Waiting for Kate Bush (14 page)

* * *

Mere mad months after the release of
The Kick Inside
, Kate and Andrew Powell and various KT Bush Band stalwarts flew to Nice, on whose outskirts they set up shop in a studio recommended by Dave Gilmour. The girl who hardly two years before had been speechless with delight
on discovering the miracle of overdubbing wanted engineer Jon Kelly to tell her in detail about every facet of the recording process. She made no bones about looking forward to a day when there would be no Andrew Powell standing between her and her vision. The temerity of the man! Delighted with her first vocal on ‘Wow’, he’d tried to discourage her from singing it 40 or 50 more times.

They brought the tapes back to AIR Studios, above Oxford Street, and replaced a lot of the KT Bush musicians’ parts with those played by the crew from the first album. One imagined that the KT Bushmen were something less than exultant. In that way of hers, Kate continued to offer to pop out for sarnies, and someone would have to remind her that she could no longer skip down Oxford Street without countless strangers stopping her to tell her how much they loved her, or to plead with her to stop controlling their thoughts via microwave transmissions to their dental fillings.

The resulting album,
Lionheart
, was another hit, albeit not quite on the scale of
The Kick Inside
. For me, it had all the debut album’s faults without half its charm. Rather than that blazed by ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, Kate had seemingly chosen the path of implacable preciousness. On ‘Hammer Horror’ and ‘In The Warm Room’, she sounded for all the world like the star of a cabaret staged by patients of a mental hospital. Her pitched screeching on ‘Fullhouse’ was enough to send the unconverted running for cover, as too, to a lesser degree, was the excruciating pun that provided the title of the severely over-arranged “rock” number ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’. She continued to seem compelled to make fun of herself every time she dropped into a traditionally adult vocal register.

The lyrics remained confusing. ‘Wow’, whose chorus, with the addition of a few cellos, might have evoked the Summer of Love Beatles, seemed to be about a gay lovey too sexually voracious to succeed as an actor, but who could tell for sure? We found out only a few words into the partially yodelled ‘Kashka From Baghdad’ that the protagonist was gay, but if you imagined Kate to be about to say something interesting about the plight of sexual minorities in repressive Muslim or other societies, you were out of luck. The arrangements were forever sacrificing rhythmic flow for cleverness. If ‘Oh England My Lionheart’ was enough to make one want to immigrate, the Brecht- and Weill-ish ‘Coffee Homeground’ made him long for temporary deafness.

But you had to hand it to her: she was uncompromising – it was impossible, in fact, to think of another recording artist to the right of
Captain Beefheart, for whom Kate made no secret of her admiration, more disinclined to make things easy for his or her listener. Years later,
The New York Press
would suggest, “Bush is a genius, and geniuses do over-reach. Some of her stuff [has been] awful, paint-peeling noise.”

I became a fervent fan in spite of my significant reservations about her music when I realised how alike we were. Screeching, writing lyrics that no one on earth had a prayer of understanding, she virtually defied people to like her music. I, desperate to spare myself the heartbreak of inexorable rejection, had taken in adolescence to defying people to like me, all in. Where Kate screeched, I was endlessly judgmental and caustic. I could have devoted myself to Captain Beefheart, of course, but there was always a slim chance he didn’t realise how difficult his music was. Kate, on the other hand, had composed and sung ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’. Anyone who could make music that beautiful but who chose instead to give us ‘Fullhouse’ had to be trying to keep the world at arm’s length just as frantically as I.

* * *

Arriving back at Gatwick from Ibiza, I suffered an unpleasant hallucination. When you go past Customs and emerge into the terminal proper, you invariably see a mob of mostly swarthy middle-aged men, nearly all of them in suits, holding aloft signs bearing the names of the passengers they’re meant to collect. But for a moment it appeared to me that all their signs said,
You should have stayed abroad, Fatso
. I stopped in my tracks, nearly causing a collision. I was so relieved to see an elderly couple behind me waving excitedly at one of the sign-holding drivers that I nearly threw my arms around them.

London as a whole hadn’t changed much since I’d been away, but it was probably foolish of me to expect that it might have.

Mrs. Cavanaugh was just serving lunch when I got home. It looked delicious. I chatted while I ate with one of the other boarders, Mr. Halibut, whose name I’m not making up. He had a very dry sense of humour, and it wouldn’t have been out of character for him to have shortened his name from Halliburton, or something, but of course I had no way of knowing. At close to 80, his main passions in life were Kate’s
The Sensual World
album, which he played at least four times per day, and hating the actress Elizabeth Hurley, whom he regarded – and this was invariably the second thing he told anyone about himself– as a talentless gold-digger.

On my sole visit to his rooms, he’d shown me the scrapbooks of Hurley clippings he maintained. One was devoted almost entirely to
articles about the christening of the son she’d had with some American scumbag movie producer who later refused to acknowledge paternity. All the biggest celebrities in the UK had attended, which was more than the American scumbag had done. Old people are commonly believed to be intimidated by digital technology, but Mr. Halibut spent up to six hours per day looking for Hurleyana and maintaining the website he’d devised to express his passion,
hurleyhatred.com
. In nearly a year, the site had received only 221 “hits,” or visits, which I thought said more about the level of interest in Hurley than in Mr. Halibut’s handiwork, which was really quite good. The portal page, for instance, contained an animation that he’d had to purchase and then learn a complicated programme to make.

I knew asking him about the website might ruin his mood – he’d originally expected it to be so popular that he’d be able to get cosmetics and hair care companies to advertise on it – but we were beginning to have more silences than chat, so I threw caution to the wind. He claimed not even to pay attention anymore to how many hits he was getting. “I do it for the pleasure it gives me,” he said. “I wouldn’t give a monkey’s if nobody at all visited.” It was clear he was lying, and I made a mental note to visit his site more often. I figured I’d been responsible for around 150 of the previous year’s 221 hits.

He didn’t fancy dessert, and said I could have his. When he went upstairs, Mrs. Cavanaugh told me she reckoned she must have been responsible for around 200 of Mr. Halibut’s hits. It occurred to me we were both probably wildly overestimating. It was wonderful to be home.

She asked me to let her know if I saw Cathy, who’d missed dinner last night and not been seen since. Mrs. Cavanaugh had recently been horrified to learn there were men who preyed on girls with eating disorders, and that, like paedophiles, they made many of their contacts over the Internet, luring their victims to clandestine meetings with promises of no food.

W
ITH me firmly on her side now, but unaware of it, Kate toured Australia and New Zealand and dutifully expressed great esteem for the Aborigines. She appeared on
Saturday Night Live
in America at guest host Eric Idle’s invitation but didn’t take the country by storm. She came home to learn she’d been voted
NME
’s number two Pin-up for the year and
Sounds’
number two Female Sex Object. Debbie Harry was in her prime. Kate seemed not to have much enjoyed the long flight, and would soon be described as frightened of flying.

She might have been a bit iffy on performing live as well, but turned out to have been girding herself for it. Fully a year before actual rehearsals began, she, Del, or Paddy took to conferring for hours with Simon Drake (no mere EMI promotion man, it turned out, but a magician as well!) in his Chiswick home about ideas for visually enhancing the presentation of songs on the first two albums. Now she began seriously visualising a 150-minute multimedia extravaganza in which every song would be a one-act play in itself. There would be supplementary dancers, Simon’s illusions, and no fewer than 17 costume changes. She would call it nothing less modest than
The Tour Of Life
, and it would be like nothing anyone had yet seen!

Was she serious? Oh, very. Fully four months before opening night, she began rehearsing with the musicians (The KT Bush Band, with Preston Heyman replacing Charlie Morgan, bolstered by three additional players, including guitarist Alan Murphy, and two female singers) at Greenwich’s Thameside Woodwharf Studios, then with dancers in Covent Garden, and finally with the entire cast of thousands at Shepperton. By mid-March, weeks before the first show, the tour was sold out.

Over the course of the 150-minute performance, Kate would never actually leave the stage, but rather disappear behind a huge metal egg that rolled on and off as needed, and that would sometimes
accommodate her in its plush red chocolate box-like innards. When first we glimpsed her, she was in a blue Lycra leotard. By ‘Them Heavy People’, she was in a trench coat and fedora. Moments later, in ‘Egypt’, she was a gypsy, and then, for ‘Strange Phenomena’, in a knackered top hat and tails. Later, for ‘James And The Cold Gun’, she was a homicidal cowgirl. It was positively dizzying!

And iconoclastic! On ‘Hammer Horror’, for which she was joined on stage by the show’s choreographer, here dressed as an executioner, she didn’t sing at all, but concentrated on dancing and pulling faces. Years before they became commonplace, her crew had rigged up a remarkable microphone harness out of ordinary wire hangers like those used by dry-cleaners. There were startling lighting effects, smoke and dry ice mist, and, for the fetishists in her audience (no one turned away!), PVC costumery and Kate herself in black leather for ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’, which she thought of as her Patti Smith song.

There was wholesale feigned violence — here Simon Drake trying to murder Kate and push her into a barrel marked Pork, here (in what one couldn’t help but view as a comment on how little she’d enjoyed playing the instrument) human-sized violins beating her to the ground, here, at the end of ‘James’, her gunning down every fellow in sight. There was Jay’s poetry and unmistakable overtones of those paragons of wholesomeness
Thoroughly Modern Millie
and
Singing In The Rain. In
‘Oh England My Lionheart’, sung by Kate in a huge flying jacket on a stage strewn with dying airmen (owed so much by so many!), there was stirring patriotism. And finally, after she’d gathered up some of the countless gifts her audience would surely fling over the footlights to her, there was Kate ending the performance waving as though from the deck of an ocean liner while we who adored her cheered and whistled and clapped along with the thunder of Heyman’s drums.

A photographer managed to sneak into one of the final dress rehearsals at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park. Roadies removed the foolish boy’s film from his camera and growled at him menacingly. A distraught Kate berated him for trying to spoil her surprise. The BBC readied a 15-minute report on the tour for
Nationwide
. Granada TV planned a show of its own. Everything seemed to be coming up roses. The unofficial opening night, at the Poole Arts Centre in Bournemouth, left everyone feeling exhilarated — until they heard that, when he’d gone to the top of the auditorium to perform an “idiot check” — that is, to ensure that no gear had been mistakenly left behind — lighting man Bill Duffield had fallen head first 17 feet onto concrete. He was in
a coma, and would die a week later. Kate considered cancelling the whole tour, but was persuaded to go on with the show. The next night, April 3, 1979, she made her official live debut at the Liverpool Empire, half a mile from the Cavern Club. At the end, the audience applauded her so enthusiastically that she told them she wished she could do the whole tour in Liverpool, though it would hardly have been fair to her fans in Stuttgart.

By all accounts, the show was magnificent, defiantly silly at times, just like her music, wildly over the top, but a bona fide extravaganza by any measure, grand fun. “The most magnificent spectacle I’ve ever encountered in the world of rock,”
Melody Maker’s
man equivocated. “Kate Bush is the sort of performer for whom the term superstar is belittling.”

She played the Birmingham Hippodrome, Oxford’s New Theatre, the Southampton Gaumont, the Manchester Apollo, the Sunderland Empire, Edinburgh Usher Hall, Newcastle’s City Hall. She was a week at the London Palladium. There was the odd audience member who was fatally disappointed that Kate didn’t chat with the audience between songs, but it would have broken the spell. And the press remained ecstatic. “Sometimes teeter[ing] on the farcical, but … never short of compulsive to watch,” marvelled the man from
Sounds
, whose vocabulary at that point seemed to lack
compelling
. Only that scurrilous curmudgeon Charles Shaar Murray of
NME
demurred, sniffing, “The trouble is that she’s completely entranced with the idea of her own stardom,” inspiring an unprecedented shitstorm of protest.

* * *

Cathy turned out not to be with an anorexiaphile, but atop my bed, unconscious. With my box of Cypramil beside her. And all but one of the little tablets punched out. She’d probably had 13 or 14 of them, and who knew what else.

Panic. Awful doused-in-ice-water, nauseating panic.

She had a pulse. That much was certain, and very good indeed. I headed for the stairs. But no. I had to keep a level head. I had to do things in the proper order. Remembering that she might have been on my bed since the night before, I was struck by how deeply unfair it was that I should feel I had only milliseconds to do the right thing. I phoned for an ambulance. The dispatcher was really good, and got me calmed down enough to be intelligible very quickly. I put the phone down and panicked all over again. Should I have asked if I needed to give artificial respiration? I’d worried in the past about some horrid old person or
homeless type collapsing right in front of me and needing it, for how would I be able to bring myself to put my mouth on that of someone of obviously deficient hygiene? Given the way her breath smelled, I might not even have managed it with poor Cathy.