Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  In terms of her cultural status, Hounds Of Love marked the birth of the Kate Bush we all now take for granted: an unimpeachable goddess, the critic’s darling, iconic, influential, a national treasure. Before 1985, the jury was divided. Hounds Of Love eventually settled the matter once and for all. It was a high watermark of artistic and aesthetic excellence – those songs, those videos, that languidly erotic sleeve, the mastery of technology – which she has found almost impossible to better. In 1991 she called it the “most complete work I’ve ever done. In some ways it was the best and I was the happiest that I’d been compared to making other albums.”41 It has proved a prophetic statement. Despite the fact she has gone on to make one more album of comparable range, quality and distilled emotional impact, she would never again sound quite so imperious, or display such absolute mastery of all her numerous talents, as she did on Hounds Of Love.

  * She did, however, participate in Ferry Aid in 1987, one of less memorable of the Eighties’ obsession with charity singles, singing on a new version of ‘Let It Be’ released in aid of the victims of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. Organised by The Sun and featuring an array of D-list celebrities, among which Bush and Paul McCartney, and also Mark Knopfler, stood out like a royal cortege strolling along Blackpool promenade, she agreed to do it but banished all press photographers from her presence and reportedly had the studio cleared while she recorded her vocal.

  * The title, taken from a passage of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s 1869 poem The Holy Grail, was applied retrospectively. The poem did not directly influence Bush’s work.

  * The choral section of ‘Hello Earth’ is taken from a Georgian folk song called ‘Zinzkaro’, which Bush heard performed by the Vocal Ensemble Gordela on the soundtrack of Werner Herzog’s 1979 German vampire film Nosferatu The Vampyre, one of her more esoteric borrowings.

  * On the 12-inch Bush gently mocks the song’s hippyish vibe by arranging an impromptu ‘That Cloud Looks Like …’ competition mid-song, featuring friends and family and a parade of very Pythonesque silly voices.

  * Bush’s work contains many examples where the moment of creative breakthrough is portrayed as essentially orgasmic. Given that she had read the book in 1976, it’s distinctly possible that ‘Symphony In Blue’ – with its triple threat of God, sex, and the colour blue – was partly inspired by reading about Reich’s theory.

  * The progress of ‘The Big Sky’ wasn’t helped by the fact it was released only days after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union; not everyone was gleefully looking up at the clouds, although it did rather underline the song’s less obvious, less positive message of impending disaster.

  * It is not her only collection of previously released material. The Single File video and box-set of singles were released as a stop-gap between The Dreaming and Hounds Of Love, while This Woman’s Work was a lavish compendium of her entire output plus B-sides and rarities, released in 1990.

  “She has an ability to focus on and give to the camera something special about herself which might only last a fraction of a second. It’s quite a mysterious process.” – Gered Mankowitz. Diving into The Sensual World, 1989 (TS/KEYSTONE USA/REX FEATURES)

  “She succeeded in looking and sounding both utterly true to herself and yet also conveniently in tune with the mood music of the mid-Eighties: big hair and great melodic hooks.” (TOM SHEEHAN/LFI)

  “If Bush had planned to seriously pursue acting, she may have needed a substantial amount of assistance.” Appearing as Angela Watkins in the Comic Strip’s 1990 film, Les Dogs.

  “They were so emotionally on the same wavelength, there wasn’t much need for words except where there was a specific thing that Kate wanted them to do.” - Borimira Nedeva. Bush with the Trio Bulgarka.

  “She ain’t daft. People shouldn’t be fooled by the mystical, hippie stuff. This girl is very, very tough.” – Brian Southall. A wary Bush scans the landscape for enemy fire. (KEVIN CUMMINS/GETTY IMAGES)

  “Much of Bush’s creative world spins out from a very tight-knit cluster of central spokes.” Prime examples include (clockwise from top left) Terry Gilliam, Midge Ure, David Gilmour, the man who first brought her to the attention of EMI, and Peter Gabriel.

  TOP LEFT: (CLIVE DIXON/REX FEATURES), TOP RIGHT: (REX FEATURES), ABOVE LEFT: (RICHARD YOUNG/REX FEATURES), ABOVE RIGHT: (DAVE HOGAN/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES)

  “She’d had enough of all that.” – Colin Lloyd-Tucker. Bush lashes out at an intrusive photographer as Del Palmer plays peacemaker, February, 1991. The drama was captured by the tabloids.

  “It was a weird, fractious, fragmented time, and nothing seemed to gel.” – Haydn Bendall. Bush puts on a brave face amidst the upheaval of making The Red Shoes and The Line, The Cross And The Curve. (TS/KEYSTONE USA / REX FEATURES)

  A still from Bush’s performance of ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ on Des O’Connor Tonight in late 1993. One of her last television recordings to date, it has never been broadcast. (FREMANTLEMEDIA LTD/REX FEATURES)

  Bush chats with fellow guests Lenny Henry and Victoria Wood on Aspel & Company, June 20, 1993. The date would have been her late mother’s 75th birthday (ITV/REX FEATURES)

  “She turned up in an audience of her peers and got the best reception of anybody throughout the event; that was something completely undistorted by ‘the legend’, and she was knocked out by it.” – Tony Wadsworth. Bush briefly re-enters public life at the Q Awards, October 29, 2001 (RICHARD YOUNG/REX FEATURES)

  “She is never coming ‘back’ in any meaningful sense, because it is fame, rather than her innate sense of privacy, that has been the great anomaly of her life.” An increasingly rare public appearance by Bush, attending a music industry reception at Buckingham Palace, March 1, 2005. (FIONA HANSON/TIM GRAHAM PICTURE LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES)

  10

  “Put Your Feet Down, Child. You’re All Grown Up Now”

  BUSH turned 30 on July 30, 1988. She spent the day volunteering as a shop assistant at Blazer’s boutique in London to raise money, alongside scores of other celebrities, for an AIDS charity (which was in itself significant; the disease was soon to have a direct impact on her life and music), looking relaxed and happy as she posed for the inevitable photo op in front of the equally inevitable cake. There was no sign of the additional weight around her face and body which had been so apparent when she appeared at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball in April 1987 and was even more evident when she descended from the heavens to sing ‘Don’t Give Up’ with Peter Gabriel at Earls Court that summer, and which brought with it tabloid rumours – cheap shots in all but name – that she was pregnant.

  Nothing quite so dramatic was happening, just another recurrence of an imbalance in the work-diet-exercise dynamic. To rectify the situation, Stewart Avon Arnold was called in to put together a programme designed to get her back into shape. “Once or twice a week I’d go over to her house and give her a work out,” he says. “It was very regimented, it had to be. There was no, ‘Right, that’s enough, you can relax now if you want to.’ No, no, no! I did it as though it were a professional class. She came out totally sweating and exhausted, otherwise there’s no point. It was a pure 90 minutes work out, physical training and dancing. We would sit around and have a cup of tea and a chat afterwards, that was something to look forward to.”

  Like the gaining and shedding of a few pounds, on the surface the changes taking place in Bush’s life were almost comically fractional. She tried to cut down on her smoking and switched from Benson & Hedges to the milder Silk Cut; she was spotted at the odd show, including those by Dave Gilmour’s Pink Floyd, her new friend Nigel Kennedy and old collaborator Davey Spillane, all of whom would appear on the next album; she added fish to her diet, at the same time as lending her name to the Vegetarian Society’s campaign to stop excessively cruel practices within the meat production industry.

  There were, as ever, no great personal extravagances or jaunts to far flung sunny climes – “I’d rather stay at home,”1 she shrug
ged – although she did find time for a short break in France with her family. Off duty she was usually dressed down in jeans, jumpers, boots or trainers and, as ever, chose to relax by watching films and television and, increasingly, gardening. She appeared on BBC 2’s Rough Guide To Europe in August 1988 to select her favourite sights in London, and seemed reconciled with the city; she was once again based mostly at Court Road in Eltham.

  And yet, while hardly a gravely tolling bell, her thirtieth birthday provides a useful point of reference. In the years and songs that immediately follow, a shadow slowly falls across Bush’s work. Not the metaphysical phantoms, demons and ghosts that have always lurked in the psyche of her songs, to be called up and dismissed when the need arises, but something less easy to negotiate: the deeper, longer shadows of death, disenchantment, broken relationships and ageing arrive on her doorstep and – often clumsily and uncomfortably, as though she really has no choice – inveigle their way into the heart of her music.

  She was already up to her hips in the next album, which for the first time involved a close collaboration with other female singers. Bush first heard the extraordinary diaphonic siren call of the Trio Bulgarka in 1985, towards the end of the Hounds Of Love sessions. It hit her with a physical force, demanding her attention, though it would be three years before their paths finally converged.

  The Trio consisted of Yanka Rupkina, Eva Georgieva and Stoyanka Boneva, three middle-aged women who had been singing traditional Bulgarian music both together and apart for a couple of decades and had contributed to the semi-legendary compilation Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, first released by a Swiss label in 1975 and later reissued, in 1986, on Britain’s hip indie imprint 4AD. Bulgarian folk had already exerted a small but appreciable influence on western popular music. In the mid- to late-Sixties, the State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir’s album, Music Of Bulgaria, The Ensemble Of The Bulgarian Republic, was released on the Nonesuch label and reached the likes of David Crosby and Graham Nash, soaking up the vibes a world away in the blissed-out, false idyll of Laurel Canyon. They were stunned by its otherworldly sound.

  “Those women sing rings around everybody in the world,” said Crosby many years later. “They make the Beach Boys sound loose. They did things that no one else has ever done. Repeatedly. And they were a huge influence on Nash and myself both. We listened to that album probably a couple of hundred times. There is no question they influenced me, strongly. I thought that was the best part singing I have ever heard in my life.”2

  Almost 20 years later, it was Paddy (but of course) who first introduced Bush to this astonishing music. She was “devastated”3 by its emotional purity, likening their voices to those of angels, although there was nothing sweet or mellifluous about it. Singing from the throat rather than the chest, the trio employed diaphonic stylings, the lead vocalist singing the melody while the others sustained a single drone note, creating an effect much like that of a bagpipe. Punctuating the dissonant, brittle harmonies in sevenths and ninths with strange whoops, trills and yelps, the results were raw and powerful, utterly alien to western ears and yet touching the receptive listener at a profoundly deep level.

  The three women had been involved in the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir and, like all its members, came from the more remote, rural regions of Bulgaria. Together they sang the preserved music of a lost world. “[Bulgaria] was under the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, and the part of the population that wasn’t slaughtered went into hiding in the mountains,” says Borimira Nedeva, a Bulgarian musicologist, composer and translator who, in the Eighties, was executive manager in the copyright agency of the country’s state music department and worked closely with Bush on her sessions with the Trio. “They made nests of culture that couldn’t be reached, and they preserved language, [identity], songs. It was absolutely isolated for 500 years, and these songs are sung in [that] old style.”

  The influence of Irish folk music had steadily become more pronounced in Bush’s music, and in making an atavistic connection with Bulgarian peasant music she perhaps subconsciously recognised a link with the musical heritage of her mother. “Irish (and Scottish) folk music and Bulgarian folk music have so much in common, that one wonders how it jumped through the whole of Europe,” says Nedeva. “There are so many things that I just can’t explain: bagpipes, tartan, the folk stories, the stamping of the feet in the dances. When I see Riverdance I think, this is a Bulgarian folk dance! But they have sharp differences as well, which is why a lot of people can’t make the parallel. The style of singing is totally different.”

  After hearing the Trio, Bush resolved to use the women’s voices in some capacity, but it took her nearly three years to develop the thought and also to pluck up the courage. Faced with the purest of folk sources, she worried that mere pop music was perhaps an unbecoming home for such deep reserves of raw beauty and unadorned emotion. She was concerned that the Trio would be “belittled”4 by her music, but it wasn’t as big as leap as it might have first appeared: it was simply her boldest attempt yet at unifying musical worlds.

  Eventually, she phoned producer Joe Boyd. A genuine pioneer in the development of folk-rock and much else besides, Boyd had worked with everyone from Fairport Convention, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band to John Martyn, Billy Bragg and R.E.M., and had first become involved with the Trio Bulgarka in 1986, when he visited Bulgaria to put together the all-star folk group Balkana, of which the Trio were a part. He subsequently signed them to his Hannibal label and released their album The Forest Is Crying in 1988.

  “The phone rang in my office and my assistant looked at me funny as she pressed the hold button,” recalls Boyd. “‘It’s Kate Bush for you,’ she said. Kate told me that she had heard – from Danny Thompson, I believe – that I was the man to talk to about Bulgarian music. She said she wanted to have Bulgarian harmonies on a couple of tracks on her new album. I told her the best way to accomplish that would be to go to Sofia and work out the arrangements there. She hates to fly, but agreed to go next time I went, which was a month or so after our conversation.”

  In October 1988 Bush duly flew to Sofia, a giant leap out of her physical comfort zone and, even for an artist as fearless as she, a bold step into unknown musical territory. She stayed in the capital for a weekend, meeting the Trio and attempting to find some common ground between her songs and their culture. The following week all four women were back in London for several more days’ intense work on three songs; within the space of a fortnight they were done, and Bush had radically altered the landscape of her new album. When it comes to her music, she often resembles a chess Grand Master: she can spend an inordinate amount of time plotting her next move, but she can certainly move fast enough when it’s time to strike.

  The Bulgarian sessions gave fresh impetus to a project that had been stuttering a little, struggling to find its identity. With much of 1986 given over to publicity and feeling for a new musical direction, it was early 1987 before Bush turned seriously to the new record. She was given a push from the outside. One of her most accessible, enduringly beautiful songs, ‘This Woman’s Work’ was written in the spring of that year for the romantic comedy She’s Having A Baby. It was a bespoke creation, commissioned by the film’s American director John Hughes and designed specifically to match the scene in which an expectant father (Kevin Bacon) sits in a hospital waiting room and silently faces up to his considerable shortcomings as a husband and a man while his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) struggles to deliver a breach baby. The song was a perfect fit, and in truth the power of Bush’s voice, unadorned piano and carefully crafted words gave the scene an emotional punch the rest of the movie failed to sustain or arguably even deserved.

  ‘This Woman’s Work’ touches on familiar Bush concerns. Its urgings that we make the most of life and its regret at words and acts of love left unexpressed (“All the things I should’ve given but I didn’t”) echo ‘All The Love’, but the sense of it being almost a sequel to �
��The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ (time, finally, for this overgrown boy to stop being a kid) ensures that it also looks forwards, neatly teasing out some of the themes that would become central to her next two albums: growing up, breaking apart, facing adversity, female strength – above all, a putting away of childish things.

  With additional orchestral overdubs, recorded much later with Michael Kamen at Abbey Road, ‘This Woman’s Work’ appeared on The Sensual World over a year after it graced She’s Having A Baby, essentially unchanged. She recalled the writing of it as “quick and easy, because the song had to be about [the scene]. It couldn’t be about anything else. I think that helps tremendously. The big problem with songwriting [is] the blank page; you can start anywhere.”5

  There is some evidence that the ‘blank page’, and increasingly the enormity of choice that the studio afforded her, were causing some problems. She and Del had upgraded the farm studio, adding an SSL console and many new tricks and technical treats, and she felt “overwhelmed by the amount of equipment around me. It was quite stifling, and I made a conscious effort to move away from that, and treat the song as the song.”6

  In the end The Sensual World turned out to be a songwriter’s album filtered – not always successfully – through the available technology, neither terribly elaborate in design nor particularly conceptual in its ambitions. Working primarily with her Fairlight III and the DX7 synth to form demo-masters, Bush wrote quickly but then took a break of several months while she struggled to find her direction. “I wrote a few songs but it didn’t take me long to realise I wasn’t happy with them,” she said. “I went through a period where I couldn’t write at all. I thought I’d lost it. Didn’t have anything to say and I didn’t want to go out … I went back to it bit by bit and eventually worked it through.”7