Sunday Times article - Part 2

[nbc@inf.rl.ac.uk]

Part 2 of the Sunday Times article - Beating About The Bush
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This was my first inkling that Bush, for all her swelling emotions, might be a
little one-dimensional. Mercer told me that she's a poet and sometimes poets
have a tendency  to say things without really knowing what they mean. "Like
when she wrote the song Man With The Child In His Eyes. Does she mean that he
was looking at a child, that he looked like a child, or he wanted to procreate?
I always wondered who that father figure was: was it a brother, was it her
father or was it an older man she had a relationship with when she was very
young?"

She is close to all her family, her older brothers Paddy and Jay and her father
particularly. The father figure has featured in much of her work. Dr Bush
himself even speaks on an old song of hers, The Fog. He was teaching her to
swim. The crying to get what she wants, the little girl's body, the little
girl's wilful mind, have all the hallmarks of daddy's girl. So what kind of
doctor is he? "That's a personal question. It's not really about my work."
Yes but he features in your work. "It's not something that I really want
to talk about."

When she first started to write songs she didn't tell boys because she thought
it would be a threat to their masculinity. She has devised a concept of
masculine and feminine energy. In Running Up That Hill from her multi-platinum
selling album Hounds of Love, she said she would like to make a deal with God.
"I wanted to be a man in a woman's body. I thought it would be completely
astounding, so that we could completely understand each other. Because in
essence we are so different.

"There is a feminine energy and there is a masculine energy. Some women have
very masculine energies, and the creativity of a lot of women is masculine
driven because they are ambitious to speed forward." She says she is
not ambitious - not for money, not for material things -
but she is driven by that great creative force to produce her work.
"It is the feminine energies which are very sepcial and they have been a little
neglected. [Early in her career everyone was discussing how her nipples poked
erect from an early poster of her in a leotard: "I was flattered and it did
help me to establish my music. I could never say it annoyed me."] I can
understand why in many situations women have found the need to become
masculine. A lot of my friends feel the feminist movement set women back a long
way. Man-hating is wrong but many women are ashamed that they can't just be a
woman. I think idealy people can be quite androgynous. That can be exciting."

She has got a new song about bananas and papayas and putting things in mouths
and putting her hands into pomegranites. "All is revealed/Not only women bleed."
That, she explains, is not sexual, it's about how beautiful men can be on the
inside. "I think proper opposites are very exciting. How could you possibly 
experience pain until you knew what laughter was?"

She then goes into a discourse about why the song Life Is Sad And So Is Love is
incredibly positive, and I'm afraid she lost me. I cannot tell whether she is
being obtuse on purpose but suspect that she is trying to avoid the questions
about men which she senses are coming. There have been so many wincingly
intimate songs about relationships, I wonder who has been her muse. "That's for
me to know and you to find out. I don't really see what that question has to do
with my work."

Well, as she's already said, her life is her work; I'm merely inquiring which
bit if her life has inspired which bit  of work. "I think that's personal and
I'm here to talk about my work. My private life I don't want to let go of. I
need to keep it close and tender so that is is still my own." And she's smiling
an assassin's smile.

I try to manoeuvre by pointing out that it is difficult to know where to draw
the boundaries when the songs are so personal and she shrugs that little girl
shrug. "Well, I'm telling you." She is unsettingly polite. If she had been
angry with me there would have been at least a confrontation, a connection.

Bush baby doesn't care if there is no connection. She doesn't care if I like her
or not. Mercer says that "even in the early days, all she wanted was to create.
Her work is her only therapy. Her psyche is not about promoting her
personality. Usuallly in this business the artists have an agenda: they want to
make you love them, they want to project their personality and that's what
drives them. And to do that they need to expose themselves. She feels that she
has worked herself so hard and exposed herself in her work so much, it is hard
to give any more. She's written about the last affair she had, or didn't have,
that broke her heart. Of course she is scared to talk more about it. She seems
to be interested only in warming to other artists. She feels press people have
their own agenda."

[To be continued]

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Neil Calton