Cloudbusting -- Kate Bush In Her Own Words

Coffee Homeground

Are there any other tracks that you could explain the meanings of to us, from the album?

Yeah, well there's one called ``Coffee Homeground'' which was in fact inspired directly from a cab driver that I met who was in fact a bit nutty. And it's just a song about someone who thinks they're being poisoned by another person, they think that there's Belladonna in their tea and that whenever they offer them something to eat, it's got poisen in it. And it's just a humorous aspect of paranoia really and we sort of done it in a Brechtian style, the old sort of German [??? Vibe] to try and bring across the humour side of it. (1978, Lionheart Promo)

In ``coffee homeground", you mention crippen. Who is he?

He was a murderer who was arrested after he had escaped from Britain by ship, thanks to the use of ship-to-shore radio. It was the first time that radio was used in this way, so he has a small place in history for that reason. (1979, KBC 3)

Someone once said that ``coffee homeground'' was about a crazy taxi driver. Is this true?

"Coffee Homeground'' was sort of based on a taxi driver that I met once, yes, but I wouldn't like to say that he was crazy because a lot of people say that I am! (1980, KBC 5)

The sort of vignette-songs like ``coffee homeground'' or ``Houdini", are those conceived in the first place as ideas, intellectually so to say, while there are others which take shape while you're actually playing the piano, whereupon you look for suitable words?

Well, ``Coffee Homeground'' would have been a song where the words and the music were coming together probably at exactly the same time. Actually, that's the only song which I wrote when I visited America about seven years ago [To appear on saturday night live]. Which is quite interesting, as it's not at all American...

A little bit german, maybe? Who did the arrangement?

Well, actually, Andrew Powell arranged the orchestra. But the riff [Kate sings it] - that was written on the piano and -

Paddy: Then translated into different instruments. As a matter of fact, ``coffee homeground'' violently mutated. When the very first demos of it were done, it had a decidedly different flavour. The brechtian treatment didn't appear until much later on, that only took shape when kate got the idea of treating the song with a slightly german sort of flavour.

So, with a song like that, it's kate who actually conceives what is possible, and then looks to the musicians or to an arranger to actualize it?

Paddy: Oh, yes, yes. But in the case of ``coffee homeground'' it did mutate. The brechtian feel is something that appeared only gradually, during the actual recording, and became more definite as time went on. (1985, Musician)

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