FEATURE:
Inside Kate Bush’s The Dreaming at Forty
Track Two: There Goes a Tenner
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BEFORE Kate Bush’s The Dreaming…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and an extra during the shoot/rehearsals for the There Goes a Tenner video in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (from the book, KATE: Inside the Rainbow)
turns forty in September, I am writing a few features about it. One run I am doing is a track-by-track guide. I have reached the second track on the album, There Goes a Tenner. To many, it is the worst track on the album. One of the reasons people think that is because the track was released as a single and only reached ninety-three. Released in November 1982, maybe people had heard the album and felt it was not necessary to buy the single. The Dreaming is more of an album that you need to listen to in full. It is not something that has many ready singles you can separate from the rest Bush corrected that with 1985’s Hounds of Love. I actually like the fact The Dreaming is an album that you need to treat as a single work. Because of that, maybe There Goes a Tenner gets overlooked. It is a fun song where Bush adopts a cockney accent. Playing a robber during a heist, I feel it is an underrated song that people should listen to. Before I continue with my thoughts on the track, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia collates a couple of interviews where Bush discussed There Goes a Tenner:
“It's about amateur robbers who have only done small things, and this is quite a big robbery that they've been planning for months, and when it actually starts happening, they start freaking out. They're really scared, and they're so aware of the fact that something could go wrong that they just freaked out, and paranoid and want to go home. (...) It's sort of all the films I've seen with robberies in, the crooks have always been incredibly in control and calm, and I always thought that if I ever did a robbery, I'd be really scared, you know, I'd be really worried. So I thought I'm sure that's a much more human point of view. (The Dreaming interview, CBAK 4011 CD)
That was written on the piano. I had an idea for the tune and just knocked out the chords for the first verse. The words and everything just came together. It was quite a struggle from there on to try to keep things together. The lyrics are quite difficult on that one, because there are a lot of words in quite a short space of time. They had to be phrased right and everything. That was very difficult. Actually the writing went hand-in-hand with the CS-80. (John Diliberto, Interview. Keyboard/Totally Wired/Songwriter (USA), 1985)”.
I think that each track on The Dreaming has its place. The fact is that, until this point, the album was the most diverse Bush had delivered. With each song completely different and with its own style, I can understand why the singles did not fare so well (apart from the first, Sat in Your Lap). There Goes a Tenner is a song that warrants more acclaim. As with all songs on The Dreaming, the lyrics are great. There are plenty of lines on There Goes a Tenner that grab you. My favourite sections are “I've been here all day/A star in strange ways/Apart from a photograph/They'll get nothing from me/Not until they let me see my solicitor/Ooh, I remember/That rich, windy weather/When you would carry me/Pockets floating/In the breeze”. Even though the accent is not everyone’s favourite part of the track, the fact Bush adopts this persona and accent is great. She commits to the part and the video, which I think is one of her most interesting, was a plea from EMI. The video for The Dreaming’s title track was less conventional and cinematic in terms of its shots and feel. That single did not do too well and, not helped by the video, there was this demand to make There Goes a Tenner’s video more conventional and less complex/expensive. Even though the Paul Henry-directed video was not shown a lot, I think that it is really great. An underrated song from The Dreaming, I think that it should get more airplay and attention! There Goes a Tenner is one of ten wonderful tracks from…
A spectacular album.