Under the Ivy Page 13

  She did not become a star by mistake. Who ever did?

  ‘Wuthering Heights’ was finally released on January 20, 1978, after all manner of eleventh hour hiccups. Originally scheduled for November 4, 1977, it was delayed to avoid being trampled by the Christmas market – Wings’ ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ was coming out on EMI the following week, devouring all in its path – and also to allow the sleeve to undergo a complete revision as Bush wrestled for the first time with the realities of projecting herself to the public. Rather than sinking it, the delay in its release lent the single a crucial momentum. Promotional pressings had been sent out some two months before Christmas, direct from the factory to key radio stations and journalists via EMI’s Automatic Mailing List. They then attempted to put the genie back in the bottle, but it was rather like trying to thumb a plum Pontefract into a slot machine. “We did, for the first time in my knowledge, send the promotion people out asking them not to play our record,” laughs Brian Southall. “Most people obliged, bar two, one of whom was Eddie Puma, the producer at Capital Radio, and the other was his presenter Tony Myatt. They weren’t having any of it and continued to play it.”

  Myatt’s dogged and genuine support of ‘Wuthering Heights’ ensured the song was an airplay hit over a month before it was released. “They said the switchboard lit up with people ringing up asking who it was, and they told people it was coming out in January,” recalls Southall. Bush never forgot this stroke of good fortune. Myatt and Puma were later given a gold disc by EMI and were guests of honour at the launch of Lionheart. As the snowball thickened and gathered pace, Bush observed its progress with a mixture of detachment and excitement.

  “I remember going round to her flat when ‘Wuthering Heights’ was first played by that DJ on Capital and Kate said, ‘Oh, they’re playing my song tonight,’” recalls Brian Bath. “We were all sitting round there and [Myatt] said he’d found this really odd song. She couldn’t believe it was coming out of the radio. And he kept playing it. You could phone Capital to vote for the song you wanted to hear each day. I was round at the farm pretty much every day, there was always something to do, and Kate’s mum would say, ‘Have you phoned Capital radio yet? Use the phone, do it now!’ It kept getting played and played and all of a sudden it just exploded.”

  In those days, there was such a thing as a gradual explosion in the music industry. Within a fortnight of its eventual release ‘Wuthering Heights’ entered the charts at number 42. It crept up, week-by-week: 27, 13, five, as the attendant clamour grew louder. The Kick Inside was released on February 17 and climbed to number three, further increasing the momentum. On March 7, the single reached number one and stayed there for a month. The media interest was astonishing, moving far beyond the music press and encompassing the tabloids, broadsheets, television and radio. Auberon Waugh weighed in appreciatively. Bush had already sold over 250,000 records and was, according to one of those great immeasurable statistics by which fame is measured, the most photographed woman in Britain. Suddenly all hell was breaking loose and she was wanted in a million different places simultaneously.

  “As soon as ‘Wuthering Heights’ became a hit … my whole routine was just blown apart,” Bush recalled. “It was extraordinary how suddenly everything changed…. It happened, it was instant. It [was] frightening.”8

  She had rounded up a revamped KT Bush Band to handle promotional duties and, one suspects equally as importantly, to lend her some much needed moral support. Since the recording of The Kick Inside Brian Bath had spent considerable time writing charts of all Bush’s songs, knocking them into shape for some future, as yet unspecified purpose. Vic King was still put out by the way the band ended –when The Kick Inside came out he refused to even look at the credits –and in his absence Bath had recruited Sergio Castillo on drums, who played in “a busy, Latin American style,” which must have done wonders for ‘Moving’. With Paddy occasionally joining in on guitar and mandolin, prior to the single and album release the band performed with Bush at some key EMI functions, notably a “pretty nerve-wracking” showcase of songs from the forthcoming album for EMI executives at the White Elephant on the River, a plush restaurant on the Thames Embankment in Pimlico, which “went down well,”9 as well as a “bun fight up at Turnberry”10 in January for record company representatives from all around the world. These cemented her reputation within the company, confirmed her as a cause well worth fighting for.

  With ‘Wuthering Heights’ climbing the charts all over Europe, suddenly they were all swept off on a great adventure. When the last minute call came to go to Germany for the music show Bio’s Bahnhof, it became apparent that Castillo, a Cuban, wouldn’t get a work permit in time. Vic King was asked to rejoin the band but declined. “I said I was doing something else,” he recalls. “I was a little bit annoyed about being kicked out of the band, and I was thinking, ‘Should I help out and then be kicked out yet again?’ There was the abrupt ending, and not being involved on the first album, and then suddenly you get a phone call. Looking back I probably should have said ‘yes’ but the pride said ‘no’. If Kate had rung up to explain the situation it may have been a bit different.” Charlie Morgan –an old friend and a member of Bath and Palmer’s former band Conkers – took Castillo’s place with less than a day’s notice. Most of the group didn’t even have passports, but within two hours of visiting EMI HQ at Manchester Square they were ready to leave.

  It was Bush’s first time in an aeroplane, an experience she never learned to love and quickly came to dislike and, in time, avoid if at all possible. It was her first ever television performance, too, consisting of a live version of ‘Kite’ played with the band on the back of a train –“poor Kate was so nervous,” says Charlie Morgan –and singing ‘Wuthering Heights’ to a backing tape, before battling gamely through an interview conducted entirely in jaunty German. The backdrop –supposed to evoke the rough majesty of the Yorkshire moors –featured a volcano. Welcome to the joys of European music promotion. For now, her smile, her giggle and her sense of wonder at this new, ridiculous world got her through.

  And so it began. For Bush, it was the start of a year of utter mayhem. Off to the BBC at seven o’clock in the morning to record a performance for Magpie; playing on Saturday Night At The Mill and chatting briefly to presenter Bob Langley; off to Ireland for the legendary Late Late Show; introduced by Peter Cook on the short-lived music show Revolver, appearing on the current affairs programme Tonight, and being gently patronised about her ‘O’ level results on Ask Aspel.

  Top Of The Pops was the big one. She made her first appearance on the BBC’s flagship music programme on February 16, when ‘Wuthering Heights’ broke into the Top 40 at number 27. What should have been a happy occasion turned into a nightmare. She discovered just prior to taping her performance that the show’s arcane rules dictated that, as a solo artist, she was not allowed to play with her band. Instead she would have to sing solo to a new, markedly inferior backing track of her song, knocked off that afternoon by the BBC orchestra. It was all dictated by stringent Musicians’ Union regulations. Robin Nash, the programme’s producer, came from a variety background (he was the man behind Terry And June and The Les Dawson Show, no less) and was unsympathetic to Bush’s plight. “He threw his weight around,” according to a member of the Bush entourage. “It was not a nice experience for someone who has bust a gut creating things properly and wants to be able to do it with backbone and honesty.”

  All her band were there but they could only stand at the front and watch helplessly as the misery unfolded. “She had a terrible time with Top Of The Pops,” says Charlie Morgan. “If you had a sound like Kate had on ‘Wuthering Heights’, with this wonderful guitar solo by Ian Bairnson, and you want to use your own band but the BBC says, ‘Absolutely not, Kate is a solo artist and she will sing with the house band,’ –well, it was a really, really unpleasant experience for her. She had a horrible time, she was practically in tears. Her band would have given her huge moral support, i
f nothing else. We all felt for her and we were really dejected, because we knew she hadn’t done a fantastic performance and it wasn’t really her fault. It’s one thing being out of your comfort zone, but if you have an element of control it’s OK. But if you’re completely out of control and you’re 18 years old [in fact, she was 19] that’s not a very good experience.” She later memorably described seeing the performance played back as “like watching myself die.”11

  These were merely the brutal opening skirmishes in her long battle with that most strange, destructive and vertiginous phenomenon: fame. Coming to terms with the odd process of observing yourself as seen from several different angles, losing control of your art, frequently feeling like a tin of beans rattling along a conveyor belt, besieged by doubt and self-loathing, the contours of your old life warped by the push and pull of constant motion. She had to learn quickly, chalking up the negatives to experience and making mental notes in her little black book: don’t do this next time. Avoid that. The fact that her career has always been defined as much by the things she refuses to do as those she embraces can be traced directly back to this time. Before the end of March she had appeared again on Top Of The Pops, a much more assured performance, this time from a number one artist. But she didn’t forget. “She was once bitten, twice shy, and she vowed never to let that happen again,” says Morgan. “Typical Leo: ‘I’m not going to let that happen again.’” Despite numerous invitations, she didn’t appear on the programme again until 1985, when she could do whatever she liked.

  Dealing with the printed press proved perhaps her steepest learning curve. “That was when things started getting very difficult for me because until then it had all been very creative work, writing, recording, learning to dance,” she said. “[Now] I was talking to press … and I couldn’t express myself easily. I was up against a different beast.”12 She was thrown into the bearpit, offered to everyone from The Sun and NME to Vogue and The Vegetarian. Reading back over the multitude of interviews, much is made of her cigarette smoking and her high voice, her rather comical habit of punctuating each statement with a sincere ‘amazing’, a solemn ‘heavy’ or a simple, breathy ‘wow’. Gurdjieff’s name starts popping up, as does her vegetarianism, her belief in astrology, ghosts, ESP and reincarnation. Already you can see the outline of a caricature forming. Penny Allan, a columnist in the Guardian, castigated her for “cultivating a childlike voice and encouraging her audience to act like voyeurs.”

  The tabloid hounds soon started sniffing around her private life. Only once, very early on, does she name Del as her beau. Thereafter, she throws out a number of red herrings. She will say she lives “alone” when in fact she was co-habiting; she invents a boyfriend –“an artist,” someone “not in the music industry” –for the benefit of Company magazine and the Evening Standard, while for others she breezily announces she is seeing lots of people and no one in particular. Always, she plays down marriage and kids, any hint of a “heavy” relationship. How much of this was down to protecting her privacy and how much to creating a sense of mystique – perhaps even an aura of availability –is open to debate. “I escorted her to lots of things as a kind of pseudo-boyfriend,” says EMI’s Brian Southall. “I don’t remember who made the decision –maybe it was Bob, maybe it was her –that she shouldn’t have a boyfriend and wouldn’t be seen with Del. It was a very Sixties thing to do. Del was very much in the background, which he seemed quite happy with, but of course we all knew.”

  She was no shrinking violet. Self-possessed and opinionated when the mood struck, she often came across as genuine, ambitious and savvy. At times she seemed blessed with an intense self-awareness far beyond her years, watching herself constantly from some far away point, both fascinated and perpetually on guard against betraying any rock-starry traits; at other times she seemed astonishingly naïve in some of her comments. On her vegetarianism: “I do eat plants, and I know they’re living, and I’m fond of them, but … I don’t think plants mind being eaten, actually. I think they’d be really sad if no-one paid that much attention to them.”13 When asked about the songs she had written about incest she conceded, with inadvisable honesty, that “I see [my brothers] as men and I see them as attractive, but there is no sexual content in the relationship. I suppose there’s never been much physical contact.”14

  Seeing her words thrown back at her having undergone various contortions was not a particularly pleasant experience for someone as essentially open and honest as she. “She got very wary of the media,” says Southall. “They didn’t dislike her, though they did take the mickey a bit, but she just wanted privacy. She was always obliging and friendly and affable, but she didn’t really want to do it. I don’t recall one specific thing that caused her to be resentful or mistrusting, but she grew up and realised that the world isn’t quite as nice as you think it is. It’s a fact of life. There was a kind of naïveté: ‘He said he was going to ask me about my video, but then he asked me some other questions …’ Well, yes! But that threw her I think. And there were a few bitchy writers.”

  The extent to which her fame broke beyond the confines of the musical world and into mass culture hit her with the force of a mugging. The success of ‘Wuthering Heights’ made her a tabloid entity, when normally an artist of her type and inclination would not have been subjected to that kind of exposure. The strength of her image and the sheer eccentricity of the song and video made her easy prey. And she was a gift for comedians. To a bastardised version of ‘Them Heavy People’ entitled ‘Oh England, My Leotard’, she was mercilessly spoofed by Pamela Stephenson on Not The Nine O’clock News, the BBC’s hippest alternative comedy show. Some of it was clever and very funny.

  ‘Went to Cairo and I read the Gnostic

  Apocryphon of John in the original Coptic

  Korsakoff’s psychosis theories

  And the Fibonacci series

  Studied acupuncture and the Bible …

  My cauliflower quiches were better than the bought ones

  And I was thicker than two short ones.’

  Impressionist Faith Brown parodied, much less subtly, her love of mime, her voice, and her use of language –“I’ve learned what ‘amazing’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘incredible’ are in 85 languages” –on her LWT show, before performing another rather accurate spoof called ‘Three Little Fishes’. She was a perfectly legitimate target for satire, but although Bush had a robust sense of humour and professed that she found this kind of thing more funny than upsetting, the implication in both cases that she was somehow stupid and contrived would have rankled.

  The media preoccupations essentially boiled down to three things: sex, age and class. The fuss made over her age was baffling. She was 19, no longer a babe in arms when it came to the pop industry, certainly not in comparison to her male contemporaries at that time: Paul Weller was 18 when ‘In The City’ went into the Top 40; John Lydon was still only 21. But the discrepancy between the maturity of the songs and her physical youthfulness and occasional gaucheness was emphasised again and again, particularly coming from someone from such an apparently ‘sheltered’ background, the dancing doctor’s daughter from the suburbs who had never had a ‘real’ job. She was a young woman with big ideas, and thus someone, somewhere, must be pulling her strings. “The thing with her career is that it started off, and people were thinking there was obviously some man behind her success,” says producer Steve Lillywhite, who worked with her on Peter Gabriel’s third album. “With ‘Wuthering Heights’, you thought she had a lovely voice, but somebody else was doing all the work.” It’s hard to believe now, but there was no comparable artist on the British scene at that time: a young, beautiful female who wrote and performed her own words and music to great popular and artistic success. As the first through the gates, she took many brickbats.

  It’s equally astonishing nowadays to recall the amount of emphasis placed on Bush’s sexual side, her erotic charge. She constantly sought to dampen down her sex symbol status, almost to the poin
t of obsession. The kind of ‘Sexy? Who, me?’ disingenuousness she often displayed in these early interviews was rather ridiculous but understandable. It’s as though she was so wary of being defined by her sexual identity she would rather try and deny it entirely, put it down to a combination of unknowing instinct on her part and subjective interpretation on the part of the audience. This, of course, was nonsense. Her sexual presence is a very real and important part of her work as, occasionally, she has acknowledged. “So much of it comes from a sexual need, from inside me,” she said. “I’m very basic.”15 Jon Kelly, who worked closely with her on the first three albums, recalls a conversation about the Never For Ever album cover, which depicts a parade of beautiful and demonic beasts flying out from under her skirt. “That’s where she said her songs come from!” says Kelly. “That’s what she told me – that’s where all her ideas come from.”

  Her attitude to sex and the senses was that of a poet, not a pop star. She certainly wasn’t ashamed of expressing her sexual side in her work, sometimes graphically, but she couldn’t seem to understand why those words and images would then seep into the public’s perception of her as a person. What she dreaded most was being defined by her looks, but if she wanted parts of her audience, and the British tabloid press in particular, to make the fine-toothed differentiation between the natural, earthy, instinctive sensuality of a ‘poet’ and the brash, blatant, come-and-get-it display of a ‘pop star’ she was in for a rude awakening.