Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  If some songs were opaque, ‘Bertie’ was courageously direct and truly unabashed, not just lyrically but also in summing up the clear distinction Bush makes between her work and her life. She poured her love for her son into her song, the album artwork featured pictures of him, she admitted she could “talk about [him] all day,”16 and yet she remained fiercely protective of his privacy. The message was clear. Bertie is not shielded away, he is the central part of my life and therefore part of my work, but he is not up for grabs. Musically, it was a rare and pleasurable opportunity to hear her singing with acoustic stringed instruments providing a tugging obligato.

  In the beautiful, effortlessly slinky ‘An Architect’s Dream’ she sang of the artist’s “best mistake,” another important strand of her creative ethos. “She likes a happy accident,” says Colin Lloyd-Tucker. “Anyone who is genuinely creative will take that on board. On ‘The Red Shoes’, she said ‘Just put a harmony on there, whatever comes into your head, let’s see what happens.’ Me and Paddy both went into the same harmony, which was actually the wrong note, and she said, ‘That’s fantastic, leave it like that.’ It wasn’t the note we were trying for, but she heard that it fitted. She picks up on things like that, she’s very good at spotting them.”

  Not everything worked. Dear old Rolf Harris sounded like he was having a minor seizure on ‘The Painter’s Link’, while parts of the first disc were hit and miss. Aside from the ‘King Of The Mountain’, ‘Joanni’ struggled to engage, while ‘?’ was a rather listless piece of synthetic background music on which Bush at least proved that – if not quite singing the phone book – she could at least sing the handset, reciting the numbers as though each were some lost holy scroll.

  Her interest in numerology was nothing new. Long attracted to the ‘Strange Phenomena’ of coincidence and synchronicity, astrology and the paranormal, she had been struck in her teens by the fact that she and Emily Brontë shared a birthday, while David Paton also recalls conversations about such matters back in the Seventies. “Her boyfriend’s name was Del Palmer, mine was David Paton,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You’ve got the same initials, but did you know you’ve got the same birthday?* She was always interested in things to do with numbers or anything slightly unusual.”

  ‘How To Be Invisible’ was a more playful immersion in a supernatural world, another ghostly tale rolled out over a wonderfully elastic, spooky rhythm. Bush was the witch with her “eye of Braille” and her “hem of anorak,” every breath of wind and falling leaf a potential unseen force flitting through the world. And is there a better summation of her music than the image of a million doors, each one leading to a million more?

  The second disc, A Sky Of Honey, began with her piano accompanying cooing birdsong, a sound that runs like a thread through the whole disc, as the music works its way up and up, further into the air, peaking on the last few minutes of ‘Nocturn’, where Bush finally lets fly vocally as she takes a moonlit swim. Despite the Balearic feel of the music, she is singing of the Atlantic, the sea directly below her Dorset home. This feels like a shared private moment of release. The final song, the title track, sustains the mood of energy and rebirth. It ends, fittingly, with laughter.

  Aerial was a terribly generous record. “My work is very, very personal and intimately connected to my everyday life,” she said, and she was as good as her word.17 Musically, after the kitchen-sink overload of The Red Shoes there was a blessed sense of light and space; a marked reduction in backing vocals, and far less technological fuss. The use of rhythm as a songwriting tool was largely absent, too. This time the textures were more traditional; piano and guitar, natural drums, while her voice had deepened and matured. Aerial came through deep and clear, befitting a deeper, clearer life. It was an exorcism of excess, the touchstones of her musical, domestic and imaginative life boiled down to their essence.

  Everywhere there was a sense of distillation, a masterly grasp of what was necessary and what was extraneous. It was also imbued with a real sense of an external life – of travelling beyond her own mind and into the wider world, to Italy and Spain, or just to the beach – that few of her previous records had possessed. Indeed, very little of it resembled anything Bush had done before, yet she was back in tune with something elemental, a pastoral sensuality, that lay at the heart of her work. Aerial is all sun, sea and sky. The pulse rate is slower than Hounds Of Love, but there are certain similarities of intent. ‘Prologue’ even sounded a little like a slowed down ‘Watching You Without Me’.

  Unsurprisingly, much of the critical emphasis was weighted away from the content of these complex songs and placed very firmly upon Bush’s prolonged absence. That, sadly but perhaps understandably, was the real story. After a recording silence of 12 years, it was little wonder that everybody wanted some time with her. Predictably, she was even less enamoured of the promotional process than ever before.

  “Most artists, regardless of how they’re disposed to that whole palaver, will just take a deep fucking swallow and suck it up,” says Bob Mercer. “She’s not one of them. Since Bertie it’s even more [horrible]. She doesn’t really see beyond going into the studio and making music, she really doesn’t stretch beyond that. Whatever the record company want to do doesn’t really engage her. I don’t think anyone at EMI is driving up to Reading and saying, ‘Kate, you gotta get off your ass and do things here.’ And if anyone came to me to suggest doing that I’d advise them against it!”

  She was highly selective in her choice of interviews, but the fact that the public and her fan base didn’t actually see her once during the entire release window of Aerial was, even for Bush, extreme. There were a few carefully chosen print interviews in the UK, Europe and North America, a little radio and a video for ‘King Of The Mountain’, but no personal appearances or television spots. Tony Wadsworth was philosophical, and entirely unsurprised, by her unwillingness to undertake a lot of promotion.

  “I’ve always taken the view that one of the aspects of dealing with music as a business is that with a real artist you’ve got to take the full package – and that includes things that they’re going to do and things that they’re not going to do,” he says. “If one of the things they will do is make an artistic statement that is excellent and lasting, I’d rather they did that than go on a Saturday morning TV show. It’s like pushing water up a hill – why do that with people who you know are not going to do it? You can bang your head against a brick wall forever. With Kate, you accepted what you got.”

  Most of the promotional interviews she did consent to were conducted from her house in Theale, and several indulged in a breathless roll call of the banal details of life chez Bush: pizza, cheese flan, crusty bread, cream cakes, tea, messy kitchens, jeans, floaty tops, children’s DVDs scattered around, the fact that she went shopping and took her son to school. There were those who suspected an element of contrivance in all this, that in showing herself to be apart from the realm of groomed, over-managed, macrobiotic celebrity culture she was very consciously declaring herself a member of The Real World. If so, it was a good act. Apart from the fact that she behaved the same way when there were no journalists present, it tallied precisely with the way she has lived her life for the past 30 years and more.

  Home, of course, was where she was most comfortable and, crucially, where she would attract the least attention. Aside from her natural reticence for publicity, there was a suggestion that, at 47, having had a baby and rarely able to keep up with her dancing, she was insecure about her more curvaceous figure and consequently reluctant to present herself to the public. Jimmy Murakami directed the video for ‘King Of The Mountain’ and recalls that “she was always worried that she’d put on weight. I thought she looked fabulous, but she kept bringing up her weight. I told her she looked lovely. I mean you can’t go back to your teenage days, and to me she still looked very good. She’d been away a long time, and we had a cameraman that she wanted who came all the way from America – it was very expensive, first cla
ss! He did the shoot, but it didn’t really require anybody that top notch.”

  Stewart Avon Arnold, on the other hand, doubts that her looks are a significant factor in her reticence to appear in public more often. “She doesn’t haven’t to worry about looking like Posh Spice or Jordan and having face lifts and arse lifts and God knows what,” he says. “She’s very natural, Kate, very much an earth woman. As long as she looked presentable, but not to extremes.”

  The video itself, shot in London on September 15 and 16, 2005, was created using live animation techniques rather than a 3D computer because, says Murakami, Bush felt “computers don’t have that human quality.” She was closely involved in crafting the story, which depicted Elvis’s trademark rhinestone jump-suit returning to the King while a shadowy Bush weaved around the millionaire’s mansion. Like Presley in ’56, she was largely shot from the waist up. “I did a series of storyboards and sent it to her, and she’d make her corrections and I’d redo it, and we worked on it quite a bit,” says Murakami. “We had long chats over the phone and emails. She was very, very strong about it.”

  It was a good video, both funny and poignant, but the pop promo was yesterday’s medium. Bush returned to an industry where her natural milieu was old hat. She understood the ramifications of the digitalisation of music, and invested a lot of time and effort into ensuring that the digital files of Aerial were of the best possible quality, but where once she had been at the cutting edge of new innovations, nowadays she was at the back of the queue and was suspicious of its influence. She said “music is suffering greatly from the overuse of computers, and taking away the human element.”18 At a time when multi-media platforms were finding new ways to bring the imagination to life, Bush, one of the few artists really capable of capitalising on the advances made in this regard, refused to click on the mouse.

  Aerial was received with the greatest respect and affection, it reached number two and went platinum in the UK and very quickly sold more than a million copies outside of north America, but it rapidly slipped out of sight. Arguably, it has not even yet been properly assimilated and appreciated by either the critical mass or the wider pop audience. Partly, this is attributable to the nature of the work. Elliptical, layered, entirely ill-suited to the current vogue for short, sharp sound experiences, it’s not a record you would happily play on an iPhone, or that fits the shuffle function on an mp3 player. It takes time and space to digest. But it also betrays the fact that Aerial was born into a new world of limitless options. We have become accustomed to the idea of musicians, of all ages, using blogs, podcasts, SMS and YouTube to sell their music and reach their audience, and it’s hard to think of any artist less suited to the relentlessly self-publicising age of Twitter than Bush.

  At a time when music is seen as more of a disposable commodity than ever before, and its perceived value is negligible, Bush seeks to retain its preciousness. The mystery of her distance helps the music; it makes its messages stronger and sets it apart. The downside is that the lack of a visual presence in 2005 made it much harder for Aerial to exert any real cultural significance. She increasingly works in a large but defined niche, well away from the mainstream. She probably likes it there. “I don’t think she’s sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my God, why didn’t Aerial sell X million?’” says Bob Mercer.

  The new album certainly put her back on the tabloid radar, with all the discomfort that implied. In December 2006 there was a widely reported kerfuffle with British Waterways over repairs to her weir, which had collapsed due to heavy rains and for which she was at first deemed liable. The wider issue was that the proximity of her house to the water – and hence the public – caused a few run-ins, with more than one canal-based internet message board ringing to tales of a small, irate lady standing on the tow path shouting “This is private property!”

  Those who were surprised at her apparent openness in bringing the media to her doorstep for the interviews for Aerial overlooked two things. Bush has never had a problem inviting people into her house; she has always been a very open and hospitable host: it’s uninvited guests, physical and psychological prowlers, with whom she has a big problem. Privacy was also the meat of the matter in May 2007 when it was reported that local residents in Dorset objected to the security cameras around her seaside property, and also resented the fact that Bush – reacting to an extension in the UK’s ‘right to roam’ laws – wanted to divert two public footpaths that provided views into her house on the Dorset coast and, it emerged, occasionally brought trespassers into the grounds of her house. “I’m afraid the coast path and the beach were there long before Kate Bush,” said a local councillor. “And I’m fairly confident they’ll still be in the same place with the same unhindered access long after she’s gone.” Bush agreed to scale down her security presence and the matter was settled amicably.

  Although she was sometimes infuriated by the intrusion of helicopters buzzing over her head to photograph her house, she could also play the rock star trump card when she wanted. “We took a helicopter that she paid for all the way from Hammersmith to her summer house in Devon, just for a meeting for a day,” recalls Jimmy Murakami. “She fixed lunch and everything, [then] we went back that evening – that must have cost a few quid. She has a helicopter pad at her second house. No one seems to complain.”

  More productively, more new music arrived relatively quickly. ‘How To Be Invisible’ was an incantatory song with a hint of Philip Pullman in its supernatural spell, so it was fitting that the celebrated author of the His Dark Materials trilogy was a friend of Bush’s. When she was asked to contribute the closing theme to the film adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first book of the trilogy, she jumped at the chance. Her friendship notwithstanding, it’s easy to see why the story of the coming of age of young Lyra Belacqua appealed to Bush, scattered as it is with spirits and demons, nascent sexuality, matters of religion and dark philosophy.

  She put the whole thing together in a blink of an eye. “She got the call a month before it was needed – and delivered,” says Tony Wadsworth. “I said, ‘Look, see, you can do it. Just focus!’ I think it might have been something she had been working on for a while and realised it was appropriate for the work, but she really wanted to do it. She said, ‘I work well to deadlines.’ I said, ‘Now you tell me!’” She recorded the track at Abbey Road and enlisted Oxford’s Magdalen College School boys’ choir on background vocals; she popped in to give them a quick pep talk beforehand and promised to pay for them all to see the film when it came out.

  ‘Lyra’ emerged late in 2007 and was a rather limp affair, far from her finest hour, and even its quick execution proved a false alarm. Already nearly five years have elapsed since Aerial, and given the steady deceleration of her work rate there must be a question of how much more music we will get from Bush. The wider landscape of the industry has changed. David Munns and Tony Wadsworth left EMI in 2008 when the company was taken over by the private equity firm Terra Firma, overseen by chairman Guy Hands. Profitability has never been more highly valued, while true artistry has lost its premium. “The attitude at EMI was always ‘Whatever you want,’ and that was an attitude I put in there,” says Bob Mercer. “If I made any contribution to her career at all – and I did, there’s no question about that – it was to let her march to her own beat.” It remains to be seen what impact, if any, the lack of a benevolent father figure within the company will have on Bush and her output. “The fact that EMI have indulged her and let her get on with it is to their credit,” says Brian Southall. “She must have breached her contract a dozen times. No one’s bothered, what are you going to do about it? She owns her own product. I hope that the new regime do the same, though I’m not convinced that they will.”

  Bush can record her music at will, with or without the help of EMI, but her desire to hand it over to people she does not trust may be an issue. Her impetus to create is also a factor. The demands of being a mother simply do not account for the appearance of just one recor
d in the space of 16 years; there would seem to be other factors at play.

  There is no sense of her being hurried by the ticking clock, and as she gets older real life has an increasing tendency to get in the way. 2008 brought more significant changes. In the summer she turned 50, just after Bertie turned 10, and Dr Bush died, at the age of 88. He was cremated at Eltham Crematorium. It was a time of deep sadness, of catching up with old friends and reflecting on the past and what was to come. Paddy and Jay were there, naturally, still as close as ever to their sister but much less involved nowadays in the day-to-day aspects of her life and career. Afterwards they all returned to the farm, where Bush’s nephew Owen, Jay’s son, now lives and works as a blacksmith and bladesmith. They sat around the kitchen table, just like the old days. It looked so small, suddenly. They used to think it was huge.

  She has been working on new material (featuring, among the usual suspects, Danny Thompson), and has also permitted Rolf Harris to release the version of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ they relatively recently recorded as a duet. However, anyone drumming their fingers impatiently and hoping for a quick turnaround of album product looks like enduring a dose of familiar frustrations. Brian Bath recalls speaking to Del Palmer on the telephone in the spring of 2009. “He said, ‘I can’t talk, Kate’s just putting this Fender Rhodes part on,’” says Bath. “I phoned him back a couple of days later and said, ‘How’s it going?’ He said, ‘We’re just putting this Fender Rhodes part on….’ Bath laughs ruefully. “Still doing it, two days later!”

  * She reasserted her natural distance from the grubby compromises of commerce a few years later, in 1999, when she was asked to write a song for the Disney film Dinosaur. At first Disney asked Bush to rewrite the words, which she refused to do, before telling her they now wanted it to be entirely instrumental. The director, Eric Leighton, said that “the rest of the score was instrumental, and hearing a voice singing seemed to confuse and unsettle the [test] audience.”[USA Today] She quietly withdrew.