Waiting for Kate Bush (7 page)

Paddy, later to specialise in medieval instruments at the London College of Furniture, seemed to feel compelled to learn to play every exotic stringed instrument of which he got wind – including mandolin, balalaika, sitar, koto, and violin. He played old English folk songs popularised by A.L. Lloyd, whose ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’ Kate would later admit to Radio One remained one of her favourite songs.
Bigger brother Jay, who’d later read his poetry on the radio and be published in
Poetry Review
, introduced her to Greek mythology and the work of the Sufic mystic Gurdjieff.

Having passed her 11-plus, Kate was enrolled at St. Joseph’s Convent Grammar School, run by enlightened nuns in modern clothing, but housed in a gloomy Victorian building in Abbey Wood. Small and skinny, younger than her classmates by virtue of having been born in late July, she would occasionally get walloped, but never fight back, not even verbally. The ability to slash her tormentors to ribbons with her tongue might have served her well, but East Wickham Farm was a sarcasm-free zone. She declined to play in the school orchestra, but sang, without particular distinction, and not very high, in the school choir. She did well at English, Latin, biology, music, and made her first contribution, the poem “The Crucifixion,” to the school’s end of year magazine when she was 11, at which age a school photograph shows her to have been dumpy, with no idea of what to do with her hair. (She’d seemingly tried to brush it straight, but had succeeded only in splitting a great many ends.) She would later contribute poems entitled “Blind Joe Death,” “A Tear and a Raindrop Met,” “Death,” and “You” to the school magazine, but didn’t tell boys she was making songs of them for fear of being seen as an emasculating overachiever.

She read science fiction, and was keen on John Wyndham. She shared her own stories with chums on the playground at lunchtime and in at least one instance – that of
The Haunted Mill
– was able to induce them to come over and act the story out. Isolation seemed to fascinate her. Those trusted few who heard her early songs often found them unnervingly morbid. Between her second and third years at school, she claimed to be writing a children’s book. To be a bright teenage girl is to claim to be writing a children’s book.

Though terribly shy elsewhere, she blossomed at the parties she hosted at East Wickham Farm, where her guests would hurl themselves into the swimming pool at evening’s end to try to make themselves sober. Commonly, one presumes, they succeeded only in making themselves damp. She admired Elton John’s piano playing, but reserved her biggest crush for a local boy who looked like Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd, and regularly implored a school friend to traipse with her past their local, Fanny On The Hill, in hopes of glimpsing him. She packed in the idea of his noticing her after meeting her first boyfriend, Al Buckle, at nearby St. Laurence’s Youth Club, at 16. Playing him tapes of her music, her shyness was such that she had to leave the room.

Treated with kindness at home, Cathy treated others with kindness
out in the world. When a classmate was hospitalised, it was she who circulated a card of condolence for everyone to sign. But most children are sadistic little monsters, and sometimes her friends sent her to Coventry purely for the pleasure of seeing the sadness and confusion in her pretty hazel eyes. She found being ignored more painful than being walloped. Still, there is no evidence of anyone having described her as unbuckled when she and Al packed it in.

Her pipe-smoking
pater
, whose accent betrayed the occasional trace of the Essex countryside, was aloof, but generous, to the tune of Cathy being free to help herself to the change he left around the house. She stashed cash in the mouth of the lion-skin rug in the front room, removing some to buy herself Simon & Garfunkel’s
Bridge Over Troubled Water
LP, and a ticket to a Who gig, the first gig she ever saw. She was there at the Hammersmith Odeon the evening David Bowie, who’d grown up a short bus ride from East Wickham Farm, announced that the Spiders From Mars would be no more after that night. She wept along with much of the audience.

During her fifth year at St. Joseph’s, she spent a week with a friend at Newcastle Polytechnic and thought she might become a psychiatrist. To be a bright, empathetic teenager is to consider becoming a psychiatrist. It also crossed her mind to do social work.

What she really wanted to do, though, was music. At 12, she’d begun recording her songs, some of which amazed her dad by seeming to emerge as whole verses at a time, on the family tape recorder. Within a year, she’d composed the clumsy but gorgeous ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’. A family friend who worked in the music business encouraged her to send tapes to music publishers and record companies. No one paid the slightest attention, and not entirely because most vetters of unsolicited tapes in the music business have no business in the music business. Her voice was unusually assured, but not quite extraordinary. Her songs occasionally betrayed traces of melodic ingenuity, but squandered them by rarely condescending to provide a recurring “hook” (think of the “Ooh, he’s here again” section of ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’) a listener could look forward to hearing at regular intervals. The mostly unrhymed lyrics, unmistakably the work of a precocious schoolgirl who did a lot of reading, were no help at all (as they would remain!). But the family friend’s belief in her precocity was undiminished, and he was able to persuade his acquaintance Dave Gilmour, he of Pink Floyd who resembled her first crush, to come hear her.

What a perfect choice – not only a rich, famous guitar god, but also
the living embodiment of male gorgeousness! Though rigid with terror, Kate impressed him a treat, and he invited her to his studio near Harlow in Essex to record better demos than she could manage on the family tape recorder. When he proposed she overdub a little electric piano part, one imagines her eyes becoming pinwheels, like Mr. Toad’s on first sight of a motorcar. She’d had no idea that there
was
such a thing as overdubbing.

Out, in any event, went the better demos, with Gilmour’s guitar and the bass and drums of a band he was producing, Unicorn, supporting Kate’s piano and voice. In came no positive feedback. Whereupon Gilmour decided that no mere demos would do, that nothing less than master quality recordings were required. He introduced Kate to EMI record producer Andrew Powell, who chose three of the more than 60 songs she’d written at that point – ‘The Child In His Eyes’, ‘Saxophone Song’ and ‘Maybe’ – to record at AIR London, high above Oxford Street. Gilmour couldn’t attend in person because of his Pink Floyd commitments, but might not have fitted in the studio anyway, given that Powell had hired an actual orchestra, for which Gilmour was generous enough to pick up the considerable tab. Powell had been afraid that his protégé, an unschooled teenager from the suburbs, might find it intimidating being surrounded by so many professional musos. If so, she kept it well under wraps, not missing a beat as she sang ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ live right along with them. Powell’s jaw plummeted in wonder.

The next month, in spite of her parents’ apprehension, she declared that there was no point in remaining at school, and left with 10 – count ’em! – O-levels. One suspects that none was in penmanship, as her handwriting would come in years to be distinguished by enormous looped descenders (g, p, f, and y) and, because she writes them lazily, making the downward-pointing diagonal stroke of the taller main part of the letter, K’s that look for all the world like W’s. Wate Bush, you see.

Gilmour, meanwhile, was presenting the Powell-produced masters to EMI pop division general manager Bob Mercer when Bob popped into Abbey Road Studios to observe sessions for Pink Floyd’s
Wish You Were Here
. Impressed by her voice, and not oblivious to her gamin sexuality, Mercer invited her in for a chat, to which Dr. Bush, wanting to save her from the casting couch, accompanied her. EMI were definitely interested, Mercer said, but without reaching for the corporate chequebook. Not until the following summer would EMI put its money (and not much of it – £3,500, including a £500 publishing advance) where
its mouth was. Mercer described it as money to grow up with. The company wondered gently if she’d consider being … a little less idiosyncratic.

Understandably deflated, Kate, who’d not got on with St. Joseph’s dance teacher, spent the money she’d inherited from an aunt (Dr. Bush seems to have stopped leaving change around the house by this time) for classes with Robin Kovak at the Dance Centre in Covent Garden. She received offers of work dancing in clubs in Germany, but didn’t pursue them. She studied with Arlene Phillips, the creator of Hot Gossip, and morosely decided that she had a great, great deal of hard work ahead if she hoped to get really good. She went out with Steve Blacknall, an EMI promotion man earlier rescued from Decca by one Simon Drake. Remember the latter’s name. She moved out of the family farmhouse, but stayed close to family, renting the top floor of a house in Lewisham that her parents owned, with Paddy and his burgeoning collection of musical exotica one floor down and Jay and his family on the ground floor.

She saw former Bowie mime mentor Lindsey Kemp’s solo show
Flowers
at the Collegiate Theatre and was transformed. “I saw this funny little guy up there on this stage giving himself physically to other people’s music and thought if one person could actually produce the music and give themselves physically at the same time, then you’d get double energy coming from one person. I thought, ‘Golly, that’s what I want to do.’” Before using one of her own songs, though, she worked up an elaborate routine for Paul McCartney’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ after what she described as a day of living in its world.

She fell contentedly into a daily routine. She’d get up in the morning and practise the piano until it was time to set out by train for London. Commuters were being blown to bits by IRA bombs left in unattended bags at the time, and you could cut the paranoia on London public transport with a knife, but Kate – as she’d begun calling herself, seemingly to draw a line under the first part of her life – revelled in it. Indeed, the danger somehow enhanced her feeling of being on a mission. In the evening she’d commune with her feline roommates Zoodle and Pye (wacket), and play the piano and sing until she could barely keep her eyes open.

It was a broiling summer, that during which British punk was effectively born, and she left all her windows open. Some poor bugger down the street whose shift work compelled him to rise at five in the morning sent her her first fan letter, advising that, while he enjoyed her singing,
he would bloody well prefer not to have to listen to it night after
bloody night when he was trying to kip, thanks so much
.

It got cooler and she closed her windows, but she wouldn’t stop composing late at night, not if everyone in Lewisham wrote her an irate letter. One midnight in the following March, while looking out at the full moon for inspiration, sniffling and dribbling with a frightful cold, she happened to remember something she’d seen as a child, a telefilm adaptation of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
. Years later she’d speculate that the memory had remained because the spirit in the story, who slashes herself with broken glass at the end, was called Cathy, just as she had been. But if that’s what made her remember the story, what enabled her to put lines from the novel in her song when she’d never read the novel? In times past, a girl could have got herself drowned as a witch for less, but in the enlightened times in which we live, she would suffer nothing worse than the Bronte Society’s emphatic scorn.

Actually, by that full-moonlit midnight in the early spring of 1978, it was a wonder she had any time to compose, as she was busy rehearsing with the band that Paddy, apparently thinking that she’d benefit from singing to live punters, had assembled around her. The presumably hygiene-minded Brian Bath played guitar, Charlie Morgan drums, and Del Palmer, as smitten with the songwriter as he was with her songs, was on bass. Their repertoire – ‘Brown Sugar’, ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, ‘Sweet Soul Music’, ‘Sailin’ Shoes’, ‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘Come Together’, and the nearest Kate would ever come to a bog-standard rock song, ‘James And Cold Gun’ – wasn’t much more imaginative than the name Paddy had come up with – The KT Bush Band. (One might have hoped for rather more from one who’d had an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery of weird, sometimes unplayable instruments, some of them with arms and legs, others made of unusual materials, he’d made at the London College of Furniture!) No callow amateurs, these – Bath, Morgan, and the smitten Del had all been members of Conkers, who’d had an actual recording deal (albeit a dodgy one) with Cube Records.

Their uninspiring name aside, they had in mind from the very beginning such enhancements as dry ice and a light show – not to mention the flower Kate wore behind her ear in homage to Billie Holiday. The first night, at their local, The Rose Of Lee in Lewisham, there were more of them on the tiny stage than in the audience – at least until Jay and Dr. Bush materialised just before last orders. The next week, though, the audience numbered a dozen. And after that, the place was heaving.

Having outgrown Lewisham, they headed for the bright lights of
Putney, there, injudiciously, to perform on the eve of an England-Scotland football match. It was absolute chaos, as the besotted laddies from the highlands flocked on stage in droves, great tartan armies of them, waving their flags, embracing the musicians, bellowing their allegiance to the glens.

* * *

On the way home from the Goose & Syringe, I asked the minicab driver to stop at an off-licence, and to go in and buy a case of Stella Artois and a couple of cans of Pringles, for me, and a bottle of Courvoisier, which I’d send to Kate. He studied me at some length in the rear-view mirror before asking why I didn’t do it myself. Because, I explained, I’d had quite enough trouble getting into the cab in the first place. “Not that I saw, gov,” he sighed. One meets a cab driver who isn’t a clever dick these days about as often as one receives a postcard from Princess Diana. Mentioning that there was an extra five quid in it for him did the trick.