Posted on

Running Up That Hill

It’s quite a surprise to have  what seems an innate appreciation of an artist (in the general sense of the word) explained by reading some analysis that explains possible reasons behind a latent, unconscious bonding  – or at least have light cast upon it. On holiday I read Graeme Thomson’s recent biography of Kate Bush – ‘Under the Ivy’  (Omnibus Press) – which bills itself as ‘the first ever in-depth study of one of the world’s most enigmatic artists’.

It’s a curious book – mostly biography gleaned from interviews with figures relatively peripheral to Kate Bush’s life and from press interviews with Kate Bush herself. She’s certainly a fascinating and enigmatic subject but what lifts the book above the levels of most music biographies is Thomson’s critical interpretation of her music, somewhat in the vein of Ian MacDonald’s classic about The Beatles, ‘Revolution in the Head’.

There were a few passages of analysis in the book which suddenly grabbed me and made me think ‘that concept is similar to what I’ve been trying to get over in my writing’.

One trait I have is to tend to throw in all sorts of cultural references and allusions, which is what Kate Bush tended to do in her lyrics – almost to the level of self-parody in ‘Them Heavy People’ but there’s far more – think of Molly Bloom’s speech from ‘Ulysses’ in ‘The Sensual World’ (my favourite Kate Bush track of the lot), or the obvious ‘Wuthering Heights’.

Yet Thomson points out that these cultural references are a paradox and something of a deliberate obfuscation because her work is impossible to fully appreciate solely by academic analysis:

‘Bush’s music takes us somewhere else, somewhere deeper…It’s a very inquisitive, giving quixotic thing…there is no need to join every dot, or explain every reference. That is a game for those who can’t trust their own responses without first looking for an intellectual hook on which to hang it. Kate Bush is all about emotion: the things she uses to get to those emotions aren’t necessarily important. You either hear it and feel it – and trust what you’re hearing or feeling – or you don’t.’

I particularly like the last sentence: you’re either the sort of person who trusts your emotional reaction or you aren’t. This ties in with some current debate about writing, especially of the more literary genre – does it work on an emotional level or does it solely exist to perform intellectual gymnastics?

No-one who’s seriously listened to Kate Bush’s music can underestimate its sensuality. The candid attitude towards sex, even in songs released in the 1970s, is quite revelatory and far more insightful than many of her female successors (think of the relatively crude shock-tactics of the likes of Madonna or Lady GaGa). However, even knowing the song for 25 years I hadn’t fully realised (shows how closely I read the lyrics) what she was trying to suggest in one of her most well known singles, ‘Running Up That Hill’. To quote Thomson:

‘Originally called “A Deal With God”, the song spoke passionately of Bush’s impossible wish to become her lover, and he her, in order that they could finally know what the other felt and desired. It was a sobering comment on misfiring communication and the impossibility of men and women ever really understanding one another, and yet – in capturing the basic human need to strive for compatibility – it was not without hope nor optimism.’

I’d say that many novelists also try to set out to achieve this ‘impossible’ ambition (trying to fully understand the experience of the other gender) – to know ‘what the other felt and desired’. It’s certainly something I’m fascinated with – as I have a novel that switches between male and female POVs in a putative relationship.

It’s pretty evident that these songs have lodged themselves quite deep in my psyche and bits of them seem to come out when I’m writing. I had a playlist of ‘quiet stuff’ on my laptop which featured a lot of Kate Bush songs and I have listened to this over the past few years at very low volume as I fell asleep in work trips in various hotel rooms around Europe.

There’s another aspect to Kate Bush’s work that makes it more approachable from a male point of view which I’d never realised until reading this book – and yet it’s so obvious. She likes men. Thomson says of one of Kate Bush’s most touching songs:

‘Aside from its luminous melody and swooping chorus, “The Man With the Child In His Eyes” is one of the first example of the extraordinarily positive ways in which Bush views men. She is surely unique among female songwriters in that her canon contains not a single song that puts down, castigates or generally gives men the brush off. She has been feminist in the bluntest sense – she wants to preserve and embrace the differences between the sexes and understand the male of the species. Many songs display a desire to experience fully what it is to be a man; she invests them with a power, beauty and a kind of mystical attraction which is incredibly generous. “It’s not such an open thing for a woman to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it” she once said. “I can’t understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful.”’

I knew that Kate Bush had a large gay (male) following but it was only after reading the above interview quotation that I the penny finally dropped. On a similar vein I’m wondering about buying ‘Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory’ which is full of analysis (as it says in the publisher’s press release) ‘written by a queer woman in her late 20s, its answers are delivered in a unique way…showing that theory can be sordid, funny and irreverent’. I wouldn’t mind too much if those three adjectives were applied to my novel, at least in part.

Posted on

Everything But The Bar Sink…

…but I did get the dishwasher in!

Bearing in mind Judith Murray’s comment that ‘in some sense all novels are historical’, I decided to load my last reading with as many contemporary cultural references as I could think of. ‘Decided’ isn’t actually a good definition — throwing in various things that pop into my head is how I tend to write anyway although maybe I’d decide to delete most of them if a book got published.

I’m rather dreading reaction to the scene I’ve just written because it could go either of two ways. It’s a climactic scene after months of simmering, smouldering sexual tension between James and Kim and this comes to the boil (good cooking metaphors there, albeit cliched). To counter the tension as it rises I start off with the most banal sort of conversations. In one point (a cop out I’m sure I’ll be picked up on) I have the narrator say ‘she didn’t care who was talking’ and then throw in three or four unattributed pieces of dialogue.

The cultural references are quite a bizarre bunch. Remember these are all in a 2,600 word piece which is meant to pivotal to the plot: Amazon, Katie Melua, Charlie Brooker, the Guardian, the Wombles, Mike Batt, William Orbit, Orbit’s ‘Adagio for Strings’, All Saints’ ‘Pure Shores’, Katie Melua’s ‘The Flood’ (which goes on to supply metaphors for the later scene), Virgin TV’s ‘Naked Office’ (see below), Jamie Oliver, a Sky+ box, the Carry On films, ‘The Full Monty’, ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ (and various of its contestants), Amanda Holden, Simon Cowell, Ant and Dec, ‘Sex and the City’, Heston Blumenthal, ‘The Fat Duck Cookbook’ and Heston Blumenthal’s notorious snail porridge. That’s well over 20 references that only someone living in this country in 2010 would really understand. Apart from the BGT references most of these aren’t gratuitously contemporary as they illustrate character and move the plot in some cases. The music is interesting as (it will be interesting to see if anyone picks this up) as Emma has bought the Katie Melua CD as it’s produced by William Orbit, whose works ten years previously (see above) were the soundtrack to a holiday she and James had in Ibiza when they first began their relationship. He’s meant to see the romantic significance in this — but doesn’t and needles her about Katie Melua’s previous association with Mike Batt (of the Wombles). So, a little vignette of their relationship.

I had to rush writing this piece and sent it out late to everyone. I’m still unhappy with the end and may revise it even further before I read it. I was totally knackered once I’d written it. Partly this was because I was determined to write something new and that pushed the boundaries a bit for me in terms of how comfortable I’d be with reading it. It’s also partly because I’m pushing myself to write new material for each reading and tutorial rather than polish up previously reviewed material. I also went to France very early on Tuesday morning partly to buy wine for our course reading. This produced probably a course first — for the first reading ever to be written, partially, on a cross-channel ferry. On the way out I annotated a printed draft then coming back I had the netbook out by the window looking out into the channel. Wonder if any of the nautical flavour comes through?

The piece was also very emotionally draining, which I found quite surprising. As it’s the consummation of a relationship I was trying to imagine and hold in my mind the feelings and emotions of the characters. When this involves scenes of a disintegrating marriage, seriously unrequited love and then some sudden switch into passion between two people who had (on the surface) treated each other as friends then this takes a lot of mental effort. I did this for three or four days and thought about it so much I was more than semi-detached from reality. I don’t know if it will be good for the writing that it felt like I was so intensely involved in their predicaments — your characters can’t do anything much more real than have sex with each other — or whether I might have got too close?

The writing was also difficult as I thought I had to do a sex scene for a reading as this is what the plot of the novel calls for and I wanted to get feedback on it — good and bad. I’m sure this is very difficult to get right and constructive feedback (though not sniggering) in this area would be a lot more useful than on a scene with people walking around London, for example. In the first drafts I had some graphic descriptions and used some very earthy Anglo-Saxon words. In some ways I’d rather these had stayed in as from a reading perspective because I’d like to have made myself read these out, to overcome the embarrassment. However, the word limit chopped any real physical description of the sex — there’s only really the build up but that’s the most interesting bit for the characters.  Even so, I’ve probably laid myself open to bonkbuster piss-taking.