Inhabiting another reality … Kate Bush in 1986.
My hero: Kate Bush by Jeanette Winterson
Idrove from Oxford in my hand-painted yellow Morris 1000 van to see Kate Bush at the Hammersmith Apollo in 1979. I was 19. It was my first visit to London and my first live event, not counting a lifetime of Gospel Tents. But this was salvation of a different kind.
Every young woman I knew at Oxford was listening to Kate Bush – even the chemistry students. For an English student the fact that a new singer could hit No 1 with a cover version of Emily Brontë was proof that poetry, music, feminism and lo-fi would rescue the world from boy bands and electro-pop, dead white males and money.
Kate Bush used herself as an invention – something that interested me greatly as a strategy for both life and art. The songs were like stage plays in miniature – a character, a situation, a verbal collision (oh to be in love and never get out again), a vocal polyphonics that allowed her to range through pain and doubt to resolution.
The Tour of Life concerts were really character acting. She performed in the sense of inhabiting another reality. She was a stretch of the imagination – and she seemed able to stretch her body beyond its own physicality. The brain is the thing with Kate Bush – the beauty was a part of her, but her mind is what takes me back and back to the music.
If it began as music for people who like to think, it developed, probably from Hounds of Love (1985) forwards, into music where feeling and thinking came together. Music as totality. You can cry with Kate Bush – and we need places to cry.
I love it that through all her experiments with herself she remains clearly and cleanly the self that she is. She's doing the work of her soul and if we like it, that's grand, if not, she's doing it anyway.
The world didn't change thanks to that new star in the firmament, but the star itself didn't burn out. She's still here. And I'll be there next week to see her play once more.
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