KATE & PETER - 'Don't Give Up'

Last week the London Evening Standard announced the results of their list of 1,000 Most Influential Londoners as chosen by ‘a panel of editors, critics and journalists from the newspaper’, which more or less means that they could stick who they wanted on the list which in turn means they could choose those with whom they wished to curry favour.

         Remarkably, Kate Bush was at number 16, three places above Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Quite why the Standard’s panel decided that Bush has more influence in London than the city’s top cop is a matter of conjecture but it seems unlikely that London mayor Boris ‘Haystack’ Johnson will consult Kate ahead of Sir Bernard before deciding on which demonstration to debut his second-hand German water cannons.

         Also, Kate Bush wasn’t born in London (Bexleyheath was in Kent in 1958 when she was born, it didn’t become part of the GLC until 1965), hasn't lived in London for donkey's years and then only down in the south east suburbs, and I’d bet good money that the recent series of concerts at Hammersmith represents the longest time she has ever spent – or will ever spend – in what most folk regard as London.

         But right now Kate Bush can do no wrong. She can walk on water. Maybe the Standard thought that by including Kate at number 16 she would grant them an interview. Fat chance, methinks. Kate doesn’t do interviews but she does sing beautifully, and one of my favourite performances of hers is not from her own catalogue but the duet she did with Peter Gabriel on ‘Don’t Give Up’, from Gabriel’s So album from 1986. The album was recorded during the summer of the previous year at Gabriel’s home, Ashcombe House in Somerset, where he kept his own studio. It was, according to Gabriel biographer Daryl Easlea, partly inspired by the startlingly evocative Dorothea Lange pictures of poor Americans during the Great Depression, three of which hang along the upstairs corridor of our house.

         ‘Don’t Give Up’ is the focus of this extract from Daryl’s book Without Frontiers: The Life & Music of Peter Gabriel.

Written as a duet, Gabriel initially envisioned Dolly Parton, one of the greatest American bluegrass vocalists of her generation, to sing with him on ‘Don’t Give Up’ but that fell through. Instead he turned to his great friend, Kate Bush, who was then enjoying huge commercial success in the wake of her 1985 album, Hounds Of Love, to add the impassioned female vocal part. Bush’s album can be seen in some ways as a sister album of So. Both he and Bush had released difficult, complex albums in 1982 that had not chimed as resonantly with the public as earlier records had done. With Hounds Of Love, like So, Bush had kept all of her inherent strangeness, yet sweetened it with some of the most commercially accessible singles of her career. Like an actor playing a part, she delivered her lines with conviction and sincerity. Over the gentle swell of Richard Tee’s gospel influenced piano part, the song was a masterpiece of understatement that was in step with the straightened times lurking beneath the shiny veneer of the eighties.

‘Don’t Give Up’ is arguably Gabriel’s most powerful statement. By the mid-eighties, the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government was shredding society with its defiant selfishness, handing down edicts to an unemployment-ridden populace with a superior and self-satisfied approach. In response to the inner-city rioting that had bedeviled the country in 1981, Thatcher’s Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit infamously used an analogy about his father being out of work in the thirties, and instead of rioting, he got on his bike and looked for work. This became interpreted popularly as telling the unemployed to ‘get on their bike’ to get a job. The way that Gabriel picks up the tale of a dispirited man at the end of his tether looking for work touched a raw nerve with millions of listeners in the UK, and latterly, the world.

Channelling the emotion of his set-piece numbers such as ‘Wallflower’, he presents this simple, personal tale, which made a remarkable connection. Designed as a conversation between a man and a woman, it seeks to emphasise the power of a bond between a couple that can defeat all obstacles. With two attempts at her vocal, Bush added the requisite warmth and vulnerability to the song. It became, as Bush biographer Graeme Thomson notes, for many people in the US their “first point of reference” for her.

The song, with Gabriel’s despair in the verses and Bush’s words of hope in the chorus, has gone on to be arguably Gabriel’s most loved composition. Cover versions have been recorded by Bono and Alicia Keys, P!nk and John Legend, Willie Nelson and Sinead O’Connor and Maire Brennan and Michael McDonald. Pop sensation Lady Gaga covered it with Canadian rockers, Midway State so “that young people would hear and learn something about Kate Bush”.

Gabriel has stated that a well-known rock star and a comedian both said that the song had stopped them from committing suicide. “You don’t know how some of the songs are going to hit people... you realise that it’s like a tool box full of emotional tools when you put out music and you put some real feeling into it. I’m a bit more conscious of that... I thought of what I was trying to do.”

DJ and author Mark Radcliffe writes with genuine affection is his book Reelin’ In The Years when he says, “It is beautiful and not without hope. The song is a duet between the battered jobseeker and his loving, protective, faithful, embattled wife. In essence, as the title suggests, she says that things might look grim but whatever happens, they’ll be together.” 

KATE BUSH - Why We Love Her, Book Extract

In case you hadn’t noticed tomorrow night Kate Bush appears on stage for the first time since 1979 in a series of London concerts that are perhaps the most widely anticipated in the history of popular music. In these closing passages from his superb biography Under The Ivy, Graeme Thomson explains the reasons for her enduring role as a key icon of British culture.

In recent years the notion of Kate Bush as a genius has rarely been disputed. In 2006, viewers of BBC 2’s Culture Show voted her seventh in a poll to find the top ten living British icons. 50 Words For Snow certainly proved that she has no need to rest on former glories, but it’s also true that 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.

Her influence certainly reaches far beyond the parameters of pop music, encompassing fashion (designer Greg Myler used her shifting styles as the bedrock of his 2005 Milan fashion show), numerous visual artists, comedians, film-makers and writers; David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, recently wrote passionately about his fandom. In her own specific field, through each of her absences her reach simply seems to grow and grow, across generations and 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. Aside 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 who has consistently haggled for a collaboration which 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 list rolls on and on; in 2010 Little Boots posted a stripped down version of ‘Running Up That Hill’ on YouTube. Some are fine artists, but the similarities with Bush often amount to little more than a smattering of external eccentricities and what is usually defined, rather vaguely and perhaps chauvinistically, as ‘kookiness’. Although Bush has made no attempt to engage with – or apparently even listen to – these acts, she is still regarded as the grande dame of arty outsiders the world over. Yet the people she is often said to have most in common with rarely sound anything 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 a sound. Never mind Bjork. How about Roald Dahl, Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Philip Pullman, Mark Hollis and perhaps Scott Walker: 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 most useful 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, a fact which may only now be becoming truly clear. She just happened for a long time 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.” 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 every twitch, every neuroses, every love, every tingle, every ache, every muscle, every unseen demon, every remembered angel, every recalled taste and smell through her music. At her worst, of course, she can be painfully sincere, naïve, twee, shrill, ridiculous and rather clumsy, but it has proved a price worth paying. Over 10 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, winter and summer. 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 Bowie once noted, “It’s not great for a writer to find [themselves as] the centre of attention.” 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 which now finally seems to be accepted as such. 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 socialises, stays in touch, via phone and email, she is very responsive and generally available to those who 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, Madonnas and Lady Ga Gas and shouting, ‘It’s not me that’s mad’. In one sense she has clearly been the victim of our distorted view of how celebrities should behave; her quiet normality has been turned into something 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 which as a result ridicules, exaggerates and demeans her eccentricities.

But her although she is at pains to emphasise how ordinary her everyday life is, it’s hard not to conclude – weighing up the lengthy silences and her now seemingly habitual refusal to support her music publicly as a living, breathing, walking, talking human being – 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 [former EMI CEO] 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, frightened 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 Palmer, 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 at times 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 for much of her career 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, has been 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.”

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.

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 to work in a safe, secluded space, free to explore and expand the borders of her imagination, the clock on the wall ticking to her own 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 continue to 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. With 50 Words For Snow, her music has returned to somewhere very close to that place.

Her career 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. Against fearsome odds, she has succeeded. She has almost come full circle: making beautiful, out-of-time music at her own speed, playing and singing in an old English building, surrounded by trees and grass and water. Still searching for clues under the ivy and under the snow. “It comes from a quiet place,” she said of her music. And the world is so loud. Perhaps that’s all we really need to know.

Here is a link to Graeme's piece about Kate Bush that appeared in Saturday's Guardian - http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/22/kate-bush-profile-before-the-dawn-concerts-london

KATE BUSH DOES PUB GIGS SHOCK

Unlikely as it might seem for a singer who last toured over 30 years ago and whose live appearances since can be counted on the fingers of one hand, Kate Bush was once a pub-rocker, as this extract from Graeme Thomson’s Bush biography Under The Ivy explains.

One of the most delicious anomalies of Kate Bush’s entire career is the short period of time she spent singing live in the pubs and clubs around London. The KT Bush Band in their initial incarnation existed as a gigging entity for only a matter of months, between April and June, 1977, and apart from Bush comprised Vic King on drums, Del Palmer on bass and Brian Bath on guitar, three old friends from Charlton Secondary School who bonded back in the late Sixties over an almost irrationally obsessive love of Free. Even today, they excitedly recall the night they witnessed the first ever performance of ‘All Right Now’.

         Between four and five years older than Bush, by 1976 the trio were already veterans of the south London music scene and had played in numerous groups – both with and without one another – and experienced the industry’s standard doling out of brief highs and crushing lows.

         Although Bush’s time with the KT Bush Band proved to be her sole experience of the dubious, stale-sweat-and-watered-down-beer romance of small scale live performance, and although it was an essentially contrived exercise in which, considering she had already signed a record deal, very little was actually at stake, nonetheless a line can be drawn between what she was doing in 1977 in places like the Rose Of Lee in Lewisham and what she did almost exactly two years later to wild acclaim in the theatres of Europe.

         Vic King recalls that after a performance at Whitechapel, Bush came up to the band, said that she enjoyed their set, and asked whether she could sing with them. Bath remembers the approach somewhat differently. “Paddy [Bush, Kate’s brother] left a note at my house with my mum, saying ‘Get in touch, something has come up’,” he says. “I phoned him up and he said, ‘I’ve got to see you, it’s about my sister. She wants to form a band because she needs the experience of playing live. Could you do it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think so!’”

         One of Bath’s previous bands, Shiner, had recently split up and he decided to enlist Del and Vic and stick with a similar set: Motown, Beatles, some rockier material from the likes of Free and The Rolling Stones; songs that everybody knew and which made few demands on the audience. The first band practice was in a boiler house in the local swimming baths at Greenwich, in “a little dungeon of a rehearsal room they used to hire out,” says King. Bush arrived fully prepared, having learned the lyrics to ten songs, including ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ and ‘Sweet Soul Music’. They all enjoyed themselves but agreed that a boiler room in the public baths wasn’t necessarily conducive to locating the creative spark, so Bush suggested they relocate to the barn at the bottom of the garden at the [Bush family] farm. “We went up there, moved all the furniture out, swept the floors, cleaned it up and played all afternoon,” says King. Once again, the old grain store became her creative playground.

         Through the late winter of 1976-77 and into spring the group rehearsed regularly at Wickham Farm, drumming up a 20-song set. Working on their music, fortified by Hannah Bush’s legendary hospitality, breaking off for games of football and as much tea and cake as they could reasonably consume, they got to know one another.

         The 18-year-old Bush made an immediate impression on her new bandmates. “She stood out from other girls, she was different,” says King. “Not overtly sexual, [but] there was something about her. Shy as shy can be, wouldn’t say boo to a goose. She just wanted to sing and play without all the trappings.” Palmer, who in due course would embark on a 16-year relationship with Bush, later recalled that he fell for her almost immediately.

         They rehearsed, according to Bath, for “ages.” In common with most fledgling bands, they argued most vociferously over what to call themselves. Bush wanted to give the band “some strange name”, and when King came up with the KT Bush Band she shrieked, ‘Ooh no, that’s terrible!’ But that’s what it became. Her opposition may have been simple diversionary tactics. There was a certain reluctance on her part to leave the age-old sanctuary of the barn and surrender herself to her first ever taste of live performance, but finally Bath used his contacts to organise a residency at the Rose Of Lee, a popular local pub at 162 Lee High Road in Lewisham*, beginning in April 1977.

         “I went down and said we were getting a new band together, we’ve got a fabulous looking girl singer, we’d got a really strong band,” says Bath. “I said the first week you’ll get a handful of people, but by the fourth week you won’t be able to get them in the door. And sure enough, it was exactly as I predicted.” Around 20 people turned up to watch the first Tuesday night gig, split into two 45-minutes sets, for which the band were paid the princely sum of £27. “I was so scared, I really was,” Bush later recalled of her live debut. “The first time was a little bit daunting [for her], but it got to be great fun,” says King. “The following week you couldn’t move – and then the week after that you couldn’t get in. It was just heaving. It was great!”

         The KT Bush Band very quickly became a success on its own terms, and their nights at the Rose Of Lee were highly anticipated by both the crowd and the rest of the band, if not necessarily by Bush. Bath tended to handle most of the talking and general audience interaction, traditionally the role of a band’s lead singer. Bush – mostly just standing and singing, without the natural defence of a piano and keyboard – was reluctant to communicate directly to the crowd. “She was very nervous,” says King. “Sometimes you had to push her on there, but once she was on she was fine. Singing in these smoke-filled rooms… wasn’t really her scene, she didn’t really frequent pubs. I don’t think it was 100 per cent enjoyable, but she wanted to do it because she had to learn stage presence and projecting and playing in front of a band of musicians.”

         Bush’s involvement brought an extra tantalising twist to standard pub fare. Her innate Englishness made everything from across the Atlantic change hue rather charmingly. They even tried to turn ‘Nutbush City Limits’ into ‘Kate Bush City Limits’ but it “didn’t quite work!” According to King, “we had this strange little way of playing and performing. The vocals were very high, she was very young and the strength of the vocal wasn’t quite there, but people’s eyes were popping because she used to wear very flimsy, floaty dresses, rather than jeans and a T-shirt. It was something South-east London hadn’t seen, especially the Rose Of Lee.”

         As word spread and the gigs at the Rose Of Lee and other venues like the Royal Albert in New Cross Road became more successful, they began to feel energised by the group’s progress. Although for Bush the experience was ultimately just about “doing [some] thing so my time would be full” while she waited for the moment of ignition, along with her bandmates she took it seriously and invested considerable reserves of time, energy and emotion into it.

         “We formed very strong links between us all,” she recalled. It was like an extended family, “a good, kind of chummy thing,” according to Brian Bath, and everyone mucked in. [Kate’s friend] Lisa Bowyer and her boyfriend Rob became unofficial roadies; Rob worked for a printing firm and offered the services of his van for shifting equipment and personnel. Paddy helped out with the lights and would drop in on guitar and mandolin. Del and Brian cooked up some hand-drawn posters for gigs and had T-shirts printed with the KT Bush Band daubed on the front – the singer, sadly, wouldn’t wear one – while King splashed the group’s name across his kick drum. In honour of Bush’s great love of The Muppet Show, he was tentatively nicknamed ‘Animal’.

         The KT Bush Band’s reign of glory lasted for a grand total of 20 gigs. Their last few engagements were, at least, memorable. On Friday June 3, 1977, they played the Half Moon in Putney, a well-established music venue, on the eve of the England v. Scotland football international which ended, famously, in the victorious Scotland fans rampaging over the Wembley turf and breaking the goals. “They were mad, they were just mad,” said Bush, recalling a night that may well have put her off performing for good. “They had flags waving everywhere, and no-one could see the stage because all the guys were getting up on the stage and putting their arms around you!”

         “Oh, it was a riot!” remembers Bath. “They were getting up on stage, some guy was all over Kate. I’m not a hard nut, but I went over and pushed him out of the way, off the stage area. Del didn’t do anything! It was mental, but we got through it. We did OK.” The following Monday, June 6, they were at The Ship in Brighton, a “lager-drinking pub [which] wanted something completely different to us,” says King. “After an hour we were asked to stop.”