FEATURE:
In Her Own Write
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at Black Island Studios, London in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari
A Singular, Brilliant Lyricist: Kate Bush’s How to Be Invisible Book at Two
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THIS will be the final Kate Bush anniversary feature…
IMAGE CREDIT: Faber & Faber
I will put out this year because, on 6th December, it is two years since she released her first book of lyrics, How to Be Invisible – there are, annoyingly, several listed publication dates for the book; I think we can take it as gospel that it was 6th December. If you are a fan of Kate Bush and do not own the book then go and buy it, as it is a really tremendous work:
“A landmark publishing event, How to be Invisible is the first ever published collection of Bush’s lyrics, selected by the artist and brought together in a beautiful clothbound gift edition.
Ivor Novello winner Kate Bush has long forged her love of literature with music. From Emily Brontë through to James Joyce, Bush has consistently referenced our literary heritage, combined with her own profound understanding of language and musical form.
How to Be Invisible: Selected Lyrics draws from her superlative, 40-year career in music. Chosen and arranged by Kate Bush herself, this very special, cloth-bound volume will be the first published collection of her work.
Accompanying the collection is an expansive introduction from Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell. ‘For millions around the world Kate is way more than another singer-songwriter: she is a creator of musical companions that travel with you through life,’ he said. ‘One paradox about her is that while her lyrics are avowedly idiosyncratic, those same lyrics evoke emotions and sensations that feel universal’”.
I have talked about Bush as a lyricist before and, whilst it might seem impossible to distil her essence and define her as a songwriting given her varied and long career, there are some beautiful selections on How to Be Invisible. I think many people, still, think of Bush more of a singer and do not highlight her lyrics. I was listening to David Mitchell - who provides a foreword to How to Be Invisible - on Desert Island Discs and he picked Sunset (from 2005’s Aerial) as one of his selections. Nearly thirty years after Bush’s debut album, she was still turning in incredible poetry and summoning these unique visions. Consider these lyrics: “Who knows who wrote that song of summer/That blackbirds sing at dusk?/This is a song of colour/Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust/Then climb into bed and turn to dust”. Although there are a few songs where Bush’s talent and clarity is not at its sharpest – a few songs on The Red Shoes lack a certain depth and spark -, just look through her career and the sort of lyrics she was producing! The Kick Inside is my favourite album and, on an album where Bush was talking about love in a very passionate and sensuous way, she was producing lyrics that were quite oblique and strange. Kite is an example where her unique wordplay really soared: “Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o/My feet are heavy and I'm rooted in my wellios/And I want to get away and go/I want to be/From all these mirror windows/I want to be home/I look at eye level, it isn't good enough/And then I find it out when I take a good look up/There's a hole in the sky with a big eyeball/There's a hole in the, there's a hole in the sky/Calling me”.
I will talk about some tracks and highlights from How to Be Invisible soon but, before then, a couple of reviews highlight the importance of the book. There is no doubt Bush is a poet and there is no doubt that she is among the most accomplished lyricists ever. This review from The Irish Times emphasises Bush’s clear gifts:
“When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, I was one of those who thought the idea of separating lyrics from music and calling them literature was a little ridiculous. I’m not ashamed to confess my hypocrisy, however, when I relax that rule for Kate Bush, the greatest singer-songwriter of the past 40 years, whose work is complex, ethereal and filled with so many secrets that one can listen to the albums for decades, as I have done, and still discover new delights every time. Unlike so many contemporary songwriters, whose Byzantine lyrics are, upon closer examination, essentially meaningless, there’s not a spare word anywhere in Bush’s work. Everything means something.
Knowing the albums as well as I do, reading these familiar lyrics is to experience the songs I love in an entirely new way. They’re not structured chronologically here, and there’s more focus on the later work than the earlier, but this adds an interesting element, for Bush has clearly chosen each juxtaposition for a reason. Breathing, for example, a song about nuclear war, is placed next to Experiment IV, which recounts a military plot to create “a sound that could kill someone from a distance”, and this is followed by Joanni, a song about Joan of Arc. The entire section is introduced by the classic Army Dreamers and ends with O England My Lionheart, where “the soldiers soften, the war is over, the air raid shelters are blooming clover”. And these five songs are drawn from four different albums. It’s so subtle, but it’s so smart”.
In their review of How to be Invisible, The Guardian had this to say about a much-anticipated release:
“Trust Kate Bush, never one to explain, to complicate the straightforward lyrics collection. She doesn’t annotate this anthology, unlike Neil Tennant’s recent Faber edition. Instead, subtler direction follows an introduction by author David Mitchell, who wrote the spoken-word parts of Bush’s 2014 Before the Dawn performances. Mitchell intermingles charming fannish detail with close textual analysis that illuminates familiar songs: it is God, he points out, not the devil, who allows the man and woman to exchange their sexual experiences on Running Up That Hill, an act of divinity rather than transgression.
But Mitchell is wrong on one key point. “Kate’s the opposite of a confessional singer-songwriter in the mould of Joni Mitchell during her Blue period,” he asserts. “You don’t learn much about Kate from her songs.” Which begs the question of how we might know a songwriter. It’s true that Bush’s personal life is so opaque that an interview betraying her Netflix habits offered grounding intimacy. Another where she described Theresa May as “the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time” burst a bubble some fans were keen to preserve. More dispiriting than partisan matters was her opinion that “it is great to have a woman in charge of the country”. If Bush’s songwriting tells us anything, it’s that her understanding of gender and power is typically more complex”.
I like the fact that How to Be Invisible is beautifully bound in black and there is the silver lettering on the front. The hardback has this wonderful feel and it looks gorgeous! I will not quote all of the foreword by David Mitchell, but there are a few key observations. Although Mitchell says we do not learn much from Bush through her lyrics – that there is this kind of mask that she wears -, I think that she reveals a lot about who she is and how she thinks through characters and her songs of love. Mitchell dissects The Dreaming (1982) and asks who dies at the end of Pull Out the Pin – “the Vietnamese solider or the big pink hash-smoking American GI; or both? -; What exactly is the ‘gaffa’ in Suspended in Gaffa?”. I do really love how Bush can be very direct and unabashed in many of her songs, but she can weave in words and stories that have mysteries and leave things to the imagination of the listeners. Mitchell noted how Bush recoils against celebrity in her lyrics but, rather than being private and reserved, she gives away secrets on songs like Under the Ivy. Through bold artistic choices Bush, as Mitchell observes, has “never been out of fashion” – because, like so many artists, she was never in fashion or trying to fit into any narrow moulds and expectations.
The title of How to Be Invisible is taken from the song of the same name from Aerial. Bush dedicated the book to her son, Bertie - and Aerial is very much about him or inspired by Bush becoming a mother. The first song that comes is Snowflake. From her 2011 album, 50 Words for Snow, it is a ‘recent’ song and one that shows Bush’s talent right from the first lines – “I was born in a cloud…/Now I am falling/I want you to catch me/Look up and you’ll see me/You know you can hear me”. I do love that the pages are not embellished or illustrated (there is some stylised lettering on some pages), so that one focuses on the songs and the meaning of the lyrics. Maybe illustrations could have added new dynamics, but I think it directs the meaning of songs too much and, by simply having songs’ lyrics printed without distraction, one reads the book like a collection of stories where we can each envisage and wonder. One of the lesser-appreciated songs from The Red Shoes, Top of the City, arrives next and, whilst I said that album contains some weaker songs, Top of the City shows that Bush was still very much firing from all cylinders when she wanted to – “I don’t know if you love me or not/But I don’t think we should/Ever suffer/There’s just one thing we can/Do about this”. Bush does not put the best-known songs at the front of How to Be Invisible, but we do get a run of post-Hounds of Love songs before that album’s title track arrives as the fifth selection.
I will highlight a few other songs, but I think the running order of the selected songs is very clever. The first ten songs include big singles like Hounds of Love, Cloudbusting, The Big Sky, Hounds of Love, together with songs that do not get huge attention – Love and Anger, The Song of Solomon, and Delius (Song of Summer). Like a great piece of album programming, you do not want your best songs to come earliest, but you do need to mix strong songs with less immediate ones! There is a perfect blend of age and themes throughout. Bush selects songs that mean a lot to her - like Bertie - that might not be among the fan favourites, but I am glad there are songs like Between a Man and a Woman (The Sensual World), and You’re the One (The Red Shoes). I think You’re the One is especially important, as it was the last song on The Red Shoes and, in album terms, the last (album) song we would hear from Bush in twelve years. I do like the song because, contrary to what some say about Kate Bush being secretive and not revealing, there is genuine personal emotion and upset in this song – even if she would say it is her playing a character. Bush was in a relationship with Del Palmer at the time of The Red Shoes (they would break up around the time of the album release) – it was a complex relationship, so I am not sure the exact date they split.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Walter/WireImage/Getty Images
Although there is implore and positivity in the song, lines like “Everything I have, I bought with you”, and, when talking about a new love/man, “He can’t make me laugh and cry/At the same time”, you get a sense of Bush’s loss and struggle! In a nice piece of arrangement, You’re the One is followed by All the Love – a song from The Dreaming that is similar in tone but different in terms of its story. Bush, of course, had to omit some songs from the book, and there are a few cuts from The Kick Inside that do not make it. Again, having songs you would not expect to be in there like Experiment IV (from The Whole Story, 1986), In Search of Peter Pan (Lionheart, 1978), and Big Stripey Lie (The Red Shoes) alongside the classics is a great touch. Bush included the entirety of Hounds of Love’s suite, The Ninth Wave, alongside Aerial’s suite, A Sky of Honey. One song that has very strong lyrics but does not get talked about much or played is The Fog from The Sensual World. There are beautiful images of Bush picking up faces in crowds and picking you/the hero up like a radio station but, if she lets him go, then he slips into the fog. We get these wonderful and very raw images - but there is also a sense of the dream-like and distant.
One of my favourite sections from any Kate Bush song comes when she sings “This love was big enough for the both of us/This love of yours/Was big enough to be frightened of/It’s deep and dark like the water was/The day I learned to swim”. I resist a little of David Mitchell’s view that Bush rarely revealed much about herself because, on songs like The Fog, I think she really writes from the heart and sounds completely naked! I think it is a good touch that Bush had songs from 50 Words for Snow bookmarking How to Be Invisible – Lake Tahoe ends things -, but I wanted to finish by quoting from the book’s titular track. I wonder why Bush decided that the book would be called How to Be Invisible? To be fair, we get quite meta with the song’s opening line: “I found a book on how to invisible”. That, at once, gets you guessing. Is the book about literally becoming invisible or is there a metaphor at play? I like the track because, on an album that documents everything from her family to nature through to Elvis Presley (on King of the Mountain), there is something fantastical about How to Be Invisible. Bush sings about “Hem of Anorak” and standing in front of a million doors – “And each one holds a million more”.
She asks: “Is that the wind from the Desert Song?”, and “Is that a Storm in the Swimming Pool?”. On the back cover for the book, there is a quote from David Mitchell that sums up her lyrics: “…her lyrics are proudly idiosyncratic, those same lyrics evoke emotions and sensations that feel universal”. I have selected a few songs that, between them, are personal and meaningful - whilst some allow the imagination to roam. I would urge people to buy How to Be Invisible because, even though it has been out two years, there is something universal, timeless and ageless about Bush’s wise and always astonishing lyrics! Near the start, I quoted from a review in The Irish Times, where Dylan was mentioned because of his Nobel Prize win and how Bush seems like an equal poet. Whilst some regard Dylan as the ultimate wordsmith and poet, I think Kate Bush could be ranked alongside him – even though she has recorded far fewer songs. Dylan won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 and, before her career is done, I wouldn’t bet again…
IMAGE CREDIT: Faber & Faber
KATE Bush receiving the very same honour!