Break-Through and Fred Vermorel Bios

[nessus (Doug Alan)]

> From:     Susanne E Trowbridge <ins_aset@jhunix>

> Any other college radio music directors out there??  I'm MD at WJHU
> here, and I've found many good opportunities to draw attention to KB
> and "Hounds of Love"...

Hey!  I know you!!!  Your favorite group is Roxy Music, right?  My
goodness it's a small world!

> BTW, has another issue of "Breakthrough" been published?

There hasn't been a new one since issue seven, which was Christmas '84.
Robyn Somerville says she plans on coming out with some more issues
sometime.  Rumor says that Dale Sommerville has totally removed himself
from the project.  He was disillusioned or something when he met Kate in
person.

> I subscribed for the first three or four issues, and thought the
> pictures were nice and enjoyed the article reprints, but its level of
> KB-worship seemed a bit on the fanatic side, or at least I thought so
> at the time.

Yeah, it can be kind of silly at times.  There are only so many silly
stories one can take about unicorns and Kate or Kate Bush crossword
puzzles or Kate Bush connectograms.  But there's plenty of interesting
stuff too to make it quite worthwhile.

> I'd appreciate any thoughts on "Breakthrough" from y'all (this
> magazine may already have been discussed here, along, I'm sure, with
> the reprehensible Fred Vermorel bio, but remember, I've only been here
> for a few weeks...)

There hasn't been much discussion of any of this.  I have just mentioned
both.  There are two Fred Vermorel bios, which are very different.
There is "Kate Bush: Princess of Suburbia" and "The Secret History of
Kate Bush".  The first one is a parody of a National Enquirer style
expose.  It's complete with "proof" that Kate Bush was trying to control
people's minds with Gurdjieffian hypnotism methods and ritual dancing
and movement.  Vermorel seems to like Kate well-enough in this bio
(though I guess he seems to think she's a somewhat amusing figure or
something, and he has many nasty things to say about her family and
friends), so I have no idea why he chose Kate as the subject of a parody
on scandal sheets.  I can't find "Princess of Suburbia" too
reprehensible, though most KB fans seem to think it is, because it can't
possibly be taken seriously -- it's more funny than anything else.  I'm
told that Kate was quite hurt by it, though.

After "The Dreaming" came out, Vermorel seemed to totally change his
mind about Kate.  He decided that "The Dreaming" is the greatest work of
art ever, and wrote "The Secret History of Kate Bush".  This one,
instead of being a biography, is a hundred page long love-letter to
Kate.  Which makes it kind of ridiculous.  I'm not sure where Fred is
coming from on this one.  Maybe it's not supposed to be taken seriously
-- maybe it's supposed to be a parody of a hundred page long love-letter
to Kate....  But he sure seems serious.

This is chapter I:

	We recognized her as we always do stars.  A face "clicks",
	happens, transfigures anonymity.  As the eye jumps to a pretty
	face in a croud, the word "sex" on a page.  So decisively it
	seems a star is *born*,  But not out of labour.  Rather as a
	flying saucer crash-landed on earth.  Gleaming mysterious and
	seamless in its crater.  Surrounded by excited cameramen and
	fenced off by stern authority.  A worldwide object of
	speculation: Gee!  Is there anyone -- anything -- inside?  And
	is it friendly?

	So she burst through the telly in early '78.  All wrists and
	lisp and dimples, all sweet and clever, all arms like water
	flowing over stones, as clean and delicious as a scoop of
	avocado pear.  The suburbs breathed again.  Fresh air after
	punk's foul blast.  And very soon very famous.  A hit, a gold,
	a number one.  Introduced to gentry.  An institution.  Snap,
	crackle and pop.  A campaign of champagne.  Prizes, encore!,
	and: who the hell does she think she is?  "The most photographed
	woman in Britain."

	Then she disappeared.

	And destroyed her talent.  For two years worked to wreck her
	facility and build something more interesting in the ruins.  As
	every artist has to.  And has taken pop production its furthest
	yet.  As frank as Cliff, as crisp as the Floyd, and as potent
	as the Pistols.  And her work's now as sharp and inspired as
	David Hockney's (which it resembles).  Only more important.  For
	Hockney's art is defunct: fine art painting.  But hers is the
	only art which really counts today.  Not pop art, but the art of
	pop.

	A strange, could be dangerous art.  Crazy Kate, pop witch.  She
	exorcises our madness.  Lives and projects myths she can't
	always control.  Or understand.

	Also an unusual person with unusual reflexes -- a welcome
	antidote to most of us.  How did she come about?  I followed the
	fragile chances and distillation which produced her and her art
	and realized how nearly she never made it -- for which we'd be
	the poorer.  And also followed her appearance through her
	folklore: Kate sphinx, Kate harlequin, Kate harlot...  A history
	of our expectations and recognition.

		"Fear cautions me, 'Remain a stranger,'
		   Yet longing urges, 'Do not wait.'
		Her eyes spell secrecy and danger,
		   Yet they are my dark stars of fate."
				(Heine, "Katherine")


This is from page 61:

	I remember that first EMI poster which loomed from buses and
	tube stations to katenap my eye in '78.  Grave, delicious Kate,
	plump owl in her tangled nest of puzzled hair with nipples
	blowing tiny kisses through a cotton vest.  Kate and I joined in
	instant photolock.  Kate Bush, bushy Kate laid out for me by the
	EMI artroom boys with a gourmet's delight like a table for
	guests.  A strawberry tea spread, with eyes like doughnuts full
	of jam, and butter lips and full cream cheeks spread with a
	blunt knife by the vicar's wife...

	So I turn Kate's glossy pages, crackling and soapy to the touch,
	paper which seems limp and heavy and wet with *realism*, as if
	her image were oozing and perspiring into my fascinated
	inspection.  Where she opens herself ultra-bright and
	ultra-sharp with what seems like almost effusive precision.  A
	kind of alacrity.  An implacably sunny and heartlessly
	optimistic photoworld where I can dwell for ever and ever with
	no problem or effort, and no hope of change or decay, over her
	lambent skin and sticky promise of her tropical lips.


	Kate Bush is our godess Frig.  And like the Saxons we both
	revere *and* fear her.  Shroud her in the mystery of her power
	and the power of her mystery.

	A fertility goddess for our Nature: the Economy.  Mother
	Commodity.

	Kate Bush is the smile on the steel of EMI, the mating call of
	Thorn Industries, British capital on heat, the soft warm voice
	of mass media, the sweet breath of vinyl, the lovely face of
	bureaucracy, the seductive gaze of power.  As every star is.

	And she also incarnates pure adventure, total freedom: the ad
	made flesh,  Fabulously rich, we rumor: an idol in our
	world-wide superstitious cult of celebrity, which is the only
	religion we all truly believe in now -- even a pope has to be a
	celebrity before we take him seriously.  The negative image of
	ourselves.  Of our anonymity and powerlessness.  Which her
	images dramatise and expiate.  Kate Catharsis.

	No wonder EMI takes such care to show her with the same
	scrupulous art as Moscow depicts Karl Marx and Thorn industry
	its computers.  Through hybrid images which hover just between
	photography and painting -- pictures which exist just beyond the
	camera's conventional vision but retain a ghostly residue of
	authority.  The art of airbrush and stencil, soft pencil and
	rubber.  The visual style proper to charismatic icons:
	celebrities are shown with its anonymous clarity, with the hard
	lustre of machinery and apothesis.  They appear to *shine*, by
	virtue of apparently effortless and bland tonal transitions,
	sharp black and white highlights, and meticulously separated
	edges -- detail given with hypnotic brilliance which displays
	people as if they had suddenly loomed, ready-made and perfect,
	like smooth obelisks from a fog into which they might also
	disappear -- monumental and intangible.

	But I like her so much because she spoils it for them.  She has
	Monroe's flawed and flagrant presence.  No wet-shine,
	deep-frozen cover girl.  No Beauty.  Not Debbie Harry's vacuous
	nonentity -- no blank screen for wet consumer dreams.  But a
	woman who besides posing looks like she might menstruate, or
	sign checks -- or punch my nose.  A self-contained exuberance
	which cheerfully stains the most pompous male tableau with
	female energy and wit.

	And her favorite photolook is the gaze openly returned to a
	friend.  Intimate, but not for sale.

He ends the book with:

		Kate Bush:

		"I think everyone is emotional and I think a lot of
		people are afraid of being so.

Gee... Could that be used as the theme for an album side?

		They feel that it's vulnerable.  Myself I feel it's the
		key to everything and that the more you can find out
		about your emotions the better"

	Unusually sensuous, unusually generous.  She wants to make us
	happy.  Give us everything she has all at once.  Superbly
	courageous, on a hire wire over ridicule, disdainful of her own
	safety, always ready to risk her talent and herself.  She opens
	her heart with her mouth and throws herself at us with
	frightened urgency and that half anxious curl of her upper lip
	-- as if fearful of finding nothing on our side.  And we would
	be most ungracious if she didn't.  If we didn't respond to her
	warmth and vulnerability with some vulnerability ourselves.

	Kate Bush is a profoundly *subversive* artist.

-Doug

P.S.  Anyone know anything about David Hockney?