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.