SEVEN MOMENTS OF PLEASURE; A WEEK OF KATE
BUSH MEMORIES – ORIGINALLY POSTED ON FACEBOOK BETWEEN
03/09/14 & 10/09/14
In one week’s
time I will have seen Kate Bush live for the first time – now there’s a
statement I never thought I’d ever get the chance to say - and to mark the
occasion I thought I’d try, in the run up to ‘Before The Dawn’, to write and
post something every day about how much Kate, and her music, has meant to me
over the years. Welcome to my Seven Moments of Pleasure...
Moment One: A Strange Phenomenon –
originally posted 3rd September 2014
In February
1978, when Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ first entered the UK Singles Chart,
I was completely and utterly oblivious to her charms. I was a 12 year-old ‘Star
Wars’ fanatic, with virtually no interest in music at all – it would be several
months before I bought my first 7” single, ‘Night Fever’ by The Bee Gees, and
it would be quite a few more before I formed any opinion about Kate Bush, her
music or the “wily, windy moors” she found herself rolling and falling on. I
remember Faith Brown’s impressions of Kate and Pamela Stephenson’s, ‘Oh,
England My Leotard’, more vividly than the real thing. It was another year
before I owned any albums – I was given my first two long-players as Christmas
presents in 1979 - and If I’m honest, I was so completely wrapped up in those
first two LP’s, Blondie’s ‘Parallel Lines’ and Dollar’s ‘Shooting Stars’, I
barely noticed anything else was happening in the world of music. So transfixed
was I by the fact you could clearly see Thereza Bazar’s nipples through her
cheese-cloth blouse on the inner sleeve, even Gered Mankowitz’s infamous Kate
photos could not distract me! By the time Kate had moved on to albums No.2 and
3, I was virtually a militant in my rejection of any guitars on the records I
listened to and bought. I had noted with interest The Human League’s ‘Dare’
inner-sleeve defiantly listed every type of synthesizer used on the album, and
gave Philip Adrian Wright’s contribution credit as ‘slides & occasional
synthesizer’ - now this was the type of band I could really get behind.
Obviously I refused to acknowledge the fact that Duran Duran’s output was
literally riddled with Chic-inspired guitar licks and Ultravox, fronted by
guitarist Midge Ure, were using guitar riffs front-and-centre on most of their
best singles.
Kate finally
started to sneak into my life via my older brother’s female friends. One
virtually stole her entire look from Kate’s crimped-haired, gypsy/hippy vibe,
while another visited several times, brandishing the ‘Never For Ever’ album,
and I was completely fascinated by the artwork before I had even heard the
music contained inside. But it was one of my own school friends, Annie, who
finally helped me fully realise ‘the pull of the Bush’.
Annie was my
unlikely ‘heavy metal’ friend – everyone had one back then – and she owned a
clear vinyl copy of ‘The Kick Inside’. During one of our endless evenings,
barricaded in her bedroom, with bottomless coffee and biscuits, reading
extracts from her (quite scandalous) diary and just laughing like I’d never
laughed before or since, she informed me, ‘You HAVE to listen to this.’ She
played me ‘Wuthering Heights’. A few years on from its release, it sounded more
magical than I remembered, unlike anything else and better than ever. We played
it again. We discovered that when her record player was set to repeatedly play
7” singles, it automatically landed at the beginning of ‘Wuthering Heights’ on
the LP. We let it play over and over, every fade was followed by the mechanical
clicks and clunks of the automatic replay, leading into THAT exquisite piano
intro. Kate had finally entered my life in an evening long continuous loop, two
years and three albums into her career...
Moment Two: Coming In With The Golden Light
- originally posted 4th September
2014
The first
Kate Bush album I owned was ‘The Dreaming’. I picked up a copy with no cover –
just the inner-sleeve – for 50p from the record department of the Edinburgh Princes
Street branch of Boots the Chemist where I worked at weekends and during school
holidays. Self-produced and almost wilfully obtuse, it would prove to be Kate’s
least commercially successful album, but one which is cited by many as her
‘lost masterpiece’. For me it would be the perfect introduction to Kate and my
gateway to accepting her as a true artist. Almost completely eschewing
traditional song structures, instead she was now creating fascinating
soundscapes and populating them with intriguing characters and extraordinary
stories. Her experiments with the Fairlight sampler meant she was no longer
limited to her previous basic palette of instrumentation – instead of guitars,
bass and drums - in Kate’s limitless new world, her voice could be transformed
into the braying of a mule on ‘Get Out Of My House’, a breathe sound formed the
backdrop for a lone choir-boy solo during ‘All The Love’ and human grunts
filled ‘Sat In Your Lap’ with an unstoppable percussive energy. A million miles
away from the relative simplicity of ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’,
accepting and loving ‘The Dreaming’ meant there was virtually nothing Kate
could throw at me in the future which would be quite as challenging – well,
there was a certain washing machine, but we’ll get to that later.
Kate was now
well and truly on my radar. In 1983, Jimmy Savile’s ‘Old Record Club’ was still
going strong in a Sunday afternoon slot on Radio 1– yes, he did have a career
as a DJ before he switched professions to ‘National Disgrace’ – and in one
particular episode he was looking back to October 1980. Hearing ‘Army Dreamers’
again for the first time in a couple of years, it was like listening to a
completely different record - that insanely complex backing vocal arrangement,
the gun mechanism as percussion, the drill sergeant screaming under the chorus
– suddenly I saw a link backwards from my beloved ‘The Dreaming’. My brother
had a few older Kate singles. I dug them out, but his collection was far from
complete. For the time being I was resigned to playing these few precious gems
time and time again.
1984 was my
final year at high school. I was preparing to attend the Edinburgh College of
Art after the summer and my friend Annie gave me the most perfect
‘end-of-school’ / 18th Birthday gift; she bought me a copy of Kate’s ‘The
Single File’. A complete collection of her 7” singles to date, from ‘Wuthering
Heights’ to ‘There Goes A Tenner’, with an exclusive bonus 7” and all housed in
an ivy covered, flip-top box. I was soon obsessed, playing every single – A’s
and B’s – until I should have been sick of them – but here’s the thing – I
NEVER WAS! Obviously, I still own the box – photo attached – and even kept it
up to date with subsequent releases from ‘Hounds of Love’ onwards. I was now
ready to travel back in time and re-discover the 1970’s Kate Bush albums...
Moment Three: Thunder In Our Hearts - originally posted 5th September
2014
My
re-introduction to the previously ignored delights of Kate Bush’s
back-catalogue coincided with my first steps into a much bigger world. I had
earned a place at the Edinburgh School of Art in the summer of 1984 and the
first year proved to be exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. The
foundation year was structured to give each student a glimpse into the workings
of every department – from ‘fine art’ subjects like drawing, painting and
sculpture to more design and craft-type skills such as graphic design,
illustration, fashion design and photography. It was a fairly intense
environment, but if there was one thing art students are really good at, it’s
drinking, socialising and throwing a party! Over the course of that year I
became particularly close to one girl, Tracey, and we have been great friends
ever since. She had gone to school in an area not far from my parent’s home and
we bonded over our shared love of music. My first memories included a
spontaneous dance-along to Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ inside the lift as it
descended from the top floor of the college building to the ground-floor
canteen and a pair of ‘Propaganda Trousers’ which would have out-sold the
‘Frankie Says’ t-shirts if we’d only had the sense to go into mass production.
With our primary subjects chosen – Illustration and Animation for me, Drawing
and Painting for Tracey, we moved into our second year. Having both spent our
first year at home, we decided to fully embrace the college experience and get
a flat share together. We recruited a third flatmate, Sarah, and found a place
in the Viewforth area of Edinburgh’s city centre. Tracey and I moved in four
weeks earlier than Sarah, so we had the whole flat to ourselves for the month
of August. Aside from several evenings spent recreating the hits of the day
with a tape recorder, a copy of ‘Smash Hits’ and an empty tape box as
percussion, we would talk endlessly about music and our favourite artists,
playing selections from my (already) vast singles collection. At the time we
disagreed fiercely about her love of Fleetwood Mac, but we were on exactly the
same page when it came to Kate. So, it was with much excitement we awaited the
release of Kate’s newly announced new album, ‘The Hounds of Love’, and its
introductory single, ‘Running Up That Hill’.
Although
Tracey and I were spending a lot of our first month away from home together, I
don’t remember us spending a lot of time watching TV. Aside from the Moldavian
Wedding Massacre on ‘Dynasty’ – which BTW caused a rather serious hair
bleaching emergency – the only other thing I vividly remember us watching
together was on 5th August 1985 - Kate’s appearance on ‘Wogan’ to launch the
‘Running Up That Hill’ single.
While it may
not have the surreal quality of her performance of ‘There Goes A Tenner’ on
‘Razzmatazz’ in 1981, where Kate lip-synched the song surrounded by a
studio-full of slack-jawed teenagers, virtually mouthing, “What the f*ck!”, I
think this television appearance, more than any other, sums up what I love most
about Kate Bush. Theatrical, highly entertaining and, more or less, completely
loopy!
The
performance opened with Kate, flanked by six musicians (including Del Palmer
and her brother Paddy) and two flag bearers, dressed in a floor-length brown
coat, ‘preaching’ the lyrics from behind a lectern. There is nothing flashy
about the costumes or the staging; nothing is going to get in the way of the song’s
lyrics. As the song builds, and the musicians inch forward, Kate produces a
full size bow. Pulling an arrow from behind her brother’s back, she crouches
into position to fire the arrow, a pose which perfectly recreates the image
featured on the single’s picture sleeve artwork.
Somehow over
the top and understated at the same time, it puts the recent
‘do-I-sing-here-are these-the-right-dance-moves’ shambles by The Saturdays,
appearing on the National Lottery programme to promote their new single, into
context! Completely mesmerizing, it acted as a stunning introduction to Kate’s
next chapter...
Moment Four: Take Me Deeper And Deeper -
originally posted 5th September
2014
Kate’s
‘Hounds of Love’ has been my undisputed favourite album for nearly 30 years. It
is easily my most played piece of music and the one I’ve extracted the most
pleasure from over the years. Since its release in 1985, nothing has come close
to taking its place. Aside from containing four of her best singles, all lifted
from the five-track, side one of the album – a hit to filler rate that rivals
Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ – it also features the extraordinary song-cycle,
‘The Ninth Wave’, a continuous narrative told across seven songs, which must
stand as one of, if not THE, outstanding achievement of Kate’s career.
Having been
slightly too young to fully embrace the excesses of prog rock and the ‘concept
album’ boom of the 1970’s, and subsequently choosing to shun most guitar based
music from my record collection, I had limited exposure to the notion of a collection
of linked songs forming a cohesive story – not something that was high on the
agenda for the likes of Depeche Mode or The Human League – but ‘The Ninth Wave’
completely blew me away. With all the state-of-the-art facilities of her newly
built home-studio at her disposal Kate was exploring cutting edge sound design
and layering the songs with some of her most raw, emotional lyrical content.
The seven inter-connecting tracks which make up ‘The Ninth Wave’ tell the story
of a woman lost as sea, slipping between consciousness and a fantasy filled
dream-state, facing her own death and clinging to the memory of the loved ones
she’s left behind. As a set of songs they are equally challenging, soothing and
profoundly heartbreaking.
I spent
months, and then years, trying to visualise the story in my head. I fantasised
about turning the songs into a film, or animation during my college years and
then for the next couple of decades have drifted back and forward into that
visual and musical landscape countless times. The very thought of seeing some
sort of visualisation of these songs at the up-coming concerts is literally a
dream come true.
Everything
surrounding the ‘Hounds of Love’ project was approaching perfection. The
artwork for the album and subsequent singles was exquisite. In a medium
notoriously expensive and difficult for the artist to control, the promo videos
for ‘Running Up That Hill’, ‘Hounds of Love’ and especially ‘Cloudbusting’,
were some of the best realised visual interpretations of her songs. Even the
B-sides of the singles would become some of my all-time-favourite Kate Bush
songs, with tracks like ‘Under The Ivy’, ‘My Lagan Love’ and ‘The Handsome
Cabin Boy’ all sounding like experiments which may have been proposed chapters
in ‘The Ninth Wave’ sequence.
Virtually
everyone who has meant anything to me in my life has a connection to this album
– old school friends, my art school class and countless former hmv colleagues –
it’s definitely the album which crops up most often in my conversation. I
wonder if anything released in 2014 will have the same lasting impact? Let’s
meet back here in 2044 and see how good that Lorde album sounds then...
Moment Five: You Don’t Need Words; Just One
Kiss, Then Another - originally posted
8th September 2014
1989 was a
bit of a landmark year for me; aside from Kate releasing her album, ‘The
Sensual World’, I got my first (and only) proper job working at the hmv store
in Edinburgh’s St. James’ Centre and started the long process of finally
accepting what everyone around me had come to terms with years before, I was
gay. I would eventually come out to some of my closest friends and family the
following year. While I always choose the more ‘traditional’ (and expected),
Kylie’s ‘Better The Devil You Know’, as the song which sums up this period of
my life, the first single and title track to Kate’s latest album could quite
easily have been my ‘coming out song’. Don’t get me wrong, the only thing my
first tentative steps onto the late 80’s/early 90’s Edinburgh gay scene and
Kate’s lustful homage to Molly Bloom’s randy soliloquy from James Joyce’s
‘Ulysses have in common is they both contained the use of the words, “Oh, yes!”
a lot, but the song, and the subsequent album, became my permanent soundtrack
for the next couple of years.
A much
‘softer’ and, in her own words, ‘more feminine’ album, ‘The Sensual World’
contains some of Kate’s best work and, with far less reliance on the fairlight
and synthesised instruments, it has a more ‘organic’ feel and has thus aged far
better than her previous couple of albums.
Highlights
include her work alongside the Bulgarian vocal group Trio Bulgarka, who add
their distinctive singing/chanting, with spectacular effect, to ‘Rocket’s
Tail’, ‘Never Be Mine’, and in particular, ‘Deeper Understanding’. While unable
to speak each other’s language, Kate reported that she managed to convey what
she wanted to the singers using ‘hugs and kisses’ – perhaps this would be the
best way for The Kardashian sisters to communicate in future, eliminating the
risk of cracking their botox assisted masks of perpetual surprise and removing
the need for us to every hear anything else they have to say – the very
definition of ‘Win/Win’. This later song tells the eerily prophetic tale of an
isolated, lonely individual who seeks to find affection and friendship with the
use of a new computer programme – as a desk-bound, would-be writer, working
from home, I definitely understand the temptation to push that ‘Execute’
button!
Alongside
lyrically compelling songs like ‘The Fog’, ‘Love And Anger’ and ‘Between A Man
And A Woman’ sits the story of a woman unwittingly accepting a date with a
pre-war Hitler in ‘Heads We’re Dancing’ – surely the perfect soundtrack to the never-to-be-seen
victory show-dance we were so tragically denied due to Vanessa Feltz’s early
exit from ‘Strictly’ a couple of years back – it all comes together to make
Kate’s most consistent and ‘complete’ sounding LP.
The cherry
on the cake, however, has to be ‘This Woman’s Work’. Rivalling ‘The Man With
The Child In His Eyes’ for its directness and un-fussy delivery, a simple
piano-vocal arrangement allows the song’s lyric to take centre stage and it
packs quite an emotional punch – you have to wonder what was happening in the
charts when the single release stalled at No.25. ‘Love And Anger’ fared even
worse, peaking at No.38, while a cod-reggae cover of Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’
– recorded for the ‘Two Rooms’ tribute album – released as a stop-gap between
albums would see Kate match the No.12 chart placing for ‘The Sensual World’ title-track.
While it
would be another four years before Kate would release another full album,
1993’s ‘The Red Shoes’, this would seem like a blink of an eye in comparison to
the agonising twelve year wait between ‘The Red Shoes’ and Kate’s eighth studio
album, ‘Aerial’.
Moment Six: These Moments Given Are A Gift
From Time - originally posted 9th
September 2014
While I
consider ‘The Red Shoes’ to be Kate’s weakest collection of songs, it is not
without merit. It’s a typical contradiction that Kate’s least compelling album
contains such undoubted highlights as ‘Lily’, ‘Top Of The City’ and the track
which I more often than not cite as my favourite Kate Bush song, ‘Moments Of
Pleasure’. While one friend – yes, you Niall - agreed with Q Magazine’s description
of the song as being, "so personal as to be impenetrable,” I think it
pretty much sums up everything I love about Kate Bush – deeply personal in a
way which would make it virtually impossible for any other artist to sing it,
lyrically compelling and all wrapped up in a swoon-worthy piano melody. It
would appear the album was forged during a period of deep personal loss and
upheaval for Kate and suffers from a uniquely dense and sometimes muddled
production. The characters and situations contained in songs such as
‘Constellation Of The Heart’, ‘You Are The One’ and ‘Why Should I Love You’
seem unusually pedestrian considering they were written by the same person who
sang about a wife disguising herself as a younger woman to trap her adulterous
husband in ‘Babooshka’, explored weather manipulation in ‘Cloudbusting’ and
sang a whole song from the point of view of a musical instrument in ‘Violin’.
It didn’t help that her choice of collaborators for the album was typically
eccentric and eclectic, ranging from the sublime - Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton,
Prince and Nigel Kennedy – to the ridiculous – Lenny Henry. In the end it would
be another twelve years before Kate would leave these particular creative
partners behind and return to working at her best – so by my reckoning we can
expect Dawn French to say something funny again sometime around April 2022.
Here is
where I risk everything by admitting that I found ‘Aerial’ virtually
impenetrable on its initial release. Over the years I continually failed to
find a way in and the album stood as the only Kate Bush album I never fully
connected with. By the time ‘Director’s Cut’ and ’50 Words For Snow’ came along
– both of which I managed to get to grips with and embraced them for what they
were - I had almost resigned myself to never getting past THAT ‘Washing Machine
Song’ or the (now somewhat unfortunate) ramblings of Rolf Harris.
Looking
back, I realise that the twelve year gap between ‘The Red Shoes’ and ‘Aerial’
must have been the necessary space Kate needed to ‘detox’, freeing herself of
the (comparative) creative stalemate and production excesses which had crept
into her work following her 80’s success and rebuild herself as a completely different
type of recording artist. No longer shackled to the restrictions of traditional
song structures, avoiding any adherence to the rules of ‘verse and chorus’ song
writing, ‘Aerial’ seemed almost jazz-like in its ‘free-form’ outlook and if
there’s one thing I just don’t understand, it’s jazz.
In the build
up to ‘Before The Dawn’, knowing that ‘Aerial’ was sure to play a part in the
forthcoming live shows, I made another attempt to ‘crack the code’ and fully
embrace ‘Aerial’.
To my surprise
I was almost instantly drawn into the album in a way that had completely eluded
me up until now. I recognised countless well-worn Kate motifs in the music and
lyrics, and despite the lack of conventional song structures, I started to make
stylistic connections to my beloved ‘Ninth Wave’ and many more of my favourite
Kate moments. I’m not ashamed to say I had tears running down my face as the
album moved from ‘A Coral Room’ into the ‘An Endless Sky Of Honey’ song cycle
contained on the second disc – the only real embarrassment was the fact that
this happened when I was outside, on the mean streets of Leyton, walking back
from Asda, loaded down with two heavy bags of shopping - all very Mrs
Bartolozzi in itself!
In a way I
feel really lucky; I get to experience ‘Aerial’ as if for the first time over
the next few months, aided by the extraordinary experience of seeing Kate
perform a large chunk of it live.
In the
spirit of ‘Moments Of Pleasure’, I will be drifting backwards through time
tonight, remembering some very special ‘moments’ I have shared with Kate Bush
alongside a similar roll call of great friends and extraordinary people over
the last thirty years or so. I will be remembering every ‘old sock’ and ‘old
shoe’, thinking about the following people on this particular dive ‘into another
moment’; Tracey, Tony, Angie, Helen, Douglas, Lesley, Kelly, Kirsty, Marie,
Jamii and my old school friend Annie (not on Facebook) who started it all.
Moment Seven – After The Dawn : Somewhere
in between; what the song and silence say - originally posted 10th September 2014
To put the
‘Before The Dawn’ show into words would be like trying to explain colours to a
blind man, sound to a deaf man, or Piers Morgan’s inexplicable success to
anyone with half a brain, but I’ll try...
I’m
attempting to express my feelings about the experience without actually giving
away too many ‘spoilers’ about the show’s actual content, so forgive me if it
all seems a bit ‘vague’ or ‘woolly’.
My
overriding impression was that this is most definitely not a straight forward
rock concert. You can tell from the moment you turn up outside the venue -
groups of friends standing, not talking, paralysed with expectation and many
still wearing the mask of ‘I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening’ blank stares which
descended over them at the beginning of the year. The crowd were mostly over
thirty - some WAY over thirty - and beyond leaping to their feet at the end of
each song, the entire audience remained seated, transfixed by every note, every
gesture, every wooden puppet unexpectedly springing to life, killing and enthusiastically
devouring a bird....oops, sorry I said I wasn’t going to include spoilers!
Kate and her
amazing cast of musicians and performers has delivered a theatrical show with
only the merest hint of a conventional rock concert coming from the fact that
the band are on stage with her during most of the performance. With a
spectacular light show, projected images and films, puppets, outlandish and
often sinister looking costumed performers, as well as exploding pyrotechnics
and spectacular sets and stage design, this has more in common with a West End
production than the Hammersmith Apollo’s usual fare. With the air of the most
psychedelic and obtuse ‘jukebox musical’ ever staged, ‘Before The Dawn’ is a
very personal journey through what Kate obviously perceives as her career highs
and most accomplished works, held together in a vaguely themed narrative –
imagine if ‘Viva Forever’, the ill-fated Spice Girls musical, had only
contained b-sides and album tracks....wait, that might have actually been
better! By eschewing much of her ‘greatest hits’, and by offering up a
spectacular visual presentation of some of her most complex soundscapes, Kate
presents a retrospective show that actually feels like she’s looking far off
into her own future, rather than dredging grudgingly through her past output.
Despite
being famously stage frightful, Kate herself seemed calm and relaxed throughout
the show, and at one point she sits completely alone at the piano to deliver
the sole selection from her most recent album, ‘Among Angels’ from 2011’s ’50
Words For Snow’, holding the pin-drop silent audience completely under her
spell. Exuding a wave of maternal benevolence over the entire proceedings, it
was easy to forget that Kate has been perfecting the art of ‘keeping oneself to
oneself’ for the majority the last few decades. Perhaps she felt comfortably
‘at home’ in the Hammersmith space she’d previously played on her ‘Tour of
Life’ shows back in the late 70’s, surrounded as she is by friends, family and
several trusted musicians, but maybe she was just enjoying herself.
When,
towards the end of the show, Kate thanked the audience and said, “We’ve had a
lovely time,” I knew she was speaking to me directly, just as the man sitting
next to me knew she was speaking directly to him.
I often feel
jealous watching music documentaries about famous rock stars and influential
musicians when equally famous ‘talking heads’ hold the subject aloft as ‘their
defining inspiration’ or ‘the most important artist in shaping who they have
become’ - the likes of Boy George explaining how important Bowie’s sexual
ambiguity and artful androgyny was to him, or Pixie Lott revealing how a
headless mannequin she once saw in a M&S window became the driving
influence for much of her creative output ever since - I often fear I don’t
have that through-line artist, until I remember I do; I have Kate Bush.
Provocative, infuriating, patience shredding, challenging and, in her own
words, ‘warm and soothing’, her music has become the soundtrack to virtually
every important occasion in my life. I feel that this may have come full circle
with ‘Before The Dawn’, a truly ‘momentous occasion’, most certainly
soundtracked by the music of Kate Bush...in her own words;
“We went up
to the top of the highest hill
And stopped
Still
It was just
so beautiful...It was just so beautiful...It was just so beautiful...”
