FEATURE:
Minnie, Moony, Vicious, Vicious, Buddy Holly, Sandy Denny
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during The Tour of Life in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Max Browne
Kate Bush’s Blow Away (For Bill)
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I have covered a very special Kate Bush song…
before when talking about Never for Ever (the album it is taken from). The one I am referring to is Blow Away – or, as it should be known, Blow Away (For Bill). It is a track with a sad background. The Kate Bush Encyclopaedia is on hand to explain who the exceptional Bill Duffield was:
“Lighting director for the Tour Of Life. On 2 April 1979, after a show at the Poole Arts Centre in Dorset, the equipment had been loaded for the journey to the next date, and Bill Duffield was having a last look around the stage area to make sure nothing had been left behind. Someone had left an open panel inhe flooring. As Bill crossed the stage he tripped and fell 17 feet onto a concrete floor under the stage. He was rushed to the hospital but tragically died a week later.
It was just prior to the official start of the Tour Of Life. A decision had to be made whether or not the tour would continue. The general consensus was that Bill would have wanted the show to go on. Less than a month later, on 12 May 1979, in the midst of the final days of the tour, Kate performed a memorial concert for Bill Duffield at the Hammersmith Odeon. Also appearing were special guests Peter Gabriel and Steve Harley, who had each worked with Duffield in the past”.
The fact that Bush, in some way, dedicated a song to a member of her tour crew is really touching and wonderful! There are other people mentioned in the song – as I shall explore and explain soon -, but Blow Away (For Bill) is the third track on Never for Ever, and it arrives in the middle of a run of three very beautiful songs – Delius (or Delius (Song of Summer), and All We Ever Look For are either side. I have seen a few sites and magazines rank Blow Away (For Bill) as one of Kate Bush’s best songs – MOJO listed it as their forty-first favourite songs (out of fifty) of hers.
There is the painful background of the song’s title and the death of someone who meant a lot to Bush. When it comes to exploring the various figures mentioned in Blow Away (For Bill), we get to ‘meet’ various departed musicians. Another article in Kate Bush Encyclopaedia provides us with times when Bush discussed the song:
“'Blow Away' is a comfort for the fear of dying and for those of us who believe that music is perhaps an exception to the 'Never For Ever' rule. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)
So there's comfort for the guy in my band, as when he dies, he'll go "Hi, Jimi!" It's very tongue-in-cheek, but it's a great thought that if a musician dies, his soul will join all the other musicians and a poet will join all the Dylan Thomases and all that.
None of those people [who have had near-death experiences] are frightened by death anymore. It's almost something they're looking forward to. All of us have such a deep fear of death. It's the ultimate unknown, at the same time it's our ultimate purpose. That's what we're here for. So I thought this thing about the death-fear. I like to think I'm coming to terms with it, and other people are too. The song was really written after someone very special died.
Although the song had been formulating before and had to be written as a comfort to those people who are afraid of dying, there was also this idea of the music, energies in us that aren't physical: art, the love in people. It can't die, because where does it go? It seems really that music could carry on in radio form, radio waves... There are people who swear they can pick up symphonies from Chopin, Schubert. We're really transient, everything to do with us is transient, except for these non-physical things that we don't even control... (Kris Needs, 'Lassie'. Zigzag (UK), November 1985)”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during The Tour of Life in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Max Browne
I really like Blow Away (For Bill), but some critics have singled it out as being quite weak and throwaway. In the sense that it reveals very little about Bush and it is a song that tells of departed famous musicians, it is not as memorable and important as, say, Don McLean’s American Pie – one where an iconic and departed musician, Buddy Holly, is very much at the heart of it. I love the ethereal nature of Blow Away (For Bill) and how gorgeous Bush’s voice is! She layers her vocals and we get these nice rises and echoes that make the song seem ghostly and far-away. I think the track is brilliantly arranged so that we get this spectral sense; Blow Away (For Bill) is also very grounded and affecting. It is a shame the track could not have been released as a single but, as I often say, there had to be limits and Bush might not have wanted too many tracks taken from Never for Ever – even though only three singles were released from the album. Even though Blow Away (For Bill) is not one of my favourite Bush songs, I think it is one of my favourite vocals from her. I also really love the fact Bill Duffield lives on through the song and, like all Bush songs, it is interesting and has something in it that few other artists would have thought of. I want to bring in an interesting article about the song that discussed Bush newfound confidence (on Never for Ever) and her approach to mortality – and how Blow Away (For Bill) deals with the afterlife:
“Bush’s newfound confidence as a songwriter was accompanied by her newfound lack of certainty about the world. The songs of Never for Ever ask bigger questions than her first two albums do. “Blow Away” is one of Bush’s many songs to deal with death, and issues of consciousness. It’s an ethereal dirge, sung “For Bill,” referring to Bush’s engineer Bill Duffield, who was accidentally killed on the first night of her tour in an especially grim bout of party-pooping. It’s rare for Bush to sing about her personal life and friends, (we’re still far away from “Moments of Pleasure”) but there’s a whole song on her tertiary LP dedicated to an engineer she knew for a probably rather short period of time.
While we’re dealing with mortality, we have to deal with the jaw-dropping fact that Bush quotes Othello in this song. “Put out the light/then put out the light” is her Shakespeare line of choice. In the context of the song, the quote is the opener for the meandering third verse. The lines that follow never quite cohere into a strong verse (“dust to dust/blow to blow”), but it’s worth thinking about why Bush copped this Othello quote. The line comes from Othello’s ending, in which Othello is preparing to murder his wife Desdemona in her sleep, falsely believing her to be an adultress. The line is a Shakespearean double-entendre, referring both to snuffing out Desdemona’s life and to her pale skin (the race politics in Othello are among the most fascinating and analyzed in all of literature). The actual meaning of this line is, of course, lost when deprived on context. Yet it’s an interesting line for Bush to lean on.
So what does “Blow Away” think of the afterlife? Well, it clearly thinks there is one. The dead have souls in Bush’s music. Her universe is populated by spectres — “The Kick Inside” and “Hammer Horror” demonstrate that. “Blow Away” fills their slot on Never for Ever — the song for those beyond the grave. Yet “Blow Away” is more optimistic about their chances of a happy eternity. Consciousness may thrive after death, but Bush has finally liberated her deceased characters of their mortal woes. Part of this is a matter of taste: everyone knows Keith Moon is in hell, but in 1980 it wouldn’t have been politic to say it in a song. Yes, there’s reverence for these musicians in this song, but the nostalgia is alleviated by the thoughtful weirdness of the song. It’s not the most radical song on the album, but it’s assuring that Bush’s optimism for the power of artistic imagination extends beyond the grave”.
I have a lot of time for Blow Away (For Bill) and I wanted to spotlight it because it is so interesting and one of those overlooked and hidden gems on Never for Ever. The death of Bill Duffield clearly affected Kate Bush, and she honoured his memory in more than one way – she put on a benefit concert in 1979. Check out a magnificent song that many might not even be aware of. It is a stunning work from one of Kate Bush’s…
MOST interesting and under-discussed albums.