Under the Ivy Page 3

  Where did she come from? Almost all her significant early creative strides were incubated in the febrile environment of Wickham Farm. “It felt like a college,” says David Jackson, the set designer on her 1979 ‘Tour Of Life’ who visited during preparations for the tour. “The farm is genuinely old, in the middle of this conventional neighbourhood, and when you go in it takes you by surprise. It’s like Doctor Who’s time machine, you step through a time warp into this old, old farmhouse. It’s a family of serious intellectuals, from daddy on down, and the boys were into renaissance music and all these ancient instruments. It was quite intimidating, in a way. I was so terrified of meeting the whole clan I went to the pub on the way there and got drunk as a skunk. I just remember this collegiate atmosphere – books everywhere, shelves and shelves in every room – and very spiritual. Not religious, but a general [spiritual] interest, obviously with Kate in her lyrics and in John’s poetry.”

  There was also a spiritual connection to music. In Hannah’s childhood home in Waterford there were always fiddles and accordions on the go, much singing and dancing. Though many of her brothers and sisters had also moved away from Ireland, the family would go back and visit from time to time and the trips made a lasting impression on Bush. Music in Ireland was considered an essential part of the domestic fabric, and it was also deeply woven into life at Wickham Farm. Pop music leaked in, often uninvited, as pop music tends to. One of her favourite singles was ‘They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haa!’, the 1966 novelty hit by Napoleon XIV; you can see how its sense of silliness and contrived derangement might have appealed to her eight-year old self. Later, she would buy her first album, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, and formed allegiances to Elton John, Dave Edmunds, Marc Bolan, King Crimson and particularly Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music.

  As a listener as well as a future performer, she was rarely more than two steps away from the pop mainstream, even if she favoured the arty, intelligent end of the marketplace. She loved David Bowie and attended his final Ziggy Stardust show at the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973, but she didn’t fall for The Beatles until well into the Seventies, and even then she rather eccentrically decreed Magical Mystery Tour to be her favourite. And although she remembers being “fascinated”7 by The Rolling Stones’ ‘Little Red Rooster’, struck by the rude swagger of Jagger’s voice, tellingly she heard it not in the house but via the radio in a car. At home, classical music and folk predominated. “We weren’t really involved in the pop thing at all at that time,” recalled Paddy Bush. “We had an incredibly staunch approach towards traditional folk music.”8

  Dr Bush practiced Schubert, Beethoven and Chopin on the piano, interspersed with a smattering of the great American songbook of the Thirties and Forties, and he also played church organ and composed his own songs, diligently rather than with any great spark of inspiration. It was he who first showed his daughter the all important middle ‘C’ note on the instrument and encouraged her at first tentative, then rapidly improving, attempts at songwriting.

  An exposure to classical music later informed her unorthodox song structures, which have rarely acknowledged the conventional patterns of most rock music. Fold into the mix her love of the more theatrical side of pop culture (a dash of Bowie, some Roxy, a little prog-rock) and an abiding love of folk music and there emerges at least a vague inkling of the direction from which she arrived at her unique musical style.

  From her mother’s heritage she discovered a direct line into the pure emotion and narrative instinct of Irish folk song, traditional Irish jigs, airs and standards like ‘The Lark In The Morning’ and ‘She Moves Through The Fair’. There was nothing intellectual about this: it was pure instinct, as naturalas breathing, and all the children picked up the baton. Jay drank up the heritage, loving the sense of layered story-telling and timelessness in the songs, and banged happily around with his folk band in the farm’s Wash House. Paddy dived perhaps even deeper into the dark waters of traditional music. He played concertina in the local folk clubs for the English Morris Dancers, and also worked for the English Folk Dance and Song Society. It became “a way of life you can’t stop,” he said. “In my case, the folk tradition was constantly there.”9

  In time, Paddy became a fixture on the south London music scene, always popping up with a mandolin or guitar slung over his shoulder. Brian Bath, a local musician and later a member of the KT Bush Band, recalls first bumping into him around 1970 at a house party in Wood Hill, where all the hippies used to congregate. “I walked up the stairs one night and there was a guy standing there with a mandolin,” says Bath. “I had my acoustic guitar with me and we started jamming. He said, ‘Fancy coming back to my place?’, so I hopped in his car and we went back to Wickham Farm. Upstairs there was a big room, like a library, with a coal fire, and we just sat there and jammed all night. I took my tape recorder and I’ve got a recording of some of it. I got on really well with Paddy. We’d meet once a month and jam, I always used to want him to come round and get involved. We used to have a really good time.”

  With his widely spaced eyes, easy smile and mass of tightly curled hair, Paddy was an amiable eccentric with a passion for old music. He became synonymous with allsorts of weird and wonderful instruments, from Pan pipes to the Strumento da Porco, which “looked like a sea crustacean,” according to Bath, and which he built himself from plans that dated back to Egyptian times. He became fascinated by how things were made, where they came from, what odd sounds could be achieved. “Paddy was like the Mad Professor!” laughs Stewart Avon Arnold. “He reminded me of Catweazle, in the nicest possible way. Every time I went around to his house he’d have these new bells from Tibet, or gongs from some farm in the Outer Hebrides. Such an interesting character.”

  After unsuccessfully seeking an apprenticeship in harp-making he eventually won a place at the London School of Furniture, studying Music Instrument Technology between 1973 and 1976, later describing himself as “an artist of weirdness…. Making instruments with arms and legs, and out of very unorthodox materials.”10 The depth of his knowledge and his enthusiasm for the ancient and experimental has proved an enormous boon for his sister, first as a guide to discovering music, then later as both a general sounding board and a member of her core band of musicians. Naturally shy, never a man for drawing attention to himself, he beavered away industriously in her shadow for many years.

  The Bush brothers’ interest in traditional music coincided with the booming folk revival of the late Fifties and Sixties, and both Jay and Paddy owned impressive collections of UK and US music, which their sister would happily plough through on wet afternoons. Sometimes they would all travel together around Kent looking for traditional dances, and she recalls being introduced to a deep, varied pool of British music. The works of those two great English folklorists and Communist custodians Bert Lloyd and Ewan MacColl sat alongside “dirty sea shanties” and long, unwinding tragic tales like ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Lucy Wan’, which in turn led to the phantasmagorical psychedelic folk of The Incredible String Band, whom they all revered, and Bob Dylan’s lysergic poetry.

  The old British folk songs often mined a subtly different seam from traditional Irish music, which was more concerned with matters of the spirit. Here, by contrast, was grittier fare: ancient myths and legends, tales of murder and madness, death and despair, infanticide and incest, women transforming into swans, the gender twists and fluid sexuality of songs like ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy’, old ballads so acute and vivid that to listen was almost to experience time travel. Folk music acts as a bridge between conscious and unconscious worlds, between the known and unknown, the stated and the implied, the guts and the imagination, the past and the present: there are disquieting narrative blips, daring flights of fancy, leaps in imagery and scant regard for temporaland spatial formalities. It is both vivid and deliciously mysterious.

  With very few exceptions, Bush has never made what could be regarded as ‘folk’ music in the conventional sense, but the in
fluence of its impact upon her runs deep in her writing. From her first album onwards we are introduced to strange characters, twisting storylines, and ghosts and spirits singing from beyond the grave. Deep, important connections between the living and the dead ring through ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘The Kick Inside’, ‘Houdini’, ‘Cloudbusting’, ‘Jig Of Life’, ‘How To Be Invisible’, ‘A Coral Room’ and many more.

  This is not, however, the world of Dungeons And Dragons or even The Lord Of The Rings. “All those characters that she sings about, the fairies and goblins and witches, all that stuff is her world,” says producer Nick Launay, who worked closely with her as engineer on The Dreaming. “I imagine as a little kid her room was full of that kind of stuff. That’s what it’s like working with her, you’re entering into this wonderful world of fantasy.”

  This is a slight but crucial misreading. Bush’s songs do indeed tap into other realms but they don’t exist in a Tolkeinesque world of pure fantasy; they aren’t peopled with strange beasts – goblins, unicorns and orcs. She once said her songs were “mostly about myths, spirits, that kind of thing. Not fairies, stronger than that.”11 Not fairies. Stronger than that: there’s a fine phrase to bear in mind. Her lyrics are about the things that drive, or repulse, or empower the human spirit. Not escapism, in fact, but its exact opposite. They’re about using the magic of the imagination to open up as many avenues of real emotional and physical connection as possible. This was an alchemic freedom she found in folk – and later, through mime and dance. “Kate’s subject matter for her lyrics has always been extraordinary,” Jay once said, “which I think comes from an ability to empathise with life forms that is unusually sensitive.”12

  Traditional songs were also one of the few places in the Sixties where Bush would have heard convincing, complex representations of female sexual desire. Albums like Anne Briggs (perhaps the only female British singer with a claim to being even less attracted to the glare of publicity than Bush) and Bert Lloyd’s The Bird In The Bush contained frank songs of lust and sensuality, such as ‘The Wanton Seed’ and ‘The Bonny Black Hare’:

  “I felt her heart quiver and I knew what I’d done.

  Says I, ‘Have you had enough of my old sporting gun?’

  Oh, the answer she gave me, her answer was, ‘Nay,

  It’s not often, young sportsman, that you come this way.

  But if your powder is good and your bullets play fair,

  Why don’t you keeping firing at the bonny black hare?’”

  She wouldn’t have found much of that sort of thing in the pop music of the time, though she would certainly have been exposed to similar urges via Jay’s poetry. If Paddy was the music man, then working with words and images was Jay’s true love. “Our lives were filled with the trappings of the Celtic Twilight, its poetry and its music,” he said. “The Pre-Raphaelites and the turn of the century book illustrators were an obsession for me long before the fashion machine born in the Sixties plastered Beardsley all over Europe, the Brotherhood into every home.”13

  It’s possible to detect a whiff of superiority in that statement, a tinge of artistic arrogance. Jay was a serious man, almost aggressively devoted to the power of ideas, the sacredness of Art with a capital A. Dismissive of the conventions of modern life, he dropped out of Cambridge to explore the lost teachings of the past, rummaging around in ancient mythology, outré philosophy, the Golden Age, spiritualism and mystical cul-de-sacs in an attempt to uncover some deep, atavistic truth. Very much an educated product of the liberal, progressive Sixties, he “was a super-hippy; he was old enough to be a real hippy,” says David Jackson. “Paddy was younger brother hippy-in-training, and Kate was the baby sister. All hippies.”

  Attracted to everything from Greek mythology to Nordic folklore, he would scrawl the mouth of the devil on the farm’s barn walland add vivid poetic augmentations. He was wary, often didactic, and in the early part of Bush’s professional career his input aggravated many people at EMI and several others creatively involved in her work. “There were tensions between me and Jay,” admits Bob Mercer, the man who signed Bush to EMI in 1976. “He was a poet, and he and she were very, very close. Jay got very involved for a while and eventually I had to kind of lay the law down and have her keep him away from us.”

  These difficulties can be explained through a combination of Jay’s strong, perhaps rather superior sense of his own artistic vision colliding with the ephemeral pop world (family motto: Kerching!), and his understandable protectiveness as an older brother. In truth, he was shy, and those who know him well lay claim to a much softer private side. He has been notably accessible and helpful to many Kate Bush fans throughout the years, and a bulwark of love and support to his sister. “What worries me is that sometimes Jay is portrayed as a Svengali who is black and evil,” said Bush. “And he’s not at all. He’s very beautiful and sensitive and I love him very much.”14

  Jay and some like-minded souls founded Salatticum Poets (derived from a Latin term for ‘wit’), through which he distributed pamphlets of their work, organised readings and met with his friends to debate intensely the pressing artistic matters of the day. Brian Bath recalls some ad hoc musical performances where he and Paddy improvised behind a screen at readings, often as far afield as Hastings, involving Jay and other like-minded poets such as Tony Buzan and Jeremy Cartland. “Different,” he says diplomatically. “Not really my cup of tea, but it was good.”

  He published slim books of his poems The Creation Edda: A Poem in 1970, and Control: A Translation in 1974, while his work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Tracks, Samphire, The Sceptre Press, Catholic Education Today, Poets’ Workshop Pamphlet, and has been heard on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio London. He self-published his novel, The Cellar Gang, in 2005. When the Bush family formed their company, Novercia Limited, in 1976, Jay stated his occupation as ‘writer’. How he managed to actually earn a living from it was less clear.

  Though he too loved music deeply, his over-riding significance in terms of Bush’s career was becoming her unofficial tutor in the deep stuff, opening many doors into the wide world of ideas. His very existence had a huge influence on her writing, her use of words, and her exposure to poetry, philosophy and spiritual doctrine, many of them deeply esoteric – and erotic. Some of his work still resides in the British Museum’s pornography collection.

  “She straddles Hekla’s mouth,

  he sucks the boiling mound:

  copulation brings screams,

  the volcano dribbles” [‘The Creation Edda’]

  Alongside the unabashed folk songs and “dirty sea shanties,” Jay’s poetry indicated to the young Bush that expressing explicit desire was a legitimate artistic endeavour; certainly nothing of which to be ashamed. From early on, her songs were full of unambiguous sexuality. The unreleased ‘The Craft Of Life’, recorded at home in 1976, is a prime example, positively revelling in the imagery of “silvers in our dark hair” and the bed sheets “soaked by your tiny fish.”*

  It’s admirably forthright, if rather clumsy. Later she would find more subtle ways of expressing sensuality, but ‘The Craft Of Life’ is by no means the sole example of such directness. Around the same time, Bush and Jay collaborated on ‘Before The Fall’ (sometimes known as ‘Organic Acid’), a story poem he had written and which he narrated, interspersed with Kate’s chorus melody and piano backing. With its references to “mutual masturbation,” “cunt” and “wet hair,” it is explicit, eroticised poetry – and remains one of the odder examples in the pantheon of brother-sister collaborations.

  It was not a prudish family. An understanding of one’s own sexual urges was simply viewed as another means of breaking free from chains of self-consciousness, of becoming more alive to one’s own true nature. The title of ‘Sat In Your Lap’, after all, suggests the possibility of experiencing enlightenment through sex. Ian Bairnson, who played guitar on the majority of The Kick Inside, recalls Bush showing her father the newly written words to ‘L’Amour Loo
ks Something Like You’ during the album sessions in 1977. “There were certain lines that jumped out at you,” he says. “I remember her dad came in, he would stop by, and she had just completed the lyric to ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’. She said, ‘Oh yeah, here’s dad. Look, I’ve got these lyrics I’ve been working on’, and she gave him the lyrics. That’s the song with the line about “sticky love inside,” but he didn’t bat an eyelid. He was very relaxed, ‘Yeah, that’s really good!’”

  Where did she come from? It’s possible to pick up direct echoes of Jay’s stylistic influence in her work, but Bush was equally as inspired by the big picture, his utter immersion in art and his seeming rejection of the conventional world. In many ways Jay’s pursuits legitimised her own ambitions. Her crucial skill was an innately populist instinct, harnessing some of the energy of her brother’s restless intellectual curiosity and giving it a clear purpose and an accessible edge.

  Who else could have smuggled Joseph Campbell, Wilhelm Reich and G.I. Gurdjieff into the charts? Just after Bush became famous some of the press latched onto her interest in Gurdjieff in particular, the Greek-Armenian Sufi mystic and spiritual teacher who died in 1949 and whom she mentioned – perhaps unadvisedly – a number of times in interviews and namechecked on the first album as an inspiration. She was almost certainly introduced to him through Jay, who has often sported a suspiciously extravagant moustache, a la Gurdjieff.

  It’s not hard to see and hear threads of Gurdjieff’s broad – and, to non-adherents, woolly and unconvincing – belief system popping up in Bush’s work. Music and movement (“the sacred dance”) were two of his favoured methods of imparting his philosophy but, perhaps more significantly, one of his central tenets was the belief that mankind lives in an almost automatonic state of permanent ‘waking sleep’. He desired that people shake themselves out of their torpor to experience life more fully, to truly connect with their own consciousness and remake the world through their own subjective experience. The ultimate aim of existence is the full development of one’s potential, to fuse the body, the mind and the emotions in what was later termed ‘The Fourth Way’.