Waiting for Kate Bush (42 page)

Rather more than Eric Clapton’s predictable B.B. King-isms, it was Gary Brooker’s brooding Hammond organ that drove ‘And So Is Love’ – that and Kate’s vocal, which, where it suddenly changed mood and soared desperately into a higher register, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end again. I revelled in her unprecedented forthrightness, as I did too in the heartbreaking Brookerdriven closing track, ‘You’re The One’. Not since Lorraine Ellison’s like-themed ‘Stay With Me’ had I heard anything quite like the screech of anguish that Kate, heretofore trying so hard, and successfully, to keep her dignity in the face of her lover’s defection, unleashed in the fade-out. This was Kate Bush just below the pinnacle of her remarkable powers.

The pinnacle being the devastating, monumental ‘Moments Of Pleasure’, in which she laments the loss of several loved ones. Forget the solipsism of a lot of the lyrics – I honestly can’t imagine anyone not being brought to the verge of tears by how she sang the bit about her recently deceased mum. And if the line about the pain of just being alive didn’t send tingles down your spine, you wanted to see a neurologist, quick.

There were those, expert in pagan invocations, who bristled when, in ‘Lily’, Kate confused Gabriel and Raphael, putting the one meant to be in front of her behind. Some of her fans seemed to need to get out more. In the even less comprehensible ‘Song Of Solomon’, the naughty Andy Gill noted, “Bush says, ‘Don’t want your bullshit/ Just want your sexuality’, though she seems to have an apparently boundless appetite for the former.”

She sang on a track called ‘My Computer’ by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, to the accompaniment of whose music she described herself as liking to dance. They’d apparently met, and agreed to work on something together, after she attended one of the London shows of his 1990
Nude
tour. By and by, she sent him a multitrack copy of’ Why Should I Love You’. According to Michael Koppelman, an engineer and musician who collaborated briefly with the Artist in the early Nineties, Kate’s original was incalculably better than the “lame disco” version the Artist came up with for
The Red Shoes
.

She came once more to New York, to Tower Records in lower Manhattan, where 2,000 people had queued for hours in freezing weather just to tell her with tears in their eyes how much her music meant to them – and, in one case, that of a girl who’d flown all the way
from San Francisco, the width of the continent away, to offer an arm to be autographed, and then the autograph made permanent by tattooing. Who but another as famous as Kate herself would have even the most crudest understanding of how terrifying and exhausting adoration of that intensity could be?

In an attempt to prevent queue jumping, Tower handed out numbered wristbands. A CNN crew showed up to film the faithful, many of whom, in hopes of improving their chances of glimpsing Kate’s arrival, had commandeered garbage cans to stand on. Finally, nearly ten hours after the first fan had turned up, her limousine dispensed her, and fans were at last admitted, in groups of 10, everyone to receive a sole autograph, to the store.

They gave her three and a half big American shopping bagfuls of gifts. She wouldn’t sign the San Francisco girl’s arm (for fear the girl might wish in a couple of years she’d saved it for Tori Amos, for instance), but did, though she wouldn’t see a penny in royalties, graciously sign a dizzying variety of heretofore-unseen bootleg albums, even one whose cover, depicting her in a halter top, visibly displeased her.

Four days later, she was in Toronto, where a mob of well-mannered (Canadian, after all) fans gathered outside CFNY’s studio to gape at her through the studio’s glass front. At the insistence of EMI’s local dignitaries, brown wrapping paper was taped to the glass to preclude poor Kate’s coming to feel like a newly imported panda in a North American zoo. When she learned that the faithful outside had got 40 signatures on their ad hoc petition asking that their gawking not be thwarted, Kate herself got up and removed the paper from the window.

How do you get 20 Canadian Kate Bush fans out of a swimming pool? You say, “All Canadian Kate Bush fans out of the pool now, please.”

With regard to video, she’d been slightly ahead of the curve with the entirely plot-driven ‘Cloudbusting’, and seemed to want to get ahead of it again. No mere individual clips would suffice. This time, nothing less than a short film, featuring six songs from the album, would do, and she herself, the shy megalomaniac (as many in the press had come to enjoy calling her) would both star in and direct. Inspired by Michael Powell’s 1948 film
The Red Shoes
, co-starring Lindsey Kemp and the estimable Miranda Richardson, and featuring a lot of dancing for one presumed to have turned her back on dance, the film depicted Kate practising to record her video of ‘Rubberband Girl’, only to be
interrupted by a loss of electrical power. After being left alone in the studio, she’s confronted by a strange woman (Richardson) who comes to her through the mirror, and offers Kate beautiful red ballet shoes in exchange for help getting home. Kate comes to regret having accepted the deal when she finds herself unable to stop dancing, as she does, frenziedly, through squishy fruit, in ‘Eat The Music’.

If largely devoid of plot and poorly edited, the film was at least extremely colourful, perhaps in homage to Powell’s, which was made at the dawn of the Technicolor Age. Much expense had manifestly been spared elsewhere, though, and Kate revealed herself, as an actress, to be a terrific singer. (What, one wondered, had happened to her since Comic Strip’s
Les Dogs?)
Her more devout fans would nonetheless manage to find it endearingly quirky ’n’ campy. At the end of its premiere screening at the Odeon West End, its London Film Festival audience rose as one, almost as though imitating that at the Liverpool Empire the first official night of the
Tour Of Life
14 years before, and applauded until their hands ached.

The reviews weren’t terrific, though. Derek Elley thought it “not so much a movie as the sort of linked sequence of promo vids pop stars are wont to hang themselves with, given a feature-length rope … The effect suggests a peculiarly daft corner of the Seventies.”
Homeground
reader Ahmir Hassib Mirza of Newcastle wrote countless thousands of words trying to vent his displeasure. Not far from Leicester Square, audiences were rather less exultant – and very, very much sparser – than the Film Festival one. In north London, for instance, it was lucky to attract audiences of more than half a dozen. Years later, Kate would apologise for having wasted La Richardson’s and others’ time, and claim to be pleased with only four minutes of the film. “I had the opportunity to do something really interesting,” she would sigh, “and completely blew it.”

* * *

Mrs. Cavanaugh was crying. I feared the worst. The first thing that went through my mind was that maybe Cathy had died, or that Kate had announced that she’d given up on trying to make another album, or that Gilmour’s mouth had got him beaten into a coma. But her tears were for herself. It appeared that she and Mr. Chumaraswamy were on the rocks. He’d been ever more distant the past couple of weeks. At first she thought he was preoccupied with a new business venture, about which he would tell her nothing, but now she’d discovered it was much more than that.

“He’s been seeing someone else. The whole time we’ve been, well, seeing each other, he’s been seeing someone else. And the worst part is that it’s a bloke.”

Blinking frantically, holding the tears back, she turned her face to the ceiling. “A bloke,” she repeated. “This is a first for me. A feckin’ bloke.” Adversity seemed to have reminded her of her ethnicity.

“And not a bloke I can compete with either. A feckin’ whirling dervish or something, this one. A bloody Muslim warrior.”

“With a turban?” I asked. “And a very long beard?”

“Oh, perfect,” she said bitterly. “So I was the last one to know.”

“If we’re talking about Mohammed,” I said, “and we’re probably not, since his interest seems to be in women with grotesquely enormous breasts, all I know is that he’s Mr. Chumaraswamy’s intimidator.”

“And all I know is that I really can’t bear much more. Which is why I’ve written this.” She removed a couple of pages folded in quarters from the back pocket of her jeans and held them out to me. I was far too knackered for reading, but the look in her eyes made clear that I couldn’t refuse. I briefly thought of trying to pretend not to be able to find my reading glasses, but they were right there atop the keyboard of my iMac. I sighed, but she wasn’t interested. She stepped over to and looked out of the window while I began to read.

“No,” she said. “Aloud. I want to hear it read out.”

It was entitled
Aibheann Cavanaugh’s Resignation from the Human Race
.

“‘At 52, after a lifetime’s trying, I must, with regret, conclude that I don’t belong in the human race. Because, as I write this, I am wracked by levels of frustration, boredom, despair, and self-loathing from which not even the exquisite music of Kate Bush can provide adequate relief anymore, this will constitute my farewell.

“‘Since relocating to London (to which my sons Duncan and Gilmour had moved in 1993) with my daughter Catherine in 1997, I have tried with implacable determination to establish myself as either a writer or website designer. I believe myself to be unusually good at both jobs, and am not alone in this belief. In my twenties and early thirties, the theatre criticism I wrote for
The Irish Times
was praised as far afield as New York. I have won awards for my poetry and short fiction.

“‘On relocating to London, I very much fancied the idea of starting up where I’d left off, and added journalism to criticism on my palette, writing about trends in theatre, about actors, and directors, and playwrights, and so on. My pedigree aside, though, I couldn’t get anyone to pay any attention at all. Quite typically, I would spend a whole morning researching a particular subject on-line, and then spend an
hour writing and rewriting what I dared imagine was a well-informed, even provocative query, which is what you call an article proposal you send an editor. If I got any response at all – and around 90 per cent of the time I didn’t – it would be one hurriedly typed line, free of punctuation and capitalisation, full of typing mistakes, often saying no more than
sorry not fr us
. If I were to have a headstone, I would want
sorry not fr us
to be my epitaph.

“‘These people are probably very busy, friends have told me repeatedly over the years, as my frustration has given way to hopelessness, as I have reconciled myself to the realisation that I will never be given another chance to do what I do uncommonly, even extraordinarily, well. Bugger that. I know what it’s like to be busy. At the height of my career as a critic, I wasn’t just writing my reviews (and poems and short stories). I was also looking after a husband and infant son, Duncan, and doing a bloody good job of it too. And yet when a young writer took the time to write to me, I wouldn’t have dreamed of being so cavalier with them.

“‘Don’t imagine I’m not taking into account that it’s a lot easier and faster to send an email than a letter, and that for that reason modern editors are probably receiving appeals from a great many prospective writers every day. But I know how long it takes to write an email that conveys some tiny modicum of respect for the recipient, rather than
sorry not fr us
.

“‘I design as well. I had a flair for it from early on. When it became possible to do it on computers, I was beside myself with glee. It seemed more fun than I’d ever imagined possible. And I was very good at it. When the Internet came along in the mid-Nineties, I started designing websites for friends. What a joy to make your work accessible for the whole world to see minutes after doing it, without having to wait for printers! And I was good at that as well. When the big multinational consulting firm of Lanigan & O’Keeffe opened an e-business unit in its Dublin office in 1998, I was one of the first two web designers they hired. But since I came over to London, I’ve had a grand total of two bloody interviews for design jobs, and one of those for a three-week contract with a client looking for someone to lay out a catalogue in bloody Quark Xpress using a template they provided. And what a naff template it was!

“‘I’ve been making ends meet by running a boarding house. I fell into it quite by happenstance, but don’t seem to be able to fall back out! I’m good at writing, and at design. I’m bloody awful at running a boarding house.’

“But that isn’t the case at all,” I interrupted myself to protest. “It seems to me that you do a marvellous …”

That was as far as I got. It would have taken a far braver man than I to go on in the face of the look she’d turned from the window to give me, her cheeks streaked with tears that she’d cried without a sound. “Just feckin’ read, you,” she said, “without editorialising.”

“‘And that’s just my professional life,’ ”I continued. “‘My personal life’s a nightmare all its own. Thank God for my elder son, Duncan. He’s never been a moment’s trouble. But the other two! Duncan’s younger brother Gilmour seems intent on getting killed in a drunken brawl, and his sister Catherine on starving her poor self to death, and this after five months of living rough and not even letting me hear the sound of her sweet voice. And as God is my witness, I wasn’t less kind to either of them. I love them no less than Duncan, not a bit. I adore all three. And I go to bed each night thinking that it might be the last night I’ll have all three of them.

“‘The men I’m mad about don’t want to know. In my day, I was gorgeous. I know this to be true. I’ve got bloody photographic documentation! But every month I look in the mirror and am horrified to see my own mum seeping out through the pores of my epidermis. I see my own reflection in a shop window and think,
Christ, I haven’t looked like that all day, have I?
And I know I have, and that I’m never likely to look better than I do today, not being one for having her face cut up to spite the years.

“‘In the past several months, I’ve had relationships, one sexual, the other platonic, with two gentlemen, each wonderful in his own way, but I can tell I’m driving both of them away as I always do. There’s no one strong enough in this world to deal with my despair. And there’s no one I hate enough to make them have to.’”