Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  There are some fine and memorable moments. The scene of Bush twirling like a musical box ballerina in a snowstorm to ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ is sublime; ‘And So Is Love’ is very powerful, while the story climaxes in a slow-motion cat-fight between Bush and Richardson which is quietly gripping. It can be fun spotting the many references to her favourite films – Night Of The Demon, The Gold Rush, The Red Shoes, The Wizard Of Oz – and there is plenty of evidence that Bush’s creative pulse was still ticking over at a steady rate. Although often tired and distracted, she was still capable of coming up with inspired ideas and was constantly willing to try new things. She certainly kept the cast and crew on their toes. During the filming of ‘Rubberband Girl’, she arrived at first light one morning and asked someone to find her a trampoline. Nobody was ever quite sure what she would come up with next.

  There is some magic in the film. It’s not the complete catastrophe that it has sometimes been painted, not least by its director, but both Bush’s ambitions and external expectations were far too high, and she suffered because of it. As anything remotely resembling a ‘film’ The Line, The Cross And The Curve simply fails. It doesn’t hang together, falling foul of the curse of the over-extended pop promo, and the script and storyline were badly malnourished. “I didn’t have time to develop the story,” she said. “I took on a bit too much.”6

  Although some interesting concepts are hinted at, nothing is pursued or resolved as the narrative cannons groggily between one song and the next. Some familiar Bush themes emerge: escaping the constraints of mind and body to achieve transcendence; spirituality, more than a dash of witchcraft and the supernatural; the power of music and dance and the dizzy compulsion of creativity, something scarily intense that takes hold and doesn’t let go. Perhaps The Line, The Cross And The Curve should really be read as a confirmation of what Bush had recently been saying in the press: music isn’t everything. I’m unlacing these red shoes and taking a break from all that stuff.

  One insurmountable problem with the film is the fact that the acting – specifically, Bush’s acting – is below par. She has occasionally displayed a measured gift for comedy during past appearances on The Kenny Everett Show or singing with Rowan Atkinson at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball; in another Comic Strip Presents … film, GLC, she produced the wildly kitsch theme song ‘Ken’ – “Who’s a funky sex machine?” – in praise of Ken Livingstone. She is obviously able to project a variety of emotions and feelings superbly through her music, and has a magnificently expressive face, but acting with dialogue was another matter. She never wanted to be an actor, she said, she had no real passion for it. When she has dipped her toe into the water – Les Dogs, ‘Cloudbusting’ – it was because it was fun and brought her into contact with people she liked and could learn from. She seemed to recognise her limitations. “If I was to make [another] film I wouldn’t want to be in it so much,” she admitted.7

  She was frequently offered parts, in films, musicals, plays and TV shows, but almost always turned them down. Nic Roeg asked Bush to take the lead role in Castaway, which would have required her to spend most of her screen time naked on a beach with Oliver Reed. Although she admired Roeg, she turned the opportunity down, not on the grounds that she objected to the nudity, but rather that spending months in a confined space with the notoriously debauched Reed didn’t appeal.* The role was eventually played by Amanda Donohoe.

  If Bush had planned to seriously pursue acting, she may have needed a substantial amount of assistance. As director on The Line, The Cross And The Curve, not only was she dealing with numerous technical headaches – filming the bird and the lacing of the shoes both posed problems – but she was then coming out from behind the camera and attempting to give a convincing performance.

  The odds were stacked against her. As someone lacking meaningful directorial experience, it would have been difficult enough simply being in overall creative control of a film; trying to act at the same time (and doing so in the knowledge that she was not a naturally gifted acting performer) made it an almost impossible conjuring trick. Perhaps in a straight pop video, where Bush the Actor was not required to convincingly convey dialogue, and Bush the Director needn’t worry overly about maintaining a narrative thread, the equation seemed more plausible. But this was intended to be so much more than a mere pop video. One scene in particular underscored the problem. Before ‘Eat The Music’, Bush and Miranda Richardson perform a scene where they change positions, sizing each other up. Richardson is – typically – sure-footed, but Bush is all at sea, over-acting and over-emphasising. Her performance jars, but it needn’t have been an insurmountable glitch. The presence of a director to suggest that she take things down a notch or two would have done the trick.

  The film fell short in post-production, too, with a final cut that the editor Julian Rodd struggled in vain to convince Bush could be improved upon, and a poorly judged sound mix that bowed more to the flashy techniques of a pop promo than the requirements of film-making. The scene with Lindsay Kemp in the storm failed to pack the desired dramatic punch partly because his voice was coming from the back of the mix rather than the centre, lending an odd detachment to the scene.

  The Line, The Cross And The Curve was a ridiculously tall order simply because she was trying to do so much, so quickly, at such a difficult time. It’s hard to think of any artist who could pull off singing, dancing, writing and directing in their debut film. Nevertheless, for someone with her cinematic knowledge, her love of the form, her talent and desire for perfectionism, to achieve little more than the typically overblown Eighties and Nineties ‘concept’ video – inflated, badly acted, rambling, wracked with faux-profundity, everything coated with that shallow glossy sheen – was a bitter disappointment.

  There was some Schadenfreude in the reviews, a sense that the experience had knocked Bush’s high falutin’ artistic pretensions down a peg or two. It’s a terrific shame, and a sign of how off-kilter she was at the time, that when it came to the realisation of a long-held ambition for once this most fastidious and careful of artists rushed into it woefully ill-prepared.

  Almost exactly 12 years later, Bush was heavily involved in the creation and execution of her next video, ‘King Of The Mountain’, producing storyboards and holding lengthy meetings with Jimmy Murakami, whom she had contacted about ‘The Sensual World’ almost 20 years before and had finally got around to working with. For the first time in two decades, however, she did not direct. Tracing the journey of Elvis’s jumpsuit, from lonely wardrobe back to the arms of its owner, hiding out in the mountains and looking uncannily like Rolf Harris, it was another mini-movie, somewhere between The Snowman, the Harry Potter films and Citizen Kane. Bush brought her innate quality of presence to the screen, but it was more muted now, less frenetic. Approaching 50, her body was no longer likely to allow for the spectacular dance routines and daring role-playing of yester-year.

  This may well prove to be a positive. No matter how eccentric or occasionally misconceived the final product, her visual gifts have always been central to her work, and certainly a key part of her being regarded as an icon. There is something rather fitting, however, about the passing of time inevitably taking her further away from that side of things. At heart she is a writer, not a performer. Strip away everything about Bush, leave only the voice and the piano, and you would still have a vast world of imagination, colour and characters into which to dive. Her songs are already like little films; they have depth and texture, they construct an aural landscape which conjures up clear images, they have shape and proportion, often they have narrative, they carry mood changes, emotions and strong atmosphere. It’s all there.

  “When people listen to your record, that’s an audial experience; you don’t necessarily want to see things,” she has said. “Like when you write a song: the person singing the song is a character. Although it might be you vocally, it’s not yourself you are singing about, but that character. It’s someone who is in a situation, so you tr
eat it like a film. That’s how I see songs. They are just like a little story: you are in a situation, you are this character. This is what happens. End. That’s what human beings want desperately. We all love being read stories, and none of us get it anymore.”8

  Since she began in 1978 deconstructing and rebuilding herself almost on a song-by-song basis, Bush has rarely been less than magnetic to watch, but the misfiring The Line, The Cross And The Curve was a reminder that doing justice to these already visually audacious songs was harder than it seems; it’s a miracle, indeed, that she has pulled it off so successfully so many times. Her videos are a sweet, sexy, silly, sublime accompaniment to the music, but they are not essential. With her next record, Bush would prove once again that she could tell stories, take on roles, act them out and weave a dense, intoxicating visual spell just by using her words and her voice. But first, there was to be a break in transmission. Necessary repairs.

  * She also quickly returned the favour, recording a short, shimmering, symphonic version of ‘Brazil’ for Gilliam’s film.

  * Watch ‘The Big Sky’ video, on the other hand, and weep for the fact that she has never played live again.

  * Some scenes in this section of the Madagascan dancers with watermelons had to be re-shot for the US, because they were deemed racially provocative.

  * She did, however, contribute ‘Be Kind To My Mistakes’ to the film’s soundtrack.

  12

  How To Be Invisible

  WHILE Nick Hornby was compiling lists of his top five Elvis Costello songs in High Fidelity, Kate Bush was busy ranking her preferred songbirds. On July 4, 1996, the English songwriter Don Black, the man responsible for the lyrics of countless standards in the fields of pop, film and musical theatre, appeared on Radio Two and mentioned a recent meeting with Bush. “I asked Kate if she had a favourite singer and she said her favourite is the blackbird and her second favourite is the thrush,” he said. “Well, I told you she was different.”1

  What was intended as a breezy showbiz anecdote turned out to be something close to a profound premonition of the substance of her next album, as yet only a distant satellite orbiting far above the planet of sound. Bush had recently purchased a 160-year-old listed building, a former mill house at Theale, near Reading, about 40 miles west of London, situated on a small, natural islet by the Sheffield Mill Weir on the Kennet and Avon canal. Unlived in for over a decade, the 14-roomed house cost £750,000 and Bush spent an even larger sum modifying it to her needs. In time, she dismantled the studio at Wickham Farm and installed it in a building in the six-acre garden, which also included a guest cottage, the remains of the old water mill, and her own dance studio by the water. “She asked me about the floor and so I went to have a look at it while she was doing it, and it’s a really lovely little studio right by the lock,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “She did it properly: harlequin floor, sprung floor, ballet bars and mirrors.”

  In the upside-down world of celebrity culture, of course, this move to the country was later portrayed as a gloomy exile into a world of melancholy and paranoia. But if it was a further retreat from the spotlight, it was also a return to the most fundamental touchstone of her creativity – solitude, privacy, the sense of time stretching out like an ocean, a certain kind of direct connection with the elements around her – which had always animated her best music. By ruthlessly protecting her personal space, Bush slowly rediscovered a familiar alchemy, putting the magic of the everyday world back into her music.

  “With her you’re getting the pure expression of someone living a home life,” says Tony Wadsworth, CEO of EMI from 1998 onwards, the man who supported Bush for seven years – without hearing a note of new music – as she endeavoured to restore the essential balance between her work and her family. “Because what Aerial is, as a piece of work, is someone obviously speaking about a very private and domesticated life. It’s massively personal. And it wouldn’t surprise you to know that a lot of birds fly into her garden!” The Red Shoes struggled to get off the ground; Aerial literally means ‘of the air’. Those songbirds proved to be significant co-writers.

  The idea, widely perpetuated upon the release of Aerial in 2005, that Bush signed off on The Red Shoes and its companion film and immediately disappeared down a foxhole – “vanished from view” as the Times and many others put it – only to emerge 12 years later is convenient to the mythology but not quite true. Like a train whose engine has cut out, her momentum carried her a little way forwards before she came to a halt in a secluded siding.

  She embarked on a series of promotional interviews to mark the limited cinematic release of The Line, The Cross And The Curve in April 1994 (the video went on general sale in October; the world shrugged); her cover of ‘The Man I Love’ was released as a single and briefly entered the charts in July; in September, she donated two pieces of artwork to War Child for a celebrity charity auction, entitled ‘Someone Lost At Sea Hoping Someone In A Plane Will Find Them’ (‘The Ninth Wave’, it seemed, was the concept that just kept on giving) and ‘Someone In A Plane Hoping To Find Someone Lost At Sea’, each consisting of a black surface containing a tiny, twinkling red light. And there was a rather perfunctory performance on Top Of The Pops in November 1994, her first on the show for over eight years and her last to date, to promote the release of the final single from The Red Shoes, ‘And So Is Love’, as it limped to number 26. All in all, by her standards we actually saw and heard quite a lot from Bush in 1994.

  More intriguingly, the same year she accepted a commission to write several brief pieces of music to accompany the $30m US TV ad campaign for the launch of Coca-Cola’s new fruit drink Fruitopia (the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser was the voice in the UK; this, clearly, was to be the soft drink of choice for fans of enigmatic female singers the world over). It seemed an incongruous move. Bush had consistently turned down advances of this nature, although she had appeared in one Japanese television advert in 1978, singing ‘Them Heavy People’ and intoning the tag line – ‘We have many varieties of mood within us; it’s up to you to choose’ – with a comical lack of enthusiasm, all for the glory of Seiko watches.

  Ever since, her unwillingness to bow to commercial pressure and use her music to promote a solely commercial purpose had been resolute. The motivation for her changing tack wasn’t clear but was probably varied: far from the commercial ingénue she sometimes appears, certainly the financial rewards would have been extremely significant; perhaps she liked the tone of the ads, which were relatively innovative and visually stimulating and over which she was given complete artistic control. She may also have recognised an opportunity to cast the net of her music a little wider, while also finding a home for all the melodic waifs and rhythmic strays that had never quite found a home in her ‘proper’ songs; and indeed, the snippets, averaging around 30 seconds each and entitled ‘Solstice’, ‘Some People’, ‘Nice’, ‘Skin’, ‘Soul’, ‘What If’, ‘Thirsty’, ‘Person’ and ‘Fighting Fruit’, were uniformly fascinating, each one hinting at a longer piece, several reminiscent of the kind of odd, rhythmic, electronic pop music she was making around the time of The Dreaming.*

  A little later her friend and regular collaborator Donal Lunny curated a compilation called Common Ground, featuring contemporary artists singing Irish songs. Recording her contribution in 1995, Bush sang ‘Mná Na h-Éireann’ (‘Women Of Ireland’), a well known piece with vaguely nationalist leanings based on the words of the eighteenth century poet Peadar O Doirnin. It was a lush performance, her voice backed by harp and strings, and sung – bravely, and rather well – in Gaelic. “I’m sure Ma gave me a helping hand!” she said.2

  These were, however, soft footfalls in a forest of gathering silence; slowly, she wandered out of public view. It should have come as no great surprise. The experience of making and facing up to The Red Shoes had constituted a natural full stop. She had been writing and recording – and occasionally performing – since the age of 18 with barely a gap in between, and despite the see
mingly modest output – one tour, a few videos, seven records over two decades – each successive album seemed to take more and more out of her.

  “I remember talking to her when she had just put The Red Shoes out,” says Bob Mercer. “I was living in Nashville, and I said, ‘What are you going to do now?’ She said, ‘I’m going to take a rest for a while, this writing and recording and mixing and putting it out and promoting it just exhausts me.’ I said, ‘Fuck me, Kate, you do it every five fucking years, for Christ’s sake!’ But she spends a long time and she is meticulous, and it shows, it really does. You’re talking about obsessive behaviour. She is obsessive, those kind of people are, and it tends to impinge on their lives, and not just their artistic lives.”

  The impact of the relative critical and artistic failure of The Red Shoes and The Line, The Cross And The Curve shouldn’t be underestimated. She had certainly had her fair share of bad reviews and naysayers in the past, and she had also frequently felt that she hadn’t quite achieved what she had intended on a record, but rarely had the two coincided quite so conclusively. Critics began comparing her unfavourably to Bjork and even Tori Amos, complaining – with some justification – that her eccentricities were now more interesting than the music. It touched a nerve. Everything Bush does has the imprint of quality and integrity (her voice, her music and her lyrics all are given a huge investment of time and care), but when the muse is misfiring sometimes the whole seems to be considerably less than the sum of its parts.