Waiting for Kate Bush (24 page)

At Elstree for ‘The Big Sky’ video shoot, wrapped in Baco-foil.
(Julie Angel)

On stage at the Amnesty International concert, 1987, with, among others, early benefactor David Gilmour, here playing bass guitar.
(LFI)

Kate with long-time partner and drum programmer Del Palmer at a Pink Floyd party. They’ve long since parted company.
(Richard Young/Rex Features)

A rare public appearance for the over-40 Kate, at the 2001
Q
awards, where she picked up the award for Classic Songwriter and endured John Lydon’s approbation.
(LFI)

Kate accepts her ‘Outstanding Contribution to British Music’ award at the 2002 Ivor Novellos.
(LFI)

C
YRIL collected me promptly the following morning, and we headed for Essex. He was very proud of the black eye the mountain of flesh had given him when he got home from The Kings Bladder reeking of beer and cigarettes. Over the course of our journey, he blagged four fags from our driver, who did a lot of sighing. He pointed out the mansion in which a noted comedian’s gay orgies had ended in a young man drowning in his swimming pool. Several motorists had stopped to be photographed with the house in the background. Our driver mused that if the comedian could somehow charge them for the privilege, he’d have made enough by now to pay for his defence. I have never very much enjoyed hyperbole unless I’m the one hyperbolising, but I suppose it’s like that for everyone.

Our first visit, Cyril revealed, would be to the home of Genoa, the
Fab Lab
contestant with a perfect face who was forever bursting into tears. Apparently taking after the lugubrious Italian side of her family, she cried when another contestant was brilliant, and when another contestant was crap. She cried when the judges told someone they’d been off-key in certain places, and when the judges said their performances had been faultless. She cried when the public voted for her, and when they didn’t. I wondered if she took salt supplements.

According to Cyril, she’d been living with her mum and her older brother since splitting up with her rugby star boyfriend, who’d found the idea of millions of male viewers looking at her tits each week unendurable. Her mum was likely to be at work, while her older brother, a depressive unemployed pianist, was likely to be in bed trying to remain asleep until it was time to die. I was worried Cyril might be required to hurt Genoa, but he assured me that no such thing was the case. “We’ve got a code of ethics just like anybody else,” he assured me, a little defensively, “and hurting women is right out. It’s their male loved ones who get it.”

Genoa answered the door, her face looking very much less perfect in real life than on television, her hips looking very much bigger. When Cyril told her who’d sent him, she tried to close the door on us, but he had his little foot in it. Screaming wouldn’t have done any good, as the nearest neighbours were too far away to hear. She did what she did best, and cried.

Cyril asked if her brother were at home. She said he wasn’t. He arched an eyebrow at her sceptically and told her he’d hate to think she might be telling a porkie. Rhyming slang seemed to make her cry harder. She looked nervously at the stairs behind her. Sure enough, there came someone who might well have been her brother in his underpants and a knackered grey T-shirt, bags under his eyes, and hair seemingly styled by Jamie Oliver – with a food processor. He didn’t smell very nice at all. “Hello, hello, hello,” he said, “what’s all this then?” Depressives often have the best senses of humour, not that it provides them with any solace.

“I’m afraid your sister’s been naughty, mate,” Cyril told him. “She helped vote a sort of friend of ours out of the
Fab Lab.”

“Fab Lab!”
Genoa’s brother snorted. “Exactly what music in this country has come to, that. A bunch of no-talents mewling a load of old crap for a panel of judges who wouldn’t know real talent if it sat on their laps, and then the tone-deaf public voting for the ones with the dewiest eyes.”

Genoa absolutely howled. Her brother rolled his eyes and said, “Not you, Gens. At least you sing in bloody tune. Leave it bloody out for a change, will you?”

Cyril cleared his throat pointedly. “If you two are done squabbling, maybe we can get to the reason for my and my colleague’s visit, which is to cause a bit of grief around here.”

“Ha!” Genoa’s brother exclaimed. “The bigger challenge would be to make it stop for five minutes.”

“Hang on,” Cyril said, frowning. “Unless I’m mistaken, you’re not really experiencing grief, but depression.”

“There’s such a big difference?” Genoa wondered, blowing her nose into a facial tissue.

“There is, in fact,” Cyril said. “Grief, according to
The Penguin Concise English Dictionary
, is deep sorrow, whereas depression is a persistent unhappiness. I think of the difference between them as more or less that between a dull ache and a sharp pain.”

Both the siblings snickered. “May I ask what’s so bloody comical?” Cyril demanded.

“The Penguin Concise English Dictionary?”
Genoa’s brother asked. “You don’t see why a person your size citing that, as opposed to the
OED
, is funny?”

Cyril tried to conceal his amusement, but it was a lost cause. He turned his face away, only to guffaw explosively. The three of them howled. What jolly fun this thugging was turning out to be!

“Right,” Cyril finally declared, only to discover, on seeing Genoa trying so hard to suppress her own amusement, that he had more laughter in him. “Right,” he said again, and this time managed to look grim. “Time to pay the piper. I understand the gentleman’s a pianist?”

“In theory,” Genoa’s brother admitted sourly, “but not in practice anymore. Packed it in. A real musician can’t make a living in this country, not unless he’s happy to play rubbish. And I wasn’t. You know who makes fortunes in this country with their music? Little twerps who don’t know the bloody bass clef from the treble. ‘Oh, you want to hear some naff Elton John song while you drink, some ghastly Barry bloody Manilow? Well, here, let me play one for you.’ Bollocks!”

I’d edged over to the siblings’ CD rack. As subtly as I could, I determined what they had in their collection. Not a trace of Kate, but Tori Amos’s
Under The Pink
. They deserved whatever Cyril might do to them.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to break a couple of your fingers, mate,” Cyril informed the brother. Genoa gasped, and burst into tears. “Please,” she said, “not that! I’ll ring the producers! I’ll see if they’ll me switch my vote.”

“Go right ahead,” her brother said, holding both hands out to Cyril. “Break them all if you like. They’re not doing me a bit of good, are they? Help yourself!” Now he was in tears too.

“Bloody hell,” Cyril said, pushing the hands out of his face, getting angrier and louder with each new syllable, roaring at the end. “Why does everything have to be so difficult?”

Well, the neighbours might have heard
that
. The rest of us were stunned. I couldn’t have said that I’d never seen anyone so angry. I’d seen Billy Ayres back in junior high school. I’ve seen Sir Alex Ferguson.

Genoa’s brother was the first to regain the power of speech in the face of Cyril’s detonation. “It’s all right,” he said, offering his hands again. “Honestly.”

“Simon, don’t, please!” Genoa said, grabbing his hands.

“We’re off,” Cyril informed me in a tone that invited no negotiation. “This tosser’s barmy. She’s suffering enough having him for a brother.”

He took my elbow and we headed back to the cab, only for Cyril to stop halfway and turn back to his might-have-been victim. “Get help, mate. Don’t lie around in your own faeces moaning about how unfair the world is. Of course it’s unfair. Of
course
it is! But there are pharmacological solutions for the likes of you, serotonin inhibitors and that. Get a bloody prescription! Stop being the black hole your poor sister has to pour endless love into, and never gets anything back! Blimey!”

I found that quite eloquent. In a film, Genoa’s brother would have been duly chastened. But this was no film. He got just as emphatic as Cyril. “Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors? I’ve tried ’em!” he shouted, his face contorted with anger. “I’ve tried ’em all! And they don’t bloody work! Luvox? Tried it! Paxil? Tried it! Zoloft? Tried it! Celexa? Tried it! Lexapro? Tried it! You know the one thing I can always count on them to do? Make it impossible to ejaculate! Do you know what it’s like to shag when you can’t ejaculate, you self-righteous little
Penguin Concise Dictionary
wankfest? It’s bloody torture! It doesn’t take you long to go off shagging entirely. And guess what that is? It’s bloody depressing!” He was hopping with rage by now, literally hopping. I supposed it was the most exercise he’d had in weeks.

“Walk a mile in my shoes, you ghastly little pygmy! Walk a bloody kilometre!”

Cyril had nothing left to fight back with. We got in the cab and were gone.

Once again my expectations were confounded. I’d have expected Cyril to be upset, or at least embarrassed. But he was about as perturbed as if he’d been told that a pop group he hadn’t heard of had postponed the release of its next single by 12 hours. I lack resilience of my own, and dislike it in others.

* * *

Kate kept her mind off the distressing news that spandex-clad American rock vixen Pat Benatar had covered ‘Wuthering Heights’ on her
Crimes Of Passion
album, almost certainly confusing many of her fans a treat, by going to see Stevie Wonder in concert. Hardly less transported than she’d been by Lindsey Kemp, she immediately began work on ‘Sat In Your Lap’, by far her most percussion-heavy track to date. It would later annoy her mightily when people imagined the recorded version to be an attempt to cash in on Adam Ant’s tribal drum sound, as she’d conceived both song and arrangement well before the Ants came to be the biggest thing in British pop since whatever immediately preceded them.

Thinking that starting with rhythms would make her music more accessible, she’d encouraged the loyal Del to learn to program her drum machine, which may sound vaguely salacious, but wasn’t intended to. She released a rather shrill Christmas single, ‘December Will Be Magic Again’.
Woman’s World
published her article “How Can You Eat Dead Animals?”
British Cattle Farmer’s World
did not, in retaliation, publish an article entitled “How Can You, a Physician’s Daughter, Chainsmoke?” There is, in fact, no such magazine.