Kate Bush

The Kick Inside

For my great and glorious love affair with the Kate Bush catalogue to begin here feels strange but not unwelcome. I remember now listening to this in Gilmore Place and explaining the time signatures to Veronica, I’d said something about the shifting time of it and she’d butted in with “I didn’t do a music degree so I don’t know” (they all, all these lovely people who I loved, seemed defensive and odd about my choice of degree…people seem to be afraid of classically-trained musicians and remain so and I hate it still) so I explained why I loved so much the switch from 4 to 6 and how it spanned simplicity and complexity at once, made you do an extra step as you swayed but accept it.

Anyway, the Kate Bush story for me is that the viola player from my string quartet (mine) in York walked back with me one day and told me how much I’d love Kate Bush, but I didn’t really take it in. I knew the name, the vision of Kate Bush, growing up in the 80s I think you had no choice. Then I moved to Edinburgh and together, Veronica and I began to understand.

These are all still very much song-based, rather than the soundscapes that were to come, and I prefer, but I am so pleased to hear these again. I am back in the kitchen in the small hours sharing a joint, a toastie and some vanilla tea as we sit on those canvas chairs, enjoying this, Kirstie and Jenny watch Eastenders or are out with their boyfriends. Maybe Veronica and I sit in her little primrose yellow room and hunch over the laptop, dropping our cigarette ends in that funny ashtray with the pink tyre around it we bought from Ikea.

There is slightly too much of the witch around Kate Bush at this stage in her career for me to love as much as I will do later. But it was at this time of night that my panic attacks would abate and I would be safe to come out. The theatricals are all here and you bump into a friend you haven’t seen for a long time. How I would love to see Veronica again.

Now Kite, the first one on this album that made me sit up and has rooted forever what I mean by Kate-Bush-reggae… and then The Man with the Child in His Eyes…a number of people say this is their favourite Kate Bush song…I suppose there’s something of that kind of Gershwin torch song in there but it never did anything to me. Kirstie’s Dad wrote a novel I believe that was all about Kate Bush, or some-one who loved her. It was published and I understand it focused on this.

And Wuthering Heights – so much in this song to tell about. When I sang it at Queens Square in the Autumn of that terrible year but when things had started to shake down. Rosie, Sam, Jack, Sofia and I’m sure some others all sat in the grass with many many others as I sang with Jesse Morningstar and the rest of the assembled band, no rehearsal – I’d rehearsed the moves drunkenly at Hayley’s goodbye party the night before as Matt and Ed waltzed around the living room at Albany Road and broke through the tulip paper chains we had. That Saturday, Sofia wore a bracelet of matchbox cars she’d made. I started singing in the lower register because I was nervous but broke free. People danced in front of me, waving their arms, and I learned later that Irma got married the same day. It was a wonderful day. I’d sung Nightbus and another to the assembled crowds before. When I was working at Bentleys and heard Alistair, the terribly gruff ex-marine landlord singing it to himself in the kitchens below. Talking to Dan about how some songs can’t be covered by anyone else, and this one begin an example. The wonderful and terrible video. Dancing the dance with Veronica in…that part of Edinburgh where I sang once with Alaric’s band…the Pleasance. We sang it post-debauch, sitting in the courtyard and doing all the moves shrieking with laughter at ourselves and how lovely it was to love this song. Red flowers. I still haven’t read the book.

And now James and the Cold Gun which I sing for Hmna Andy on special request and practised for hours in my sea-green room at Gilmore Place…Veronica hearing me and impishly reporting on my progress. I sang it busking in Edinburgh in those early days too. I loved busking but am too responsible now, I suppose. The Hammond Organ. Those high As still impress and I still love to sing them, even if I’ve never got the chords 100% right. And the backing (a-chu-chu, a HEE-YAH!) I sang to myself when I worked at the Corn Exchange, mixing drinks, opening cans and serving cocktails for the various functions, kissing once a wine waiter called Michael and dancing in a nightclub with the other bar staff the one and only disastrous night I ever drank lager and enjoyed it. That walk from Gilmore up Home Street, perhaps going up the curve that led you to the old hospital, where I would learn to decry Edinburgh as at once seedy and imperious. I’ve always had little patience with the ending of this song.

I don’t like the next one so much, I remember feeling irritated by it at the time. But Oh to be in love hit me badly at the time and still does – the sensation of drowning. I could’ve been anyone – and it makes me think of everything that’s recently been in front of me and dancing around, shifting and running away at the point of contact – how do you decide what love is? Is it a form of protection? And to balance the binarism in my head – or survival? Chemicals or history? I’m no closer to knowing in all my twenty eight years.

Them Heavy People always makes me smile, I believe it’s about getting away from the academy, but understanding the continuation of progress (rolling the ball to me). And when she sings “Whirling dervishes”, I have a memory of Veronica cackling with laughter and imitating it a second later, maybe going to skip the CD back to the second or two she wanted to hear again. Maybe a combination of dim lighting, failing eyesight, smoke or simply being stoned, I always thought this album was called King Incense. The last song put me right, but apart from that “The Kick Inside” (the song) made little impression upon me previously. There’s heavy rain outside – recently rain has begun to make me feel nervous. I think about the ceiling caving in. I cleaned so much today, I dusted the photo frame that holds a picture of me and Chris as toddlers wearing matching Spiderman masks. I see the early-80s telephone and think of Threads. I hear Kate Bush singing about women and wombs and I think of Sylvia, my supervisor from the helpline and I think about the journey from girl to woman and I wonder where my Spiderman mask is.