More worryingly, she felt decidedly lukewarm about one of her own albums for the first time since 1978. Even before it came out she was almost apologetic, explaining it was “the best I could do at the time.”3 She stood by most of the songs but later felt that, at 55 minutes, The Red Shoes was at least ten minutes too long, falling foul of the modern temptation to fill an entire CD with music rather than using only what is up to par.
Also, there was rather a lot of negative feedback about the album and film coming from her most loyal fan base, through fanzines and – increasingly – the internet. She and Jay and Paddy, always amenable and available to trusted sources, subsequently backed away a little from direct contact; the 1994 fan convention was to be the last Bush attended. She may have a strong centre of self-belief, but she is hyper-sensitive to perceptions of her. “I was actually viewed in quite a negative light at that point … it dissipated my energy severely and threw me into a state of severe exhaustion,” she said later. “You just get worn down.”4
She was negotiating a fairly complicated confluence of major life changes: some practical, some planned, some unexpected, some challenging, some sad and some immensely joyful. Re-reading the few significant interviews she conducted upon the release of The Red Shoes, it’s clear with hindsight that she was saying some significant goodbyes. “I am at a point … where there’s a few things I’d like to be doing with my life,” she said, speaking in drizzly Cricklewood during the dubbing sessions for The Line, The Cross And The Curve. “I’d like to catch up. Over the next few years I’d like to take some time off…. It’s silly that I haven’t taken more breaks. I’ve spent a long time in the city and I love being by the sea, and I’m starting to pine for it. I’d like to put energy into stuff like that … I haven’t wasted any of my life yet, but I’m a bit fed up of being stuck in a studio.”5
For many, the rhythm of the jobbing musician simply becomes their life, often with consequential diminishing returns. Bush was determined not to let that happen. Her mention of the ocean evoked memories of her childhood holidays in Birchington-on-Sea; when she later talked about a new love of visiting museums, it brought to mind her annus mirabilis of 1976, when she was soaking up knowledge and inspiration from all quarters. At 35, there was a sense of someone taking stock and realising there were several significant tears in the fabric of her existence, a certain loss of direction. There is a clear desire to get back to the stabilising nexus of family, and home – or perhaps more accurately, since the death of her mother and her parting with Del, to establish her own domestic nest.
It’s very easy to get hysterical about what happened to Bush in the years between 1994 and 2005. As she became less and less visible, the tabloid press needed little encouragement to peddle the by now standard dark rumours of nervous breakdowns, binge eating, a woman in perpetual retreat in some overgrown gilded cage, lost behind high gates and shuttered windows in her “vampire castle”.6 They even ran a story that she had officially changed her name on the voters’ register to Catherine Earnshaw.
If not quite plumbing the depths of this Gothic nightmare, it’s clear that it was a very difficult period. Although she had taken some time off during the making of The Red Shoes, she hadn’t really addressed the death of her mother – “I hadn’t grieved properly”7 – and was also adjusting to the end of a 15-year relationship, and the beginning of another with Danny McIntosh. After her split from Del she moved to a flat in south London overlooking the Thames – the proximity to water seemed to have an increasing allure – before moving with McIntosh into the renovated house in Theale, which eventually became their primary base; Court Road was kept on but was increasingly not used, and was eventually sold for £900,000 in 2002. Shortly afterwards she bought a £2.5m cliff-top house on the South Hams peninsula in Dorset, with a boathouse and private beach.
Through 1994 and 1995 there were periods of isolation, exhaustion and something resembling a black dog scratching at the door. “I slept, I spent a lot of time sleeping,” she said. “I used to enjoy bad television, like really bad quiz programmes or really bad sitcoms…. I needed to be in a position where there were no demands … I was very quiet. I was just trying to recuperate.”8
The subtext is clear. However, this dark night of the soul was relatively brief. And far from being a recluse, she was still around if you knew where to look: at David Gilmour’s fiftieth birthday party at Fulham Town Hall; in theatre land, at the Lion King and the musical Maddie; in Julies, a discreetly high-end restaurant in Holland Park, where she could be seen relaxing with, among others, Robert De Niro and Bob Geldof after a Van Morrison concert. Attending the People’s Banquet in 1997, held at the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall to celebrate the Queen’s Golden wedding anniversary, she shared a table with John Major, whom she had first met six years earlier when, as Prime Minister, he invited her and Joe Boyd to Downing Street as an acknowledgment of their work promoting Bulgarian music. In 1996 she spent some time at the Royal College of Art, working on a bronze sculpture inspired by Billie Holiday. Entitled ‘Strange Fruit’, it was donated to another War Child auction and suggested fairly conclusively that her future did not lie in visual art.
She did not advertise her whereabouts, but neither was she hiding under lock and key. She also began to compose again. Instead of treating writing as a job or a compulsion – pushing and pushing until something came – she reversed the process; when an idea arrived, and the time was appropriate, she would address it. In 1996 she wrote and recorded the demo version of ‘King Of The Mountain’ – indeed, some of the finished track and much of the final vocal dates back to that time. A song about fame, isolation and possible redemption, it was inspired by the notion that Elvis Presley, a modern day Citizen Kane, was still alive, watching from the mountain top, ready to “rise again”.*
A year later she wrote ‘Sunset’ – a hymn to her favourite crooner, the blackbird – and ‘An Architect’s Dream’, a sweet, drifting sigh of a song that pulls together the work of a street painter with the meeting of two lovers, both parties engaged in their own acts of precarious creation. The beginnings are inauspicious enough – a “kiss,” a “smudge” – but look “what it becomes.”
The knowledge that she was pregnant when she wrote those words invests them with an extra level of significance. Bush was finally looking forward to the prospect of motherhood at the age of 39. She had been asked about children almost from the moment she had first become famous, and throughout her twenties had always said she could not conceive of having both a family and a career. She had stuck to this mantra for many years, but her maternal instinct was strong and her position had changed with the passing of time and the turn of events.
In an interview in early 1994, an admirably fearless writer from the US magazine Details, using a transatlantic phone line for cover, pressed her on her desire for children and the impact of her mother’s death and got an unexpectedly straight answer: “I would like to have kids, yeah,” said Bush. “It’s certainly loss that heightens the realisation that life is short …” In fact, she had wanted to have children for some time, and her pregnancy was a source of profound joy.
Her son Albert, known to all as Bertie, was born in July 1998. Naturally, her creative pursuits once again took a back seat during this period, though for very different reasons. Although she and McIntosh were “completely shattered much of the time”9, she found herself entirely consumed with love for her child. “I didn’t want anything to interfere with that process,” she said. “I wanted to give as much time as I possibly could to my son. I love being with him, he’s a lovely little boy and he won’t be little for very long.10 The idea was that he would come first, and then the record would come next.”11
“When she became a mother she turned into her own mother,” says Charlie Morgan. “She had a good role model, [and] she became her mum: ‘This is what I’m doing right now. I’ve been the singer songwriter and I’m going to be a mum for a while, until Bertie is old enough to understand. I ha
ve this human being that I need to protect.’ Kate’s songs were her babies, definitely, and when they turned out to be less than she expected she was always very disappointed. I think the mothering instinct took over. All things considered, it is the ultimate creative act!”
Tony Wadsworth made it one of his first objectives to make contact with Bush and establish a bond on a purely personal level. It was apparent to him that making a new record was not of primary importance. “It was pretty clear that her priority was her family, specifically this new baby, who was just a few months old,” he says. “One of the … nice things about paying visits to her place was meeting her and her partner and watching the baby grow.”
It was hardly surprising that Bush did not announce the birth with an interview – he was not a new album, after all, he was a human being – a Hello! photo spread or indeed any kind of public declaration. However, it is a testament to both her vice-like mastery of privacy and the fierce loyalty she inspires that news of her pregnancy, the birth and the subsequent existence of Bertie was kept firmly within her circle of friends and associates for almost two years. She could have counted on discretion from within the medical profession, but there were others in her orbit who simply wouldn’t have known who she was, such was the discrepancy between Bush the Pop Goddess and the way she presented herself on a daily basis. “A lot of people I mix with are the mothers of Bertie’s friends,” she later said. “I don’t even know if some of them know who I am.”12 This, no doubt, she regarded as progress.
Of course, those whom Bush wanted to know about Bertie were well aware. Her family, naturally, and close friends like Michael Kamen and Peter Gabriel, as well as people like Tony Wadsworth and artists she barely knew in the industry like Jean Michel Jarre, who had recently contacted her about a collaboration. Though she insisted there was no great denial or cover up, she managed to enforce a remarkable and rather fearsome feat of prolonged and collective omerta. She felt it was simply nobody else’s business.
It was left to Peter Gabriel in an online interview in 2000 to unintentionally spill the beans. In response to a question about his old friend and collaborator, he answered: ‘Kate Bush has become a mother. I have not been to see her for about six months but I think she is working on her music now.’ When the news broke that Bush had a two-year-old child there was a predictable flurry of press interest. The Mirror and Mail On Sunday each ran typically immoderate articles in mid-July, the latter under the headline THE SECRET SON OF KATE BUSH, exhausting the whole lexicon of pejorative clichés: ‘Miss Haversham’ [sic], ‘forlorn and derelict’, ‘reclusive’, ‘lonely and isolated’, ‘a web of secrecy’, ‘perfect hiding place’, ‘turning her back on showbusiness.’
She had already grown properly sick of the press. In many ways, the tabloid’s perception of Bush has never moved far beyond that initial first impression cultivated in early 1978. They have never understood her, and what the tabloids don’t understand (which is plenty) they simplify and mock. She was caricatured as either the screeching sexpot or, later, the dotty recluse. The music was an irrelevance.
What had once been an irritant was by now something far more intrusive. By 1990 she had taken to recording interviews on her own tape recorder, while Colin Lloyd-Tucker recalls “sitting in the kitchen in Eltham, and there was a picture of her in the paper at some opening. I said, ‘Oh, there’s a really nice picture of you in the paper,’ and she didn’t even want to look at it. She said, ‘Oh, I’m avoiding all that kind of stuff.’ She’d had enough of all of that.” During a visit with Del to see the Ben Elton play Silly Cow at the Theatre Royal in February 1991 she was photographed taking great exception to the intrusions of photographer Robin Kennedy, and had to be calmed down by Del as she aimed a boot at the snapper’s rear end. Afterwards the cameraman said: ‘I didn’t think that anyone so small would be able to kick so hard.’ More fool him. She had, after all, once convincingly pretended to be a donkey.
In 1993 she endured a highly combative Sunday Times interview with celebrity journalist Chrissie Iley, who found her polite but obvious hostility – her “assassin’s smile” – and her refusal to answer even the most straightforward question – what kind of doctor is your father, for instance – deeply infuriating, and you could see her point. Bush often experienced her most testing interviews with women; an early interrogator likened her to Lady Macbeth. They fancied that they could see something cold and steely lurking beneath her immaculate exterior that men – too busy rhapsodising about her dimples and tiny stature – tended to overlook.
Iley subsequently wrote what amounted to a sincerely felt hatchet job. The articles about Bush’s son and her lifestyle went even deeper. Shortly after they appeared, she sent a message to her fan club:
Hello everyone,
Here is a press statement I have issued and I wanted you to see it….
“A number of inaccurate comments have been made about me in recent articles which I am taking further. I just want everyone to know I am very happy and proud to have such a beautiful son, Bertie – he is absolutely gorgeous. Far from being secretive, I am just trying to be a good protective mother and give him as normal a childhood as possible whilst preserving his privacy – surely everyone can understand that. I am having great fun being a Mum as well as working on a new album.”
I hope you will understand how invaluable it has been to me to have a very fulfilling and normal start to motherhood and I felt unable to tell you about Bertie previously for reasons already explained. He is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. He is my joy and I’m very happy and very busy being a Mum. I am finding time to write for the new album and very pleased so far.
Thanks again for your lovely letters and kind wishes. I hope you will be happy for me.
Lots of love, Kate XX
Indeed it would seem she went out of her way to ensure that her son was given every chance to enjoy normal, uninhibited social interaction. “I was at Paddy’s fiftieth birthday party [in December 2002] and she had her little boy then,” says Colin Lloyd-Tucker. “She was in good form, she was in good spirits – very much a mum, that’s the main difference I noticed. Suddenly there’s a little chap running around, so we had a good mums and dads kind of chat. She looked well and seemed happy, talking about going to garden fetes and school starting and all that.” At Terry Gilliam’s sixtieth birthday party, in November 2000, she bumped into many old friends, and introduced them to an energetic Bertie. Little wonder, they might have pondered, that she was now writing songs about washing machines.
The fuss had all but blown over by the time Bush broke cover at the Q awards on October 29, 2001 to receive the Classic Songwriter award.* She had been out of the public eye long enough for her attendance to cause quite a stir. She looked happy and healthy, smartly dressed in a black trouser suit, and her obvious joy at being a mother ran though her brief acceptance speech and her subsequent conversations, almost to the point of parody. For all that Bush was keen to keep her son out of the public eye, like most new mothers she was certainly not averse to making him a conversation piece. She revealed Bertie had won an inflatable hammer at a local fair, was into Bob The Builder and Elvis Presley, and that she had finally given up smoking.
The event was a timely reminder of the solid foundations that supported the rickety infrastructure of rumour and hysteria, and how much she had been missed. It was an opportunity for her to witness the direct appreciation of a diverse group of contemporaries – ranging from Cher to John Lydon, Elvis Costello and Liam Gallagher – who had no truck with cobbled together mythology; they simply recognised her strength and her artistry. She greeted the rapturous applause with an orgasmic squeak – ‘Oooh, I’ve just come!’ – strategically intended to puncture any notions of her as some precious, fragile, doe-eyed creature.
“I remember talking to her about it beforehand and she‘d obviously thought about it really seriously because she’d not been out in public for ages,” recalls Tony Wadsworth. “The fact that she tu
rned up in an audience of her peers – if there are such things – and got the best reception of anybody throughout the event, that to me was something that was completely undistorted by the legend. Here was a roomful of musicians and producers and people in the industry who know that a lot of this imagery can sometimes be artifice and can be distorted, [and] what they were doing that day was applauding her incredible talent that has sustained. And she was knocked out by it. It was interesting seeing her chin-wagging with John Lydon. You never fail to be surprised by Kate – they knew each other, these two very uncompromising artists.”
She told the audience at the Park Lane Hotel that she was working on her new record – and she was, although it was by necessity a part-time process. The way Bush had always worked, the intensity with which she approached her music and the hours, days and years she put in simply couldn’t continue if she was to be the mother she wanted to be. In the past, music was ultimate act of creation. When the act of creation took on a human face – “I look at him, know I gave birth to him, and I know magic does exist,”13 she said – music was bound to take a back seat.
“I think she was obsessed with the music [in the past],” says Haydn Bendall. “We were younger then. Now she has Albert. I’d never insult her by saying she has a better perspective now, but maybe she has a different perspective.” Or, as Bob Mercer puts it, rather more succinctly: “She never chose to have hoards of nannies. She’s not fucking Madonna, she does it all herself. She’s just a ferocious mother. It’s wonderful to watch it all happen.”
Under the Ivy Page 38
