Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  This was clearly inspirational to the young Bush, as she quite specifically relayed in ‘Them Heavy People’, an uncommonly direct thank you to all the teachers who “rolled the ball” of knowledge and wisdom her way and forced her to look deeper, who “read me Gurdjieff and Jesu” and showed her the “heaven inside.”

  Yet the idea that she was pursuing one dedicated path towards enlightenment seems overly simplistic. There was always much more going on than that, and so it remains. For many years, Stewart Avon Arnold has enjoyed intense conversations with Bush about a range of spiritual and philosophical matters. “We talk about different philosophies on the phone for hours,” says Arnold. “She mentions karma a lot, and reincarnation, and witchcraft and paganism and Buddhism. We always end up in these conversations about life in general and spiritual life in particular. Both of us have a fascination about spiritual life; we used to question each other and we still do. She’ll phone me and say, ‘What do you think about this, Stewart?’ It always comes round to the spiritual questions in life, Man’s place on the planet and what we’re doing to it. The other thing that I talk about with Kate is End of Days. Not Revelation, because neither of us believe in the Bible as such, but in terms of what Nostradamus was saying about 2012. The Hopi Indians, too. We’re in for a global meltdown of some kind, the planet will change drastically in the next 10, 15 years. That’s something that Kate and I talk about quite a lot.”

  In her songs, videos and interviews it is possible to discern a clear love of ritual and to pick up on influences as diverse as Vedic, Sufism, Catholicism, Krishna, Buddhism, paganism, karma, reincarnation, astrology. It’s an entirely bespoke, self-sufficient search for meaning – and one in which the search is at least as important as the meaning – and a clear continuation of a learning process that began at Wickham Farm. As often as not these influences filter into the music at a subconscious level. Most religious stories, spiritual philosophies and classical myths can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Their influence constantly bubbles away beneath the surface with shifting emphasis, to be called up and used at any time, often in a highly impressionistic manner.

  As a girl significantly younger than her two male siblings, naturally Bush had her own private interests. Her brothers may have drawn her into a whole world of art, philosophy and music, held her hand as she ambled through it and pointed out notable landmarks, but she wandered off and took what she needed from a wide spectrum of sources. In Cathy, John Carder Bush notes at the foot of one image: “Splashed by the obsessions of her brothers she was masking her own secret conclusions.” Perfectly expressed. Like any decent artist, she has a knack for dipping into a subject, finding out what interests her about it and incorporating elements of it – sometimes heavily disguised, sometimes more obviously – into her work. “All the stimulus comes rushing in and I pack it away in the back, and it will come out maybe a couple of years later,” she said.15

  In the earliest years of this holistic approach to creation, everything became fodder for her music. Books – Kurt Vonnegut, John Wyndham, Oscar Wilde, though not Emily Brontë – dance, ‘heavy’ spiritual ideas, disposable TV shows, the pre-Raphaelite art of John Millais, snatches of conversation, her friends, the sea, the sky. She loved Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, the whole business of show, and although it was an academic house, television was also a major influence. “I was always in front of the television instead of doing my homework,” she said. “I wasn’t off reading books, I was watching television, and cinema.”16

  From television songs such as ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’ arrived; from film, the inspirations are multitudinous: ‘The Infant Kiss’ (The Innocents), ‘Hounds Of Love’ (Night Of The Demon), ‘The Wedding List’ (La Mariée Etait En Noir), ‘Get Out Of My House’ (The Shining), Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes and many, many more. She had a realknack for responding to visual stimulus, much more frequently, in fact, than to the written word.

  All the things she loved and absorbed as a child poured into her songs, and the songs in turn inspired her own ideas for film, dance routines, striking photographic images. Bush has the power of conversion. “You eat what you steal, digest it and it becomes part of you.”17

  In the end, it comes from her gut as much as her head. There is real beauty in the fact that she has never distinguished between high and low brow. Bush has always displayed a complete absence of preciousness about the things she loves and which have inspired her: it could be Pinocchio, it could be Wilhelm Reich; it could be a camp old horror flick or Ulysses by James Joyce. She treats them all equally, because at heart her music has always been about what triggers her emotionally rather than intellectually. She had no compunction, for instance, about admitting that she had no idea who Doris Lessing or Angela Carter are. Perhaps the most persistent error certain fans and critics make about her is that she is somehow an academic or difficult songwriter, forever cramming her music with ancient mythological codes or wrestling with weighty literary references. In fact, one of the great things about her music is that her small, silly thoughts – “That cloud looks like Ireland!” – are equally as compelling as her profound ones. Her music, especially as time has passed, is about serving the mood of the emotion that first inspired her. There’s nothing consciously ‘clever’ about the best of it.

  It is certainly possible, therefore, to get too high-falutin’ and precious about her childhood, to get lost in the Gurdjieff and forget the Alec Guinness, as it were. There was a great deal of laughter at Wickham Farm, much fun, silliness and uncomplicated joy. What is of enduring significance, more than any single mode of influence, is the fact that she was permitted her secret, internal life, developing from an early age an artistic vision, a growing idea of herself as being apart. Perhaps her biggest single inspiration was simply the notion, validated by Jay and Paddy and endorsed by her parents, that she really could spend her life among words and music, expressing herself as an artist.

  What you can’t actually see in the Cathy photographs but which is equally clearly on view is the space her home environment afforded her to explore who she was and wanted to be. A tangible atmosphere of creativity and validation seeps through the lens: nobody here was going to mock her ideas, precious though they may have been, or laugh at her aspirations, or tell her what she could or couldn’t be. From a young age she was allowed and indeed encouraged to poeticise her life, to create a world all of her own. Her family seemed to have made some kind of deep, unspoken creative pact with her long before the likes of David Gilmour came on the scene. Already they were dedicated to her artistic endeavour in some indistinct but quietly profound way. Indulged? Probably. But also liberated.

  * Thirty years later, she was still using fish to convey an erotic charge, in ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’.

  2

  Somewhere In Between

  THERE are two distinct sides to Bush’s childhood. “Before I was going to school, before I was reading, I was singing along to songs, to traditional music,” she once said. “And in a way I think it got my soul before the education even got near me. I think really when you are that young…. The sparks of what you really want to do are there somewhere.”1

  Allowed to roam free at home, at school she was forced to keep herself and her imagination rather more buttoned up, holding her creative side in check. It created a tension that became more pronounced as her school years progressed and later led her to describe the experience in unusually blunt terms. “I was unhappy at school and couldn’t wait to leave,” she said.2 “I couldn’t express myself in the whole system.”3

  Until the summer of 1969 Bush attended St Joseph’s Convent Preparatory School on Woolwich Road, Abbey Wood, after which she sat her 11-plus exam and moved up to St Joseph’s Convent Grammar, on the same site, where she stayed until early 1976. There was nothing particularly remarkable about Catherine Bush the schoolgirl. Most of the omens and portents have been spied retrospectively, spotted only through the gift of hindsigh
t.

  When she appeared, as a rank and file third former, in the school’s 1972 production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s one-act opera, the Christmas parable Amahl & The Night Visitors, she was given a bit part as a shepherdess. Those who saw it recall that the lead girl stole the show, with her “fantastic operatic voice,” according to Bush’s school friend Shealla Mubi. “She was the star, a bit of a diva.” By comparison, Bush’s performance made a minimalimpression. Only brief mention was made of her in the review in the school magazine, which noted the ‘entrance of the shepherds and shepherdesses, members of the Senior and First and Second year Choirs, who tripped in all rosy-cheeked and healthy-looking, bringing gifts for the kings. Two of these, Catherine Bush and Sarah Brennan, later gave a short dance in honour of the kings, which was both pastorally graceful and imaginative.’

  It’s safe to say that nobody at St Joseph’s saw ‘Wuthering Heights’ hovering on the horizon, or guessed at the “wiley, windy moors” lurking beneath her placid disposition. When they were later revealed it was a colossal shock to the school’s collective system. “After we left school [my friends and I] all kept in touch,” says Bush’s school friend Concepta Nolan-Long. “I can remember them contacting me and saying, ‘We need to listen to the radio because Catherine is going to be on.’ We honestly thought it would be something classical, and we were absolutely bowled over when we heard ‘Wuthering Heights’. Can you imagine!”

  “She was a very likeable, quiet personality,” recalls Mubi. “These huge big eyes, huge dimples. My sister always talked about Kate even before she became famous: ‘Oh, I love Kate! Those eyes! She’s so sweet, so cute, like a little elf!’ The way she smiled, her face just lit up, that’s something I always remember. She was a very, very nice girl. Very nice in a warm way.”

  It’s a description echoed by many. Most friends and acquaintances recall a pretty girl, self-contained, bright, overwhelmingly nice. “My only memories are of someone quiet who certainly didn’t stand out as someone destined to be a rock star,” recalls classmate Jane Wilkinson. “Her dark hair was usually covering her eyes, she was shy and unassuming.” However, although she is remembered as a pleasant, studious girl, outwardly calm and accommodating, her time at school was inwardly mutinous and ultimately defining. It was largely characterised by a process of, at best, marking time and, at worst, feeling acutely inhibited, overtaken by a sense of being steered down a road she didn’t wish to travel.

  A short hop on the 96 bus from Wickham Farm, or more often a ride in Dr Bush’s car, St Joseph’s stood at the top of the hill at Abbey Wood. An academically selective convent school, it was run by nuns with the help of lay staff, also mostly women, with a small but significant male presence. Other than the fact that the convent building symbolically tied together the lower and upper schools, each school was self-contained, with separate teaching blocks and playgrounds.

  The main body of the grammar school was Victorian, smelling vividly of polished wood and scrubbed righteousness, its corners cast in long, cool shadow. Prior to Bush’s arrival a modern block had recently been added, three stories high, and with it came six new classrooms, an assembly hall and a new entrance. Despite these jarring additions the school maintained an element of mystique and mystery: secret doors that only the nuns could use connected the two school premises, “a bit like going through the looking glass, or down a rabbit hole,” according to Nolan-Long.

  Surrounded by woods, with its own hockey pitch and tennis courts, the spruce, ordered environment was a reminder of the school’s “expectation of the standard to which you should aspire,” says Nolan-Long. “You should have nice things around you and have the best. There was a sense of a beautiful atmosphere and things being kept really nicely. There were gardeners, lots of green and grass, very well tended. I remember [head teacher] Sister Margaret saying, ‘Whatever you do you should do it to the best of your ability.’” Whatever else may have frustrated her about the school, it’s an ethos Bush has continually held onto, even if the means and methodology of her execution transpired to be rather more idiosyncratic than most.

  St Joseph’s was certainly highly regarded locally, a sought after school for middle-class families and an aspirational one for less monied children smart enough to win scholarships. ‘A good education for young ladies’ was the mantra. Each year’s intake was split into two classes, divided alphabetically with some aptitude streaming later on. There was a reasonably diverse social mix from all over South-east London, from the plusher locales to the rather more rough and ready Thamesmead estate. Although the school roll was predominantly white and Catholic, and there were prayers before and after each lesson and Mass on St Joseph’s day, it did not necessarily conform to the stereotype of a Catholic girls school. There was a smattering of Asian and black pupils, as well as some non-Catholics who were attracted by its single-sex ethos, secure environment and high educational standards.

  “The nuns who taught us at St Joseph’s were proto-feminists, they were not Sound Of Music nuns,” says Nolan-Long. “Nuns are always strict, but there were no beatings or anything like that. You were spoken to in terms of ‘letting people down’. They were looking for an expected level of behaviour and they were generally met.” There was very little misbehaviour and discipline was generally self-regulated. “It was a school that was very strict, you had to obey the rules, down to the hat you had to wear, the colour of your socks; inside and outside shoes,” says Nina Brown, also in Bush’s year. “We got on with our schoolwork. It wasn’t a very sociable time for any of us. If anyone was slightly different they certainly could not have shown it off at that school.” During Bush’s time, the names of transgressors were read out at assembly by the head teacher, first Sister Elizabeth, later Sister Margaret.

  Shealla Mubi remembers the school – not without affection – as “a weird environment. I had friends from other schools and I would tell them about things we did that I thought were normal, and they would laugh.” It was not unknown for the nuns to lift up the girls’ skirts to check that they were wearing their regulation red knickers. There were different sports kits for hockey, tennis and netball, and the uniform – grey skirt, white blouse, maroon jumper and tie – was strictly enforced: no jewellery, no short skirts, no make-up, no heels. The school song, ‘Potius Mori Quam Foedari’ (‘Death Before Dishonour’) portrayed the girls from St Joseph’s going out into the world and fighting to retain their honour against the advances of rapacious and dishonourable men: ‘Honour and purity’, they sang, ‘Shall guard our way!’ The girls rather liked it.

  “Within the school, the worst thing you could do was behave in an unladylike manner, that brought a very stern rebuke,” says Nolan-Long. “I’m sure the nuns felt it was their mission to educate young women so they would be able to function in society.” Preparing the pupils for a sexually fulfilling adult life wasn’t high up on the agenda: there was some furtive talk about placing telephone directories on one’s lap before letting a boy near you, and some hearty advice about the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach. For Bush, who harboured a fascination with all things masculine from a young age, this kind of attitude, combined with the lack of male company at school, was less than inspiring.

  More promising, at least in theory, was the fact that music was an integralpart of the curriculum. Every pupil had to learn an instrument, and individual tuition was augmented by a choir, an orchestra, lots of hymn-singing and frequent shows. The principal music teacher, Miss Slade, was an eccentric but rather stolid presence. She was, recalls Mubi, “quite powerful in the school. A single woman, highly strung, a bit manic, almost.” “Oh God, talk about a traditional music teacher,” adds Nolan-Long. “The thing I remember about her is that she used to attack the piano. Not arty-farty at all.” According to another pupil, Oonagh McCormack, “when she worked she did it with gusto!”

  Catherine Bush, however, was already beyond her reach, trying to negotiate a less rigidly defined path. Even before she started at pr
imary school she was enchanted by music, and had an ingrained sense of it being something extraordinary that held transformative powers. Although she periodically enjoyed studying music at St Joseph’s, the school never added to the bubbling sense of magic cultivated by her family at Wickham Farm. Indeed, the general perception of music as a rather dull duty seemed directly at odds with the “sparks” of her ad hoc home education. But she tried. She sang in the choir, competently if without any great acclaim, and took up the violin in the orchestra. “I played violin in the school orchestra as well, and she was always better than me,” says Connie Nolan-Long. “Kate was a good girl, she would always practise.”

  She did indeed fulfil her obligations, 20 minutes practise a day, prodded along by private lessons, but she chafed against the formality of the tuition. Brian Bath recalls that often he would be upstairs at Wickham Farm playing music with Paddy and “Kate used to pop in: ‘Paddy, I’ve got a violin lesson and I don’t want to go!’ ‘OK, hide behind the sofa, we won’t tell anyone!’ She was only about 12.” In 1976, not long after leaving school, she wrote ‘Violin’, later recorded on Never For Ever. It’s a spirited reclamation of that most virile of instruments, dragging it “out of the realm of the orchestra” and back to the “Banshees,” the female spirit of Irish mythology who traditionally appeared as an omen of death from the Otherworld. The implication is clear. Here is both a rejection of the fettered formality that made school so stifling for her, and also an unambiguous declaration of where her loyalties have always lain when it comes to music: gut feeling over prissy technique every time. Like music, dancing – which she came to love – was little more than a perfunctory sideline as taught at St Joseph’s. “I didn’t really get on with the dance teacher at school,” she later said.4 Simply doing these things wasn’t enough; they had to mean something, touch her in some way.