Quintessence of Old Wave (5 of ??)

 

I've observed before that Kate Bush - now a national treasure, hip reference point, influence on a whole 21st Century phalanx of female artists etc etc - was deemed thoroughly uncool during her peak years of popular success. 

Some reviews from that time gathered below indicate her general standing and credibility levels in the afterpunk schema.  

New Wave people - critics, fans, musicians - saw her as an Old Wave throwback (her famous friends and supporters like Dave Gilmour and Peter Gabriel certainly helped in that perception). 

As would the music itself, especially the second album Lionheart, and the videos.

And things like this 1979 TV Christmas special, whose existence I didn't know about until a few weeks ago. 

It's really quite frightfully unwatchable stuff - except one bit that is less mime and modern-dancey, indeed it's completely static and subdued -  which is when Kate and Peter Gabriel duet on a  version of "Another Day" by Roy Harper (another Old Waver)

[text version]

Kate Bush

Lionheart

NME, 1978.

by Ian Penman

These are the seductive voices of the year.

There's a lot of swooning, but not enough choice. Ms. Sioux, yeah, but Ms. Bush especially – she seems destined, anything from Ritz to Rolling Stone could conceivably process this coy, clean, photogenic prodigy into appealing copy. Is ours or hers a convenient age, or what?

Ritz probably is Rolling Stone, actually, and the readership could do with a new "accessible", "intellectual" pin-up. Kate Bush fits snugly, somewhere on a line from model agency cheek bones through a young Joni to Janis Ian at 17: manageable melancholy.

She got the mime troupe tuition, the Gurdjieff teaching, the vegetarianism, the beauty that stops nicely before being out of reach, and what this adds up to, as has been remarked, is the ability to "cover markets". What can stop her?

She plays cute, pastel-doldrums piano; she looks 'good' on Lionheart's cover, although a pernicious phenomenologist could question the presentation of Woman as Object or as Mystery Object – or, further, as Child Mystery Object.

All these themes run through her lyrics and this, presumably, acts as some kind of justification for the cover photosnap of our Kate crouching seductively atop a (costumer's?) crate in an empty, dusty attic. She is wearing a fancy dress lion's outfit, the head of which rests on the floor. There are songs called 'Oh England My Lionheart' and 'In The Warm Room', 'Hammer Horror' and 'In Search Of Peter Pan'.

I look at the photo and I see an object...and this, more than anything, is the David Bowie (both taught by Lindsey Kemp, mime artist) connection, as it indeed is with the pantherish, pale, prima(l) donna Banshee. And, like Sioux, Kate is sometimes rather clumsy when it comes to hanging lyrics on the image (or is it the other way round?).

Lionheart starts with words which could easily slot into The Scream: "Blue on the walls, Blue out of my mouth" ('Symphony In Blue'). But where a Banshee might follow that up with, say, "Blood on the walls. Blood out of my mouth", Kate goes for "The sort of blue between clouds when the sun comes out", and thereby covers the markets.

She can even get away with "When that feeling of meaningless sets in" – that, and "The more I think about sex/The better it gets/Here we have a purpose in life".

I hate quoting lyrics, but when they're printed on the sleeve it must be for a reason – usually that the singer in question thinks of himself as a songwriter, a communicator of meaningful messages, and as such is up for discursive analyses from the scurvy, common likes of I and you.

Kate's trick is the way she clings to thoughts of Innocence (capital Me) and Better Times, at the same time hinting that, you know, she knows and has known more than she's letting on. 'Mature' lyrics sung in that twee, irritating schoolgirl-siren voice. I know you can't help your voice, dear, but then I can't help being irritated by it.

Actually, most of the time she's nearer a vague British lineage – Barbara Dickson to Lindsay De Paul – than any Joni/Janis wonderland. It's the 'up' side of melancholy: muted, mellifluous piano backed by a lame, loveless cradle of pristine and processed acoustic/electric guitar, drums, subtle synthesiser, bass and varied additions where necessary, harmonium, recorder and harpsichord in the tree top. Her musicians add little or nothing to most of the songs, and her own piano playing is too 'nice' to merely be the prop it mostly is.

The songs range from 'In Search Of Peter Pan' ("I've been told, when I get older/That I'll understand it all") to 'In The Warm Room': "She prepares to go to bed/She'll let you watch her undress/Go places where your fingers long to linger/In the warm room/You'll fall into her like a pillow/Her thighs are as soft as marshmallows."

Now, for all I know, that last lot might well be an attack on traditional, mythical ideas and ideals about the mysterious, silent, seductive woman who somewhere waits for you and you only. But nothing in the way it is presented and nothing in the way Ms. Bush presents herself in the glossy, glazed photographs suggests that this is indeed the case.

Other cameos and scenarios flirt with the exotic ('Kashka From Baghdad') and historic ('England My Lionheart', 'Coffee Homeground') without really saying much, mostly metaphors for dewy romanticism, the pleasures and pains thereof.

Nothing wrong with that?
The Sirens, too, sing that way. Trying to disguise that which pressed them into their fame and fashion but allowed them to feel nothing but function. They lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful.

(Poetic, huh?)

[text version]

Kate Bush

The Palladium

NME, April 28 1979

by Charles Shaar Murray 

Two memories: recalled first are the days when rock and roll was swamped with failed classical pianists and violinists who knew that they could make it in rock and roll because certain strata of the rock audience have an inferiority complex about Real Culture and no standards by which to judge it.

Recalled second are all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era. Successfully shoved under the cerebral carpet by the passing of time and the ghosts of all those dynamite gigs, it only takes a whiff of Kate Bush's tour programme and the haughty condescension of the little notes from the Kate Bush Club that you find on your seat when you arrive to bring it all back.

No photographers. Stay in your seats and worship, you dumb bastards!

The Kate Bush show that's been wowin' 'em (as in "Wow, wow, wow, wow, we think you're unbearable") all over the country is a tribute to hard work, lots of money and the old-style ideology that defines the relationship between artist and audience as purely that between worshipper and worshipped. Described (elsewhere, natch) as some kind of apex in the mating of rock and theatre, it is simply the most complicated and expensive extant collision between theatrics (there is a difference between 'theatre' and 'theatrics', but if Kate Bush is aware of it, she certainly isn't letting on) and MOR pop.

An endless stream of sets, costumes, pantomine-conjuring special effects, back projections sound effects (ranging from wind and rain to her brother's awful crypto-poetry read in a portentous, echoing elocution-competition voice to audible sniggering from people who hadn't paid the statutory fiver for their tickets) and things that would be described as 'gimmicks' if they occurred in the course of a performance with less lofty ambitions as this one, the KATE BUSH (she prefers capitals) experience is an exercise in the time-honoured art of battering an audience to death and making them like it.

Ms Bush herself is the evident product of an awful lot of strenuous self-improvement. One can only imagine all those years of ballet training, mime classes, piano lessons...she is Supergirl: the range of her skills aspires to be breathtaking and the end result is that she is capable of doing enough things passably to convince large numbers of people (only a few of whom are equipped to know better) that she is doing them brilliantly.

Her piano playing is competent but characterless: unlike Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell – whose work she evidently admires – the style is neither distinctive nor expressive. Her songwriting hints that it means more than it says and in fact means less: she hints at mystery and uses it as a cloak whereas true mysteries always stand naked. Her singing is at least unusual: her shrill, self-satisfied whine is unmistakable.

Altogether, a lightweight talent with one good song ('Wuthering Heights') to her credit.

Her dancing is more perspiration than inspiration: completely lacking in sensuality or funk, it relies instead on a supple, well-exercised frame and enough ballet moves to impress people who know nothing about ballet just as the Emersons and Wakepersons of yesteryear were able to bullshit people who knew nothing about classical music.

Her mime is elegant sham: great mime expresses everything, good mime expresses something and bad mime expresses nothing other than somebody's been to mime classes.

Backed by a cast of a dozen (seven musicians, two dancers, two singers and the real star of the show, illusionist Simon Gray), Bush twirled and skittered and trilled her way through a series of tableaux vivants which almost disguised that if it had actually been performed and staged as a straight concert it would have been tedious in the extreme.

For the climax – centred around 'James And The Cold Gun' – she dressed up in cowboy togs and methodically shot Gray and the two dancers, complete with fake blood, rimshots and dry ice, before retreating to the stylised womb at the back of the stage from which she had originally emerged, shooting at the audience. It was the first time that she played direct to the crowd and the only emotion expressed was hatred.

It has been pointed out that she's terribly young and oh, so talented. She certainly works hard: the show runs over two hours and except for when she's seated at the white piano, she's in constant motion, using a radio mike on a kind of telephonist's headset so that she can move freely the whole time. The trouble is that she's completely entranced with the idea of her own stardom and the concept of presenting an almost superhuman facade.

Tony DeFries would've loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago maybe I would've too. But these days I'm past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself.

Sure, what you do takes talent, but it ain't the kind of talent I respect.

Enjoy your success.

Kate's fluctuations in critical standing is one of the main things (see also Graham Parker) that led me to the concept of Drops Away Syndrome (and it's less common counterpart,  Rises Up Syndrome)

However I guess in Kate's case it's a critically speaking Dropped From the Start, and then Rises  Up

Drops Away Syndrome is more about figures who are deemed (by critics and hipsters, the rock intelligentsia) to be central and crucial but with time that just completely erodes away, and you are left scratching your head a bit (G. Parker classic case, especially in America)

More Kate being utterly Old Wave even as the New Wave raged and rearranged around her 

The big live comeback residency thing Before The Dawn some years ago was a giant volcanic eructation of this kind of thing

Here's what my friend Samantha had to say about it 

"What a monumental disappointment. The show was little more than a prog rock Jackanory, wish I had never seen it and had saved ourselves the best part of 300 quid."

"My heart sunk right at the beginning when Kate and co 'conga-ed' onto the stage like some waifs and strays from an office party. Still, I tried to rally and remain optimistic. As things went on it seemed like the show was a vehicle for middle aged release, as I looked around the audience, everyone obediently in their seats, it struck me that some of these folk needed to get out more often. Was it a collective amnesia about what really comprises a great gig?.... . In the second half, I cast a glance at [my 15 year old daughter] who was falling asleep.

"Kate felt the need to plug her son, tell us all how much she loved him, 'more than anything else in the world'. Son, Bertie had been given a lead role in the excruciating panto. It did strike me that Bush had seen War Horse a few years ago and had been hopelessly influenced by it. 

".... I never want to hear Aerial again...am so disappointed, she was such a heroine, wish this concert had never happened to us."