Kate Bush: Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush

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Trust Kate Bush, never one to explain, to complicate the straightforward lyrics collection. She doesn’t annotate this anthology, unlike Neil Tennant’s recent Faber edition. Instead, subtler direction follows an introduction by author David Mitchell, who wrote the spoken-word parts of Bush’s 2014 Before the Dawn performances. Mitchell intermingles charming fannish detail with close textual analysis that illuminates familiar songs: it is God, he points out, not the devil, who allows the man and woman to exchange their sexual experiences on Running Up That Hill, an act of divinity rather than transgression. Like all of Kate’s own work, this book will be produced like a labour of love to the highest possible standard, both at the design and the print production stages. Michael and Marius alone will conceptualise, write, create, illustrate and handle the pre press stages of the book. Comprising fifty chapters or ‘visions’, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush is a multi-faceted biography of this famously elusive figure, viewing her life and work from fresh and illuminating angles. Featuring details from the author’s one-to-one conversations with Kate, as well as vignettes of her key songs, albums, videos, and concerts; this artful, candid and often brutally funny portrait introduces the reader to the refreshingly real Kate Bush.

Those shrieks and warbles are beauty beyond belief to me,” said John Lydon in 2009, recalling the day he came home with Kate Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, and played it for his mother. She thought it sounded like “a bag of cats”, but Lydon, who had just left the Sex Pistols, heard a fellow renegade. Bush’s singularity makes fans feel like members of the biggest secret society in music, though it’s one they now share with the Gen Z-ers who discovered her last spring, when the 1985 single Running Up That Hill was featured on the Netflix series Stranger Things. Ever since a teenage Kate Bush arrived chanting Heathcliff’s in 78, stretching the key of C sharp like an oscillating wave, there’s been a sense of the otherworldly about her. As much a ground zero moment for pop as the Pistols were for the denim brigade, Wuthering Heights, a chart hit not in 4/4 time, sang about an eighteenth-century troubadour should have been an anomaly not a blueprint for a career that has now stretched out over nearly five decades and shows no sign of ending.In 1978 a then totally unknown teenage girl topped the UK Singles Chart with her debut single Wuthering Heights and in doing so became the first female artist to achieve a UK number one hit with a self-penned song. In 1980, aged 20 she was also the first British female solo artist to to enter the album charts at number one with Never For Ever, her third studio album. Her career currently spans five decades and she has had twenty five UK Top 40 singles in that time. As a singer, songwriter, musician, dancer and record producer she has been a groundbreaking artist in the truest sense of the word, often laying bare her soul in her songwriting and she is someone who has never been afraid to take risks creatively. She was one of the first musicians to use the revolutionary Fairlight synthesiser, which emboldened her to begin producing her own albums, starting with 1980’s Never for Ever – a leap forward for her, but deeply dry in the telling. One astonishing sentence pings out of the Fairlight chapter: Bush was so unsure of her production skills that she wrote in her fan club newsletter: “After all, I am only little, a female and an unlikely producer!” The chapter of course that all Bush obsessives will rush towards is the section on her best and most celebrated album. Part wall of sound, part Herman Melville, Hounds of Love ( alongside Prince’s Around the World in a Day ) still remains one of the most left-field albums ever made by a chart-topping star. Over three years in the making and featuring a raft of session players and producers, it was a lexicon of both time and craft. Doyle writes well about the album and in conversation with Bush gets her to reveal an insight into the album which is fascinating. Was it’s now infamous pop side an attempt to regain the commercial ground he asks. “Yeah, I guess it was hooky. I wanted one side to be very up and band-orientated. The other side to be more, this conceptual piece,’ she reveals. It was also a victory in her long-running war with EMI for artistic control. ‘They left me alone from that point,” she laughs. “It shut them up.” Michael was incredibly passionate about Kate Bush’s music and about the artist herself. He was driven to share this passion with fellow fans and also hoped he might draw in new fans through his beautifully written book. Kate Bush: the subject of murmured legend and one of the most ground-breaking, idiosyncratic musicians of the modern era.

Along the way, the narrative also includes vivid reconstructions of transformative moments in her career and insights from the friends and collaborators closest to Kate, including her photographer brother John Carder Bush and fellow artists David Gilmour, John Lydon and Youth. The book is a vibrant and comprehensive re-examination of Kate Bush and her many creative landmarks.As nearly all of the photographs that have been shot of Kate over the years are very familiar to fans through their constant use both online and in press, the aim of the book is to create vivid and exciting ‘illustrated visuals’ which will be new to fans. These ‘illustrated visuals’ will be based on original photographs (which we are licensing the rights and paying for) and which will connect with the text and visually explore the themes in Kate’s songs. Two sections dwell on gender. Joanni, her portrait of Joan of Arc, is juxtaposed with an indictment of masculine warmongering ( Army Dreamers). Later, Bush explores masculine and feminine perspectives, contemplating desire (Reaching Out) and obligation (Night of the Swallow), never reaching trite conclusions. Desire runs wild in the final section: Mrs Bartolozzi’s sexual laundry fantasia; the wily, windy Wuthering Heights. This headstrong pursuit has guided Bush. The question is not what we can learn about her, but what we might learn from following her lead.

What keeps 50 Visions from being a cheery, dip-in-at-will Bushopedia is the exhausting, overly detailed sections on her music-making process. Certain albums, videos and tours have been selected for deep dives into how they were made, which will be of interest mainly to Bush-heads – probably the only readers who could get lost in arcana such as her struggle to write the 2005 double album Aerial. (There were problems explaining her vision to her band, she was unsure whether the record company would accept a double LP and much more along these lines. There are also notes on how each song was written). Michael found great joy in hearing from people who have said that the book has touched them or helped them in some way. Kate Bush fans have told us that they have read things in the book that they never knew about her before but also that they felt that they got to know a little bit about Michael through his writing in the book. When he photographed her for the last time, in 1993, Guido remembers leaving the set telling her that they shouldn’t wait another ten years to get together again. “She just smiled and said nothing. It wasn’t until twelve years later, in November 2005, that she released another album, Aerial, followed in 2011 by 50 Words For Snow. And now she has announced her first concerts in 35 years! Wow!” If you are a new convert to Kate Bush or a life-long fan (or anywhere in-between), Tom Doyle’s book looks like it will be right up your street! Here is some detail and insight into a book that is going to be a must-buy for all lovers of Kate Bush:Daniella, the signed editions were available from Waterstones, Rough Trade and various independent book and record shops all over the UK from 9am on Friday 20th January. It took stealth and cunning to find shops selling many many many fans were unsuccessful.