Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  That’s why – still – it takes so long and is so hard.

  The anti-nuclear content of ‘Breathing’ and the message of ‘Army Dreamers’, a deceptively spry little waltz lamenting the high and enduring personal price of war on generations of society’s young and undervalued – would-be fathers, MPs and rock stars who didn’t even survive their teens – were greeted by reviewers as examples of a new-found political strain in Bush’s writing. As she pointed out several times, however, these were songs in which the initial spark was intensely personal rather than polemical. “It’s only because the political motivations move me emotionally – if they hadn’t it wouldn’t have gotten to me,” she said. “It went through the emotional centre, when I thought, ‘Ah, Ow!’ And that made me write.”10

  These two songs did, however, illustrate an opening up and out in her writing. Her reluctance or inability to grapple with social issues and live in The Real World had certainly not gone unnoticed at the time of her initial impact. In the aftermath of punk, scribes in the weekly rock press in particular expected any ‘serious’ artist to have a socio-political agenda and to be engaged with what was happening around them. It was a time when anger and the desire for change were the prevailing sources of creative energy in music, and Bush’s positivity was viewed with great suspicion and often real contempt. When Danny Baker interviewed her for NME in October 1979 during the early stages of the Never For Ever sessions, he was briskly dismissive of her spacey hippie-chickisms and “creative energy” chat. She appeared to him to be little more than a polite, pampered rich girl who wrote about the most indulgent, frivolous things, someone for whom working in Woolworths constituted a ‘real’ job. She didn’t watch the news or read the papers, she seemed disengaged and uninformed about the wider world. The gist of his recounted experience was: ‘Fine, fine, but nothing this girl is saying – or singing about – really matters.’

  It would be overly convenient to imagine that Baker’s implied criticisms gave Bush pause for thought, but within a year she had released ‘Army Dreamers’ and ‘Breathing’ and was discussing her ‘protest songs’ on the BBC’s current affairs show Nationwide, while the more socially aware compositions on The Dreaming were just around the corner. None of these, however, were remotely comparable to explicitly political songs like The Beat’s ‘Stand Down, Margaret’ or Elvis Costello’s ‘Pills And Soap’, nor were they the beginning of a flood of issue-led material. She has certainly never been keen to pin her colours to the mast. An appearance at a benefit concert for Amnesty International and a televised appeal in 1990 for the same organisation, in which she looked like she was auditioning for a job reading the Nine O’Clock News, spoke of the broadly compassionate world-view already apparent from her songs, but nothing more defined.

  As the Eighties rolled on, and the Falklands War and Miners’ Strike and the grip of Thatcherism rumbled all around her, Bush remained – rather wonderfully, in retrospect – miles above the scuffle and fray. “I’ve been tucked away in the studio during the riots,”11 she said at the height of Britain’s inner city race violence of 1981, a line that acts as a neat summation of her general position regarding music and the wider world. When an interviewer from Hot Press tried to goad her into being indiscreet about Margaret Thatcher in 1985 she was not forthcoming. She fudged the issue; she was not a “political thinker”. Nor would she define herself as a feminist. “When you hear ‘feminist’ you go ‘Ummgh!’” she said. “You get all these terrible images, like women with hairy legs and big muscles. I mean, you just think of butch lesbians.”12

  If this all made her sound rather detached and even rather ill-informed within the highly politicised context of the times, it proved to be nothing but beneficial to the music, which soared above and beyond such considerations. The great pay-off was the complete absence in her songs of knee jerk sloganeering, hectoring, proselytizing and cause-hopping from one album to the next. Embracing any creed or cause was too limiting. She was a metaphysical poet in a roomful of hollering three-chord revolutionaries, and she has remained so. Bush’s lack of engagement, particularly in early interviews, could be more than a little wearing, but her gifts are intuitive. She has never sought to hone them to present a watertight argument or world-view, so they remain dazzling, infuriating, sometimes contradictory abstractions. Rather than taking on the taint of day-to-day surface life, her music is about the politics of the heart. There’s an enormous amount of trust in her songs, which is rare; they are unguarded and unposturing, which is even rarer. It’s one of the reasons she has steadily retreated from the press. The utter sincerity and openness with which she discussed her art when she started out was almost painful, and made her an easy target. Raised in a nurturing environment, she was ill-prepared for being ridiculed for her creative ideas and the way in which she was prepared to share them. The realisation kicked in around the time she was making her third album that she was presenting her work to the world, rather than herself.

  “We would have conversations about it, it [became] more of a frustrating thing for her, the press,” says Jon Kelly. “I remember on Never For Ever she came in one day and had decided that there were two Kate Bush’s. She’d managed to separate herself. I often use it as an example to artists now: it’s good if you try not to confuse the artist who you present to the public and the one you take home. People confuse the strangeness of her songs with the way she lives her life, [but] in person she’s very down to earth, girl next door.”

  As if to prove Kelly’s point, during the album sessions she took a break to appear in a demure, high-collared dress – very Abigail’s Party – on the Delia Smith Cookery Course television show, discussing her vegetarian tastes. In the peaceful, verdant surroundings of East Wickham Farm she chatted happily to the doyenne of British cuisine and introduced a series of non-meat dishes prepared by Jay’s wife Judy, showing off her fruit salad, brown rice, yoghurt with honey and a Waldorf salad – even finding room to reference a Fawlty Towers gag, quipping “that one’s got waldorfs in it!” – before concluding, “I really do think there’s a lot in vegetables!” It’s not easy to reconcile this woman with the one who had just made a video for ‘Babooshka’ in which she portrayed a sword-wielding nymphet with very little left to the imagination, or the one who sings “the more I think about sex the better it gets.” The confusion was too much for some. For the tabloids, which by 1979 had already given up trying to understand what Bush was doing creatively, it was all about ‘raunchy Kate’, the ‘sexpot’. That remained their agenda until she became less visible, whereupon she became a ‘troubled recluse’, pop’s resident weirdo. Within a black-and-white world where the grasp of culture is forever governed by the lowest common denominator, Bush would always be trapped somewhere between Miss Whiplash and Miss Havisham.

  Even the music papers were far from immune. Record Mirror’s review of the opening night of the ‘Tour Of Life’ lingered over her “unabashed obsession with sex” and “soft focus porn”. In hindsight she felt the experience of the ‘Tour Of Life’ had been invasive, and it had a profoundly significant affect on her subsequent view of her own femininity. “By the end of the tour, I felt a terrific need to retreat as a person,” she said. “I felt that my sexuality, which in a way I hadn’t really had a chance to explore myself yet, was being given to the world in a way which I found impersonal.”13 She must, of course, take at least some responsibility for this. As the ‘Babooshka’ video clearly conveyed, her work offered her the chance to be the things she sometimes felt, the things, in truth, that most of us privately feel at one time or another, but the fact that she portrayed these feelings in her music so vividly, so publicly – and yes, so sexually – with no apparent inhibitions, caused considerable confusion over the years. The manner in which her public expressions have encouraged assumptions about her private nature as a woman has clearly been an active factor in her decision to make herself less and less publicly available.

  Much of the time in 1980 she was simply the
young, unaffected person evident in the Delia Smith clip, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, usually alternating between Benson & Hedges and John Player Specials, living not on yoghurt and fruit but mostly on chocolate, tea, toast and chips, and spending almost all of her time either writing and recording or watching television and movies with her boyfriend in her relatively humble flat in Lewisham. She was almost a normal person, but it wasn’t quite that simple. Normal people weren’t offered the part of the Wicked Witch in Wurzel Gummidge, or had a driver at their beck and call, despite being able to drive herself. Bush had certain expectations about what she would and wouldn’t do which came as an inevitable consequence of fame, but at the same time she was still taking her laundry round to her mother’s house. She was never comfortable when asked to pull the levers on the star machine and genuinely took fright at industry parties, which she described as “unhealthy, disgusting”.14

  Her old friend David Paton recalls bumping into her at Abbey Road on November 12, 1981, during a party marking the studio’s 50th anniversary, which she attended alongside luminaries such as Paul McCartney and Sting. Paton was recording in Studio Three at the time. “There was a lot of people giving her a lot of attention and she wanted to escape from it all, so she said to me: ‘Have you still got Studio Three? Can we go up there, I just need a break?’” he says. “I took her up there and we spoke for about half an hour about lots of things, her relationship with Del and stuff, until two or three people discovered we were sitting in Studio Three and before you know it there are more people in there than at the party! She didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. She liked one-to-ones or being on her own a lot of the time.”

  Lyrically the songs from the Never For Ever sessions were notable less for their political content than for Bush’s continued determination to reject and subvert conventional gender roles. Attuned to her own ‘masculinity’ as an artist, time and again she deployed the kind of twists more often found in old folk songs, where a blue-buttoned cabin-boy turns out to be a lusty young maiden already four months gone. ‘The Wedding List’ renounced the traditional image of the blushing bride by turning her into a vengeful killer, aroused by her own blood lust, while in ‘Babooshka’ Bush sided – surprisingly – with the unfaithful husband, on the grounds that it’s the jealous wife whose “boredom breeds suspicion”15 and whose initial lack of trust kills the relationship.

  ‘Ran Tan Waltz’, which eventually turned up as the B-side to ‘Babooshka’, was another tale where the traditional roles were switched. Bawdily comic in tone, it told of a young husband left at home holding the baby while his wife is out drinking and philandering, forlornly predicting that she’ll return only when she “picks on a dick that’s too big for her pride.”* Again, the sympathy falls on the male.

  Most daring of all was ‘The Infant Kiss’, a beautiful song rather sorrowfully examining sexual feelings from an adult towards a child; where one might expect the adult in such a scenario to be portrayed as male, in ‘The Infant Kiss’ it was a woman who became attracted to a schoolboy. This being Kate Bush, however it wasn’t quite that simple. The song was inspired by the 1961 film The Innocents, itself a take on Henry James’ novel The Turn Of The Screw, in which Deborah Kerr plays a governess who believes the ghost of her predecessor’s dead lover is trying to possess the bodies of the children she is looking after. There is a scene in the film where she kisses the boy on the lips, and in the song, too, the child’s body is inhabited by a demonic older male – he becomes, in effect, the child with the man in his eyes. It’s a fearless, complex song, venturing into uncharted ground for a female pop singer, and the music perfectly captures the mood. Using only piano, guitar, strings and voice, Bush builds the tension and momentum as the woman’s feelings tumble and torment. As ever, no judgement, no blame. And how often she sings of love and sexual desire as a form of possession, a taboo, a terrifying and unwanted ghost-demon stealing into our heart and bones.

  The Never For Ever sessions ended in June, with the album release held back until September 8 to avoid competing with two other major EMI records, Paul McCartney’s McCartney II and the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue. Bush promoted the record with some gusto. She made personal appearances by car and train at record shops around the UK (in Manchester she kissed each and every fan, amounting to over 600, presumably few of whom have washed since) and embarked upon brief hit-and-run missions to Europe, where she performed dazzling new routines to ‘Army Dreamers’ and ‘Babooshka’ on television. In the UK there were several major print interviews and a fascinating appearance on Paul Gambaccini’s Radio One show, where over two evenings she played some of her favourite music, including the Bothy Band, Delius, Bert Lloyd, Allegri’s Miserere, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Steely Dan, Alan Stivell and Rolf Harris. Very little of it could be called pop music.

  The hard work in and out of the studio paid off. Never For Ever went straight to number one, making Bush the first British female solo artist ever to have a number one album in the UK charts. Review coverage was extensive though decidedly mixed, and even the praise was sometimes grudging. Julie Burchill in The Face conceded that “at last I have to admire Kate Bush” (Bush was surely overcome with gratitude), while Record Mirror went as far as to opine that “by no stretch of the imagination could one describe Bush and her music as inspiring. Never For Ever, in fact, is as depressing an album as one might find all year.”16 She still confounded critical consensus, inspiring extreme reactions on either side of the fence.

  A pair of singles roved ahead, forming a particularly irresistible advance party. The first was ‘Breathing’, a deliberately bold choice which reached number 16 in the UK charts, while the second release, the more obviously commercial ‘Babooshka’, climbed to number five over the summer of 1980, her biggest hit since ‘Wuthering Heights’. A third, ‘Army Dreamers’, released in September, also entered the Top 20.

  The title of the album was a tantalising nod to one of the great ‘lost’ Bush songs. “We did record ‘Never For Ever’ for Lionheart, and I thought it was a killer song but it never appeared,” says Andrew Powell. “Fantastic vocal, really good song. She wasn’t quite happy with something … so we eventually agreed we wouldn’t use it and we’d save it for the next album. In the end all that got saved was the title, which must have been a mystery to some people.” The beautiful ‘Warm And Soothing’, played on the piano as a simple run through in order to acclimatise herself when she first entered Abbey Road, was another wonderful song relegated to B-side status. It was almost as though she now found this kind of thing too easy, too conventional, and therefore viewed it with suspicion. Occasionally one wondered whether she was tossing away some of her most affecting material. “I think her best stuff, the ultimate thing with Kate, is her singing and playing the piano,” says Ian Bairnson. “It’s stunning, it just goes straight to you. It’s there from the first note. It’s really about her and the piano and the rest of us could all go take a hike!”

  The cover art, meanwhile, was a remarkably frank piece of creative expressionism, a stunning coloured pencil drawing by Nick Price depicting Bush with her hands folded behind her head as a stream of alternately angelic creatures (rainbow butterflies, swans) and demonic beasts (strange fantasy creations with bats’ heads and snakes’ bodies) pour out from under her raised skirt. “She was quite particular about what she wanted,” says Price. “The idea of all these light and dark characters coming out from under her skirt, that was the run of it, the light and dark balancing each other out. In fact, the image was taken from a photograph that John had taken of her in that position. I remember when she mentioned that it was all coming out from under her skirt I asked her to repeat that: ‘From under your skirt?’ She just said, ‘Yeeeeah!’ There was a [sexual] aspect to it, but I’m not quite sure what it meant.” She told Kelly that that was where all her songs came from.

  She quickly recognised, before the paint was even dry, that Never For Ever was an incomp
lete metamorphosis, a partial revolution. It was a “new step”,17 the beginning of her embracing a more contemporary sound and adding adventurous layers of instrumentation to her songs, but it was an album in which the possibilities were only unveiled as the sessions wore on and the ultimate prize remained beyond her grasp. “I couldn’t take the last and decisive step then, because I lacked courage and specialised knowledge,” she said. “You need an enormous amount of strength to control your own musical work.”18 Control was the next step. Controlled chaos.

  * A ran tan – and its derivative ‘ran-dan’ – means to go on a debauch or spree.

  8

  Into The Dreaming

  AT the end of September 1980 Bush and Palmer went to see Stevie Wonder perform during his week-long run of concerts at Wembley Arena. He played for over three hours and, inspired by the sheer energy of Wonder’s performance and by meeting him backstage, she returned home and wrote much of ‘Sat In Your Lap’ the following day. It marked the symbolic end of what was becoming a pattern of sorts: complete immersion in a project, then deflation. She described the period immediately after finishing Never For Ever as “sort of terrible introverted depression. The anti-climax after all that work really set in in a bad way, and that can be very damaging to an artist. I could sit down at the piano and want to write, and nothing would happen.”1

  It was a salutary lesson that there was, after all, more to life than work, but it was a lesson she wasn’t quite ready to take on board. She had moved almost immediately from the ‘Tour Of Life’ into the making of the album and the batteries were drained. She took a short break, saw her friends and spent time with her family – and then proceeded to throw herself back into her music, with even greater conviction and an increasing obsession for attaining perfection.