Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  Look again and she has become the profoundly private writer, largely hidden from sight, pouring herself into an almost unending stream of superb new songs, sometimes writing all through the night. Prior to going into the studio in July 1977 to make The Kick Inside, Bush handed producer Andrew Powell a vast amount of material which gave him – in football parlance – a serious selection headache. “I’ve still got some of the cassettes,” he says. “I must have 100 songs here, pre-Kick Inside, some of which I still wish she’d done. The process was difficult.”

  This picture, too, dissolves to reveal another view: the dedicated dance and mime student of tutor Robin Kovac’s recollection, the girl with the “beginner’s body” who “made herself wonderful. I have a picture of her in pigtails, of all things. She was really sweet, she still had baby fat in her face, [but] she was determined to be a dancer.”

  Yet another angle shows the deceptively “calculating” – her word – careerist, setting up with her family a series of limited companies with which to keep tabs on her song publishing rights, her future earnings, setting in place her control strategy long before fame and fortune struck. “She ain’t daft,” says Brian Southall, EMI’s former Head of Press and later in charge of Artistic Development. “People shouldn’t be fooled by the mystical, hippie stuff. This girl is very, very tough.”

  At the centre of it all, unifying these diverse characters, is the independent young woman, leaving the family home at 18 and pushing out towards freedom. Hers was a characteristically sensible departure, reasoned and well planned. Owned by her father and divided into three spacious flats, 44 Wickham Road* in Brockley was a rather grand red-brick Victorian building set back off the road, far enough from home to enable independence, close enough to maintain family ties. In any case, it was already a fiercely tight-knit Bush fiefdom in the south of the city: Jay lived on the ground floor with his teacher wife Judy and their two children; Paddy occupied the middle apartment; and Kate moved in to the top floor with a second-hand upright piano and a couple of cats, Zoodle and Pyewacket. In time, boyfriend and bass player Del Palmer would join her. For now, she luxuriated in her freedom.

  Emerging from a period where she wondered whether she would ever be able to break free and channel her feelings into something truly liberating, suddenly she found she was able to do everything all at once: dancing, writing, exploring mime, even performing live. Leaving an old way of life behind and embarking on a new phase, the sense of transformation was vividly, almost physically, apparent to her. Embracing vegetarianism at 16 – “I don’t believe in eating life”2 – leaving school, throwing herself into dance, learning to drive (though she rarely did), living alone; all these steps forward were synthesised in what she regarded as symbolic change in her preferred Christian name. “I used to be called Cathy and I became Kate, and that was a very different stage for me,” she said, adding. “The first part of my life was so difficult.”3

  In hindsight it all happened rather quickly, though at the time it didn’t seem nearly fast enough. All her pursuits were leading towards one inexorable conclusion: recording an album. In 2005 she looked back and claimed she felt she was on a “mission from God.”4 It’s a purposely tongue-in-cheek phrase, but it accurately captures her drive and sense of growing momentum. Suddenly, the future was wide open, and she stepped gratefully inside. She later remembered it as one of the happiest times of her life.

  After nearly a year of to-ing and fro-ing, in the summer of 1976 Bush finally concluded a deal with EMI. Initially, it was a straightforward direct artist agreement: EMI paid for all the recording and up front costs and owned the results. The deal included Europe and Canada but not the United States, where EMI America would have first option on Bush’s albums but were under no obligation to release them.

  At Bob Mercer’s insistence recording expenses would not be deducted from Bush’s advance on the grounds that such a practice was “immoral,” a concept not normally acknowledged within the industry. A straight-talking, humorous, larger-than-life figure, Mercer was widely regarded as a decent man who, after joining the company in 1971, had somewhat belatedly ushered in the era of T-shirts, long hair and growing artist power at Manchester Square following several decades of suits, ties and received pronunciation. He rapidly became an avuncular figure in Bush’s life, a role he happily fulfils, from a distance, to this day. He was another in the line of significant, powerful, kindly older men who made up her extended musical ‘family’.

  EMI offered a four-year contract paying an initial, non-recoupable advance of £3,000, with an additional £500 for publishing, with options at the end of the second and third year. This last detail was crucial. It enabled Bush to renegotiate her contract from a position of strength following the huge success of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and The Kick Inside, with the result that she was able to retain ownership of all her later recordings, only leasing them to EMI for agreed periods of time. This move, allied to a stubborn adherence to her unflinching vision, gave her real power and has allowed her to retain tight control of her music throughout her career, as well as protecting her image and her legacy. “It was renegotiated very early on so she owned her own music,” recalls Brian Southall. “That was unheard of for an act that early on in their career. To their credit, when she started selling records they rewarded her. Bob was very fair in that respect, he was a good man. It was unusual for EMI to do a license deal. Many other acts wanted similar deals and they were turned down.”

  How did she pull it off? The immediate success of ‘Wuthering Heights’ certainly afforded her enormous bargaining power, but even before then every move was made with deliberate and careful forethought. Pink Floyd had carved out significant creative independence, albeit only after prolonged ascendency, and the family sought advice from their manager Steve O’Rourke and David Gilmour, as well as taking advantage of Jay’s legal learning and his experience in publishing. They set up a company, Novercia Holdings Limited, later expanded to include Kate Bush Songs Limited, Noverica Limited and Novercia Overseas Limited. All five principal family members were named as directors and Bush, Paddy and Jay became shareholders, the brothers owning ten per cent each and Bush the remaining 80 per cent. They brought on board an accountant and a top industry solicitor, Bernard Sheridan, in advisory capacities. All contracts went through this route, discussed by the family and rubber stamped by the suits. “The whole thing is really to just structure it so that the final decision on anything becomes Kate’s, which tends to be unusual in rock music – especially when somebody has just become popular,” Jay explained.5

  This was not an uncommon set-up among established rock stars with real clout, but it was almost unheard of among new acts. It was designed to ensure that Bush would never be one of the industry’s hard luck stories, either artistically or financially. The accounts of her company show highly astute financial management, with substantial sums (£223,000, for example, in 1992) set aside for pension contributions, establishing a considerable nest egg, a significant factor for someone who takes as long between records as she does. They also show that all the company directors have been well rewarded for their roles in helping to run her career. The money has always been kept firmly within the family. The Bushes may have had a pronounced bohemian streak, but like many other middle-class artists they understood the absolute necessity for control. In this regard they were unsentimental and clear-sighted in negotiating contracts and helping her stick to her guns. If she made mistakes, she was determined that they would be her own. “The most important thing seemed to be that I had control,” she said. “Because one of the worst things that can happen to one’s product – that terrible word – is that you become manipulated.”6

  She couldn’t call the shots just yet. EMI didn’t want her to record straightaway, and Bush spent much of the next two years in a strange kind of limbo: something was going to happen – but what? And when? The gap, though frustrating, enabled her to think long and hard about her appearance, her expression, her
songs, her body, her style. Andrew Powell, for one, thinks that “it was inordinately helpful that we didn’t straight away make an album. She discovered a lot about herself in that time, working a lot of stuff out. She certainly wasn’t wasting time.”

  The big surprise, and in retrospect one of her most astute moves, was that she focused the greater part of her energy on dance and physical movement, not simply for its own sake but quite consciously in an attempt to make it work in tandem with her music. Though she had danced at St Joseph’s – it was another compulsory step in the great quest to become A Lady – the tuition had, once again, been rather formal and she “didn’t really get on with the dance teacher”.7 At Wickham Farm she could at least move freely to her own internal pulse. Retreating to her room, she would work out routines to songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – hardly the most upbeat material – showing typical dedication, practising for days and days until it was right.

  She loved dancing, but it was another private passion. The penny didn’t really drop until she was knocked sideways by Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers, an intensely powerful re-imagining of Jean Genet’s Notre Dame Des Fleures. A world away from the niceties of ballet, Flowers was populated by drag queens, pimps, murderers and sailors; it was orgiastic, erotic, oppressive, violent, funny and thoroughly homosexual in its aesthetic – Kemp played ‘Our Lady’. It would not have been allowed within 100 yards of the gates of St Joseph’s. In its earliest showings it was often raided by the police.

  Bush went to see the show when it played at the Collegiate Theatre in Bloomsbury in 1975 and again during its later, long run at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, north London. This was no teenage girl trotting off dutifully to Covent Garden to gaze at Swan Lake, and even for an adolescent as accustomed to the avant garde as Bush, Flowers felt thrilling and even slightly illicit. And tremendously powerful. The visceral impact of her first viewing directly inspired her to leave school and follow her burgeoning love of physical movement. “I couldn’t believe how strongly Lindsay communicates with people even without opening his mouth,” she said. “It was incredible, he had the whole audience in his control … I’d never seen anything like it, I really hadn’t. I felt if it was possible to combine that strength of movement with the voice then maybe it would work, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”8

  She had already realised that “there was something missing from the expression” in her music,9 that just sitting down and playing her songs at the piano wasn’t going to be enough. She was influenced in this regard by Gurdjieff’s ‘Fourth Way’, the idea that mind and body are not separate creative entities and that the key to personal and creative breakthrough lies in learning how to fuse the two, using the one to feed off the other. Seeing Lindsay Kemp in action vindicated the notion of using movement as “as an extension of my music”10 and, crucially, gave her practical instruction as to how it could actually be achieved. After leaving school she had tried to enrol at dance school, but without any formal qualifications nobody would admit her. Instead, in 1976 she began taking mime lessons at Kemp’s drop-in classes, 50p per session, each one lasting as long as three hours at a time.

  Kemp was no stranger to the music world. A 38-year-old former enfant terrible whose previous highlights included studying with Marcel Marceau, starting his own dance company and making a splash at the 1968 Edinburgh festival, he was a teacher, choreographer, dancer and actor whose style – a unique and seductive blend of Butoh, mime, burlesque, drag and music hall – was highly personal and often confrontational. His teachings had already had a profound influence on another of his students, David Bowie. “I taught him to exaggerate with his body as well as his voice, and the importance of looking as well as sounding beautiful,” said Kemp in 1974. “Ever since working with me he’s practised that, and in each performance he does his movements are more exquisite.”11 Kemp wasn’t interested in escapism or pretence. His central mission was to “free what is already there. Everybody has that dove flying around inside them, and to let it fly is a fabulous experience. That’s why Isadora Duncan danced, and Pavlova danced – because they loved the moment when they actually became swans, not just impersonating them as actors do.”12

  It’s also why Bush danced. The sense of transformation is what she keyed into. It wasn’t about who or what you were; it was about what you could become. The experience of freeing from within her a series of multi-faceted personae was profoundly liberating and had an obvious affect on the way she has both written and presented herself throughout her career. “For me, the singer is the expression of the song,” she said. “An image should be created for each song … the personality that goes with that particular music.”13 It’s not acting, it’s emotional amplification; finding the right part of her character to accentuate in order to represent the emotion of the songs, dissolving the fixed parameters of the corporeal into an amorphous, ever-changing “moving liquid” alter ego, bursting through boundaries and rolling over obstacles. “She’s a lot stronger [than me],” she once said of her other self. “I wouldn’t be as daring as her.”14 What may look like an escape into other characters is, in actual fact, the direct opposite: a means of deeper self discovery and release.

  Guitarist Ian Bairnson recalls being particularly struck by this aspect of her work when they were recording The Kick Inside. “She did everything with such conviction, and she seemed to adopt different personas within the album,” he says. “She’d sing the lead vocal with one voice and do the backing vocals in a completely different character and you’d think, ‘There’s a cast of people in there!’ That’s what so amazing about her – everything she does hits home. Whether she is putting on an unusual voice, it still comes across as genuine and we accept it, and that’s what makes her stand apart. The fact that her talent has so many facets to it and each one is so believable.”

  When Kemp went off to tour Australia, Bush started studying with the American mime artist Adam Darius, another renowned performer with a global reputation who, between professional engagements, taught at the Dance Centre on Floral Street in Covent Garden. When Darius left the Dance Centre and began taking smaller private classes in Elephant and Castle, she followed him. It was here that teacher first really noticed pupil, recalling an “eagerness and enthusiasm about her. Not in an attention-grabbing way, not at all, but she was very absorbent in the best way that a student can be. One sees things in a person’s eyes, and she was drinking in a very thirsty manner.”

  Like Kemp, Darius worked in the area of expressive mime and his methods – though different – were also designed to unlock something personal from within each individual. “I cultivated this rippling, liquid quality where the movement begins centrally, in the solar plexus, and radiates outwards to all the extremities, to the head and the hair follicles, and the arms, hands, fingertips and beyond,” he says. “When done well, it’s a very hypnotic way of moving. Kate absolutely absorbed it, to the manner born.”

  At the same time, and for the same reasons, she began taking dance classes, also at the Dance Centre. For over a year she studied with several tutors, attending a number of drop-in classes five days a week. The classes gave a new shape and purpose to her life; she would later talk about how much she loved travelling into central London every day, how she felt herself becoming an individual for the first time, taking control of her own life, shaping her future. Afterwards she might dive into Watkins’ occult bookshop at Cecil Court on Charing Cross Road for a root around, or head off for vocal practice.

  Although dancing taught her “discipline and humility”15, she characteristically gravitated towards the visceral rather than the formal. She tried ballet but found it “very hard to get on with the people in the room.”16 She came to the conclusion that she was willing to sacrifice a degree of classical technique in order to get to the raw emotions, that “feeling of movement and freedom … like suddenly breaking through a barrier.”17

  One of her key tutors in this regard was Robin Kovac, a graduate in English Literature, Dance
and Drama from Florida State University. Kovac remembers Bush as “a gentle soul, a special person. I was fond of her from the beginning, I loved having her in class. You love anyone who is keen and determined and working hard. A teacher recognises someone dead keen and concentrated, [and] even at the time I thought the best of her.”

  The classes at the Dance Centre attracted students of all levels. Initially, the standard of Bush’s dancing was not impressive. “I was useless,” she said. “I looked an idiot for months and I used to get very depressed because I couldn’t do it, but challenge is very important to me and I was really tough with myself.”18

  She was being characteristically harsh, and applied herself unsparingly. She soaked up everything and improved rapidly, although Kovac recalls “a real beginner’s body. She came straight fresh in, and the feet have to be trained, the legs, the arms, everything has to be trained. It takes 10 years to be a good dancer. She jumped out before she was fully trained, but she was a wonderful, fluid mover.”

  Kovac taught a contemporary style, with touches of jazz, heavily influenced by Martha Graham’s ‘contractions’. Anyone who has seen Bush’s early videos and live performances will immediately recognise the following description. “Contractions begin in the stomach, as if someone knifed you, and you just press back, rounding the back,” says Kovac. “It’s not that you’re getting smaller, you’re actually getting bigger in the back, like a bow, but it’s called a contraction because you’re lifting up and away from the legs. The body must flow through that, because you’ve started an impulse, spreading ripples through the body.”