Times of passion
Marcus Berkmann
Quick off the mark as ever, I have been listening a lot to the new Kate Bush album. Not that it is exactly ‘new’ any more. It has been out since November, which is roughly the Mesozoic era in pop terms; it has had its moment in the glare, earned its creator a Brits nomination (but no award) and will soon, no doubt, be turning up in an HMV sale, at which point I strongly suggest you buy it if you haven’t bought it already. Albums this accomplished simply don’t come along that often, and it’s a particular pleasure to let it seep into your consciousness in the knowledge that you will be enjoying it just as much in five years’ time, and maybe ten and 20 and more. Excess of enthusiasm compels me to overpraise things in this column from time to time, as does sheer relief, but I hope I am right about this, especially as the album is so resolutely unfashionable.
As someone very perceptive said a year or two ago — was it Brian Eno? — these are times of passion rather than finesse in pop music. If Bush had turned up with a guitar album she had recorded in a weekend, she would have had much better reviews and probably sold more CDs. By contrast, Aerial (EMI) took so long to make that the orchestral arranger on one track, Michael Kamen, actually died two years before it was released. But this isn’t a dry, overworked record like so many you hear from middle-aged pop performers who no longer ‘do’ deadlines. Bush is extraordinary partly because she can combine passion and finesse without compromising either. She manages to be both a completely instinctive artist and a crazed perfectionist. She has lived with this record for years, and now it’s our turn.
So who should care about the reviews of such a record? We may read reviews before we buy, and then think no more of them, unless like me you litter your home with piles of slightly-out-of-date newspapers and magazines which you retain for ‘research’ purposes and end up skimming through late at night when going to bed requires slightly more energy than you can muster. As a result I have read several reviews of Aerial only recently, and what a curmudgeonly lot they were.
While everyone accepts that Bush is close to genius (because that’s the critical consensus), no one seems to like her music much, which I can see would be a bit of a problem. Instead, several reviewers I read kept using words like ‘mawkish’ and ‘sentimental’, and particularly objected to a song called ‘Bertie’, which is essentially a declaration of love for her young son, and ‘Mrs Bartolozzi’, otherwise known in these parts as ‘Washing Machine’, as that is the regularly repeated refrain. Both songs are intimate, emotional, domestic, one might even say female, and some (male) reviewers have recoiled in horror. Not that they actually said it, but you could tell they didn’t feel these were proper subjects for rock musicians to be writing about. Life on the road, fine. Life in the kitchen, absolutely not. Bush has a reputation for eccentricity, and one famously pseudy critic almost implied that she had a screw loose for writing these impossibly homebound tunes. I can’t quote his precise words, as I’m afraid I ripped the page into confetti, trying to obliterate his smug assumptions and, indeed, his particularly irritating picture byline.
Rock music, of course, remains an overwhelmingly male enclave, invariably claiming progressive political affiliations but rather less liberal in its social attitudes. Women still need to be honorary blokes if they are to get anywhere; the more blatantly female their behaviour the less respect they will earn. Kate Bush used to get away with it because she is supremely talented, but it’s no surprise that the most critically admired of her albums, Hounds of Love, is also the most conventionally rocky. She now has complete freedom to do anything she wants, which may explain why this album features birdsong and, even more shockingly to some, Rolf Harris. But it has also allowed her to write songs about normal life in the way many of us live it. Almost no one else seems to do this. It shows, in this anything-goes era of pop music, that in reality almost nothing goes. Want to bet on Noel Gallagher writing a song about hoovering the stairs or taking his children to the playground? Want to bet on the moon being made of green cheese?
Previous page
