Friday, December 8, 2023

My hero: Kate Bush by Jeanette Winterson

 

Inhabiting another reality … Kate Bush in 1986.


My hero: Kate Bush by Jeanette Winterson

Kate Bush gave my 19-year-old self a strategy for both life and art – that's why I'll be there next week to watch her again
Jane 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.

THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray / Quotes
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
076 My hero / John Cooke by Geoffrey Robertson 
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
095 My hero / Les Murray by Daljit Nagra 
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan


211 My hero / Mavis Gallant by Jhumpa Lahiri and  Michael Ondaatje 

212 My hero / David Rayven Allen on John Arlott 




245 My hero / Geoffrey Chaucer by Lavinie Greenlan 

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre 
2016




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