An enumeration of the errors in _Kate_Bush:_A_Visual_Documentary_

[IED0DXM%OAC.UCLA.EDU@mitvma.mit.edu]

 To: Love-Hounds
 From: Andrew Marvick (IED)
 Subject: An enumeration of the errors in _Kate_Bush:_A_Visual_Documentary_

   At least two Love-Hounds have privately requested that IED itemize the
errors in Mayes and Cann's _Kate_Bush:_A_Visual_Documentary_ which IED
recently alluded to. IED will not call attention here to the many grammatical
errors in the book; nor will he list the many statements--most of them
to do with Kate's childhood--which are simply rehashed from the collection
of suspect hearsay originally found in Fred Vermorel's first book about Kate,
_Princess_of_Suburbia_. These statements are derived
from the "recollections" of former "schoolfriends"--who remain for the
most part unidentified--as told originally to arch-jerk and -slime
Fred Vermorel, and as such they should be given no more weight than their
dubious provenance merits. To be fair, IED should add that the book contains
a large number of interesting facts and observations--the book has many good
qualities. That said, here is a list of 39 errors of fact and untenable
opinions which Mayes and Cann offer their innocent and unsuspecting readers:

   On page 12 a detail from a group photograph of Kate's class at St.
Joseph's Convent Grammar School, Abbey Wood is almost certainly _not_
a photograph of Kate Bush, but of some other unidentified girl. A careful
look at the entire photograph, showing all the girls in the class, reveals
that Kate, by this time a senior student at the school, is in fact standing
in the back (highest) row, next to her friend Lisa. This mistake is under-
standable, because it was made before in earlier sources, but readers should
be aware of the error.
   On pages 17 and 94 the statement that the song _Maybe_ "has never appeared"
is not strictly speaking correct. Although the version referred to on these
pages has yet to be heard, part of an earlier recording of that early song,
with David Gilmour himself on guitar, was briefly played by Kate on BBC radio
in 1978 or 1979.
   On page 19: "...other members of the KT Bush Band were completely
excluded <from the _TKI_ sessions>. (Kate later brought them back into the
fold for the tour, and after that they joined her in the studio for
subsequent albums.)" This is not accurate. Kate actually fought for and
won the right to bring in the entire KT Bush Band (Charlie Morgan,
Brian Bath, Paddy Bush and Del Palmer) for the recording of two tracks
from _Lionheart_ (_Wow_ and _Kashka_From_Baghdad_).
   On page 20: "_Moving_ is a strange but beautiful song in which (as in
many songs) she seems to be clasping a lover to her with one arm while
pushing him away with the other...<More in a similar vein.>" While all
this is hard to dispute outright, Mayes's and Cann's analysis of this
song makes clear their ignorance of the fact that _Moving_ is a tribute
to Lindsay Kemp, an innovative mime, dancer and choreographer who intro-
duced Kate to the world of movement as an expressive element in her art.
   On page 21: "_James_and_the_Cold_Gun_ is a jaunty rock song about a
cowboy (Jesse James?)..." This is false. Kate has stated categorically
that the James in her song refers to no particular historical or fictional
character.
   On page 28: "They <Kate's family> all write for _The_Club_ magazine..."
Actually only John's brothers Paddy and John have contributed to the
_Newsletter_ (unless one counts a ten-word-long thankyou note from Hannah
several years back).
   On page 37: "18th-21st February 1979. Kate visits Leysin in Switzerland
to record appearances for a BBC-inspired European television showcase. The
only footage to survive is a video of Kate's following single _Wow_,
but this was never broadcast either." Actually it _was_ broadcast, on
the very programme in question! It is known among fans as the Abba Easter
Special version of _Wow_. The other performance from the Swiss taping
session was an outdoor lip-synch of _Wuthering_Heights_ which Kate
performed in the Alpine snow. This version, it's true enough, has never
been released--it was originally scheduled to be included in the second
Abba special (a Christmas follow-up to the Easter show called the _Winter_
_Snowtime_Special_), but shortly before airtime Kate replaced it with a
hastily taped lip-synch of _December_Will_Be_Magic_Again_.
   On page 44: "<For the live performances of _Hammer_Horror_> Kate, in
widow's weeds and a black veil, was manhandled in a vigorous dance routine--
performed to the record..." False: Kate went to extra time and expense to
re-record the song for the stage performance, partly in order to avoid
problems with the Musicians' Union concerning the use of taped music. The
sound of the Tour version is clearly more "live" than that on the album
   On page 45: "The two bars of 6/8 time at the beginning of _Symphony_in_
_Blue_ were also extended <for the Tour> as a long waltz intro..." Mayes
and Cann are confusing the live intro for _Kite_, apparently, for the intro
for _Symphony_in_Blue_. The latter song has a quite different sort of live
introduction in the Tour performances.
   On page 48 Kate's abbreviation of the Stockholm show is ascribed to "voice
strain". Actually she had come down with a bad flu which necessitated
shortening not only this show but the Copenhagen, Hamburg and Amsterdam
shows which followed.
   Also on page 48 (in the margin): "Recordings of the <13th May Hammersmith
Odeon> show were also released on record." This implies that a live
album of the entire show was released, when in fact only four songs, carefully
re-mixed and overdubbed, from that performance were ever officially released,
in the form of an EP called _On_Stage_.
   Also in the margin, page 48: "Kate turns down the offer of writing the
theme tune for the new James Bond movie of the day, _Moonraker_..." Kate
was never asked to write the theme tune for that film, only to _sing_ the
lead vocal of John Barry's theme tune, which had already been written. Kate
praised Barry's song as "beautiful", but "not right" for her. She also
praised the recording which was eventually made with Shirley Bassey.
   On page 51 it is suggested that Kate's comments about the dangers
of accidents during a bank heist, made in an interview in reference to
the song _There_Goes_a_Tenner_, offered possible insight into Kate's
reluctance to tour. There is _no_ connection between these two subjects.
   On page 57 Mayes and Cann claim that Kate identifies with the cat
in the second verse of _Egypt_. Actually, the character is a.) not Kate,
but a very different personality invented for the song, and b.) not symbolized
by a cat, but enthralled _by_ the image of the ancient Egyptian Sphynx--a
very different situation, one which has a bearing on the theme of the song.
   Also on page 57: "_The_Wedding_List_ may have come straight out of a
newspaper--but was the whole story there or did she read about the first
killing and dream up the revenge to get something out of her system?" Kate
did not get the subject of this song from newspapers, nor did she invent the
idea of the protagonist's revenge. The entire story is closely based on the
plot of a film by Francois Truffaut called _La_Mariee_etait_en_noir_, or _The_
_Bride_Wore_Black_. In fact, when Kate performed the song in her Christmas
special of 1979, she reproduced almost frame for frame the initial assassina-
tion scene from the movie, and changed little from the original aside from
shifting the setting from modern times to the Old West.
   On page 60: "The moral of these tales <the songs in _Never_For_Ever_> is,
there is nothing you cannot change if you try hard enough." This is a highly
disputable assumption. As far as IED is aware, Kate has never said any such
thing.
   On page 61: "The first verse <of _December_Will_Be_Magic_Again_, in its
final vinyl version> is a humdrum Christmas mixture..." Nothing could be
further from the truth! The first part of this recording is sheer magic.
   Also on page 61: "In the second verse--'Light the candle lights to
conjure Mister Wilde'--she settles down in her den with a Christmas
present: _The_Complete_Works_of_Oscar_Wilde_ perhaps, published in 1976."
Aside from the fact that complete editions of Wilde's work had appeared
well before 1976, Mayes and Cann could have discovered, had they done their
homework, that Kate's love of the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde dates from
her early childhood. She has said so on several occasions.
   Also on page 61: "The B-side, _Warm_and_Soothing_ is a gentle but
unsentimental portrait of an elderly married couple with Kate wondering
how her ideas of love will weather in old age." This interpretation is
problematic, and Kate herself has never said anything of the sort about it.
Also, the song's "gentleness" is highly deceptive, in IED's opinion.
   On page 65, in reference to the 1982 Prince's Trust Gala performance
of _The_Wedding_List_, often (foolishly) remembered for the moment when
the strap of Kate's top broke during midsong, Mayes and Cann write: "She
ended her performance clutching her bosom and improvising choreography."
Untrue. She clutched only the strap, not her bosom, and not only did Kate
not improvise choreography for the end of the performance--there _was_ no
choreography for the performance at all! Kate began _and_ ended the song
more or less standing still. Unnecessary sensationalism.
   On page 67: _Suspended_in_Gaffa_ is likened to this verse from Gilbert
and Sullivan's _Nightmare_Song_, in _Iolanthe_: "Well this you can't
stand so you throw up your hands/And you find you're as old as an icicle/
In your shirt and your socks--the black silk with gold clocks/Crossing
Salisbury Plain on a bicycle." IED has listened to the passage in question,
and sees only a generic similarity which could as easily be found to exist
between Kate's song and dozens of other waltz-time popular songs of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And the lyrics are wholly
unreleated to those of _Suspended_.
   On page 68: "Kate has solved the problem <of foreign buyers misunder-
standing her lyrics> by insisting the lyrics are printed on every album."
Yet lyrics are not included in _The_Whole_Story_, nor for most of her b-sides.
   On page 69, in reference to _Night_of_the Swallow_: "Using cinematic
images she shows us a man of the gun about to migrate like a bird and she
pleads with him not to leave her. Kate treads carefully in politics but
she can feel her way into the subject through the personal angle. She
returns to the problem of a woman's loyalty in _Mother_Stands_for_Comfort_."
   Kate has said that she intended no political implications at all in
_Night_of_the_Swallow_. Nor has she ever described the man in the song
as a "man of the gun". On the contrary, he is a pilot who has been hired
to fly on a completely unspecified dangerous, possibly illegal, mission
at night. There is no sign that the pilot totes a gun. Furthermore the
woman is anxious only for the man's safety--loyalty is not at issue in
the song, as it is in _Mother_Stands_for_Comfort_.
   On page 70 some completely inappropriate and irrelevant stuff about
the sterility of mules is posited by the authors, in reference to the end
of _Get_Out_of_My_House_. Since so much has been said in Love-Hounds already
about this subject, IED will not repeat Mayes's and Cann's wildly off-the-
mark observations here, but will only comment that Kate herself has made it
abundantly clear that the reference to the mule was intended to have no
sexual connotation of any kind.
   Also on page 70, in the margin: "Kate also records one track with The
Chieftains (_Night_of_the_Swallow_) on a brief trip to Dublin." Not The
Chieftains, but Bill Whelan, Donal Lunny, Liam O'Flynn and Sean Keane,
played on this track.
   On page 72: "These contract-release gestures <in Kate's routine for
_The_Man_With_the_Child_in_His_Eyes_> are again straight out of a
contemporary dance class..." Not true at all. Some of the basic movements
are perhaps rudimentary, but there is not one movement in even Kate's
earliest routines which is not made for a directly relevant expressive
or narrative purpose. Snide criticism such as Cann's and Mayes's above
only betrays their own ignorance of the sophistication of Kate's choreo-
graphic vision.
   On page 73 (and elsewhere), the authors refer to Kate's longtime dance
partners Stewart Avon-Arnold and the late Gary Hurst (both black) as "boys".
Since they were unmistakably _men_ even from the time of their earliest
collaborations with Kate, IED cannot help but find this terminology
offensive, to say the least!
   On page 76: "From the first her writing was extraordinarily mature
but she took time to realise the potential of video, unlike Bowie
who was quick to grasp the possibilities of the medium but slower in
developing real songwriting maturity..." IED will overlook the stunningly
false assertions about Bowie's development as a songwriter, and will
merely comment that Kate's slowness to "realise the potential of video"
is a matter for extended debate; and is anyway quite unfair, since Kate
was virtually the _first_ artist to make promotional videos to accompany
singles' releases _at_all_! The truth is that by the time the rest of
the industry had begun making videos at all (early 1980) Kate had already
been making highly original and enormously expressive videos for well over
a year.
   On page 78 Mayes and Cann interpret a line from _Under_the_Ivy_
("I sit here in the thunder/The green on the grey/I feel it all around
me") as some kind of low bathroom joke: "She may smile at the line 'I
sit here in the thunder'--the thunder-box was an old-fashioned privy
or lavatory..." Judged within the context of the song as a whole and
especially the line "I feel it <the thunder> all around me", there can
be no question of any such utterly irrelevant and stupidly scatological
symbolism. Such an interpretation reveals far more about Mayes and Cann
than it does about Kate's song.
   Also on page 78: "In due course <_Hounds_of_Love_> went double
platinum <in England>." Well before Mayes and Cann published their
book the album had already attained triple platinum status, and at
this point it has already reached quadruple platinum status in the UK.
   On page 79, Kate's reference in _The_Big_Sky_ to those who "look
down at the ground, missing" is interpreted as an allusion to journalists
who "thought she was too wide-eyed, too Gosh! and Golly! Too _Wow_!"
There is nothing in this song to lead us to believe that it is intended
to be autobiographical, and Kate has _often_ cautioned listeners of her
music not to confuse the narrators in her songs with herself.
   On page 80: "The serene voice <in _Cloudbusting_> soars above a
low string quartet." Del Palmer and Kate both made it clear in their
respective _Newsletter_ accounts of the recording sessions for this
track that the part was written by Kate, on Fairlight, expressly for
string _sextet_, and that subsequently six string parts were recorded.
   Also on page 80: "The cover photo for _The_Ninth_Wave_ (taken by
Kate's brother Jay <John Carder Bush>) is _Ophelia_ in a life-jacket--a
young woman floating in water, strewn with wild plants and with her hair
flowing about her. This was inspired by a celebrated Pre-Raphaelite
painting by John Everett Millais."
   Although the picture does strongly recall Millais's 1852 vision of
Ophelia; and although we know that Kate herself greatly admired both
that painting and a modern re-interpretation of it which hangs on her
own wall; and although (as IED learned through conversation with John) Kate's
brother is highly knowledgeable about Pre-Raphaelite imagery, nevertheless
we should believe Kate's own statement that Millais's _Ophelia_ was _not_
in their minds when they created the photos for _The_Ninth_Wave_. Perhaps
it's an example of unconscious influence, but IED for one would prefer to
take Kate's word for it.
   On page 81, the "little light" in _The_Ninth_Wave_ is interpreted as
simply a metaphorical reference to "love and life <which> lights up her
face." In fact, the "little light", while possibly a symbol for these
things, is, in narrative terms, a reference to a _lighthouse_.
   Also on page 81: "'White horses' and 'buoy' are sea images but they carry
overtones of sex." They do? How so? This is absurd.
   Also on the same page, Mayes and Cann dredge up the completely
false interpretation of the words "ice", "white", "cutting out little lines"
and "snow" as references to cocaine. The same interpretation was foisted on
Kate by a bullying male Irish journalist for _Hot_Press_ in 1985, and Kate
categorically denied that the imagery was ever intended to represent such
a thing. She acknowledged that the image of the opium poppies in the song
was a drug-related symbol, but pointed out that it referred to the motif
of sleep, not drug-taking in a literal sense, and that anyway this had
nothing to do with cocaine. And she explained that the references to
snow, ice and the cutting of lines were clearly intended to describe
the scene in the song, wherein the protagonist remembers skating as
a little girl.
   On page 82 there is an entirely untraced and unidentified quote from
Kate of her memories of a moment when her own mother allegedly fainted and
had an out-of-body experience. There have been other similarly unidentified
"quotes" from Kate, mostly about her childhood, which have turned out to
be the spurious "memories" of anonymous so-called former schoolfriends.
IED concedes that it is quite possible that this particular quote is authentic,
but it could just as easily be fabricated. Anyway, it's completely
unfamiliar to this fan.
   Also on page 82: "The end of <_The_Morning_Fog_>--and of this momentous
album--is abrupt and inconsequential, as if cut off." IED doesn't see any
reason for such a characterization of the last measures of this song.
The ending is unemphatic, perhaps, but not really "abrupt", and _certainly_
not "inconsequential".
   On page 84, in describing Kate's performance in the official video for
_Running_Up_That_Hill_: "For the first time on screen she is appearing,
not as the subject of a promotion but as an element in the drama." This
is blatantly untrue. The _RUTH_ video is neither more nor less "promotional"
than any of Kate's earlier videos. From EMI's point of view, of course, all
of Kate's videos are valuable primarily as promotional tools, and _RUTH_ was
quite successful--particularly in Europe--as such. From Kate's point of view,
however, _RUTH_ was just another in a long line of more or less modest
visual accompaniments to her songs, and her concern with this video as
with all its predecessors was to make a work of artistic value, something
which complements and with luck enlarges upon the expressive content of
the music itself.

   The above litany might seem to indicate that IED does not think well of
_A_Visual_Documentary_. That's not true. In fact, he considers most of
the above errors to be relatively minor ones, and there are after all
not terribly many of them. The book is for the most part quite
accurate; it's well organized, according to a carefully detailed
chronology; and it's filled with interesting and for the most part
reliable points. In addition the book contains one of the best
collections of candid photographs of and relating to Kate Bush
that one can find anywhere. So long as readers are made aware of
the above inaccuracies, IED thinks they will be well served by
_A_Visual_Documentary_.

-- Andrew Marvick