Bush Kate - Under the Ivy The Life and Music of Kate Bush

Text Graeme Thomson
Copyright 2015 Omnibus Press
This edition 2017 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

Cover designed by Fresh Lemon
Picture research Jacqui Black & Ruth Keating

EISBN: 978.1.78323.392.2

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For my father

The American had arrived direct from Bali, landing in London the previous day with nowhere to stay. He had watched the sun rise over the Thames at four oclock that morning, and had no idea where he would sleep tonight. His worldly possessions were in storage, his life was in flux, his face was etched with exhaustion, yet he had made it to Hammersmith and the Eventim Apollo to see Kate Bush return to the stage, after an absence of 35 years, to perform Before The Dawn.

Before and during the show I kept an eye on this man. He was sitting three or four seats along from me in Row K, almost within touching distance of the stage. He shook hands with some strangers around him, embraced others. He cried, he sang along, he punched the air, he slumped exhausted in his seat. At one point he disappeared entirely. He said later he had been compelled to dance, although Im not sure where he found the room or permission to do such a thing.

At almost any other seated concert in a theatre venue his antics would have attracted disapproving attention, and perhaps some concern for either his sobriety or well-being. On this night, such extreme and eccentric levels of commitment were the norm. So, to a greater extent, was the journey he had undertaken to be here. On this night and 21 others the Apollo was filled not just with Londoners, or Brits, but with Americans, Canadians, Swedes, Dutch, Germans, Italians, Australians and representatives of scores of other nationalities, all of whom had made the long trip some more than once to witness what had become the most eagerly anticipated and widely reported music story of the new millennium. People wept. Strangers hugged and hi-fived. Some wide-eyed, nervous, child-like energy seemed to have taken hold of the theatre. It was easily the most emotionally charged, keyed-up, expectant and downright odd atmosphere of any concert I have ever experienced. And all this before Kate Bush even stepped onstage.

When the first edition of this book was published in April 2010, the kind of drama that unfolded in west London over 22 summer and autumn nights in 2014 belonged firmly in the realms of fantasy. I know I wasnt alone in finding it all but inconceivable that Kate Bush would ever perform in concert again. Not only had she not done so since 1979, she had released only one album albeit a double in a little under two decades. For all that the persistent tittle-tattle about her being a recluse was reductive, lazy and wrong-headed, it was still the case that she made official public appearances only slightly less frequently than Haleys Comet. When Aerial arrived in 2005 her fans hoped that further records would emerge at some indefinite future point, but to imagine her shrugging off her happily domesticated private existence to embrace all the awkward intrusions that singing in front of a gawping audience would necessitate seemed utterly fanciful.

Quite quickly after this book appeared, however not for a second to suggest a case of cause and effect Bushs work rate began to pick up pace. In 2011 came Directors Cut, and then 50 Words For Snow. If she could release two albums in the space of a single calendar year, all bets were off. She recorded a new version of Running Up That Hill for the London Olympics in 2012. She publicly collected a Sky Arts award. By the time she received her CBE from the Queen in the spring of 2013, behind the scenes the prospect of doing some shows was already gathering momentum. Fast forward to March 2014, and fans from all over the world were spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds on tickets, flights, accommodation. The seemingly impossible had become reality.

Whether Before The Dawn will be remembered as an unforgettable one-off or the start of an-going engagement between Bush and her music in a live environment, her return to the stage throws new light on much of what has come before, as well as changing the expectations of what may yet be to come. With that in mind, the existing text of Under The Ivy has been revised and rewritten where appropriate, and the narrative of Bushs career happily and seemingly robustly moving forward has been brought up to date.

Graeme Thomson, Edinburgh, November 2014

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