Dreams of Orgonon

Coffee Homeground
Tour of Life

“Coffee Homeground” comes at the tail end of Lionheart, when the album’s slower and quieter tracks have all trailed off. As the album’s penultimate track, it provides Lionheart with a relatively bombastic and staunchly theatrical climax. For all that Lionheart explores stagefright and theatrics in depth, it’s a much quieter album than that description might suggest. There are few especially up-tempo songs on it, and Bush’s piano guides her backing musicians through her songs. “Coffee Homeground” almost sounds out of place on the same album which has “Oh England My Lionheart” and “In the Warm Room,” with Bush’s camp attempt at a German accent and Kurt Weillian orchestral scoring. It’s by the grace of Lionheart’s strong thread of camp that “Coffee Homeground” is allowed to work, exploding into full blown theatrics at the end of an album which previously treated them as something more to be discussed than outright embraced.

As we’ve discussed at length in this blog, Kate Bush is a consistent purveyor of camp. Her mime training, her focus on character in her songwriting, and a constant awareness of form are camp attributes of her songs thus far. When we get to the Tour of Life, we’ll see just how far she takes that. Bush’s camp instincts to come a head in “Coffee Homeground,” is one of her most unreservedly theatrical songs. It’s hard to overstate just how theatrical this song is. Bush as a singer is always expressionist; in “Homeground” she takes this camp tendency to its logical conclusion by doing a funny accent. Her play at a German accent is willfully funny, one of the silliest things on Lionheart. Bush was often mocked for her gurning and high-pitched vocals (by such comedians as Faith Brown and Pamela Stephenson), and “Homeground” suggests she’s in on the joke to some extent, or least just as capable of having fun with it. On the track she engages in Sprechgesang, a kind of singing in which a singer rapidly moves back and forth between speaking and singing. This a natural move for Bush, who’s done this sort of thing before — moving back and forth between speech and song is a stylistic norm for her. But it’s worth investigating just what brings her to it this time around.

Bush’s use of Sprechgesang, her mimed German accent, and an unusually playful orchestra make up a hat tip to the early 20^th century German theater team of playwright Bertolt Brecht, composer Kurt Weill, and singer Lotte Lenya. This collective is one of the most influential in 20^th century theater, and we could get a whole book out of talking about any one of them. Let’s start with Brecht, as his writing is useful for discussing Bush’s storytelling in “Homecoming.” Brecht’s great contribution to dramatic theory is “Epic Theater,” which, like glam rock, revels in its status as artifice and production. Jack has written about Epic Theater as applied to Doctor Who before, so for a more thorough take on the subject you should read his post.…

Continue Reading

This essay was brought to you by 20 backers on Patreon.

In the Warm Room
Tour of Life

For all that Lionheart is positioned in the shadow of The Kick Inside, it diverges from its predecessor in significant ways. The Kick Inside is more or less an art rock album — a much quirkier art rock album than something like The Wall or Low, but nonetheless in a tradition that houses Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, and Genesis. There are certainly strands of art rock in Lionheart (which are most prominent in “Wow,” “Hammer Horror,” and “Symphony in Blue,” all the singles), but it’s frayed at the edges and beginning to pull away from its obvious tradition. There’s an edge of darkness to Lionheart, which wasn’t as prominent in Bush’s debut. It’s almost a Gothic album with a healthy dose of the pastoral thrown in. There’s also a folk touch to it, with its increased use of acoustic instruments (down to the influence of Paddy Bush). Lionheart is lonely, and its singer is left in France to ruminate on cultural fragments of England.

One of the quietest songs on the album is “In the Warm Room,” also one of the album’s acoustic songs. It fills the “Feel It” spot on the album, the one exclusively-piano song. “Feel It” used its slot on the album to explore sexual desire and seeking pleasure in ambiguous circumstances. “In the Warm Room” is just a dead end — a treacly, inept dirge of a love song. It actually is what male rock critics (a tautology if ever there was one) said her other songs were. It’s the nadir of the album, and a self-evident career low for Bush.

 “In the Warm Room” is that ever so ubiquitous and banal staple of popular music, a song where a man is encouraged to think about an offstage woman dying to sleep with him. The woman is typically voluptuous and seductive, a femme fatale of the highest pedigree: “she’ll tell you that she’ll stay/so you’d better barricade the way out,” “she’ll touch you with your mama’s hand” (which… ew). Women become a way to keep score, and the lady in the warm room is the ultimate conquest. It’s creepy and an indulgence of Bush’s most obsequious catering to misogyny.

If this song sounds male gazey, that is intentional. Bush claimed she often wrote songs for men, giving them what they want, specifically citing “In the Warm Room.” Such a decision is backwards for Bush, who’s always been a tad conservative in her outlook but manages to hides it behind radically conceptual songwriting (she’s stronger at navigating aesthetics than politics). And it’s just banal here — it’s depressing to see someone who once wrote a musical suicide note for an incestuous woman settling for writing a song about a dude who likes to get laid with spooky dames.

Bush plays it with such po-facedness too: the song crawls, shapelessly wandering in various modes of A (switching between major and minor) as Bush croons the lyrics in a warmed over Billie Holiday impression.…

Continue Reading

Oh England My Lionheart
Tour of Life

This essay was brought to you by 17 backers on Patreon. Many thanks to the lovely people who give me some money to read my stuff every month. El’s not the only person who needs a bit of help here. If you’d like to help a low-income queer writer trying to get herself on the ground, please consider backing me. I’m planning Q&A livestreams and essays which will be available exclusively on Patreon. In fact I’m doing a Q&A livestream tomorrow at 2 PM EST, so if you back me now you can tune in and ask me some questions. I’m in a difficult place financially, so any support would mean the world to me. You can find my Patreon here.

It’s difficult to imagine Kate Bush heralding from any place except England. It’s certainly easy to understand why she’s popular in countries outside the U.K., but Bush is a uniquely English phenomenon. She came from pastoral England and often sings about British culture. Her work, especially on Lionheart, is full of allusions to English and Irish folklore, and she’s predominantly influenced by British music (glam rock was also a chiefly UK-locked phenomenon). Unlike most British rock singers, Bush doesn’t shy away from singing in an English accent, as she herself has pointed out. Bush is uniquely hard to categorize as an artist, but she’s consistently staked herself out as an English singer.

Even more than most of her albums, Lionheart is cohesively British. This is reflected by such songs as “In Search of Peter Pan” and “Wow,” both of which pile on staples of British culture, and the album’s title. “Lionheart” is a word mostly associated with England, conjuring up images of Richard the Lionheart and British staunchness. Its connotation is of fearlessness and an endless march, of “God Save the Queen” and Trafalgar. Even the cover of Lionheart suggests frigidity: Kate Bush sits in an attic with gold cloth draped around her, perched on top of a wooden chest, with a stuff lion’s face resting on the floor next to her. There’s a standoffishness to it which the anabatic, orientalist cover of The Kick Inside lacks. The cover suggests that this is a more serious album, one that’s placing itself in a lineage of British stalwarts.

The title track “Oh England My Lionheart” engages with this British tradition. It is a classical song in a fair few regards. Unlike most of Bush’s music, the song is played features acoustic instruments exclusively, including Richard Harvey’s recorder and Francis Monkman’s harpsichord. If reading that you thought “huh, this sounds like a Renaissance song,” you would be correct. Bush described the song as being done “madrigally.” It’s not difficult to imagine “Oh England My Lionheart” being used in a classicist production of Twelfth Night. “Lionheart” sounds like a folk song, with its fixed structure of repeated chords, its descending melody, and its lengthy descriptions of scenery. This isn’t the first time Bush has interacted with folk music, of course.…

Continue Reading

In Search of Peter Pan
Tour of Life

In recent entries, we’ve addressed that Lionheart is a heavily recycled album. Pressed for time to read an album after months of promoting The Kick Inside, Bush did the sane thing and salvaged songs she’d already written. The result is largely to the album’s detriment, with the overall sound being a step backwards from The Kick Inside’s iconoclasm. Yet the overall retro feel makes Lionheart an interesting album in its own right, with a relative lack of confidence which in some ways makes it more compelling than its predecessor. Lionheart retreats often to the recesses of childhood and theater in the face of worldly adult duties. It’s an album constructed from a terror of being thrust onto the world stage and working in narrower confines than one was allowed in adolescence. Worse, it’s being asked to fall back to keep yourself afloat. Imagine if you had to submit your associate’s degree essays for an undergraduate program, and you have something akin to this album.

Resultingly, Lionheart is apprehensive and often lyrically tense. “In Search of Peter Pan,” an odd track loved more by Björk than the general public, is rife with tension. It’s one of the more shapeless songs on Lionheart, starting the verse with a Bushian piano sweep, and moving into a clunky “they took the GAME/right out of it” section underscored by David Paton’s thudding bass, which awkwardly segues into Bush’s ebullient declaration of “I will be/AN ASTRONAUT and find Peter Pan.” It’s an awkward song that consists more of segments of melody than a consistently hummable piece of music. Yet it’s hard to say this isn’t a compelling piece of work. The creeping synthy parts under “she makes me sad” are hair-raising, and Bush’s harmonic vocals on “second star on the right/straight on ‘til morning” are genuinely beautiful. Whatever musical stage “In Search of Peter Pan” places its story on, it’s one with a sense of dramatic juxtaposition, however flawed it is.

Of course we have to talk about the song’s titular character. Peter Pan is effectively popular culture’s favorite anthropomorphization of adolescence. As he will never grow up, he embodies childhood as an endless state which actively revolts against growing up. Given that Bush had been writing fairly adolescent songs not too far back, it’s clear to see why she’d use Pan as a touchstone. Yet her path differs from Pan’s: in the chorus, she declares her desire to grow up and “find Peter Pan” (perhaps as some kind of star sailor) and escape from the trap of adult life. The departure from Peter Pan is that Bush states that she will become an adult instead of just flying to Neverland. Part of being an adult to Bush is being able to enjoy childlike things. More pertinently, as a child you believe you will hold onto childish things forever, and as an adult she holds onto this belief. The culture of children is an important part of Bush’s ethos — it presents an alternative to the tedium of adulthood.…

Continue Reading

Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake (demo)
Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake
Leo Sayer Show
Tour of Life
Xmas special

Following her six months of promotional excursions through Europe, Kate Bush had four weeks to write songs for a new album. This time crunch put great restraint on Bush, and as a result she only wrote three truly brand new songs. Shortly afterwards, Bush spent ten weeks at Superbear Studios in Nice, France, recording her only album to feel like it was made under time constraints. Accordingly, Lionheart is inferior to The Kick Inside: it lacks the “new artist” thrill of that album and the preparedness that is a trademark of Bush’s other albums. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating collection of ten songs in its own right, and deserves more attention than the critical consensus has given to it.

As we’ve mentioned, Lionheart is mostly leftovers, scraps of The Kick Inside and the Phoenix demos reheated in a French studio. Yet for all that gets made of its leftovers status, Lionheart showcases a drastic tonal shift from The Kick Inside. It’s a much queasier album, with less assurance that the power of youth and precociousness will save the day. If The Kick Inside is Bush’s world-conquering single, Lionheart is opening night. It’s an album full of anxiety and stage fright, a fear of being seen and retreating into the dark. Yet it’s also full of compromises, with songs unsure of whether they want to be on The Kick Inside or Lionheart. The ridiculously titled “Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake” is one such song, initially recorded for The Kick Inside and rightfully set aside.

It’s hard to imagine The Kick Inside functioning with “Heartbrake,” which is more blatantly goofy than anything on that album. In the first verse, Bush has a mental breakdown on a motorway expressed through a series of car puns: “breaking down,” “stuck in low gear,” “fears of the skidding wheels.” It’s a vague emotional spiral, construed as a barrage of automotive verbiage. A character called Emma has been left high and dry by someone called Georgie, and responds to this loss by losing her shit on the road. Fittingly enough for this premise, “Heartbrake” is a melodically bizarre machine, moving from a tingling piano-led intro to kookiness, eventually landing on a bawdy, brass-accompanied shoutfest of a chorus (“don’t put your BLUES where your SHOES should be!”). Yet “Heartbrake” is so noisy it obscures whatever point it attempts to make. Additionally, it’s too undisciplined for its volume to even work, becoming white noise rather than grabbing attention with spectacle. The thematic dubiousness of Lionheart extends to the album’s quality, and the it suffers as a result.

Already we have a mediocre song on Lionheart. This isn’t particularly indicative of anything — The Kick Inside works in spite of “Room for the Life.” But Kate Bush recording a song that’s straightforwardly not very good isn’t an especially interesting event in itself. It’s more interesting to ask what Bush fails at.…

Continue Reading

Following the release of The Kick Inside, Kate Bush undertook an astonishingly busy 6-month promotional campaign. In addition to topping charts and appearing on what seemed like every TV program in the UK, Bush did an extensive amount of traveling, visiting West Germany, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, France, the United States, Canada, and Japan. One could unpack any one of these tips individually, but they mostly consist of Bush performing songs from The Kick Inside. As Dreams of Orgonon is a song-by-song blog, we analyze episodes in Kate Bush’s career through the lenses of new songs as they come. Bush’s promotional visit to Japan in June of 1978 not only offers a couple songs we haven’t heard her sing before, even if they are covers, but it gives a chance to see what Kate Bush does when she’s not doing Kate Bush things.

You see, Kate Bush wasn’t in control of her environment. She didn’t have her own band, gigs she planned, and she was undertaking activities she wouldn’t do again until the Eighties and Nineties (we will cover Let It Be on this blog again). But even more paramount to the uniqueness of Bush’s Japan trip is the firsts it uncovers: it is the first time Bush performs to a major audience.

On the 18^th of June, 1978, Kate Bush performed “Moving” to an audience of 11,000 people at the Nippon Budokan for the 7^th Tokyo Music Festival. This is just the number of people watching who were present, however. About 33 million people watched Bush on TV, a staggeringly large number. Japan and its huge physical music market had its eyes on Bush, and she was suitably terrified. For all that the lead track status of “Moving” makes it a fitting opening number for a performance, Bush is visibly terrified while singing this song, her voice wavering as a band she’s never met before coming to Japan played her music.

The entirety of the trip consists of Bush doing not-very-Kate-Bush things, and she’s visibly ill at ease with this. A studio artist with no tour experience was going to be out of sorts performing to thousands of people 9 and a half thousand kilometers away from home. Yet Bush was clearly set on getting as much done in a short period of time as she could. She respected Japanese cultural norms, attending a Shinto shrine and (apparently) conducting herself with characteristic etiquette. Sadly few details about the shrine visit are known, as history has generally not recorded Bush’s time in Japan well.

Bush’s relationship with Japan is slightly vexed. She’s… well, Bush is a bit rough on the issue of cultural appropriation. The cover of The Kick Inside is famously orientalist, and we’ll have lots to talk about when we talk about The Dreaming. Bush certainly has respect for other cultures, but takes the European artist’s path of lifting cultural touchstones rather than delicately conversing with their creators — indeed, she slightly flubs her one English TV interview discussing Japan when she refers to Japanese people as “not saying how they feel.”…

Continue Reading

Strange Phenomena (demo)
Strange Phenomena
Efteling
Hammersmith Odeon

In “Strange Phenomena,” we have another statement of intent from Kate Bush. Unlike most of Bush’s songs, it’s a purely conceptual rather than narrative work. “Strange Phenomena” is populated by the esoteric and the inconclusive, dwelling in the liminal spaces of everyday life and exploring its unexplained coincidences. It nods to the physical and the supernatural in equal turn, suggesting the two aren’t separate entities but different compartments of life, in league with one another, conspiring to make life exciting. In short, it’s everything The Kick Inside takes stock in and values.

“Strange Phenomena” famously begins with an arpeggiating (A/F) ode to menstruation, “the phase of the moon when people tune in.” In her typical fashion, Kate Bush refers to menstruation as “the punctual blues,” suggesting both a musical quality and a natural rhythm to this particular bodily function (she also refers to it as something “every girl” knows about, but in her defense trans issues were not a topic of national conversation in 1978). Throughout The Kick Inside, Bush has made a case that all functions of the body are a thing of beauty, whether those be love-making or flying. With the opening of “Strange Phenomena,” Bush has extended her invitation of bodily functions into the fold beyond the pleasurable or fanciful and to parts of life women and other menstruating individuals aren’t encouraged to discuss in everyday life. Even more intriguing is how Bush frames menstruation as an almost musical act. In addition to her quasi-musical coinage of “the punctual blues,” she calls a period the phase “where people tune in.” To be sure, menstruating a subject people discuss in private, bringing discomfort to cisgender women and often triggering severe bouts of dysphoria in transgender men. It’s an aspect of life that unites lots of people in their unease by widespread patterns and, more importantly, rhythms of nature. Bush dignifies menstruating by making it a musical process. If there’s a central idea to The Kick Inside, it’s that everything is music.

This exercise of defining musicality as a unifying force isn’t confined to physical planes in “Strange Phenomena.” Bush described the song as being “about the coincidences that happen to all of us all of the time. We can all recall instances when we have been thinking about a particular person and then have met a friend who — totally unprompted — will begin talking about that person.” She more or less paraphrases this in the song, referring to “a day of coincidence with the radio.” Texts are a source of coincidence as well, such as when “you pick up a paper/you read a name/you go out/it turns up again and again.” There’s a sense Bush is being haunted by text, that the spoken word will accompany her wherever she goes. This is where Bush differs most radically from, say, Burroughs or Foucault, in that this constant presence of language and strangeness is a comfort to her, something to tip her hat to.…

Continue Reading

Feel It
Tour of Life (Stockholm)
Tour of Life (London)

Out of the 13 songs on The Kick Inside, 12 are fairly maximalist in their productions, sporting a few musicians on each track. Even the quieter piano ballads like “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” and “The Kick Inside” are accompanied by orchestras. The result is an album that, while not necessarily carried by its production, measures itself by a standard of heavily produced and instrumentation-based albums.

It’s long been remarked that Kate Bush’s primary instrument is her voice. Even when her melodies are idiosyncratic and sprawling and her albums’ productions demand an audience’s ear, listeners always talk about her voice first. Even an instrumental track like “Night Scented Stock” is guided by Bush’s vocals. Her most recent collection of new songs, 50 Words for Snow, takes a back-to-basics approach of voice-and-piano that Bush started her career with. While the Fairlight will guide Bush towards her best work, there’s hardly a more powerful duo in popular music than Bush and her piano.

“Feel It” is an exceedingly intimate affair, the only song on The Kick Inside to have no session musicians. It’s Bush alone at her piano, saying “no props this time, just hear me play.” “Feel It” is one of the more realist tracks on the album — rather than teaming with mysticism or high concepts, it has a fairly common down-to-earth situation: a one-night stand between two people who don’t know each other very well. “Well, it could be love/or it could be just lust/but it will be fun/it will be wonderful,” sings Bush. It’s a song of pure hedonism, consequence-free and absorbed in the moment.

Notable is how “Feel It” takes The Kick Inside’s approach of youthful attitudes to adult subjects to its zenith. Its tone is secretive, subtextually whispering “be quiet — this is a sacred moment.” It’s relatively low tempo, with the piano guiding the song in a lugubrious, creeping G minor (with unexpected appearances of F minor and B diminished), almost laughing anxiously with an upward turn on “a little nervous laughter.” To hear a young female British singer to sing so frankly about matters like this in the Seventies must have been astonishing at the time. There’s a sense Bush is as nervous as she is giddy to be writing a song like this and putting it out on a major label.

As Zoey Peresman points out, “[Bush] stretches out the word ‘more’ with her inimitable voice for as long as she can, mimicking the sound of a woman in ecstasy.” Bush stresses the sexual nature of the song, punctuating the calls of “feel it” with sharp “ohs,” making it clear how far she’s taking this exercise.

For a Seventies song about love-making, “Feel It” is unusually explicit. Bush equates sex with music, using phrases like “synchronizing rhythm” and “keep on a-tunin’ in.” She marries her skill at crafting melodies to her love of the sensuous with remarkable ease, but adds an extra factor to the mix: bluntness.…

Continue Reading