* A similar theme runs through some of the songs on Prefab Sprout’s 1990 album, Jordan: The Comeback.
* She later turned down a Brits Lifetime Achievement award, in 2006, partly because she wouldn’t perform live at the televised event.
* This is not quite true: Paton was born on October 29, Palmer on November 3.
Epilogue
Under The Ivy
IN recent years the notion of Bush as a genius has rarely been disputed or indeed tested. It is regarded as something close to an accepted fact, but although she is cited almost daily as an influence by any number of artists, it is the Bush of The Dreaming and specifically Hounds Of Love who is mentioned most often. Most people who care about such matters agree that she is a wonderful, pioneering, utterly unique artist, but not all of them will have an intimate working knowledge of her last album. As an icon, as an idea, Bush is in that rare and strange position where what she represents now overshadows the actual music. Her life is in her work, but her work exists beyond her, is greater than her.
In 2006, viewers of BBC Two’s Culture Show voted her seventh in a poll to find the top ten British living icons. Her influence certainly reaches far beyond music, from fashion (designer Greg Myler used her shifting styles as the bedrock of his 2005 Milan fashion show), to numerous visual artists, writers and film-makers. In musical terms, through each of her frequent absences her reach seems to grow and grow, across genres. Countless dance acts have sampled or covered her songs, among them Utah Saints, E-Clypse and Blue Pearl, and she has also penetrated urban music. Apart from Prince, Tupac Shakur was a fan, US nu-soul singer Maxwell did unspeakable things to ‘This Woman’s Work’, while OutKast’s Big Boi is a raving devotee (“She was so bugged out man! My uncle would explain what the songs stood for, like ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ and all that shit”1) who has consistently haggled for a collaboration that has, sadly, yet to emerge. Guitar bands seem equally in her thrall. Among many others, Futureheads had a Top 10 hit in 2005 with ‘Hounds Of Love’, Placebo covered ‘Running Up That Hill’, and the Decemberists have played ‘Wuthering Heights’ in concert many times.
Since the emergence of Toyah Wilcox, and later Tori Amos, it has been de rigueur for virtually every young female artist to either cover Bush’s songs, cite her as a heroine or be compared to her. Fiona Apple, Bat For Lashes, Lily Allen, Kathryn Williams, Lady Gaga, Florence & The Machine, MPHO, Charlotte Church, Joanna Newsom, La Roux – the current list rolls on and on; Little Boots recently posted a stripped down version of ‘Running Up That Hill’ on YouTube. Some are fine artists, but the similarities often amount to little more than a smattering of external eccentricities and what is usually defined, rather vaguely, as ‘kookiness’. She is regarded as the grande dame of arty outsiders the world over, yet the people she is often said to have most in common with sound nothing like her. But then who does? Before Kate Bush, there was no Kate Bush. She is sui generis. There are only a few comparisons that make sense, and they are all about a certain shared sensibility rather than a look or sound. Never mind Bjork, I’d throw in Roald Dahl, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Philip Pullman and, latterly, Mark Hollis: inimitable individualists who paint vivid pictures and work in the realm of dark imagination, sly humour and deep emotion; who inhabit lands that belong to neither the adult or the child; or rather, belong to both.
David Bowie may well be the closest point of musical comparison. Crucially, like Bush, he has always been unafraid to make himself seem ridiculous for a good cause.* But although Bowie is ultimately a more comfortable and accomplished pop star than Bush – with thicker skin, better at finding the art in the artifice and quicker on the draw – he never quite defeated his acute self-awareness; with Bowie there is always a pose, always a façade. His music is a beautiful fabrication.
Bush takes us somewhere else, somewhere deeper. She theatrically embodies and exaggerates numerous personality traits, but only in order to get to the heart of what makes us all tick. Despite the dressing up and dancing, there is no trace of affectation in her music. It’s a very inquisitive, giving, quixotic thing which in the end has nothing to do with the teachings of Gurdjieff, or Sufi mysticism, or Peter Pan, or Lindsay Kemp, or the films of Michael Powell, or Jay’s poems. There is no need to join every dot, or explain every reference. That is a game for those who can’t trust their own responses without first looking for an intellectual hook on which to hang it. Kate Bush is all about emotion: the things she uses to get to those emotions aren’t necessarily important. You either hear it and feel it – and trust what you’re hearing and feeling – or you don’t.
She is not a pop star. She just happened to make what we broadly describe as pop music the vehicle for her creativity. Who is she? “A writer, I suppose.” “That’s what I started doing when I was a little girl,” she said. “That’s what turned me on, that’s the buzz: writing a story.”3 At her best she is our greatest poet of the senses and the psyche. “With a mind that renders everything sensitive,” she once sang. “What chance do I have here?” She brings to life, through her music, every twitch, every neuroses, every love, every tingle, every ache, every muscle, every unseen demon, every remembered angel, every recalled taste and smell. At her worst, of course, she can be painfully sincere, naïve, twee, shrill and rather clumsy, but it’s usually a price worth paying. Over eight albums she had tried to resensualise the human experience, to break down the barriers between the heart and the mind, the body and the spirit, the living and the dead, the sea and the sky. The thought often occurs that she gives her fans very little back in return for their endless patience, yet they remain incredibly loyal because on some level they recognise the depth of her music, how much goes into it and how much she reveals of herself.
It’s a generous gift from such an otherwise determinedly concealed individual. As David Bowie once noted, “It’s not great for a writer to find [themselves as] the centre of attention.”4 Her intensely private nature is not a fiction, but it has perhaps been misinterpreted. There are many stars who appear more regularly in public than Bush who live considerably more reclusive, fearful lives, and the idea of her eking out a remote, witchy existence is a nonsense. Away from the spotlight she genuinely seems to enjoy the kind of true stability with her partner and her son that doesn’t require outside validation. She does normal things. She stays in touch, via phone and email, she is very responsive and generally available to those whom she trusts, by all accounts a loyal and often very generous friend.
She could be forgiven at looking out at the Jordans, the Brangelinas, the Mariah Careys and Madonnas and shouting, ‘It’s not me that’s mad!’ In one sense she is clearly the victim of our distorted view of how celebrities should behave; her quiet normality has been turned into something odd and grotesque, primarily due to a popular press that is unable and unwilling to cope with a woman who has consistently refused to play the PR game and so as a result ridicules, exaggerates and demeans her eccentricities. Though she may deny it, it’s hard not to conclude, weighing up the lengthy silences and increasingly fleeting public appearances, that at some level Bush has been wounded by the experience. Has she been cursed with fame? “I’ve thought about that a lot, because I was so proud of signing her and not letting her go into the studio, and so I was obviously somewhat conscious of that,” says Bob Mercer. “But to be honest, no. I think Kate is Kate, and fame didn’t crack her at all – the demands, yes, but that’s because of the way she is. But Kate has had the career that she would have liked to have had.”
As a woman who has always fought to control every aspect of her art, it would be foolish to expect her to then cede control of her life. Fame can arrive so fast sometimes that reality never succeeds in catching up; she hasn’t allowed this to happen to her. Not only has she refused to permit the wide world access to her internal life, but she has also refused to construct an alternative version to sell publicly as part of fame’s Faustian pact. The decision has served her well, though many times it has made
her seem prickly, defensive, controlling, humourless and paranoid, with an overdeveloped sense of persecution. When she appeared at the Q awards in 2001, emerging from a public absence of several years, she was booed by the waiting paparazzi outside the Park Lane Hotel because she didn’t linger to pose for shots. She was upset, interpreting it as representing some kind of deep, lingering hostility on the part of the public dating back to 1993, rather than a few disgruntled snappers venting pantomime spleen at her refusal to humour them for a moment or two. When she was featured on the BBC’s Queens Of British Pop series, broadcast in April 2009, she was the only living artist involved not to consent to a new interview. The participation of those close to her – Del, Jay – was only granted after Bush was allowed complete control over the contents of the broadcast. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what exactly it is she’s afraid of.
There are inherent contradictions: she likes people yet craves solitude; she is proud of her work and wants people to hear it, yet hates selling it; her music is both candid confession and armour-plated shield. These tensions have made her life difficult. In particular, the artist who has relished playing around with binary opposites in her work – the synthetic and the earthy, the childishly innocent and the overtly erotic, the male and the female – has struggled to resolve the core clashes in her life, those between privacy and fame and reality and image. The result, from those looking in from the outside, is a central confusion about who she really is. “There is a figure that is adored,” she says. “But I’d question very strongly that it’s me.”5
It’s very clear now that Aerial was not a ‘comeback’. She had not been ‘away’ and was not now returning from some form of exile – instead, she did what she always said she would do: she popped up briefly to announce that her new album was coming out, and quickly disappeared again into her private existence. She is never coming ‘back’ in any meaningful sense, because it is fame, rather than her innate sense of privacy, that has been the great anomaly of her life.
She survived the post-‘Wuthering Heights’ period of invasion, intrusion and immense self-consciousness, but it’s little wonder that she has spent the ensuing 30 years and more steadily backing away from that utterly unexpected entrance, gradually carving out more and more elbow room. Her career has been an incremental process of withdrawal from that first hot blast of exposure, shedding along the way producers, bands, musicians, studios, press, the expectation of live performance, even her own image. In a sense she has become an artist without a face, or at least an artist with a face that is almost 20 years out of date.
She has jettisoned all the unwanted accoutrements of a ‘pop’ career in order to maintain a connection – primarily mentally rather than physically, although she did build two studios in the barn at East Wickham Farm and record three albums there – with the emotional landscape in which she started: being left alone in a safe, secluded space, free to explore and expand the borders of her imagination, the clock on the wall ticking to her own sleepy, stretched sense of time, the ones she loves around her, always there but not always right there.
Her pursuit of this very authorly isolation, doggedly carved out from instant pop stardom and its attendant objectification and ceaseless questions; the constant demands to tour; to be here, there, anywhere and to produce more, more, more, is perhaps her greatest achievement. She simply couldn’t do what she does without protecting it fiercely. “The more I got into presenting things to the world, the further it was taking me away from what I was, which was someone who just used to sit quietly at a piano and sing and play,” she said.6
It has never been about fame or fortune. Everything has been concerned with keeping alive the initial, terribly fragile surge of wonder and possibility she first glimpsed as a young girl. In the end she has almost come full circle: making beautiful, out-of-time music at her own speed, playing and singing in an old building in the garden surrounded by trees and grass and water; still searching for clues under the ivy. “It comes from a quiet place,” she said of her music.7 Perhaps that’s all we really need to know.
* When Bush was introduced to the Queen at an industry reception at Buckingham Palace in 2005, she produced a piece of paper from her handbag and asked for an autograph for Bertie: “I made a complete arsehole of myself!”2
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone who agreed to answer my questions for this book. They include:
Christine Ashley, Stewart Avon Arnold, Ian Bairnson, Brian Bath, Haydn Bendall, Steve Blacknell, Joe Boyd, Nina Brown, Richard Burgess, Richard Campbell, Ian Cooper, Adam Darius, Geoff Emerick, Peter Erskine, Martyn Ford, David Garfath, Chris Hall, Paul Hardiman, Paul Henry, John Henshall, David Jackson, Vic King, Robin Kovac-Mueller, Daniel Lanois, Nick Launay, Steve Lillywhite, Colin Lloyd-Tucker, Bruce Lynch, Peter Lyster-Todd, Gered Mankowitz, Pat Martin, Oonagh McCormack, Bob Mercer, Max Middleton, Charlie Morgan, Shealla Mubi, Jimmy Murakami, Borimira Nedeva, Concepta Nolan-Long, Randy Olson, Hugh Padgham, David Paton, Susanna Pell, Morris Pert, Andrew Powell, Nick Price, Steve Sanger, Alan Skidmore, Brian Southall, Jeremy Thomas, Sean Twomey, Tony Visconti, Tony Wadsworth, John Walters, Jane Wilkinson, Janet Willmot, Brian Wiseman and Youth.
Thanks also …
To all those who helped facilitate the interviews, and to Jon Kelly for talking in such depth about his work with Kate Bush for another of my projects, an interview which was of much use here.
To Peter Fitzgerald-Morris at Homeground magazine, and Sean Twomey of the Kate Bush News & Information Service for their assistance and advice.
To my editor, Chris Charlesworth, for his patience, enthusiasm and insightful comments; thanks also to Gordon, for reading and responding to early parts of the book, and to my agent Stan for all his help. Particular thanks to Johnny Rogan for his admirable attention to detail.
And finally, a huge thank you to all my family – primarily my wife, Jen, and our three children, for their love, patience and understanding.
Notes & Sources
All the quotations in the book are derived from interviews conducted by the author unless indicated otherwise in the text or marked with a reference number corresponding to the sources listed below. All footnotes are denoted by an asterisk and are listed at the bottom of the relevant page.
INTRODUCTION:
1. Q, November 1989
2. Personal Call, BBC Radio One, 1979
3. Bob Mercer, interview with author
4. Q, December 1993
5. Hi-Fi & Record Review, December 1985
CHAPTER ONE:
1. Cathy, John Carder Bush, 1986
2. Personal Call, BBC Radio One, 1979
3. Evening Standard, September 5, 1980
4. Sounds, August 30, 1980
5. Max Middleton/Brian Southall, interviews with author
6. Unedited interview with MTV, November 1985
7. Musician, Autumn 1985
8. ibid
9. ibid
10. ibid
11. Sunday Telegraph, July 6, 1980
12. http://gaffa.org/dreaming/ied_3.html
13. Introduction to Cathy, John Carder Bush, 1986
14. http://gaffa.org/cloud/subjects/john_carter_bush.html
15. Profiles In Rock, CITY-TV, December 1980
16. ibid
17. Sunday Telegraph, July 6 1980
CHAPTER TWO:
1. Friday Night, Saturday Morning With Desmond Morris, BBC 2, November 21, 1981
2. Kate Bush: A Visual Documentary, Kevin Cann and Sean Mayes, Omnibus Press, 1988
3. Interview Picture Disc, 1985
4. Electronics & Music Maker, 1982
5. My Beliefs, October 1978, http://gaffa.org/reaching/i78_mb.html
6. Melody Maker, March 1978
7. Flexipop, September 1982
8. Connie Nolan-Long, interview with author
9. Cathy, John Carder Bush, 1986
10. Flexipop, September 1982
11. My Beliefs, October 1978, htt
p://gaffa.org/reaching/i78_mb.html
12. Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio Four, February 21, 1979
13. Musician, Autumn 1985
14. Interview with Tony Myatt, Kate Bush fan convention, November 1985
15. Musician, Autumn 1985
16. Kate Bush: The Whole Story, Kerry Juby, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988
17. Sounds, March 11, 1978
18. Kate Bush: The Whole Story, Kerry Juby, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988
19. Trouser Press, July 1978
20. New Statesman, February 7, 2005
21. You magazine, October 22, 1989
22. Trouser Press, July 1978
23. Personal Call, BBC Radio One, 1979
24. Pop On The Line, BBC World Service, November 22 1998
25. Sound International, September 1980
26. Sounds, August 30, 1980
27. Kate Bush: The Whole Story, Kerry Juby, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988
28. Sounds, August 1980
29. The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, BBC 1, January 20, 1979
30. Personal Call, BBC Radio One, 1979
31. Record Mirror, October 7, 1978
32. Flexipop, September 1982
33. ibid
34. Q, November 1989
35. Sunday Mirror, Inside The Private World Of Kate Bush
36. Interview Picture Disc, 1985
37. Superpop, February 10, 1979
38. Nationwide, BBC One, April 4, 1979
39. Flexipop, September 1982
40. ibid
CHAPTER THREE:
1. What Kate Did Next, http://gaffa.org/reaching/i85_what.html, 1985
Under the Ivy Page 41