Waiting for Kate Bush by John Mendelssohn Page B

a cover than EMI’s art department, that she wanted a rendering illustrating the song ‘Kite’ on the cover instead of Mankowitz’s extremely soft porn, and the album’s release had to be postponed until after Christmas. Then she was further mortified to learn that EMI intended to release ‘James And The Cold Gun’ as the first single. Bob Mercer, who wasn’t at all sure there were
any
hit singles on the album (on first exposure to which other EMI employees had been observed looking queasy with apprehension), told her pointedly that he knew how to do his job, and she burst into tears of frustration. Whereupon, depending on which legend you choose to subscribe to, one of two things happened. Either Mercer told her he’d make her own choice, ‘Wuthering’, the first single, even though the bloody cleaners who hoovered his office floor at night could have told you it hadn’t a prayer, and she’d see what a foolish, wilful girl she was being. Or his colleague Terry Walker happened to be sauntering past, ducked in to say hello, and said something about ‘Wuthering’ being the obvious first single.
    He and Kate were right, Mercer and the bloody office cleaner deadwrong. In terms of songwriting craft, it was rather a mess, with lyrics and melody so badly mismatched that poor Kate had here to accent the wrong syllables of words (“Cathy,” most notably), there to add multiple syllables (to “cold” and “window”), and Bairnson’s guitar solo during the coda, unable to decide where it wanted to go, wound up not going much of anywhere.
But who cared?
The audacity of Kate’s vocal was simply breathtaking. Had anyone ever sung so high, or so zanily? And the arrangement! When Andrew Powell hits that note on his bass guitar in the bar before the chorus kicked in, you feel as though your lungs might burst. Countless great records have done that, created unendurable tension at the end of verses, and then relieved it with the refrain, but few had done it better.
    All in all, the record was thrilling, hilarious, irresistible, inevitable, glorious, a breath of exhilaratingly fresh air! Twenty-five years after the fact, listening to it still gives one chills. To compare The Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’, to it, or The Rolling Stones’ ‘Come On’, for that matter, is to make yourself snicker.
    Some sussless cow condemned it in
Record Mirror
, but two weeks later it was in the charts at number 42, and on top of them by the end of the first week in March. Thanks in part to the poster EMI had caused to be displayed on the front of London buses (Kate’s right nipple suggested it might have been a bit nippy in Mankowitz’s studio), the album was flying out of the shops.
    And Kate’s life would never be the same. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” she would admit years later. “All I wanted was to make an album. I’d been writing songs since I was little, and just wanted to see them on an album. That was my purpose in life – to just look at the grooves and think, ‘I did that.’ ” Suddenly, she had absolutely no time for herself, not to commune with friends, not to read or watch TV, not even to have her bath when she was accustomed to having it. She was talking non-stop to the press now, appearing on television – on ITV’s
Magpie
children’s show, on the current affairs programme
Today, on
BBC’s
Saturday Night At The Mill
, feeling eaten alive by the ravenous beast that is instant celebrity. When she appeared at the HMV shop in London’s Oxford Street, she had to stand on a table to address the unexpectedly (terrifyingly!) huge crowd that had turned out to gawk at her.
    The Brits imagine themselves to love their irony, and here was some Grade A. In being compelled to submit to endless interviews, she was being taken away from exactly that which had made her potentially interesting to interviewers in the first place. But she came from a lovinghome, and was a trouper, and dutifully came