Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  The same roar of surprise and delight greeted her equally unexpected appearance with David Gilmour in 2002 at the Royal Festival Hall. She sang the part of the ‘Evil Doctor’ on Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’, perched somewhat self-consciously at the right of the stage, dressed all in black with her hair worn straight and long. She sounded a little tentative and only broke into a smile as the song ended, whereupon she waved at the crowd, hugged Gilmour, kissed the grateful piano player and made a swift, probably rather relieved exit.

  These were pleasing reminders of her presence and her ability as a live performer, and it was always a treat to hear her voice ringing out, but it’s an insubstantial legacy. There have been no more tours since 1979, indeed not even a single one-off concert. The more this fact is contemplated, the more extraordinary it becomes. It’s certainly hard to think of any artist of comparable stature who has taken such a prolonged leave of absence from the stage while still producing a – more or less – steady stream of records. Her stage absence has not been an accident. “Nothing has happened for 30 years, so that’s a very, very active decision that was made there,” says Tony Wadsworth. Bush is in the privileged position where she can pursue almost any whim she likes. Given her tenacity and her dedication to her vision, if she truly wanted to play live she would have done a whole lot more of it. She has consciously chosen not to – but why?

  Many of those who know Bush well plead a simple case of cause and effect, convinced that the experience of organising and then performing the ‘Tour Of Life’ was so unbelievably draining that it has outweighed any desire she may have had to repeat the experience. “I think it was just too hard,” says Bob Mercer. “I think she liked it but the equation didn’t work, it was too exhausting. I’ve seen that happen to other people but nothing like as severely as it did to her. These are not conversations I recall ever having with her, it was just I could see it. I went to a lot of the shows in Britain and in Europe, and particularly in Europe I could see at the end of the show that she was completely wiped. She danced and she sang and did the whole number, and it wiped her out.”

  Brian Bath tends to agree. “When she finished ‘James And The Cold Gun’, the last number [before the encores], I’d see her walking up the ramp in the middle and she was finished,” he says. “Absolutely finished, sweat pouring off of her. Then she’d have to change costume, catch her breath, and come out to sing the big number, ‘Wuthering Heights’. I don’t know how she did it. She used to just collapse, really, at the end of the show, and I’d have to carry her back a few times. It was not … it wasn’t really good, you know.” Some of Bush’s comments have tended to back this up. “The idea is so unattractive when I think about what the tour took out of me,” she said in 1989. “I haven’t wanted to commit myself since.”17

  The tragedy of Bill Duffield’s death is often mooted as another conclusive factor. “She did discuss playing live, and she said she never wanted to embrace that experience ever again,” says Haydn Bendall, an engineer and friend who worked with her over four albums. “She never said, ‘I’m not touring because of the accident’, but she said, ‘This poor guy died and it was a terrible experience’ and one was left to make one’s own conclusions. She felt absolutely awful about that.” But while Duffield’s accident was a horrendous piece of ill fortune that undoubtedly deeply affected her, it is unlikely to have been a tipping point. Other friends insist that the experience of touring was, on balance, a joyous and rewarding one. “She absolutely loved the tour, really she enjoyed it so much,” says Jon Kelly, who mixed the On Stage EP, recorded at Hammersmith Odeon, and then co-produced Never For Ever with Bush “All her dance and her theatre and her music came together in one place. The audience reaction was phenomenal, people loved it. It’s not as if the tour was a disaster or things had gone wrong, it was the complete reverse. It was so pioneering.”

  Success came at a clear price, however. Afterwards she described herself as “a drained battery, very physically tired and also a bit depressed.”18 Most worryingly of all, she struggled to write. The sheer cost involved, meanwhile, was prohibitive and left her with a bloody nose and empty pockets. “It certainly wasn’t [a] financial success,” she said. “Much more a loss thing than making money … With 40 people to look after it was astronomical.”19

  It was glaringly apparent that any future tour would involve an enormous commitment of time, money and energy. It would have to be a truly spectacular event, something that not only combined her love of dance, theatre and music but also moved her story forward from the ‘Tour Of Life’ and incorporated the great strides being made in technology. When she announced her intentions to play concerts in 1991 there were rumours that she had contacted the Jim Henson Company with a view to inviting them to work with her on a new stage show; Bush, of course, was a lifelong Muppets fan. She also wanted to embrace film and video. “I cannot help but feel it is very important to give people something visually special,” she has said. “I don’t think, by any means, that the tour which we did some years ago was perfect, there were a lot of things that were experimental, and we didn’t know if they were going to work, but I think we did explore new territory, visually speaking, and the reaction was so positive. And I do feel that, when eventually I get the time and money to do another show, I hope we will continue working along those lines of combining music with dance and with theatre and it would be even better and much more interesting than the last time. I think that is a very untouched area in rock music, and it has great potential.”20

  It sounds great, doesn’t it? Not only would the expense have been phenomenal – something which, surely, could have been overcome by involving people with the relevant nous – but someone with Bush’s streak of perfectionism and extraordinarily creative ambition could not combine the conception, planning, rehearsing and performing of a major tour in conjunction with writing and recording in the studio. “I need five months to prepare a show and build up the strength for it, and in those five months I can’t be writing,” she said;21 the thought, she admitted, was “daunting … it scares me a bit.”22 When it came to making hard choices regarding further significant investments of her own time and money, she opted to make films, videos and to build and install her own 48-track studio at Wickham Farm. “It did pose the problem: follow that,” says Brian Southall. “At some point she must have sat down and thought, ‘Do I really want to put myself through that again, because if I do it again I’ve got to make it bigger and better, and it’s only me,’” said Del Palmer. “‘It’s not like there’s a band, it’s just me. I’m responsible for the whole thing.’”23

  More generally, the mechanics of touring simply do not appeal. Bush has a deep seated fear of flying which, though never quite phobic (she has flown to America and elsewhere several times), nonetheless has been an active ingredient in her decision not to perform on a global stage. She certainly dislikes intensely the grind of sustained travel, having endured a promotional whirlwind throughout 1978 and much of 1979, and no other aspect of the music industry so relentlessly drives the machinery of stardom and the distancing effects of fame as touring; the lifestyle and inbuilt stress that comes with it – airports, hotel rooms, press calls, bulletproof itineraries, swift getaways, a phalanx of PAs and advisors, precious little solitude – sits entirely at odds with how she chooses to live her life.

  Of course, touring and playing live are not the same thing, and her lifelong reluctance to embrace the latter is more revealing. On a fundamental level, it’s clear that, although she likes singing and will do it instinctively at home, humming along to the radio or to records, for instance, she does not actively enjoy the experience of performing in even the most informal of public situations. She is immensely self-critical. Although most objective observers would agree that she acquitted herself spectacularly on the ‘Tour Of Life’, she was pursued by a feeling that she was not as good as she could have been. “Kate said to me one time that she had somehow lost confidence in performing, which I c
ould never work out because she was such a staggering success on that tour,” said Del Palmer.24

  Some of those present during the making of Bush’s 1993 film The Line, The Cross And The Curve recall her acute unease at performing on set. Bush approached ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ several different ways, and on one occasion she tried singing it solo at the piano. It did not escape the attention of the cast and crew that her legs were visibly trembling throughout the entire rendition. Even playing live in front of no more than 40 people, all of whom she was accustomed to working with on a daily basis, appeared intolerably nerve-wracking. She finds it incredibly difficult to perform ‘straight’, as herself. “If I can be the character in the song, then suddenly there’s all this strength and energy in me which perhaps I wouldn’t normally have,” she said. “Whereas if it was just me, I don’t think I could walk on the stage with confidence. It’s very hard for me to be me on a stage.”25 It’s notable that even the brief cameos she has made in the past 30 years have with been close friends whom she knows well and trusts implicitly: David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel, Midge Ure. They offer empathy, protection, cover.

  It cuts much deeper than simple nerves. At its core, Bush’s reluctance to perform is a clear aesthetic choice. Perhaps the least innovative aspect of the ‘Tour Of Life’ was the music. On the sidelines and in shadow throughout, a pit orchestra in all but name, the band’s virtually invisible profile was another deliberate concession to the theatrical bent of the show. Professional and highly polished rather than spectacular, the superb musicians gave Bush exactly what she needed – a largely unobtrusive, completely solid platform from which she could project her voice and her performances with total confidence, although it proved impossible for backing vocalists Glenys Groves and Liz Pearson to recreate Bush’s superb, stacked vocal harmonies. However, the tour did throw open the vital question: just what do you do with your songs when you play them live? As little as possible, seemed to be the answer.

  “I saw one of the last shows,” says Ian Bairnson. “She basically made everyone in the band learn exactly what was on the records. Alan Murphy did all my solos pretty much note for note, and it worked. I think it was the right thing to do.” She has never been one for improvising or, heaven forbid, flying by the seat of her pants when it came to public exposure. The increased chance of something going wrong – though, of course, it might just as easily go gloriously right – clearly unnerves her. “The worst thing is not being prepared,” she said. “I have to know, before I go onstage, exactly what I am going to do.”26 The studio is the place where her imagination takes flight. Onstage, she wanted to be locked in tight.

  This, too, may have been a decisive realisation when it came to her long term plans. In some deeply ingrained sense playing live contradicts the entire purpose of her music, which at its best is an attempt to disappear into the sound, to dematerialise, to liquefy the physical self until all that’s left is pure sensation and feeling; to achieve some degree of personal and very private transcendence. From as far back as her early years at St Joseph’s Bush displayed a clear reluctance to let any light fall upon her working process; even talking about it seemed like it might somehow break the spell. Even now, in the studio she tends to sing her vocal parts entirely alone. Playing live – an environment where self-consciousness and an over-awareness of one’s surroundings can easily take hold of a performer as sensitive as Bush – appears to obstruct rather than aid her connection to her music. The more people watching her, the less able she is to defeat her inhibitions. Onstage, she is forced to think rather than simply feel.

  On the ‘Tour Of Life’ Bush had showed she could do it. Why do it again? “People said I couldn’t gig,” she said, “And I proved them wrong.”27 She certainly doesn’t crave adulation. She wants people to enjoy her work, but she genuinely does not have – and in this she is perhaps unique amongst performers at any level – the need to be loved by a room full of strangers. Indeed, it’s possible she feels the exact opposite: there is no hiding place on stage from the full force of the adoration of fans and from the strange shadows cast by fame.* Onstage, a performer must confront every aspect of their legacy, their past incarnations, while the audience expects deliverance, for the artist to follow through on the promise of who they think you are. One can see why this would be uncomfortable for Bush, and profoundly limiting.

  Perhaps the primary purpose of the ‘Tour Of Life’ was simply to force people to take her work seriously, to allow her subsequent records to be given a fair hearing. The experience certainly seemed to clarify something fundamental regarding her future path. She does not have the nostalgia gene when it comes to her music and has displayed little enthusiasm for anything that hints at retrospection: reissues, Best Ofs, box-sets and ‘deluxe’ remasters, all recycled product that is inexpensive to manufacture and therefore very profitable from the artist’s, not to mention record label’s, point of view, have all been thin on the ground. Playing live seems to fall into the same category: yesterday’s news. “I can’t possibly think of old songs of mine because they’re past now,” she said shortly after the tour ended. “And quite honestly I don’t like them anymore.”28 Playing those songs over and over again would only stunt her creativity as a writer, she concluded, not feed it. Her music does not evolve that way. Unlike Dylan, who seeks to write a new page onstage each night, or perhaps just tear up an old one and throw it away, by the time Bush went onstage the story was already finished and she was desperate to dream up a fresh one.

  After the ‘Tour Of Life’ she went into an almost immediate reinvention: ‘I’m not going to do it that way, I’m going to do it this way.’ She embarked on the tour just at the moment when she had become powerful enough to begin moving away from the notion of her albums being aural documents of what had occurred in a room between a handful of musicians performing more or less live; that kind of interaction interested her less and less. Instead, she was fully smitten with the possibilities of stretching reality in the studio, of exploring what could be constructed rather than merely captured. “We went back into the studio,” said Del Palmer, “And she discovered that she could say a lot more there.”29

  And yet despite all these attempts to explain it logically, her reluctance to perform live remains the great mystery, the great lack in Bush’s career. It is not simply a conundrum, or a disappointment; it is a decision that has shaped her music to a profound degree. In her personal life Bush is no more of a recluse than dozens of other pop stars, but her refusal to play live has made her seem so. Her unwillingness to embrace one of the record industry’s articles of faith sets her out as a truly independent spirit but it has also enhanced the myth: few activities restore an enigma to mere flesh and blood more rapidly than two hours of sweating, chatting, puffing and panting on stage, with perhaps the odd bum note thrown in for the sake of veracity.

  More importantly, it has meant that we have been denied direct access to one of our most innovative artists, while she has denied herself the traditional indulgence of reinventing her music anew as the years progress and her perspective changes. One of the key derivatives of touring is to pull together the disparate strands of an artist’s work in an easily digestible form, to shuffle the pack, provide new narrative threads, but her stage absence has ensured that every song and each of her albums is entirely fixed in time. As, in a sense, are all the various representations of Bush herself, embalmed and perfectly preserved. There is no unified overview, no melding of the past and the present. Perhaps that’s why she still holds such a strong fascination. Each album reinforces her status as a unique artist floating entirely out of time. “She is still producing music, but it’s not today’s music,” observes Stewart Avon Arnold. There is undeniably something rather lovely about this.

  And yet. And yet. “It’s a tragedy she didn’t go back out touring, an absolute tragedy,” says Jon Kelly. “A huge loss to the world, like a star dying early.” It is indeed impossible, looking and listening back to the ‘Tour Of Life’,
or hearing her sing ‘Breathing’ alone at the piano, not to feel a sharp pang of regret at the enormity of what we may have missed. Who would not love to hear a 1996 version of ‘Cloudbusting’, or ‘This Woman’s Work’ reworked in 2010? But it’s a dangerous game, idealising the unknown, and her decision to shun the stage shouldn’t necessarily be viewed entirely as a negative. Unequivocally, a Bush who was touring the world every three or four years would not have been able to record the body of work she has. “If she was the kind of person who would be happy to tour and go on TV shows then you could say it might have sold better, but would it actually have been the same piece of work in the first place?” says Tony Wadsworth. “If you become an artist who has to slog around the world there is an argument that that activity starts to have a negative effect on the art itself.” She no doubt realised long ago that, without the distraction of live performance, she could be absolutely true to her own impulses. All art is by necessity a compromise between the artist’s hopes and ambitions and their human limitations, but anything intended for public performance is further compromised; wherever there is an observer, that which is being observed automatically changes. Writing her songs with the implied awareness of a future live audience would subtly skew Bush’s music even before it had left her head. Restricting herself to the studio, on the other hand, allows her to fool herself into believing she is making music only for herself, a conceit which brings with it a precious freedom.