Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  Morgan, on the other hand, claims the incident “left a very bad taste in Kate’s mouth,” but she was forced, for the time being, to divorce her personal feelings from her professional ones. Once everything had settled down, she could at least recognise that some of the music was sounding good. “Once she’d heard, for example, what they’d done on ‘Symphony In Blue’ she was kind of like, ‘Hmm, OK,’” says Powell. “Because it’s brilliant, and it’s not an easy song to play.”

  “I think she basically had to agree with Andrew that we could get a better result, and we shouldn’t be looking at just keeping your friends happy, we have to make the best possible record,” says Ian Bairnson. “I don’t think she was cold about that decision, but she took advice.”

  As the album sessions wore on, the days slipped into a comfortable routine. They would all rise late in the morning and congregate by the pool, some of the band leaping off the roof of the villa straight into the water. Bush would often appear poolside to sunbathe, or work with a notepad and a pen, writing lyrics or other bits and pieces. They would then start recording, stopping for meals in the canteen, perhaps returning to the pool later. Relaxation often took a traditional route. “Somebody was there constantly rolling joints,” says Paton. “Not everyone was doing it with Kate, I think it was only me.”

  It was searingly hot, and although the residential set-up was good for camaraderie it could get a trifle claustrophobic, working together all day, sleeping under the same roof and eating all their meals together; that said, the close proximity had its side benefits. “It was very nice to finish working in the studio and Kate would be lying by the pool,” says Paton. “Almost naked. Topless. To come out of working in that studio environment to find a 20-year-old girl lying on the grass by your side was very refreshing!”

  Though by no means an unhappy camp, making the album was a trickier proposition than The Kick Inside, and not just because of the problems with the band, although it did rather dent her confidence in her vision for the record. Her promotional schedule, too, had sapped some of her energy. “I did sense she was a little tired,” says Jon Kelly, although fame hadn’t appeared to affect her whatsoever in terms of her personal demeanour. “She would still be the first person to say, ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’” says Paton. “She was so easy to work with. I’ve had many ego problems with other artists but not with Kate Bush.” However, the scrutiny that comes with success had certainly made her much more self-conscious. One of the new songs, ‘Full House’, was a rather alarming insight into the psychological struggles she was encountering, a case study in paranoia and self-doubt.

  Having digested her own weight in press cuttings and television coverage, much of which she felt was misleading, she worried that people thought she was contrived, that she was somehow nothing more than a record company marionette. “I think she was going through ‘second album syndrome’,” says Powell. “It’s always phenomenally difficult, especially when your first album is successful, and it’s not unusual to start questioning why people liked it and think, ‘Should I try and do the same?’ That way lies potential madness.” Or indeed, to try and do the opposite. She dreaded being pigeon-holed. Many of her interviews around this time can be summarised by the mantra: Must Do Better! Must Try Harder! She was setting herself almost impossible targets.

  “She had become a lot more self critical, I think that’s true,” says Powell. “Actually, it is true, no question. I mean, ‘Wow’ took days for the vocal. I don’t know how many 24-track tapes we had her vocals on in the end, but it was several. She really pushed herself hard –to the absolute limits – physically, mentally and emotionally.”

  She allowed the players the freedom to come up with their own parts, to find their own way into her music, and she was full of enthusiasm and appreciation for whatever input they put into her songs. But although she was constantly encouraging when it came to her fellow musicians, she was punishingly hard on herself. On ‘Wow’, “It was all in tune and it was OK, there was just something missing,” she mused.10 As ever, she was searching for the kind of emotional connection that couldn’t quite be described in words. In her role as assistant producer she sometimes struggled to communicate her ideas to the musicians in a language they understood. “The reaction to me explaining what I want in the studio was amusement, to a certain extent,” she said. “They were all taking the piss out of me a bit.”11

  She was beginning to realise that the studio offered almost limitless alternatives; that the song was only the starting point, and that you could do things over and over again, approach the music from opposing angles, play the same note in radically different ways. This is the first confirmed sighting of Bush the studio baby, the relentless perfectionist, enraptured by the possibilities of sound, intent on chasing the music until it reveals some shard of magic, a fleeting glimpse of wonder. “On the first album she just stuck with her songs: ‘I sing it like this, I play it like this’, and we wrapped around her,” says Ian Bairnson. “On the second one she was open to changing things. It was the seed of her starting to think in terms of studio, and the possibilities of production.”

  It was exciting, but also terribly frustrating given that she was working to a strict time limit, without her preferred musicians, and without complete autonomy. Though there were no fallings out, the differences between her ideas and those of Powell’s were clear. “There were a few things we didn’t agree on,” says Powell. “I just remembering thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t like that idea,’ and she obviously didn’t like what I wanted to do either, but we’d normally find a way around it. We’d try and talk about it, and we’d do it and see. She wasn’t dogmatic.” Once again, everything was stored away for future reference.

  They returned to London in September to add strings and some other final overdubs, and for Bush to undertake another round of unrelenting promotional duties, which included being photographed by David Bailey for Vogue. Lionheart was mixed in early October, immediately after which she flew to Australia and New Zealand for a couple of weeks, chasing her tail, singing ‘Hammer Horror’, already pushing the new album before it was even out on a conveyor belt of press junkets. “You’ve got five minutes,” Hilary Walker barked at hapless journalists as Bush sat rather dazed in the middle of it all. How much more productively, she thought, this time could have been spent.

  Lionheart was released the following month, on November 10, launched with much fanfare at Ammersoyen Castle, a fourteenth century pile near the River Maas two hours from Amsterdam. Her parents were there, alongside Tony Myatt and anyone who mattered from EMI in the UK, Europe and Canada. Without her willingness to support it on stage, EMI America declined to release the album.

  The glitz and glamour of the launch only partially obscured the fact that Lionheart didn’t really achieve its aims. It’s a good album, and it arguably contains a truer essence of Bush’s creativity –the constant role-playing and changing characterisations are particularly ambitious –than The Kick Inside, but it did little to move her story forward, either commercially or creatively. There are some stunning moments. The only two songs to feature the original band –‘Wow’ and ‘Kashka From Baghdad’ –are clear highlights. ‘Wow’ is a classic marriage of subtle verse and barnstorming chorus, with a massively powerful vocal. Lyrically it’s a pitch-perfect piss-take of theatrical conceits, and contains a pleasingly risqué joke, emphasised in the video where she sings the line “busy hitting the Vaseline” while sticking out her derriere and giving it a good slap. When she released The Whole Story video compilation in 1986, this promo was replaced by a collage of performance images, suggesting she was no longer felt comfortable with such a blatant nod and a wink. However, in an atypically candid moment in which she dropped the faux-naif persona, she did own up to the essential duality of her work. There was sometimes a subversive sexual subtext to her music, but it was not necessarily something she was going to shout about. “I feel if everyone understood the real things I’m saying it wouldn’t be
much good, it wouldn’t help me,” she said. “If it seems harmless on the surface, that’s all right. I don’t want to upset people who don’t want to know.”12

  At the other end of the emotional spectrum, ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, a song which she later all but disowned as embarrassing, is deeply moving, a paragon of her ability not only to conjure up the ache of a lost past, but to instil that ache with a tangible sense of time and place and string together a series of unforgettable images –“dropped from my black Spitfire to my funeral barge” –that perfectly complements the musical accompaniment. ‘Hammer Horror’ is a rousing drama, all guilt, possession and dark humour, while ‘In The Warm Room’ is delicately erotic and not a little voyeuristic. The almost fathomless depths of ‘Symphony In Blue’ marked a real progression in her writing, another song prodding at her own belief system, pondering the nature of God, the spiritual purpose of sex, the world and her own place in it: a stew of soul-searching sung to an impossibly beautiful soundtrack.

  Much of the rest, however, is half-cocked, and some of the songs –the muddled melody of ‘Full House’, the rather tired mix of murder mystery and Brechtian pastiche that is ‘Coffee Homeground’ – are simply underwhelming. Most disappointingly for Bush, the punch isn’t really there.

  The album cover featured the enduring imagine of Bush in a lion bodysuit, complete with a tail and an expectant expression. Another superb Gered Mankowitz portrait –taken, inevitably, from a concept by John Carder Bush –it fuelled many an adolescent fantasy, but spoke of deeper, more private feelings of loss and longing that harked back to the emotions captured in Jay’s Cathy photographs. “That was her idea, of being a child going up to the attic and finding a dressing up box and dressing up,” says Mankowitz, who also shot the rather more conventional portrait on the back cover. “EMI loved the Lionheart cover and I think she loved it, too.”

  In blunt business terms, Lionheart underperformed slightly. The debut single, ‘Hammer Horror’ (a fine song but an odd choice, its stomping chorus belying its unorthodox structure) entered the charts at a poor 73 and only climbed to 44. ‘Wow’, released in March 1979, did much better, eventually reaching number 14, buoyed by the ‘Tour Of Life’ and its irrepressible chorus. Lionheart entered the album chart on November 21 at a disappointing number 36, and only reached a peak of number six. As far as EMI were concerned the record just about did its job, keeping her in the public eye, maintaining impetus and, crucially, giving her a platform on which to perform live. It was, in other words, a typically compromised second album. “It wasn’t the best album in the world,” says Brian Southall blithely. “That’s the nature of the beast.”

  Although Lionheart was a useful reminder to EMI that Bush had no intention of being the company’s cash cow, it was not what she wanted. The destiny of the album had slipped from her grasp, the last time for many years that would be the case. She never entrusted her music to a producer again. She would never be rushed into recording, or at least finishing, an album again. Everything else –promotion, press, commercial considerations, the record company, the expectations of her fans –would from now on be very much secondary considerations. Before she had the chance to put all these new resolutions into practice, however, it was time to show her audience exactly what kind of performer she was.

  6

  The Tour Of Life

  WELCOME to the show. There’s something here for everyone, from the trench-coated, trilby-hatted gangsters frugging in a manner that suggests a close acquaintance with both Guys And Dolls and Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races, to a wartime fighter pilot –a flying jacket for a shroud and a Biggles helmet for a burial crown –dying on foreign soil, wishing only that the idealised England of his past will become his future heaven. There’s a Lolitaesque seductress, winking outrageously at us from behind the piano; a ghostly apparition, up to her waist in mist and misery; a top-hatted magician’s apprentice; a souk-siren singing of her “Pussy Queen” beneath a golden coronet; a murderous gunslinger, and a leather-clad refugee from West Side Story.

  There are 13 people onstage, 17 costume changes and 24 songs scattered over three distinctly theatrical Acts. At the centre of this wild, swirling, ever-changing musical circus, living out each song as though her life depended upon it, is one woman: 5‘ 3″ in her bare feet (in which she appears throughout) and calling the shots on everything from the programme design to the veggie cuisine. She is still only 20 years old.

  The Bush who unveiled her ‘Tour Of Life’ on the stage of the Liverpool Empire on April 3, 1979 and hauled it around Europe for the next six weeks appeared to be unleashing a new, exhilarating, hugely potent weapon in her artistic armoury. She was, it seemed clear, born to do this. Three decades later, however, the tour more closely resembles a compelling footnote, a brief but brilliant detour down a one-way street. Because the ‘Tour Of Life’ turned out to be the tour of a lifetime, a once-only experience rather than the start of an unfolding dialogue between Bush and her songs, it’s tempting to conclude that it was extraordinary simply because it has never happened again. But it was extraordinary even to those who saw it with their own eyes.

  After the release –and dawning disappointment –of Lionheart Bush began pushing aside unwanted commitments like a snowplough carving a path through a blizzard, clearing the road ahead of obstacles, determined to focus her energy on the things that really mattered to her. She was helped immeasurably in this respect by Hilary Walker. Something of a poacher turned gamekeeper, as the head of EMI’s international division Walker had been instrumental throughout 1978 in breaking Bush outside of the UK; the glitzy Lionheart launch in Holland had been orchestrated by her. Shortly afterwards “she was invited to leave EMI by Kate to work with her, which she did very readily,” says her former EMI colleague Brian Southall. “Hilary worked very closely with her, they had a very close bond, and she knew the business backwards.”

  At Bush’s side for most of the next 30 years, Walker was never quite a manager. She handled much of the day-to-day heavy lifting in the manner of a PA, but contracts and financial matters were still handled by Novercia in conjunction with their trusted accountant and solicitor. Walker was primarily a buffer, someone to field the endless enquiries, say ‘no’ on Bush’s behalf and keep unwanted distractions at bay. As such, she was not always popular. The ‘Tour Of Life’ set designer David Jackson recalls her “confrontational, dog-in-a-manger management style,” while Brian Bath remembers moments when “she started pushing her weight around and it wasn’t very comfortable.” Charlie Morgan, who perhaps has a little more distance, admits, “she was pretty tough, [but] she was good.” Above all she was necessary, and the final piece in the management structure.

  As 1978 closed The Kick Inside was named the tenth best selling album of the year in Britain and ‘Wuthering Heights’ the eleventh best-selling single. Bush was harvesting gold and platinum discs from around the globe and had picked up armfuls of awards from the industry and music magazines. To cope with the deluge of fan mail, the Kate Bush Club was created, based in Welling and entrusted to Lisa Bradley, who still runs it today. Bush continued to make appearances on the promotional treadmill, but they were gradually becoming less frequent. Mostly it was UK radio and TV, plugging ‘Wow’ and the forthcoming tour, with the odd jaunt to Italy and Switzerland to perform on television.

  Some interesting opportunities came her way. She was offered, and declined, roles in two horror films –one playing a vampire –and was also invited to record the main title theme for the next James Bond film, Moonraker, composed by John Barry and Hal David; she politely passed on the grounds that she didn’t feel the song suited her, and Shirley Bassey did the honours more than capably. She did, however, return briefly to the studio in February to record ‘Magician’ for The Magician Of Lublin, Menahem Golan’s so-so celluloid interpretation of Isaac Beshevis Singer’s 1960 novel. Written by Maurice Jarre and Paul Webster and all but inaudible in the film, the song was a fleeting but lovely fairground waltz,
reminiscent of Tom Waits’ circus songs, and a much more satisfying take on queasy, slightly sinister Weimar cabaret than her own ‘Coffee Homeground’.

  This was all very gratifying but essentially extracurricular. Everything was leading towards playing live. The ‘Tour Of Life’ was intended to be a hydra-headed beast with several distinct faces: music, movement, poetry, mime, burlesque, magic and a continuous parade of eye-popping visual stimuli. Ever since she had started conversing with the media Bush had been steadily talking herself into undertaking a tour, promising something beyond the run-of-the-mill. “Bands that do nothing, that just go out and … play their latest album, or sing it and then just walk off, are boring,” she said with disarming emphasis and scant regard for the sensibilities of regular rock fans.1 It was another illustration of how little she was prepared to conform to the rock model. This was the age of new wave, when the no-frills ethos of punk still held sway and turning up, tuning up and singing your songs straight was very much what bands did. In the era immediately following the act of symbolic regicide performed on prog rock pomp, anything other than a display of unfussy, conspicuous passion was viewed with extreme suspicion by most quarters of the highly influential rock press. The escapist Technicolor fantasy world of the New Romantic movement –arguably the logical destination of punk’s Be Yourself ethos – was awaiting around the corner; Bush was already far ahead of the pack in this respect, at least visually and conceptually. It would take her music a little time to catch up.

  The tour had originally been scheduled to start in March but was shunted back to April as Bush struggled to ensure that the hugely ambitious undertaking would gel to her satisfaction. Although the dates were officially announced on March 3, preparations had begun in earnest immediately after Christmas 1978. In her first meeting with set designer David Jackson at EMI’s offices, many of the visual aspects were thrashed out in an impromptu, open-ended brainstorming session which started with a businesslike handshake and ended up in a huddle on the floor.