BACK in the late 1970s American music critic Ann Powers was looking for a role model. At the time, she says, she was a “chaotic, dreamy girl … Awkward and loud. I had become accustomed to people telling me I was too much,” she explained on Archive on 4 last Saturday night.
“Punk had taught me to be aggressive, New Wave had made me care about fashion. But I’d never be as sexy cool as Chrissie Hynde or Debbie Harry. I needed a hero who would validate the weirdest parts of me; my unmanageable emotions, poetic pretensions, unwieldy desires.”
Step forward Kate Bush.
Kate Bush: The Power of Strange Things was no doubt commissioned (as the title might suggest) on the back of the remarkable renewed success of Bush’s 1985 hit Running Up That Hill in the wake of its use in the Netflix TV series Stranger Things. (A number one hit in the UK in June this year. There were also six million Spotify streams of the song over the summer). But the joy of Powers’s celebration was the way it concentrated on the early years of Bush’s career. The witchy, mad years you might say. And, more importantly, how it reclaimed such pejorative descriptions as part of Bush’s creative strength.
As the author Jeanette Winterson suggested, the teenage Bush’s love of dressing up, of playing characters in her music, was very much part of her appeal.
“It was performance layered on performance. I liked that Russian doll syndrome that she has where you keep finding another Kate Bush inside, slightly different to the one that’s gone before.”
On Bush’s fourth and possibly most outre album The Dreaming, Powers suggested, Bush “became male and female, old and young, ferocious and ethereal, even immortal… Her audacity gave me courage.”
So much so that when Bush then released the album Hounds of Love in 1985 Powers initially found it a little too tame. “I loved the mad Kate so much that it took time for me to recognise that this was the emergence of her mature voice.”
And yet via Stranger Things that 1985 version of Kate resonates with young artists today. Running Up That Hill, Gen Z singer Katy J Pearson suggested, has become a song of safety for people. “I think it’s a song that has made people feel alive and made people feel hopeful.”
This was very much a fan’s portrait of their favourite star. It had that slightly breathless love of its subject. But that’s OK. It found new, interesting ways to state that love.
In the end, it is Bush’s transmutability that is key to her appeal, argued Winterson. Bush, the writer suggested, is an example of someone who has demonstrated that our own sense of self can be a creative act.
“It’s not just your background, your education, your family, your DNA, your direct experience. It’s how you’re going to take all that and remake it,” Winterson suggested. “That you are a living volatile moving substance which doesn’t need to be fixed in any mould. It needs to go on changing, developing.”
There’s a life goal for all of you.
From “godlike genius” (yes, I heart Kate too) to God. After more than 20 years Ernie Rea presented his last episode of Beyond Belief on Radio 4 on Monday. How has the landscape of faith in Britain shifted over the past two decades, Rea asked in his valedictory show? Well, it has grown smaller. In 2001 just 15 per cent of the population claimed to have no religion. By 2021 half the population said as much. A slightly melancholy note for Rea, a former Presbyterian minister, to end on.
Listen Out For: Sam Hughes, Scala radio, 1pm, Monday
To mark World Mental Health Day, Scala is giving us a playlist of peaceful classical music.
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