Eruditorum Press

Less concerned with who’s first up against the wall than with how to decorate it

Christine Kelley

About Christine Kelley

Christine Kelley writes about speculative fiction and radical politics from a queer revolutionary perspective. Currently her main project is Nowhere and Back Again, a psychogeography of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Her first project was the now semi-retired blog Dreams of Orgonon, a song-by-song study of Kate Bush. Support Christine on Patreon.

Posts by Christine Kelley:

Get Out of My House

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Get Out of My House

CW: This entire blog post discusses domestic abuse, sexual violence, and severe emotional manipulation at length and in triggering detail.

“The little fucker had thrown my papers all over the floor. All I tried to do was pull him up… a momentary loss of muscular coordination.”
Jack Torrance, The Shining.

***

The woman who raised me had seemingly few qualms about shrieking her disapproval at me several times per day. Usually she accomplished her purpose with words, but sometimes she would punctuate her castigations with a punitive strike of her hand. It was unclear to me what this accomplished beyond making me afraid of my own parent. If that was her purpose, she succeeded impressively.

In the summer of 2015, I learned that there was a familial precedent for my birth-giver’s violent tendencies. For a couple months, I stayed with her parents while she worked abroad. After a minor argument in which I told the family that an extended episode of severe depression would impair my ability to join the family on a daytrip, my grandfather trailed me to my guest bedroom and aggressively pushed me through the door. As I attempted to raise myself from the floor and understand what had just happened, my grandfather stormed into the room, leaned on the floor, and pinned me down with his thumb close enough to my windpipe to be threatening. I recall little of the following altercation, except for when I was called an “evil little shit,” “an unruly child,” and worth reporting to the police. When the cops eventually arrived at the house (a process that entailed my grandfather disconnecting the landline while I barricaded myself in my room as my then-mother pounded on the door and begged me not to call the police), they concurred with my family. I was told later that my ambiguously defined ill behavior was out of line and repeat incidents could call for juvenile detention. The event was left unaddressed.

Months later, my birth-giver pressured me into emailing her father an apology. At that point, I acquiesced to the idea that I was a delinquent whose behavior disrupted and hurt the whole family. It felt like a resolution. I was at peace with my family, insofar as one can maintain a truce with a person who remorselessly assaulted them. The fatuousness of viewing abuse stories as having a clear-cut beginning or ending did not occur to me. I could do nothing but retreat inward and shrink, hoping desperately that I could be small enough to escape from the small-minded capriciousness of the people who should have raised me.

***

The Dreaming sees Kate Bush turning towards an epistemological centering of subconscious and repressed emotions. It calls to the listener, inviting them to unleash their trauma, rage, and fear in torrents of vital and horrible catharsis. Bush reveals that the adolescent optimism of her previous albums, while real and legitimate, masked deep-rooted emotions beyond neophyte positivity and bravado. While those other albums (particularly the doleful Lionheart and sometimes Delphic Never for Ever) contain great darkness themselves, The Dreaming sees Bush unleashing the id, allowing the powerful emotiveness of her work to reveal its full breadth and ability to be furious, wretchedly disconsolate, and full of hurt.…

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Leave It Open

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Demo
Leave It Open

The first song to have a demo completed for The Dreaming (“Sat In Your Lap” was initially released as a standalone single), “Leave It Open” introduces much of the album’s ambition and cadences. Another treatise on the nature of thought and repression, Bush develops and inverts her previous metaphysical ideas about the world, presenting it as a frightening and hostile sphere yet treating interaction with it as an inevitability, and even a relationship where a person’s interiority can have input. As the refrain stipulates with a degree of bellicosity, “harm is in us, but power to arm.” In “Leave It Open,” Bush creates an ethos of wondrous fear, where allowing the self to become a vessel for something Other is an act of submissive reclamation of human potential.

Let’s start counterintuitively (in the spirit of The Dreaming) with the coda of “Leave It Open”, which sees Bush proffering a rare, aphoristic thesis statement in the form of a repetitive double-backmasked chant: “we let the weirdness in.” Amusingly, upon release this was Bush’s most controversial coda, with listeners calling into Bush’s television and radio interviews attempting to guess what distorted words Bush is singing (“we paint the penguins pink” is the best one). “We let the weirdness in” sounds unlikely — it’s disjointed, with abstractions and syntactic ambiguity. As my friend Rohanne points out on the brilliant Kate Bush podcast Strange Phenomena, The Dreaming sees Bush shifting from writing character narratives to reorienting her songwriting around concepts and abstractions. What is “the weirdness?” And how are we letting it in? “Leave It Open” concludes on a note of imprecision and unknowability. But the song also begins there — the verses and refrains are similarly disjointed in their grammar: “with my ego in my gut/my babbling mouth would wash it up.” The clauses are unclear in their relationship to their object and subject, phrasing abstractions in a way that suggests they’re corporeal stimuli. “Wide eyes would clean and dust/things that decay, things that rust” suggests bodily fluidity. The aversion to coherent speech and language is almost Burroughsian: language is a virus, and can only be allowed through in a broken, primal form, taking after a rhythm track. The Dreaming’s incipient nucleus of uncertainty creeps forth.

Moreso than “Sat In Your Lap,” “Leave It Open” emphasizes a theme that pervades The Dreaming in its exploration of madness as a feminist liberation. It sees Bush unharnessing herself from the tyranny of rational thought and conventional speech in favor of “letting the weirdness in.” An infusion takes place, with the song mostly looking at forms of opening and closing (“my door was never locked/until one day a trigger come cocking”). “Leave It Open” describes physically allowing unknowable things into one’s mind and body. Bush’s vocals are an entourage of different voices, with her lead vocal a tremulous inhalation (“watched it weeping/but I made it stay”), and her B.V.’s a series of childlike, high-soprano shouts (“but now I’ve started learning how!”).…

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Sat In Your Lap

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We did it. I hit $300 on the Patreon because of your support. Thank you so much to everyone who pledged (all 98 of you), shared the link, contributed to reaching the goals, or was just kind and supportive. This is quite literally life-changing for me. I can making a living off my passion without having to compromise financial security or my mental health. You people are amazing and I am indebted to you all. To be clear, $300 is a minimum though. I’m a disabled trans woman, and people will inevitably drop their pledges. Continued support would be great. But in the meantime, thank you. My life is better for your support. 

Demo
Sat In Your Lap (single)
Sat In Your Lap (LP version)
MV
Dance rehearsal (fragment, Looking Good Feeling Fit)

The aftermath of Never for Ever was a period of burnout for Bush. Prone to depressive burnouts after the completion of projects, she found herself drifting into a nadir of fruitless ennui, which she deemed “the anti-climax after all the work.” Completing Never for Ever in May 1980, Bush, not for the last time, put significant space between herself and the public, taking a holiday after an exhausting several months of recording. By the time Never for Ever was released in September, Bush was only just recovering from her creative inertia. Her timing was auspicious, as Never for Ever not only became her first #1 LP in the UK but the country’s first ever #1 studio album by a female solo artist ever. Never for Ever’s success was accompanied by heaps of promotion by Bush, including the usual run of performing songs on talk shows as well as signing albums for hundreds of fans at a time. Now she had more creative agency than she had previously, touting Never for Ever as “the first [album] [she] could hand to people with a smile.” Kate Bush the prodigy who sang “Wuthering Heights” was already a distant memory, transforming into Kate Bush the great 1980s British songwriter.

Yet Bush’s listlessness and struggle to write songs persisted for some time. It’s not hard to see why — the stress of Never for Ever’s production and the attention of the British public would be enough to put a damper on anyone’s creative output. It took seeing other musicians at work to get her motivated again. In September, Bush and her boyfriend Del Palmer attended a Stevie Wonder concert at Wembley Arena. Wonder was in a period of creative renewal himself. Having recently turned out a rare Motown flop in the distinctively titled Journey Through “the Secret Life of Plants”, he’d rebuilt confidence with his delightful Hotter than July LP. The concert broke Bush out of her writer’s block — “inspired by the feeling of his music,” as she later wrote, Bush got back to work on her songs, and forged a path towards her next album.

Bush’s work to date was largely harmonic, built around what notes went together interestingly on the piano.…

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Of Human Bondage Ep. 1: Dr. No & Patreon Update

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Hi all! I want to start this post with a quick update regarding the Patreon. The outpouring of support from friends and readers has been truly astounding. I cannot describe the thrill of waking up yesterday and realizing I would soon be able to live off my writing. The support of my community, the chance to fully dedicate myself to my craft, and not having to resort to a re-traumatizing job in order to survive makes for a tremendous feeling of support and gratitude. I cannot thank you all enough. You are amazing and have literally, materially changed my life.

Yet we musn’t declare victory too early. $300 is the goal at which I’ll feel safe living off Patreon, and at time of writing we’re just $17 short of that. Lots of folks have stepped in to get me to the $300 mark with promises to undertake various projects. Here are some things that will happen if I hit $300 on Patreon:

  • El will review Revolution of the Daleks. This is the only way she will do so.
  • Jack will write about the Big Finish audio Brotherhood of the Daleks, featuring the Doctor’s ties to Karl Marx. Yes, really.
  • My dear friend Will Shaw, author of the Black Archives book on The Rings of Akhaten and New Atheism, will write an undoubtedly delightful missive on the terminally execrable Sam Harris.
  • James Wylder will write queer monster stuff! With spiders!
  • Several other people have made offers I can’t recall off the top of my head, so let’s go with “& more!”

I literally cannot overstate how much getting to this tier would mean to me or how delightful any one of these little projects would be. So please back, or you can’t back, share the link. This is already putting me on a path to stability. 

In other exciting news, you can now listen to Of Human Bondage, the podcast where Kit Power, Sam Maleski, and myself discuss the James Bond movies of Eon Produtions. It’s an unusual Bond project, in that none of us are terribly sympathetic or reverential about our source material (what do you think we are, firing squad fodder?). Yet we retain a strange fascination with James Bond, having intelligent and riotously funny conversations about the pathologies and psychosexual weirdness of upper-class British white men that these films and Ian Fleming’s novels serve as a lens towards. It’s one of the most fun and cathartic projects I’ve ever engaged in, and feedback so far has been positive. Check it out. It’s a good time.

And thank you, everyone.…

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Breathing

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Breathing
MV
Comic Relief (’86)

My Patreon is doing tremendously well, having gotten over the $200 threshold thanks to my amazing backers. This is a huge deal for me. It means being able to survive off work that doesn’t interfere with my disabilities and allows me to focus on my writing. I can’t thank y’all enough. Yet nothing is quite nailed down – $300 is the point where I’ll be able to comfortably live off Patreon income until my seasonal job resumes, and the page has stalled at $206. So here’s some fun: at $225, I’ll cut a podcast with Daniel Harper (yes! the guy from “I Don’t Speak German!”), and at $250, Jack (the other IDSG guy!) will cut a podcast on “Alien” and “The Shining.” You don’t want to miss out on that now, do you? Of course not. Feel free to back, or at least share my work. Every bit helps. Thanks so much.

*********************

“Outside gets inside, through her skin
I’ve been out before, but this time it’s much safer in.”

A refugee of fire and radiation self-sequesters in the only shelter it knows. It’s safe in here, it lies to itself, seeking the consolation of its comforting abode. Mother, where are the angels? I’m scared of the changes. Mother is silent, smothered by the asphyxiating light in the night sky. The being responds accordingly, attempting to preserve itself the only way it can: breathing, inhaling every last respirable substance in its vicinity. There are two possible trajectories: out and in, a cyclical dichotomy of breath its hope for life relies upon. Yet its perambulation towards personhood is mutable and futile. If the being is inducted into humanity, its christening into personhood will be a hydrodynamic baptism by fire. It is the first and the last, the honored and the scorned — its story begins where it ends. This is how Kate Bush imparts the awful truth: the world will end, now, and we will hear every syllable of its last, desperate cries for clemency.

What energy did Kate Bush put into her best song? “Breathing” was her “little symphony,” as Bush diminutively but proudly deemed it. Wrought over three tormented days at the tail end of Never for Ever’s Abbey Road sessions, “Breathing” had a rigorous parturiency. On some days, Bush worked for 20 hours, sometimes stopping to rest (often failing) or get high (keyboardist Max Middleton notes this seemed to relax Bush, rather than helping with any creative breakthroughs). More energy was spent on the sessions than Bush’s, however — far from accepting her band playing instruments like craftsmen, Bush was a spiritual taskmaster, making her session musicians play the song again and again until they “felt it.” Eventually it became a ritual, almost a spiritual transformation, which shaped “Breathing” accordingly. Even poor Brian Bath, who claims that Bush drove him to record his guitar part “about 200 times,” admits that “the song had changed, there was this extra thing happening in it.” Max Middleton insisted on amending his Fender Rhode part for each take, trying to make every performance more unnerving than the last.…

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Army Dreamers

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Hello all! Since we only ever moved Christine off the site to make room for Boys in Their Dresses, and since that project has faltered while she keeps absolutely killing it, I thought it would be a good idea to put her back on the site.

More personally, as you probably don’t know if you don’t read my Twitter, my family has recently made the decision to legally adopt Christine, having already helped her relocate away from her abusive family and to Ithaca so she could transition safely. Christine is currently looking for housing, which is exciting for a trans woman in the middle of a pandemic. She’s also disabled and working through some pretty serious trauma of the sort you might expect when your story is “an abusive family so bad you moved across several states and were adopted.” We’re trying to give her some space to heal so she can go back to school and become the amazing and badass woman that anyone who has read her work can blatantly tell she’s going to be. But, well, there’s only so much we can do.

You have all been incredible in supporting me and letting me have the career of my dreams here. And so I’m asking you, if you enjoy her work at all, to do the same for her. We figure she can scrape by if her Patreon gets to $300 a blog post. That’s just over double where she is right now, so it’s not a small thing. But, well, my daughter needs help, so I’m asking you to do what you’ve done for me so many times and help an amazingly talented woman have the life and financial stability she deserves.

You can support Christine’s work at her Patreon.

Thank you, 
El.

Note from Christine: the Patreon is up to $139, which is hopeful and close to the halfway mark but not anywhere close to $300. Times are tough on everyone right now, but if you could share my work and the link to my Patreon, that would mean an insurmountable amount to me.

Army Dreamers
Music video
German performance (“Mrs. Mopp”)
Dutch performance
Friday Night, Saturday Morning

 

The senseless homicide, epistolary self-cuckoldry, and generational trauma in Never for Ever is a sort of horror writing from Bush. Her reverence for family and domesticity is clear throughout her work, and in how she lives — she stepped mostly out of public view for many years after the birth of her son. In Never for Ever, Bush explores what happens when families are torn apart by the infrastructure of modernity: weaponry, dissociation, social pressure, celebrity. Preliminary sketches of The Dreaming surface in the record’s soundscape of classical instruments and synthesizer innovations, underlined by trauma and madness. If Lionheart was Bush’s inward retreat in response to the world’s frightening instability, Never for Ever turns that lens outwards, exploring the impact of violence on families and survivors.

Bush has dabbled in folk music before, through engagements with parabolic theming, classical acoustic instrumentation, and straight-up rewrites of folk ballads.…

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Ran Tan Waltz

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This will be my last blog post to be crossposted to Eruditorum Press, as Elizabeth’s Tori Amos project, “Boys In Their Dresses,” will begin its run on the site come Monday. In the meantime you can still follow me at katebushsongs.wordpress.com, or financially support me in exchange for exclusive writing and personal editing at my Patreon. I am literal days from moving out of my current apartment and haven’t found an affordable replacement, so my partner and I could really use your help. Thanks so much for reading. It means the world to me.

Ran Tan Waltz
Xmas special

Numerous times on this blog we’ve talked about Kate, Bush’s classic 1979 Christmas special. As one of the few extended performances of her music Bush has done, and the only one made for television, it documents some of her less performed songs. While the bulk of Kate’s setlist was played on the Tour of Life, with the exceptions of Peter Gabriel’s contributions and a couple of Never for Ever songs, the BBC’s style of “televised theatre” differs from the musical theater Bush spent the tour performing. 20th century BBC shows were often boxed into a single room of a studio, and wholeheartedly embraced their limits by emphasizing their producedness, operating as filmed theater. Bush capitalized on the theatrical aspect of TV, particularly in her early career, relying more on costuming and mime than special effects and cinematographic precocity. Most of the songs performed in the Christmas special have visual counterparts from Bush or Gabriel elsewhere, barring “Another Day,” but we’ll leave that post to itself. The other exception, “Ran Tan Waltz,” is a B-side, an eccentric piece of smut that would have made de Sade drool.

“Ran Tan Waltz” has one of the strangest videos of Bush’s career. It’s a three-dancers-on-one-stage setup that’s not atypical of Bush in this era, but the costuming tips it into what-the-fuck-are-we-looking-at territory. Bush is decked out in Tevye-like garb, boasting a chinbeard, waistcoat, and bare feet, an exemplary sample of how middle-class English girls think the working class looks (à la some cabaret). To her left and right are dancers Stewart Avon Arnold and Gary Hurst dressed respectively as an upper class woman in purple and, I swear to God I am not making this up, a fucking baby in a diaper. Kate Bush has made a music video that’s a weird mix of cabaret, Victoriana, early 20th-century Russo-Jewish musical theater, and AB/DL. In a BBC Christmas special. Having written these last two sentences, I shall now retire Dreams of Orgonon and languish in obscurity.

 Alas, if every blogger who covered BBC television from the Seventies quit after seeing things like diaper men, there’d be a complete deficit of media criticism about this era. So umm… yeah, “Ran Tan Waltz,” the song and the video, has a lot going on. Normally we could contextualize the substance of a video with its song, but really, how do you get Tevye and diaper fetishes out of a song like this?…

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Another Day

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CW: child sexual abuse. 

Another Day
Another Day (Bush/Gabriel)

We must address some important facts in this blog post. For starters, folk musician Roy Harper is a songwriter of note. He’s got solid and interesting work in his discography, bits of which get covers by remarkable artists like the Cocteau Twins or, as this post demonstrates, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. It’s intuitive that Bush and Gabriel would choose to duet on a cover of “Another Day”; an sturdy and compelling break-up song, whose themes of wistfulness and the cognitive dissonance of desire overlap with both artists’ interests. The Harper album “Another Day” hails from, Flat Baroque and Berserk, has songs that are the equal of mid-tier tracks from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, or Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer’s Flowers of Avalon. Harper’s work is firmly second-tier folk music, respectable but not transcendent. Given that he’s a direct influence on Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd (with whom he cut a lead vocal on “Have a Cigar”), and Pete Townshend, he’s clearly a figure with some relevance to both rock and folk music and a force to be reckoned with.

The other thing we need to address in this blog post is the revelations about Roy Harper that have been made over the years. He is the subject of child sexual abuse allegations by two women, who were 11 and 16 at the time the abuse occurred. These women, who have chosen to be anonymous, have recounted their trauma in accounts too harrowing to quote on this blog but which can be read here. As is typical of these cases, Harper was cleared of these charges in 2015 and served no prison time.  Any discussion of Harper must at least acknowledge the violence he’s committed against these women, and that he effectively ruined their lives.

It’s not often when relating the story of Kate Bush that I have to talk about things like this. Most figures in this narrative aren’t actively monstrous, although we’ll talk about Rolf Harris in time. But in the era of #MeToo, it’s vital that we talk about the violence committed by influential persons. When you write about Roy Harper, you can’t simply stop at saying Flat Baroque and Berserk is pretty good. While the objective quality of his work isn’t diminished by his actions, what he’s made is necessarily tainted by his crimes. The fact that these songs were written by a rapist has them in the same way that the revelations about Louis CK and Kevin Spacey have affected their work.

Harper is also influential enough that in 1979, “Another Day” was covered on TV by two popular artists. Bush and Gabriel covered it on Bush’s BBC Christmas special, “Kate,” the most gonzo thing the BBC has aired that’s not The Web Planet. It’s an eclectic piece of stage theater that serves as a 45-minute sampler of the Tour of Life as well as a warm-up for Never for Ever.…

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Blow Away (For Bill)

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This blog post was brought to you by 22 backers on Patreon. If you’d like to read Dreams of Orgonon early and have access to my exclusive writing on other subjects, please consider pitching in. I’ve recently added a $10-per-post tier to the Patreon for those who’d like me to proofread their writing. If that interests you, we can talk. Any money at all significantly helps out this minimum-wage-working trans writer. Thanks for your support.

Blow Away (demo)
Blow Away

After the Tour of Life wrapped, Bush stayed out of the studio for a few months, giving herself room to breathe in between albums. By August, she’d gone to Abbey Road with engineer Jon Kelly to mix the EP On Stage, a collection of four live recordings from her tour and the only EP she’s ever produced herself (other Bush Eps have been promotional efforts by EMI). Shortly afterwards, Bush and Kelly moved to London AIR Studios to record Never for Ever. The initial 3-and-a-half-month-long sessions that followed heralded the masters of “Violin,” “Egypt,” “The Wedding List,” and “Blow Away.” Given that “Violin” dates from around 1976 and Bush wrote “Egypt” for her tour, “Blow Away” is the initial Never for Ever song, and it’s more beholden to her tour than most of the album. It’s the most directly autobiographical song, drawing as it does from both personal acquaintances of Bush and music history. Like “Violin” and “Egypt,” “Blow Away” made its debut onstage, when Bush performed it for the 75th anniversary of the London Symphony Orchestra in November of 1979, when Bush put in an appearance at the Royal Albert Hall. The song’s structure was nailed down pretty early on, as its demo is more or less a stripped down version of the master recording. It’s not clear exactly when Bush wrote “Blow Away,” as it could have been written on the road or during the summer between tour and album, but it’s definitely marks a newfound clarity in Bush’s songwriting, which become sharper, boasting more memorable hooks and keen structures than Lionheart’s more unruly songs.

Bush’s newfound confidence as a songwriter was accompanied by her newfound lack of certainty about the world. The songs of Never for Ever ask bigger questions than her first two albums do. “Blow Away” is one of Bush’s many songs to deal with death, and issues of consciousness. It’s an ethereal dirge, sung “For Bill,” referring to Bush’s engineer Bill Duffield, who was accidentally killed on the first night of her tour in an especially grim bout of party-pooping. It’s rare for Bush to sing about her personal life and friends, (we’re still far away from “Moments of Pleasure”) but there’s a whole song on her tertiary LP dedicated to an engineer she knew for a probably rather short period of time. Bush’s renowned generosity towards her collaborators extends to everyone on her team, as her charity concert for Duffield shows. Her use of “we” instead of “I” when discussing the making of her albums pretty much says it all.…

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Egypt

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This post was backed by 22 supporters on Patreon. If you back me for $1 a post, you’ll get next week’s essay earlier than everyone else. For $2 you can read my writing on other subjects, and at $5 you can commission a whole essay from me.

Egypt live at Manchester
Xmas special
Egypt

While Kate Bush was staging her only tour, the 1980s were being born. The Labour government of James Callaghan collapsed, and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power, a major step towards the austerity policies and neoliberalism that’s defined the last forty years.  The Camp David Accords were orchestrated by American President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin, and the Egypt-Israel Peace treaty, effectively terminating the Israeli occupation of Sinai while also seeing to it Egypt began supplying Israel with oil. Soon afterwards, Carter lost a presidential election to Ronald Reagan, the American half of neoliberalism’s early regime. CNN was established, arcade video games were becoming a viable commercial presence, and John Lennon was killed in New York. To be an artist is to be a cultural marker for a moment in history. To be one in 1980 was to witness the world falling on its head.

The massive global upheaval is noticeable in music as well. Just look at the UK’s Top 10 singles of 1980: it’s topped by Don McLean’s “Crying,” and the other songs are apprehensive titles like The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and the MASH theme song. Even a catchy disco single like Odyssey’s “Use It Up and Wear It Out” sounds tense and minimalistic compared to something like “YMCA” or “Freak Out.” Also in the top 10 is ABBA’s “Super Trouper,” their last #1, which deals with being pursued and has a campily militaristic title. 1980’s albums tend to abandon some of the Seventies’ utopianism as well: punk had given way to the abjection of post-punk groups like Public Image Ltd and Magazine, synthpop was rearing its head in the form of Ultravox and The Human League, and new wave was speeding up with Blondie and Talking Heads. Rock veterans were also pushing themselves, like David Bowie, who made the violent and weird Scary Monsters and its turn-of-the-decade-anxiety single “Ashes to Ashes,” and Bruce Springsteen, who went all-out with the wildly undisciplined double-LP The River. Songwriters of Bush’s generation were forging ahead: Elvis Costello released Get Happy!, one of his longer and more sprawling albums, and Prince dropped his funk-cum-erotica LP Dirty Mind. In the music of 1980, popular music is torn between sensibilities: the drive of the Seventies and the call to innovation necessitated by the new decade.

Having just completed her triumphant European tour, Kate Bush was entering her imperial phase. Instead of working with producer Andrew Powell and the band of her first two albums again, she established control of her work by appointing herself co-producer with Jon Kelly, and finally using her own band for a whole LP.…

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