THE Line, The Cross And The Curve was, to date, Bush’s last significant visual statement. It was the logical, if not wholly satisfactory destination of a journey that began in early 1978 on a grey, misty Salisbury Plain – a rather drab approximation of wild northern moorland – with Bush leaping through the undergrowth wearing a fiery red dress and a rather startled expression that at times looked something like embarrassment. The contrast between the first ‘Wuthering Heights’ video and Bush’s lavish mini-film of 1993 could hardly have been more pronounced, excepting the fact that, as Brian Southall drily points out, Bush’s earliest promo clip also “got an awful lot of bad publicity”.
Her earliest videos can be viewed with a certain fond indulgence. Open, odd, naïve, capturing a disarming innocence that may not be quite what it seems, they are primarily filmed pieces of dramatised choreography, a diaphanous legacy of what she had learned from her mentors in mime and her teachers at the Dance Centre, caught somewhere between sensuality and acute silliness and unlike anything captured on film before or since.
They are small, idiosyncratic baby steps that later caused her to wince a little, but they are still amazingly compelling, simply because she is in them. Bush’s greatest asset as a visual artist is her face, and as such it’s possible to trace the genesis of her performing instinct to an early source, moving through her dancing days back to those powerfully evocative Cathy photographs from her pre-teens, and then presumably further back still. From a young age she clearly possessed an instinctive and intrinsic understanding of how to captivate the lens, displaying a powerful gift for being observed that has permeated every aspect of her career.
“She was fantastic, she was very visually aware, she knew what the camera was, where the boundaries were, she completely understood all that,” says Paul Henry, who directed her in ‘The Dreaming’ and ‘There Goes A Tenner’. “She could turn it on immediately the cameras started rolling. It was a privilege to work with her. Of all the people I’ve ever worked with, visually her and Iggy Pop were the most aware.” Gered Mankowitz has photographed her on dozens of occasions, and agrees. “She has an ability to focus on and give to the camera something special about [herself] which might only last a fraction of a second, but it is there,” he says. “It’s a quite mysterious process that occurs between the subject and the camera, you don’t question it too much or over analyse it. It’s a strange, intimate process. It doesn’t always work, but some people just respond fantastically, and can communicate something special. That aura only really occurs in front of the camera.”
You suspect that even Bush herself has never entirely understood this alchemy, or been wholly comfortable with it. The gap between the reality of her life and the expression in her work has always proved somewhat difficult to reconcile; many have failed to make a distinction between what she is projecting and who really lies beneath, yet it’s difficult to overstate the extent to which her ability to transform herself for the camera is integral to her work. Ask a stranger to contemplate Kate Bush and it’s very often not a song that will spring immediately to mind, but a kaleidoscope of changing images. “I don’t think I want to be up there … being me,” she said. “I don’t think I’m that interesting for people to see. I think what I want to do is to be up there actually being the person that’s there in the song. I think that is much more interesting for people and it is much more of a challenge for me.”1
Who is she? Even her friends were sometimes not immune to wondering. “The ‘Babooshka’ video was a shock,” recalls Jon Kelly. “When the single came out and I saw that video of her dressed up, I was really quite shocked.” It’s easy to understand what he means – who is that half-naked scimitar-wielding temptress? Not the woman making cups of tea and sitting next to me in the studio, that’s for sure – but the correlation should be clear: the track is about a woman who is split down the middle, a middle-aged wife dressing up as a young seductress to entrap her husband, and in the video Bush is serving the song faithfully, just as on the cover of Hounds Of Love she is also in character, embodying the suggestion in the title: herein awaits something languorous, seductive, yet also with an implied threat. It clearly does not make her, as one interviewer seemed to imply, an advocate of bestiality. And yet – even though she has always been as happy to play grotesques, or ‘go ugly’, or swap gender as she has been to appear alluring – in her head-on visual representations she has always walked a precarious line.
“Kate is a very assertive Leo, and Leo’s tend to be quite exhibitionist in many ways,” says Charlie Morgan. “Part of Kate wanted to be centre of attention, but there was a certain reserve about her as well; part of her is this incredibly reclusive, creative artistic type. Again, a dichotomy, a battle within herself. There’s no doubt that when she did those videos she was very out front and wanted people to see them and appreciate them, and yet in terms of her private life and public image, she really wants to keep them separate, which is very hard to do.”
Regardless of the risk of people misunderstanding the line that separates public performance and the private person, film and video was always likely to prove irresistible to Bush. A woman who has frequently found cinema a direct source of inspiration in her writing, who often approached composition in a highly visual way and is acutely aware of the importance of projecting a compelling image, she was bound to recognise the medium as an outlet for many of the ideas – dance, cinema, role-playing – that form an integral part of her music.
Its illusory nature and the freedom it allowed also appealed to someone who was never comfortable in the gladiatorial environment of the live arena, where the battle commences and we see whatever we see. In concert, once the bell rings it cannot be unrung; with video, conversely, she discovered a medium for her performance talents in which she could control the picture all the way down the line. “Perhaps that’s where she transferred the impulse to play live, and put it into that expression,” says Jon Kelly. Certainly, following the ‘Tour Of Life’ she actively stepped up the ambition and scale of her videos, moving away from straight performance to something more ambitious and allusive.
The story of Bush’s progression as a visual artist is partly that of astutely selecting highly influential collaborators and mentors. Thanks to EMI she started out in the hands of Keith MacMillan, alongside David Mallet one of the key figures of early music video, but as she began to spread her wings she craved not only greater freedom but greater knowledge and craft, aligning herself to recognised film-makers such as Terry Gilliam, Nic Roeg, Michael Powell and Jimmy Murakami. She instinctively leaned towards the auteur.
The beginnings, however, were not so auspicious. Shot by Rockflix in a day on a budget not much bigger than a petty cash float, the original ‘Wuthering Heights’ video was the clip that launched a thousand parodies, mother’s milk to mimics like Faith Brown. It was swiftly withdrawn by EMI, who commissioned MacMillan to shoot another video for the song in the more hospitable environs of Ewart’s Studio A in Wandsworth. The film was hastily assembled even as the single was climbing the charts, and within a matter of days was being shown on Top Of The Pops. These were the Dodge City days of smash and grab film-making.
“We did ‘Wuthering Heights’ through the middle of the night,” says its editor, Brian Wiseman. “We got halfway through it, decided we didn’t like what we were doing, and started over. We got an idea from some Canadian movie Keith had seen, did it on video and went down a load of generations to get that [swirling] effect. She didn’t have any input on that at all, I don’t think. That was Keith’s idea, and the same with ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’.”
“The great thing about music videos [then], and especially with Keith MacMillan, was that you could do what the hell you wanted,” adds John Henshall, who worked as director of photography on several early Bush videos. “There were no rules. I remember with ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, we used the heaviest fog filter, which was unbelievably revolutionary. We started her looking down in that foetal position, and then we opened the exposure to burn her out, and then just took the exposure down again so she appeared out of it. It was shown on Top Of The Pops and there was this complete change of mood and image with this weird girl singing this weird song. It was unbelievable.”
There’s no doubt that those early videos, somewhat dated though they appear today, made an immeasurable contribution – for good or ill – to creating Bush’s public image, even if they did lean a little heavily on the dry ice, a simplistic meme of the times for any female artist deemed a little ‘quirky’ and mystical. In some ways, MacMillan was to Bush’s early videos what Andrew Powell was to her early records: an experienced, empathetic, occasionally inspired figure with very strong ideas who liked ultimately to call the shots, although she was always in charge of the choreography. She learned a lot from him, and his contacts. For the rather risqué ‘Hammer Horror’ video he introduced her to Anthony Van Laast, which proved to be the start of a highly productive relationship.
“Keith understood that she was a sensitive artist and totally different to the other people, so it was very much a partnership,” says Henshall. “It wasn’t just a Keith thing, but I think she had phenomenal guidance on those early ones. He was good to work with, he would definitely take ideas, and I think he was a major influence on Kate, who was a little 18-year-old, just a normal girl, no edge at all. She wasn’t grand in any way, shape or form. She was a bit … not vacant, but a lot of ‘Yeah, wow’.”
Paul Henry, for one, was never fooled by Bush’s oft-mentioned ‘cosmic, amazing’ shtick. “She could be quite vague at times once the camera was cut, [but] I think that might be just very clever, actually, because it’s so obvious that she is very bright and is pretty shrewd about how to get what she wants,” he says. “That rather beguiling look that she’d have occasionally, as if she didn’t really know what was going on, was all just part of an invitation to put in your thoughts about something.”
As if to prove the point, following the tour and the making of Never For Ever she sought the kind of control over her visual output that she had gained over her records. After that solo, eye-popping interpretation of ‘Babooshka’ in the studio, her focus began to move away from presenting herself as a dancer or a mover who chipped in with storyline and choreography ideas but ceded control of the final product to the director and editor. She started edging towards something more obviously dramatic, using outdoor locations, stronger narratives and larger casts.
“My God, the expense was nothing,” recalls Brian Bath. “We used to go to the forest out in [Windsor], Black Park, where all the Hammer Horror stuff was shot. We did ‘Army Dreamers’ there, and ‘Breathing’, where they all come out of the water at the end. Del wouldn’t do it: ‘Ah no, I ain’t doing that!’ We had scuba suits on underneath these overalls, it was February and it was freezing. Paddy says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you if you float away.’ I always said I’d sit in a tree upside down if they asked me.”
Bush loved ‘Breathing’ and particularly ‘Army Dreamers’, a snappy, powerful, stylish summation of the song’s personalised anti-war themes, declaring that “I got everything I wanted to say across.”2 However, it marked the end of her relationship with MacMillan. The director could be a tricky customer, as could Bush in her own way, and she was about to disappear over the horizon of her own imagination and into The Dreaming. “Ever since ‘Breathing’ I’ve wanted to make videos like little films,” she said.3 She had her own agenda to pursue.
“[Keith] had quite good ideas but she wanted much more creative control,” says Brian Wiseman. “She wasn’t getting that kind of freedom from Keith. She did ‘Army Dreamers’ with him and then they fell out. I’d stopped working with Keith, but she had a relationship with me and asked if I would effectively direct with her [on ‘Sat In Your Lap’]. It was her ideas and me making sure that it worked.”
‘Sat In Your Lap’, an exercise in highly kinetic abstract impressionism, with roller-skating bulls thrown in for good measure, is hardly coherent but it is eminently watchable. The other videos for The Dreaming singles revealed someone still struggling to master the art of matching music to visual expression. Bush sought the same absolute creative control she had had on the album but did not yet have the technical expertise to pull it off, and so was forced to hire directors to do her will. It was not always a comfortable fit. Wiseman, who also directed ‘Suspended In Gaffa’, admits “she was a very nice lady, there was never any arguments or anything, but as a piece of video it wasn’t hugely interesting.” Actually it was interesting. Filmed in a set of a barn, the dusk punctuated by shafts of sunlight, and featuring her mother in a brief cameo, it conjured up a very distinct sense of Wickham Farm. But it is doggedly uncommercial.
‘The Dreaming’, the opening single from the album and therefore a relatively important piece of film in terms of promoting the record, was based around a highly stylised piece of slow choreographed movement, presented with cinematic values. Ewart’s sound stage was transformed into a vast, desolate stretch of Australian outback, with a 10kW light rigged up as the sun, topped off with lasers borrowed from The Who. It was an ambitious and very expensive undertaking, and yet many of the visual effects were obscured by clouds of red cement dust (“I think people probably died because of the video,” jokes John Henshall. “For years the dust was all over Ewart’s lights, everywhere, we were breathing that stuff”) while the action, full of vivid visual stimulus, was rendered inaccessible because of the way it was shot.
Bush had initially approached Terry Marcel, the director of the cult 1980 swords and sorcery movie Hawk The Slayer, to direct the video; Marcel wasn’t interested but suggested his friend, Paul Henry, instead. “I was pretty excited about the idea of working with her,” says Henry. “She knew exactly what she wanted, and in a way that made it quite difficult. She wanted it based around dance routines, so whilst I shot a lot of close ups, mid-shots and so on, when it came to the edit she basically insisted that it was pretty much kept as a wide shot, which worked for her, but I think it was compromised from my point of view. For me it was very unfortunate, because she was entering a phase where artistically she was expressing herself, but commercially it was no good. The record company didn’t like it at all. Martin Wyn Griffith [EMI’s Head of Production at the time] called me and said, ‘This is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe you’ve spent all this money and made this terrible film.’”
The song was far from innately commercial in the first place, but the video hardly helped its fortunes as it stalled at number 48. John Henshall also worked on the film and is equally damning about the experience. “That was a bit of a shambles. A lot went into it, but she was lost. I don’t think [Paul] controlled it, you know, but she needed a guiding hand and she didn’t get it. She thought she knew.”
On the next video, ‘There Goes A Tenner’, Henry was under strict instructions from EMI to draw in the reins. Before they began, he told Bush that it had to be made much more in the manner of a conventional video. We need to shoot this in the standard way, he told her: cover it in a wide shot, then go in for two-shot, mid-shot and close up, so we have the ability to cut it conventionally and it will have a better chance of being shown on television which, presumably, was the point of the exercise.
“I don’t think she liked that,” he says. “So after that one she employed everyone that I had employed on ‘There Goes A Tenner’ – except me! She had my art director, my set dressers, my cameraman, wardrobe people, everyone but me, because she didn’t like the fact that I tried to be more in control of it. Most creative people want complete control. On one hand it was a gift to be able to work with her, on the other hand she was heading in a direction that wasn’t going to be commercially successful. Both the films I made didn’t get a huge amount of exposure.”
Indeed, that’s an understatement. ‘There Goes A Tenner’ is the least successful single of Bush’s career, played and seen virtually nowhere, primarily due to the song – the video is perfectly fine. As ever, there were no great scenes, no fallings out; neither Henry nor Wiseman have a bad word to say about Bush personally and, you suspect, would have leapt at the chance to have worked with her again. For her part, she remained resolute in her belief that she had to follow her vision, resolving to do it better next time. Which is what she did.
By the mid-Eighties Terry Gilliam had forged a reputation as a cinematic innovator. A confirmed fan, occasionally Bush would ring Gilliam’s office in Neals Yard in Covent Garden to rave about his work, particularly Time Bandits, and suggest that he direct her videos. Eventually she came into the office and the two met. Gilliam was struggling with the edit of Brazil, so he suggested that Bush instead used his cameraman, David Garfath, for her next promo, ‘Running Up That Hill’. She tried to tempt Gilliam again with ‘Cloudbusting’, and this time he recommended another member of his creative team, Julian Doyle.
Much of Bush’s creative world spins out from a very tight-knit cluster of central spokes: Abbey Road, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel. She has been very conscious and astute in her choice of collaborators and working environments, and these trusted hubs have served her well. A constant throughout her career has been her ability to surround herself with supremely talented people. She has lofty ambitions for her art and is far from shy or retiring when it comes to approaching those she admires, and her ability to zone in on quality people and use their resources – not in a cynical way – has had a positive impact on her work. Her attitude has always been: if you’re going to have somebody else contribute, get the best. So if she needed a choral group, she would get singers overseen by Richard Hickox, one of the great English conductors. If she required a classical guitarist, she would get John Williams. This tendency has been even more pronounced in terms of her videos. “Kate was so respected by people and they were so fascinated by her that they would do it,” says David Garfath. “And she’s got that thing: no harm in asking.”
Terry Gilliam became another spoke in the wheel. It’s little wonder she made a bee line for the Monty Python animator, who at the time was at the early stages of a consistently intriguing and visually enchanting career as a film director. Time Bandits, his fantastical grown-up kid’s adventure – or perhaps it’s an very adult fable with a child-like veneer – about a young boy taken on a series of time travelling adventures by six dwarves, was very much her kind of thing. Bush had loved Monty Python since her schooldays and Time Bandits was one of her favourite films. Gilliam’s vision chimed with the vividly unusual way in which she saw the world.
Although she was disappointed not to be working with him directly, Gilliam became a close friend and he gave her the benefit of his advice on things like story boards, while her collaborations with his colleagues made groundbreaking forward strides in terms of her own visual work.* Perhaps she felt she had less to prove; certainly her ideas were stronger and more focused; and the music she was working with was considerably more accessible.
David Garfath recalls a woman who was typically unaffected and pleasant in person, always open and willing to hear ideas, and yet absolutely resolute about what she wanted. “When I first went to her house in Eltham and she opened the door, I remember thinking, ‘Is that Kate or not?’” he says. “Just for a split-second moment, because she was so relaxed in her dress sense, and so friendly. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea’, it was a natural warmth. We sat and talked over ideas. I thought of this ballet dance troupe I’d heard of somewhere in west Africa, which sounded fascinating, and doing it outside at sunset, but it wasn’t right for her. I came up with something else, and once again that didn’t click, and I thought, ‘Hmmm, I don’t know that this is going to work.’ But I gave it one more shot, I came up with other ideas and went to her and she picked up on it and we pushed it forward together. She has very strong ideas about which way it should go and how it should develop. I enjoyed it very much indeed, it was a very good experience. She pushes people to try and make something [special] of it.”
‘Running Up That Hill’ was always intended to be a beautifully filmed piece of pure classical dance. Bush had been studying hard with Dyane Gray-Cullert, and in the absence of Stewart Avon Arnold – who was, to his eternal regret, busy with other commitments – she was partnered in the film by Michael Hervieu, a young dancer who had passed an audition to win the role. The Japanese hakama costumes and the recurring miming of the firing of an arrow nod to the family interest in Kyudo. Out of long discussions between Bush and Garfath came the idea of placing photographic cut-outs of the faces of Bush and Hervieu onto an army of invading dancers to convey the song’s core idea of the difficulty in resisting our given gender and identity.
It was all too much for MTV, who used a clip of her performing the song on Wogan instead, but it was a beautiful and rather haunting piece of film. Bush, as usual, put her all into it. “She would go on and on in her performance until she felt it was right,” says Garfath. “She loved dance, and she was very professional about it, and very anxious to get it right. She was still dancing at midnight when we would have started at six in the morning. It was fantastic. I can’t remember anyone having a bad word. People really loved her, they warmed to her. When we finished some of us went off to have a drink together. We went to a bar somewhere in London and she didn’t want to be recognised. When she used to order a cab she would use a pseudonym, but I should think that’s quite normal.”
The director, who had worked on films such as The Empire Strikes Back, Superman II and Another Country, was also impressed by the amount of autonomy Bush exercised. There was no one from the record company looming over the proceedings, and she always seemed to get what she required. “I remember one night we needed to go past midnight, where it suddenly gets much more expensive because of crew and everything, and my producer said we didn’t have it in the budget,” says Garfath. “Kate just picked the phone up, spoke to someone, and said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’ A wonderful freedom.”
‘Running Up That Hill’ was intended as a fond farewell to dance, at least as far as her video appearances were concerned. That proved premature, but she was already fixated on film, and had been talking seriously about developing ‘The Ninth Wave’ concept from Hounds Of Love into a mini-movie. It “was a film,” she said, “that’s how I thought of it”4, and indeed, when she discussed her songs it was clear how vivid and real they appeared to her. ‘The Ninth Wave’ movie never happened, disappointingly, as it had a much stronger dramatic thread than the one she eventually made, but the ambition remained.
In many ways her next promo video was a small, self-contained film in its own right. She made ‘Cloudbusting’ with Julian Doyle, who had edited Monty Python’s Life Of Brian and had been a second unit director on Time Bandits and Brazil, and who went on to become a feature director. Bush’s ideas for the video originated from some preliminary drawings she had made, most memorably a picture of the sun displayed as a huge face coming over the horizon. The shoot was the scene of perhaps her biggest coup, recruiting the renowned Canadian actor Donald Sutherland – star of Don’t Look Now, another of her favourite films, directed by another of her favourite directors, Nic Roeg – to play the role of Wilhelm Reich.
Originally, they had talked about the possibility of hiring the British actor and former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton to the play the father, but then Sutherland’s name cropped up. Bush had a contact for the actor through Barry Richardson, a stylist who had worked on Pink Floyd’s The Wall and who was part of the crew on the film Sutherland was currently making in Kings Lynn, the disastrous American Revolutionary War movie Revolution. When she asked Sutherland’s agent if he might be available the answer was a simple ‘no’, so she tried a less formal tack, using Richardson as an intermediary.
Sutherland agreed to meet for dinner and quickly accepted the part; aside from the fact he was charmed by Bush, he may well have been looking for a little light relief. He later confessed he was having a miserable time on Revolution, where he was surrounded by intense method actors, including Al Pacino, who would completely ignore him off-set because he was playing an English sergeant in the film and they were all fighting for the freedom of the colonies.
EMI’s Brian Southall maintains that Sutherland “was in it in order to attract the American market. She was a great fan of his, but there was also, ‘It’s gonna be good for America’. From our point of view, it wouldn’t do any harm.” There was certainly an awareness that cracking MTV might provide a short cut to success in the US; pop videos had become increasingly homogenised, and it was felt that the cinematic qualities of ‘Cloudbusting’ might stop viewers flipping between channels and force them to pay attention. MTV, however, ultimately shied away from it precisely because it was so different. “In the end, it made no bloody difference,” says Southall. “They don’t get this stuff.” ‘Cloudbusting’ eventually played in cinemas in support of the Michael J. Fox teen vehicle Back To The Future. There was some discussion about adding a statement at the end of the film revealing that Reich was sentenced to two years for contempt of court and had died in jail, but Bush decided that such a bald announcement had no place in a pop promo.
The video was filmed over three days at the White Horse Hill, near Uffington on the Berkshire Downs, at a cost of a little over £100,000. The sky stayed blue and the clouds, arguably the true stars of the piece, were bought from Oxford Scientific and added in post-production. Bush cast herself as the son, Peter Reich, who was a pre-pubescent boy in the period the video describes. The crew were sceptical that she could pull it off, and they had every right to be. Decked out in dungarees, the addition of a short, spiky wig admittedly lent her a certain boyish quality while making her head seem bigger and thus helping her appear younger; while Sutherland – already a towering 6 ft 4 – stood on a box in order to make the petite Bush seem even smaller. Even after all that effort, however, she remained a highly unconvincing male.
The schedule was impossibly tight. Sutherland was only there thanks a brief spell of shore leave and had to be surrendered back to Revolution within the agreed time span. As a consequence, he was filming right up until the moment of his departure: the shot of him getting into the car as the sun starts to sink behind the hills captures his actual exit from the ‘Cloudbusting’ set. Every available moment with the star was grabbed with both hands, and by the end of the third day he was exhausted, beginning to lose focus and jokingly wondering aloud what exactly he had let himself in for, slumming it on the set of a pop video. His presence was tangible evidence not only of Bush’s tenacity, but also the genuine esteem in which she was held beyond the confines of the pop world. Few other artists would have managed to get him to play ball.
Everyone loved Sutherland. He brought a real gravitas to the project, and he not only made a perfectly sympathetic and convincing Reich, he was very generous with Bush. “He was really professional, really patient, and an incredible help to me,” she said. “I mean, whenever we were acting, he was my father. I just had to react to him like child. He made it very easy.”5
Sutherland’s strength as an actor pulled these feelings out of Bush. There is a lovely scene in the video when they both look down at the approaching car. Bush backs into him, turns around and they embrace. When they broke apart Bush was crying real tears. The openness of Sutherland’s performance brought her emotions to the surface, to the point where she was living the moments described in the screenplay. In common with the best of her music, it wasn’t so much acting as being.
If she was learning simply from her proximity to a masterful actor, she was also picking up technical tips from the crew, who would talk constantly to her, gently and informally tutoring her in the art of filming, explaining what they were doing and the best means of getting certain results. It seemed to have the desired effect. Buoyed by the experience of working with such a stellar group, she immediately began directing her own videos, beginning with ‘Hounds Of Love’ and ‘The Big Sky’ in 1985 and 1986, followed by all the subsequent videos for The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, as well as ‘Experiment IV’ and ‘Rocket Man’. In many of them she used her friends from the world of alternative comedy – Hugh Laurie, Dawn French and Tim McInnerny – whom she had met through Comic Relief functions and her Amnesty International fundraisers and via mutual acquaintances; Robbie Coltrane had even appeared on Hounds Of Love. She co-directed ‘The Sensual World’ with The Comic Strip Presents’ … actor, writer and director Peter Richardson, which led to her being invited to play the role of bride Angela Watkins in the Comic Strip’s rather deranged 1990 film, Les Dogs, also featuring McInnerny and her future co-star in The Line, The Cross And The Curve, Miranda Richardson. More spokes, more contacts.
It would be easy to put rather arch inverted commas around the description of Bush as a director, and it’s true she did get help from many of her right hand men, experienced cameramen, editors and cinematographers such as Roger Pratt, Brian Hurley and Julian Doyle. But watching ‘Hounds Of Love’, ‘Experiment IV’, ‘The Sensual World’ and ‘This Woman’s Work’ a clear unity of style to Bush’s direction emerges: the videos are heavily stylised, dramatic and rather stagey.* When not conjuring a Hitchcockian sense of menace (‘Hounds Of Love’ is partly a homage to The 39 Steps) and casting long shadows, she favours deep, warm browns, greens and purples. She’s excellent at switching atmosphere by changing the backdrop – the weather, the season, the time of day. That elemental touch again.
She is a classicist. Her love of Thirties and Forties noir and caper comedy is clear in the clothing and the crisp lines of many of her videos, and she is fond of the somewhat operatic grand gesture: there’s lots of clenched fists, enveloping hugs and long stares into the mid-distance. It’s not always subtle, it’s perhaps a tad indulgent, and it does often border on pastiche, but it is undeniably accomplished in places. At home Bush had a room full of films by favourite directors like Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock, often video-taped from the television. Her passion for cinema bequeathed a certain amount of technical knowledge, as well as a genuine thrill at being behind the camera.
While directing and performing these songs, she was edging towards something bigger, more ambitious. Ever since ‘The Ninth Wave’ she had yearned to make an extended piece of film combined with her music. She gradually conceived The Line, The Cross And The Curve. “She started to talk about this project about a year before it happened,” recalls Stewart Avon Arnold. “She said she wanted to put together this story, like a mini-film. She talked about different elements of it when I was coming down there to teach her private classes at Eltham, the house next to [Paddy]. She’d bounce any ideas off me, and then it came up and she asked me to help her with the choreography, because there were quite a few other dancers. I helped her put it together, although obviously all the ideas were coming from her. There were some great people in it. She wanted to get some mature dancers, so I recommended Christopher Bannerman and Bob Smith, who were Michael and Gabriel, the angels, and she used Lindsay Kemp, of course. The number that she did with the Madagascan musicians [‘Eat The Music’], they were all dancers that were auditioned at the Pineapple, I helped put that together.”
For the lead dramatic parts she recruited the fine actress Miranda Richardson, who had a sparkling CV and had worked with her in Les Dogs, to play the Irish dancer, and Lindsay Kemp as her tour guide through the mirror world, a show of gratitude for all he had taught her. Her band all participated, her ‘healer’ Lily showed up, Paddy was there, Peter Richardson had a cameo.
None of it, alas, amounted to very much. The plot was essentially an extended and confused re-telling of the lyrics of the album’s title track, which was in itself inspired by Powell’s film, in turn inspired by a Danish fairy tale. It opens with Bush and Stewart Avon Arnold dancing while her band perform ‘Rubberband Girl’: a good, straight pop video. The routine ends with her flailing in a straightjacket (a nice poke at all those “she’s mad” naysayers) and after a bit of lame tomfoolery with a wind machine Bush’s character – who is never named – expresses her dissatisfaction with her dancing. There is a blackout, the band leave, and Bush sings ‘And So Is Love’ amid some dread symbolism involving candles and dead birds. Richardson’s character then arrives, requesting from Bush the mysterious symbols – the line, the cross and the curve – in order for her to “get back home.” She gives Bush her possessed red shoes in return and Bush sets off into a mirror world, beckoned across fire by Lindsay Kemp. She must then try and get the symbols back, avenge the evil Richardson, while also joining the dots between songs as diverse as ‘Lily’ and ‘Eat The Music’.*
There are some fine and memorable moments. The scene of Bush twirling like a musical box ballerina in a snowstorm to ‘Moments Of Pleasure’ is sublime; ‘And So Is Love’ is very powerful, while the story climaxes in a slow-motion cat-fight between Bush and Richardson which is quietly gripping. It can be fun spotting the many references to her favourite films – Night Of The Demon, The Gold Rush, The Red Shoes, The Wizard Of Oz – and there is plenty of evidence that Bush’s creative pulse was still ticking over at a steady rate. Although often tired and distracted, she was still capable of coming up with inspired ideas and was constantly willing to try new things. She certainly kept the cast and crew on their toes. During the filming of ‘Rubberband Girl’, she arrived at first light one morning and asked someone to find her a trampoline. Nobody was ever quite sure what she would come up with next.
There is some magic in the film. It’s not the complete catastrophe that it has sometimes been painted, not least by its director, but both Bush’s ambitions and external expectations were far too high, and she suffered because of it. As anything remotely resembling a ‘film’ The Line, The Cross And The Curve simply fails. It doesn’t hang together, falling foul of the curse of the over-extended pop promo, and the script and storyline were badly malnourished. “I didn’t have time to develop the story,” she said. “I took on a bit too much.”6
Although some interesting concepts are hinted at, nothing is pursued or resolved as the narrative cannons groggily between one song and the next. Some familiar Bush themes emerge: escaping the constraints of mind and body to achieve transcendence; spirituality, more than a dash of witchcraft and the supernatural; the power of music and dance and the dizzy compulsion of creativity, something scarily intense that takes hold and doesn’t let go. Perhaps The Line, The Cross And The Curve should really be read as a confirmation of what Bush had recently been saying in the press: music isn’t everything. I’m unlacing these red shoes and taking a break from all that stuff.
One insurmountable problem with the film is the fact that the acting – specifically, Bush’s acting – is below par. She has occasionally displayed a measured gift for comedy during past appearances on The Kenny Everett Show or singing with Rowan Atkinson at The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball; in another Comic Strip Presents … film, GLC, she produced the wildly kitsch theme song ‘Ken’ – “Who’s a funky sex machine?” – in praise of Ken Livingstone. She is obviously able to project a variety of emotions and feelings superbly through her music, and has a magnificently expressive face, but acting with dialogue was another matter. She never wanted to be an actor, she said, she had no real passion for it. When she has dipped her toe into the water – Les Dogs, ‘Cloudbusting’ – it was because it was fun and brought her into contact with people she liked and could learn from. She seemed to recognise her limitations. “If I was to make [another] film I wouldn’t want to be in it so much,” she admitted.7
She was frequently offered parts, in films, musicals, plays and TV shows, but almost always turned them down. Nic Roeg asked Bush to take the lead role in Castaway, which would have required her to spend most of her screen time naked on a beach with Oliver Reed. Although she admired Roeg, she turned the opportunity down, not on the grounds that she objected to the nudity, but rather that spending months in a confined space with the notoriously debauched Reed didn’t appeal.* The role was eventually played by Amanda Donohoe.
If Bush had planned to seriously pursue acting, she may have needed a substantial amount of assistance. As director on The Line, The Cross And The Curve, not only was she dealing with numerous technical headaches – filming the bird and the lacing of the shoes both posed problems – but she was then coming out from behind the camera and attempting to give a convincing performance.
The odds were stacked against her. As someone lacking meaningful directorial experience, it would have been difficult enough simply being in overall creative control of a film; trying to act at the same time (and doing so in the knowledge that she was not a naturally gifted acting performer) made it an almost impossible conjuring trick. Perhaps in a straight pop video, where Bush the Actor was not required to convincingly convey dialogue, and Bush the Director needn’t worry overly about maintaining a narrative thread, the equation seemed more plausible. But this was intended to be so much more than a mere pop video. One scene in particular underscored the problem. Before ‘Eat The Music’, Bush and Miranda Richardson perform a scene where they change positions, sizing each other up. Richardson is – typically – sure-footed, but Bush is all at sea, over-acting and over-emphasising. Her performance jars, but it needn’t have been an insurmountable glitch. The presence of a director to suggest that she take things down a notch or two would have done the trick.
The film fell short in post-production, too, with a final cut that the editor Julian Rodd struggled in vain to convince Bush could be improved upon, and a poorly judged sound mix that bowed more to the flashy techniques of a pop promo than the requirements of film-making. The scene with Lindsay Kemp in the storm failed to pack the desired dramatic punch partly because his voice was coming from the back of the mix rather than the centre, lending an odd detachment to the scene.
The Line, The Cross And The Curve was a ridiculously tall order simply because she was trying to do so much, so quickly, at such a difficult time. It’s hard to think of any artist who could pull off singing, dancing, writing and directing in their debut film. Nevertheless, for someone with her cinematic knowledge, her love of the form, her talent and desire for perfectionism, to achieve little more than the typically overblown Eighties and Nineties ‘concept’ video – inflated, badly acted, rambling, wracked with faux-profundity, everything coated with that shallow glossy sheen – was a bitter disappointment.
There was some Schadenfreude in the reviews, a sense that the experience had knocked Bush’s high falutin’ artistic pretensions down a peg or two. It’s a terrific shame, and a sign of how off-kilter she was at the time, that when it came to the realisation of a long-held ambition for once this most fastidious and careful of artists rushed into it woefully ill-prepared.
Almost exactly 12 years later, Bush was heavily involved in the creation and execution of her next video, ‘King Of The Mountain’, producing storyboards and holding lengthy meetings with Jimmy Murakami, whom she had contacted about ‘The Sensual World’ almost 20 years before and had finally got around to working with. For the first time in two decades, however, she did not direct. Tracing the journey of Elvis’s jumpsuit, from lonely wardrobe back to the arms of its owner, hiding out in the mountains and looking uncannily like Rolf Harris, it was another mini-movie, somewhere between The Snowman, the Harry Potter films and Citizen Kane. Bush brought her innate quality of presence to the screen, but it was more muted now, less frenetic. Approaching 50, her body was no longer likely to allow for the spectacular dance routines and daring role-playing of yester-year.
This may well prove to be a positive. No matter how eccentric or occasionally misconceived the final product, her visual gifts have always been central to her work, and certainly a key part of her being regarded as an icon. There is something rather fitting, however, about the passing of time inevitably taking her further away from that side of things. At heart she is a writer, not a performer. Strip away everything about Bush, leave only the voice and the piano, and you would still have a vast world of imagination, colour and characters into which to dive. Her songs are already like little films; they have depth and texture, they construct an aural landscape which conjures up clear images, they have shape and proportion, often they have narrative, they carry mood changes, emotions and strong atmosphere. It’s all there.
“When people listen to your record, that’s an audial experience; you don’t necessarily want to see things,” she has said. “Like when you write a song: the person singing the song is a character. Although it might be you vocally, it’s not yourself you are singing about, but that character. It’s someone who is in a situation, so you treat it like a film. That’s how I see songs. They are just like a little story: you are in a situation, you are this character. This is what happens. End. That’s what human beings want desperately. We all love being read stories, and none of us get it anymore.”8
Since she began in 1978 deconstructing and rebuilding herself almost on a song-by-song basis, Bush has rarely been less than magnetic to watch, but the misfiring The Line, The Cross And The Curve was a reminder that doing justice to these already visually audacious songs was harder than it seems; it’s a miracle, indeed, that she has pulled it off so successfully so many times. Her videos are a sweet, sexy, silly, sublime accompaniment to the music, but they are not essential. With her next record, Bush would prove once again that she could tell stories, take on roles, act them out and weave a dense, intoxicating visual spell just by using her words and her voice. But first, there was to be a break in transmission. Necessary repairs.
* She also quickly returned the favour, recording a short, shimmering, symphonic version of ‘Brazil’ for Gilliam’s film.
* Watch ‘The Big Sky’ video, on the other hand, and weep for the fact that she has never played live again.
* Some scenes in this section of the Madagascan dancers with watermelons had to be re-shot for the US, because they were deemed racially provocative.
* She did, however, contribute ‘Be Kind To My Mistakes’ to the film’s soundtrack.