FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Whole Story
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1981/PHOTO CREDIT: Clive Arrowsmith
A KBC Short Story, Issue 11 (Christmas 1981): ‘Tansa's Guitar’
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THIS may be the final time…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with Lyn Spencer for Razzmatazz at ITV’s Tyne Tees studios in 1981
I take from this resource when it comes to guidance and inspiration for Kate Bush: The Whole Story. I am travelling back to Christmas 1981. I have spent a lot of time in 1980 and 1981 for features lately. I want to move around a bit for future ones. However, as this caught my eye, I am compelled to include it here. For the Kate Bush Club, she did contribute articles. Like diary entries. Kate Bush discussing her career and what she was up to. There were also interviews. Occasionally there would be short stories and something fictional, which gave us a new insight into Kate Bush. For a Christmas edition of the Kate Bush Club, Issue 11, she provided fans with an interesting short story. I want to comment on it, but here is her tale: Tansa’s Guitar:
“Weston was going on his winter tour and needed some focal point to make the tour more complete and relevant. He had recently bought a guitar at an auction in New York. The guitar had been beautifully made in California by a small company with a reputation among the leading rock musicians.
The guitar had a strange history, and was meant to have passed through the hands of a number of guitar heroes at the end of the sixties and early seventies. There was no documentation with the instrument to indicate who had owned it over the years, but the original bill showing that it was bought from Tansa of California had come with the instrument.
Weston hoped that he could use this instrument as an extra dynamic in his act. For a moment he remembered how the auctioneer had held the guitar by its neck, looking as though he was acknowledging the roars of a crowd at the end of a concert, with the handmade gold machine-heads on the instrument suddenly reflecting the lighting of the auction rooms. Weston had known instinctively as a professional musician that his excitement at seeing the guitar was nothing to do with the external appearance of the instrument. It was something deeper, almost like seeing a beautiful girl in a crowded place and then seeing her eyes turning to meet his, and not turning away.
It makes me wonder what motivated this particular story. I guess, as it was published near Christmas, that idea of a perfect gift. Perhaps Kate Bush imagined receiving a historic instrument would be a great present. A bit of a dream. She herself was at an auction around about this time. In fact, at the end of 1981, Bush made an appearance at Sotheby’s annual rock memorabilia auction.. She picked up a Perspex sculpture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their Two Virgins pose. She got a shooting script for The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. This auction was whilst she was finalising The Dreaming (1982). Her reason for picking up this John Lennon/The Beatles memorabilia might have been a reaction to John Lennon’s death in December 1980. Bush was a big fan of The Beatles, so I feel this story of someone buying a guitar that had this history and gravitas was loosely based on her own experience. I know Bush was engaged with auctions after 1981 but, when it came to buying stuff rather than donating to them, the late-1981 example might be unique. Perhaps she enjoyed the experience and wanted to write a short story around it:
There was a great deal of carving on the instrument, not unlike the sort of tooling and decoration that used to be found on muskets. The instrument was heavy, but Weston liked a heavy guitar, liked to feel its weight pulling down on his neck and centering in his stomach. With that sort of stability, his hands could flit around the neck and body of the instrument like white spiders.
When the rehearsals for his tour began, Weston realised that the guitar was no ordinary instrument. At first it wouldn't work at all. He felt clumsy, he felt as though he'd only been playing guitars for a couple of years, he felt as though his bones and muscles were reacting to the cold winter air like thick oil. But after a couple of hours the instrument began to sing, and by the end of the rehearsal session Weston was feeling good. When he had finished, he handed the guitar to his roadie. The roadie made it quite clear that although he thought the instrument very beautiful it was, in his terms, a "weird axe", and Weston would be better off leaving it alone. Weston laught this off--if the guitar had any sinister connections, he was going to blow them to pieces with his playing.
As he was getting ready for the first gig of the tour a message came through that Tansa of California were phoning from America, saying that Weston owed them for a guitar he had recently purchased at an auction. This puzzled Weston, as he had personally handed over the money to the auctioneer, but he had no time for these sort of problems, with only half an hour to go. As he warmed up in his dressing room the instrument responded well and Weston felt that the night was going to go in a positive direction. But when he got out under the lights in front of the audience and roars of appreciation had quietened down, he began to feel that same thick, oil-sump movement in his hands. He asked the management to put up the heating on the stage during the act. But things didn't get very much better, and by the interval he had changed his guitar and was back on one of his standard favourite instruments. When the second half ended, he pulled the place together and during his last number the audience had begun to dance at the back.
I do love how Kate Bush focused on a guitar and this sort of odd direction. Rather than someone buying it at auction and it be very positive and this dream come true, there is a twist in the tale. The drama of Weston being called by Tansa. This California thing too. In 1981, Bush had not broken into America. She loved many American artists, but there was not a huge fanbase in the U.S. for her music. It would grow but, as of the end of 1981, she was better known in the U.K. That part about asking the venue to turn the heating up on stage makes me connect dots to Kate Bush and The Tour of Life. Th dress rehearsal at The Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park, London. A Victorian space, there was no heating, so quite a bit of money was spent heating the stage and space up. The idea of a performer being cold on stage is not something we have much these days, though Bush experienced that. Like a bad dream, was this something Kate Bush had dreamt and is recalling? Did it have psychological relevance in terms of how she felt about performing and considering another tour? I do like how there are not many direct comparison to her own career. The guitar, an instrument she did not play herself, as the focal point.
On the second gig, a similar situation occurred. With only a few minutes left before going on stage a message came through that Tansa wanted to talk to him about payment for a guitar. And again, when he went on to the stage the same thing happened: he couldn't make the instrument function properly.
It was during one of these moments, when he was on the verge of deciding whether to try a particularly tricky solo on the instrument, that he noticed a man sitting in the front row of the audience, clearly lit up by the stage lighting. This man was looking at him with something more than just the expression of a fan lost in a dream of appreciation. He was definitely trying to catch Weston's eye, and it wasn't to indicate to him that liked what he was doing.
Again he had to change over to another guitar for the second half, and again the gig took off as soon as he'd made the switch. Afterwards in the dressing room, he was told that there was somebody at the back stage entrance demanding that he see Weston about payment for the guitar. Weston dismissed it; but as they were driving away from the gig, and as usual many faces pushed themselves against the window of the car to look at Weston, staring into the back seat through the warm glass of the window was the face he'd seen in the front of the audience. The man was shouting something at him and he appeared angry. Weston gave instructions to the driver to go faster, and they cleared the crowd without any mishap.
By now the rest of the band were quite familiar with the weird, unpredictable playing of their front-man and were trying to persuade him to leave the instrument alone. Weston, however, took it on stage on the third gig, and after the first hour of the first half, having been unable to make the instrument sing and soar, he flung it across the stage, where it smashed into a stack of amplifiers and fell to the ground, with the whole of the back-plate coming apart and tinkling on the wooden stage floor. He picked up one of his other guitars, but the anger and frustration that had caused him to sling Tansa's instrument away from him seemed to have affected his guitar playing, and the concert was not a success.
In 1981, Bush was producing her own music. She produced Never for Ever with Jon Kelly and was putting together The Dreaming solo. Maybe there is some of her own anxiety and anger in the story. Trying to get something right. That idea of perfectionism or struggling to make something as great as you’d hope. I do not know whether the Kate Bush Club reached out to her to come up with a story for that Issue 11, or whether Bush submitted it of her own accord. This was a hectic period for her. In August 1981, Bush goes into Odyssey Studios with Paul Hardiman as engineer to record the overdubs on all tracks in a four-and-a-half month session. By October, working tirelessly on The Dreaming, she is to the point of exhaustion. Forcing her to take a short break. There are other events from around that time, such as attending Abbey Road Studios to celebrate its fiftieth birthday in November 1981. She appeared on a new chat show, Friday Night Saturday Morning, on 21st November and discussed her work. It was a time of stress for sure, so I think some of the story relates to her. This notion of preserving with something against the wishes of band members. Then getting frustrated. Almost like analysing her dreams, Bush must have faced some resistance and walls that she had to break through.
This gig was in London, and by the time they'd finished and were coming down backstage, Weston could hear a strange silence through the dressing room windows, and he knew immediately that the whole of the city was encased in snow. Depressed and puzzled, he got ready to make a run for the car. As he was doing this, his guitar-roadie came in with the broken instrument, pointing out that there was no real damage and that it was nothing he couldn't sort out in a couple of hours.
Weston wanted to get back to his bed and sleep, so he went with the roadie in the crew van. As they were pulling away from the theatre down a narrow alley, a man came running out of a shop doorway, and immediately Weston recognised him as the man who'd been watching him from the audience. The roadie pointed out to him that it was the same man who'd been hanging around the stage door saying he was from Tansa and needed payment.
As they accelerated away, the man ran faster and faster, and although the vehicle was quite easily doing in excess of 40 mph on the wet and sludgy road, the man was still gaining on them. They could hear him shouting that he'd come for payment, that payment was needed and that until Weston had made the payment he would never be able to play the guitar in front of an audience. The people inside the van were beginning to panic now, as on a straight run up a deserted and quite Oxford Street they hit 55, almost 60 mph--but the man was still gaining.
The roadie suddenly kicked open the back door of the vehicle and slung the guitar out into the snow towards the running man. He slammed the door and they skidded round the corner and were away. The last Weston saw of the guitar was the man gently picking it up out of the sludge, talking to himself--or to the instrument. Then a shop window full of Christmas decorations blocked his view. Weston didn't feel angry, but still he wanted to know what the hell his roadie meant by throwing his best guitar out of the back of the van. The roadie, who was quite shaken and upset, took a piece of paper from out of his pocket.
"I found this stuck inside the back of the guitar."
It was a bill from Tansa, and written on it were the words:
"One handmade custom guitar--material and sundries: $2000.00."
"Special effects for enchanting & capturing the minds of audiences, our fee: One soul."
Kate Bush”.
There is a lot to unpack in the final stages. This dramatic chase. Snow blanketing London. There was a lot of snow in the U.K. in 1981. Often remembered as The Big Snow, December 1981 was one of the coldest and snowiest months on record, with over half of the country experiencing lying snow on Christmas Day. Demands for payment for a guitar. You think back to that auction and what happened. Weston won that item and seemingly had paid for it. Perhaps there was an issue. A cursed guitar. In terms of something darker, Bush did buy that Perspex sculpture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The recent death of Lennon gave that culture a slightly eerier or haunted nature. Did she consider this and transpose that to a guitar? This being Kate Bush, there was something a bit unusual and sinister. You could analyse things and think that this chase is between Kate Bush and the record labels. The demand for an album to come out and this pressure. Her trying everything and reaching a bit of a crisis point. This idea of exchanging your soul to please an audience and have this dream. I think this short story would have made a great song. Nearing the end of a busy year, she did get the chance to pen the tale. Of course, Tansa is an anagram of Santa, so this is almost like a twist on the conventional magic of Christmas. Santa getting gifts for good children. Instead, we get an example of this instrument not playing properly and there being this sort of hex. Or there being a problem with it.
Instead of this magical Christmas story, there is this dramatic and tense tale that I do feel can be linked to Kate Bush. In a September 1981 interview for Record Mirror, there was pressure on her to write a book. At the same time as putting together another album: “But yes, a book is on the cards, hopefully before the end of the year, and she says: "I'd like to write it myself. Without saying anything about the other books, which I don't want to, I feel almost pressured to speak, otherwise there's this huge misrepresented area. "In one way it's ridiculous--I feel it's much too early to write a book, I've hardly done anything yet. But I really want people to be aware of reality--subjective reality, obviously. "It'd be about what it's like being me, my feelings, my friends, the people that I rely on. I need to be represented in a positive way, and I'll have to do it myself." [This book, tentatively titled Leaving My Tracks, was shelved in 1984.] Slowly Abbey Road is beginning to wake up for another Kate Bush day that is likely to last until the early hours of the next morning, and she announces candidly: "I'm beginning to feel like shit. Ireland's catching up on me. And all the things that have to be done. It's impossible to do it all in the time...perhaps if I could stop sleeping it would help." But she doesn't really believe it, even if she does wonder if transcendental meditation does help you to relax enough to cut down on those "very wonderful" hours of sleep. No, she decides, it's work as usual. Twenty-two years old, a Tour of Life and three albums behind her...and the rest can wait. Treading devastatingly and surely between the doubters and the devotees, Kate Bush may well continue to "amaze" us all”. Tansa’s Guitar is something a lot of Kate Bush fans do not know about. I do love reading what she wrote for the Kate Bush Club. This short story at Christmas 1981 is amazing. So much going on! Although 1981 and 1982 were very stressful and hard years as Kate Bush finished The Dreaming, it would al be worth it, as it truly is…
A wonderful album.