I discovered Kate Bush....

[ketman]

...on YouTube a few months ago, not long after my 60th birthday (David Bowie is seven months older than me). But I wasn't looking for her. I was looking for Frederick Delius. That's the short answer. Do you want the long one?

[Al Truest]

Jun 17, 2008 18:59:26 GMT ketman said:

...Do you want the long one?

'sounds like a loaded question. I likewise found Gurdjieff through Kate's music. There are many links to follow through the apparent and hidden references in her work.

[ketman]

Why, yes, ketman. We'd like the long version. Please continue.

(I know no one actually said that, but I'm pretending they did)

Very well, if you insist. I was heavily into pop as a teenager in the 1960s, and had played lead guitar in an amateur (and not good) band. But in 1968-9 when I was 21, I suddenly got interested in classical music, which I knew hardly anything about. Sometime earlier, I can't remember how long, I had seen a TV film about a composer who had gone blind. I hadn't paid much attention, but I remembered a couple of scenes from it. One was where the composer was singing the notes of his composition to a young man who had the impossible task of trying to write it down. It was comical in the extreme, because it was the most tuneless sound you could imagine - "ta ta-ta...ta ta-ta....ta ta-ta...." - and you can imagine the despairing look on the young man's face, who hadn't a clue what notes were being sung.

Later, I got to know the music of the composer, who was called Frederick Delius, and I have been listening to him for nearly 40 years now. But after all that time, the memory of that film became very vague, and I never heard it mentioned by anyone, and the few people I asked had never heard of it. I actually wondered if I'd conjured up a non-existent film out of my imagination. Maybe I'd dreamed it. So when I got to know YouTube, I immediately searched for this film - and found it. It was quite a relief to know it did exist. It was called "A Song of Summer", and it was a bonus to find out it was a Ken Russell film, because I'd admired his work for years.

What was also intriguing was that the YouTube search results had turned up this young girl called Kate Bush who'd written a song about Delius. Her name was familiar to me since the 1970s, but I didn't know any of her work. I thought she was a folk singer of some sort. The clip I found was the Russell Harty interview which included a mimed performance of the song. It perplexed me at first, since it bore no obvious relation to Delius musically, but I was amused to find that the scene that had struck me from the film had also struck her the same way. She has the back-up singer going "tuh tuh-tuh...tuh tuh-tuh..." in the same tuneless drone. (I also worked out that she couldn't have been more than ten or eleven when she'd seen it.) But I did something of a double-take with the last line that goes "...to be sung of a summer night on the water". Because it would have a special resonance for Delius fans. The piece heard briefly in the film, the eponymous Song of Summer, is not a song as such, but an orchestral piece. But, as it happens, in 1917 Delius wrote two (true) songs for choir called "Songs to be Sung of a Summer Night on the Water". It occurred to me then that this girl was no fake, and probably knew the entire Delius catalogue.

I was impressed enough to investigate more of Kate Bush's own music. And the more I hear, the more impressed I become. But I have a lot of catching up to do.

[rosabelbelieve]

Thank you for elaborating on your Kate discovery, ketman. Isn't it interesting the way one piece of art can connect us to another.

[ketman]

Especially if it's Kate's piece of art, it seems. She's like Clapham Junction, branching off in all directions.

[rosabelbelieve]

Yes, she is part of a very diverse and intriguing web of influences.

[ketman]

I said in a previous post that I'd heard of Kate Bush from at least the early 1980s even if I didn't know anything about her except that she was a singer of some sort. But in the last couple of days I tried to remember contexts where her name might have arisen, and I did think of one. So, having nothing better to do, I'll tell you about that.

I visited Russia in the early 1980s when it was still called the Soviet Union. Everything was state-run, including the hotels and restaurants. They were desperately poor. The shops were virtually empty, and nothing worked - taps, electric sockets, nothing. They were supposed to be a super-power who threatened the whole world with nuclear destruction, but it seemed to me their missiles would never have got off the ground. It was a third-world country.

Anyway, I was asked by a hotel employee, "You khev Byittles?" He sort of whispered it out of the corner of his mouth. It threw me for a while, but after I'd asked him to repeat it several times, I eventually deciphered it as "You have Beatles?" In those days all western music was banned, and existed only as part of the underground culture. And not many westerners went to the USSR back then anyway, because being followed around everywhere by the KGB was nobody's idea of a good time. You wouldn't go there for fun, that's for sure. I was a minor international discus thrower and was in town for a Great Britain v USSR competition. As foreigners, the whole team would have been under automatic surveillance, and like everyone else I assumed my hotel room was bugged.

But human nature is what it is, and in odd places like corridors, toilets, side streets, you would find people sidling up to you with whispered questions. Even the KGB couldn't keep the entrepreneurs away. If you were British, they were interested in two things. The first thing was any item of Marks & Spencer clothing you might have in your suitcase or on your person. For some reason, M&S clothes were prized above any designer label you cared to name from back home. In Russia, sewing forged M&S labels onto cheap Russian-made clothing was a well-known scam. So the genuine article was like gold dust. You could sell an M&S shirt in the street, literally off your back. They'd swap shirts with you in a doorway, and then hand you enough money to pay your entire hotel bill. Unfortunately, I didn't know that, or I'd have brought a couple with me.

The second thing they wanted back in the USSR (you don't know how lucky you are, boy) was...the Fab Four! - who were forbidden but hugely loved. "You khev Byittles?" - sadly, I didn't. But if I'd had the foresight to smuggle an album into the country, that bloke would have copied it onto a cheap Russian reel-to-reel tape-recorder, and the tapes would have been sold on to people who used them to make further copies, which they'd sell on to others who'd make copies of copies, and so on. With the sound quality diminishing from copy to copy, the customers at the end of the chain would have ended up with something that sounded like the mop-tops were gargling in a tin bath with a blanket thrown over them.

But the third thing I was asked for in Moscow foxed me completely, and I remained in the dark for another twenty years or so - "You khev Catboosh?" Not that I didn't know who was meant. I knew the name all right - once I'd deciphered it. But the time was past when I could be expected to know much more than that. I'd been a teenager in the 1960s, and when I was 21 or so I decided that pop music was crap and started listening to classical instead. It was ridiculous, really, because what I was alienated by was not the music, but the DJs, who as a breed I loathed, and continue to loathe. So I started listening to BBC Radio 3, where they didn't have DJs as such. It was about the worst possible reason for switching musical genres that you could think of, but amazingly it stuck. Classical music became and remains my main musical interest. From the early 1970s on I dipped into the pop world occasionally, just to see what was going on, but I was interested only in what I already knew - Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Bowie etc. Anything more recent just passed me by.

So who was Kate Bush to me? Well, I was in my mid-30s by then and would probably have said that she was one of a tribe of girls, often called Kate, who played acoustic guitar at folk festivals, where the audience sat cross-legged on the grass, nodding and smoking substances. All the Kates were interchangeable as far as I was concerned. Kate this, Kate that, Kate the other, what's the difference? They all looked and sounded the same. So I was a bit puzzled by this particular Russian interest. I could understand why Byittles was a precious commodity, but not Catboosh. They might as well have asked for Toyah Wilcox or Lena Zavaroni.

Getting even a hint of my mistake has taken a long time. I remember even as recently as three years ago idly asked someone if Kate Bush had written that parking lot song, you know " something.....something....put up a parking lot", and got a contemptuous hoot of laughter for my troubles. But I was only fifty-seven at the time. I was too young to know any better. I'm much wiser now, though as I said I have a lot of catching up to do.

[Al Truest]

^ Take your time catching up. And that was Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" I believe...

[rosabelbelieve]

^ Great story, ketman.