Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  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, meanwhile, later recalled that he fell for her almost immediately.

  None of them, perhaps with the exception of Bath, realised initially how deep her involvement with EMI went. It was not a frequent topic of discussion. “It didn’t come out at first, it came out later that she had been paid some money to stay at home and write,” says King. “We didn’t have to pay for anything at the time, I remember that. The petrol was all paid for.”

  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-minute 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.28 “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 group, 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.”

  There’s little doubt that if Bush had been willing to perform earlier she would have found a more direct route to a record contract, though at what price creatively it’s hard to say. Although King says he envisaged the KT Bush Band progressing along the lines of a group like The Pretenders, more straight ahead and rocky, with less emphasis on the arty angle, even in 1977 they stood out. At the time pub-rock was all the rage, its foundations laid deep in US roots music – blues, folk-rock, country, R&B – and a set of aesthetic values that stopped at jeans and plaid shirts. The emphasis was on raw energy and accomplished – solid as opposed to flashy – musicianship over anything so presumptuous as a performance or spectacle. In this landscape, the KT Bush Band was a strange beast indeed.

  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”29 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.30 It was like an extended family, “a good, kind of chummy thing,” according to Brian Bath, and everyone mucked in. 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’.

  Rather quickly, Bush’s natural urge to push the envelope and her burgeoning notions about performance – which were being fed daily by her sessions at the Dance Centre – began to rise to the fore. They had rehearsed her song ‘James And The Cold Gun’ right from the beginning, and it was so cold in the barn that sometimes they would decamp to the front room at Wickham Farm, putting the drums on the hearth rug and playing with acoustic guitars. Because there was a piano in the room, they started rehearsing more Bush originals, and the band of seasoned semi-pros was given a direct insight into her astonishing gift.

  “Kate used to write a lot each week and come up with these ideas and bounce them off you,” says King. “I don’t know how many songs she had for the first album that weren’t used. [I remember] some strange song about ‘tick tock the clock …’ She had a unique style of writing and composing music. Books, stories, films – she loved The Red Shoes – it was that world of art and portraying characters, detectives with trilby hats and old raincoats, old Forties and Fifties films. It became something to write about. From our point of view, it was just chords and rhythms and beats.”

  Del Palmer, meanwhile, was also impressed and intrigued. “The songs always started off in a way I found instantly familiar, but then suddenly they’d leap off somewhere completely different and I’d think, ‘How could you possibly think of going to there from where you were originally?’” he said. “I would never have thought of doing that, and yet it always works! … I’ve never had any desire to work with anyone else since.”31

  There was no shortage of material, but only the songs that most obviously lent themselves to the standard band format – and the ones that stood the most chance of being easily digested by a pub crowd – made it into the set. The strange beauty of ‘Them Heavy People’, ‘James And The Cold Gun’ and ‘The Saxophone Song’ insinuated themselves into the cracks between Marvin Gaye and the Stones. On these songs, Bush would bring her plastic portable keyboard to the front of the stage and add her piano playing to the band; her own songs somehow seemed to require her direct musical participation where ‘Honky Tonk Women’ did not.

  On other numbers, she started putting into practice some of the things she was learning through Lindsay Kemp, Adam Darius and her teachers at the Dance Centre. ‘James And The Cold Gun’ in particular became a showpiece, complete with fake gun. “Rob got a dry ice machine from somewhere,” says Bath. “We used that on stage for ‘James And The Cold Gun’ and it looked great. We had a bit of a show going! Kate did a costume change, she’d put on a bloomin’ Western cowgirl dress for the second set! The theatrical thing was starting to get there. She wasn’t shy on stage. She would move around
, she didn’t stand there like a prop. She was pretty dynamic, she used to live it all.” Del Palmer recalls that “she was just brilliant, she used to wear this big long white robe with coloured ribbons on or a long black dress with big flowers in her hair. She did the whole thing with the gun and [the audience] just loved it. She’d go around shooting people.”32

  As the band’s circle grew wider, they began amassing more equipment, a bigger PA system, and signed a contract with Len Fletcher’s South Eastern Entertainment Agency to play nightclubs at £60 a show. “Once they came to see us they were just ringing up all the time,” says King. “We did build up a following, especially in the London scene. It was great driving around and seeing our posters on the hoardings.” At Tiffanys in Harlow they played a Sunday afternoon cabaret spot in a restaurant where fake palm trees gazed back at them forlornly and faded photographs of distant beaches adorned the walls. They were asked back but declined. If they were playing places like the Target in Greenford, west London, on the way home they would park Vic King’s Hillman Imp and Bath’s Morris 1000 van and stop off at Mike’s Diner, an all-night eatery in New Burlington Street, off Regent Street. Over 4 a.m. omelettes and cups of tea and strong coffee, they would dissect the night’s gig and discuss plans for the next day: Shall we meet tomorrow at the farm? Does Kate have any new songs?

  Aside from meeting to play and rehearse, there wasn’t a huge amount of this kind of social interaction. They would sometimes pop around to Bush HQ in Wickham Road for a plate of spaghetti and a pow-wow, but she retained a customary detachment between the band’s life and her own existence. “She liked to turn up, hide as much as possible, hide again and then go home,” says King. “She didn’t really drink, she might have had a glass of wine but when we were doing the gigs I don’t remember any of that. She didn’t really like to hang around and talk to lots of people. She had her little entourage, always secluded. Lisa and Rob, Jay or Paddy, her parents came along to the gigs sometimes. She didn’t have a boyfriend that I knew of. I think she might have been seeing a few people, but nothing serious.”

  That was to change when she and Del Palmer became an item. Neither of them, it seems likely, were initially aware that this was going to be a long lasting attachment. “I felt Kate was more dedicated to singing and writing, to being on her own, rather than being attached to someone,” says Vic King, bearing out Bush’s earlier feelings about settling down too early. Palmer, however, was to become one of the key figures in her life story. Their romantic relationship would last 15 years, and their working relationship still thrives today.

  Palmer recalls feeling an instant attraction from the very first rehearsal at Greenwich Baths. “I felt a little nervous because, you know, I felt a particular emotional involvement coming on right from the word go,” he later said.33 “Kate used to travel with Vic in the Hillman Imp and I used to travel with Brian and we’d follow along and I used to sit in the van raging because I was so envious of Vic that she was travelling with him.”34 When he began hearing her compositions these feelings only intensified. In some deeply subconscious way his love of her work and the woman were bound together. “It was a phenomenon because it was so completely different from what anyone else was doing,” he said. “I knew I just had to get involved in some way because this was going to be mega.”35

  The initial steps of their pas de deux are long forgotten, but Brian Bath and Vic King recall two separate moments of ignition. “We played a nightclub in Lewisham, the Black Cat or something like that, and [afterwards] we were all talking,” says King. “Then they started talking a bit more between themselves than me and Brian. We assumed something might be happening, and obviously at the next gig something was happening.”

  “After a couple of times at the farm you could see there was something going on between Kate and Del,” says Bath. “Really quickly they just ran at each other and that was it, they were off – during one of the rehearsals, I think. I thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s going to be trouble here!’ She was just a member of the band, and this was the first time we’d ever had a woman in the band, but it worked out OK. We all got on with each other.”

  She was 18, he was 24, born on November 3, 1952. When he moved into her flat on Wickham Road later in 1977 it was “all a bit hush-hush and keep-it-careful,” says Bath. Charlie Morgan, who had played with Del in one of their previous bands, Conkers, and later drummed for Bush, recalls that the prospect of another male entering the tight-knit Bush circle wasn’t necessarily welcomed by all the family. “I think there was a bit of friction between Del and John,” he says.

  Palmer’s influence, however, was unquestionably good for her, both personally and professionally. Talented as Bush undoubtedly was, there was a tendency towards a blanket acceptance of everything she did as being outstanding, particularly when it came to her family’s views. Even her mother occasionally made interjections on Bush’s behalf if she felt her daughter’s interests weren’t being represented as well as they might be. “I do remember Kate coming to me after we’d mixed ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ [in 1975] and saying that her mum didn’t think the strings were loud enough!” says Andrew Powell. “And I said, ‘Mmm, OK, but I think it’s all right.’ If I thought they weren’t loud enough I would have turned them up.”

  Charlie Morgan recalls another time, shortly after The Kick Inside, when “everything that she did was just amazing according to the family and everyone around her: ‘Kate, that’s incredible!’ We were listening to these [new] songs and everyone was going, ‘Oh, that’s great! That’s got to be on the album! That’s fantastic!’ But nobody writes fantastic songs all the time, and a couple of times I said, ‘You know, that one’s not as good as that one.’ I got these horrified looks from the family, that I’d dared to imply that one of Kate’s songs was substandard. I was just trying to be pragmatic and as objective as possible. I think Del was able to cut through some of that adoration factor … and say, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s the best thing you’ve ever done. You’ve got better in you.’”

  This would sometimes result in a butting of heads. “I don’t like hearing very truthful things about myself,” Bush admitted. “Iget really indignant, I put a lot of defences up, and I can be stubborn.”36 The fact that Del remains her engineer and sounding board today, long after the end of their personal involvement, suggests that unlike many at the higher echelons of rock and pop she has learned the value of hearing the unvarnished truth on occasion, no matter how unpleasant it may be. She can also be severely self-critical.

  Like her best friend Lisa, Palmer was another of those funny, no-nonsense extroverts who took the lead socially, whose behaviour allowed Bush, to a certain extent, to take the back seat in public situations. A working-class south Londoner with few airs and graces, he was able to balance the more serious, academic and ‘arty’ side of her family’s input with a more grounded, pragmatic route to creativity. “Well, Del swears a lot,” laughs Bath. “Del just knocks it right down to the basics, he’s very blunt with it. He can bring it down to normality, but at the same time it could bring the whole thing down. It can get on your nerves, but he does push it down to reality, which is a good thing, a good attribute for a bass player. He’s an anchor point all the way across.”

  From the outside, it looked like an odd pairing. With his passion for motor racing and fast cars – Hugh Padgham, the producer who worked with Bush on The Dreaming, recalls, “My friend several years later sold Del a Ferrari S40, a pretty happening car, and he crashed it on the way home” – there were certainly those who always found Bush’s relationship with Palmer a little perplexing, and who were not immune to pondering aloud what exactly it was she saw in a man who would talk excitedly about 4 × 4 cars while wearing a double-breasted suit and sporting a lavish moustache. Everyone agreed he was a nice guy, but he didn’t particularly seem her type.

  In fact, as much as Bush has ever had a ‘sort’, Del seemed to fit the bill. From as far back as her earliest romances she h
as preferred older men – “I don’t think I could find a younger man attractive,” she once said37 – from backgrounds often very different to her own. Even their names give off a solid, no-nonsense ring: Steve, Al, Del. Her current partner and the father of her son, Danny McIntosh, falls into a similar category. Direct, grounded, supportive but unafraid to offer criticism of her work.

  “Danny and Del – they’re both very down to earth,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “I think she needs that. I call her a space child – if she was with someone who was similar to her I think they’d be on another planet by now, mentally. I think Del and [now] Danny ground her, in a sense. Like all couples it works if there’s the right combination of energies. It does seem to work for Kate, because she went out with Del for many years, and he is the kind of person that calls a spade a spade. Del was a normal cockney guy, very talented musician, and also very funny, a right laugh. And Danny is very similar, in a sense. Very down to earth. A fantastic musician, but not a Keith Moon type character, let’s put it that way. He’s very organised!”

  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!”38