Graeme Thompson - Under the Ivy. The life and music of Kate Bush

Copyright 2010 Omnibus Press

This edition 2012 Omnibus Press

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EISBN: 978-0-85712-775-4

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For my father

I T starts with a question. Two questions. The absolute shock was this art-rock, pantomime, musical theatre, novelty or left-field genius of hearing and seeing Wuthering Heights, feeling the perceptible thud of its instant impact upon popular culture, was immediately followed by these simple queries, heard in offices and pubs, in schools, shops, cafes and building sites, spoken over breakfast tables, in front of televisions and from behind crackling newspapers: My God, who is she? And where did she come from?

Good, enduring demands. This book doesnt promise to supply all the answers so much as revel in the act of delving deeper inside them. The truly tantalising thing about Kate Bush is that the whole has always been somehow greater, more dazzling, more mysterious, than the sum of her many parts.

Who is she? Every time you look you get a different answer. She is the 19-year-old who fought EMI General Manager Bob Mercer tooth and nail in order to ensure that the stupendously strange Wuthering Heights would be her first single rather than his preferred choice the more orthodox James And The Cold Gun and won.

She is the astute million-selling rock star and reluctant sex symbol who knocked Madonna off the top of the album charts in 1985, who has successfully controlled every aspect of her career and who once called herself the shyest megalomaniac youre ever likely to meet,

She is the Celtic spirit-child who sings of witches and phantoms, who has been known to give her friends sealed jars containing essence of the day: some air, a few twigs, some grains of earth, a flower; and she is the relentlessly tenacious studio artist, playing the same piece of music over and over and over again as though lost in some Shamanistic ritual, cajoling, caressing, chipping away at the chrysalis of her art until the longed-for butterfly of emotional truth emerges. She would do lots and lots of takes and I could never understand why, says Max Middleton, who played organ on Never For Ever. Normally with other musicians wed do it again because it was too fast or slow or youre playing the wrong chord something very definite but she was looking for something nebulous that was hard to pinpoint. She wasnt doing it again out of sheer belligerence. She was looking for something [that no one else could see].

She is the unguarded young woman who once walked down a south London street and saw a lady waving at her from some distance away, through the window of a first floor building. Smiling and waving back as she continued down the street, Bush finally reached the house and realised that the woman was, in fact, cleaning her windows.

She is the visual icon, an inspiration for countless creative artists for more than three decades; and she is the reluctant pub singer, performing The Beatles Come Together and The Rolling Stones Honky Tonk Women in a Putney pub to a bunch of heroically inebriated Scottish football supporters who were, according to her old bandmate Brian Bath, playing catch the whisky bottle, throwing it at each other, climbing up the pylons. They were getting up on stage. Some guy was all over Kate.

She is the powerful multi-millionaire who flew the director of the King Of The Mountain video, Jimmy Murakami, by helicopter from London to her summer home in Devon for lunch and then promptly flew him back again afterwards.

She is the down-to-earth den mother, bustling around making cups of tea for her family, her musicians and producers, phoning out for curry and pizza when hunger strikes; the fearsomely loyal woman who has frequently helped out her friends financially and who is described by her former Abbey Road engineer Haydn Bendall echoing a sentiment shared by almost everyone interviewed for this book as very sensitive and aware and gentle and loving. Its an intoxicating mixture. Im ashamed that she isnt regarded more as a national treasure.

She is the artist so ruthlessly dedicated to her vision that she is prepared to exist within strictly defined physical parameters in order to explore fully the vastness of her interior landscape. She is both the semi-mythical recluse of tabloid lore who has lived on an island and in her head and the very model of sanity in a world where celebrities accumulate children from around the globe and subject them to the full glare of the media machine, delegating their management to a well-drilled team of nannies, minders, publicists, dieticians and private tutors, and for whom nothing in their life is deemed real or worthwhile until it is observed by millions of strangers and projected back at them.

She is all and none of these. And she is more. There are several parts of her we will never be permitted to see: the ferocious mother, the lover, the composer, cocooned in silence and solitude. Each fractured snapshot captures a portion of her, some more revealing than others, but none are defining. Piecing them together to form a single picture often feels like trying to complete a jigsaw when some of the pieces are missing, or simply dont fit.

* * *

Let Me In-A Your Window! Given the decades of rumour and steady retreat, its worth recalling the moment of arrival. Bush started her career in full flight, already airborne at 19, pitched headfirst into the kind of unforgiving spotlight that can leave much of the world beyond its glare dark, shadowed and forever changed. Rarely has any artist made such an immediate impact upon public consciousness. Within a month of releasing her first single in January 1978 Bush was as famous as she ever would be, her image plastered on buses, tube station billboards and TV shows, her songs one in particular, so precocious it practically dared you to ignore it all over the radio, her somewhat gauche pronouncements to the media printed in every variety of magazine and newspaper, her breasts a topic of national debate.

Her life, such is the way of instantaneous fame, was subjected to a brutal and entirely unexpected coup dtat. The ferocity of the success of Wuthering Heights took everyone by surprise. Buffeted off course, blown into the wider pop slipstream, Bush didnt really locate her artistic true north until the early Eighties, while those observers who attempted to define her through the rather limited critical vocabulary of the pop lexicon were usually stumped, opting for either fawning hagiography, open hostility, or a kind of benign patronisation.