FEATURE:
There’s Half of a Heaven
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Pierre Terrasson
Kate Bush’s Suspended in Gaffa and There Goes a Tenner at Forty-Two
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I like to mark anniversaries…
when it comes to Kate Bush’s singles. There are a couple of tracks that were released on the same day. These days, when an artist releases a single, it is usually the only one they release. Years ago, you would get an artist releasing one single in various countries and another in other nations. It is an interesting thing. Maybe trying to ensure that an album gets as much exposure as possible by releasing different songs from it, this is something Kate Bush did a bit. On 2nd November, 1982, Kate Bush released two underrated songs from the Dreaming. That album was released on 13th September, 1982. Before the album came out, two singles had already been put out. Sat in Your Lap came out on 29th June, 1981. The Dreaming arrived on 26th July, 1982. Enjoying mixed success, it was quite a difficult decision what to release after that. The first singles after the album came out. After The Dreaming single charted low and was not a critical success, it must have been disheartening. I have often said how Houidini or All the Love could have been successful singles. Instead, Suspended in Gaffa and There Goes a Tenner were released. The former is one of the gems from The Dreaming. There are few obvious single options on The Dreaming. Lighter and less dense than The Dreaming or even Sat in Your Lap, it was released in continental Europe and Australia (but not the U.K.). This idea of releasing a song in some territories and not others. I think Suspended in Gaffa could have been a big success in the U.K. As it is, there was a smattering of success for Suspended in Gaffa but it did not do great business. I think it is a tremendous song. With musical contributions from Del Palmer, Kate Bush, Stuart Elliott, Dave Lawson and Paddy Bush, this is a song more people near to hear. Ahead of its forty-second anniversary, I will shine a light on it.
Kate Bush performed Suspended in Gaffa on T.V. a few times. I shall come to its video soon enough. Before that, it is worth getting some words from Kate Bush about the song. A track from an album that many people might not know about.
“‘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”.
I love the fact that the video features Kate Bush’s mum, Hannah. The set is this wonderful barn that has this enchanted quality. Built by Steve Hopkins, it is the center point of the visual. Kate Bush was very pleased that her mother was in the music video:
“The video did remain uncomplicated – just a few effects and just one extra: but a very special. one. There is one section where a child’s voice says, ‘Mother, where are the angels? I’m scared of the changes.’ And there was only one person that could be addressed to – my mother. When I asked her to appear in the section, contrary to my concern about her nerves, she was more than obliging and said, ‘Yes’. She was definitely the star of the day, and waited patiently hour after hour as we slowly moved through the bulk of the shooting to eventually reach her debut. I was amazed at her grace and stamina: as all of us began to wane and wilt, my mother continued to blossom and glow, and her only worries were getting back home in time to get dinner and hoping she would not succumb to an attack of giggles during the vital moments of being on screen. She needn’t have worried, for she is a natural professional, a real star and my favourite mum”.
I do not have as much to say about There Goes a Tenner as Suspended in Gaffa. I want to complete my spotlight of this song with some words from the amazing Dreams of Orgonon. I think one of the defining qualities of Suspended in Gaffa is that it skips and jumps. It seems more airy and open than many of the songs on The Dreaming.
“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.
The music video, while counterintuitively simple in its setup of Bush dancing on her own in a barn, is similarly weird. Bush’s hair is made up to twice the height of her head as she dances in a purple jumpsuit, slowly jogging in place and thrashing her arms on the floor like an adolescent Job on her rural ash pile. In a pleasantly domestic turn, Bush’s mother Hannah appears (shockingly) as Bush’s mother. The resulting video is both tender and discordant, the ethos of “Suspended in Gaffa” in microcosm.
Bush’s fight with aporia moves forward. She mixes religious metaphors like a hermeneuticist in a Westminster pub (“it’s a plank in me eye,” taken from Matthew 7:5, is adjuncted by “a camel/who’s trying to get through it,” a quiet subversion of the Talmudic “eye of a needle” axiom, cited by Christ in the Synoptic Gospels and additionally by the Qu’ran 7:40), grasping fragments of faiths, mediums, and metaphors in their simplest form. The results are crucially inchoate, as the perspective of a child so often is. Yet through that rudimentary perspective comes a different understanding of emotional truths than one usually finds from an adult point-of-view. Fragments and naïveté are by no means inherently less scholarly than a more mature perspective; sometimes, they’re the most efficacious tools a person has for exploring the ridiculous and sublime.
(Bush.) Personnel: Bush, K. — vocals, piano, strings. Elliott — drums. Palmer — bass. Bush, P. — strings, mandolin. Lawson — synclavier. Launay — engineer (backing tracks). Hardiman — engineer (overdubs). Cooper — engineer (mastering). Backing tacks recorded at May/June 1981 at Townhouse Studios, Shepherd’s Bush. Overdubs recorded at Odyssey Studios, Marylebone, West End and Advision Studios, Fitzrovia from August 1981 to January 1982, 4-and-a-half months. Mixed at the Townhouse from March to 21 May, 1982. Issued as a single 2 November 1982”.
I want to move onto There Goes a Tenner. Perhaps not as regarded as Suspended in Gaffa, this was released in the U.K. and Ireland. The single featured Ne T’enfuis Pas as the B-side. With the video directed by Paul Henry, this was Kate Bush appearing as a robber planning to pull off a bank heist. The Suspended in Gaffa video was directed by Brian Wiseman. I shall come to Kate Bush’s words about the song. First, here are a selection of the reviews for a song that miffed and confused some people:
“A practically formless song with odd vocal affections, and no chorus to speak of. (…) Most disappointing.
Record Business, 1 November 1982
Very well planned, and executed with relish. Katy doesn’t mind acting a bit silly if it makes the end result better.
Dermot Stokes, Hot Press, 5 November 1982
Very weird… Obviously she’s trying to become less accessible. Even so this has a haunting atmosphere.
Neil TennanT, Smash Hits, 1982”.
I am going to end with a bit more details about 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”.
Reaching a dissapointing ninety-three in the U.K., it was her first single to that point not to reach the top seventy-five. I do love There Goes a Tenner. So many standout lyrics: “I hope you remember/To treat the gelignite tenderly for me/I’m having dreams about things/Not going right/Let’s leave in plenty of time tonight/Both my partners/Act like actors:/You are Bogart/He is George Raft/That leaves Cagney and me/(“What about Edward G.?”)”.
I am going to wrap up in a minute. I have written about There Goes a Tenner and Suspended in Gaffa before and incorrectly noted the release date as 1st November, 1982. Correcting that, I want to explore these amazing songs. Why there were released as singles. I want to return to Dreams of Orgonon for their analysis of a song that many people have not heard:
“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.
(Bush.) Bush — vocals, piano, Fairlight, CS80. Elliott — drums. Palmer — bass. Lawson — synclavier. Launay — engineer (backing tracks). Hardiman — engineer (overdubs). Backing tracks recorded at Townhouse Studios May – Jun ’81. Overdubs at Odyssey Aug – Dec ’81, Jan – Mar ’82. Mixed Mar – May ’82. Issued 2 November 1982 w/ B-side “Ne t’enfuis pas.” Performed on Razzmatazz 21 September 1982. Shown on Pebble Mill at One 8 October 1982. Image: Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda (1988, dir. Charles Crichton)”.
With The Dreaming sporting very few single options, there was this decision to follow up the first two with a duel-release. I do think that Suspended in Gaffa could have charted quite high in the U.K. There Goes a Tenner is a slightly odder song to sell. It is amazing, yet perhaps one of the lesser songs on The Dreaming. What would have happened if Leave It Open or Houdini was a single? I do love the songs that were selected. As they are coming up for their forty-second anniversary, I wanted to shine a light on the tracks. One further single would arrive from The Dreaming. Night of the Swallow was released in Ireland on 21st November, 1983. Over a year after The Dreaming was released, there was this long wait. That said, Sat in Your Lap was released over a year before the album came out. Five singles that came out over the period of almost two and a half years. I have a soft spot for There Goes a Tenner and Suspended in Gaffa. Although not successful or often regarded as highlighted as much as other songs on the album, they are gems in their own right. I think people should check them out…
AHEAD of their anniversary.