{"id":523,"date":"2010-08-25T23:32:47","date_gmt":"2010-08-25T23:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=523"},"modified":"2010-08-25T23:38:55","modified_gmt":"2010-08-25T23:38:55","slug":"running-up-that-hill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/?p=523","title":{"rendered":"Running Up That Hill"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quite a surprise to have \u00c2\u00a0what 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 \u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u201c or at least have light cast upon it. On holiday I read Graeme Thomson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recent biography of Kate Bush \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcUnder the Ivy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 \u00c2\u00a0(Omnibus Press)<\/a> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c which bills itself as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthe first ever in-depth study of one of the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most enigmatic artists\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a curious book \u00e2\u20ac\u201c mostly biography gleaned from interviews with figures relatively peripheral to Kate Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life and from press interviews with Kate Bush herself. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s certainly a fascinating and enigmatic subject but what lifts the book above the levels of most music biographies is Thomson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s critical interpretation of her music, somewhat in the vein of Ian MacDonald\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s classic about The Beatles, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcRevolution in the Head\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n

There were a few passages of analysis in the book which suddenly grabbed me and made me think \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthat concept is similar to what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been trying to get over in my writing\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c almost to the level of self-parody in \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThem Heavy People\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 but there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s far more \u00e2\u20ac\u201c think of Molly Bloom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s speech from \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcUlysses\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcThe Sensual World\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 (my favourite Kate Bush track of the lot), or the obvious \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWuthering Heights\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s music takes us somewhere else, somewhere deeper\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a very inquisitive, giving quixotic thing\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6there is no need to join every dot, or explain every reference. That is a game for those who can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily important. You either hear it and feel it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and trust what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re hearing or feeling \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n

I particularly like the last sentence: you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re either the sort of person who trusts your emotional reaction or you aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. This ties in with some current debate about writing, especially of the more literary genre \u00e2\u20ac\u201c does it work on an emotional level or does it solely exist to perform intellectual gymnastics?<\/p>\n

No-one who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s seriously listened to Kate Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fully realised (shows how closely I read the lyrics) what she was trying to suggest in one of her most well known singles, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcRunning Up That Hill\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. To quote Thomson:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcOriginally called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A Deal With God\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, the song spoke passionately of Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s impossible wish to become<\/em> 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in capturing the basic human need to strive for compatibility \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it was not without hope nor optimism.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n

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I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d say that many novelists also try to set out to achieve this \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcimpossible\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 ambition (trying to fully understand the experience of the other gender) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to know \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwhat the other felt and desired\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s certainly something I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m fascinated with \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as I have a novel that switches between male and female POVs in a putative relationship.<\/p>\n

It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pretty evident that these songs have lodged themselves quite deep in my psyche and bits of them seem to come out when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m writing. I had a playlist of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcquiet stuff\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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.<\/p>\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another aspect to Kate Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work that makes it more approachable from a male point of view which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never realised until reading this book \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and yet it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so obvious. She likes men. Thomson says of one of Kate Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most touching songs:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcAside from its luminous melody and swooping chorus, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Man With the Child In His Eyes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not such an open thing for a woman to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she once said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m wondering about buying \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcAdventures in Kate Bush and Theory\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 which is full of analysis (as it says in the publisher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s press release<\/a>) \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwritten 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind too much if those three adjectives were applied to my novel, at least in part.<\/p>\n

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It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quite a surprise to have \u00c2\u00a0what 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 \u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u201c or at least have light cast upon it. On holiday I read Graeme Thomson\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recent biography of Kate Bush … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Running Up That Hill”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[424],"tags":[317,344,275,425,100,42,98],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influences-2","tag-80s-music","tag-cultural-references","tag-gender","tag-kate-bush","tag-pop-music","tag-sex","tag-subconscious"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":526,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions\/526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macnovel.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}