After a lot of long, hard days and gruelling nights, the film was finished by early November, presented to EMI on the tenth and screened at the London Film Festival on the thirteenth, an event which sold out in ten minutes and which she attended with Del, Dr Bush and the film’s producer, Margarita Doyle. Gazing up at the vast 60ft screen at the Odeon on Leicester Square, the Bush party nervously sat through the support film, Wallace and Gromit in The Wrong Trousers, wondering how The Line, The Cross And The Curve would fare by comparison. The screening – dotted with Bush fanatics – went well, and at the end she gave a brief but graceful speech following a very generous standing ovation.
It was perhaps the kindest review the film received. It toured several other city film festivals in Europe, the US and Canada through late 1993 and into early 1994 and enjoyed a brief cinematic release before coming out on video. It even received a Grammy nomination in 1995 for Best Music Video: Long Form – Bush didn’t attend, being a fan of neither awards nor Los Angeles – but the critical reception ranged from lukewarm to hostile. “High on whimsy, low on content,” said Variety, while Q deemed it “not so much a movie as the sort of linked sequence of promo vids that pop stars are wont to hang themselves with, given a feature length rope.”
Bush herself quickly distanced herself from the film. As early as April 1994, while ostensibly promoting it, she admitted she had taken on too much. Later, she was less measured. “I shouldn’t have done it. I was so tired. I’m very pleased with four minutes of it, but I’m very disappointed with the rest. I let down people like Miranda Richardson who worked so hard on it. I had the opportunity to do something really interesting and I completely blew it.”38 Later still, in 2005, she simply dismissed it as “a load of bollocks.”39
Shortly after the premiere, Bush – again, accompanied by Palmer – flew to New York for a round of promotional appearances. Most notable was a signing session at Tower records, where she arrived in a white limousine and stayed for over three hours as the enormous queue slowly drained into the building, and an odd, rather out-of-it interview with JBTV, a small Chicago based station. Sporting big brown shades and clearly wishing herself anywhere else but here, her utter exhaustion is almost painful to behold. On her return, slowly the brakes were applied and the shutters came up. She hadn’t had time to properly grieve her mother, nor absorb all the other changes she had undergone in the past few years. “I needed to stop working because there were a lot of things I wanted to look at in my life,” she said. “I was exhausted on every level.”40 Bush, that most magnificently airborne of artists, had slowly lost altitude. She had run herself and her music into the ground.
* The Trio Bulgarka’s forenames, Yanka, Eva and Stoyanka, also spelt YES, Bush noted happily.
* The 12-inch had a double grooved A-side which, depending on where you placed the needle, would either play the vocal version or the instrumental. “She didn’t tell the record company,” recalls her mastering engineer Ian Cooper. “They pressed them all up and they were getting quite a few returns, people complaining that the vocals had disappeared. She just did it for a laugh, and it worked. Eventually, EMI had to put a sticker on it.” Bush would often push EMI’s patience to the limits when it came to ensuring the quality of her records at the crucial mastering stage. “She would always get EMI to do test pressings, and check them out, and if they weren’t good enough they’d get rejected and remastered, and told to do a better job next time. EMI never learned their lesson that this was a woman who would check everything.”
* This proved impossible, and Bush had to hastily shoot extra performance footage for the ‘Rubberband Girl’ video, the first single, released in early September.
11
An Architect’s Dream
THE Line, The Cross And The Curve was, to date, Bush’s last significant visual statement. It was the logical, if not wholly satisfactory destination of a journey that began in early 1978 on a grey, misty Salisbury Plain – a rather drab approximation of wild northern moorland – with Bush leaping through the undergrowth wearing a fiery red dress and a rather startled expression that at times looked something like embarrassment. The contrast between the first ‘Wuthering Heights’ video and Bush’s lavish mini-film of 1993 could hardly have been more pronounced, excepting the fact that, as Brian Southall drily points out, Bush’s earliest promo clip also “got an awful lot of bad publicity”.
Her earliest videos can be viewed with a certain fond indulgence. Open, odd, naïve, capturing a disarming innocence that may not be quite what it seems, they are primarily filmed pieces of dramatised choreography, a diaphanous legacy of what she had learned from her mentors in mime and her teachers at the Dance Centre, caught somewhere between sensuality and acute silliness and unlike anything captured on film before or since.
They are small, idiosyncratic baby steps that later caused her to wince a little, but they are still amazingly compelling, simply because she is in them. Bush’s greatest asset as a visual artist is her face, and as such it’s possible to trace the genesis of her performing instinct to an early source, moving through her dancing days back to those powerfully evocative Cathy photographs from her pre-teens, and then presumably further back still. From a young age she clearly possessed an instinctive and intrinsic understanding of how to captivate the lens, displaying a powerful gift for being observed that has permeated every aspect of her career.
“She was fantastic, she was very visually aware, she knew what the camera was, where the boundaries were, she completely understood all that,” says Paul Henry, who directed her in ‘The Dreaming’ and ‘There Goes A Tenner’. “She could turn it on immediately the cameras started rolling. It was a privilege to work with her. Of all the people I’ve ever worked with, visually her and Iggy Pop were the most aware.” Gered Mankowitz has photographed her on dozens of occasions, and agrees. “She has an ability to focus on and give to the camera something special about [herself] which might only last a fraction of a second, but it is there,” he says. “It’s a quite mysterious process that occurs between the subject and the camera, you don’t question it too much or over analyse it. It’s a strange, intimate process. It doesn’t always work, but some people just respond fantastically, and can communicate something special. That aura only really occurs in front of the camera.”
You suspect that even Bush herself has never entirely understood this alchemy, or been wholly comfortable with it. The gap between the reality of her life and the expression in her work has always proved somewhat difficult to reconcile; many have failed to make a distinction between what she is projecting and who really lies beneath, yet it’s difficult to overstate the extent to which her ability to transform herself for the camera is integral to her work. Ask a stranger to contemplate Kate Bush and it’s very often not a song that will spring immediately to mind, but a kaleidoscope of changing images. “I don’t think I want to be up there … being me,” she said. “I don’t think I’m that interesting for people to see. I think what I want to do is to be up there actually being the person that’s there in the song. I think that is much more interesting for people and it is much more of a challenge for me.”1
Who is she? Even her friends were sometimes not immune to wondering. “The ‘Babooshka’ video was a shock,” recalls Jon Kelly. “When the single came out and I saw that video of her dressed up, I was really quite shocked.” It’s easy to understand what he means – who is that half-naked scimitar-wielding temptress? Not the woman making cups of tea and sitting next to me in the studio, that’s for sure – but the correlation should be clear: the track is about a woman who is split down the middle, a middle-aged wife dressing up as a young seductress to entrap her husband, and in the video Bush is serving the song faithfully, just as on the cover of Hounds Of Love she is also in character, embodying the suggestion in the title: herein awaits something languorous, seductive, yet also with an implied threat. It clearly does not make her, as one interviewer seemed to imply, an advocate of bestiality. And yet �
� even though she has always been as happy to play grotesques, or ‘go ugly’, or swap gender as she has been to appear alluring – in her head-on visual representations she has always walked a precarious line.
“Kate is a very assertive Leo, and Leo’s tend to be quite exhibitionist in many ways,” says Charlie Morgan. “Part of Kate wanted to be centre of attention, but there was a certain reserve about her as well; part of her is this incredibly reclusive, creative artistic type. Again, a dichotomy, a battle within herself. There’s no doubt that when she did those videos she was very out front and wanted people to see them and appreciate them, and yet in terms of her private life and public image, she really wants to keep them separate, which is very hard to do.”
Regardless of the risk of people misunderstanding the line that separates public performance and the private person, film and video was always likely to prove irresistible to Bush. A woman who has frequently found cinema a direct source of inspiration in her writing, who often approached composition in a highly visual way and is acutely aware of the importance of projecting a compelling image, she was bound to recognise the medium as an outlet for many of the ideas – dance, cinema, role-playing – that form an integral part of her music.
Its illusory nature and the freedom it allowed also appealed to someone who was never comfortable in the gladiatorial environment of the live arena, where the battle commences and we see whatever we see. In concert, once the bell rings it cannot be unrung; with video, conversely, she discovered a medium for her performance talents in which she could control the picture all the way down the line. “Perhaps that’s where she transferred the impulse to play live, and put it into that expression,” says Jon Kelly. Certainly, following the ‘Tour Of Life’ she actively stepped up the ambition and scale of her videos, moving away from straight performance to something more ambitious and allusive.
The story of Bush’s progression as a visual artist is partly that of astutely selecting highly influential collaborators and mentors. Thanks to EMI she started out in the hands of Keith MacMillan, alongside David Mallet one of the key figures of early music video, but as she began to spread her wings she craved not only greater freedom but greater knowledge and craft, aligning herself to recognised film-makers such as Terry Gilliam, Nic Roeg, Michael Powell and Jimmy Murakami. She instinctively leaned towards the auteur.
The beginnings, however, were not so auspicious. Shot by Rockflix in a day on a budget not much bigger than a petty cash float, the original ‘Wuthering Heights’ video was the clip that launched a thousand parodies, mother’s milk to mimics like Faith Brown. It was swiftly withdrawn by EMI, who commissioned MacMillan to shoot another video for the song in the more hospitable environs of Ewart’s Studio A in Wandsworth. The film was hastily assembled even as the single was climbing the charts, and within a matter of days was being shown on Top Of The Pops. These were the Dodge City days of smash and grab film-making.
“We did ‘Wuthering Heights’ through the middle of the night,” says its editor, Brian Wiseman. “We got halfway through it, decided we didn’t like what we were doing, and started over. We got an idea from some Canadian movie Keith had seen, did it on video and went down a load of generations to get that [swirling] effect. She didn’t have any input on that at all, I don’t think. That was Keith’s idea, and the same with ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’.”
“The great thing about music videos [then], and especially with Keith MacMillan, was that you could do what the hell you wanted,” adds John Henshall, who worked as director of photography on several early Bush videos. “There were no rules. I remember with ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, we used the heaviest fog filter, which was unbelievably revolutionary. We started her looking down in that foetal position, and then we opened the exposure to burn her out, and then just took the exposure down again so she appeared out of it. It was shown on Top Of The Pops and there was this complete change of mood and image with this weird girl singing this weird song. It was unbelievable.”
There’s no doubt that those early videos, somewhat dated though they appear today, made an immeasurable contribution – for good or ill – to creating Bush’s public image, even if they did lean a little heavily on the dry ice, a simplistic meme of the times for any female artist deemed a little ‘quirky’ and mystical. In some ways, MacMillan was to Bush’s early videos what Andrew Powell was to her early records: an experienced, empathetic, occasionally inspired figure with very strong ideas who liked ultimately to call the shots, although she was always in charge of the choreography. She learned a lot from him, and his contacts. For the rather risqué ‘Hammer Horror’ video he introduced her to Anthony Van Laast, which proved to be the start of a highly productive relationship.
“Keith understood that she was a sensitive artist and totally different to the other people, so it was very much a partnership,” says Henshall. “It wasn’t just a Keith thing, but I think she had phenomenal guidance on those early ones. He was good to work with, he would definitely take ideas, and I think he was a major influence on Kate, who was a little 18-year-old, just a normal girl, no edge at all. She wasn’t grand in any way, shape or form. She was a bit … not vacant, but a lot of ‘Yeah, wow’.”
Paul Henry, for one, was never fooled by Bush’s oft-mentioned ‘cosmic, amazing’ shtick. “She could be quite vague at times once the camera was cut, [but] I think that might be just very clever, actually, because it’s so obvious that she is very bright and is pretty shrewd about how to get what she wants,” he says. “That rather beguiling look that she’d have occasionally, as if she didn’t really know what was going on, was all just part of an invitation to put in your thoughts about something.”
As if to prove the point, following the tour and the making of Never For Ever she sought the kind of control over her visual output that she had gained over her records. After that solo, eye-popping interpretation of ‘Babooshka’ in the studio, her focus began to move away from presenting herself as a dancer or a mover who chipped in with storyline and choreography ideas but ceded control of the final product to the director and editor. She started edging towards something more obviously dramatic, using outdoor locations, stronger narratives and larger casts.
“My God, the expense was nothing,” recalls Brian Bath. “We used to go to the forest out in [Windsor], Black Park, where all the Hammer Horror stuff was shot. We did ‘Army Dreamers’ there, and ‘Breathing’, where they all come out of the water at the end. Del wouldn’t do it: ‘Ah no, I ain’t doing that!’ We had scuba suits on underneath these overalls, it was February and it was freezing. Paddy says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you if you float away.’ I always said I’d sit in a tree upside down if they asked me.”
Bush loved ‘Breathing’ and particularly ‘Army Dreamers’, a snappy, powerful, stylish summation of the song’s personalised anti-war themes, declaring that “I got everything I wanted to say across.”2 However, it marked the end of her relationship with MacMillan. The director could be a tricky customer, as could Bush in her own way, and she was about to disappear over the horizon of her own imagination and into The Dreaming. “Ever since ‘Breathing’ I’ve wanted to make videos like little films,” she said.3 She had her own agenda to pursue.
“[Keith] had quite good ideas but she wanted much more creative control,” says Brian Wiseman. “She wasn’t getting that kind of freedom from Keith. She did ‘Army Dreamers’ with him and then they fell out. I’d stopped working with Keith, but she had a relationship with me and asked if I would effectively direct with her [on ‘Sat In Your Lap’]. It was her ideas and me making sure that it worked.”
‘Sat In Your Lap’, an exercise in highly kinetic abstract impressionism, with roller-skating bulls thrown in for good measure, is hardly coherent but it is eminently watchable. The other videos for The Dreaming singles revealed someone still struggling to master the art of matching music to visual expression. Bush sought the same absolute creative control she had had on the album but
did not yet have the technical expertise to pull it off, and so was forced to hire directors to do her will. It was not always a comfortable fit. Wiseman, who also directed ‘Suspended In Gaffa’, admits “she was a very nice lady, there was never any arguments or anything, but as a piece of video it wasn’t hugely interesting.” Actually it was interesting. Filmed in a set of a barn, the dusk punctuated by shafts of sunlight, and featuring her mother in a brief cameo, it conjured up a very distinct sense of Wickham Farm. But it is doggedly uncommercial.
‘The Dreaming’, the opening single from the album and therefore a relatively important piece of film in terms of promoting the record, was based around a highly stylised piece of slow choreographed movement, presented with cinematic values. Ewart’s sound stage was transformed into a vast, desolate stretch of Australian outback, with a 10kW light rigged up as the sun, topped off with lasers borrowed from The Who. It was an ambitious and very expensive undertaking, and yet many of the visual effects were obscured by clouds of red cement dust (“I think people probably died because of the video,” jokes John Henshall. “For years the dust was all over Ewart’s lights, everywhere, we were breathing that stuff”) while the action, full of vivid visual stimulus, was rendered inaccessible because of the way it was shot.
Bush had initially approached Terry Marcel, the director of the cult 1980 swords and sorcery movie Hawk The Slayer, to direct the video; Marcel wasn’t interested but suggested his friend, Paul Henry, instead. “I was pretty excited about the idea of working with her,” says Henry. “She knew exactly what she wanted, and in a way that made it quite difficult. She wanted it based around dance routines, so whilst I shot a lot of close ups, mid-shots and so on, when it came to the edit she basically insisted that it was pretty much kept as a wide shot, which worked for her, but I think it was compromised from my point of view. For me it was very unfortunate, because she was entering a phase where artistically she was expressing herself, but commercially it was no good. The record company didn’t like it at all. Martin Wyn Griffith [EMI’s Head of Production at the time] called me and said, ‘This is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe you’ve spent all this money and made this terrible film.’”
Under the Ivy Page 35