Good or bad timing
Marcus Berkmann
KATE BUSH by Rob Jovanovic Piatkus, £16.99, pp. 240, ISBN 0749950498 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 ‘T here are no childhood pics,’ says my girlfriend. ‘What’s the use of an autobiography with out any childhood pics?’ ‘It’s not an autobiography. It’s a biography,’ I tell her.
‘Is it authorised?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh.’ And that, in essence, is the problem with the rock biography, or at least this one. Once you have disregarded all the things it isn’t and won’t have in it, you are left with ... well, what exactly? Rob Jovanovic has previously written books about REM, Beck, Pavement, Nirvana and Big Star, not to mention Nottingham Forest FC, so he should know how to put together a book like this. And he has one crucial advantage: good timing. This very month Kate Bush releases her first new album in 12 years. Simply by not actively courting publicity during this time, she has been routinely portrayed by the press as, at the very least, a recluse and, more frequently than seems decent, a complete nutter. So for Rob to publish his biography right now — and, crucially, for there to be no competing biographies coming out at the same time — is to ride the wave of media interest the new Bush album has generated. Put it this way: this book has already been widely reviewed, and at any other time I doubt it would be.
Bush, of course, is a considerable figure. Hers is not a huge body of work — the new album is only her eighth in 27 years but in an industry that habitually belittles everything women do she is almost alone in being universally respected. Her music, from the start, was exciting, different and wilfully uncommercial, and yet people instantly loved it. The first time I heard ‘Wuthering Heights’ I remember thinking ‘Number One record’, as we did in those days, when the phrase meant something. Later albums not only maintained the standard, but revealed an endlessly questing talent, someone who was never satisfied with doing again what she had already done. As 98 per cent of all rock musicians have little choice but to do again what they have already done, this set her apart from the mass, as did her determination to live a straightforward domestic life to her own non-rock rules. After she gave birth to a son, Bertie, in July 1998, the press didn’t find out for 18 months. You can’t help admiring her for this.
Jovanovic has talked to a few people and read all the early interviews. (There are almost no later interviews, so when quoted Bush always sounds like the slightly wideeyed 19-year-old she once was.) He makes some agonising attempts to fill in the gaps — ‘As she got home from school, the 11year-old Cathy Bush jumped out of her dad’s car and dashed into the house’ — but there is no getting past the fact that Jovanovic had no access to Bush, her family or either of her long-term partners. He has manfully resisted any temptation to write a hatchet job; instead he is scrupulously fairminded and appreciative of her musical output. But I’m not sure this is enough.
The real problem is, who needs a cut-andpaste biography when you have a new record to listen to? Good timing, then, and bad timing: for Rob Jovanovic it could conceivably be both.
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