replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Saturday, December 21, 2024
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."
Queen are the same. The critical consensus of the 70s and 80s was formed by a set of ideas and associations that are unrecoverable today.
Penman’s line about “from Barbara Dickson to Lindsay De Paul” is very sharp. But where are Barbara Dickson and Lindsay De Paul today? Lost like tears in rain.
Today’s Kate Bush fans would probably have a lot to say about Ian Penman working through his confusing feelings in the first half of that piece, too. And the headline!
Another issue is that, really, Hounds of Love was the one that broke through the critics' defenses - it fit the zeitgeist in 1985 too well, so even though it was arguably just as un-punk as the rest of her work (the side-long suite, the video with her playing Donald Sutherland's prepubescent son), they were willing to overlook it, and one senses they've regretted it ever since - every subsequent album has had the same undertone of 'why did we let her in again?'
She was absolutely besotted with Hugh Cornwell at one time, and used to inveigle her way backstage to meet him after Stranglers gigs. The band's nickname for her was "Squeaky".
Bush's real peers are not the sirens of the New Wave (Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, etc.) but what might be called 'crypto-Old Wave' - devotees of the pre-punk era (prog and art rock in particular) who found ways of existing in a post punk epoch: Mark Hollis and Talk Talk, David Sylvian and Japan, Tim Smith and Cardiacs, and so on. Not quite Marillion-style revivalists, but people existing in and influenced by the punk order (Cardiacs is as much Wire, Devo, and David Lynch as Henry Cow and Gabriel-era Genesis), but really were apart from it
It's always incredible when people notice that, especially in Bush's case - it's very much a 'what the-?!' Prog rock Jackanory is a great description, but it's not quite complete - Bush's core influences are prog and art-rock (including the glammier side of it - Bowie, Roxy, Cockney Rebel) and what might be called pre-AIDS queer experimental theater. Lindsey Kemp often gets tagged as a 'mime' or 'dancer', but that's not how either Bush or Bowie knew him - he was essentially the UK equivalent of the Theater of the Ridiculous or Richard Foreman
Oh, and folk/folk-rock - she had folkie brothers, and Donovan and Sandy Denny are strong in her development (she covered one of the former's children's songs, Lord of The Reedy River, as a B-side in the mid/late 80s)
Yes “prog rock Jackanory” is a great line. It also brings up something I think of as very distinctively 1970s: the interface between rock culture, especially Prog, and light entertainment / MOR. The fact that there was a Kate Bush Christmas Special is a perfect example. Hard to imagine anything similar from an equivalent figure either ten years earlier or ten years later.
Other such cases: Manhattan Transfer covering Weather Report on The Two Ronnies. The trajectory of Demis Roussos from vocalist with ultra-proggers Aphrodite’s Child to a running gag in ‘Abigail’s Party’. Rock Follies performing Alice Cooper. Lulu doing Bowie. Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. And right at the heart of the Prog / MOR nexus: Dark Side of the Moon.
That's more glam's influence than anything (Cooper hanging out with Groucho and Mae West, Bowie's Anthony Newley fixation), plus Jagger's social climbing, but prog is definitely in there - Marc Almond once referred to it as 'dramatic rock', and particularly if you narrow it down to the more song-focused examples - Genesis, Procul Harum, Floyd from DSOTM on, Van Der Graaf - it fits
I always remember a good test of whether anything was any good at the time was if the NME said it was good it was usually self important crap and vice versa.
Ah but have you actually watched the 1979 Xmas special or Tour of Life? Even someone who likes / loves a fair bit of her early music, such as myself, might find themselves tested.
The punk concept of Year Zero feels pretty dubious now, and I regret it buying into it when I was a teenager. But if punks look narrow-minded for rejecting prog, hard rock and disco, I still cling to many of my opinions from the '80s (eg., solo Phil Collins is utter crap except for "In the Air Tonight;" apart from "Fantasy" and "I Want to Dance With Somebody," Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston wasted their enormous skill as singers on bland music). Most people in their 20s would be baffled by those judgments - there's a constant tendency to reclaim despised music from the past once its presence in pop culture has diminished. Post-poptimism, Patrick Bateman's rants about Phil and Whitney must read pretty strange now.
This is 100% accurate. I was mocked by a friend recently for observing that readers can tell Patrick Bateman is a bad guy because of his views on Genesis and Huey Lewis. I still think I am right, though. Obviously they are not the only reason, but those passages of music criticism are there for a purpose, and Brett Easton Ellis always relies heavily on pop culture references to make his points. Think of the freighted use of Elvis Costello in Less Than Zero, for example. Including the title.
I see him as one of those Gen Xers who take their moral cues from their aesthetic judgments. In that he’s the opposite of today’s Millennials and Zoomers, who take their aesthetic cues from their moral judgments.
Think this goes back to Garry Bushell on The Clash. In the olde days there was a social commitment inherent in music fandom, and Kate Bush was doing nothing to progress the revolution. As that kind of sentiment looks ridiculous in hindsight, much of the disdain for Kate Bush does likewise.
I've never been able to stand her personally, because she sang a couple of octaves too high for my nervous system. But I didn't object to her for what she represented.
With regard to Brett Easton Ellis, there's the perennial tragedy that the fiery satirist decays into the timeworn reactionary. It happened with Evelyn Waugh, it happened with Kingsley Amis, it's happened with poor Brett. Jesus, aren't there moves to remake the film of American Psycho?
By the by, the best bit of American Psycho is when Patrick Bateman tries to impress some potential conquest with U2 tickets, saying that Donald Trump is a big fan of the band. Maybe not the best moment in a literary sense, but nowadays, what else could it be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27GZ1ESgrO0 Kate Bush winning the Classic Songwriter Award at the 2001 Q Awards, and John Lydon winning the Inspiration Award.
Looking up the Q Awards on Wikipedia, there's a lot of what you'd expect (i.e., U2), but a few curiosities. The Inspiration Award in 2006 went to a-ha (which was a strange sentence to capitalise). 2007's Classic Song was the Stereophonics' Local Boy in the Photograph (nope, I can't comprehend it either). Neil Finn, lead singer of Split Enz, won Classic Songwriter in 2010. The Icon, Inspiration, Maverick and Hero Awards proliferate as time goes on.
And yet somehow, despite the indifferent malice of the universe, justice swung her sword and the Happy Mondays' Bummed won the 2013 Classic Album Award. I know all award shows are meaningless, but how often do they actually get it platinum-clad right?
The Wikipedia entry for the Q Awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_Awards
Utterly unrelated, and almost no interest to anyone but me, but here's the Happy Mondays on Club X, the worst of Channel 4's early days (and home of the futurist banquet). Magnificently, the Mondays rise above the failings of the production and demonstrate how wonderful they really are, and then at the end the presenters cock it all up.
As I recall, the music press decided Kate Bush was cool long before the wider public. Hounds Of Love seemed to win over the rock critics, but well into the nineties, her music was seen as the kind of thing middle-class housewives would listen to. Also, she was one of those perpetual Brit Award nominations, a good representative of " the industry " like Annie Lennox or Phil Collins. I remember, she was even nominated in 1992- A year when she did next to bugger-all, and her nomination was duly scoffed at - The ultimate proof that the Brits committee were stuck in a time warp.
This was close to my own view of Kate Bush. I was somewhat bemused that Brett Anderson, who I thought was the height of cool when I was 14, was a Kate Bush fan, but then, Alan Partridge was a Kate Bush fan, as well.
The now familiar consensus that Kate Bush is some kind of musical goddess seemed to really gain momentum mid-way through the twelve year gap between Red Shoes and Aerial. This hiatus seemed to draw attention to how rock & pop seemed a little less imaginative, a little less enchanting for Kate's absence. This is why her ok-but-not great comeback single, King Of The Mountain, in 2005, was treated as some kind of event.
Her debut single was Number One! You can't get much more a thumbs up from the general public than that. And then she had a big hits all the way up to "The Dreaming", her first real flop. on the singles front.
It was only then that a glint of appreciation came into critical responses. And even then only a glint, here and there.
Albums sold very well too. She was loved by the general public, or large swathe thereof, long before the rock press. Probably she hit with that post-Beatles middlebrow audience, Dark Side of the Moon etc loving swathe of the public open for some artiness so long as it comes with prettiness or at least tunefulness.
I was referring more to how she was perceived, in the manner of your original article, rather than her actual popularity. Was she seen as cool or uncool? For a long time, it was the latter. Oh, she was respected, admired, given credit for her originality and how she seized control of her career and art, but it took a while for her to be seen as hip or cool.
The popularity was never in doubt. I mean, there are a lot of middle class housewives out there
Queen are the same. The critical consensus of the 70s and 80s was formed by a set of ideas and associations that are unrecoverable today.
ReplyDeletePenman’s line about “from Barbara Dickson to Lindsay De Paul” is very sharp. But where are Barbara Dickson and Lindsay De Paul today? Lost like tears in rain.
Today’s Kate Bush fans would probably have a lot to say about Ian Penman working through his confusing feelings in the first half of that piece, too. And the headline!
DeleteAnother issue is that, really, Hounds of Love was the one that broke through the critics' defenses - it fit the zeitgeist in 1985 too well, so even though it was arguably just as un-punk as the rest of her work (the side-long suite, the video with her playing Donald Sutherland's prepubescent son), they were willing to overlook it, and one senses they've regretted it ever since - every subsequent album has had the same undertone of 'why did we let her in again?'
Delete* every subsequent album'S REVIEWS
DeleteShe was absolutely besotted with Hugh Cornwell at one time, and used to inveigle her way backstage to meet him after Stranglers gigs. The band's nickname for her was "Squeaky".
ReplyDeleteBush's real peers are not the sirens of the New Wave (Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, etc.) but what might be called 'crypto-Old Wave' - devotees of the pre-punk era (prog and art rock in particular) who found ways of existing in a post punk epoch: Mark Hollis and Talk Talk, David Sylvian and Japan, Tim Smith and Cardiacs, and so on. Not quite Marillion-style revivalists, but people existing in and influenced by the punk order (Cardiacs is as much Wire, Devo, and David Lynch as Henry Cow and Gabriel-era Genesis), but really were apart from it
ReplyDeleteIt's always incredible when people notice that, especially in Bush's case - it's very much a 'what the-?!' Prog rock Jackanory is a great description, but it's not quite complete - Bush's core influences are prog and art-rock (including the glammier side of it - Bowie, Roxy, Cockney Rebel) and what might be called pre-AIDS queer experimental theater. Lindsey Kemp often gets tagged as a 'mime' or 'dancer', but that's not how either Bush or Bowie knew him - he was essentially the UK equivalent of the Theater of the Ridiculous or Richard Foreman
Oh, and folk/folk-rock - she had folkie brothers, and Donovan and Sandy Denny are strong in her development (she covered one of the former's children's songs, Lord of The Reedy River, as a B-side in the mid/late 80s)
DeleteYes “prog rock Jackanory” is a great line. It also brings up something I think of as very distinctively 1970s: the interface between rock culture, especially Prog, and light entertainment / MOR. The fact that there was a Kate Bush Christmas Special is a perfect example. Hard to imagine anything similar from an equivalent figure either ten years earlier or ten years later.
DeleteOther such cases: Manhattan Transfer covering Weather Report on The Two Ronnies. The trajectory of Demis Roussos from vocalist with ultra-proggers Aphrodite’s Child to a running gag in ‘Abigail’s Party’. Rock Follies performing Alice Cooper. Lulu doing Bowie. Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. And right at the heart of the Prog / MOR nexus: Dark Side of the Moon.
That's more glam's influence than anything (Cooper hanging out with Groucho and Mae West, Bowie's Anthony Newley fixation), plus Jagger's social climbing, but prog is definitely in there - Marc Almond once referred to it as 'dramatic rock', and particularly if you narrow it down to the more song-focused examples - Genesis, Procul Harum, Floyd from DSOTM on, Van Der Graaf - it fits
DeleteI love Kate!
ReplyDeleteThe critics were painfully wrong!
I always remember a good test of whether anything was any good at the time was if the NME said it was good it was usually self important crap and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteAh but have you actually watched the 1979 Xmas special or Tour of Life? Even someone who likes / loves a fair bit of her early music, such as myself, might find themselves tested.
DeleteThe punk concept of Year Zero feels pretty dubious now, and I regret it buying into it when I was a teenager. But if punks look narrow-minded for rejecting prog, hard rock and disco, I still cling to many of my opinions from the '80s (eg., solo Phil Collins is utter crap except for "In the Air Tonight;" apart from "Fantasy" and "I Want to Dance With Somebody," Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston wasted their enormous skill as singers on bland music). Most people in their 20s would be baffled by those judgments - there's a constant tendency to reclaim despised music from the past once its presence in pop culture has diminished. Post-poptimism, Patrick Bateman's rants about Phil and Whitney must read pretty strange now.
ReplyDeleteThis is 100% accurate. I was mocked by a friend recently for observing that readers can tell Patrick Bateman is a bad guy because of his views on Genesis and Huey Lewis. I still think I am right, though. Obviously they are not the only reason, but those passages of music criticism are there for a purpose, and Brett Easton Ellis always relies heavily on pop culture references to make his points. Think of the freighted use of Elvis Costello in Less Than Zero, for example. Including the title.
DeleteI see him as one of those Gen Xers who take their moral cues from their aesthetic judgments. In that he’s the opposite of today’s Millennials and Zoomers, who take their aesthetic cues from their moral judgments.
Think this goes back to Garry Bushell on The Clash. In the olde days there was a social commitment inherent in music fandom, and Kate Bush was doing nothing to progress the revolution. As that kind of sentiment looks ridiculous in hindsight, much of the disdain for Kate Bush does likewise.
DeleteI've never been able to stand her personally, because she sang a couple of octaves too high for my nervous system. But I didn't object to her for what she represented.
With regard to Brett Easton Ellis, there's the perennial tragedy that the fiery satirist decays into the timeworn reactionary. It happened with Evelyn Waugh, it happened with Kingsley Amis, it's happened with poor Brett. Jesus, aren't there moves to remake the film of American Psycho?
DeleteBy the by, the best bit of American Psycho is when Patrick Bateman tries to impress some potential conquest with U2 tickets, saying that Donald Trump is a big fan of the band. Maybe not the best moment in a literary sense, but nowadays, what else could it be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27GZ1ESgrO0 Kate Bush winning the Classic Songwriter Award at the 2001 Q Awards, and John Lydon winning the Inspiration Award.
ReplyDeleteLooking up the Q Awards on Wikipedia, there's a lot of what you'd expect (i.e., U2), but a few curiosities. The Inspiration Award in 2006 went to a-ha (which was a strange sentence to capitalise). 2007's Classic Song was the Stereophonics' Local Boy in the Photograph (nope, I can't comprehend it either). Neil Finn, lead singer of Split Enz, won Classic Songwriter in 2010. The Icon, Inspiration, Maverick and Hero Awards proliferate as time goes on.
And yet somehow, despite the indifferent malice of the universe, justice swung her sword and the Happy Mondays' Bummed won the 2013 Classic Album Award. I know all award shows are meaningless, but how often do they actually get it platinum-clad right?
The Wikipedia entry for the Q Awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_Awards
Utterly unrelated, and almost no interest to anyone but me, but here's the Happy Mondays on Club X, the worst of Channel 4's early days (and home of the futurist banquet). Magnificently, the Mondays rise above the failings of the production and demonstrate how wonderful they really are, and then at the end the presenters cock it all up.
DeleteAs I recall, the music press decided Kate Bush was cool long before the wider public. Hounds Of Love seemed to win over the rock critics, but well into the nineties, her music was seen as the kind of thing middle-class housewives would listen to. Also, she was one of those perpetual Brit Award nominations, a good representative of
ReplyDelete" the industry " like Annie Lennox or Phil Collins. I remember, she was even nominated in 1992- A year when she did next to bugger-all, and her nomination was duly scoffed at - The ultimate proof that the Brits committee were stuck in a time warp.
This was close to my own view of Kate Bush. I was somewhat bemused that Brett Anderson, who I thought was the height of cool when I was 14, was a Kate Bush fan, but then, Alan Partridge was a Kate Bush fan, as well.
The now familiar consensus that Kate Bush is some kind of musical goddess seemed to really gain momentum mid-way through the twelve year gap between Red Shoes and Aerial. This hiatus seemed to draw attention to how rock & pop seemed a little less imaginative, a little less enchanting for Kate's absence. This is why her ok-but-not great comeback single, King Of The Mountain, in 2005, was treated as some kind of event.
Her debut single was Number One! You can't get much more a thumbs up from the general public than that. And then she had a big hits all the way up to "The Dreaming", her first real flop. on the singles front.
DeleteIt was only then that a glint of appreciation came into critical responses. And even then only a glint, here and there.
Albums sold very well too. She was loved by the general public, or large swathe thereof, long before the rock press. Probably she hit with that post-Beatles middlebrow audience, Dark Side of the Moon etc loving swathe of the public open for some artiness so long as it comes with prettiness or at least tunefulness.
I was referring more to how she was perceived, in the manner of your original article, rather than her actual popularity. Was she seen as cool or uncool? For a long time, it was the latter. Oh, she was respected, admired, given credit for her originality and how she seized control of her career and art, but it took a while for her to be seen as hip or cool.
DeleteThe popularity was never in doubt. I mean, there are a lot of middle class housewives out there