Waiting for Kate Bush
Read Waiting for Kate Bush Online
Authors: John Mendelssohn
Copyright © 2004 Omnibus Press
This edition © 2010 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)
ISBN: 978-0-85712-323-7
Cover designed by Mike Bell
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Prelude: Just One Thing I Can Do About This
1. The Most For Which We Can Hope
2. The Gormless, Misshapen Few
3. My Infinite, Familiar Shame
4. A Postcard From Princess Diana
5. An Odd Choice For A New Vegetarian
6. The Worst Sorbet You’ve Ever Tasted
9. The Final Brutal Affirmation
10. The Pain Of Our Estrangement
11. Allowing Another His Tears
17. George Harrison’s Mistress
To the two I love most
Claire, by whose love I am blessed beyond my most extravagant imaginings
and
Brigitte, whom I haven’t stopped loving, not even for an hour, in these years of excruciating silence
* * *
Moreover, I hope that Anna Chen, Mistress Antoinette, Peter Pacey, Mark Pringle, Nancy Rumsey, and John Rumsey all know how avidly I cherish their friendship.
Write to the author at
[email protected]
.
Just One Thing I Can Do About This
Something inside never failed to whisper excitedly, “Go on, jump!” at the sight of heights, and I spent my whole life shying away from them. But here I was sitting on the very ledge that sinister inner voice had always ached to coax me over, and I just couldn’t pull the proverbial trigger.
Besides, I was rather enjoying winding up poor Constables Chiang and Murray, probably not yet 50 between them.
They’d been the first to arrive, presumably on the tip of someone who’d noticed me from the shorter block of flats across the road, and God knows they were doing their best, but all they had going for them was sincerity. They were genuinely frantic about the prospect of my jumping, and at first I loved them for it. But then I came to resent them. I wasn’t a person to them, but an idea. It wasn’t losing Leslie Herskovits that troubled them, but the notion of anybody voluntarily taking his own life. It was very much in the same vein as their calling me
sir
, pretending to respect me because I was a member of the public they were supposedly in the business of serving, rather than genuinely respecting
me
.
As though such a thing were possible, least of all by me.
Constable Chiang, a devout Presbyterian, the great or greater grandson, I supposed, of Chinese saved by Scots missionaries, was aghast that I’d be forfeiting my little corner of Heaven by jumping, whereas his mate Charlene was more concerned that I’d injure an innocent passer-by when I landed, or at the very least damage somebody’s property.
They implored me to tell them what the problem was, but I thought I’d be casting pearls before swine. If I told them I was consumed by self-loathing, and had never managed to climb the metal pole in junior
high school, wouldn’t they just look at one another in confusion and blurt something about how it made no sense for me to loathe myself when I was clearly such an altogether terrific bloke? If I related that I’d failed dismally at the one job in life at which I’d most wanted to be superb, being my daughter’s dad, would they, too young to be the parents of anything but infants, have any real idea what I was on about? And if I told them how I could no longer bear my own ugliness, my own obscene obesity, wouldn’t they be part of the epidemic of cruel teasing that had swept London in the past several months and pretend not to have noticed?
So I didn’t tell them any of the first 29 reasons that my life hung so precariously in the balance, but gave them No. 30 instead. “If you can promise me that Kate Bush will release an album of new material in the next six months,” I offered, “I’ll take your hands.”
They looked at each other in confusion, as I’d known they would, and it infuriated me.
“You haven’t even heard of her, have you?” I said. “You haven’t even bloody
heard
of her! Well, how can you imagine that I’d want to live in a world in which public servants are ignorant of the greatest British songwriter and singer in the past 25 years?” I turned back toward the abyss.
“No!” Constable Chiang blurted. “‘Withering Heights’, right? Of course I’ve heard of her. My sister Victoria fancied her. Played her music all the time in her bedroom, didn’t she?”
“‘Wuthering’,” I corrected him, “for Christ’s sake. Named for the Emily Bronte novel that inspired it. Also a classic film with Sir Laurence Olivier. I suppose you haven’t heard of him either. Only the greatest actor of his generation.” I was such a hypocrite. As though
I
’d read the Brontë novel. (As though Kate herself had!) As though I could remember having seen Sir Larry in much beside
Marathon Man
and
The Boys From Brazil
. Oh, it gets dark, just as Kate said in her breakthrough hit. But it also gets cold. If I didn’t jump soon, there was a good chance I’d freeze solid there on the ledge.
“What’s your music?” I asked Constable Murray, mostly to interrupt her mobile phone conversation. I assumed she was calling for reinforcements. “Me?” she said, stupidly. Then she brightened, enjoying my interest in her. “R&B and that. Craig David. The Sugarbabes. Mis-Teeq.” I’d spent a lifetime making other people feel interesting.
“The real giants of the genre then, in other words,” I said. “Step aside, Smokey Robinson and Aretha and Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, right?” When I’d lived by sarcasm, why shouldn’t I die by it as well?
A couple of gangly teenagers in hooded sweatshirts and enormous trousers that just barely covered their groins, probably residents of the block of flats, emerged onto the roof. They took one look at the constables and froze. But then the taller noticed me and exclaimed, “Wicked!”
“Clear off, you lot,” Constable Chiang called to them.
The smaller was eager to oblige, but the taller pretended he hadn’t heard. He produced a little digital video camera from one of his gigantic front pockets, almost certainly stolen, and pointed it at me. “If he goes over, dog, we’ll be able to sell this to the BBC. Nuff wick-
ed
!”
“I’m not going to tell you again to leave,” Constable Chiang threatened, not very convincingly.
“People’s right to know, mush,” the kid with the camera insisted, watching me in the little flipout monitor on the camera’s side, not budging.
There were a couple of new arrivals – another, older, constable, jowly and middle-aged, with a florid complexion, and a guy in a suit. The constable put his hand over the teenager’s camera and pushed it into his forehead, making the kid howl. The guy in the suit headed toward me.
I stopped him in his tracks, inching nearer the edge, calling, “Far enough.” It was getting windy. We had maybe 10 minutes’ daylight, or what passes for it in London in November, left.
The guy was nothing if not obliging. Indeed, he was my best mate ever. “Absolutely!” he affirmed, stopping in his tracks, holding his hands up in surrender. “Absolutely. You’re the gov. See, I’m playing ball, mate. Aren’t I? I’m Lt. Martyn – and that’s with a y– Root, Metropolitan Police. May I know your name?”
“Del Palmer,” I said, making myself smile.
He looked hard at me for a minute. “No,” he said, “I suspect you’re not. Del Palmer was Kate Bush’s live bass player, and later her recording engineer, and Linn drum programmer, and long-time romantic partner.”
I was impressed. It had taken them a remarkably short time, all things considered, to get somebody who really knew his stuff, a
bona fide
fellow Kateperson, onto the scene.
“My identity’s immaterial,” I said. “We’re not going to be long enough in one another’s company for you to care about my name.”
Constable Chiang gasped audibly, but my new best mate Lt. Root, presumably bred for unflappability, seemed only to sigh. “I wish you wouldn’t say that, sir. My hunch is that if we work together, we can
sort everything out.” He took a couple of steps toward me and then did something I thought brilliant: sat down himself.
“I understand you’re upset about Kate’s being 11 years between albums. Well, who among us isn’t? By my reckoning, that’s too long to have to wait by a factor of around five.”
Oh, I felt awful now. The guy was so kind, and knew only what I’d told Chiang and Murray, and was trying so hard to work with it, even though he probably realised how foolish it made him sound. But I couldn’t keep myself, by saying nothing, from making him continue.
“I phone EMI periodically, sir, maybe once every six months or so, to see if they can tell me anything. They never can. All they’ll ever do is confirm she’s been in the studio. As though that’s news. And most of the time they just put you on hold until you get fed up and put the phone down without having heard even that much.”
He was right, of course. I’d phoned them myself and been treated not as someone whose custom they valued, but as an annoyance. Arrogant record company bastards. Rotters.
“My own favourite is
Never For Ever,”
he continued. “I realise that isn’t a common view. At a fan convention I went to in Amsterdam around four years ago, something like 70 per cent of those attending named
Hounds
as her finest hour. What are your thoughts, sir?”
An ambulance and a couple of police squad cars arrived 12 storeys below me. A phrase from an Elvis Costello song I’d always liked, but never been sure I understood, came to mind: “Clown time is over”. If I let Lt. Root seduce me with his kindness, I’d never be able to accomplish my mission. It would end, as so much of my life had, in abject embarrassment, with the locals laughing and pointing as Constables Chiang and Murray helped me with theatrical gentleness into the back of a squad car.
My getting to my feet caused a lot of commotion, both on the ground and on the roof. Lt. Root scrambled to his own. “Del,” he implored me, grasping frantically at straws, desperate for us to be on a first-name basis,
“please!
Let’s talk it over. There’s no need to make a snap decision here. We’ve got all night. Are you cold?”
He turned back to Chiang and Murray and barked, “Get Mr. Palmer an overcoat,” in a voice that bore almost no resemblance to that in which he’d been addressing me.
“I don’t know if you love me or not,” I said, quoting Kate. “But I don’t think we should ever suffer. There’s just one thing we can do about this.” If he’d said, ‘Top Of The City’, I’d have surrendered there and then. But he only looked at me in confusion.
“It’s from a song of Kate’s,” I said, “as you no doubt know – a song apparently about the allure of suicide. If you can’t name the song, can you at least tell me which album it was on?”
There was a lot of hatred mixed in with the confusion on his face now. I could be such a sadist when I wanted to.
Oh, it gets cold. I couldn’t last much longer, and I didn’t believe my two original constables were going to come up with a coat. The block of flats’ lift didn’t work. It would take them forever to get down to the ambulance, which at best might have only blankets, and then forever to get them back up to me. And did I really want to be seen being coaxed into the back of the squad car swaddled in blankets?
“I want,” I told Lt. Root, “to make a statement.”
“Absolutely!” my new best mate agreed, rapturous that I wasn’t holding ‘Top Of The City’ against him. “You make your statement, which will help me understand you better obviously, and we’ll get you a lovely warm coat, and then we’ll get this whole thing sorted, all right, Del?”
I motioned for the kid with the camera to come nearer. You should have seen the proud look he gave his mate. You should have seen how concerned Lt. Root was with the kid’s getting the best possible camera angle. Between being absolute bastards, people can be so endearing sometimes.
My slashing wit didn’t fail me, as it had never done. It occurred to me to take full advantage of my captive audience and air all my actual grievances, but in the end, I decided to confine my closing remarks to Kate, which seemed rather more droll. “From conception to release,” I said, “The
Red Shoes
took around four years. Assuming it’s released sometime in 2004, its follow-up will have been nearly 12 years in the making. If this pattern – of each album taking three times longer than its predecessor – holds, Kate will have her ninth album ready in 2040, assuming having turned 80 two years before hasn’t slowed her down. For those of us who can thus reasonably expect to live to hear only one more Kate Bush album, this simply isn’t good enough – not nearly.
“I suspect she imagines that she doesn’t owe us anything. I can understand why she’d think that, but believe her to be profoundly mistaken. Were it not for our adoration, and our fiscal expression of that adoration, she would not have the luxury of taking forever and ever to make a bloody album. Had we not consumed her music in huge numbers, she might today be teaching Latin or English in some draughty convent school in Kent, hating having to get up in the frigid darkness on winter mornings, hating her meagre salary, hating most of all the insolent little bitches who are her charges.
“‘But I owe it to myself,’ I can just imagine her protesting, ‘to release only the best-realised version of my music I can.’
“Well, bollocks. Let us imagine that, at the time of its release, she regarded
The Sensual World
, let’s say, as 90 per cent realised. Let’s now imagine further that she’d quit fussing with her eighth album, still unreleased at the dawn of 2004, and released it only 40 per cent realised in 1995. Does she imagine that, rather than bringing vast joy to the countless tens of thousands of us who love her, this strategy would have resulted in the even faster proliferation of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, or in Margaret Thatcher making a surprise political comeback at 106, or England losing the rugby World Cup?”
Lt. Root was grinning, out of what seemed genuine amusement. My swan song: a smash!
“Let’s go back – way back! – to
The Hounds Of Love
. On Side 2, the tracks ‘Dream Of Sheep’ and ‘Under Ice’ are separated by the sound of lapping waves. On hearing the lapping waves sound effect EMI had in its library, Kate decreed that it simply wouldn’t suffice, that entirely new waves would have to be recorded, no doubt at substantial expense. I would guess that of the couple of million people around the world who have bought
Hounds
since it came out in 1985, not a single one would have been able to tell you sincerely that he or she enjoyed it less with the EMI sound effects library lapping waves, not bloody one!”
Now even the teenager without the digital video camera was amused.
“Or maybe she should think of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, that other brilliant, reclusive megalomaniac, to whom she’s been compared. Is the world a better place for his having made poor Jack Nicholson play a particular scene, later cut from the final print of
The Shining
, 128 times? Better that his actors conformed with excruciating exactness to Our Stan’s conception of how particular lines should be read, or one in which he’d made two or three more films?
“Oh, the colossal hubris of this woman, Kate Bush, having the ability to inspire so much joy in the world, and instead opting to deprive us, to agonise for years over preposterous trivialities!”