WHILE Nick Hornby was compiling lists of his top five Elvis Costello songs in High Fidelity, Kate Bush was busy ranking her preferred songbirds. On July 4, 1996, the English songwriter Don Black, the man responsible for the lyrics of countless standards in the fields of pop, film and musical theatre, appeared on Radio Two and mentioned a recent meeting with Bush. “I asked Kate if she had a favourite singer and she said her favourite is the blackbird and her second favourite is the thrush,” he said. “Well, I told you she was different.”1
What was intended as a breezy showbiz anecdote turned out to be something close to a profound premonition of the substance of her next album, as yet only a distant satellite orbiting far above the planet of sound. Bush had recently purchased a 160-year-old listed building, a former mill house at Theale, near Reading, about 40 miles west of London, situated on a small, natural islet by the Sheffield Mill Weir on the Kennet and Avon canal. Unlived in for over a decade, the 14-roomed house cost £750,000 and Bush spent an even larger sum modifying it to her needs. In time, she dismantled the studio at Wickham Farm and installed it in a building in the six-acre garden, which also included a guest cottage, the remains of the old water mill, and her own dance studio by the water. “She asked me about the floor and so I went to have a look at it while she was doing it, and it’s a really lovely little studio right by the lock,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “She did it properly: harlequin floor, sprung floor, ballet bars and mirrors.”
In the upside-down world of celebrity culture, of course, this move to the country was later portrayed as a gloomy exile into a world of melancholy and paranoia. But if it was a further retreat from the spotlight, it was also a return to the most fundamental touchstone of her creativity – solitude, privacy, the sense of time stretching out like an ocean, a certain kind of direct connection with the elements around her – which had always animated her best music. By ruthlessly protecting her personal space, Bush slowly rediscovered a familiar alchemy, putting the magic of the everyday world back into her music.
“With her you’re getting the pure expression of someone living a home life,” says Tony Wadsworth, CEO of EMI between 1998 and 2008, the man who supported Bush for seven years – without hearing a note of new music – as she endeavoured to restore the essential balance between her work and her family. “Because what Aerial is, as a piece of work, is someone obviously speaking about a very private and domesticated life. It’s massively personal. And it wouldn’t surprise you to know that a lot of birds fly into her garden!” The Red Shoes struggled to get off the ground; Aerial literally means ‘of the air’. Those songbirds proved to be significant co-writers.
* * *
The idea, widely perpetuated upon the release of Aerial in 2005, that Bush signed off on The Red Shoes and its companion film and immediately disappeared down a foxhole – “vanished from view” as the Times and many others put it – only to emerge 12 years later is convenient to the mythology but not quite true. Like a train whose engine has cut out, her momentum carried her a little way forwards before she came to a halt in a secluded siding.
She embarked on a series of promotional interviews to mark the limited cinematic release of The Line, The Cross And The Curve in April 1994 (the video went on general sale in October; the world shrugged); her cover of ‘The Man I Love’ was released as a single and briefly entered the charts in July; in September, she donated two pieces of artwork to War Child for a celebrity charity auction, entitled ‘Someone Lost At Sea Hoping Someone In A Plane Will Find Them’ (‘The Ninth Wave’, it seemed, was the concept that just kept on giving) and ‘Someone In A Plane Hoping To Find Someone Lost At Sea’, each consisting of a black surface containing a tiny, twinkling red light. And there was a rather perfunctory performance on Top Of The Pops in November 1994, her first on the show for over eight years and her last to date, to promote the release of the final single from The Red Shoes, ‘And So Is Love’, as it limped to number 26. All in all, by her standards we actually saw and heard quite a lot from Bush in 1994.
More intriguingly, the same year she accepted a commission to write several brief pieces of music to accompany the $30m US TV ad campaign for the launch of Coca-Cola’s new fruit drink Fruitopia (the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser was the voice in the UK; this, clearly, was to be the soft drink of choice for fans of enigmatic female singers the world over). It seemed an incongruous move. Bush had consistently turned down advances of this nature, although she had appeared in one Japanese television advert in 1978, singing ‘Them Heavy People’ and intoning the tag line – ‘We have many varieties of mood within us; it’s up to you to choose’ – with a comical lack of enthusiasm, all for the glory of Seiko watches.
Ever since, her unwillingness to bow to commercial pressure and use her music to promote a solely commercial purpose had been resolute. The motivation for her changing tack wasn’t clear but was probably varied: far from the commercial ingénue she sometimes appears, certainly the financial rewards would have been extremely significant; perhaps she liked the tone of the ads, which were relatively innovative and visually stimulating and over which she was given complete artistic control. She may also have recognised an opportunity to cast the net of her music a little wider, while also finding a home for all the melodic waifs and rhythmic strays that had never quite found a home in her ‘proper’ songs; and indeed, the snippets, averaging around 30 seconds each and entitled ‘Solstice’, ‘Some People’, ‘Nice’, ‘Skin’, ‘Soul’, ‘What If’, ‘Thirsty’, ‘Person’ and ‘Fighting Fruit’, were uniformly fascinating, each one hinting at a longer piece, several reminiscent of the kind of odd, rhythmic, electronic pop music she was making around the time of The Dreaming.*
A little later her friend and regular collaborator Donal Lunny curated a compilation called Common Ground, featuring contemporary artists singing Irish songs. Recording her contribution in 1995, Bush sang ‘Mná Na h-Éireann’ (‘Women Of Ireland’), a well known piece with vaguely nationalist leanings based on the words of the eighteenth century poet Peadar O Doirnin. It was a lush performance, her voice backed by harp and strings, and sung – bravely, and rather well – in Gaelic. “I’m sure Ma gave me a helping hand!” she said.2
These were, however, soft footfalls in a forest of gathering silence; slowly, she wandered out of public view. It should have come as no great surprise. The experience of making and facing up to The Red Shoes had constituted a natural full stop. She had been writing and recording – and occasionally performing – since the age of 18 with barely a gap in between, and despite the seemingly modest output – one tour, a few videos, seven records over two decades – each successive album seemed to take more and more out of her.
“I remember talking to her when she had just put The Red Shoes out,” says Bob Mercer. “I was living in Nashville, and I said, ‘What are you going to do now?’ She said, ‘I’m going to take a rest for a while, this writing and recording and mixing and putting it out and promoting it just exhausts me.’ I said, ‘Fuck me, Kate, you do it every five fucking years, for Christ’s sake!’ But she spends a long time and she is meticulous, and it shows, it really does. You’re talking about obsessive behaviour. She is obsessive, those kind of people are, and it tends to impinge on their lives, and not just their artistic lives.”
The impact of the relative critical and artistic failure of The Red Shoes and The Line, The Cross And The Curve shouldn’t be underestimated. She had certainly had her fair share of bad reviews and naysayers in the past, and she had also frequently felt that she hadn’t quite achieved what she had intended on a record, but rarely had the two coincided quite so conclusively. Critics began comparing her unfavourably to Bjork and even Tori Amos, complaining – with some justification – that her eccentricities were now more interesting than the music. It touched a nerve. Everything Bush does has the imprint of quality and integrity (her voice, her music and her lyrics all are given a huge investment of time and care), but when the muse is misfiring sometimes the whole seems to be considerably less than the sum of its parts.
More worryingly, she felt decidedly lukewarm about one of her own albums for the first time since 1978. Even before it came out she was almost apologetic, explaining it was “the best I could do at the time.”3 She stood by most of the songs but later felt that, at 55 minutes, The Red Shoes was at least ten minutes too long, falling foul of the modern temptation to fill an entire CD with music rather than using only what is up to par.
Also, there was rather a lot of negative feedback about the album and film coming from her most loyal fan base, through fanzines and – increasingly – the internet. She and Jay and Paddy, always amenable and available to trusted sources, subsequently backed away a little from direct contact; the 1994 fan convention was to be the last Bush attended. She may have a strong centre of self-belief, but she is hyper-sensitive to perceptions of her. “I was actually viewed in quite a negative light at that point … it dissipated my energy severely and threw me into a state of severe exhaustion,” she said later. “You just get worn down.”4
She was negotiating a fairly complicated confluence of major life changes: some practical, some planned, some unexpected, some challenging, some sad and some immensely joyful. Re-reading the few significant interviews she conducted upon the release of The Red Shoes, it’s clear with hindsight that she was saying some significant goodbyes. “I am at a point … where there’s a few things I’d like to be doing with my life,” she said, speaking in drizzly Cricklewood during the dubbing sessions for The Line, The Cross And The Curve. “I’d like to catch up. Over the next few years I’d like to take some time off…. It’s silly that I haven’t taken more breaks. I’ve spent a long time in the city and I love being by the sea, and I’m starting to pine for it. I’d like to put energy into stuff like that … I haven’t wasted any of my life yet, but I’m a bit fed up of being stuck in a studio.”5
For many, the rhythm of the jobbing musician simply becomes their life, often with consequential diminishing returns. Bush was determined not to let that happen. Her mention of the ocean evoked memories of her childhood holidays in Birchington-on-Sea; when she later talked about a new love of visiting museums, it brought to mind her annus mirabilis of 1976, when she was soaking up knowledge and inspiration from all quarters. At 35, there was a sense of someone taking stock and realising there were several significant tears in the fabric of her existence, a certain loss of direction. There is a clear desire to get back to the stabilising nexus of family, and home – or perhaps more accurately, since the death of her mother and her parting with Del, to establish her own domestic nest.
It’s very easy to get hysterical about what happened to Bush in the years between 1994 and 2005. As she became less and less visible, the tabloid press needed little encouragement to peddle the by now standard dark rumours of nervous breakdowns, binge eating, a woman in perpetual retreat in some overgrown gilded cage, lost behind high gates and shuttered windows in her “vampire castle”.6 They even ran a story that she had officially changed her name on the voters’ register to Catherine Earnshaw.
If not quite plumbing the depths of this Gothic nightmare, it’s clear that it was a very difficult period. Although she had taken some time off during the making of The Red Shoes, she hadn’t really addressed the death of her mother – “I hadn’t grieved properly”7 – and was also adjusting to the end of a 15-year relationship, and the beginning of another with Danny McIntosh. After her split from Del she moved to a flat in south London overlooking the Thames – the proximity to water seemed to have an increasing allure – before moving with McIntosh into the renovated house in Theale, which eventually became their primary base; Court Road was kept on but was increasingly not used, and was eventually sold for £900,000 in 2002. Shortly afterwards she bought a £2.5m cliff-top house on the South Hams peninsula in Devon, with a boathouse and private beach.
Through 1994 and 1995 there were periods of isolation, exhaustion and something resembling a black dog scratching at the door. “I slept, I spent a lot of time sleeping,” she said. “I used to enjoy bad television, like really bad quiz programmes or really bad sitcoms…. I needed to be in a position where there were no demands … I was very quiet. I was just trying to recuperate.”8
The subtext is clear. However, this dark night of the soul was relatively brief. And far from being a recluse, she was still around if you knew where to look: at David Gilmour’s fiftieth birthday party at Fulham Town Hall; in theatre land, at the Lion King and the musical Maddie; in Julie’s, a discreetly high-end restaurant in Holland Park, where she could be seen relaxing with, among others, Robert De Niro and Bob Geldof after a Van Morrison concert. Attending the People’s Banquet in 1997, held at the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall to celebrate the Queen’s Golden wedding anniversary, she shared a table with John Major, whom she had first met six years earlier when, as Prime Minister, he invited her and Joe Boyd to Downing Street as an acknowledgment of their work promoting Bulgarian music. In 1996 she spent some time at the Royal College of Art, working on a bronze sculpture inspired by Billie Holiday. Entitled ‘Strange Fruit’, it was donated to another War Child auction and suggested fairly conclusively that her future did not lie in visual art.
She did not advertise her whereabouts, but neither was she hiding under lock and key. She also began to compose again. Instead of treating writing as a job or a compulsion – pushing and pushing until something came – she reversed the process; when an idea arrived, and the time was appropriate, she would address it. In 1996 she wrote and recorded the demo version of ‘King Of The Mountain’ – indeed, some of the finished track and much of the final vocal dates back to that time. A song about fame, isolation and possible redemption, it was inspired by the notion that Elvis Presley, a modern day Citizen Kane, was still alive, watching from the mountain top, ready to “rise again”.*
A year later she wrote ‘Sunset’ – a hymn to her favourite crooner, the blackbird – and ‘An Architect’s Dream’, a sweet, drifting sigh of a song that pulls together the work of a street painter with the meeting of two lovers, both parties engaged in their own acts of precarious creation. The beginnings are inauspicious enough – a “kiss”, a “smudge” – but look “what it becomes.”
The knowledge that she was pregnant when she wrote those words invests them with an extra level of significance. Bush was finally looking forward to the prospect of motherhood at the age of 39. She had been asked about children almost from the moment she had first become famous, and throughout her twenties had always said she could not conceive of having both a family and a career. She had stuck to this mantra for many years, but her maternal instinct was strong and her position had changed with the passing of time and the turn of events.
In an interview in early 1994, an admirably fearless writer from the US magazine Details, using a transatlantic phone line for cover, pressed her on her desire for children and the impact of her mother’s death and got an unexpectedly straight answer: “I would like to have kids, yeah,” said Bush. “It’s certainly loss that heightens the realisation that life is short …” In fact, she had wanted to have children for some time, and her pregnancy was a source of profound joy.
Her son Albert, known to all as Bertie, was born in July 1998. Naturally, her creative pursuits once again took a back seat during this period, though for very different reasons. Although she and McIntosh were “completely shattered much of the time”9, she found herself entirely consumed with love for her child. “I didn’t want anything to interfere with that process,” she said. “I wanted to give as much time as I possibly could to my son. I love being with him, he’s a lovely little boy and he won’t be little for very long.10 The idea was that he would come first, and then the record would come next.”11
“When she became a mother she turned into her own mother,” says Charlie Morgan. “She had a good role model, [and] she became her mum: ‘This is what I’m doing right now. I’ve been the singer songwriter and I’m going to be a mum for a while, until Bertie is old enough to understand. I have this human being that I need to protect.’ Kate’s songs were her babies, definitely, and when they turned out to be less than she expected she was always very disappointed. I think the mothering instinct took over. All things considered, it is the ultimate creative act!”
Tony Wadsworth made it one of his first objectives to make contact with Bush and establish a bond on a purely personal level. It was apparent to him that making a new record was not of primary importance. “It was pretty clear that her priority was her family, specifically this new baby, who was just a few months old,” he says. “One of the … nice things about paying visits to her place was meeting her and her partner and watching the baby grow.”
It was hardly surprising that Bush did not announce the birth with an interview – he was not a new album, after all, he was a human being – a Hello! photo spread or indeed any kind of public declaration. However, it is a testament to both her vice-like mastery of privacy and the fierce loyalty she inspires that news of her pregnancy, the birth and the subsequent existence of Bertie was kept firmly within her circle of friends and associates for almost two years. She could have counted on discretion from within the medical profession, but there were others in her orbit who simply wouldn’t have known who she was, such was the discrepancy between Bush the Pop Goddess and the way she presented herself on a daily basis. “A lot of people I mix with are the mothers of Bertie’s friends,” she later said. “I don’t even know if some of them know who I am.”12 This, no doubt, she regarded as progress.
Of course, those whom Bush wanted to know about Bertie were well aware. Her family, naturally, and close friends like Michael Kamen and Peter Gabriel, as well as people like Tony Wadsworth and artists she barely knew in the industry like Jean Michel Jarre, who had recently contacted her about a collaboration. Though she insisted there was no great denial or cover up, she managed to enforce a remarkable and rather fearsome feat of prolonged and collective omerta. She felt it was simply nobody else’s business.
It was left to Peter Gabriel in an online interview in 2000 to unintentionally spill the beans. In response to a question about his old friend and collaborator, he answered: ‘Kate Bush has become a mother. I have not been to see her for about six months but I think she is working on her music now.’ When the news broke that Bush had a two-year-old child there was a predictable flurry of press interest. The Mirror and Mail On Sunday each ran typically immoderate articles in mid-July, the latter under the headline THE SECRET SON OF KATE BUSH, exhausting the whole lexicon of pejorative clichés: ‘Miss Haversham’ [sic], ‘forlorn and derelict’, ‘reclusive’, ‘lonely and isolated’, ‘a web of secrecy’, ‘perfect hiding place’, ‘turning her back on showbusiness.’
She had already grown properly sick of the press. In many ways, the tabloid’s perception of Bush has never moved far beyond that initial first impression cultivated in early 1978. They have never understood her, and what the tabloids don’t understand (which is plenty) they simplify and mock. She was caricatured as either the screeching sexpot or, later, the dotty recluse. The music was an irrelevance.
What had once been an irritant was by now something far more intrusive. By 1990 she had taken to recording interviews on her own tape recorder, while Colin Lloyd-Tucker recalls “sitting in the kitchen in Eltham, and there was a picture of her in the paper at some opening. I said, ‘Oh, there’s a really nice picture of you in the paper,’ and she didn’t even want to look at it. She said, ‘Oh, I’m avoiding all that kind of stuff.’ She’d had enough of all of that.” During a visit with Del to see the Ben Elton play Silly Cow at the Theatre Royal in February 1991 she was photographed taking great exception to the intrusions of photographer Robin Kennedy, and had to be calmed down by Del as she aimed a boot at the snapper’s rear end. Afterwards the cameraman said: ‘I didn’t think that anyone so small would be able to kick so hard.’ More fool him. She had, after all, once convincingly pretended to be a donkey.
In 1993 she endured a highly combative Sunday Times interview with celebrity journalist Chrissie Iley, who found her polite but obvious hostility – her “assassin’s smile” – and her refusal to answer even the most straightforward question – what kind of doctor is your father, for instance – deeply infuriating, and you could see her point. Bush often experienced her most testing interviews with women; an early interrogator likened her to Lady Macbeth. They fancied that they could see something cold and steely lurking beneath her immaculate exterior that men – too busy rhapsodising about her dimples and tiny stature – tended to overlook.
Iley subsequently wrote what amounted to a sincerely felt hatchet job. The articles about Bush’s son and her lifestyle went even deeper. Shortly after they appeared, she sent a message to her fan club:
Hello everyone,
Here is a press statement I have issued and I wanted you to see it….
“A number of inaccurate comments have been made about me in recent articles which I am taking further. I just want everyone to know I am very happy and proud to have such a beautiful son, Bertie – he is absolutely gorgeous. Far from being secretive, I am just trying to be a good protective mother and give him as normal a childhood as possible whilst preserving his privacy – surely everyone can understand that. I am having great fun being a Mum as well as working on a new album.”
I hope you will understand how invaluable it has been to me to have a very fulfilling and normal start to motherhood and I felt unable to tell you about Bertie previously for reasons already explained. He is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. He is my joy and I’m very happy and very busy being a Mum. I am finding time to write for the new album and very pleased so far.
Thanks again for your lovely letters and kind wishes. I hope you will be happy for me.
Lots of love, Kate XX
Indeed it would seem she went out of her way to ensure that her son was given every chance to enjoy normal, uninhibited social interaction. “I was at Paddy’s fiftieth birthday party [in December 2002] and she had her little boy then,” says Colin Lloyd-Tucker. “She was in good form, she was in good spirits – very much a mum, that’s the main difference I noticed. Suddenly there’s a little chap running around, so we had a good mums and dads kind of chat. She looked well and seemed happy, talking about going to garden fetes and school starting and all that.” At Terry Gilliam’s sixtieth birthday party, in November 2000, she bumped into many old friends, and introduced them to an energetic Bertie. Little wonder, they might have pondered, that she was now writing songs that took the humble washing machine as their starting point.
* * *
The fuss had all but blown over by the time Bush broke cover at the Q awards on October 29, 2001 to receive the Classic Songwriter award.* She had been out of the public eye long enough for her attendance to cause quite a stir. She looked happy and healthy, smartly dressed in a black trouser suit, and her obvious joy at being a mother ran though her brief acceptance speech and her subsequent conversations, almost to the point of parody. For all that Bush was keen to keep her son out of the public eye, like most new mothers she was certainly not averse to making him a conversation piece. She revealed Bertie had won an inflatable hammer at a local fair, was into Bob The Builder and Elvis Presley, and that she had finally given up smoking.
The event was a timely reminder of the solid foundations that supported the rickety infrastructure of rumour and hysteria, and how much she had been missed. It was an opportunity for her to witness the direct appreciation of a diverse group of contemporaries – ranging from Cher to John Lydon, Elvis Costello and Liam Gallagher – who had no truck with cobbled together mythology; they simply recognised her strength and her artistry. She greeted the rapturous applause with an orgasmic squeak – ‘Oooh, I’ve just come!’ – strategically intended to puncture any notions of her as some precious, fragile, doe-eyed creature.
“I remember talking to her about it beforehand and she’d obviously thought about it really seriously because she’d not been out in public for ages,” recalls Tony Wadsworth. “The fact that she turned up in an audience of her peers – if there are such things – and got the best reception of anybody throughout the event, that to me was something that was completely undistorted by the legend. Here was a roomful of musicians and producers and people in the industry who know that a lot of this imagery can sometimes be artifice and can be distorted, [and] what they were doing that day was applauding her incredible talent that has sustained. And she was knocked out by it. It was interesting seeing her chin-wagging with John Lydon. You never fail to be surprised by Kate – they knew each other, these two very uncompromising artists.”
She told the audience at the Park Lane Hotel that she was working on her new record – and she was, although it was by necessity a part-time process. The way Bush had always worked, the intensity with which she approached her music and the hours, days and years she put in simply couldn’t continue if she was to be the mother she wanted to be. In the past, music was ultimate act of creation. When the act of creation took on a human face – “I look at him, know I gave birth to him, and I know magic does exist,”13 she said – music was bound to take a back seat.
“I think she was obsessed with the music [in the past],” says Haydn Bendall. “We were younger then. Now she has Albert. I’d never insult her by saying she has a better perspective now, but maybe she has a different perspective.” Or, as Bob Mercer puts it, rather more succinctly: “She never chose to have hoards of nannies. She’s not fucking Madonna, she does it all herself. She’s just a ferocious mother. It’s wonderful to watch it all happen.”
As such, she wrote and recorded in short bursts in stolen moments. She would put down the music on her Kurtzweil 250 keyboard or her piano, perhaps adding a drum loop or a click track and then a guide vocal. The set up may have changed – they were no longer at Wickham Farm, they were no longer an item, and they no longer worked 16 hour days – but Del remained her foil in the studio, turning up most mornings and getting down to work. “He’s the only one who can say [things about her music] without damning her, without putting her down, and that comes from decades of experience,” says Charlie Morgan. “He’s just like an old friend, y’know,” she said. “Working with Del, there’s a very relaxed feeling.”14
Danny McIntosh was naturally present, picking up musicians and dropping them off, popping in and out. He played all the guitars, which were more prominent than on any Bush record since the first two and became a prime component of the album’s sound, adding flamenco stylings to ‘Sunset’, a reggae rhythm on ‘King Of The Mountain’, and a real crunch to ‘Aerial’. His atmospheric, interlocking parts on ‘How To Be Invisible’, meanwhile, were a highlight, immeasurably enhancing one of her best new songs.
McIntosh had some technical input, wrestling with the digital convertors when everyone else had given up, but, as ever, it was mainly Bush and Del working on the nuts and bolts of the songs. “We didn’t see much of Dan,” says Peter Erskine, the American drummer who played on several tracks. “John [Giblin] at one point explained a couple of things one night as he was driving me back to the hotel, because I was a little bit puzzled. I wasn’t quite getting the dynamic, that was all, but it wasn’t my business.”
Towards the end of 2000 Bush had made sufficient progress to begin inviting outside musicians into the studio to add parts to the songs; Erskine was one of the first. Primarily a jazz drummer who had played with John Martyn and Joni Mitchell, Erskine had been spotted by Bush on a BBC documentary about English composer Mark Anthony Turnage. Typically, she picked up the phone and made direct contact, and shortly afterwards Erskine was flown to England.
“There was a bit of secrecy attached to everything, in terms of where the drums would be delivered – there was a protocol that they wanted observed,” he says. “The cases should be labelled in a specific manner so it would not be apparent to anyone handling those along the way where they were going or what the project was. They had a car service that would pick me up [from my hotel] and drop me off a specific spot and then I’d get through the security gates, but there was nothing disproportionate. They’re all very well-balanced, an incredible amount of normality. That security apparatus is to maintain some normalcy.”
Erskine was there for three days and played, by his estimation, on seven or eight tracks, although he only appears on three: ‘An Architect’s Dream’, ‘Prologue’ and ‘Nocturn.’ It was a leisurely process – “they just work at a different pace” – which encouraged experimentation. It was a very much more organic process than Bush’s most recent albums. Erskine even recalls that at first he, Giblin and Bush performed together as a kind of ad hoc jazz trio. “Kate was playing piano,” he says. “Like, ‘here’s a new song I’m working on.’”
Later, he added his contributions to previously recorded backing tracks. On ‘King Of The Mountain’ he “came up with a wacky idea. I put on a beat like the Weather Report track, ‘Nubian Sundance’, this double tempo, free-syncopated, aggressive drumbeat. It’s not the easiest thing to play, and then I added a half-time Ringo style beat as a counter point. When Del mixed it I said it sounded like [US drummer and member of Presley’s TCB Band] Ron Tutt with Elvis, and she gave me a startled look: ‘Of course, that’s what the song is about! Elvis!’” Erskine hadn’t picked up on the lyrics nor Bush’s idiosyncratic Elvis impersonation. “I had no idea,” he laughs. “Her tune conveyed this subliminally to me! I’m sure at some point they realised that the drum part I put on was an absolute mess, but the nice thing was that they indulged the idea.”
This working process was mirrored throughout the sessions. Musicians would be invited to improvise on a variety of tracks. If it worked, great; if not, no harm done. Someone else would get a shot. Steve Sanger, an old friend of McIntosh’s from his session days, came up from Dorset on several occasions to play drums, bells, shaker and percussion. He added a more conventional pattern to ‘King Of The Mountain’ and Bush also asked him to play along to the rhythm of birdsong on ‘Aerial’, the title track.
The idea had slowly evolved to make Aerial a double album with two distinct sides, a little like Hounds Of Love but on a larger scale (in a premeditated gag, in interviews Bush would refer to it as ‘Great Danes Of Love’ or ‘Irish Wolfhounds Of Love’). The first side would be a collection of seven individual songs, while the second would be a connected, conceptual piece tracing the arc of an entire day through nine interlinked pieces of music, from the afternoon through sunset and night to the following dawn, all soundtracked by the trill of her favourite band: the birds. “It’s almost as if they’re vocalising light,” she said. “And I love the idea that it’s a language we don’t understand.”15 In Kaluli culture in Papua New Guinea, Bush may or may not have been aware, bird song is believed to be communication from the dead.
“She explained that when this particular birdsong starts that’s when I start playing,” says Sanger. “I did it on an electronic kit, just playing the bass drum. That was a different day! Great food, great fun. It was me and Del the engineer and Kate, and Danny was popping in and out.”
These sessions were punctuated with long periods where very little happened, but when she was working things often coalesced quite quickly, particularly towards the end of the project. Much of the musical decoration for ‘Bertie’, for example, came together in little more than an afternoon. Susanna Pell and Richard Campbell, head-hunted after a performance of St Matthew Passion at the Festival Hall, came to the studio to play gamba – a renaissance period viol, and distant cousin of the guitar – alongside classical guitarist Eligio Quinteira.
“My memory was that she had laid down the basic track, I think the day before, which was her vocals and the dulcimer she was accompanying herself on,” says Campbell. “We were overdubbing onto that, playing from the notation that [arranger Bill Dunne] had provided. Eligio did his guitar overdub after we did the gamba track, so he stayed a little bit longer. It was reasonably close to chamber music. We were playing to what we heard through the cans, which gave it a kind of natural freedom.”
‘Bertie’ was a madrigal of devotion to her son, a song that vaulted the barrier between heartfelt and mawkish, though only a churl could fail to be touched by its artless candour and sheer heartbursting expression of love. Just when you thought Bush has exhausted her rapture, she found deeper reserves: “You bring me so much joy,” she sings, “And then you bring me – more joy!” It’s a shamelessly sentimental song, basking in the eternal sunshine of an idealised childhood, though its subject may not care to have it sung back at him now that he’s a teenager. The visiting musicians were able to get a first hand glimpse of the song’s inspiration. “Bertie himself bounced in at one stage, so we met the person who the song was about, which was nice,” says Campbell.
She had preserved the atmosphere of familial informality that had permeated Wickham Farm, except now she was the mother figure. Accordionist Chris Hall had been recommended by Joe Boyd after Bush mentioned she wanted the sound of Cajun accordion on ‘How To Be Invisible’. In the end the instrument proved too rich for the song, almost overpowering it, and instead Hall played two-note accordion which – with the aid of advanced sonar equipment – can just about be heard on the final track. “I was there for a couple of hours,” he recalls. “Had a chat, drank some tea and ate pizza, met her family, played with the kid, did some recording and went away. Not [mystical] at all!”
Everyone who worked on the album was struck by all the things people are usually struck by when they first work with her: her cheerful informality, her genuineness, her distinct lack of ceremony. “I turned up, came in through the gates, parked the car, got the gamba out and walked into the studio,” says Campbell. “Up came this person who said, ‘I’m Kate, I’m making the tea,’ and I confess that I initially thought it was another Kate. And then I suddenly realised, that is Kate Bush.” They ended up trading lines on that perennial middle-class lament: the difficulty of getting a good builder.
And then there was the endless stream of tea, without which no session could run smoothly. “She was always offering tea,” says Peter Erskine. “The running joke at the session was that Del or John [Giblin] would say, like a British actor’s voice in a movie, ‘Ah, you’re a fine woman, Kate.’ That was the motto, I remember.” Says Susanna Pell, “We arrived and went straight to the studio and within minutes this woman arrived and said, ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’ And that was her. She bumbled off and made a cup of tea. She was just incredibly nice. Very unassuming, she knew what she wanted and had a clear vision but in the nicest possible way. When it was all over she sent us a personal cheque with a very nice note attached, thanking us. It was just a very, very nice experience.”
Although she sometimes wondered if it would ever be finished, over a period of three or four years Bush began to edge closer to the end of the album. Friends such as Lol Creme and Gary Brooker popped in to add vocals and keyboards, and in October 2003 she went to Abbey Road to record orchestral overdubs with Michael Kamen, who sadly died of a heart attack shortly afterwards, aged 55. “The last time I spoke to her was soon after Michael died and we spoke to each other because we were both very sad about it,” recalls Haydn Bendall. “She adored him and so did I.”
Throughout this period, Tony Wadsworth kept in regular contact. After Bob Mercer and David Munns, it was clear Bush had found another ‘music man’, someone prepared to give her the time and space to create without making demands or waving the small print of the company contract in her face. There is a fine story about Bush one day telling Wadsworth that she was finally going to show him her latest creation, and then taking some cakes out of the oven and plonking them in front of him. It’s an apocryphal tale, sadly, but it is true that he travelled to see her a few times every year for several years, and not once did Bush play him so much as a note of music.
“Even though it was never stated explicitly, it was pretty clear that I wasn’t going to hear anything until it was finished,” he says. “It was simply starting a relationship of trust. That was the main product of those meetings over the years. I’d like to think that she eventually developed a trust, and I developed an understanding of what her concerns her and what was important to her when it came to dealing with a record label. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of, ‘OK, we’ve got an album that we have to put into this machine’ which is a corporate record label and can go many different ways, I think an artist likes to feel that there’s somebody pretty senior in the organisation that’s looking out for them at crucial times, because it can get impersonal. [But] I thought there might be a distinct possibility that I might get fired before anything came!”
Rumours about the album and projected release dates, alternately woefully misinformed and optimistic, had been doing the rounds since 1997. In late 2004 Bush finally announced that recording had finished and the record would be ready for release sometime in 2005. If she had been worried, as she claimed, that people might have forgotten her, she needn’t have been: the news sent the papers, magazines and the internet into an overdrive of anticipation. Some time afterwards, Wadsworth and David Munns, Bush’s old champion who had recently returned to the company from Polygram, were summoned to the studio to hear the finished album. There was no one else present. She handed each of them a track-listing, set up the machines herself, said, ‘It’s a bit long,’ and then sat down behind them as they listened, like a spectre at the feast, no doubt ultra-sensitive to every twitch, cough and shuffle. It was the first time anyone outside of herself, Del and Danny had heard the complete record.
“She was definitely nervous,” says Wadsworth. “We sat there and listened … and were stunned. I suppose the first time certain things really stood out for me: I don’t think I’d heard the human voice singing with birds before; I thought, ‘My God, still she is doing things that are incredibly original, and yet seemed absolutely right and natural.’ That was striking. Her voice is always striking, because it’s so powerful and emotional. You came out after listening to the two albums back to back and just thought this was an amazing piece of work.”
They talked about how it should be released, with some debate about whether it should be a double album or two single albums staggered over a six- to 12-month period. In the end Bush thought it was fairer to her fans and better value to release it as a double, not to mention the fact that now the music was finally finished she wanted to get it all out. She was not a big fan of the miniaturised CD format. She preferred the glory days of vinyl, and wanted Aerial to be a meaningful, unified piece of work physically as well as musically. “There were more discussions about work in progress when it came to the artwork than there was about the music, interestingly,” says Wadsworth. “She would show me something and say, ‘What do you think about that? Do you think that works?’”
Some aspects of the sleeve art were clearly autobiographical – photographs of Bertie and his drawings – and some deeply impenetrable but no less private: pictures of a large red-brick house and a garden, the washing flapping in the breeze; a reproduction of James Southall’s painting ‘Fishermen’; a simple portrait of a figure that resembled Bush as a young girl; several birds and a reproduction of a photograph featured on the cover of June 2000 edition of National Geographic, called ‘Indus bird-mask’. As with the music, there were codes within the artwork so personal they will never be cracked. “She did discuss what she wanted to put across,” says Wadsworth. “It was … pretty personal stuff, there were a few conversations about that.”
The title and cover were also carefully conceived, a combination of visual puns – at first the image looked like some desolate rock formation, but was actually a soundwave of birdsong – and layered wordplay: Aerial suggests flight and height, but it’s also an antennae, a tool for sending and receiving. “And as I pointed out to her, it’s also a washing powder that Mrs Bartolozzi might want to use,” says Wadsworth. “That might be the key.”
* * *
In August 2005, a November 7 release date was announced for Aerial, preceded by a single, ‘King Of The Mountain’, on October 24. There had been some talk between Bush and EMI of making ‘How To Be Invisible’ – a far more persuasive, characterful song with which to announce a return after 12 years – the first single, but in the end ‘King Of The Mountain’ “jumped out”, according to Wadsworth. I’m not sure how much jumping it does. The song was not one of the album’s highlights, with a curiously uncommitted vocal and a rather flat structure. It was nevertheless widely hailed as a welcome comeback, if not one of her most arresting songs, and reached number four in a singles market that was by now all but moribund.
Reviews of the album when it arrived ranged from the ecstatic to the muted to the confused. Many were written after only one or two supervised listens, an almost impossible undertaking. Aerial is a dense, complex piece of work, split into two distinct discs: A Sea Of Honey and A Sky Of Honey. Far more than any interview, it provided eloquent answers to all those awkward questions that had arisen over the past decade. In many ways it completed the story that The Red Shoes started. We knew why she had to go away; now we had a fair idea of what she had been doing.
Aerial pulled off the trick that lies at the heart of much of Bush’s finest music: that of being evocative of her day-to-day life and innermost feelings without being personally revealing. Singing of her physical environment, her son and her lover, there was a deep sense of joy, tinged with the loss that time brings. Mimicking the journey of the sun on the suite of songs on A Sky Of Honey, the feeling was of someone travelling through a period of darkness into sunlight.
The stand-outs were the two unadorned piano and vocal songs. ‘A Coral Room’ was a desperately moving track about lost cities, lost times, about all those lives and places that were once here but had now gone; it mourned the death of her mother in the most poetic way imaginable, using her little brown milk jug as the central image. Performed without a safety net – no strings, no backing vocals – it was impossible not to be transported back to Bush’s earliest songs, written in 44 Wickham Road at a time of relative innocence. There was even an explicit reminder of one, ‘Atlantis’, where she had sung of a blue city “covered in coral and coral”, adorning treasure chests and ancient scrolls from the Caribbean. But ‘A Coral Room’ showed how far she had come, both musically and emotionally. It was oblique and impressionistic but utterly true, and it cut far deeper than the more formal pitch of ‘Moments Of Pleasure’, which covered similar ground in much more awkward shoes. She had once again perfected the craft of saying without telling.
Most reviews also latched upon the other stark piano ballad. ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’ seemed to finally reconcile the interests of Bush the housewife and mother with Bush the impenetrable artist. A song combining earthy domesticity and magic realism, it depicted a woman falling into a reverie, both erotic and disturbing, while watching the clothes in the washing machine spinning around and around, the trousers and blouses intermingling among the soap and suds. She imagines herself in the sea with her lover, fish swimming between her legs, but there is also a taint in the song, the idea of the clothes, with their distinctive smells and stains, being the most tangible memory of a person who is no longer there. It is another dark song of the senses, and deeply, stubbornly unreadable, even if the final lines of “Slooshy sloshy, get that dirty shirty clean” veered perilously close to self-parody.
If some songs were opaque, ‘Bertie’ was courageously direct and truly unabashed, not just lyrically but also in summing up the clear distinction Bush makes between her work and her life. She poured her love for her son into her song, the album artwork featured pictures of him, she admitted she could “talk about [him] all day,”16 and yet she remained fiercely protective of his privacy. The message was clear. Bertie is not shielded away, he is the central part of my life and therefore part of my work, but he is not up for grabs. Musically, it was a rare and pleasurable opportunity to hear her singing with acoustic stringed instruments providing a tugging obligato.
In the beautiful, effortlessly slinky ‘An Architect’s Dream’ she sang of the artist’s “best mistake”, another important strand of her creative ethos. “She likes a happy accident,” says Colin Lloyd-Tucker. “Anyone who is genuinely creative will take that on board. On ‘The Red Shoes’, she said ‘Just put a harmony on there, whatever comes into your head, let’s see what happens.’ Me and Paddy both went into the same harmony, which was actually the wrong note, and she said, ‘That’s fantastic, leave it like that.’ It wasn’t the note we were trying for, but she heard that it fitted. She picks up on things like that, she’s very good at spotting them.”
Not everything worked. Rolf Harris sounded like he was having a minor seizure on ‘The Painter’s Link’, while parts of the first disc were hit and miss. Aside from the ‘King Of The Mountain’, ‘Joanni’ struggled to engage, while ‘?’ was a rather listless piece of synthetic background music on which Bush at least proved that – if not quite singing the phone book – she could at least sing the handset, reciting the numbers as though each were some lost holy scroll. Her father had harboured a love for mathematics, so this most seemingly oblique of songs may well have hidden a very personal message to a “sweet and gentle sensitive man / With an obsessive nature and deep fascination for numbers.”
Her interest in numerology was nothing new. Long attracted to the ‘Strange Phenomena’ of coincidence and synchronicity, astrology and the paranormal, she had been struck in her teens by the fact that she and Emily Brontë shared a birthday, while David Paton also recalls conversations about such matters back in the Seventies. “Her boyfriend’s name was Del Palmer, mine was David Paton,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You’ve got the same initials, but did you know you’ve got the same birthday?* She was always interested in things to do with numbers or anything slightly unusual.”
‘How To Be Invisible’ was a more playful immersion in a supernatural world, another ghostly tale rolled out over a wonderfully elastic, spooky rhythm. Bush was the witch with her “eye of Braille” and her “hem of anorak”, every breath of wind and falling leaf a potential unseen force flitting through the world. And is there a better summation of her music than the image of a million doors, each one leading to a million more?
The second disc, A Sky Of Honey, began with her piano accompanying cooing birdsong, a sound that runs like a thread through the whole disc, as the music works its way up and up, further into the air, peaking on the last few minutes of ‘Nocturn’, where Bush finally lets fly vocally as she takes a moonlit swim. Despite the Balearic feel of the music, she is singing of the Atlantic, the sea directly below her Devon home. This feels like a shared private moment of release. The final song, the title track, sustains the mood of energy and rebirth. It ends, fittingly, with laughter.
Aerial was a terribly generous record. “My work is very, very personal and intimately connected to my everyday life,” she said, and she was as good as her word.17 Musically, after the kitchen-sink overload of The Red Shoes there was a blessed sense of light and space; a marked reduction in backing vocals, and far less technological fuss. The use of rhythm as a songwriting tool was largely absent, too. This time the textures were more traditional; piano and guitar, natural drums, while her voice had deepened and matured. Aerial came through deep and clear, befitting a deeper, clearer life. It was an exorcism of excess, the touchstones of her musical, domestic and imaginative life boiled down to their essence.
Everywhere there was a sense of distillation, a masterly grasp of what was necessary and what was extraneous. It was also imbued with a real sense of an external life – of travelling beyond her own mind and into the wider world, to Italy and Spain, or just to the beach – that few of her previous records had possessed. Indeed, very little of it resembled anything Bush had done before, yet she was back in tune with something elemental, a pastoral sensuality, that lay at the heart of her work. Aerial is all sun, sea and sky. The pulse rate is slower than Hounds Of Love, but there are certain similarities of intent. ‘Prologue’ even sounded a little like a slowed down ‘Watching You Without Me’.
Unsurprisingly, much of the critical emphasis was weighted away from the content of these complex songs and placed very firmly upon Bush’s prolonged absence. That, sadly but perhaps understandably, was the real story. After a recording silence of 12 years, it was little wonder that everybody wanted some time with her. Predictably, she was even less enamoured of the promotional process than ever before.
“Most artists, regardless of how they’re disposed to that whole palaver, will just take a deep fucking swallow and suck it up,” says Bob Mercer. “She’s not one of them. Since Bertie it’s even more [horrible]. She doesn’t really see beyond going into the studio and making music, she really doesn’t stretch beyond that. Whatever the record company want to do doesn’t really engage her. I don’t think anyone at EMI is driving up to Reading and saying, ‘Kate, you gotta get off your ass and do things here.’ And if anyone came to me to suggest doing that I’d advise them against it!”
She was highly selective in her choice of interviews, but the fact that the public and her fan base didn’t actually see her once during the entire release window of Aerial was, even for Bush, extreme. There were a few carefully chosen print interviews in the UK, Europe and North America, a little radio and a video for ‘King Of The Mountain’, but no personal appearances or television spots. Tony Wadsworth was philosophical, and entirely unsurprised, by her unwillingness to undertake a lot of promotion.
“I’ve always taken the view that one of the aspects of dealing with music as a business is that with a real artist you’ve got to take the full package – and that includes things that they’re going to do and things that they’re not going to do,” he says. “If one of the things they will do is make an artistic statement that is excellent and lasting, I’d rather they did that than go on a Saturday morning TV show. It’s like pushing water up a hill – why do that with people who you know are not going to do it? You can bang your head against a brick wall forever. With Kate, you accepted what you got.”
Most of the promotional interviews she did consent to were conducted from her house in Theale, and several indulged in a breathless roll call of the banal details of life chez Bush: pizza, cheese flan, crusty bread, cream cakes, tea, messy kitchens, jeans, floaty tops, children’s DVDs scattered around, the fact that she went shopping and took her son to school. There were those who suspected an element of contrivance in all this, that in showing herself to be apart from the realm of groomed, over-managed, macrobiotic celebrity culture she was very consciously declaring herself a member of The Real World. If so, it was a good act. Apart from the fact that she behaved the same way when there were no journalists present, it tallied precisely with the way she has lived her life for the past 30 years and more.
Home, of course, was where she was most comfortable and, crucially, where she would attract the least attention. Aside from her natural reticence for publicity, there was a suggestion that, at 47, having had a baby and rarely able to keep up with her dancing, she was insecure about her body image and consequently reluctant to present herself to the public. Jimmy Murakami directed the video for ‘King Of The Mountain’ and recalls that “she was always worried that she’d put on weight. I thought she looked fabulous, but she kept bringing up her weight. I told her she looked lovely. I mean you can’t go back to your teenage days, and to me she still looked very good. She’d been away a long time, and we had a cameraman that she wanted who came all the way from America – it was very expensive, first class! He did the shoot, but it didn’t really require anybody that top notch.”
Stewart Avon Arnold, on the other hand, doubts that her looks have ever played a significant part in deciding whether or not to appear in public more often. “She doesn’t haven’t to worry about looking like Posh Spice or Jordan and having face lifts and arse lifts and God knows what,” he says. “She’s very natural, Kate, very much an earth woman. As long as she looked presentable, but not to extremes.”
The video itself, shot in London on September 15 and 16, 2005, was created using live animation techniques rather than a 3D computer because, says Murakami, Bush felt “computers don’t have that human quality.” She was closely involved in crafting the story, which depicted Elvis’s trademark rhinestone jump-suit returning to the King while a shadowy Bush weaved around the millionaire’s mansion. Like Presley in ’56, she was largely shot from the waist up. “I did a series of storyboards and sent it to her, and she’d make her corrections and I’d redo it, and we worked on it quite a bit,” says Murakami. “We had long chats over the phone and emails. She was very, very strong about it.”
It was a good video, both funny and poignant, but the pop promo was yesterday’s medium. Bush returned to an industry where her natural milieu was old hat. She understood the ramifications of the digitalisation of music, and invested a lot of time and effort into ensuring that the digital files of Aerial were of the best possible quality, but where once she had been at the cutting edge of new innovations, nowadays she was at the back of the queue and was suspicious of its influence. She said “music is suffering greatly from the overuse of computers, and taking away the human element.”18 At a time when multi-media platforms were finding new ways to bring the imagination to life, Bush, one of the few artists really capable of capitalising on the advances made in this regard, refused to click on the mouse.
Aerial was received with the greatest respect and affection, it reached number two and went platinum in the UK and very quickly sold more than a million copies outside of north America, but it rapidly slipped out of sight. Arguably, it was not properly assimilated or appreciated by either the critical mass or a wider audience until A Sky Of Honey formed the centrepiece of ‘Before The Dawn’ almost a decade after it was released. Partly, this is attributable to the nature of the work. Elliptical, layered, entirely ill-suited to the vogue for short, sharp sound experiences, it’s not a record you would happily play on an iPhone, or that fits the shuffle function on an mp3 player. It takes time and space to digest. But it also betrays the fact that Aerial was born into a new world of limitless options. We have become accustomed to the idea of musicians, of all ages, using blogs, podcasts, SMS and YouTube to sell their music and reach their audience, and it’s hard to think of any artist less suited to this relentlessly present and self publicising age than Bush.
At a time when music was in the process of becoming more of a disposable commodity than ever before, and its perceived value negligible, Bush sought to retain its preciousness by stepping outside of the spotlight and allowing the work to speak for itself. The downside is that the lack of a visual presence in 2005 made it much harder for Aerial to exert any widespread cultural significance. It felt as though she had returned to a large but defined niche, well away from the mainstream. She probably felt most comfortable there. “I don’t think she was sitting there thinking, ‘Oh my God, why didn’t Aerial sell X million?’” says Bob Mercer. Its reputation, however, has only grown with time and exposure.
The new album certainly put her back on the tabloid radar, with all the discomfort that implied. In December 2006 there was a widely reported kerfuffle with British Waterways over repairs to her weir, which had collapsed due to heavy rains and for which she was at first deemed liable. The wider issue was that the proximity of her house to the water – and hence the public – caused a few run-ins, with more than one canal-based internet message board ringing to tales of a small, irate lady standing on the tow path shouting “This is private property!”
Those who were surprised at her apparent openness in bringing the media to her doorstep for the interviews for Aerial overlooked two things. Bush has never had a problem inviting people into her house; she has always been a very open and hospitable host: it’s uninvited guests, physical and psychological prowlers, with whom she has a big problem. Privacy was also the meat of the matter in May 2007 when it was reported that local residents in Devon objected to the security cameras around her seaside property, and also resented the fact that Bush – reacting to an extension in the UK’s ‘right to roam’ laws – wanted to divert two public footpaths that provided views into her house on the Devon coast and, it emerged, occasionally brought trespassers into the grounds of her house. “I’m afraid the coast path and the beach were there long before Kate Bush,” said a local councillor. “And I’m fairly confident they’ll still be in the same place with the same unhindered access long after she’s gone.” Bush agreed to scale down her security presence and the matter was settled amicably.
Although she was sometimes infuriated by the intrusion of helicopters buzzing over her head to photograph her house, she could also play the rock star trump card when she wanted. “We took a helicopter that she paid for all the way from Hammersmith to her summer house in Devon, just for a meeting for a day,” recalls Jimmy Murakami. “She fixed lunch and everything, [then] we went back that evening – that must have cost a few quid. She has a helicopter pad at her second house. No one seems to complain.”
More productively, more new music arrived relatively quickly. ‘How To Be Invisible’ was an incantatory song with a hint of Philip Pullman in its supernatural spell, so it was fitting that the celebrated author of the His Dark Materials trilogy was a friend of Bush’s. When she was asked to contribute the closing theme to the film adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first book of the trilogy, she jumped at the chance. Her friendship notwithstanding, it’s easy to see why the story of the coming of age of young Lyra Belacqua appealed to Bush, scattered as it is with spirits and demons, nascent sexuality, matters of religion and dark philosophy.
She put the whole thing together in a blink of an eye. “She got the call a month before it was needed – and delivered,” says Tony Wadsworth. “I said, ‘Look, see, you can do it. Just focus!’ I think it might have been something she had been working on for a while and realised it was appropriate for the work, but she really wanted to do it. She said, ‘I work well to deadlines.’ I said, ‘Now you tell me!’” She recorded the track at Abbey Road and enlisted Oxford’s Magdalen College School boys’ choir on background vocals; it didn’t hurt that Bertie was among their ranks. She popped in to give them a quick pep talk beforehand and promised to pay for them all to see the film when it came out.
‘Lyra’ emerged late in 2007 and was a rather limp affair, far from her finest hour, and even its quick execution proved a false alarm. Two years had already elapsed since Aerial, and it would be a further three and a half years before the world heard from Bush again. During that time the wider landscape of the industry changed markedly, and Bush was directly affected. David Munns and Tony Wadsworth left EMI in 2008 when the company was taken over by the private equity firm Terra Firma, overseen by chairman Guy Hands. Profitability at the company had never been more highly valued, while true artistry had arguably lost its premium. “The attitude at EMI was always ‘Whatever you want,’ and that was an attitude I put in there,” says Bob Mercer. “If I made any contribution to her career at all – and I did, there’s no question about that – it was to let her march to her own beat.”
“The fact that EMI have indulged her and let her get on with it is to their credit,” says Brian Southall. “She must have breached her contract a dozen times. No-one’s bothered, what are you going to about it? She owns her own product.”
But the tide was turning. Both the wider changes in the industry and the lack of a benevolent father figure within EMI were not incidental to Bush and her future music. Entirely creatively self-sufficient, she could record her music at will, with or without the help of EMI. Her unwillingness to hand over her music to people she didn’t know or particularly trust had become an issue, and one she would set about rectifying.
It was yet another reason why there appeared to be no sense of her being harried by the ticking of the clock. With age, real life displayed an increasing tendency to get in the way. In the summer of 2008 she turned 50, just after Bertie turned 10; Dr Bush had recently passed away, cremated at Eltham Crematorium. It was a time of deep sadness, of catching up with old friends and reflecting on the past and what was to come. Paddy and Jay were there, naturally, still as close as ever to their sister but much less involved nowadays in the day-to-day aspects of her life and career. Afterwards they all returned to the farm, where Bush’s nephew Owen, Jay’s son, now lives and works as a blacksmith and bladesmith. They sat around the kitchen table, just like the old days. It looked so small, suddenly. They used to think it was huge.
As the first decade of a new millennium drew to a close, inevitably some question marks lingered over her impetus and desire to create. Would we hear more music from Bush? The demands of being a mother simply could not account for the appearance of just one record in the space of 16 years; there seemed to be other factors at play. However, in 2009 news emerged that she was working on material (featuring, among the usual suspects, Danny Thompson) and had also permitted Rolf Harris to release the version of ‘She Moved Through The Fair’ they had relatively recently recorded as a duet. The cogs were still in motion, although anyone drumming their fingers hoping for a quick turnaround would have been forgiven for resigning themselves to a dose of familiar frustrations. Brian Bath recalls speaking to Del Palmer on the telephone in the spring of 2009. “He said, ‘I can’t talk, Kate’s just putting this Fender Rhodes part on’,” says Bath. “I phoned him back a couple of days later and said, ‘How’s it going?’ He said, ‘We’re just putting this Fender Rhodes part on….’” Bath laughs ruefully. “Still doing it, two days later!”
Who could have foreseen that one of the most intensely productive periods of her career lay just around the corner?
* She reasserted her natural distance from the grubby compromises of commerce a few years later, in 1999, when she was asked to write a song for the Disney film Dinosaur. At first Disney asked Bush to rewrite the words, which she refused to do, before telling her they now wanted it to be entirely instrumental. The director, Eric Leighton, said that “the rest of the score was instrumental, and hearing a voice singing seemed to confuse and unsettle the [test] audience.”[USA Today] She quietly withdrew.
* A similar theme runs through some of the songs on Prefab Sprout’s 1990 album, Jordan: The Comeback.
* She later turned down a Brits Lifetime Achievement award, in 2006, partly because she wouldn’t perform live at the televised event.
* This is not quite true: Paton was born on October 29, Palmer on November 3.