Waiting for Kate Bush (29 page)

I asked what the dilemma was, since it was clearly Nimalka he adored, and Mrs. Cavanaugh approved of as she’d never approved of anyone before.

“Well, for one thing,” he said, the joyfulness draining out of him, “there’s my daughter. In a different way, I may love her even more than Nimalka. But it’s so bloody tricky. I love Jennifer like mad, but it’s Nimalka that I think my first thought about in the morning, and Nimalka who’s most of the air in my lungs. It’s Nimalka who makes me a man, rather than just human, if you see what I mean.

“And Gemma! First girl I ever loved, and she’s always stuck by me. She stuck by me through the years that I drank, and she stuck by me in the years that I gambled, and the years when I was in a pop band earning fuck-all, and putting every penny I did earn up my nose.

“You didn’t know I was in a band? Big time. I was the singer.” He took out his wallet and lovingly extricated a fragile newspaper cutting. It had been refolded so many times over the years that half the text was illegible, but you could tell it was Duncan pouting in the middle of the photo, in a preposterous ornate hairdo, lots of make-up, and a waist-length jacket with big padded shoulders. “Bistro d’Espair we were called. Sort of New Romantics, you’d probably say. We played broody songs with dance beats about lost love. I nicked all my parts intact off Chic records. We were really crap, but of course so were Spandau Ballet. We played the Rose Of Lee in Lewisham, just like Kate and her
brother’s band. Mammy was well chuffed. We tried to find the place in Putney where they’d played, but nobody could remember where it was.” He shook his head and sighed. I couldn’t imagine the cutting surviving three more refoldings.

“As much as I want to run off with Nimalka, I also want to keep from hurting Gems. If I weren’t sure the agony of hurting Gems wouldn’t be as great as the ecstasy of having Nim full time, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

* * *

Neither Radio One nor very many critics wound up liking Kate’s often fervently bizarre 1982 album
The Dreaming
, which many believed could be used to bolster a plea of temporary insanity if Kate were accused of a crime, and which she would later describe as a howl of pain. Said the
Melody Maker’s
man of the title track, about the Aborigines’ showdown with extinction, “It’s the weirdest damn record I’ve ever heard.” Heard by some, because of its spine-chillingly eerie vocals and guest appearance by Rolf Harris on digeridu, as an attempt to ensure there would never again be 100-yard-long queues waiting for her outside record stores, the album nonetheless reached number three. And Kate discovered that she had avid fans in unexpected places, as, for instance, the communist newspaper
The Morning Star
could hardly think of enough superlatives to heap on it. She appeared on
Looking Good, Feeling Fit
to talk about dancing and fitness.

Entirely on her own in the production cockpit now, free to indulge herself without inhibition, Kate let much, much weirdness into
The Dreaming
. ‘Houdini’ and the title song, the latter full of animal noises and sound effects, the sort of disjointed musical gibberish one heard so much of after the release of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, when there were so very few pop singers around, and so many Artists. ‘Get Out Of The House’, full of reverb-drenched shrieking, ends with the chanting of an Eeyore impersonator, and may well be the single most unlistenable track of Kate’s career, which is saying a great deal. (If you hadn’t read that it was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s
The Shining
, what prayer would you have had of making sense of it?) The poundingly percussive ‘Sat In Your Lap’ was more mental patient cabaret, and the munchkins of the previous album’s ‘Blow Away’ were back in force, to the song’s limitless detriment, in the polka-derived ‘Suspended In Gaffa’. Kate encouraged her bass players to play entirely too many
glissandi
. ’Twas though she ordered the necks of their instruments buttered as they entered the studio.

All that said, moments of significant pleasure abounded. ‘All The Love’, in part homage to Laurie Anderson, was disjointed, and, as usual, lyrically impenetrable, but genuinely affecting in places, touchingly plaintive. She managed to be harrowing in a moving, rather than off-putting way, for the first time in the tortured refrain of ‘Pull Out The Pin’. And the highly theatrical ‘Night Of The Swallow’, apparently a dialogue between the singer and the would-be smuggler she’s trying to save from himself, achieved a sort of cinematicness, using Celtic instrumentation to marvellous effect.

Melody Maker’s
Colin Irwin gasped, “Initially it is bewildering and not a little preposterous … ‘Get Out Of My House’ has her roaring and ranting like a caged lion, ‘Leave It Open’ has her yelling like a demented mynah bird. She’s taken the riskiest, most uncommercial route …” In America,
Record’s
Nick Burton asserted, “Bush has the dramatic edge, quirkiness and delicacy of Bowie in his
Hunk Dory
period; the eclectic, almost Baroque curiosity of a Peter Gabriel; a simply amazing voice that allows her to be alternately childlike and sensuously forceful … The cornerstone of the album is ‘Night Of The Swallow,’ which … moves gracefully through many changing moods and patterns; it’s a work of both beauty and anguish, poignancy and eeriness.” Charles Faris won the cogency award, calling the album “a season in hell”.

* * *

I knew all too well how Duncan felt. The problem with having grown up feeling an embarrassment was that I could never get enough affirmation from women. Even when I was living with the universal object of desire, I was forever sneaking out to prove to myself that lots of other women wanted me too, a fact of which I’ve come to be hugely ashamed.

The universal object of desire either didn’t know or simply refused to talk to me about it. But not so her successor, the one with the best hair in Los Angeles, a breathtaking gigantic honey-coloured Afro, or perhaps Norgefro, as her parents were Minnesota Norwegians. Halfway through my two years with her, and just before I became the face of Marcel Flynn, we went to a concert at which I apparently caught the eye of George Harrison’s former Hollywood mistress, who sent me a letter suggesting that we meet, and then another, more emphatic one, pretty nearly demanding it. She enclosed a photograph that suggested that she might be the last woman in Los Angeles to repudiate the
Valley Of The Dolls
look, which suited me right down to the ground, as I
found outlined lips, big hair, and deep cleavage very appealing. It was all moot anyway, of course. I was going to turn down a former Beatle’s former (and apparently not that long ago!) lover? No, I hardly thought so.

I took to telling my Minnesota Norwegian every Saturday morning that I was off to play basketball, would play long enough to get sweaty, would phone George Harrison’s former mistress to ask if she wanted to lick the sweat off my gorgeous hairless chest, would be assured that she certainly did, and would hurry over to her place, where she’d greet me at the door dressed as though to model for
Penthouse
, with music she knew me to approve of on the stereo and neat lines of coke waiting for me on the little mirror on “my” bedside table.

Everyone wound up suffering. George Harrison’s former mistress revealed that she wasn’t, as she originally promised, content to see me only on Saturday mornings, and began phoning me in tears at hours my Minnesota Norwegian was likely to be at home. The night she phoned to say she’d decided to kill herself if I didn’t get over there immediately, I rang a pal to lie for me, to say I’d just left his house if my Minnesota Norwegian rang to confirm my story that I was going over to see him. Passive aggressive as he’d always been, he neglected to tell his own girlfriend, though, and it was she who answered when my Minnesota Norwegian, who had a good idea by this time I was up to something, phoned.

When I got home from telling George Harrison’s mistress that it was now over between us because she’d revealed herself to be an emotional blackmailer, and promised her (bluffing, of course!) that I wouldn’t feel even a pang of guilt or remorse if she went through with topping herself, my Minnesota Norwegian greeted me with a torrent of kicks and punches, none of which hurt nearly so much as the look in her eyes when she calmed down, just before she began to cry. And I wasn’t allowed to console her. The person with whom I’d shared my life most intimately for the past two years was in horrible, audible pain in the next room, and when I went in to try to think of something to ease it, she didn’t scream at me or throw more punches, but just said, very quietly, “Please leave me alone. Please.”

Which isn’t to make her more heroic than she actually was. A few weeks later, as we reclined on the bed together, watching a movie on television, she suddenly decided to try to extinguish her cigarette in my face. It hurt, but not as much as the look in her eyes the night she’d found out about the affair.

It’s a common affliction, the no-affirmation-is-ever-enough one.
During the Monica Lewinsky hurly-burly, it was suggested that the most powerful man in the world seemed to suffer from it as well, that Bill Clinton found it no less impossible to turn down a presentable woman (or La Lewinsky) than I.

I have often asked myself over the decades why I didn’t leave my Minnesota Norwegian for George Harrison’s mistress. My Minnesota Norwegian was sweet and funny and devoted, but not nearly the traffic-stopper the universal object of desire had been, and not terribly clever. George Harrison’s mistress wasn’t exactly Susan Sontag (as I, of course, wasn’t Noah Chomsky), but she seemed, with her greater cleavage, to get a lot more attention from men, and wasn’t the primary purpose of my girlfriend in those years to prove to the world that I wasn’t merely as good as The Boys Who Could, but in fact far superior?

Even then, though, there was something about her wanting me so fiercely, in wanting to define herself in terms of me, that made me very uncomfortable. I mean, she was going to feel good about herself because I was her lover? Had she taken a good look at me? How could she have failed to see that, beneath the superior fashion sense and saturnine Semitic good looks, there beat the heart of a boy who not only couldn’t climb the pole, but had left poor Diane Geller in the middle of the sportsnite floor, dancing with no one?

It was actually right after I left the Minnesota Norwegian, while in London with a bunch of New Zealanders who’d hired me to present the pilot of a rock video show (MTV wasn’t yet a tingling in its creators’ loins) they were working up to try to sell in America, that I first heard Kate. One of the New Zealanders, the one whose facial hair suggested that he thought Amish chic was right around the corner, had picked me up hitchhiking to the beach. Impressed, as the creative director of Marcel Flynn’s advertising agency would be two years later, by my saturnine Semitic good looks, my usually correct use of words of three syllables, and my famous slashing wit, he asked if I’d fancy an all-expenses-paid trip to the UK. I was fed up with the beach and said sure. My use of three-syllable words notwithstanding, they treated me when we convened in London like just another pretty face, a saturnine Semitic blond bimbo. I had to badger them implacably to be allowed to attend a production meeting at which they viewed tapes of emerging British artists whose managers wanted them on the show. One of the tapes was of Kate doing ‘Wuthering Heights’.

It made everyone’s jaw drop open, most, though, in horror. One of the New Zealanders, a longhaired pothead in leather and denim who believed Deep Purple to be the best thing the UK had ever produced,
pronounced it, between belches, the biggest pile of shit he’d ever had to sit through. The one who’d hacked off most of his hair 48 hours after our arrival and dyed what was left blue thought Kate represented everything the music he preferred was trying to eradicate. If we included Kate among the many punk acts he’d personally recruited for the show, he promised, he would hurl himself in front of a train. (I thought we should include her for that reason alone.) The one who believed that white people could play classical music, but nothing else, not really, and who was pushing a bunch of reggae acts none of the rest of us could even begin to tell apart, thought the tape a wind-up.

Only the boss, the Peter Sellers lookalike who downed enough Foster’s before breakfast every morning to fill a bathtub, agreed the tape was hilarious and original, audacious and exhilarating, and thus would offer a nice contrast to everything else we had. One of the first Walkman owners, I went out and got her cassette immediately. The first night, I must have played ‘Wuthering Heights’ 35 times, to the exclusion of everything else. I hadn’t loved anything so much since ‘Anarchy In The UK’ the year before. The next afternoon I got to the rest of the album, and discovered that I liked ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ as much as ‘Wuthering’. Just exquisite, that vibrato-less whole note with which she began the choruses – and splendid work by Andrew Powell on the string arrangement. And if she was a maddeningly vague lyricist, she was one of the most imaginative melodists I’d come across in ages. The chorus of ‘Them Heavy People’: a melodylover’s dream come true!

“So what do you reckon?” Duncan asked, reeling me back in from my reverie. I thought of telling him about the universal object of desire, and about George Harrison’s mistress and my Minnesota Norwegian, but how could I reasonably expect him to believe that someone such as I had ever been of interest to women like that? I hated myself for what I’d allowed myself to become as much as for what I’d been, back in the era of my greatest allure, and told him that, as much as I wished I could give him the answer, I could not.

I wouldn’t have blamed him, in his awful uncertainty and frustration, for snarling, “What would someone like you know about this sort of thing?” and storming out, but he said nothing of the sort, and in fact embraced me. It made me ashamed of myself for having so little faith in the innate goodness of people.

A
T the beginning of my next session with the inaudible little Turkish psychotherapist the NHS had provided at my insistence, I pulled my chair very near to hers before she’d even murmured anything, and admitted I’d had a very hard time hearing her the week before. It either fell on deaf ears or there was something wrong with her vocal cords. I wonder if she had lots of nightmares in which she called for help but couldn’t be heard by anybody. I wondered if that wondering said something about my own pathology.