Phew, it’s still going, isn’t it?  Half the way there.  I could have been at Kim Newman’s Christmas lunch today, apart from having to write the script I’m in the middle of.  They invited Rob Shearman instead.  Which, I suspect, is going to be the story of my life from now on.  (Just got a text message from the lunch: me bringing cheese as a gift last year is why they have a ‘no foodstuffs’ rule now.)  Couple of announcements before we get going: I’ve now had loads of late responses to the first three favourites blogs, so we’re going to have a further bout of mixed comic creator/SF novelist/Who writer delights right at the end of the run.  And my Dalek operator/Bowie specialist/Big Finish writer friend Nick Pegg tells me that he has two professionally-produced pantomimes out there this year: Cinderella at the Harrogate Theatre, and Dick Whittington at the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch.  There will doubtless be hidden Doctor Who jokes ahoy.  Do pop along and enjoy having a look at Nick’s... Cinders.

 

My subject today is one close to my heart, and yet something I’ve never written about on the blog.  But thanks to the poll and Gareth’s video choice, now seems an appropriate moment to mention it.  The work of Kate Bush has been important to me, and influenced my writing, for many years now.  So here are ten tracks/themes that sum up why she’s my favourite musician.

 

‘Suspended in Gaffa’/Sidelong Meaning: What I most like about Kate’s song writing is that she approaches the abstract in a way which seems genuinely poetic, that is, not just throwing random words at the wall, perhaps to fit the shape of a tune (hello, New Order) but being in charge of at least some of the many different interpretations that her lyrics are open to.  ‘Suspended in Gaffa’ (from The Dreaming) is a case in point.  What exactly is this song about?  It’s not in the slightest bit obvious, and is all the better for it.  ‘Unless we can prove that we’re doing it, we can’t have it all’ reminds me of one of those grim social situations from around the time the album was made, where couples were forced to demonstrate they were in a relationship to deserve various forms of benefit.  But that’s probably not deliberate.  For me the song sounds like something very familiar from my own worst moments, a writer wondering just how much more effort it’ll take to get noticed: ‘Can I have it all now?’  Especially when Kate looks at that girl in the mirror:  ‘Between you and me she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere... no, not a thing’.  And the beat of the song reminds me of that emotion as well, a point we’ll get to later.  But if that’s one of the meanings, then who’s that very quietly whispering ‘I’m scared of the changes’?  In the way of all the best art, meaning is left down to us listening to just the right degree, and there’s a lot going on at once. And I’ve taken something very important to me from it, which is some of my own work and some of the song’s.  As it should be.  The Dreaming is the heartland of this abstraction, and indeed where it first seriously appears, but it persists throughout the rest of Kate’s career.  Indeed, Kate is arguably at her worst when telling absolutely concrete stories, such as in ‘Heads We’re Dancing’.  Although there are some huge exceptions, which we’ll come to.

 

‘Sunset’/Restraint:  There’s a pause of complete silence, one minute thirty five into this, my favourite track of my favourite Kate disc (Aerial: A Sky of Honey), which speaks to what ‘turning to dust’ might actually mean.  (We’ll talk about that in a minute.)  The whole track is a fight between nervous energy and a slow, jazzy late night tumble into relaxation.  As befits its theme, the fight between life and death, as demonstrated in nature, but rather horribly leading to the question of what that means for the individual.  (Again, your interpretation may vary.)  ‘Who knows who wrote that song of summer the blackbirds sing at dusk?’  is a leading question about another of Kate’s themes, again one we’ll pick up on in a minute.  The whole restrained lead up is designed to accelerate us completely naturally in a developing rhythm that becomes a dance, and yet again suddenly ends, with just birdsong leading into the next track.  And it feels like the most organic thing in the world, like it’s something from your dreams or your nervous system.  Kate is a performer who isn’t content to just sing songs to a guitar, because you know, Bulgarian trios, Rolf Harris, Prince... but she’s one who definitely knows when to hold everything back.

 

‘Symphony in Blue’/Death:  ‘My terrible fear of dying no longer plays with me, but now I know I’m needed for the symphony.’  To be honest, this track is a bit played out for me, like much of Lionheart and Never For Ever.  (It’s my opinion that the very best thing about Kate is: she keeps on getting better, re: the new vocal version of ‘Wuthering Heights’.)  But I think that, early on, the ‘me’ referred to is usually her, and I wonder if this line doesn’t reflect something that keeps recurring in her work, up to and including the track above.  She has so many death songs: ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’; ‘James and the Cold Gun’; ‘Pull Out the Pin’; large chunks of The Ninth Wave.  These songs never display that slightly queasy romance with death that’s there in a lot of English Romanticism and Psychedelia, but are instead usually bloody terrified.  Bellowing ‘I love life!’ doesn’t qualify you for the baggy shirt and opium brigade.  And thank goodness.  It’s where a lot of her energy seems to come from, racing ahead of something.  It’s notable that her biggest career break (indeed, perhaps her only one, given that she always otherwise seemed to be working, just very slowly!) was to raise her son. 

 

‘Sat in your Lap’/Rhythm:  Another very abstract song, but marked by a rhythm that’s very familiar to me.  It reminds me of what I’ve always assumed is tarantism on my part (although it doesn’t really sound very similar), a tendency to drift off into thinking hard about something, usually a story, while my limbs flap about wildly and generally scare people.  I got it socialised out of me in childhood, to the point where now if someone walks into the room I stop instantly.  I’ve sometimes found myself walking around the room when I’m in search of where next to go in a plot, deliberately starting to gently flap my arms in an effort to bring it on, as if I’m making a very half-hearted attempt to take off.  When I’m working as hard as I am now, it’s as if it’s used up, it just doesn’t happen.  (It’s also completely positive, as far as I can see, so talking about it here doesn’t break my blog’s usual ‘no sob story’ rule.)  Anyhow, when people ask what it feels like, I tell them to listen to this track.  I doubt Kate’s a fellow sufferer (hello there, extreme fandom!) but what she often does is use rhythms that seem to me to be very biological, not necessarily the rhythms of dance, but instead of things like heartbeats (‘Running Up that Hill’) and marching (‘The Big Sky’) and designs made with mime in mind (‘Them Heavy People’).  I think her mime training has a lot to do with this.  But I’m aware I’m on the thinnest of ice with this one.  As with all these points, your own experience will vary hugely.  All I know is, I want to dance to ‘Running Up that Hill’ but can’t. 

 

‘Constellation of the Heart’/Comedy:  It always makes me sigh when people refer to Kate as ‘eccentric’, not just because that’s quite a surface reading (a few expressions, poses and acts from when she was trying to be something entirely new, the female Bowie, with almost no rock family tree, and when she was seen as quite punk, and thus scary and funny at the same time) but because I think she’s from a strain of genius that’s actually rooted in everyday life.  I wouldn’t be surprised to run into her in the supermarket.  I think people probably do and don’t notice.  A sign of this awareness of normality is, I think, her well-documented love of British comedy.  You wouldn’t find Patti Smith (one of those slight precursors) singing with Rowan Atkinson.  It’s not only visible in her outright comedy songs like ‘Ken’ (Ken Livingstone as ‘funky sex machine’), but in a wryness and (often rocking) overstatement in tracks like ‘The Big Sky’ (those yodelling Rhine Maidens) and  ‘Sexual Healing’, which delights in being such a bloody unlikely track for her to cover, and manages to thus be hilarious, warm and horny at the same time, while also pinning down what a terrible lyric it is.  The silences here often sound like her trying not to laugh, and it’s notable how many of her tracks include laughter.  ‘Constellation of the Heart’, from my second favourite of her albums, The Red Shoes, sets up the device of Kate being the captain of her romantic life, getting disturbing reports from the rest of the ship (‘we think you’d better wake up, Captain’), but takes it deliberately too far for drama (‘I want a full report’/’That’s it’/’What do you mean “that’s it”?’) Funky, funny and true, all at once.

 

‘Coffee Homeground’/Theatricality:  This song even uses stage drum rolls and cymbal crashes, but what I want to talk about is one class of exception to the ‘Kate not so good at concrete subjects’ rule, where she puts together a little movie in three minutes, here about country house poisoners, with fake deep comedy voices, Weimar strut and a dozen other shades of meaning, but a definite atmosphere.  There is no video, but we know what it’d look like.  My favourites in this class are where they tend towards abstraction within the theme, like with ‘Egypt’, but it’s an appealing sort of Kate, chiefly to be found around ‘Never For Ever’. 

 

‘You’re the One’/Devastating Emotional Truth Out Of Nowhere:   And then you suddenly find out she’s got a brick in her other boxing glove.  It’s painful, this song.  It’s about the terrible things people say during break-ups, and it’s obviously, horribly, true.  She hasn’t spared herself a moment of it, and she isn’t going to spare us, either, in the best possible way.  It’s not a plea for him to come back, but a plea that the genuine pain be acknowledged and not replaced with stupid words.  No acting, no artifice, she’s spitting these lyrics.  See also ‘Never Be Mine’, ‘Get Out of my House’. 

 

‘Leave It Open’/Art Rock:  Byrne/Eno/Bush.  I’m just saying.  If Japan or Talking Heads had recorded that it would be a famous track in its own right.  Theatricality, abstract theme, that rhythm from inside, the great Kate song that nobody mentions.  Perhaps just a bit of its time in terms of the synth sounds, which, along with its sheer darkness is what makes The Dreaming not quite my favourite Kate album.

 

‘Blow Away’/A Search for the Numinous:  You may have thought of this track when I was going on about death, in that it specifically asks for a lack of resuscitation.  I did say these were my own readings, and I’d say also that this track is trying a bit too hard.  ‘Lights in the sky invite you to die’ indeed, ‘die’ sounding almost like a question mark with how hard it is.  And the procession of dead rock stars sounds like she’s trying to persuade herself that that familiar vision is actually the case.  Hmm, maybe not.  But what I think it does stand for, alongside ‘In Search of Peter Pan’, ‘Strange Phenomena’, ‘Cloudbusting’, ‘All We Ever Look For’, ‘Reaching Out’, almost every moment of A Sky of Honey and many many more as they say, is the other central theme in Kate’s work, the search for mystical experience.  This is the thing with which I identify the most, and I appreciate how, especially as she gets older, she’s started to explore musical effects that can approximate and stimulate such experience.  (Oh come on, I mean as any great musician does, consciously or not.  The voices haven’t started talking to me from the telly quite yet.)  Certain parts of Kate’s work, chiefly instrumental, although she uses her voice as one of those instruments, seem to me to be trying to approach the same thing Vaughan Williams approached: the ineffable, half seen at dusk, in that same very British context.  I’d like to hear a purely instrumental album from her.

 

‘Why Should I Love You?’/My Own Point of View:  It’s funny the tracks people choose as their most meaningful.  Usually it’s very hard to explain why.  In this particular case, I might be regarded as being pre-disposed towards this, in that it’s a co-write between Kate and my other favourite artist, Prince.  But that’s not why I’m so fond of it.  Indeed, the first section, which is most heavily funky in a Prince way, is what I like least.  It’s when the track burrows under that and starts finding quiet inside that it starts blowing me away.  Actually, and here are those comedy roots again, it’s Lenny Henry’s (yes!) solo ‘the fine purple, the purest gold’ that gets me.  And from then on it’s ritual magic, a pattern being outlined that expresses an emotional truth through ceremony, in one of those magic atmospheres that feels half cathedral half mother’s embrace.  (Or as Moffat would say, ‘it’s really your Mum and Dad’.)  So by the time we get that guitar break, I’m so thoroughly swept up by it that it’s sheer joy.  Everything mad I’ve said here about Kate, combined in the one song.  Which is why I used lines as chapter titles in Human Nature. 

 

But there, I’ve wittered fannishly enough, and made too little sense.  And used the word ‘ineffable’, which invites trouble.  And now it’s dark outside, and warm in here, and I’ve done my work and I could do with dark beer. 

 

The Adventures of the Amazing Scale Guy... Day Six.

‘Scale Guy, Scale Guy, does whatever a Scale Guy does.  But he’s the best at what he does.  And what he does is demonstrate relative size.  Da de dah de dah...’

 

Today, Essential Scale Guy from 1975.

 

‘Big... small... you see them now, in the instant of seizing the mugger by the collar, as just points on the ruler of consciousness.  Does he see things the way you do?  Something in his eyes, there for an instant, suggests it is so.  But –‘ (Caption continued on next panel.)

 

See you tomorrow!  Ho ho ho!  Cheerio!