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
No comments:
Post a Comment