Waiting for Kate Bush by John Mendelssohn Page A

generationswould call one another dorks or nerds, we called one another priscillas. We accused her, in the time-honoured American tradition dating back to the Salem of the 1600s, of being a witch. We made her day at school a living nightmare.
    And guess who was always right there in the forefront, trying to win his classmates’ esteem by taunting Mary Priscilla Enser more imaginatively and implacably than all the others? I, who knew from the inside how much it hurt to be shunned and ridiculed. I, who should have been more empathic than anyone.
    I have my excuses, my patently inadequate excuses. Who could blame me for trying to encourage my classmates to give someone else a hard time for a change? And who could help me for despising her, in view of how vividly her passivity reminded me of my own?
    I have somewhere the little autograph book that each pupil at my elementary school was given at the end of his or her sixth grade term, just before going on to the unimaginable horror that was junior high school. Inside the first page is a group portrait of my class. In the margins, in my precociously gorgeous 12-year-old’s penmanship, I have written the names of all my classmates. In one case, though, I wrote not a name, but an epithet. Witch.
    I believe, at my age, that it’s the exception, rather than the rule, for people to get what’s coming to them. Arrogant wankers with no perceptible talent, but fantastic luck, make fortunes early in their thirties, and then spend the rest of their lives imagining themselves clever and talented, being deferred to as though they are indeed clever and talented by people who want some of their money. Conversely, noble, kind, hardworking, genuinely gifted people live lives of almost unendurable frustration, or even lose their children in freakish accidents.
    But in the case of Mary Priscilla Enser, I got exactly what was coming to me, in the second semester of my fifth-grade year. There was an unexpected epidemic of decency, gentleness, and sense of fair play in my class just before we were to elect a new president and vice president, and both Mary Priscilla and I were nominated. I was beside myself with joy. How, in her wildest dreams, could Witch get even a single vote?
    I came in a distant second.
    * * *
    When at last EMI deemed Kate ready to record, Andrew Powell, apparently believing The KT Bush Band fine for pub gigs, but not up to the task of recording (save for Paddy’s appearance on one track),introduced her to the musicians he’d recruited to be her backing band –drummer Stuart Elliot and keyboardist Duncan MacKay from Cockney Rebel, and guitarist Ian Bairnson and bassist David Paton from Pilot. They were embarrassed by the subject matter of some of the songs she played for them – by the incest in ‘The Kick Inside’, for instance, and by the unusually candid expression of female lust that was ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’ – but far less embarrassed than gobsmacked by how good both she and her songs were. If they’d had any thoughts of patronising her, of playing the seasoned studio hotshots to her 19-year-old naïf, there was no trace of them left by the end of the first session. And it turned out that she wasn’t only a terrific songwriter and singer, but also quite happy to make everyone else tea, or dash out for sarnies.
    Seven weeks later, the album was finished. EMI scheduled its release for November and sent out advance copies to DJs. Listeners to Tony Myatt’s Capital Radio
Late Show
thought Kate’s music really … weird, and God knows it was. However weird, though, no one seemed content to hear it only once.
    Kate posed for Gered Mankowitz, best known for his mid-Sixties photos of The Rolling Stones. Such was her energy that he described himself as feeling, at shoot’s end, “as limp as a rag”. Few heterosexual males would feel similarly when they saw the work they’d done together.
    But stop the presses! Kate decided she had a better idea for