Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  The downside, of course, is that she has largely foresworn the possibility of experiencing the spontaneous, fleeting act of creation that occurs when a song takes on a life of its own as it meets a crackling crowd of 12,000 expectant fans, or sparks a unique ambience as it fills a new space. Instead, her work is static, preserved, anthologised. She prefers it that way. Like an author, the connections with her audience occur primarily in quiet, private places, conducted as a conversation rather than a mass declaration. They are all the more intense and enduring for doing so. It certainly gives her work an extraordinary power, authority and timeless beauty.

  Of course, her fans would happily pay through the nose just to watch her sing for 45 minutes on an old pub piano. Del Palmer has been trying to persuade her in this direction, both on record and onstage, but it seems the simplicity of this would never satisfy her. “I would feel that that was such a cop-out,” she once said. “I don’t think I’d be able to feel that I had any effort or sense of challenge left in me. I don’t really feel that happy doing something, in a way, unless I’ve really pushed myself to the limit … otherwise it doesn’t feel like you’ve put enough effort into it.”30

  It’s almost impossible not to conclude that the moment has passed, but only Bush truly knows for sure. The question will, of course, not go away. “There have been lots of times we’ve talked about this,” said Del as recently as 2007. “We’ve gone through the whole thing of doing a massive spectacular production, to have her doing it on her own, and we just go round and round and round … I still have my fingers crossed. You can never say never.”31

  Perhaps not, but the odds are absurdly long. Since motherhood, there’s even less imperative for Bush to fly the coop for any length of time, or expose herself to the physical rigours, intense scrutiny and knee-knocking terror of live performance. She will not tour again, but even a concert would be accompanied by an unimaginable fuss, hailed as a Lazarushian comeback. The media attention it would generate is almost unfathomable and would be entirely unwelcome.

  But more than that, 30 years on from the ‘Tour Of Life’ it’s possible to see that playing live emphasises the fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of Bush’s life and her music. The equation is deceptively straightforward. She requires a protected, highly controlled environment in order to fully access and explore the untamed wildness of her own imagination; an interviewer once noted that “Kate Bush lives in a very small world,”32 and it’s true that her vaulting leaps of creativity occur within strict and rather limited physical parameters. She is by no measure a ‘safe’ artist, yet in the way she lives her life she has proven stubbornly unwilling or unable to leave her personal comfort zone. “Part of her really relies on the family, the protective cocoon, and yet another part of her is so adventurous creatively and so willing to just depart completely from the box that she’s been put in and stretch the fabric of time and space,” says Charlie Morgan. “It’s an interesting and total dichotomy [between] her day-today life, which is relatively cosseted, and yet her creativity being without boundaries.”

  This dichotomy is the driving force for her music, which is essentially a private, personal struggle to defeat her self-consciousness and break through to deeper emotions, but the equation fails when she climbs onstage. Live performance is where the contradictions between the endlessly inventive studio pioneer, driven by her artistic impulses, and the quiet, grounded woman, wary of change and very much in need of the solid certainties of hearth and home, become uncomfortably exposed. When it comes to her music, Bush needs everything to be, if not perfect then at least within her jurisdiction; if she falls short, let it be through her own failings rather than a stray lead or a muddy sound mix. For this most fearless of artists, it seems playing live is a risk too far.

  * The Egyptian ‘Key Of Life’, a hieroglyphic character resembling a Cross with a loop at the top, denoting eternal life. This may have helped give the tour its name.

  * McAlea later wrote the English lyrics for Nena’s 1984 number one ’99 Red Balloons’.

  * She was always happy, up until 1994, to meet her most loyal fans at the annual Kate Bush Conventions, but these events were more like a cross between a book signing, an informal Q&A and an extended family gathering than a gig.

  “She could turn it on immediately the cameras started rolling. Of all the people I’ve ever worked with, visually her and Iggy Pop were the most aware.” – Paul Henry. Transforming herself in 1980 to become ‘Babooshka’. (REX FEATURES)

  Off duty: just prior to recording a relaxed interview for Personal Call at Radio One, 1979. (BBC)

  On duty: in a clearly chilly Switzerland recording her contribution to the Abba Snow Time Special, broadcast in the UK on Christmas Day, 1979. (BBC)

  Recording ‘Sing Children Sing’ for UNICEF with, among others, Joe Brown, Pete Townshend and Phil Lynott. Paddy is on the far right. November 1979.

  “There’s a cast of people in there. That’s what so amazing about her.” – Ian Bairnson. Bush performing highly theatrical routines for, left, ‘Army Dreamers’, and right, ‘December Will Be Magic Again’. ABOVE LEFT: (ADRIAN BOOT/LFI), ABOVE RIGHT: (BBC)

  “I came from the punk rock thing, and to me she was punk rock. She was doing stuff that was going against the grain.” – Nick Launay. In the late Seventies, Bush’s unlikely admirers included John Lydon, Phil Lynott and Ian Dury, pictured here chatting with her at the Capital Music Awards, March 3, 1980. (CHRIS SKARBON/REX FEATURES)

  “She mentions karma a lot, and reincarnation, and witchcraft and paganism and Buddhism. We always end up in these conversations about life in general and spiritual life in particular.” – Stewart Avon Arnold. Bush casts her spell performing ‘Wuthering Heights’ on Top Of The Pops, 1978. (BBC)

  “Not innocent, our Kate, but very sweet. You don’t write those songs if you’re innocent!” – Jon Kelly. Performing a sultry new routine for ‘Babooshka’ on Germany’s Rock-Pop, September 2, 1980. (PETER MAZEL: LFI)

  “Half Irish, Bush connects with a harder, more mythical England, a pre-Christian Celtic land, a deep, green dream of a country.” (CLIVE ARROWSMITH)

  “From conversations I had, that was the closest EMI got to returning an album to the artist in my time there.” – Brian Southall. Bush promoting her pioneering but doggedly uncommercial album, The Dreaming, in 1982. (PETER STILL/REDFERNS)

  “She came in one day and had decided that there were two Kate Bushes. She’d managed to separate herself.” – Jon Kelly (NEAL PRESTON/CORBIS)

  “She was bitten by the charity bug which, post-Live Aid, in fltrated much of popular culture.” Promoting the Comic Relief book with Lenny Henry and a pair of Spitting Image puppets at Claude Gill book shop on Oxford Street, October 23, 1986 (DAVID CRUMP/DAILY MAIL/REX FEATURES)

  “You knew you were involved in something really special. I felt Hounds Of Love was something special then and I still do. It was very exciting.” – Haydn Bendall. Bush affects to enjoy the launch of her masterpiece at the London Planetarium, September 9, 1985. (EUGENE ADEBARI/LFI)

  “It was all a bit hush-hush and keep-it-careful.” – Brian Bath. Bush and Del Palmer finally appear together in public at the Hounds Of Love launch, seven years after the beginning of their relationship. (BRENDAN BEIRNE/REX FEATURES)

  “It’s a tragedy she didn’t go back out touring; it’s like a star dying early.” – Jon Kelly. Bush captured during a rare live performance, singing ‘Running Up That Hill’ at an Amnesty International benefit, 1987 (MAURO CARRARO/REX FEATURES)

  “She’s very down to earth, apart from the fact that every man in the room falls in love with her.” – Daniel Lanois (STEVE RAPPORT/LFI)

  7

  Breathing

  THE quality of Bush’s first two records and the vast stockpile she had amassed of songs in a similar style suggest that she could have gone on making albums like The Kick Inside and Lionheart indefinitely. That idea, however, held no appeal. These were works on which she essentially f
elt she only shared authorship; almost as though the words were hers but the pictures belonged to somebody else. “I don’t really think that Lionheart expressed the true phase I was in at the time, whereas all the others have,” she later reflected. “[It] could have been a lot better.”1

  The first two albums are collections of – often exceptional – group performances, the sound in the room rendered more or less faithfully. She longed to move away from this method of aural documentary and develop a more stylistically adventurous approach. Over the course of a three-year period of almost continuous recording, resulting in a final, conclusive creative breakthrough, she began to see and hear her music in dramatically altered ways, while gradually wresting control of the technology that would finally allow her albums to keep pace with her vision. Never For Ever edged towards a more experimental sonic palette, flirting with the idea of using the studio as an instrument; The Dreaming completed the transformation. She was no longer simply pointing a camera towards her subject. Now, she was becoming an auteur.

  Following a short period of post-tour decompression, by August she was peering back through the lens. Bush entered Abbey Road’s Studio Three with Jon Kelly to mix the tapes from the Hammersmith Odeon show and select four tracks – ‘Them Heavy People’ as the lead, backed with ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’, ‘James And The Cold Gun’ and ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’ – for the On Stage EP, released on September 3. But that was old news. Already, she had her eyes fixed on the horizon. “I haven’t really begun yet,” she said during the mixing sessions for the EP. “I’ve begun on one level, but that’s all gone now so you begin again …”2

  You begin again. She was as good as her word. From Abbey Road, the sessions spilled almost seamlessly into AIR studios and she found herself starting work on a new album with a new set of rules and goals. Most significantly, her relationship with Andrew Powell had, amicably, run its course. “I think she just wanted to move on,” says Powell. “She wanted to be in control, really, of the whole shooting match, pretty much like the live show.”

  Yet this was to be a relatively benign, perhaps even tentative autocracy. Never For Ever is a fascinating record, divided as it is almost exactly down the middle, torn between capturing where Bush had been and where she was heading. The musicians, production set-up, studios, song choices and even the chronology of the record captured this dichotomy precisely. Never For Ever mixes players from her own live band with those who had performed on her first two albums and features old songs alongside some stunning, pioneering new compositions; the sessions even started at the end of one decade and spilled over into a new one. It was, in all senses, a record created on a cusp.

  Alan Murphy and Brian Bath shared duties on guitar; Del Palmer played the majority of the bass (Bush had also asked David Paton to contribute but he was pre-booked on another album session) and Preston Heyman most of the drums. Ian Bairnson popped in to add vocals. Paddy was there, as ever, strumming, plucking and crooning, alongside newcomer Max Middleton, the highly regarded keyboard player who had been in the Jeff Beck Group and on the landmark Blow By Blow album. He arrived as something of a sceptic. “I’d thought ‘Wuthering Heights’ was a bit gimmicky and thought, ‘She won’t last long,’” he says. “But the more I worked with her and listened to her lyrics, the more I thought she was very clever and wrote lovely melodies. I got more and more impressed, every track was so different and had something [special] about it. That combination of talent and being a lovely person is rare, but [that’s] not to say she’s not eccentric.”

  Middleton had been recommended by Jon Kelly who, as a kindred spirit and a trusted pair of hands technically, had been retained by Bush as co-producer. “She had control then, she could pick and choose, and lucky for me she asked me to work for her,” says Kelly. “The past didn’t haunt her or anything, but I remember her saying, ‘Now we – she would always say ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ – have control of what we do’. We played them for days, some of these songs, but under no pressure. We just played them for the joy of playing and seeing where they developed. I just remember it being such a creative time.”

  Nonetheless – or perhaps understandably – the album took some time to find its feet. Bush was creatively spent after the tour and she initially struggled to compose. At AIR she started off with the songs that were already written. On ‘Violin’ she wanted to capture some of the residual energy from the tour and bring it into the room, stripping the sound down to two electric guitars, bass and drums, with Kevin Burke’s fiddle weaving in and out of the arrangement. It featured one of her most extraordinarily gone vocals, and while in the studio she lived out every word. “When she sang it it was like she was performing it on stage,” says Middleton. “In the sound box she didn’t just stand there and sing, it was 200 per cent effort every time, really like a performance. I was very impressed with the way she went about doing those things.”

  ‘Egypt’ travelled from stage to studio less successfully, losing a little of its snap en route. An opaque, opiatic erotic reverie in which the “Land of the Pharaohs” takes on the characteristics of the female body, the complex time signature tied everyone in knots. “It was in 9/8, or 11/9 or something, and nobody could play it,” says Brian Bath. “Nobody!” The methodology at AIR was much the same as on her previous records. Bush would play the song to the band and then everyone would follow her. Even a track like ‘Egypt’, serpentine as a sidewinder, was recorded live in the room with any additions – Bush’s vocals, Middleton’s mini-moog – overdubbed afterwards. Without Andrew Powell calling the shots, and with an artist as self-critical and insistent on emotional veracity as Bush, such an approach tended to be highly labour intensive.

  “She would do lots and lots of takes and I could never understand why, that was a little difficult for me,” says Middleton. “It sounded good in the end, but normally with other musicians we’d do it again because it was too fast or slow or you’re playing the wrong chord – something very definite – but she was looking for something a little bit nebulous that was hard to pinpoint: the atmosphere or the feeling of the song. She always knew what she wanted, but she’d just say, ‘Let’s do it again,’ and you’d think, ‘I wonder why?’ We didn’t talk about the content of the songs, I don’t think she was into dissecting music too much, I think she wanted it to come together naturally. She wasn’t doing it again out of sheer belligerence, she was looking for something.”

  ‘Blow Away (For Bill)’ was a whimsical but unengaging tribute to Bill Duffield, a creaky conceit about rock stars congregating in some backstage holding area twixt life and death. Aside from Buddy Holly the musicians she mentioned were all recently deceased: Marc Bolan died in 1977, Keith Moon and Sandy Denny in 1978, Sid Vicious in early 1979, while the inclusion of Minnie Riperton dates the writing of the song to no earlier than July 12, 1979, the day Riperton died, and no later than November 18, 1979, when Bush performed it live at the Albert Hall during the concert for the LSO. Riperton is an unusual inclusion in a song otherwise dedicated to rock legends, but Bush may have felt a particular affinity with a woman whose songs – particularly the huge 1975 hit, ‘Lovin’ You’ – were also notable, and often derided, for the extraordinary high pitch of the vocal.

  ‘Blow Away (For Bill)’ was a banal song, the weakest on the record. ‘The Wedding List’, by contrast, was the standout track of the early session. Another mini-movie, another four-minute psychodrama, it told the story of a bride whose husband was murdered just after their wedding – “You’ve made a wake out of our honeymoon” – and who then wreaked vengeance on his killer. Loosely inspired by Truffaut’s 1968 movie The Bride Wore Black, in which a grieving widow embarks on a killing spree, hunting down the five men she blames for her husband’s death, the song was loaded with highly charged imagery. Like the stage version of ‘James And The Cold Gun’ it made explicit the link between guns – a recurring Bush fascination, objects she describes as “fantastic, beautiful”3 when detach
ed from their deadly purpose– and sex, mixing the language of violence with the language of lust. In the song, hunter and hunted “come together” in the same room, and when the drama is played out she rolls him over “the butt of my gun.”

  It’s a fabulous song with a lovely dramatic pause, a little sigh, where Paddy’s harmonica wail drops in, and from the punning title on down it’s filled with an irresistible black humour which spilled over into the recording. “She wanted me to sing with her at the end so we went in and I was in hysterics, I just could not stop,” says Bath. “In the end she said, ‘Brian, you’ve got to stop laughing, we’ve got to do this now.’ I had to really pull myself together. She had the most incredible sense of humour. We used to be in hysterics, rolling on the floor, we were having such a good time.”

  Completed studio mixes of these songs – minus orchestral overdubs – were ready by late autumn, and they formed the backbone of a 45-minute Christmas television special Bush recorded for the BBC. Kate featured ‘Violin’, ‘The Wedding List’, ‘Egypt’, as well as the ‘Ran Tan Waltz’ – a relative throwaway which, musically, sounds like a dry run for ‘Army Dreamers’; the 3/4 time signature is the same and the instrumentation very similar – and ‘December Will Be Magic Again’, a sweetly evocative seasonal song released as a Christmas single in 1980, with a fine original picture sleeve by Nick Price.