There’s something about Kate Bush
SHE doesn’t seem nervous in the least – not even when the interviewer tries to push the conversation in a personal direction by asking the maiden name of her Irish mother. Smilingly elusively from beneath a tangle of ringlets, Kate Bush purses her lips, explains she’d rather not go into that: since overnight fame kicked down the door on her life, her family has started to feel besieged by the media. She’s taking a stand: no private details, no tittle-tattle.
It is 1978 and Bush is being interviewed on the Late Late Show by Gay Byrne. By now the singer, a worldly 20 year old, has begun to accumulate a reputation for eccentricity – there’s the strange music, simultaneously disembodied and powerfully primal, but also that electrifyingly elusive persona, debuted fully-formed in the video to her first song, Wuthering Heights. So young and yet already she has something of the mad aunt in the attic about her – Miss Havisham updated for the punk era.
Still, appearing on Irish television for the first (and, it transpires, final) occasion, it is Bush’s self possession that shines through. For the past six months the eyes of the world have been on this shy young woman: nonetheless she appears entirely in control, not exactly comfortable with fame, certainly not intimidated by it. When Byrne attempts to unearth some straight-forward biographical details – we are all dying to find out the identity of the Waterford family of which she is a scion – she stares him in the eyes until he blinks.
She has never stopped playing by her own rules. Later this month, Bush will perform publicly for the first time in more than 30 years, playing for an unprecedented 22 nights commencing on August 26 at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. To say the dates are highly anticipated would be an understatement – tickets sold out in minutes and are retailing on the secondary market for upwards of €3,000 a pair. Without a hit in years and of arguably negligible influence on popular culture – she was neither the first nor last gothically kooky female singer – her continued grasp on our collective imagination is astonishing.
Most of us know two things about Bush: that her music was at its best, thrillingly offbeat and that, for the latter half of her career, she has lived reclusively in the English countryside. It is possible that the two are intertwined, our appreciation of twinkling dirges such as Wuthering Heights, Cloudbusting and Running Up That Hill accentuated by the knowledge that they are the work of confessional pop’s answer to Howard Hughes. Everyone loves a mystery and they don’t come more intractable than that which swirls around Bush – a global star worth an estimated €50m living a low-key existence in a banal English town (it is said that interlopers seeking her out are confronted by an flummoxed middle-aged woman loudly demanding they leave her property). But recently the veil has perhaps started to lift a little. She was reasonably happy to promote her 2011 album 50 Words For Snow, granting phone interviews to whatever publication wanted one. That same year, she put in her most high profile public appearance in years, turning up a London’s Dorchester Hotel to receive an award.
It was the first time she had been before the cameras since the early 1990s and onlookers were struck at how little she had changed: at 53 clearly she was no longer the waifish pixie-child who had graced the cover of The Kick Inside, her debut album from 1979. However, the hair, long, just this side of unkept, was exactly as we had remembered, her eyes still those big, liquid pools, glimmering mischievously.
Bush was born in suburban Kent in 1958. Her father was a doctor, her mother a former Irish dancer. From childhood she sensed she had a higher calling (“School inhibited me. It wasn’t until I left school that I found the real strength inside. All the rest was karma.”). By 14 she was writing original material and playing pubs around suburban London.
Through friends of her brother, she reached out to Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour – instantly convinced of her talent he bankrolled a demo tape and arranged for a deal with the band’s label, EMI. She was 19 when she released Wuthering Heights in 1978; it was number one for a month in Britain. At the height of punk, this weird wispy woman-child had put an entire nation in a trance: The Sex Pistol’s John Lydon was so besotted he suggested he write her a song (and offer that was gracefully declined).
Always wary of exposure, it was in the ’90s that she withdrew from public view in earnest (as her waifishness ebbed it is rumoured she grew increasingly self-conscious about her weight). She married guitarist Danny McIntosh and had a son Bertie (she kept the news to herself — the media didn’t find out until friend Peter Gabriel let the fact slip 18 months later). Installed in Berkshire, a bucolic stretch of the English Home Counties, Bush has passed much of the intervening period tinkering in her studio, releasing two new albums and a collection of reworked earlier material.
“She has spent the past 30 years backing away,” commented her biographer Graeme Thomson. ‘Her career has been an incremental process of withdrawal.”
“She is lovely to work with, a true musician,” her friend and collaborator Roy Harper observed several years ago. “There is no need to tell her what to do, she has already done it and she is ahead, making suggestions. She is very honest and very gentle, bright and full of creativity, the kind of girl you should’ve married, really. She is very private and family-orientated now. When you are that good a person, the danger is that everybody takes the piss. The cure for that is to keep yourself out of the public eye.”
Bush has always been conscious of her Irish heritage. Growing up, her two elder brothers played in trad bands; her 1989 song The Sensual World quotes Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses (initially refused for the original release, she received special permission from the Joyce estate for the Director’s Cut of the album). Seven years later, she guested on Donal Lunny’s LP The Common Ground, singing Mnâ Na hÉireann.
“She’s a brilliant woman, great,” Lunny told me in 2012. “She is such fun and is absolutely grounded in herself. She also has an awareness of the Irish songwriting tradition. Working with her was tremendous fun.”
Bush will be nervous as she looks ahead to her first run of concerts in decades. She was scarred by her last tour, a 28-date European jaunt promoting The Kick Inside in 1979. She didn’t enjoy being propped on a stage for audiences to gawp at – as a woman she felt she was on show in a way that is inappropriate.
“By the end,” she said later, “I felt a terrific need to retreat as a person, because I felt that my sexuality, which in a way I hadn’t really had a chance to explore myself, was being given to the world in a way which I found impersonal.”
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