FEATURE:
In My Garden
IN THIS PHOTO: A young Kate Bush/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, Cathy)
Home and Hearth: Early Influences on Kate Bush
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AS I (and many others) imagine whether we…
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, Cathy)
will ever see another Kate Bush photograph book in the world, I have been thinking about John Carder Bush’s Cathy. Here are some more details:
“First published as a run of just 500 copies in 1986, Cathy is a collection of photographs by John Carder Bush of his sister Kate as a young girl, with accompanying text. This new edition—the first printing since the original edition—includes a new introduction by John Carder Bush, illustrated with eight previously unpublished photographs. A beautifully bound hardback with a linen cover, head and tail bands, and a matching linen slipcase, Cathy is comprised of 28 cut out pages featuring the text, with full-page photographs revealed on a separate page beneath. The design matches the original limited run in layout, including the original introduction as well”.
One can buy a copy of that book and, whilst it is expensive, it does provide an intimate and vivid look into the early life of Kate Bush by her brother. I will come on to look at the art, music and inspiration Bush was surrounded by in her childhood home (and school to an extent), as I have not really looked back at Kate Bush pre-The Kick Inside (her debut album of 1978). When it comes to a lot of great artists, we do not really have access to photos of them when they were very young and really falling in love with music and the world around them. I guess it helped having a photographer brother, so we can get a photographic representation of Cathy blossoming into this fantastic artist.
I want to cover a small window of her childhood where she was in a family home and the earliest musical seeds were being planted. There aren’t interviews with Kate Bush really before 1978, so these photographs are invaluable and give us a great impression of a curious and shy girl who was absorbing so much around her and, even as a child, possessed this unnatural ability and prolific intent! I am going to be referring from the 2015 book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow. It is a great book I would urge any Kate Bush fan to own:
“KATE: Inside the Rainbow is a collection of beautiful images from throughout Kate Bush’s career, taken by her brother, the photographer and writer John Carder Bush. It includes outtakes from classic album shoots and never-before-seen photographs from sessions including The Dreaming and Hounds of Love, as well as rare candid studio shots and behind-the-scenes stills from video sets, including ‘Army Dreamers’ and ‘Running Up that Hill’.
These stunning images will be accompanied by two new essays by John Carder Bush: From Cathy to Kate, describing in vibrant detail their shared childhood and the early, whirlwind days of Kate’s career, and Chasing the Shot, which vividly evokes John’s experience of photographing his sister”.
There are interviews where Bush looked back at her upbringing and family home, but I am going to start off by quoting from John Carder Bush’s 2015 update and expansion of the Cathy book. KATE: Inside the Rainbow has over 250 rare photos in black-and-white and colour that were taken between 1964 (when she was five/six) and 2011 – when her current studio album, 50 Words for Snow, was released.
Like any songwriter, those very early years are as influential and formative as any. I think the music and culture we are surrounded by as children moulds and directs us. Carder Bush was involved with his sister (in a creative manner) for twenty years, and, as he puts it in his book, he was “surrounded by a pulsating system of remarkable creativity – it actually felt like I was living life from inside such a phenomenon: from inside a vibrant shimmering rainbow, where reality juxtaposed seamlessly with intense creativity to conjure something enigmatic and intangible that has always embraced my sister and her music”. Although she was born in Bexleyheath in 1958, the Bush family lived in a farmhouse in East Whickham – an urban village in Welling, London (Welling is located in the London Borough of Bexley, although it does share the Kent postcode prefix of DA16). Her father, Robert, was a doctor, and her mother, Hannah, was an Irish staff nurse; daughter of a farmer in County Waterford. Surrounded by a loving family including her older brothers John (or ‘Jay’) and Paddy, Bush came from an artistic background: her mother was an amateur traditional Irish dancer, her father was an amateur pianist Paddy worked as a musical instrument maker, and John was also a poet and photographer. Both brothers were involved in the local Folk music scene. Although she wasn’t necessarily a veracious reader, Bush would have been influenced by literature and poetry from a young age. Celtic and Folk music was in her bloodstream very early, and the idyllic surroundings of the farm provided perfect tonic and elixir for someone who was clearly instilled with a love of music and the arts from a very young age.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow)
I think one of the reasons Bush’s music is infected by and infused with elements of dance, literature, and cinema is because of her childhood years and the way the arts was introduced into her life very young - and it became such an important element of her daily life. Carder Bush, in KATE: Inside the Rainbow, recounts how he kept journals and can remember how (for his sister) “1973 and 1974 were very intensive creative years, with often a couple of new songs a week”. Bush would have been fifteen by that point, and I am going to go back further a bit later when I reference Graeme Thomson’s biography, Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush. Through Kate Bush’s infancy, the house was awash with the Irish singing of her mother. As Hannah Bush grew up in the rural South of Ireland, family holidays were taken in Ireland, and the vivid and colourful landscape was at odds with the somewhat greyer and more modest greenery of rainy England. That experience of holidaying among such evocative countryside had a very direct and powerful impact on young Kate/Cathy. As Carder Bush remarks: “Most of our uncles played an instrument, and our mother’s family all loved dancing, both traditional and ballroom”. Sequestered in a slice of paradise in Welling, although the urban expanse had increased in the 1950s and 1960s, there was something pleasingly traditional about the Bush household.
With the music, dance and words of the Irish connecting to the young Bush through her mother and her side, coupled with the piano and Methodist hymns from her father, it must have been quite strange for Bush to enter quite an orthodox school in England! I want to discuss her brother Paddy and his musical influence, in addition to Bush’s school life and her fascination with poetry. Whilst quite a disparate and eclectic cocktail of English and Irish poetry, music and religion might have been quite confusing and strange for a child, it seemed to provide a warm cocoon for Kate Bush – as John Carder Bush attests to in his book. In conjunction with music and literature came film and T.V. I am not sure how many families had access to T.V. in the 1950s and 1960s – Bush’s family were comfortably middle-class, though she was never spoiled -, but the young Bush was often found sitting in front of the T.V. watching the Saturday night film on BBC 2. I have explored how influential film was to Bush in terms of her songwriting and original tangent, and how many of her songs are rich with images and elements of classic T.V. and film – her debut single, Wuthering Heights, was written after Bush saw a T.V. adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel of the same name. Cathy/Kate was meant to practice violin – something she did but never really enjoyed -, but, instead, she began playing the piano.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow)
The piano was in the room where she was meant to play violin, and that piano was given to Bush’s father by his piano teacher. Bush would embrace Irish music and her mother’s side through her career – one can hear elements through many of her albums from 1980’s Never for Ever onwards -, but the violin was a pathway into the piano and, on this instrument, Bush enjoyed her first crush and most passionate relationship. Her brother, Paddy, was also very music (he appeared on many of her albums), and they both had a great and easy aptitude for piano – perhaps more influenced by their father than their mother. So many iconic songwriters started out listening to commercial artists or being influenced by what they heard on the radio; they would go on to develop their own style later and evolve through time. Kate Bush definitely loved more conventional music – from Steely Dan and Captain Beefheart through to Elton John and Roy Harper -, but her earliest songs were provoked by things and events around her; anything that really moved her – from pets and animals through to imaginary love. As a child prodigy became more prolific, none of the family realistically felt that this would lead into a music career but, as John Carder Bush remarks in KATE: Inside the Rainbow: “We all became aware of something unexpected emerging; the flower left to grow in its own safe surroundings was blossoming in an exotic and unique way, like a rare orchid among daffodils”.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow)
That is a beautiful and apt description of his sister’s clear talent, and the photos John Carder Bush took in those very early years shows Kate at the piano in her elements, frolicking in the splendour and grace of her family’s garden, or looking thoughtful and pensive beneath a tree. One interesting observation (made by Carder Bush) is that Kate Bush’s generation was the first who were not pressured by their parents or expected to follow in their footsteps. Bush could have become a doctor or a nurse – as she was extremely academic and could have gone to university -, but she was gently encouraged to go into music, as her father especially could see that she possessed unflinching and fascinating ability. Although he was proud of his daughter, there was a fear of future instability: the perception that she would become a wandering musician and pursue creativity and success with very little financial stability and career to fall back on. This sort of fear exists in the minds of parents today, and it wasn’t until Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour heard a demo tape from Bush and took an interest in her that the fear subsided. In 1975, Bush recorded both The Man with the Child in His Eyes, and The Saxophone Song – they would appear on The Kick Inside three years later. Not only was music and art an important factor in the Bush household but, curiously, karate was prevalent!
IMAGE CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Everyone, apart from their mother, practiced karate, and Kate Bush trained with her brother, John, for two years – she took two examinations in the Shotokan style. I think the exposure to karate and this form of movement not only fed into her songwriting later on, but it coupled alongside her attraction to dance. Bush trained with and was a fan of the late Lindsay Kemp – whose incredible production, Flowers, resonated and deeply affected her -, and the marriage of movement, song and literature – alongside film and T.V. -, all went into Kate Bush’s wild and wonderful musical brew! Karate is about defence and attack and, whilst Bush studied it, she substituted for a form of expression more about beauty and protection; something less offensive and confrontational – which is where mime, dance and Lindsay Kemp played an important role. During a time when music was making its way into every household and car, the young Kate Bush was experiencing so many different sounds that her parents would not have had access to in their youth. Her brother, Paddy, brought her examples of World music and unusual sounds; this continued through her entire career, and I think it is as important to her originality and success as anything. Whilst myriad sounds and musical sources provided direction for Bush, it would have been quite overwhelming too. I often wonder whether Bush’s love of nature and birdsong is intended as an escape from the noise and assault of the media…and the endless stream of music.
Kate Bush, appropriately, arrived in music like a rare and magical bird, pure of song and spirit in a music scene enveloped in noise and generic clatter. That sounds rude to her peers, but Wuthering Heights seems like it arrived from a different world and time period; hardly typical of what was absorbed and popular in 1978! I want to shift from the Bush household to the school environment in a moment but, in KATE: Inside the Rainbow, there is a passage that made me stop dead. As John Carder Bush notes: “When I was sixteen, our father’s father, our English grandfather, told me the story of his adolescence”. Because of his religious convictions, he was designated as a conscientious objector when World War I broke out in 1914. Conscription did not come in until 1916, so there was no choice but to enrol; his grandfather went on the run. He was caught and put before a military tribunal. Alongside eleven other ‘conchies’, they were sentenced to death before a firing quad unless they enlisted to go to war. “Six took the opportunity of saving their lives” whereas the remaining six were sent before the firing squad; they were given the chance (again) to go to war, and three more took that option. Three were left, including Carder Bush’s grandfather, and the riffles were cocked and ready to fire…but it was all a ruse!
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow)
Rather than execution, he was sent to prison for the rest of the war. That self-belief and determination not to kill another human was an unpopular one at a time when Britain needed to recruit soldiers. Maybe not as dramatic, John Carder Bush equates that story with his sister determined to follow her instincts and enter an industry by herself. Not only was she influenced by her brothers and her parents, but her grandfather too! The inter-generational and multifarious influences all seeped into her bones and soul, and the girl who wrote from a very young age and was playing her creations to family members and friends was now embarking on a very challenging and frightening move into professional music! As Graeme Thomson writes in his excellent book, Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, Bush’s background and family home was important regarding her decision to go into music, but there was this niggling that, as she was from a stable home and had not suffered for her art, then that this somewhat invalidated her career choice. I think there is this perception that great art comes from sadness and struggle but, as Bush dispelled in future interviews, one does not need to be unhappy to create great music. Her parents were from “unshowy country stock”, and one cannot accuse Bush of being spoiled. The shift from Catherine to Kate occurred after she left school, but those school years are important – which I shall get to in a second. Bush and her family would holiday in countries like New Zealand (where they would visit members of Bush’s mother’s family), and this infant exposure to different nations and cultures would have been instrumental.
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow)
Thomson argues that, rather than wealth and opportunity being the most important reason why Bush stepped into music, it was the artistic environment and bohemian atmosphere of her household that was the biggest factor. Indeed, many of Bush’s school friends remarked how her father, Dr. Bush, took surgery in a flowered smock; the family house had a Victorian ghost exorcised when it became too intrusive, and there was this eccentric nature to the home which, inevitably, explains why Bush’s music has always been imbued with a slightly more unusual edge! Whilst the young Bush loved and followed Roxy Music, Marc Bolan, and Simon & Garfunkel (the first album she owned/loved was their Bridge Over Troubled Water album), there was not a lot of traditional Pop music in the house – Bush didn’t get into The Beatles until the Seventies (and later explained how Magical Mystery Tour was her favourite album of theirs). Whilst Paddy played concertina for the English Morris Dancers, and the pure narrative of Irish music was a common sound, those wondering why Bush’s arrival into music was so unconventional-sounding and unorthodox should look at her childhood and upbringing – the Kate Bush we know and love would not exist were it not for her family and the sounds of East Wickham Farm! Through her brothers, Bush was exposed to a lot of English Folk music, which was often gritter than Irish Folk – tales of murder, incest and ghouls ran deep! Bush, as Thomson notes, cannot be categorised as a Folk artist, but its impact “runs deep in her writing”. John Carder Bush, whilst a huge fan of music, became a sort of tutor to his sister and opened her eyes to poetry and deeper ideas.
Jay/John was an accomplished poet, and some of his more illicit and explicit work was shown to his sister. He showed her “how explicit desire was a legitimate artistic endeavour”. Bush wrote her own poetry similar in tone to that of her brother’s and, whist a little sloppy, she would become more refined later. Listen to songs on her debut album, The Kick Inside, where she talks of love and lust in such a direct and bold manner, and one can link that back to her connection with poetry and her brother’s influence. The Bush household was unencumbered and unabashed, and there would have been no taboo when it came to sex and desire. Whilst Paddy Bush brought to his sister so many weird and wonderful recordings that spiked her mind, Jay’s intellectual curiosity and ferocity rubbed off on his sister; she especially loved G.I. Gurdjueff (a Greek-American spiritual leader who died in 1949), and mentioned him on her debut album and in several interviews. Her older brothers’ passions definitely shaped her but, like all great artists, the young Kate Bush pursued her own outside interests. From books – by Kurt Vonnegut to Oscar Wilde -, to Billie Holiday and T.V./film, everything became food for thought. Thomson also notes how there is this misconception that Bush’s music is high-concept and all about philosophy and high-minded ideas where, in actuality, there is silliness, fantasy and humour.
IN THIS PHOTO: A young and mirror-side Kate Bush/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, Cathy)
Track backwards and sideways to Bush’s school years and, whilst it was an unhappy environment (she could not wait to leave), her time at St Joseph’s Convent Preparatory School and St Joseph’s Convent Grammar definitely left their mark. Though her school friends paint her as a shy and extremely nice person, I am intrigued by St Joseph’s and the blend of the ordered and strict. Run by runs – always a horrifying image and sentence! -, everything was kept very beautiful and neat; there was a gardener, and the surroundings were beautiful. It was a school for middle-class children and it prepared these young women for excellence. The nuns, it seems, were proto-feminists and any discipline that took place was self-regulated – there were no canings or anything of that manner! Rather than girls being fearful of a lashing or some form of physical rebuke, there was a sense of disappointment if the pupils did not perform at their highest level. That ethos of performing to your very best standard definitely motivated Bush, and it stuck with her through her career. One can imagine that it was frustrating for Bush to be surrounded by girls with very little male contact, given her fascination with the masculine. Perhaps that stems from her childhood home and the influence of her father and brothers; school was a sharp contrast to life at home.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on holiday in Kent in 1972/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow)
One of the positive aspects of school was the fact that music was a part of the curriculum. I have already mentioned the prolificacy of music in the Bush household, but every pupil at St Joseph’s had to learn an instrument. I think the importance of school on Bush was less about absorption and obedience and more about a sense of defiance. By that, music was taught rather rigidly and there was little in the way of flexibility and excitement in the curriculum. This was at odds with the freer and thrilling energy of home, so I can understand why Bush did not enjoy school a whole lot. Despite her English classes being too regimented and structured to offer any stimulation or interest, Bush did start to blur the lines between home and school. Friends would come home to the farm, and it was a very different atmosphere to St Joseph’s. A more open and far less disciplined space, there were parties, seances, smoking and singing! Bush was probably the most introverted of her friend circle, and I think being around more extroverted characters was important; the very shy Kate Bush definitely started to come out of herself, though she would remain quite private and shy for much of her young and adult life. If her English classes were quite dull and rigid, many noticed Bush excel as a poet and writer whilst at school.
IN THIS PHOTO: Paddy and Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from his book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow)
As Graeme Thomson writes: “Between Form I and III she had several poems published in the school magazine”. This magazine was a rare chance for Bush to express herself in a manner she would not have been afforded in English classes. She was just eleven when her first poem was published, and there was a mix of more introspective pieces and poems that related to death and religion – nothing too unusual for a teen in the Seventies (or any time). Thomson describes those early poems as the “first tangible public evidence of the overpowering excess of emotions that, hidden away, characterised her private childhood…”. A lot of her earliest poems had a definite fixation on death, and it is clear that Jay’s influence was there. Even though Bush would strengthen as a poet and writer in years to come, it is evident from her very first works that she had a great grasp on form and language; a definite confidence of voice. One can see a continuation of the themes in her poems in some of the earliest tracks that would appear on The Kick Inside. I am interested in the demos that Bush recorded in 1972 and 1973 – she would have been around fourteen or fifteen when these songs were put to tape. Many of the songs on these demo tapes would have been considered for inclusion on The Kick Inside, but most of the recordings have never been officially released.
I want to bring in an article from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia concerning some early demos, and how Bush went from those similar songs to recording her first professional cuts in 1975:
“In 1972 and 1973 Kate recorded several tapes of songs. Reports vary about the amount of songs that were recorded, but there must have been dozens. 20 to 30 of these songs were presented via Kate's brother John Carder Bush's friend Ricky Hopper, first without success to record companies. Ricky Hopper then presented the songs to David Gilmour. Gilmour noticed her talent, but also the bad tape recorder quality. This led to one or more recording sessions with David Gilmour present, but with a better recorder. According to Kate: "Absolutely terrified and trembling like a leaf, I sat down and played for him."
At Gilmour's insistance, another recording session took place in the summer of 1973, at Gilmour's farm with two band members from Unicorn: drummer Peter Perrier and bassist Pat Martin, and Dave Gilmour on electric guitar. According to Gilmour, ca. 10-20 songs were recorded. This tape definitely made it to EMI Records. One of the songs recorded during this session was Passing Through Air, which ended up on the B-side of the single Army Dreamers in 1980.
Then, in June 1975, David Gilmour booked a professional studio (AIR London), brought Andrew Powell to arrange and produce the songs and hired top musicians to back Kate. They recorded The Man With The Child In His Eyes, Saxophone Song and Maybe. This tape finally was Kate's breakthrough at EMI. The first two songs from this session appeared on The Kick Inside. With the three demo songs in hand, a recording deal is much discussed between Kate, her family, Gilmour and EMI. In July 1976 it finally comes together: Kate gets £3000 from EMI Records and a further £500 to finance her for a year of personal en professional development”.
I have talked a lot about how there was positive family influence but, when talking about Bush’s school life, there was a lonelier side. Maybe not overly-impactful when it comes to her music and creative drive, I think it warrants mention though. I want to quote from an article from 2017 relating to an article Bush wrote for a magazine called FlexiPop! It makes for quite sobering reading:
“I was too shy to be a hooligan but inside I had many hooligan instincts,” wrote Ms Bush in Testament of Youth, an article published in 1982 by Flexipop!, a short-lived pop magazine.
Reprinted in a new book detailing the history of the cult magazine, which featured a flexi-disc by a leading pop act on each cover, the Bush article pulls no punches about her troubled childhood.
“I became very shy at school,” wrote Ms Bush, who attended St Joseph’s Convent Grammar School in Bexley, south-east London. “There were people who picked on me and gave me a very hard time. It was a very cruel environment and I was a loner,” said the singer, who would “get hit occasionally.”
“My friends used to play this game whereby they’d ‘send you to Coventry.’ My friends sometimes used to ignore me completely and that would really upset me badly.
“I still tend to be vulnerable, but I’m much better at fighting back if people are nasty to me today.”
The aspiring performer was writing songs at the age of 10 but didn’t tell anyone at school “because I feared it would alienate me even more.”
Describing her life as a teenager as “interesting and difficult”, Ms Bush, then 24, concluded: “I was very lonely. And even after I left school there were times when the loneliness became desperate.”
In her article, Ms Bush said she found the idea of school “exciting” because she “liked the idea of wearing a uniform.” An extrovert as a young girl, she became “very self-conscious” and stopped dancing to music.
“I found it very frustrating being treated like a child when I wasn’t thinking like a child,” said the singer who “felt I was being patronised, right through the until I was 18 or 19. From the age of 10 I felt old.” Her adolescent struggle was “important because it stirred up all sorts of things in me” which shaped her persona as a musician.
One of the reasons why I want to see/hear a new Kate Bush documentary and see her demo recordings released officially is because that pre-debut album period is fascinating and instrumental! I am intrigued by her childhood and the impact her family had on her music - and it is great that we have books like KATE: Inside the Rainbow to provide a literal look at her childhood home and the very young Kate Bush. It is interesting looking back at the pre-teen/teen Kate Bush and those promising beginnings and the music/art she was exposed to. Who would have known, back in the 1960s and early-1970s, that she would grow into the…
PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn
LEGEND that she is today!