Kate Bush
The Sensual World

I will admit it, like a dirty sinner – I’ve skipped and I’ve shuffled. And I loved it. In my defence, the ipod is a seductive demon and I have been weak, but I have tamed it and overpowered it by plenty of Pet Shop Boys and Wings (Sam tells me that I don’t mess about with listening to crap music, I zone in for the core of crap).

But I did begin listening to this album on a long bus ride from Bedminster to Speedwell. I got half into it and then I saw some-one I knew so had to take the telltale white earphones out and have a quick conversation. So I listen to it again now on a monstrously lazy day, having danced for hours at the hatchet wearing a top hat and sunglasses. Veronica told me the opening song is related to Ulysses, and that’s another thing I need to finish off, I got halfway through it and became waylaid by the wasteland instead…will return to it, I loved the sketch of the amputee watching fireworks…

I confess I hardly know this album, maybe three or four songs have embedded themselves in my head but perhaps there’s always going to be a kind of anti-climax after Hounds of Love…it sounds in a way as if there’s some kind of tepid maturity after the water-rebirth…have been reading Jung again and thinking about his interpretation of the Oedipal myth, and the two Piscean fish swimming away from each other, Jonah and the Whale…a little piece of rope won’t hope it together…it’s so deep you don’t think you can speak about it…

The sound is slicker already, 1989…that represents quite a pause between Hounds of Love and this one…the Celtic vibes to the whole thing stay…but there’s a lot of heavier guitar surrounding it, I hope I’m not sulking just because the previous album is over (which I guess we’re all guilty of) but the lyrics even start to sound like the dreary “trust in yourself and you can achieve anything” philosophy I remain so suspicious of…at least she laughs at the end of the song. The idea of “I’m all grown up now” disturbs me a little, maybe it’s supposed to, just put your feet down there because you’re all grown up now…maybe it’s the child-like aspects of her voice that render it so disturbing to me; I’ve not worked it out just yet but it raises discomfort in me when placed with the same flaky feminist sentiments expressed previously… there’s definite landscape in this, rolling strings…I read the lyrics, swimming, feet on the sandy ground, her father speaks – that’ll be my discomfort. Imagine your father calling you “child” – am I jealous or outraged? And something else hidden in there possibly. I’m glad the song ends when it does but that’s more for me than the CD…

Actually, this album takes a lot of child/parent images on its way. There is something of that dreadful late 80s “we are the world” crap seeping through, despite the presence of the Balanescu Quartet. There’s something about the rhythms she employs, so scattered…not quite (or even remotely) breakbeat, but although they do become cohesive eventually, there’s a certain time of a hall-of-mirrors with beats chasing beats before they arrive as some kind of concrete, walnut-shaped whole… I think of Chaplin in The Circus. And then of course I think of Chaplin dancing in The Great Dictator (dancing with Hitler being the theme of the song) – “Madame, your dancing was exquisite… wonderful… amazing… very good…good” as if the truth of the matter lay in the diminuendo.

This is one of the songs now that’s always hit me, Deeper Understanding, about a woman’s love affair with her computer, the computer sings to her, offering love and deeper understanding. I imagine a dark room, and the light coming from the screen the woman huddles around being brighter than the light of any Jesus currently available…until my family found me and intervened…there was a story about a Bristol City Council tenant who had died and lain undiscovered for 8 years, I think of Maya Angelou writing in Africa, and a friend wailing because a corpse had remained unclaimed in the morgue for two days…sunglasses being the privilege of secularism, change the light, make it evening when it is morning, turn to your computer in little rooms up and down the land and rejoice in freedom, voices surf from liquid crystal and graphics forgive. Computer-controlled Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy programmes, your computer will cure you and mould you to serenity – is it so unfeasible to see the computer as a god and a lover? I hate to lose you.

But now, clumsy rhythms, dialogue-style lyrics, wailing recorders and some West-Coast guitar to try and cling it all together. Two songs have gone past, and now Rockets Tail fills me with the absurdist Kate Bush I so love, so much more than the one who languidly dissects (carelessly) relationship misunderstandings…the story of a woman who dresses as a suicide bomber to understand the feelings of a firework soon to explode, lonely and frightened while the crowds cheer below…Veronica and I sat in the kitchen the first time we heard this, purple walls, black and white tiled floors, she sat, smoking and laughing at the big cock-guitar solo. When I first came to Bristol I peddled a couple of compositions to the Gasworks choir, the woman and her husband liked my music very much and invited me to come to a rehearsal but I was still too timid and post-Edinburgh to carry it out. She played me a recording of their choir singing this, an exact copy…even the wailing of the Trio Bulgarka (similar backing techniques to the early Kate Bush – why did she abandon almost completely that side of herself? The more guttural voices make it so much more interesting than the wistful lace-clad witch and earth mother she seemed to style herself as after that…)

This Woman’s Work retains special meaning for me; early March 2004 an event brought me nearer to and further from different kinds of life, and while I acted and reacted rationally and sensibly and felt, really no sadness, sometime after the song gave me, and still gives me moments of silence I can’t really understand or explain. I don’t like hearing it on that NSPCC advert, it feels too holy for that.
And oh God, after that, what a terrible song to end with “He thought he would die but he didn’t”…the bird noises neither help no rescue it. Calling out for middle street sounds more like wandering aimlessly in the middle of the road.

Kate Bush
Hounds of Love

I need to start writing before it begins. This is the huge, huge album. My sanity and a sticking-post for the end of 2001 and much of thereafter. Two halves – Hounds of Love and The Ninth Wave. Elements of both appearing forever. Calvary. The video, the dance (Debbie and I performed on a tube speeding away from London and Rosie’s funeral). Tell me we both matter, don’t we? I heard this first as “the most 80s song ever” as described by Veronica. Adam has shown me a 12-inch Spanish version of the single. The dogs on the cover are called Bonnie and Clyde – none of this scratches the skin of it, the purple, grey, white, drowning in a sea of copied faces all marching towards an exit – you won’t be unhappy. Walking to see Dan when he lived on the other side of Edinburgh, I would put this on my Walkman, the album lasted long enough to take me to Stockbridge. This would get me to the traffic island where Jen told me she had to get to the other side before the green man started flashing or her family would die – I would make a deal with God. The screams, the twisting voices beneath – if only I could. I listened to this album with my head in the fireplace again and again and again. This album, more than anything else apart from the stuff I was writing at the time (and I heard how a woman could conjure up the land if she needed to) is the orange streetlights and chain-smoking of Edinburgh.

The excitement, the fog around ones ankles is the start of Hounds of Love – the video, a desperate handcuffed chase into and out of a sombre New Years Eve party. The strings, Eleanor-Rigby like, provide the regularity the nearly-melodic drums fail to give, they stumble and the strings lift. The fear and the long-coming rest. The canal behind Gilmore Place, the brewery smelling of vinegar and gravy in the morning. The Big Sky – being amazed at the handclaps and talking about how they were recorded, maybe in teams. Noah, Ireland. Perhaps now in the evening walk I’d be at the Lyceum, the big hotel with the fountain in front of it where I worked for an afternoon before escaping with full and empty lungs. You never understood me.

This album shows more than any other I can think of that the whole is more than the parts – for me the quality dips with this and the next song. This would have been side 1, Act 1 before the bigger, weightier themes of the Ninth Wave appear, the big death and resurrection game suggested in her Ophelia pose. A party – the end of the world. Astronauts and Elephants.

Mother stands for comfort – the broken glass again that vexed me so in Babooshka. The meandering bass line again. An inconclusive point, line and story. It never rained in my head when I heard this, just a feeling of curtains being drawn temporarily, going through a tunnel and looking at one’s watch. The pun at the end “Mother will stay Mum” did nothing for me then and does nothing now. The warped recorders at the end charmed me, but the beginning of Cloud busting is like the morning.

The strings, have always in that style been bread and water to me. Martial and glass-like. The regularity attracts me – I know that something good is going to happen, I don’t know when. I understand the clockwork and in the video was impressed by the exact footfall of the bad government men in black. The voices of the chorus appear, shrieking, controlled. The sound of the train at the end is only a culmination of the slow and steady warm-up of wheels that begun at the beginning and have been quietly producing steam and air to open the windows with. Here I am at the castle on the corner.

And then the Ninth Wave is about to begin – it tells a story that we debated about, waves of water, images of ice and drowning, stranded at sea. Related to Arthurian legends, a Tennyson quote about The Holy Grail. Death and Rebirth, Finnegan, begin again. And then Kirsten brought up the idea of sound waves – an oscilloscope.

No matter, for now, Dream of Sheep begins it. I learned this on the guitar and played it to Veronica in the kitchen. Floating in a bathtub on the sea (think of Buster Keaton sill resolutely turning on the tap). I hear voices of a lost helicopter searching for her through dreams and fears. With one sweep of the piano, you can feel the sea swelling below. Wish I had my radio – I’d tune into some friendly voices. I can’t be left to my imagination, I knew this at the time my imagination was liable to put me out with the rubbish and leave me to be ground to salt in the morning.

Under Ice gave me the fear one time, I remembered a scene from a horror movie (The Omen?) where some-one indeed fell through ice, I think now of governmental information films that currently obsess me. She paints the picture with hesitant clarity. There is no need to describe how the air smells, just that she leaves behind her little lines in the ice, splitting sounds spitting snow. She changes from the subject to object – she is no longer describing her course but her moving under the ice – we missed the moment she fell.

The voices – not a song but my most beloved Kate Bush song, the voices all telling her to wake that I heard best and frightened myself the first time along Princes Street listening to this on headphones and the voices swimming at 360 degrees around me – shards and snatches of all the rest of the Ninth Wave coming together and meeting in a sleepy soup. As we got to know the album better and better we could isolate and identify each strand, each little light, each stroke towards sunlight – you still in bed? We are all water and the holy land of water – remove the water, carry the water…the sudden change of “Help me baby, talk to me, please baby help me!”, the epileptic struggles of a voice caught behind glass, ice, sleep, and the devil voice alternately calling her “whore” and “blackbird” – the bells are playing and not in celebration. Waking the witch – bless me father for I have sinned, her breath goes in, she has been punched, help this blackbird, there’s a stone around my neck. A near-death, is this in her mind? Wings and water. Curses and crowds, the helicopter appears, get out of the waves, get out of the water – what business did you have being there anyway? Get out.

Dripping, sodden, she returns and is invisible, you suppose she must be dead. I should have been home hours ago – you hear of her life outside the calamity. I’m not here. Her boyfriend? Mother? Friend? Some-one is waiting for her, but the trapped and silent figure she has become, perhaps not recognised for what she was or should have been is only “watching you without me” – the measure of love being loss, again. I’m not here. The radio searches for her. Spirits appear, singing backwards, the voice breathlessly, please help me, listen to me, talk to me baby, please baby help me – how are my arms? Am I talking loud enough? I developed a stutter the summer of 2001 and quietened myself down to hide it from those who would know.

The Jig of Life – I heard it first as medieval rather than a straight Celtic example. The Irish arrangement by Bill Whelan, who later did Riverdance so I guess that’s pretty authentic. I wanted to find the mathematics behind it, the reducing numbers in the circular pattern, how many times round did the riff play in the major before those clashes? Come on, let me live – Chris said maybe it’s not “arrangement” in the classical sense and that’s what gives it the power, but there are arrangements everywhere, the whole Fibonacci thing taught us this; there is maths in the curl of leaves, in the fact that trees continue to exist and I know it’s here in this song too – every time I try and count the drum beats that pull my shoulders up to my ears in an ecstasy, my feet work in counterpoint, wherever I’m sitting, however I’m standing and analysis breaks down – holding all the love that waits for you here. We are of water and the holy land of water.

Voices reappear. Have they been looking for her? Hello Earth, Earth as a baby, I think of the Bundle from The War Plays – shall we give the world a nice clean face? I can blot you out of sight, a one-handed eclipse. I could be driving home with you asleep on the seat. At this point I would nearly be at Dan’s house but would detour so I could get to the end of the album by the beginning of the Water of Leith. We have heard voices of deep men, far below the surface. Can’t do anything, just watch them swing with the wind out to sea. All you sailors (get out of the waves, get out of the water) All life-savers…all you cruisers…all you fishermen, head for home. Go to sleep little earth, I was there at the birth, out of the cloud-burst, ahead of the tempest…All you cruisers – that hits me the hardest. Edinburgh – the water’s edge, those schizophrenic and jagged skyscapes of the castle, Arthur’s seat, the sea. The dark, the cold. All I could think about. Winding – a slow descent into the blue with one hand still held open as the keys changed, go to sleep little earth, unknown words in a dark place.

Once upon a time I walked along Princes Street listening to the last track on this album, having survived the fear of drowning. A bagpipe player coincided exactly with everything else I was hearing and I danced on the street – little light, I love you better now. I’m falling like a stone.

Kate Bush
The Dreaming

So we were walking past the doctors surgery in Edinburgh, we were going somewhere new to drink, sometime early on and Veronica linked my arm and we walked on ahead and she told me about a Kate Bush album she’d just heard about all based on dreams, some good, some bad. She was discovering Kate Bush just a couple of steps ahead of me and oh how excited we felt to think about it. This is this.

Apparently this is the album that fully made people view Kate Bush as a freak, weirdo, kooky, however else such women are described. A bizarre opening song certainly, the weird backing, the fucking odd video as she sits, ballet-dressed performing a weird tribal dance surrounded by minotaurs on roller-skates and Ku Klux Klan members. She looks like Susie in the middle section. What is the song about? I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a scholar but I really can’t be bothered. My cup shall never over-floweth, it is I that moan and groaneth. We drew a cartoon with Steve Norrie as Kate Bush. We said the video was Dada. The song about the botched bank job. I love it – this is the first complete album of hers I love. Jen was paying back Veronica some money once and V was delighted to hear her say There goes a tenner, hey look, there’s a fiver. I’m having dreams about things not going right.

How long until we worked out track three was about hand-to-hand combat? Indigenous tracking and hand-grenades. I have heard Kate Bush mentioned so often by feminist artistic friends, does she count as a feminist? Or is hers just a particularly feminine way to write about issues of warfare etc? I’ve read about the Greenham Common protests and how the feminist movement coincided so well with the anti-nuclear stuff of the early 1980s and the focusing on continuation of life as opposed to strategies, which is apparently a traditional male dominion. I’m not sure I agree with that argument though, surely it’s just more of a humanist standpoint? Not necessarily feminist. We’re not ones for busting through walls, but unless we can prove that we’re doing it, we can’t have it all – can I have it all now? Between you and me, she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere.

Leave it open: I remember forgetting this from early listens to this album, but it’s amazing, so strange and freaky. That weird flanger effect on the voice. So noisy and painful, reminding me of that weird “radio edit” version of Hyperballad that knocked me over for so long.

When Veronica made me a random CD of random Kate Bush stuff (Pull of the Bush she called it, after a bit of backing from this song), she included a backing-only version of this song (The Dreaming). Sadly, it was too late for me to consider pulling it out at Yo Sushi to fuck with the hen-party diners who expected Son of a Preacher Man, Fame and Puff the Magic Dragon as they choked down Udon and Ramen, maki and nigiri. I would have loved to have done this, just to say I had done it (in the same way, being able to revel in the memory, if not the artistic product of myself and Kirsten rapping to Play that Funky Music White Boy in hayseed Scottish accents), but it’s another damn weird song, I’ll never pretend to understand it or even like it that much, the voice of the face buried in the sand at the end, in truth, scared me a little. The strange bridge section which glues together this and Night of the Swallow is a thing I love very much though. Night of The Swallow is incredible. I remember when we “got” it, and latched on the “Give me something to show for my miserable life” – you can hear the Celtic stuff coming to the fore, but it’s not in an overblown way, just in the clashing of sticks.

The first time I died was in the arms of good friends of mine – that was a lyric that stabbed me at the time, but it feels churlish to mention it now, now that those things get further and further away. This is another one of those stop-and-start songs, the Danny Thompson bass keeps it in the wandering style. Houdini always stayed very beautiful and full of love, but images of young men hitting the water freaked me out, even though I thought of myself in no way like Rosabelle. I could see the séance, all dark furniture and reflected candles.

And of course, Get Out of my House (which we sang as we went to Ikea, never dreaming it was such a long taxi ride away). It’s like a dark film, all twisted and angled, running with the camera, unflattering lighting and badly-built sets. I sang it as I helped unpack glasses at the new-look Bentleys, all cocktail glasses and leather seating – my home, my joy are barred and bolted. The idea of oneself as a diseased property seemed beautiful, but the stains were not for moving. I can hear the spite and joy of neglect and the importance of retaining mistakes (oh, like Bright Eyes again, are mistakes wrapped in glass necessarily errors?) In refusing entry, she is more controlled and sane than she has been when cataloguing her misfortunes. Her “change into the mule” is so much more demented than his, and more terrifying for it. He retains a tune and fits with the music – where he is embroidery and she is a weird potato-stamp that matches nothing she is more effective and memorable. The voices meld into Indian drum-talk as they disappear and you can imagine that the dust has gathered arms and assembled itself along the sidelines to watch.

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.

Kate Bush

Lionheart

This is the strange one – the one I know the least, apart from Aerial, about which more later when my venom is up. Consensus has it that this album was “rushed out”, and certainly few people mention it when talking about Kate Bush. When Veronica and I made up our great and glorious Top 20 Kate Bush lists, I think nothing from this came up in it.

It was Veronica’s birthday at the end of November, when the Kate Bush wagon had got well underway. Myself, Kirstie and Jen found this in a second-hand record shop on Lothian Road (which just briefly turned into Bury Road in my head as I remembered it) as the one album she didn’t have. A song about Peter Pan - thinking of Sylvia again, she and I spoke about Peter Pan last time we spoke, and she talked about the sculpture outside the Bristol Children’s; Infirmary, saying that she’d prefer a fountain with a Peter Pan statue it, clear jets of water, rather than those weird loops and silver bends. She wonders what they do at night and now so do I. If I think of a Peter Pan statue I think of the statue in London that you see when you come in on the bus to Victoria, past the Albert Bridge, all sugar pink and blue - the boy who holds onto the fin of the dolphin as it dives into the pavement. Is it outside Sadler’s Wells? The first brave trip I took to London by myself armed with a map, a bottle of Kalms pills that rattled reassuringly, and a compulsion to at least find the offices of Faber and Faber, Queens Square (I dream of Faber and Faber) – I thought of buying two tickets to a ballet, Dan was so knocked out by the two ballets we’d seen in Edinburgh I wanted to continue this for him. Now when I think of Peter Pan and London, I think of Rosie and her close boy’s haircut as she morphed into Roh. I never knew Roh as well as I knew Rosie and I wanted to ask her but that was cut short. This time last year we were still hoping she’d come to our New Year Eve in Bristol I read some Jeanette Winterson today where a similar death was described in the space of a sentence. It seemed more and less horrifying than the experience so many people scattered across the world now know as part of their history, and the culmination of someone else’s. I thought of her just before Christmas in the Duke of York as a friend of Andy’s, a nice guy called Alistair talked about his father’s death. Wow, I think you’re unbelievable. The music’s nice but it isn’t doing anything for me beyond that.

But I don’t remember hearing Fullhouse before, I like the idea of “Remember yourself”. But truth – nothing else hits me until Coffee Home Ground and Hammer Horror – these are the ones that seem to change from the wistful and pixie-like meandering of so much of the early Kate Bush stuff. She is beginning to be a narrator rather than a singer, and I know which my aesthetic prefers. I have more space and tolerance for characters than I do heroines.

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.

The Buggles

The Age of Plastic

Somewhere in my third year at University, I bought a CD of greatest number one hits ever, or similar. I was falling in love with songwriting and recording as opposed to composing, and thanks to Steve was thinking so much about Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and reconsidering my beloved Beatles. I was interested in the idea of form and shape and structure in pop music, and saw this CD of, arguably classics, as a bit of a text book – how do hooks work? Choruses? What renders them most memorable? And in it I really discovered Video Killed the Radio Star.

We used to have barbecues at Temple Villas, Chill-out weekends and parties. I remember sitting in the conservatory with everyone and playing this song, going crazy for those high syncopated strings and Vicky saying to me (placating my mania I suppose) “I do like it, but I’m not hearing what you’re hearing”. No matter. I found the album and bought it in Edinburgh to hilarity. It amazes me how much the first rack sounds like Abba. Were they ever a serious band? I’m aware of how many different side projects Trevor Horn (really, who is the other guy? Only a face with a plug in the neck) had on the go at any one time, so is this the limit or the piss-take?

Anyway, Video Killed the Radio Star appears soon enough. I worked out a pretty acoustic version early in Bristol. Most wonderful and sad song. I don’t care how “cheesy” this comes across, it’s beautiful. I feel a night of music I love coming along – I sang Elvis Costello to myself as I walked back from Tescos with milk. It’s such a wonderful song, the arrangement, the sentiment. The rest of the album could never match up. And I’m not just being wilful or kitsch, it’s gorgeous, and the funny little fadeout only adds to it.

Lines from Kid Dynamo come and hit me – call me if you ever feel like letting go. Our minds will not change, only our cars. I love you Miss Robot, the only other song that’s stuck in my head from my initial listening of this album – thinking you can hear Daft Punk and all of that coming…Cool is cool but how can anyone not love this? OK – the next one’s shit (Clean, clean) but does seem to have something to do with the vague “concept” that seems to be surrounding this (A character called Johnny? There’s even a reprise which is often tell-tale of such things)

Oh, but how I love the introduction to Elstree, even though I laughed as I imitated it to Heppell, Kirstie and Dan in Colville Place as we ate that weird custard apple I bought, split into four, and celebrated each of us the securing of each of our first flats together, them above the chip shop at the top of Broughton Place, us on East London Street, down the road and round the corner, equally down the road and round the corner from Adam, Tim and Jen. Action. Perhaps it owes a debt to Video Killed the Radio Star in terms of chord progression which is why it sits comfortably in my head. I have read about James Mason orating at Judy Garland’s funeral; “Time does not remember the entertainers”.

There does seem to be a point to all of this, even if it is obscured by time and fashion. Let them be lonely and say you don’t care. Let them be broken and say you don’t care. I am beginning to love this more than I thought possible – even I thought I had this in my collection as more of a curio but I am entertaining thoughts of teaching myself these songs. Perhaps these things are better when they are more reflective than heroic. “Oh my-my, you are so sci-fi”

The start of Technopop is so joyous. It does make me laugh tho – I wonder what was in her mind, was I really so unkind? I lie back and turn the radio on – TECHNOPOP!! That’s pretty hilarious actually, I have an urge to tell Jack. I wonder if that was the end of the album originally (I hope it was, an amazing ending) because surely the Johnny on the Monorail (a very different version) is some kind of bonus track…All we cannot see we call invisible. They call him “Johnny Rascal” and I can hear parts of I love you Miss Robot reappearing before the album disappears into guitars.