FEATURE:
Mustn't Give the Game Away
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the There Goes a Tenner video/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Henry
Kate Bush’s There Goes a Tenner at Forty-Three
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I am going to start out…
by quoting some interviews snippets I have sourced before. Relating to Kate Bush’s There Goes a Tenner. Included on her fourth studio album, The Dreaming, it was released as a single on 2nd November, 1982. On the same day, Suspended in Gaffa was released as a single in continental Europe and Australia. There Goes a Tenner was the U.K. and Ireland release. Perhaps the oddest single release day in Kate Bush’s career, one would have though Suspended in Gaffa would have made a more successful U.K. single. Maybe There Goes a Tenner could have been released more widely. Even though it only reached ninety-three in the U.K. and was her worst-performing single to that point, I really like There Goes a Tenner and feel it should be talked about. I am going to start with those interviews with Kate Bush:
“It’s about amateur robbers who have only done small things, and this is quite a big robbery that they’ve been planning for months, and when it actually starts happening, they start freaking out. They’re really scared, and they’re so aware of the fact that something could go wrong that they just freaked out, and paranoid and want to go home. (…) It’s sort of all the films I’ve seen with robberies in, the crooks have always been incredibly in control and calm, and I always thought that if I ever did a robbery, I’d be really scared, you know, I’d be really worried. So I thought I’m sure that’s a much more human point of view.
The Dreaming interview, CBAK 4011 CD
That was written on the piano. I had an idea for the tune and just knocked out the chords for the first verse. The words and everything just came together. It was quite a struggle from there on to try to keep things together. The lyrics are quite difficult on that one, because there are a lot of words in quite a short space of time. They had to be phrased right and everything. That was very difficult. Actually the writing went hand-in-hand with the CS-80.
John Diliberto, Interview. Keyboard/Totally Wired/Songwriter (USA), 1985”.
The reviews for the single were not that kind at all. A mix f bafflement and disappointment. Record Mirror’s Jim Reid wrote this in November 1982: “Blackheath beauty goes all cooey cockney-gasp in a bouncy tale of the downfall of Thatcherism and the rise of mass working class solidarity… actually it’s more trivial than that”. There Goes a Tenner is fascinating. Maybe a political song against high taxation and the British government, the song contains some of Kate Bush’s best and most unusual lyrics: “I hope you remember/To treat the gelignite tenderly for me/I’m having dreams about things/Not going right/Let’s leave in plenty of time tonight/Both my partners/Act like actors:/You are Bogart/He is George Raft/That leaves Cagney and me”. In terms of the musicians who feature on the song, it is quite basic and streamlined: drums: Stuart Elliott; bass: Del Palmer; synclavier: Dave Lawson; piano, Fairlight CMI, CS80: Kate Bush. Del Palmer features in the video as the getaway driver. I have a lot of time for There Goes a Tenner, even if most people do not. Maybe an unusual and flawed choice for a single, I think there is more depth and potential in this song than it is given credit for. Though Dreams of Orgonon highlight flaws with the song, they do write about some of the more interesting aspects of There Goes a Tenner. Even though Kate Bush revealed no political motivation in the song, you can read between the lines and see it is taking aim at Margaret Thatcher and the government in 1982. A time of austerity and hardship for many working-class people in the U.K., There Goes a Tenner reacts to this, albeit through the lens of something more playful and apolitical:
“Fundamentally, “There Goes a Tenner” channels the heist movie through a children’s panto. It treats poverty and crime with the tropes and language available to Bush through English popular culture. “Ooh, there’s a tenner/hey look, there’s a fiver” interpolates British currency onto the trope of money exploding in the middle of a robbery, as seen in such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There are some hat tips to old gangster films, like when Bush observes her partners’ conduct in the middle of their robbery: “both my partners/act like actors/you are Bogart/he is George Raft/that leaves Cagney and me.” Clumsy, to be sure, but distinct in its aesthetics, and in a better song, Bush’s dive into British class politics with crime film tropes might be enlightening.
There’s something more going on here though. Bush asserted that her robbers were incompetents with limited experience: “It’s about amateur robbers who have only done small things, and this is quite a big robbery that they’ve been planning for months, and when it actually starts happening, they start freaking out.” She goes on to cite Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as an example of hypercompetence in cinematic criminals, objecting to the composure of the genre’s heroes, observing “the crooks have always been incredibly in control and calm, and I always thought that if I ever did a robbery, I’d be really scared.”
Certainly the heist genre is populated by “chill” paragons of masculinity. It’s how you get lead actors like Paul Newman, Al Pacino, or George Clooney as top notch criminals. The genre offers the pleasures of breaking with the decorum of civil society while still keeping a layer of masculine authority in the mix, and its films tend to conclude with major punitive measures for the culprits (see Bonnie & Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, etc).
Bush’s resulting bemusement at this is almost quaintly middle-class. “But don’t people who’ve robbed hundreds of banks get scared when they rob a bank” is the sort of question your childhood friend who’s horrified by shoplifting would pose. The pantheon of confident men in her early work is broadly absent from The Dreaming, which abounds with self-destructive masculinity. Moving beyond the bourgeois fantasy of domestic bliss between a man and a woman shakes up Bush’s faith in men. Femininity and masculinity become fluctuant, throttled by patriarchy, colonialism, trauma, and poverty. Bush could feasibly be writing a character of any gender here, but to have a woman’s voice leading the charge and vocalizing the anxiety that might pervade a robbery is canny.
For its vexed class dynamics, “There Goes a Tenner” does acknowledge poverty as a motivation for its characters. “Pockets floating in the breeze” indicates impoverishment, and the final line of the song “there’s a ten-shilling note/remember them?/that’s when we used to vote for him” is a weirdly subtle political critique for “Tenner.” When the single dropped in 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government was enjoying a 51% approval rating in the wake of the Falklands War and Thatcher’s craven sinking of the retreating Argentinian battleship the ARA General Belgrano, killing 323 people. By the 22nd of September, 9 days after the release of The Dreaming, 14% of the United Kingdom’s workforce was reported to be unemployed. As the Tory government waged a war on inflation in its slow establishment of neoliberalism, it caused a glut of unemployment that lost 1,500,000 people their jobs. “When we used to vote for him” is an odd phrase — but clearly the robbers have turned to crime because alternatives are unavailable (one merely has to point out that poverty is a major contributor to crime)”.
The single has never really had a kind write-up or much said about it. I mark its anniversary every year, and though I have to include a lot of the same information, it is important to talk about this song. There Goes a Tenner is still a brilliant song from one of Kate Bush’s best albums. One really not designed with singles in mind. Rather than seeing There Goes a Tenner as a singles disaster and signs of a decline, it is one of ten gems that forms her amazing fourth studio album. Rather than it being a failure or minor song, There Goes a Tenner is…
FAR better than that.