Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  The song was far from innately commercial in the first place, but the video hardly helped its fortunes as it stalled at number 48. John Henshall also worked on the film and is equally damning about the experience. “That was a bit of a shambles. A lot went into it, but she was lost. I don’t think [Paul] controlled it, you know, but she needed a guiding hand and she didn’t get it. She thought she knew.”

  On the next video, ‘There Goes A Tenner’, Henry was under strict instructions from EMI to draw in the reins. Before they began, he told Bush that it had to be made much more in the manner of a conventional video. We need to shoot this in the standard way, he told her: cover it in a wide shot, then go in for two-shot, mid-shot and close up, so we have the ability to cut it conventionally and it will have a better chance of being shown on television which, presumably, was the point of the exercise.

  “I don’t think she liked that,” he says. “So after that one she employed everyone that I had employed on ‘There Goes A Tenner’ – except me! She had my art director, my set dressers, my cameraman, wardrobe people, everyone but me, because she didn’t like the fact that I tried to be more in control of it. Most creative people want complete control. On one hand it was a gift to be able to work with her, on the other hand she was heading in a direction that wasn’t going to be commercially successful. Both the films I made didn’t get a huge amount of exposure.”

  Indeed, that’s an understatement. ‘There Goes A Tenner’ is the least successful single of Bush’s career, played and seen virtually nowhere, primarily due to the song – the video is perfectly fine. As ever, there were no great scenes, no fallings out; neither Henry nor Wiseman have a bad word to say about Bush personally and, you suspect, would have leapt at the chance to have worked with her again. For her part, she remained resolute in her belief that she had to follow her vision, resolving to do it better next time. Which is what she did.

  By the mid-Eighties Terry Gilliam had forged a reputation as a cinematic innovator. A confirmed fan, occasionally Bush would ring Gilliam’s office in Neals Yard in Covent Garden to rave about his work, particularly Time Bandits, and suggest that he direct her videos. Eventually she came into the office and the two met. Gilliam was struggling with the edit of Brazil, so he suggested that Bush instead used his cameraman, David Garfath, for her next promo, ‘Running Up That Hill’. She tried to tempt Gilliam again with ‘Cloudbusting’, and this time he recommended another member of his creative team, Julian Doyle.

  Much of Bush’s creative world spins out from a very tight-knit cluster of central spokes: Abbey Road, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel. She has been very conscious and astute in her choice of collaborators and working environments, and these trusted hubs have served her well. A constant throughout her career has been her ability to surround herself with supremely talented people. She has lofty ambitions for her art and is far from shy or retiring when it comes to approaching those she admires, and her ability to zone in on quality people and use their resources – not in a cynical way – has had a positive impact on her work. Her attitude has always been: if you’re going to have somebody else contribute, get the best. So if she needed a choral group, she would get singers overseen by Richard Hickox, one of the great English conductors. If she required a classical guitarist, she would get John Williams. This tendency has been even more pronounced in terms of her videos. “Kate was so respected by people and they were so fascinated by her that they would do it,” says David Garfath. “And she’s got that thing: no harm in asking.”

  Terry Gilliam became another spoke in the wheel. It’s little wonder she made a bee line for the Monty Python animator, who at the time was at the early stages of a consistently intriguing and visually enchanting career as a film director. Time Bandits, his fantastical grown-up kid’s adventure – or perhaps it’s an very adult fable with a child-like veneer – about a young boy taken on a series of time travelling adventures by six dwarves, was very much her kind of thing. Bush had loved Monty Python since her schooldays and Time Bandits was one of her favourite films. Gilliam’s vision chimed with the vividly unusual way in which she saw the world.

  Although she was disappointed not to be working with him directly, Gilliam became a close friend and he gave her the benefit of his advice on things like story boards, while her collaborations with his colleagues made groundbreaking forward strides in terms of her own visual work.* Perhaps she felt she had less to prove; certainly her ideas were stronger and more focused; and the music she was working with was considerably more accessible.

  David Garfath recalls a woman who was typically unaffected and pleasant in person, always open and willing to hear ideas, and yet absolutely resolute about what she wanted. “When I first went to her house in Eltham and she opened the door, I remember thinking, ‘Is that Kate or not?’” he says. “Just for a split-second moment, because she was so relaxed in her dress sense, and so friendly. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea’, it was a natural warmth. We sat and talked over ideas. I thought of this ballet dance troupe I’d heard of somewhere in west Africa, which sounded fascinating, and doing it outside at sunset, but it wasn’t right for her. I came up with something else, and once again that didn’t click, and I thought, ‘Hmmm, I don’t know that this is going to work.’ But I gave it one more shot, I came up with other ideas and went to her and she picked up on it and we pushed it forward together. She has very strong ideas about which way it should go and how it should develop. I enjoyed it very much indeed, it was a very good experience. She pushes people to try and make something [special] of it.”

  ‘Running Up That Hill’ was always intended to be a beautifully filmed piece of pure classical dance. Bush had been studying hard with Dyane Gray-Cullert, and in the absence of Stewart Avon Arnold – who was, to his eternal regret, busy with other commitments – she was partnered in the film by Michael Hervieu, a young dancer who had passed an audition to win the role. The Japanese hakama costumes and the recurring miming of the firing of an arrow nod to the family interest in Kyudo. Out of long discussions between Bush and Garfath came the idea of placing photographic cut-outs of the faces of Bush and Hervieu onto an army of invading dancers to convey the song’s core idea of the difficulty in resisting our given gender and identity.

  It was all too much for MTV, who used a clip of her performing the song on Wogan instead, but it was a beautiful and rather haunting piece of film. Bush, as usual, put her all into it. “She would go on and on in her performance until she felt it was right,” says Garfath. “She loved dance, and she was very professional about it, and very anxious to get it right. She was still dancing at midnight when we would have started at six in the morning. It was fantastic. I can’t remember anyone having a bad word. People really loved her, they warmed to her. When we finished some of us went off to have a drink together. We went to a bar somewhere in London and she didn’t want to be recognised. When she used to order a cab she would use a pseudonym, but I should think that’s quite normal.”

  The director, who had worked on films such as The Empire Strikes Back, Superman II and Another Country, was also impressed by the amount of autonomy Bush exercised. There was no one from the record company looming over the proceedings, and she always seemed to get what she required. “I remember one night we needed to go past midnight, where it suddenly gets much more expensive because of crew and everything, and my producer said we didn’t have it in the budget,” says Garfath. “Kate just picked the phone up, spoke to someone, and said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’ A wonderful freedom.”

  ‘Running Up That Hill’ was intended as a fond farewell to dance, at least as far as her video appearances were concerned. That proved premature, but she was already fixated on film, and had been talking seriously about developing ‘The Ninth Wave’ concept from Hounds Of Love into a mini-movie. It “was a film,” she said, “that’s how I thought of it”4, and indeed, when she discussed her songs it was clear how vivid and real they appeared to her. ‘The Ninth Wave’ movie never happened, disappo
intingly, as it had a much stronger dramatic thread than the one she eventually made, but the ambition remained.

  In many ways her next promo video was a small, self-contained film in its own right. She made ‘Cloudbusting’ with Julian Doyle, who had edited Monty Python’s Life Of Brian and had been a second unit director on Time Bandits and Brazil, and who went on to become a feature director. Bush’s ideas for the video originated from some preliminary drawings she had made, most memorably a picture of the sun displayed as a huge face coming over the horizon. The shoot was the scene of perhaps her biggest coup, recruiting the renowned Canadian actor Donald Sutherland – star of Don’t Look Now, another of her favourite films, directed by another of her favourite directors, Nic Roeg – to play the role of Wilhelm Reich.

  Originally, they had talked about the possibility of hiring the British actor and former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton to the play the father, but then Sutherland’s name cropped up. Bush had a contact for the actor through Barry Richardson, a stylist who had worked on Pink Floyd’s The Wall and who was part of the crew on the film Sutherland was currently making in Kings Lynn, the disastrous American Revolutionary War movie Revolution. When she asked Sutherland’s agent if he might be available the answer was a simple ‘no’, so she tried a less formal tack, using Richardson as an intermediary.

  Sutherland agreed to meet for dinner and quickly accepted the part; aside from the fact he was charmed by Bush, he may well have been looking for a little light relief. He later confessed he was having a miserable time on Revolution, where he was surrounded by intense method actors, including Al Pacino, who would completely ignore him off-set because he was playing an English sergeant in the film and they were all fighting for the freedom of the colonies.

  EMI’s Brian Southall maintains that Sutherland “was in it in order to attract the American market. She was a great fan of his, but there was also, ‘It’s gonna be good for America’. From our point of view, it wouldn’t do any harm.” There was certainly an awareness that cracking MTV might provide a short cut to success in the US; pop videos had become increasingly homogenised, and it was felt that the cinematic qualities of ‘Cloudbusting’ might stop viewers flipping between channels and force them to pay attention. MTV, however, ultimately shied away from it precisely because it was so different. “In the end, it made no bloody difference,” says Southall. “They don’t get this stuff.” ‘Cloudbusting’ eventually played in cinemas in support of the Michael J. Fox teen vehicle Back To The Future. There was some discussion about adding a statement at the end of the film revealing that Reich was sentenced to two years for contempt of court and had died in jail, but Bush decided that such a bald announcement had no place in a pop promo.

  The video was filmed over three days at the White Horse Hill, near Uffington on the Berkshire Downs, at a cost of a little over £100,000. The sky stayed blue and the clouds, arguably the true stars of the piece, were bought from Oxford Scientific and added in post-production. Bush cast herself as the son, Peter Reich, who was a pre-pubescent boy in the period the video describes. The crew were sceptical that she could pull it off, and they had every right to be. Decked out in dungarees, the addition of a short, spiky wig admittedly lent her a certain boyish quality while making her head seem bigger and thus helping her appear younger; while Sutherland – already a towering 6 ft 4 – stood on a box in order to make the petite Bush seem even smaller. Even after all that effort, however, she remained a highly unconvincing male.

  The schedule was impossibly tight. Sutherland was only there thanks a brief spell of shore leave and had to be surrendered back to Revolution within the agreed time span. As a consequence, he was filming right up until the moment of his departure: the shot of him getting into the car as the sun starts to sink behind the hills captures his actual exit from the ‘Cloudbusting’ set. Every available moment with the star was grabbed with both hands, and by the end of the third day he was exhausted, beginning to lose focus and jokingly wondering aloud what exactly he had let himself in for, slumming it on the set of a pop video. His presence was tangible evidence not only of Bush’s tenacity, but also the genuine esteem in which she was held beyond the confines of the pop world. Few other artists would have managed to get him to play ball.

  Everyone loved Sutherland. He brought a real gravitas to the project, and he not only made a perfectly sympathetic and convincing Reich, he was very generous with Bush. “He was really professional, really patient, and an incredible help to me,” she said. “I mean, whenever we were acting, he was my father. I just had to react to him like child. He made it very easy.”5

  Sutherland’s strength as an actor pulled these feelings out of Bush. There is a lovely scene in the video when they both look down at the approaching car. Bush backs into him, turns around and they embrace. When they broke apart Bush was crying real tears. The openness of Sutherland’s performance brought her emotions to the surface, to the point where she was living the moments described in the screenplay. In common with the best of her music, it wasn’t so much acting as being.

  If she was learning simply from her proximity to a masterful actor, she was also picking up technical tips from the crew, who would talk constantly to her, gently and informally tutoring her in the art of filming, explaining what they were doing and the best means of getting certain results. It seemed to have the desired effect. Buoyed by the experience of working with such a stellar group, she immediately began directing her own videos, beginning with ‘Hounds Of Love’ and ‘The Big Sky’ in 1985 and 1986, followed by all the subsequent videos for The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, as well as ‘Experiment IV’ and ‘Rocket Man’. In many of them she used her friends from the world of alternative comedy – Hugh Laurie, Dawn French and Tim McInnerny – whom she had met through Comic Relief functions and her Amnesty International fundraisers and via mutual acquaintances; Robbie Coltrane had even appeared on Hounds Of Love. She co-directed ‘The Sensual World’ with The Comic Strip Presents’ … actor, writer and director Peter Richardson, which led to her being invited to play the role of bride Angela Watkins in the Comic Strip’s rather deranged 1990 film, Les Dogs, also featuring McInnerny and her future co-star in The Line, The Cross And The Curve, Miranda Richardson. More spokes, more contacts.

  It would be easy to put rather arch inverted commas around the description of Bush as a director, and it’s true she did get help from many of her right hand men, experienced cameramen, editors and cinematographers such as Roger Pratt, Brian Hurley and Julian Doyle. But watching ‘Hounds Of Love’, ‘Experiment IV’, ‘The Sensual World’ and ‘This Woman’s Work’ a clear unity of style to Bush’s direction emerges: the videos are heavily stylised, dramatic and rather stagey.* When not conjuring a Hitchcockian sense of menace (‘Hounds Of Love’ is partly a homage to The 39 Steps) and casting long shadows, she favours deep, warm browns, greens and purples. She’s excellent at switching atmosphere by changing the backdrop – the weather, the season, the time of day. That elemental touch again.

  She is a classicist. Her love of Thirties and Forties noir and caper comedy is clear in the clothing and the crisp lines of many of her videos, and she is fond of the somewhat operatic grand gesture: there’s lots of clenched fists, enveloping hugs and long stares into the mid-distance. It’s not always subtle, it’s perhaps a tad indulgent, and it does often border on pastiche, but it is undeniably accomplished in places. At home Bush had a room full of films by favourite directors like Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock, often video-taped from the television. Her passion for cinema bequeathed a certain amount of technical knowledge, as well as a genuine thrill at being behind the camera.

  While directing and performing these songs, she was edging towards something bigger, more ambitious. Ever since ‘The Ninth Wave’ she had yearned to make an extended piece of film combined with her music. She gradually conceived The Line, The Cross And The Curve. “She started to talk about this project about a year before it happened,” recalls Stewart Avon Arnold. �
��She said she wanted to put together this story, like a mini-film. She talked about different elements of it when I was coming down there to teach her private classes at Eltham, the house next to [Paddy]. She’d bounce any ideas off me, and then it came up and she asked me to help her with the choreography, because there were quite a few other dancers. I helped her put it together, although obviously all the ideas were coming from her. There were some great people in it. She wanted to get some mature dancers, so I recommended Christopher Bannerman and Bob Smith, who were Michael and Gabriel, the angels, and she used Lindsay Kemp, of course. The number that she did with the Madagascan musicians [‘Eat The Music’], they were all dancers that were auditioned at the Pineapple, I helped put that together.”

  For the lead dramatic parts she recruited the fine actress Miranda Richardson, who had a sparkling CV and had worked with her in Les Dogs, to play the Irish dancer, and Lindsay Kemp as her tour guide through the mirror world, a show of gratitude for all he had taught her. Her band all participated, her ‘healer’ Lily showed up, Paddy was there, Peter Richardson had a cameo.

  None of it, alas, amounted to very much. The plot was essentially an extended and confused re-telling of the lyrics of the album’s title track, which was in itself inspired by Powell’s film, in turn inspired by a Danish fairy tale. It opens with Bush and Stewart Avon Arnold dancing while her band perform ‘Rubberband Girl’: a good, straight pop video. The routine ends with her flailing in a straightjacket (a nice poke at all those “she’s mad” naysayers) and after a bit of lame tomfoolery with a wind machine Bush’s character – who is never named – expresses her dissatisfaction with her dancing. There is a blackout, the band leave, and Bush sings ‘And So Is Love’ amid some dread symbolism involving candles and dead birds. Richardson’s character then arrives, requesting from Bush the mysterious symbols – the line, the cross and the curve – in order for her to “get back home.” She gives Bush her possessed red shoes in return and Bush sets off into a mirror world, beckoned across fire by Lindsay Kemp. She must then try and get the symbols back, avenge the evil Richardson, while also joining the dots between songs as diverse as ‘Lily’ and ‘Eat The Music’.*