Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  Of the song itself, she said: “A lot of men have got a child inside them, you know, I think they are more or less grown up kids. It’s a very good quality. It’s really nice to have that delight in wonderful things that children have.”29

  It has been dismissed as mere adolescent fantasy, but like many of her best songs ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ successfully blurs the lines between reality and imagination, between romantic and platonic love, sex and sensuality, between the woman and the child. And once again there is that familiar, tugging hint at a secret life: “Nobody knows about my man.” There has been much speculation over the years about who inspired her to write the song. David Gilmour’s name has often been thrown into the ring, alongside her brothers. While it transcends specifics and is unlikely to be wholly ‘about’ any one person – it’s an elusive song, and she once claimed it “had something to do with one of my nephew’s books”30 – it seems likely it was written with her first serious boyfriend in mind.

  Steve Blacknell was another older, formative figure in Bush’s younger years, who later became a record plugger, a DJ and VJ, a TV presenter on Live Aid and many other music shows, and latterly has worked in PR. An old friend of Lisa Bowyer and her boyfriend Rob, at the time he met Bush he was a toilet cleaner, but she saw beyond the bleach and Brillo. “I’m told I’m ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’,” says Blacknell today. “Kate never told me that, but I was told through the family and Lisa. I know it’s true. I’ve got the handwritten lyrics here, they’re dated and it’s [dedicated] to me. I’m very proud of that. I think it’s one of the greatest songs ever.”

  A few years her senior, Blacknell first met Bush in Dartford. “We were each others first loves, and first loves are always special,” he says. “The fact that they go on to be a star means fuck all. She was a true genius. I can recall her playing in the farm, hearing these incredible songs and thinking, bloody hell! I have some very personal memories of that kind of thing. I’m privileged, but more than that she was my first love. That’s more important than anything.”

  Later in their relationship, when they were “going strong,” Blacknell tracked down Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band, one of Bush’s favourites, and scored a job with them, living for a while in the group’s commune at Glen Row in Innerleithen, near Edinburgh, working as roadie, chief cook and bottle washer. “She was a big String Band fan and I think that probably influenced her somewhere, in her tribal, percussive ways,” says Blacknell. “But she drew from so many sources. Just bloody stunning.”

  Blacknell was a self-confessed “hippie,” deeply immersed in that lifestyle. Bush’s social group away from school was diverse and rather exotic, which probably reinforced her feeling of alienation at St Joseph’s. Many of her songs were inspired by the interesting, eccentric people she met or saw around the farm, her own friends or Paddy’s or Jay’s. When she first arrived on the scene much was made of Bush’s ‘little girl lost’ persona and apparent naïveté, but “she wasn’t innocent by any means,” according to

  Jon Kelly, who engineered The Kick Inside and Lionheart and co-produced Never For Ever. “Her brothers were quite bohemian, mystical, open to the ways of the world, and her parents were very open minded. Not innocent, our Kate, but very sweet. You don’t write those songs if you’re innocent!”

  She later said she smoked her first cigarette at the age of nine, and has maintained a love affair with smoking throughout most of her adult life. And although she was never particularly keen on alcohol, she was well aware of drugs and their impact. In one of her unreleased songs, ‘Cussi Cussi’, she sings of getting “really stoned, really amazingly,” and in an 1978 interview in Record Mirror with the novelist-to-be Tim Lott, she was uncharacteristically direct, if not exactly open, about her experiences: ‘She experimented,’ wrote Lott, but “I’ve never taken acid,” said Bush. I don’t think I’m into things like that. I’ve seen a lot of people screwed up through it. The idea of it is really fascinating, though – to be able to see the room breathe, and stuff like that.”’31

  She may well have had contact with people who had a taste for stronger stuff – “there was a lot of acid flying around,” says one friend – but for Bush marijuana was as far as it went. The great keyboard player Max Middleton, who played on Never For Ever, recalls attending a party at the farm on New Year’s Eve 1979. “Midnight came,” says Middleton. “There were several rooms, and one of them was filled with balloons and the TV was on playing all the Scottish songs, but there was not a soul in there. I walked into the kitchen and everybody was sitting around the table smoking and it was absolutely silent because they were so stoned. And in another room it was silent because they were all listening to seventeenth century recorder music. Just your typical New Year’s party! It was a bit odd. They were eccentric and lovely, the whole family were.”

  She wasn’t one of the brash girls, ostentatiously picked up from school in their boyfriends’ car, but she was no wallflower. Later she said she had “lots” of boyfriends. “I really liked boys … I was popular with them.”32 Maybe she did and no doubt she was. In early interviews she scattered many seeds of obfuscatory misinformation about her romantic life, not just on the grounds that it was nobody’s damn business, but also to deflect attention away from the fact that by early 1978 she was already living with her bass player, Del Palmer. Only in 1985 did she fully acknowledge Del as her partner; later, quite understandably, she clammed up completely.

  She did reveal that she had her first boyfriend at the age of 11 – someone called John, who lived “around the corner”. Like most teenage girls, she developed “terrible crushes on boys, always much older than me.”33 Hardly surprising, considering her own emotional maturity and her many older male role models. Her early romantic life seems a typical teenage mix of rich fantasy and some direct experience, all of which felt real and fed directly into her songs: excitement, trepidation, longing, disappointment, secrecy. A decade before she wrote ‘Hounds Of Love’, the idea of love was already a kinetic speedball comprising of equal parts thrill and terror. Unlike many of the girls at St Joseph’s, she was not naïve, dismissive or, conversely, overly rash when it came to men. “Some fell pregnant not long after going to university, some got into marriages very quickly which they regretted,” says Shealla Mubi. “You didn’t have that much exposure to men. Kate was lucky, she had much older brothers. When I left I’d not been kissed and never had a boyfriend, and I viewed the opposite sex with fear mixed with, ‘Oh, you don’t need men!’ I think Kate had a more rounded experience.”

  Whether it was directly inspired by Blacknell or not, by the time she had recorded the definitive version of ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ at AIR studios in June 1975, Bush had embarked upon another relationship. Alastair Buckle, known as Al, was another slightly older boy whom she dated seriously. Like Blacknell and Paddy’s steady girlfriend of the time Teresa Fox, he was made an honorary member of the Bush family and was a frequent visitor to the farmhouse during the period they were together, plonked down at the kitchen table and fed tea, cake and good will.

  Buckle was a polite biker, with shoulder length hair and a leather jacket. She didn’t quite fit into his social set, and often felt shy and self-conscious. Once, according to her schoolmate Francis Byrne, rather than venturing into the We Anchor In Hope pub to meet Buckle and his friends she left a single rose on the petrol tank of his motorbike parked outside, an almost quintessentially Bush gesture that could have come straight from one of her songs or videos. From an early age, clearly, she had an instinct for the powerfully romantic and dramatic, with a twist of Celtic melancholy.

  Bush and Buckle had a typically intense on-off relationship with the usual measures of heartache and rapture. They split up after a year, and for the next couple of years there was no one steady. After the AIR demo she was getting serious about her work and her music, thinking about leaving school, leaving home and living alone for the first time. She wasn’t ready
for commitment and indeed chose not to confide in any of her boyfriends when it came to her music. Steve Blacknell, for instance, recalls being only vaguely aware of the recordings sessions. “I knew about [them] … but that’s about it,” he says.

  It was a post-feminist world, but only just, and she feared her male companions might be discouraged or intimidated by her talent, perhaps even regard her as a “threat to their masculinity”.34 As she progressed, she “tended not to tell my boyfriends about my music. My family and my close friends knew about it and that was OK, but I didn’t want anyone else to share it.”35

  Again, there is evidence of that understated but steely single-mindedness, the sense of playing for high stakes and placing an appropriate value on her most precious pursuits. Around her, friends like Diane Carman and Lisa Bowyer, who would soon marry Rob Bradley and start working as a telephonist, were already finalising their wedding plans. She decided it wasn’t for her.

  The 1975 AIR recording session turned Bush’s life around. Such was its quality, it not only secured her a major label deal with EMI but two of the recordings – ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ and ‘The Saxophone Song’ – ended up over two years later, unadorned, appearing on her debut album, The Kick Inside.

  When he heard the demo, Gilmour “loved it,” according to Powell. “He was very happy.” Shortly afterwards, he was in the studio with the rest of Pink Floyd, in the final throes of completing Wish You Were Here, finished on July 19, 1975 and released in mid-September, when EMI General Manager Bob Mercer popped in for a visit. In Abbey Road’s Studio 3 Mercer was given his first, unexpected introduction to the music of Kate Bush.

  “It was two or three o’clock in the morning, and David said he had paid for these demos that Andrew Powell had produced and that he wanted me to listen to,” recalls Mercer. “We went into another studio and had a listen. He had [three] songs, extremely high-end demos, string sections, the whole lot, and one of those songs in particular really got to me: ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’. I listened to it a few times and the next day I called Dave and Steve O’Rourke to find out what was in their minds. Were they going to sign her and record her? Dave said, ‘No, no, I just wanted to help her out, so if you’re interested go ahead.’”

  Mercer says he called Dr Bush straight away and asked him and his daughter to come and see him the following day. “We talked it over a fair amount, and I told him I was happy to sign her but I wouldn’t want her to go into the studio for a couple of years, and her dad was obviously not against that at all,” says Mercer. “He was a very level-headed GP and they weren’t short of money, there was absolutely no showbiz promotion coming from that side at all. So that’s what we did.”

  It wasn’t quite that simple. EMI’s head of publishing Terry Slater was also involved, and negotiations were protracted, probably because Bush had not yet even turned 17 and her family, notably Jay, became heavily involved in the whole process. The final contract was sealed in July 1976, a year after the AIR session, which suggests that all parties may have been waiting until Bush was 18 before committing to anything formal.

  There was also the small matter of school. She had achieved an outstanding 10 ‘O’ Level passes in 1974 and was now in the sixth form, taking her ‘A’ Levels. Everything at St Joseph’s was geared towards the top pupils attending university. This was an assumption rather than a hope or expectation: the question was not, ‘Will you go to university?’ but ‘What will you be studying?’ For the brightest – which included Bush – the Oxford entrance exam beckoned. She had harboured vague ideas about becoming a vet, a psychiatrist, a social worker – always, it seemed, a profession that helped someone or something – but deep down she recognised that she had no great passion for any of them. In her heart, she knew there was only one thing that would satisfy her. “She was good, she was bright, she had other options to follow, she could have led a very professional life,” says Mubi. “Coming from a school like ours it took a lot of courage to follow that [musical] line and say, ‘OK, I’m going to pursue this.’ She must have been extremely brave to buck the expectations that the school had instilled in her over all these years.”

  Her mother and father, so steeped in academic excellence and true believers in the value of education, were at first against her dropping out of school. They had already been disappointed when Jay had chosen not to be a solicitor. “My parents were very concerned I was leaving school and going into something that was completely insecure,” she said. “They had a tremendous amount of faith in me. They wanted me to be happy and they understood that I wasn’t just spending my time doing nothing.”36

  It is to their eternal credit that they saw her argument and subsequently backed her to the hilt. Having spent so long exposing her to a rich and varied world of art and creativity, when it mattered most they were prepared to put their money where the mouths were. They were also fans. Highly impressed with her talent, in the end they were content to trust the evidence of their own ears. “I remember the first time I heard ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, not long after she recorded it,” says Brian Bath. “I went round to the farm [and] Kate’s dad said, ‘Do you want to hear something Kate has recorded?’ He took me into the front room and put it on, I stood there with him, it started and, honestly, the hairs on my neck were tingling. I could not believe it was so beautiful. I looked at him and he said quietly, ‘Good, you like it? It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’”

  How could they have stopped her? She left school early in 1976, soon after sitting her mock ‘A’ levels and midway through the final year of Upper Sixth, before her deal with EMI was concluded but with the promise of it glinting on the horizon. “I knew I had to leave school then,” she said. “Iwanted to do something in music and I had to get away from the alternative career opportunities being rammed down my throat.”37

  A small inheritance from an aunt assuaged any immediate financial concerns, although they were hardly pressing: she would not – God forbid – ever have to get anything as troublesome as a job, a prosaic but highly significant point. There was, naturally, no general announcement to the masses. She simply left. The teachers thought she was “a bit foolish”.38 According to the relatively low readings picked up on the school’s rumour radar she had gone to pursue dance, not music.

  “It was like, ‘Where’s Cathy?’,” recalls Shealla Mubi. “Somebody mentioned that she was doing dancing – Oh! A girl had left before to go to ballet school, but I don’t remember [Cathy] doing any ballet, so it was a bit of a shock to hear that she’d gone to do that. It didn’t really make sense. I’m sure Lisa would have known, but there wasn’t a big, ‘Oh, I’m leaving to go and do this and this.’ That wouldn’t have been her way.”

  The canny, low-key negotiation of her time at St Joseph’s reveals much about Bush’s personality and the way she has conducted her career ever since. “I was too shy to be a hooligan, but inside I had many hooligan instincts,” she said.39 She practiced a prolonged and unfailingly polite internal rebellion, all the more effective for the fact that few saw it or even recognised that it was happening at all. A cool patience underpinned a great confidence. She didn’t make a fuss and then ultimately conform, like many of us. She got on with school, studied hard, did as she was asked – “never gave any lip”40 – and then went off to pursue her own singular vision, defying the expectations not only of her teachers but, initially, her friends and parents.

  There are echoes of this low volume, maximum yield approach to patrician authority throughout her subsequent career: in battles with EMI chief Bob Mercer and the record company in general, in skirmishes with producer Andrew Powell and various video directors, in jettisoning an unwanted manager, in continually defying the lumpen expectations of the media or the public in general to pursue her vision. Voices are rarely raised, but she invariably emerges victorious. Actions and results, not words, are what matter. It could be said that – subconsciously, no doubt – she has consistently used the reserved, p
olite, very English side of her nature as a Trojan horse, a vehicle for smuggling in the wild, uninhibited Celtic part of her lurking beneath, begging for release, freedom and flight. Her schooldays ended in an act of proper rebellion, much more deft than those routinely mapped out by surly young men in artfully distressed clothes mouthing second hand, lazily confrontational platitudes. They revealed an inner strength that has served her well ever after.

  * Former EMI chief Bob Mercer claims the Bush family had another connection with the Pink Floyd guitarist, suggesting that Dr Bush was friendly with one of Gilmour’s guitar technicians.

  * The occasion revealed another example of Bush’s innate sense of decency. Pat Martin: “Years later she put out a single [‘Army Dreamers’], and one of the additional tracks on it was ‘Passing Through Air’, and I remember getting a cheque for it. She organised to send us some money out of the blue, which was a nice gesture. She was that sort of person, a really nice, unaffected person. I remember after ‘Wuthering Heights’ came out and Unicorn was killed by punk, just after we’d had the fateful meeting, we went home and put the telly on and she was sat there talking and she actually mentioned us. She said she’d really like to thank the guys from Unicorn for helping her.”

  3

  Room For The Life

  “IT wasn’t until Ileft school that I found real strength inside,” Bush later said.1 The events of 1976 and 1977 bear out these sentiments a hundred times over. The next two years are a blur of creative evolution in fast forward, and each time the show reel stops spinning it throws out a host of seemingly conflicting images.

  When the light falls a certain way an unlikely pub singer comes into focus, embarking on an enforced, somewhat delayed apprenticeship. Fronting the KT Bush Band, she was a characteristically vivid turn as a lounge bar chanteuse, singing the likes of Hall & Oates’ ‘She’s Gone’, Steely Dan’s ‘Brooklyn’, Arthur Conley’s ‘Sweet Soul Music’ and Free’s ‘The Stealer’ to a less than select crowd of lager drinkers, corporate low-rollers and sports aficionados. “We played Tottenham Football Club, where they thought she was the stripper,” says the band’s drummer, Vic King. “At a pub in Putney on the day [before] Scotland beat England at Wembley we had dry ice machines that set off the fire alarm. There was a bit of a riot and a panic. It was a really good evening!” He pauses. “But not really her thing, no.”