Tom Doyle - Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush

NEB 012

First published in the UK in 2022 by Nine Eight Books

An imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7887-0779-4

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7887-0839-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-7887-0780-0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Publishing director: Pete Selby

Senior editor: Melissa Bond

Cover design by Lora Findlay

Cover image Lichfield Archive via Getty Images

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Text copyright Tom Doyle, 2022

The right of Tom Doyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright-holders of material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher would be glad to hear from them.

Nine Eight Books is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

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For Karen and Eddy

CONTENTS

I never wanted to be famous. My desire wasnt to be famous. It was to make a record. Thats very different from wanting to be famous.

Kate Bush

Moving Back into the Light

Facing fame, 2005

The car arrived just before 10.30 a.m. on a bright, early autumn morning to pick me up from my home in north London. It was 22 September 2005, a Thursday, and I was heading to an unknown destination. All I knew was that I was being driven to Kate Bushs house, somewhere in Berkshire.

Bush had been missing from public view, pretty much, for the past twelve years. But shed finally agreed to break her silence with an extensive, exclusive cover story for MOJO magazine and Id been asked to do the interview. It was an equally exciting and unnerving proposition.

In the days and weeks leading up to this point, the anticipation had been ramping up. At the west London home-cum-office of Bushs then-manager Geoff Jukes, Id heard her first album in a dozen years the multi-layered and immediately brilliant twin disc Aerial three times already. Listening intently as it blasted out from Jukess posh audiophile hi-fi, Id scrawled copious notes. After the relative disappointment of its patchy predecessor, 1993s The Red Shoes, it was clear that Bushs creativity was back in sharp focus.

Still, the people at EMI Records (her record label since 1976) were all a bit nervous, as I would soon discover they always were when tiptoeing around their most elusive artist. The increasing pressure of the pre-interview build-up had started to get to me. I tried to remind myself that it was, after all, just two people meeting up in a room to have a chat.

Bushs last encounter with the press, four years earlier in 2001, had been a polite, if evasive natter in a Harrods caf with Q magazine, ahead of her attending the mags annual awards ceremony in the Park Lane Hotel to pick up the Classic Songwriter trophy. Prior to that, eight years before, shed put herself out there far more press-wise to promote The Red Shoes, appearing on various magazine covers. She had however suffered a particularly gnarly, borderline nasty encounter with the Sunday Times where the interviewer clearly hadnt liked her, and the singer had been forced to push back against uncomfortable prying into her personal life. It was said that she hated being interviewed.

As such, in recent years, shed acquired the reputation of a media-shy, almost Greta Garbo-like figure whod retreated from the real world, while at the same time attaining the reverential respect of a creatively controlling auteur in the mould of Stanley Kubrick. Out there in the world, her saintly patient fans gratefully absorbed every molecule of drip-fed information. Out there was a world of whispered rumours adding to an already towering myth.

The news that Kate Bush was due to return with a new album had prompted umpteen frothing headlines in the papers:

Kate Bush Still Alive

Shes Here Again!

Return of the Recluse

Dithering Heights

Wow! Bush Is Back!

At a time when record industry profits were being hammered by free MP3 file-sharing services such as Napster and LimeWire, EMI were quite obviously getting worked up about the return of Kate Bush, and perhaps more importantly, the buying power of her devoted fanbase. There is a lot of optimism in the business compared to previous years, a spokesman for the label commented. We have our Kate Bush album, so its shaping up to be a really strong quarter for us.

Ahead of the interview, a plan had been hatched for us to meet at Abbey Road Studios. The day before, Bush suddenly changed her mind and decided to move the location to her home. She wasnt about to give me the address, though, hence this air of mystery. As the car sped down the M4 in the direction of Reading, it became clear that the driver regularly ferried Bush around.

Oh, it must have been you she was talking about the other day, he let slip to me. She was in the back, on the phone, saying, Maybe we should just put a bag over his head.

It didnt feel like Id been taken hostage, but it was, of course, brilliantly intriguing. An hour-and-a-half after wed set off, the car pulled up outside a set of gates, and the driver reached out through his open window and pressed an intercom button.

This is how twelve years disappear if youre Kate Bush.

It is 1993, and she has just released The Red Shoes, her seventh album in a fifteen-year career characterised by increasingly ambitious records, ever-lengthening recording schedules and compulsive attention to microscopic musical detail. Emotionally drained after the death of her mother Hannah the previous year, and against the advice of some of her friends, she then threw herself into writing and directing The Line, the Cross and the Curve, a film-cum-extended music video, which despite its merits Bush considered in retrospect to be a load of old bollocks.

After taking two years off to recharge her batteries, in 1996, she completed a song in which she imagined Elvis Presley to still be alive somewhere and named it King of the Mountain. Another two years on, while pregnant, she teased out another song, about the unpredictable nature of artistic endeavour, called An Architects Dream. Following the birth of her son, Albert (or Bertie), in 1998, she and her guitarist partner Danny McIntosh found themselves completely shattered for a couple of years. She moved house. She converted the garage into a studio. But, being a full-time mother who chose not to employ a nanny or housekeeper, it was hard to find time to actually work there.