FEATURE:
Gods and Robbers
IN THIS IMAGE: Kate Bush in the Suspended in Gaffa video/ART CREDIT: iniminiemoo via Deviant Art
Kate Bush’s There Goes a Tenner and Suspended in Gaffa at Forty-One
_________
SLIGHTLY breaking away…
from my Kate Bush album anniversary features, it is an opportunity to talk about two singles that were released on 2nd November, 1982. The penultimate released from her album – after Sat in Your Lap and The Dreaming -, these two very different songs were released in different parts of the world. As an experimental and not instantly accessible album, it was difficult getting singles out and them riding high in the charts. I don’t suppose Bush was thinking about singles and getting chart success. The Dreaming was very much about the whole. How the album sounded. Although this was reversed to a degree on 1985’s Hounds of Love, 1982’s The Dreaming was very much a chance for her to show she was a serious artist. Not one who like her Pop peers or easy to define. Instead, The Dreaming is a collection of songs that reveal themselves over multiple listens. That said, on 2nd November, 1982, Bush did launch her newest singles. After Sat in Your Lap fared well on the charts and The Dreaming was considered a comparative failure, there was probably a feeling that, if two different singles were released in different areas of the world, then that would be a gamble worth taking (?). One could say two other songs on The Dreaming would have been successful singles – perhaps All the Love and Houdini. Bush released the jaunty crime caper, There Goes a Tenner, in the U.K. and Ireland. Suspended in Gaffa was released in Australia and the continental Europe. There Goes a Tenner reached ninety-three. It is a song that gained no interest from any radio stations. There Goes a Tenner’s video gained little attention on music television programmes. Suspended in Gaffa got top-forty in some countries. Even if the chart position do neither song justice, they are worth highlighting and celebrating!
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and an extra during the rehearsals for the There Goes a Tenner video in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Coming up to the forty-first anniversary of their release, these tracks still sound like nothing else! Distinctly the work of Kate Bush. Kate Bush Encyclopedia gives us some information about There Goes a Tenner. It is one that miffed critics. Perhaps wanting Kate Bush to be more accessible - and release songs that were more traditional -, it was clear her work was ahead of its time. The perception that women considered as Pop artists should be releasing certain types of music. I think There Goes a Tenner is a really interesting song that should have done better on the charts. It has quite a nice backstory. Another assuredly Kate Bush type of song. She explained in interviews where she got the idea for a terrific track:
“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 suppose Suspended in Gaffa would have been a successful single in the U.K. I think it is close in tone and inspiration to Sat in Your Lap. Whereas There Goes a Tenner has Bush adopting a Cockney accent and there is no real chorus, Suspended in Gaffa seems more familiar and accessible in some ways. Something that could have got radio play. I love There Goes a Tenner and think that it was let down by radio stations and the media. No fault of Kate Bush and EMI! Suspended in Gaffa is an intriguing song that should be played more today. This is what Kate Bush said about a beauty of a song:
“I could explain some of it, if you want me to: Suspended in Gaffa is reasonably autobiographical, which most of my songs aren’t. It’s about seeing something that you want–on any level–and not being able to get that thing unless you work hard and in the right way towards it. When I do that I become aware of so many obstacles, and then I want the thing without the work. And then when you achieve it you enter…a different level–everything will slightly change. It’s like going into a time warp which otherwise wouldn’t have existed. (Richard Cook, 'My music sophisticated?...'. NME (UK), October 1982)
'Suspended In Gaffa' is, I suppose, similar in some ways to 'Sat In Your Lap' - the idea of someone seeking something, wanting something. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic and had the imagery of purgatory and of the idea that when you were taken there that you would be given a glimpse of God and then you wouldn't see him again until you were let into heaven. And we were told that in Hell it was even worse because you got to see God but then you knew that you would never see him again. And it's sorta using that as the parallel. And the idea of seeing something incredibly beautiful, having a religious experience as such, but not being able to get back there. And it was playing musically with the idea of the verses being sorta real time and someone happily jumping through life [Makes happy motion with head] and then you hit the chorus and it like everything sorta goes into slow mo and they're reaching [Makes slow reaching motion with arm] for that thing that they want and they can't get there. [Laughs] (Interview for MTV, November 1985)”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush embraced by her mother, Hannah, in the video for Suspended in Gaffa/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Wiseman
I don’t think many people dove into There Goes a Tenner and deeper meaning. Hearing the composition and vocal and writing it off as a novelty or strange song, Bush had created something socially aware and political. On an album with a few political moments – not least Pull Out the Pin and The Dreaming -, this was a song that had its heart in British society under Margaret Thatcher. This is what Dreams of Orgonon wrote in their feature:
“Yet even with her classism, there’s some worth to her attempts here. Fundamentally, “There Goes a Tenner” channels the heist movie through a children’s panto. It treats poverty and crime with the tropes and language available to Bush through English popular culture. “Ooh, there’s a tenner/hey look, there’s a fiver” interpolates British currency onto the trope of money exploding in the middle of a robbery, as seen in such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. There are some hat tips to old gangster films, like when Bush observes her partners’ conduct in the middle of their robbery: “both my partners/act like actors/you are Bogart/he is George Raft/that leaves Cagney and me.” Clumsy, to be sure, but distinct in its aesthetics, and in a better song, Bush’s dive into British class politics with crime film tropes might be enlightening.
There’s something more going on here though. Bush asserted that her robbers were incompetents with limited experience: “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.” She goes on to cite Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as an example of hypercompetence in cinematic criminals, objecting to the composure of the genre’s heroes, observing “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.”
Certainly the heist genre is populated by “chill” paragons of masculinity. It’s how you get lead actors like Paul Newman, Al Pacino, or George Clooney as top notch criminals. The genre offers the pleasures of breaking with the decorum of civil society while still keeping a layer of masculine authority in the mix, and its films tend to conclude with major punitive measures for the culprits (see Bonnie & Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, etc).
Bush’s resulting bemusement at this is almost quaintly middle-class. “But don’t people who’ve robbed hundreds of banks get scared when they rob a bank” is the sort of question your childhood friend who’s horrified by shoplifting would pose. The pantheon of confident men in her early work is broadly absent from The Dreaming, which abounds with self-destructive masculinity. Moving beyond the bourgeois fantasy of domestic bliss between a man and a woman shakes up Bush’s faith in men. Femininity and masculinity become fluctuant, throttled by patriarchy, colonialism, trauma, and poverty. Bush could feasibly be writing a character of any gender here, but to have a woman’s voice leading the charge and vocalizing the anxiety that might pervade a robbery is canny.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in the There Goes a Tenner video/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Henry
Bush also taps into a tradition of British comedy which pivots on woefully incompetent characters issued a societal role or occupation completely unsuited to them. The likes of Python or Fawlty Towers spring to mind, and doubtless Bush saw some Ealing comedies. The children’s panto delivery of “There Goes a Tenner” infers a stylistic awareness of Bush’s debt to this tradition. The music video certainly tips the viewer off to what kind of song this is, with its frankly adorable deployment of Bush and Gary Hurst in black jumpsuits and soot on their faces, its dutch angles depicting the Very Scary robbery, and the explosion of a safe full of money. Its stars are the major aberration among these cliches; a woman and people of color aren’t supposed to be the daring stars of a heist film. This isn’t the heroic act of white men showing up the rest of the world; it’s women and minorities acting out of desperation.
For its vexed class dynamics, “There Goes a Tenner” does acknowledge poverty as a motivation for its characters. “Pockets floating in the breeze” indicates impoverishment, and the final line of the song “there’s a ten-shilling note/remember them?/that’s when we used to vote for him” is a weirdly subtle political critique for “Tenner.” When the single dropped in 1982, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government was enjoying a 51% approval rating in the wake of the Falklands War and Thatcher’s craven sinking of the retreating Argentinian battleship the ARA General Belgrano, killing 323 people. By the 22nd of September, 9 days after the release of The Dreaming, 14% of the United Kingdom’s workforce was reported to be unemployed. As the Tory government waged a war on inflation in its slow establishment of neoliberalism, it caused a glut of unemployment that lost 1,500,000 people their jobs. “When we used to vote for him” is an odd phrase — but clearly the robbers have turned to crime because alternatives are unavailable (one merely has to point out that poverty is a major contributor to crime).
“There Goes a Tenner’s” death on the charts was not a tragedy. Bush’s decision to release it as a single is one of her oddest choices as a public figure. Yet even if by accident, she’s tapped into the zeitgeist of early neoliberalism and Thatcherite austerity. How come we’re not getting paid any more? Because Margaret fucking Thatcher ruined everything”.
One great thing about Suspended in Gaffa is that Bush’s mother, Hannah, appears. It is a tender moment where they embrace! With Bush dancing in a barn in a purple jumpsuit and then going into the woods, there is something strange, child-like and a bit mysterious about the video. I guess that reflects the nature and meaning of the song to a degree. Again, Christine Kelley’s Dreams of Orgonon raise some interesting observations about a classic Kate Bush song. How many critics gave Suspended in Gaffa that much time and listened closely? Perhaps those in Europe and Australia were not expecting a track like this from Kate Bush:
“Yet at the core of this excess, there’s a simplicity to “Suspended in Gaffa.” It has the same expansive and consumptive obsessions as its sister songs — youthful aporia, an obsession with an unreachable god, a desire to unite with the subconscious. Yet it filters this through a childlike, somewhat Carrollian filter, with a surfeit of internal rhymes, abstract nouns, and ambiguous pronouns like “out in the garden/there’s half of a heaven/and we’re only bluffing,” “I try to get nearer/but as it gets clearer/there’s something appears in the way,” “I pull out the plank and say/thankee for yanking me back/to the fact that there’s always something to distract.”
The lyric is an endless series of prevarications, often relating to knowledge, or the unattainability of it (see “Sat in Your Lap”). The refrain’s “not till I’m ready for you,” “can I have it all now?/we can’t have it all,” “but they’ve told us/unless we can prove that we’re doing it/we can’t have it all” speak to an “all or nothing” approach, not identifying exactly what’s at stake so much as its urgency. Desire gets codified as an end in itself, often for a god (“I caught a glimpse of a god/all shining and bright”) — “until I’m ready for you” gives away the game (constructive spiritual union with a deity is impossible if one is unready to consent). “The idea of the song is that of being given a glimpse of ‘God’ — something that we dearly want — but being told that unless we work for it, we will never see it again, and even then, we might not be worthy of it,” Bush explained to her fan club. Tapping into the subconscious is a difficulty — when one has a glimpse of something wondrous, there’s a desperation to retrieve the feelings associated with it. “Everything or nothing” can be a neurodivergent impulse, but it’s also how a taste of the sublime works.
The nature of aporia in “Suspended in Gaffa” is cinematic. There’s the title, obviously, referring to the line “am I suspended in gaffa?,” itself a reference to gaffer (or “gaffa”) tape, which is commonly used in film and stage productions. The laboriousness of cinema is inferred a few times (“it all goes slo-mo”), as reflections and manipulation, staples of cinema, get pulled into the mix. Bush even goes quasi-Lacanian at one point; nudging herself with “that girl in the mirror/between you and me/she don’t stand a chance of getting anywhere at all,” a moment of amusing self-deprecation”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982
I am going to wrap up now. On 2nd November, it is forty-one years since There Goes a Tenner was unleashed in the U.K. and Ireland to follow from The Dreaming (that single was released on 26th July, 1982). If it was a chart bomb, the song itself is great and deserves a lot more love. Bush’s singles from Hounds of Love fared much better. Lighter, with distinct choruses and subjects/lyrics more relatable, there was this deliberate move from her to connect with the charts and put out music that was more accessible to many. Suspended in Gaffa is a terrific song that was vastly different to anything that was around in 1982. I like them both. They are very different. I will look at the final single released from The Dreaming, Night of the Swallow, closer to its anniversary on 21st November. I wanted to look ahead to 2nd November and forty-one years of the single release of There Goes a Tenner and Suspended in Gaffa. The Dreaming is an album that has always divided people. At the very least, it has not gained the appreciation and respect it deserves! From 1980’s Never for Ever, there was a distinct change. Bush solo producing for the first time. Music very much in her image. She did make another big change with Hounds of Love. Perhaps there was this move to make an artistic statement. Reacting to people who defined her by a particular sound. Felt that she was a middle-class girl who was making twee Pop music. A very serious and hugely accomplished album, many critics still couldn’t shake off those image. Accept her as a serious producer and artist. All these years later, I feel more people have more fully embraced songs like There Goes a Tenner and Suspended in Gaffa. I, for one, have a lot of good things to say about these…
TWO awesome songs.