Kate Bush
Never for Ever

It starts with Babooshka and I see the wonderful video in my head, remembering how Veronica and I laughed deliriously in Kirstie’s bedroom (did we move Jen’s TV there?) the first time we watched the video – the double bass and bizarre dance and then the weird warrior princess. I think I remember Therese liking this song too, and I sang it at some big Folk House concert last year, last Spring, and I think it was the night that things cemented with me and Jon when I played my old trick (I’m afraid) of asking him to hold a bracelet, a watch, something while I played the piano and sang so that when I came back he had something from before and after. There’s something of the cunning in this song, a definite story. The broken glass doesn’t seem to have much to do with it though, here and in my own history.

Delius is a strange one, the weird Bontempi-kinda drums with weird Indian style scales and singing to glorify this very English composer, who I always tie in with Finzi in my head (and know very little about either, but I liked Finzi’s settings of the Shakespeare sonnets I heard Paul sing). I remember when we discovered this album too, and Veronica laughed (so much laughing) at the cover and all the monsters…she would say “Look…all those monsters…are flying out…of her vagina” and then flip the CD round to do an impression of Kate Bush’s bat face. The next song becomes that meandering magic I don’t normally like, but something today makes me enjoy it a little more than I have done previously.

All we ever look for wakes me up. The pizzicato strings rising help. The section where she opens and closes doors and hears variously religious caterwauling, birdsong and applause knocks me into my childhood where I did, on some level, hope that the world shown in Yellow Submarine was real somewhere, all those doors with the train speeding towards you, the All-American statues of beauty queens and cowboys, the concert-hall where one stepped out of, having caught a bouquet – all of that was present and correct somewhere. I see Kate Bush tip-toeing around behind the changing colours of that car. The Wedding List continues the nicely masochistic story-teller role. I like listening to the string counter-melody that appears as her voice becomes more and more guttural, and I think about the disco-style of such things, the second string melody of I will survive and how I related it to Dowland-style lute and viol songs, that was what I wanted to do with one of my songs, This is your Disco was supposed to be Elizabethan but it never ended up that way.

Violin is a peculiar one, fairly heavy music for the time (1980) I suppose, especially coming from the kind lacy-froth-witch that Kate Bush was putting herself across as. It’s a funny thing to be singing such a song about, I’ve seen her do a live thing (on video or something) where a violinist, dressed as the devil, dances around her as she sings. Her tone of voice when she sings “Whack that devil” is another thing that made Veronica screech with glee. And also how the vocal outro replicates the tuning of a violin.

And now a very beautiful and very disturbing song about a woman confessing to sexual feelings about a baby boy. Form overriding content maybe? Because it’s such a polite, chamber arrangement, the menace and disgust is missed. She is not convinced though when she sings “Let go, let go”, and the move into Night Scented Stock, a weird little vocal piece never convinces otherwise. The voices build and build, Lego-like into ungainly Berio-style chords.

Army Dreamers – some-one told me recently this was their favourite Kate Bush song. A vague Irish accent creeps into Kate Bush’s voice in this song that sounds strange – I’ve heard her speak in some interview from the late 80s and she’s got a weird Sloane-y kind of cockney voice. I have read that the user of the Fairlight sampler in this album comes from her association with Peter Gabriel (who I don’t get outside of Sledgehammer), it’s only a very subtle use when you hear the clicking of a gun providing a tiny part of percussion. I think of the video, where she creeps out from behind a tree with her gun, three times, to encounter nothing on the path in front of her. Camouflage gear. There’s something sad, every time you expect her to find something, or some-one.

Oh, and Kate Bush’s nuclear song. Breathing. The video, she is a foetus rolling in a womb as the lights reflect on her face from the world outside, then she is born to chaos and zombies and fallout. I love this song, the breathing-out-in-out-in-out scared me at the time as breathing steadily had become both unattainable and overrated. After the blast, chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung – I love my beloved, and I think about love and family, and how the concept of a steady and solid (nuclear) family is so much a construction of history rather than a standard – thinking of Ruth and her unnamed daughter as they till the diseased fields and the daughter doesn’t know to hold Ruth’s hand as she dies, an earlier incarnation of Ruth weeping and trying to make bread, and still earlier of her browsing in Mothercare, and the journey from one to the other. A voice tells me things I already know about the reality of a mushroom cloud, but the music conjured over it is comforting rather than alarming, and the voices “What are we going to do?” suggests we can at least do something, and at least the voices are still singing together. It is strangely melodic for the end of the world, but the long and drawn-out bass note, a long time in the coming, that freaked us out in Edinburgh will suggest bright lights in the sky and Kittyhawk sunk once and for all.