FEATURE:
“Mother, Where Are the Angels?”
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with her mother, Hannah, in the video for Suspended in Gaffa (a single taken from Kate Bush’s 1982 studio album, The Dreaming)
Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa at Forty-Three
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WHEN I normally…
mark the anniversary of this Kate Bush song, I also write about There Goes a Tenner. Both singles were released on 2nd November, 1982. They were included on her fourth studio album, The Dreaming. There Goes a Tenner was released in the U.K. and Ireland only. Another single, Night of the Swallow, was a later release that only came out in Ireland. The Dreaming had an odd single release schedule. I agree that maybe four or five should have been released, though considering she could have put out Houdini and Get Out of My House, you wonder whether it was the wisest decision to release The Dreaming and There Goes a Tenner as singles. I love both of these songs, though I feel the music videos of Houdini and Get Out of My House would have been more powerful and could have resulted in top twenty placings for both songs. The first single, The Dreaming, got into the top twenty – that was as good as it got. One of the poorest-selling singles albums, it was hard to market in that way. Bush was not looking to write singles, so it was not surprising that the chart positions were quite low. This was not the only time that Kate Bush released two singles on the same day…or close to it. For The Red Shoes, Eat the Music and Rubberband Girl came out within a day of each other in 1993. The former was released in the U.S., whilst Rubberband Girl was released everywhere else in the world. Circling back to The Dreaming and its second single that came out on 2nd November, 1982. Suspended in Gaffa was only released in continental Europe and Australia. I am not sure why it was released there. You would think The Dreaming and its Australian connections would be released only there. Suspended in Gaffa warranted a more widespread release! It reached the top fifty in a few European countries – including number thirty-three in France -, but was a very minor success.
It is a shame, as this is one of Kate Bush’s best songs. Many highlight Night of the Swallow as one of these gems that is rarely talked about. But it is a masterpiece. The same could be said of Suspended in Gaffa. In an album with quite a few intense and darker songs, Suspended in Gaffa has this spright and energetic bounce that is at odds with more propulsive and heavier songs such as Pull Out the Pin and Get Out of My House. I want to start off by coming back to a source I included in my most recent feature of Suspended in Gaffa (and There Goes a Tenner). It is interesting that Suspended in Gaffa has been covered quite a few times; by pretty obscure artists for the most part. It was also performed three time for T.V. Kate Bush mimed each time. She performed it live in October 1982 for Houba Houba (France); 2nd November, 1982 for Bananas (Germany), and 30th December, 1982 on Champs Elysées (France). The inspiration behind the song is interesting, as we see in this Kate Bush Encyclopedia feature:
“Suspended In Gaffa’ is, I suppose, similar in some ways to ‘Sat In Your Lap’ – the idea of someone seeking something, wanting something. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and had the imagery of purgatory and of the idea that when you were taken there that you would be given a glimpse of God and then you wouldn’t see him again until you were let into heaven. And we were told that in Hell it was even worse because you got to see God but then you knew that you would never see him again. And it’s sorta using that as the parallel. And the idea of seeing something incredibly beautiful, having a religious experience as such, but not being able to get back there. And it was playing musically with the idea of the verses being sorta real time and someone happily jumping through life [Makes happy motion with head] and then you hit the chorus and it like everything sorta goes into slow mo and they’re reaching [Makes slow reaching motion with arm] for that thing that they want and they can’t get there. [Laughs]
I am going to concentrate on the lyrics of the song to end. However, to start out, I am coming back to a Dreams of Orgonon article for Suspended in Gaffa and highlight a few observations and insights that they make about the track. I think this is one of the most underrated songs of Kate Bush’s career. A single that deserved wider distribution and more love on the charts:
“It has the same expansive and consumptive obsessions as its sister songs — youthful aporia, an obsession with an unreachable god, a desire to unite with the subconscious. Yet it filters this through a childlike, somewhat Carrollian filter, with a surfeit of internal rhymes, abstract nouns, and ambiguous pronouns like “out in the garden/there’s half of a heaven/and we’re only bluffing,” “I try to get nearer/but as it gets clearer/there’s something appears in the way,” “I pull out the plank and say/thankee for yanking me back/to the fact that there’s always something to distract.”
The lyric is an endless series of prevarications, often relating to knowledge, or the unattainability of it (see “Sat in Your Lap”). The refrain’s “not till I’m ready for you,” “can I have it all now?/we can’t have it all,” “but they’ve told us/unless we can prove that we’re doing it/we can’t have it all” speak to an “all or nothing” approach, not identifying exactly what’s at stake so much as its urgency. Desire gets codified as an end in itself, often for a god (“I caught a glimpse of a god/all shining and bright”) — “until I’m ready for you” gives away the game (constructive spiritual union with a deity is impossible if one is unready to consent). “The idea of the song is that of being given a glimpse of ‘God’ — something that we dearly want — but being told that unless we work for it, we will never see it again, and even then, we might not be worthy of it,” Bush explained to her fan club. Tapping into the subconscious is a difficulty — when one has a glimpse of something wondrous, there’s a desperation to retrieve the feelings associated with it. “Everything or nothing” can be a neurodivergent impulse, but it’s also how a taste of the sublime works.
The nature of aporia in “Suspended in Gaffa” is cinematic. There’s the title, obviously, referring to the line “am I suspended in gaffa?,” itself a reference to gaffer (or “gaffa”) tape, which is commonly used in film and stage productions. The laboriousness of cinema is inferred a few times (“it all goes slo-mo”), as reflections and manipulation, staples of cinema, get pulled into the mix. Bush even goes quasi-Lacanian at one point; nudging herself with “that girl in the mirror/between you and me/she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere at all,” a moment of amusing self-deprecation.
The music video, while counterintuitively simple in its setup of Bush dancing on her own in a barn, is similarly weird. Bush’s hair is made up to twice the height of her head as she dances in a purple jumpsuit, slowly jogging in place and thrashing her arms on the floor like an adolescent Job on her rural ash pile. In a pleasantly domestic turn, Bush’s mother Hannah appears (shockingly) as Bush’s mother. The resulting video is both tender and discordant, the ethos of “Suspended in Gaffa” in microcosm.
Bush’s fight with aporia moves forward. She mixes religious metaphors like a hermeneuticist in a Westminster pub (“it’s a plank in me eye,” taken from Matthew 7:5, is adjuncted by “a camel/who’s trying to get through it,” a quiet subversion of the Talmudic “eye of a needle” axiom, cited by Christ in the Synoptic Gospels and additionally by the Qu’ran 7:40), grasping fragments of faiths, mediums, and metaphors in their simplest form. The results are crucially inchoate, as the perspective of a child so often is. Yet through that rudimentary perspective comes a different understanding of emotional truths than one usually finds from an adult point-of-view. Fragments and naïveté are by no means inherently less scholarly than a more mature perspective; sometimes, they’re the most efficacious tools a person has for exploring the ridiculous and sublime”.
I am going to return to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia and what Kate Bush said about filming its music video. One that features a brief appearance from her mother, Hannah. She hugs her daughter in a really lovely and powerful moment! I think that the video, whilst simple, is one of the best she released. Directed by Brian Wiseman, it is a visual that stays in the head:
“Kate wrote about the filming of this music video: “The video of ‘Suspended in Gaffa’ was to be done as simply and quickly as possible; as always with very little time to complete it in, the simpler the better. I saw it as being the return to simplicity, a light-hearted dance routine, no extras, no complicated special effects. As we were all so pleased with the previous sets – put together under the supervision of a very clever man, Steve Hopkins – we asked him to build another, this time an old barn with large gaps in the walls where we could allow the light to streak through. We used a combination of natural and artificial light, and everyone was thrilled with the sense of realism that the set achieved. Steve brought in huge branches of trees that were behind the gaps in the set, and a dedicated helper called ‘Podge’ sat up on a piece of scaffolding for six hours and enthusiastically shook a piece of tree to make the light move and dance as if motivated by a furtive wind. The video did remain uncomplicated – just a few effects and just one extra: but a very special. one”.
I think that Suspended in Gaffa is one of the most tattoo-worthy songs in her cannon. In terms of the lyrics and how you should have them on your skin. Prime examples include “Out in the garden/There’s half of a heaven”, “I caught a glimpse of a god, all shining and bright”, and “That girl in the mirror/Between you and me/She don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere at all”. On 1st November, this amazing single turns forty-three. In a wider sense, it is the fourth track on The Dreaming. It is sandwiched between two quite haunting and intense songs: Pull Out the Pin and Leave It Open. The tracks are quite hypnotic in their own way. I think Suspended in Gaffa offers some levity and reflection. It is a deep and fascinating song that breaks up two slightly more dense and layered numbers. A freedom and comparative looseness to Suspended in Gaffa. It is a masterful Kate Bush song I have rarely heard played on the radio. There is not too much written about it. That brilliant video and those compelling lyrics. It is peak Kate Bush! I am aware there are some fans of Bush who might not know about this song at all. It is a work of incredible brilliance that…
YOU really need to hear.