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The girl with the stars in her eyes

Richard Cook

Kate Bush remains a mystical if not mythical creature, even after the latest surge in her ten-year career. Richard Cook peers through the looking glass into the dream sequences of her public persona, and tries to find the Kick inside this private dancer. "The cosiness of Bush denies her any erotic standing in pop. She's a family girl. If people fantasies about her, it must be as an elfin sprite, an immortal love, not a flesh and blood thing with a smell of female…"

Private people always end up putting themselves on show. There's no choice. The wheels of ordinary life makes sure that you're spied on all the time, so if you want to be private you have to put another person up front to hide the real creature behind.

Kate Bush, who is always protesting her privacy, puts on a show of herself with every record and video. In her few concert appearances, she has put together shows of operatic brouhaha. If it all plays like an extravaganza of hungry body language, it also runs into a timetable of ruthless precision. Like her under-wear, her guard doesn't drop for a moment. The show is everything: show us, we implore, and like a sullen stripper she shows us everything and reveals nothing. It's a tease, which has lasted remarkably well.

Kate Bush slipped into pop at a point when 'rock women' had little alternative to tackling the make stronghold of rock on it's own terms. The Slits and The Runaways, typical girls to a woman, took their supposedly subversive course under the flag of punk. It was scarcely a new wave for women. The one other route, unless you were a black soul mama, was the soupy songwriter practice that only Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro had managed to personalise with any particular strength. With an artless guile - and a head apparently overstuffed with art - the 17-year-old Bush wrote and performed an LP called 'The kick inside' that took a third possibility in hand. She invented a female slant on another hitherto male preserve art-rock.

The strain of art-rock has been music's real mainstream ever since players realised that crusty British blues was only good for a couple of records. Art-rock isn't only Genesis and Yes, it's Cocteau Twin, Japan, Simple Minds. Once new wave bands learned the fourth chord, they aspired to art-rock. The snobbery of pop musicians - that they are somehow better than the musical jingles that most of them start out playing - makes them want to graduate, to enter the sovereign realm of a higher creativity. They take to art. They play art-rock.

Kate Bush, a teenager from a wealthy middle class family, had art-rock waiting for her like a gift from the tooth fairy. The dinosaurs of her listening youth weren't monsters for her. Pink Floyd, the most miserable group that ever existed and the skeleton in many pioneer's closet, provided her first archangel in the form of David Gilmour, who would produce that first studio work. She would later admit her fascination with 'The Wall'. It's not hard to perceive the echoes of Floyd's weary symphonies in the Bush catalogue.

'The kick inside' is a typically cluttered but often startling debut LP for such a tender youth. Who on earth was this girl? On the sleeve she looks Amazonian, a diminutive figure cleverly disguised. On the record songs with titles like 'L'Amour looks something like you' and 'Them heavy people' were delivered in a voice that could sound like a bewitched boy soprano or a cartoon crow. The production staggered under a weight of trinkerty; the tunes sounded like the fussy little melodies one associates with the musical sewing boxes. Alongside are lyrics of the order of "Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o / My feet are rooted in my wellios".

This record is a folly, but many found it a fabulous one. It stood a decent chance of complete disappearance, and could have wound up as a cult failure. But what EMI had was too good to fail. A child star wreathed in exceptionally appealing good looks. Possessor of a peculiarly unique voice and brains enough to organise all her own music. Even better - that music had the brevity to be pop (this was 1978, the start of pop's rehabilitation as a force over rock) and the ponderously ornate qualities of the older art-rock. Every Bush song was as modelled as miniature candelabra. And there was a final clinching factor: she sounded like she knew about rolling in the hay ('Feel it' - "Here comes one and one is one…feel your warm hand walking around").

The company sat back and waited for the deluge. 'Wuthering heights' looked like a novelty hit when it preceded the LP, but it proved to be the print for all her subsequent meanderings. The song simple transposes a received idea: a précis of the hook of the title, a torn-out page set to rock music. There is no ambiguity, nothing that's metaphorical - the play's the thing. She sings the tune in a manner that might as well bellow, "look at this, I'm acting". Words abound that you expect to encounter in the mouths of upper-crust nannies - "Wily windy moors" and "Let me in-a-your window". With this veneer of literacy and poetic weight, a flimsy set of songs became the refuge of everyone who wanted their art-rock to be pretty and sweet. For Bush, a "simple souls working meekly at her piano and her dance classes, the ferocious gaze of the pop public and media grew by the moment. It's never really sunk in since that there's so little for us to turn off.

Some have tried ludicrously to create a legend and an inner meaning for Bush and her muse. The most notorious and funniest instance was Fred Vermorel's desperate The Secret History and the strange art of pop, an elevated pop biography that trustingly blew the woman's extraordinarily ordinary life into pure mystique. Like the boyhood of boy George, it's tragic disappointment that things prove so routine. The case presented by Vermorel and a few others for Bush's transcendence of art-rock is shattered by any proper listen to her first three LPs. 'Lion heart' and 'Never forever' took Bush into the '80s with a ripening sense of great art in the making. 'Lion heart' leaves us choking on a kind of exotic good taste. 'Coffee homeground'. 'In search of peter pan' and 'Hammer horror' offer a bewildered mix of Walter De La Mare and Herbert Van Thal (somehow one can't resist citing authors when in considering Bush, although she claims to read little - her writerly lyrics read like the product of a distiller's craft). But it is all a witness to nothing special.

The short, starlit pieces of 'Lionheart' grow gloomy in the tunnels of 'Never forever', which has a sort of demented butterfly ball sleeve and another sequence of rarefied but now rather remorse subjects. It's as though, every time she sees another film or hears another piece of music, Bush has to jot down a song about it, so there is 'Delius' about the composer and his companion Eric Fenby, and 'Babooshka', an anecdote of suburban love rekindled - Iris Murdoch in a Laura Ashley dress. One can toil through Bush's work making flip comparisons all the time, but it's a search that turns over no personal vision on all these bits and pieces. 'Army dreamers' has some beautifully written lines in it's way - "Tears o'er a tin box…like a chicken with a fox, he cannot win the war with ego, give the kid the pick of pips" - and they all fall into a scene-shifter's lament with the chintzy music and Bush's own daft accent ("Oi've a bunch of poiple flowers"). To keep the show safely before us, in march the funny voices and the periwigged arrangements. Her few, exhaustively prepared live appearances play the same carefully chosen cards. Imagery, for Bush, is something to be blasted in an observer's face. Every tuck and fold of her songs gets the literalist treatment: if there's a line about jackals, somebody cues up a jackal.

Her videos accomplish the same feat. It's impressive. Even someone like John Cale, whose sensibilities appear Jacobean by comparison, opines that Bush's videos are the only creative work in the field. But they look like visual contraptions, a looking glass of contrived charms. This grain-by-grain pursuit, a quintessence of art-rock, reached overload with 'The dreaming'. It's a thunderously awful LP. After the opening 'Sat in your lap', an energetic howl about the getting of wisdom, the record collapses into a sluggish, elephantine blowout of words and music in search of meaning and structure. Even Bush's faithful were foxed by it.

The three year gap between 'The dreaming' and 'Hounds of love' would have been enough to kill off most pop stars; but art-rockers work to a different time span, and in Bush's case people seem prepared to wait for a long time. Her undiminished appeal was proved by the almost hysterical rush to acclaim (and buy) the record. In the interim of her absence, pop's media profile has gone through the roof and is rapidly nearing heaven with the rise of Annie Lennox, Sade, Alison Moyet and Madonna -none of them art-rockers) though Lennox comes close). How does Bush align with this movement? Feminism doesn't seem to interest her. Like many successful but traditional women, she thinks the mere fact of her success is example enough. There is no specific femininity in her work, nothing beyond that native 'knowledge of woman' - "we're tough because we're woman", she says, and leaves it at that. But hasn't sex appeal been a mainspring in her success? Well … Pop has never been short of child-women stars. Helen Shapiro, Lulu, Rachel Sweet, scores of them. Adolescent girls sell better than their male counterparts. Bush looked a sucker for the treatment. One of her first recordings. 'The man with the child in his eyes', was an impudent inversion of the matter: she was barely older than a child herself when she wrote it. Ever since, there's been a gentle conspiracy to keep her from growing much older. She seems to look just the same as she did ten years ago, the saucer eyes and wild hair and peach complexion of a Rossetti portrait. Even the press seem to coddle her. Interviewers never refer to her as 'Bush': she's always 'Kate', the sort of familiarity that one bestows on a favourite child. There've been a few half-hearted references to 'raunchy Kate' in the nationals, but even they've been mild. Preferring to zero in on her apparent loneliness. Bush's recently revealed liaison with Del Palmer has earned only a ripple of interest. The cosiness of Bush denies her any erotic standing in pop. She's a family girl. If people fantasise about her, it must be as an elfin sprite, an immortal love, not a flesh and blood thing with a smell of female. She's just too nice for that. She seems genuinely oblivious about any suggestive undertow in her album sleeves. Early publicity shots that gave her chest some prominence cause her embarrassment now, but her expression in the picture is, glassy, absolved of knowledge.

This isn't the moon-eyed innocent at play. You don't run ten years on pop maintain an unblemished conscience. Instead, Kate Bush has merely lost herself in the luxury of making what she wants when she wants. 'Hounds of love' is an about-face from 'The dreaming'. It's sparser and clearer than any of her other records. But it's the same genteel wonder at the world, the customary sliding through the images of art. A surface is skated. The first side s the strongest music she's made, rising to a disarming intensity with 'The big sky' - there, at last, Bush hurls herself out into the world. The second side, subtitled 'The ninth wave', is a dream sequence that's as substantial as cotton wool. It's about floating and not quite drowning in water, through a long speechless night. Horror is one Bush's favourite playthings, but her treatment is after the fashion of designer terror. It's not blood, or even ketchup: it's plasma. Her horrors are Grimm: they are a company of Wolves, not The Evil Dead. It's an impressive sleight offhand, Bush, while still in possession of the waif-like merriment that is unique to her, now looks like a good idea of cool, intelligent sophistication too. Her rock seems steeped in clever thoughts, finely rehearsed steps, beautiful and passionate gestures. But it all passes like one of her dreams.

Bush can't create anything more than a mood, nostalgia for the resonance of art. She's like someone who flicks through the pages of a book, impatient for the pictures to come up. It has always been the way of art-rock. A handful, including David Sylvian, Scott Walker and just sometimes Howard Deveto, have pressed art-rock to serious ends; their approach was elliptical, relishing the gaps, embracing the indefinite. Bush, like Peter Gabriel and Jim Kerr, is a mere translator. A simple soul. A show-woman, she is really no more important or profound than Sheena Easton, and you can't imagine Bush making a record that's as much fun as 'Sugar walls' (or 'Like a virgin'). When asked if she might be a bit strange, she says yes, she might be. I think not. After all, we all know 'Kate', don't we? She's not strange or barmy, or anything that's very far out of line. She just passes on her dreams; she sets art to rock. And, somehow, we find it all fascinating. Then we knock; but she does not let us in her window.