is more of a strength than a weakness. For over three decades she has held onto a kind of heroic artistic blindness that allows her to pursue her most outlandish ideas to their conclusion without feeling restricted by popular opinion or current trends. She is certainly the only musician who, having persuaded Prince to play on one of her songs, would then decide that what the track really needed was a contribution from Lenny Henry. Being a mere ‘pop star’ has never been enough, but if pop music lays claim to harbouring any geniuses, her name must be somewhere near the top of the list.

  For those who never did understand, who always found her self-indulgent, self-absorbed and dippy, who corralled her within the confines of their own limited imaginations – the worst of all possible things: a female pop singer with ideas above her station – she was dismissed as a twittish hippie girl, the suburban doctor’s daughter with a thing about mime and mysticism, all too easily mocked on Not The Nine O’clock News. Wow. Amazing. Like all great artists, she is easier to parody than to understand.

  For the rest of us, ‘Wuthering Heights’ was simply the opening pistol crack in a mystery tale that has negotiated myriad twists and turns and has rarely failed to grip.

  After countless contemplations of songs like ‘Moving’, ‘Babooshka’, ‘Breathing’, ‘Night Of The Swallow’, ‘Under The Ivy’, ‘Rocket’s Tail’, ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ – the list rolls on and on – we’re still waiting to find out whodunit. Those initial two questions hold true, with only a slight shift in emphasis: Who is she? And where did she come from?

  And at certain points in our story comes a third question, the inescapable follow-up: Where did she go?

  1

  All The Love

  A WHITE, solid stone farmhouse. Sprawling but homely, a jumble of uncertain angles, its belly full of battered black beams, sloping floors, unlikely stories and all manner of mysterious nooks and crannies. Upstairs, a warren of bedrooms, private dens, a library with a coal fire. Downstairs, a large kitchen, the wooden table serving as the thrumming engine at the hub of the house; a living room, its open fireplace almost tall enough to swallow a man, gazing down onto exotic rugs and well-used furniture; a study here; a grand piano over there, French windows opening out to a self-contained micro-world, thick with trees, honeysuckle and cobwebs, hiding within its heaven and earth an eighteenth century rose garden, a Victorian pond, a scattering of sheds and outbuildings offering secrecy and sanctuary. Literally and metaphorically, a place in which to lose yourself.