Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  As such, she wrote and recorded in short bursts in stolen moments. She would put down the music on her Kurtzweil 250 keyboard or her piano, perhaps adding a drum loop or a click track and then a guide vocal. The set up may have changed – they were no longer at Wickham Farm, they were no longer an item, and they no longer worked 16 hour days – but Del remained her foil in the studio, turning up most mornings and getting down to work. “He’s the only one who can say [things about her music] without damning her, without putting her down, and that comes from decades of experience,” says Charlie Morgan. “He’s just like an old friend, y’know,” she said. “Working with Del, there’s a very relaxed feeling.”14

  Danny McIntosh was naturally present, picking up musicians and dropping them off, popping in and out. He played all the guitars, which were more prominent than on any Bush record since the first two and became a prime component of the album’s sound, adding flamenco stylings to ‘Sunset’, a reggae rhythm on ‘King Of The Mountain’, and a real crunch to ‘Aerial’. His atmospheric, interlocking parts on ‘How To Be Invisible’, meanwhile, were a highlight, immeasurably enhancing one of her best new songs.

  McIntosh had some technical input, wrestling with the digital convertors when everyone else had given up, but, as ever, it was mainly Bush and Del working on the nuts and bolts of the songs. “We didn’t see much of Dan,” says Peter Erskine, the American drummer who played on several tracks. “John [Giblin] at one point explained a couple of things one night as he was driving me back to the hotel, because I was a little bit puzzled. I wasn’t quite getting the dynamic, that was all, but it wasn’t my business.”

  Towards the end of 2000 Bush had made sufficient progress to begin inviting outside musicians into the studio to add parts to the songs; Erskine was one of the first. Primarily a jazz drummer who had played with John Martyn and Joni Mitchell, Erskine had been spotted by Bush on a BBC documentary about English composer Mark Anthony Turnage. Typically, she picked up the phone and made direct contact, and shortly afterwards Erskine was flown to England.

  “There was a bit of secrecy attached to everything, in terms of where the drums would be delivered – there was a protocol that they wanted observed,” he says. “The cases should be labelled in a specific manner so it would not be apparent to anyone handling those along the way where they were going or what the project was. They had a car service that would pick me up [from my hotel] and drop me off a specific spot and then I’d get through the security gates, but there was nothing disproportionate. They’re all very well-balanced, an incredible amount of normality. That security apparatus is to maintain some normalcy.”

  Erskine was there for three days and played, by his estimation, on seven or eight tracks, although he only appears on three: ‘An Architect’s Dream’, ‘Prologue’ and ‘Nocturn.’ It was a leisurely process – “they just work at a different pace” – which encouraged experimentation. It was a very much more organic process than Bush’s most recent albums. Erskine even recalls that at first he, Giblin and Bush performed together as a kind of ad hoc jazz trio. “Kate was playing piano,” he says. “Like, ‘here’s a new song I’m working on.’”

  Later, he added his contributions to previously recorded backing tracks. On ‘King Of The Mountain’ he “came up with a wacky idea. I put on a beat like the Weather Report track, ‘Nubian Sundance’, this double tempo, free-syncopated, aggressive drumbeat. It’s not the easiest thing to play, and then I added a half-time Ringo style beat as a counter point. When Del mixed it I said it sounded like [US drummer and member of Presley’s TCB Band] Ron Tutt with Elvis, and she gave me a startled look: ‘Of course, that’s what the song is about! Elvis!’” Erskine hadn’t picked up on the lyrics nor Bush’s idiosyncratic Elvis impersonation. “I had no idea,” he laughs. “Her tune conveyed this subliminally to me! I’m sure at some point they realised that the drum part I put on was an absolute mess, but the nice thing was that they indulged the idea.”

  This working process was mirrored throughout the sessions. Musicians would be invited to improvise on a variety of tracks. If it worked, great; if not, no harm done. Someone else would get a shot. Steve Sanger, an old friend of McIntosh’s from his session days, came up from Dorset on several occasions to play drums, bells, shaker and percussion. He added a more conventional pattern to ‘King Of The Mountain’ and Bush also asked him to play along to the rhythm of birdsong on ‘Aerial’, the title track.

  The idea had slowly evolved to make Aerial a double album with two distinct sides, a little like Hounds Of Love but on a larger scale (in a premeditated gag, in interviews Bush would refer to it as ‘Great Danes Of Love’ or ‘Irish Wolfhounds Of Love’). The first side would be a collection of seven individual songs, while the second would be a connected, conceptual piece tracing the arc of an entire day through nine interlinked pieces of music, from the afternoon through sunset and night to the following dawn, all soundtracked by the trill of her favourite band: the birds. “It’s almost as if they’re vocalising light,” she said. “And I love the idea that it’s a language we don’t understand.”15 In Kaluli culture in Papua New Guinea, Bush may or may not have been aware, bird song is believed to be communication from the dead.

  “She explained that when this particular birdsong starts that’s when I start playing,” says Sanger. “I did it on an electronic kit, just playing the bass drum. That was a different day! Great food, great fun. It was me and Del the engineer and Kate, and Danny was popping in and out.”

  These sessions were punctuated with long periods where very little happened, but when she was working things often coalesced quite quickly, particularly towards the end of the project. Much of the musical decoration for ‘Bertie’, for example, came together in little more than an afternoon. Susanna Pell and Richard Campbell, head-hunted after a performance of St Matthew’s Passion at the Festival Hall, came to the studio to play gamba – a renaissance period viol, and distant cousin of the guitar – alongside classical guitarist Eligio Quinteira.

  “My memory was that she had laid down the basic track, I think the day before, which was her vocals and the dulcimer she was accompanying herself on,” says Campbell. “We were overdubbing onto that, playing from the notation that [arranger Bill Dunne] had provided. Eligio did his guitar overdub after we did the gamba track, so he stayed a little bit longer. It was reasonably close to chamber music. We were playing to what we heard through the cans, which gave it a kind of natural freedom.”

  ‘Bertie’ was a madrigal of devotion to her son, a song that vaulted the barrier between heartfelt and mawkish, though only a churl could fail to be touched by its artless candour and sheer heartbursting expression of love. Just when you thought Bush has exhausted her rapture, she found deeper reserves: “You bring me so much joy,” she sings, “And then you bring me – more joy!” It’s a shamelessly sentimental song, basking in the eternal sunshine of an idealised childhood, though its subject may not care to hear it sung back at him when he’s hitting his teenage years. The visiting musicians were able to get a first hand glimpse of the song’s inspiration. “Bertie himself bounced in at one stage, so we met the person who the song was about, which was nice,” says Campbell.

  She had preserved the atmosphere of familial informality that had permeated Wickham Farm, except now she was the mother figure. Accordionist Chris Hall had been recommended by Joe Boyd after Bush mentioned she wanted the sound of Cajun accordion on ‘How To Be Invisible’. In the end the instrument proved too rich for the song, almost overpowering it, and instead Hall played two-note accordion which – with the aid of advanced sonar equipment – can just about be heard on the final track. “I was there for a couple of hours,” he recalls. “Had a chat, drank some tea and ate pizza, met her family, played with the kid, did some recording and went away. Not [mystical] at all!”

  Everyone who worked on the album was struck by all the things people are usually struck by when they first work with her: her cheerful informality, her genuineness,
her distinct lack of ceremony. “I turned up, came in through the gates, parked the car, got the gamba out and walked into the studio,” says Campbell. “Up came this person who said, ‘I’m Kate, I’m making the tea,’ and I confess that I initially thought it was another Kate. And then I suddenly realised, that is Kate Bush.” They ended up trading lines on that perennial middle-class lament: the difficulty of getting a good builder.

  And then there was the endless stream of tea, without which no session could run smoothly. “She was always offering tea,” says Peter Erskine. “The running joke at the session was that Del or John [Giblin] would say, like a British actor’s voice in a movie, ‘Ah, you’re a fine woman, Kate.’ That was the motto, I remember.” Says Susanna Pell, “We arrived and went straight to the studio and within minutes this woman arrived and said, ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’ And that was her. She bumbled off and made a cup of tea. She was just incredibly nice. Very unassuming, she knew what she wanted and had a clear vision but in the nicest possible way. When it was all over she sent us a personal cheque with a very nice note attached, thanking us. It was just a very, very nice experience.”

  Although she sometimes wondered if it would ever be finished, over a period of three or four years Bush began to edge closer to the end of the album. Friends such as Lol Creme and Gary Brooker popped in to add vocals and keyboards, and in October 2003 she went to Abbey Road to record orchestral overdubs with Michael Kamen, who sadly died of a heart attack shortly afterwards, aged 55. “The last time I spoke to her was soon after Michael died and we spoke to each other because we were both very sad about it,” recalls Haydn Bendall. “She adored him and so did I.”

  Throughout this period, Tony Wadsworth kept in regular contact. After Bob Mercer and David Munns, it was clear Bush had found another ‘music man’, someone prepared to give her the time and space to create without making demands or waving the small print of the company contract in her face. There is a fine story about Bush one day telling Wadsworth that she was finally going to show him her latest creation, and then taking some cakes out of the oven and plonking them in front of him. It’s an apocryphal tale, sadly, but it is true that he travelled to see her a few times every year for several years, and not once did Bush play him so much as a note of music.

  “Even though it was never stated explicitly, it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to hear anything until it was finished,” he says. “It was simply starting a relationship of trust. That was the main product of those meetings over the years. I’d like to think that she eventually developed a trust, and I developed an understanding of what her concerns her and what was important to her when it came to dealing with a record label. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of, ‘OK, we’ve got an album that we have to put into this machine’ which is a corporate record label and can go many different ways, I think an artist likes to feel that there’s somebody pretty senior in the organisation that’s looking out for them at crucial times, because it can get impersonal. [But] I thought there might be a distinct possibility that I might get fired before anything came!”

  Rumours about the album and projected release dates, alternately woefully misinformed and optimistic, had been doing the rounds since 1997. In late 2004 Bush finally announced that recording had finished and the record would be ready for release sometime in 2005. If she had been worried, as she claimed, that people might have forgotten her, she needn’t have been: the news sent the papers, magazines and the internet into an overdrive of anticipation. Some time afterwards, Wadsworth and David Munns, Bush’s old champion who had recently returned to the company from Polygram, were summoned to the studio to hear the finished album. There was no one else present. She handed each of them a track-listing, set up the machines herself, said, ‘It’s a bit long,’ and then sat down behind them as they listened, like a spectre at the feast, no doubt ultra-sensitive to every twitch, cough and shuffle. It was the first time anyone outside of herself, Del and Danny had heard the complete record.

  “She was definitely nervous,” says Wadsworth. “We sat there and listened … and were stunned. I suppose the first time certain things really stood out for me: I don’t think I’d heard the human voice singing with birds before; I thought, ‘My God, still she is doing things that are incredibly original, and yet seemed absolutely right and natural.’ That was striking. Her voice is always striking, because it’s so powerful and emotional. You came out after listening to the two albums back to back and just thought this was an amazing piece of work.”

  They talked about how it should be released, with some debate about whether it should be a double album or two single albums staggered over a six- to 12-month period. In the end Bush thought it was fairer to her fans and better value to release it as a double, not to mention the fact that now the music was finally finished she wanted to get it all out. She was not a big fan of the miniaturised CD format. She preferred the glory days of vinyl, and wanted Aerial to be a meaningful, unified piece of work physically as well as musically. “There were more discussions about work in progress when it came to the artwork than there was about the music, interestingly,” says Wadsworth. “She would show me something and say, ‘What do you think about that? Do you think that works?’”

  Some aspects of the sleeve art were clearly autobiographical – photographs of Bertie and his drawings – and some deeply impenetrable but no less private: pictures of a large red-brick house and a garden, the washing flapping in the breeze; a reproduction of James Southall’s painting ‘Fishermen’; a simple portrait of a figure that resembled Bush as a young girl; several birds and a reproduction of a photograph featured on the cover of June 2000 edition of National Geographic, called ‘Indus bird-mask’. As with the music, there were codes within the artwork so personal they will never be cracked. “She did discuss what she wanted to put across,” says Wadsworth. “It was … pretty personal stuff, there were a few conversations about that.”

  The title and cover were also carefully conceived, a combination of visual puns – at first the image looked like some desolate rock formation, but was actually a soundwave of birdsong – and layered wordplay: Aerial suggests flight and height, but it’s also an antennae, a tool for sending and receiving. “And as I pointed out to her, it’s also a washing powder that Mrs Bartolozzi might want to use,” says Wadsworth. “That might be the key.”

  In August 2005, a November 7 release date was announced for Aerial, preceded by a single, ‘King Of The Mountain’, on October 24. There had been some talk between Bush and EMI of making ‘How To Be Invisible’ – a far more persuasive, characterful song with which to announce a return after 12 years – the first single, but in the end ‘King Of The Mountain’ “jumped out,” according to Wadsworth. I’m not sure how much jumping it does. The song was not one of the album’s highlights, with a curiously uncommitted vocal and a rather flat structure. It was nevertheless widely hailed as a welcome comeback, if not one of her most arresting songs, and reached number four in a singles market that was by now all but moribund.

  Reviews of the album when it arrived ranged from the ecstatic to the muted to the confused. Many were written after only one or two supervised listens, an almost impossible undertaking. Aerial is a dense, complex piece of work, split into two distinct discs: A Sea Of Honey and A Sky Of Honey. Far more than any interview, it provided eloquent answers to all those awkward questions that had arisen over the past decade. In many ways it completed the story that The Red Shoes started. We knew why she had to go away; now we had a fair idea of what she had been doing.

  Aerial pulled off the trick that lies at the heart of much of Bush’s finest music: that of being evocative of her day-to-day life and innermost feelings without being personally revealing. Singing of her physical environment, her son and her lover, there was a deep sense of joy, tinged with the loss that time brings. Mimicking the journey of the sun on the suite of songs on A Sky Of Honey, the feeling was of someone travelling through a period of darkness into sunlight. />
  The stand-outs were the two unadorned piano and vocal songs. ‘A Coral Room’ was a desperately moving track about lost cities, lost times, about all those lives and places that were once here but had now gone; it mourned the death of her mother in the most poetic way imaginable, using her little brown milk jug as the central image. Performed without a safety net – no strings, no backing vocals – it was impossible not to be transported back to Bush’s earliest songs, written in 44 Wickham Road at a time of relative innocence. There was even an explicit reminder of one, ‘Atlantis’, where she had sung of a blue city “covered in coral and coral,” adorning treasure chests and ancient scrolls from the Caribbean. But ‘A Coral Room’ showed how far she had come, both musically and emotionally. It was oblique and impressionistic but utterly true, and it cut far deeper than the more formal pitch of ‘Moments Of Pleasure’, which covered similar ground in much more awkward shoes. She had once again perfected the craft of saying without telling.

  Most reviews also latched upon the other stark piano ballad. ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ seemed to finally reconcile the interests of Bush the housewife and mother with Bush the impenetrable artist. A song combining earthy domesticity and magic realism, it depicted a woman falling into a reverie, both erotic and disturbing, while watching the clothes in the washing machine spinning around and around, the trousers and blouses intermingling among the soap and suds. She imagines herself in the sea with her lover, fish swimming between her legs, but there is also a taint in the song, the idea of the clothes, with their distinctive smells and stains, being the most tangible memory of a person who is no longer there. It is another dark song of the senses, and deeply, stubbornly unreadable, even if the final lines of “Slooshy sloshy, get that dirty shirty clean” veered perilously close to self-parody.