Waiting for Kate Bush (38 page)

We dissolve to some home video footage of a younger Ivor kicking a football around in their enormous back garden with his three young sons
and daughter, here aged around four to 11, while his breathtaking former model wife looks on worshipfully. Two of the boys seem to have got their dad’s DNA. They elbow one another mercilessly as they try to get to the ball first. But poor Claude, a little more rotund, seems more interested in protecting the garden’s flowers. As the frame freezes on him, Sir Ivor’s voice-over confirms our impression. “While Terence and Hugo loved nothing more than kicking the ball around with me on a warm afternoon, Claude always seemed more interested in gardening and cooking. While the other boys loved the same reggae and ska and dance hall I’d grown up on, Claude seemed drawn from the age of maybe six to the music of Judy Garland, Cher, and Madonna.”

Now we saw a montage of poor little Claude, dressed in his model mum’s clothing, entertaining at family get-togethers. Ivor has his face in his hands. Poor Claude’s two normal older brothers are at first slack-jawed with amazement, and then mortified. Only Mum and Sis seem to enjoy his performance. Over the course of the montage, poor Claude ages from around nine to maybe 16, by which point he is very rotund indeed. We see him performing in an old folks’ home, a convalescent hospital. The women – at least those aware of their surroundings – adore him. The men – at least the two aware of their surroundings – are aghast. The frame freezes and then dissolves back into Sir Ivor at his fireplace, a small tear in the corner of the eye that restored England’s national pride or something by detecting a few vulnerable inches of the goal in the big game against Whoever-It-Was in Whenever-It-Was.

“I’ve had to admit to myself, just as his mum, my first wife, and my new partner Ivanka” [here a young blonde right off the cover of
Loaded
or
Maxim
struts protuberantly into the frame, and to Sir Ivor’s side, at which she kneels worshipfully] “have all had to admit to themselves that Claude’s highly unlikely to follow in my famous footsteps. He’s never taken the slightest interest in anything to do with school either, though, which means his only hope is in pop music.”

Here Ivanka, seemingly able to restrain herself no longer, does what one suspects she’s in the habit of doing when there are cameras pointed at her. She pouts, lasciviously.

Now the three of them – Sir Ivor, Ivanka and poor Claude – are seen walking through one of Sir Ivor’s forests together, to the unlikely but emotionally evocative accompaniment of a wistful melody played on Irish pipes rather like those Davy Spillane played on Kate’s ‘The Sensual World’, with lots of reverb. Sir Ivor, in voice-over, tells us, “A few months ago, the experts said a boy like Claude couldn’t reasonably
look forward to much of a career in pop music either. Far too tubby, they said.”

Now Sir Ivor and Ivanka and poor Claude’s two brothers and sister are walking barefoot (except for Ivanka, of course, who’s managing it in four-inch heels) on a beach in Cornwall, and the pipes have been joined by other traditional Celtic instruments, albeit not by the Trio Bulgarka. “But then
Megastar
came along, and gave hope to Claude and others like him, others who either can’t control their appetites, or can’t muster one.

“As you know if you’ve seen the programme, the singer who gets the fewest votes of support from the public after their performance each week is sent home. I couldn’t bear for that to happen to my Claude. Singing’s the only thing he can do.”

Here the camera pulled in so close on Sir Ivor that you could make out the irises in his eyes, which had seemed black from a greater distance. “If I gave you or anyone you know pleasure during my career, either scoring more goals for Charlton Athletic than any other player, save one, or while scoring nine times for England in international competition, I’m asking you to please,
please
pick up the phone and vote for Claude in next week’s competition.”

A hero of Sir Ivor Praiseworthy’s stature, one who’d never known what it was like to be picked anything other than first for any team he ever deigned to play for, was appealing with glistening eyes (and, it wasn’t unreasonable to infer, on bended knee), for Joe and Jo Bloggs’ help? At that moment, I knew Claude would be in the final. As if Joe Bloggs, whose life Sir Ivor had made worth living with his sterling play and revealing autobiography, were about to refuse him anything!

I had to hand it to Sir Ivor. A lot of former star athletes would have tried to have a son like poor Claude kidnapped and sold into white slavery, even though Sir Ivor himself was black, the son of immigrants from Bermuda.

* * *

As the Eighties began to run out, one began to see bootleg compilations of the demos Kate, then Cathy, had recorded ages before on the family tape recorder before EMI signed her. Thought to have been taken to America by a former EMI employee turned Arizona radio personality, they made clear why nobody had signed her. Once you got past the prettiness of her voice, there wasn’t a great deal to be said for a lot of the early songs

At last, with mere weeks left of the Eighties, her sixth album,
The
Sensual World
, was released. Many found it dark, but Kate herself claimed to think of it as her happiest album, to regard the very tracks other people found scary as real knee-slappers. One wondered if maybe she needed to get over to Harrod’s and among ordinary people more often.

The undervalued Chris Roberts asserted that “this album marries the physical honesty and self-pride of Marvin Gaye to the querying passionate intelligence of, say, Elizabeth Smart, and gives birth to a rare mystical and aesthetic precision. Kate Bush represents both philosopher and love object. Gertrude Stein and, oh, Ava Gardner. It is, need I tell you, a triumphant combination.”

David Quantick marvelled, “The music is – at one go! – seamless and incongruously bizarre. We get the latest studio technology, natch, and we get uillean pipes. We get Bush playing the most Lionel Ritchie-type piano and we get her singing like she was a rare visitor to any known Earth language.” A million miles away, in southern California, Steve Hochman told his readers, “Bush’s relative seclusion over the years has coincided with an expanding musical vision, much as a cloistered child might explore exotic worlds armed only with some musty tomes and an overactive imagination…. the throaty quavering Eastern European voices [of Trio Bulgarka] release Bush from her Victorian inhibitions into a state of expressionist frenzy … The first pressings of the album are on vinyl that looks like marble, for crissakes, but this is her first outing without at least one moment to make you cringe at its feyness.”

David Cavanagh pronounced her “still the most inspired nonconformist in commercial music.” Tom Hibbert wrote, “Kate Bush exudes Englishness … Croquet and gingham and scones on the dainty patio. She is our dottiest dame since Margaret Rutherford. She still sings like the slightly crazy girl on the lacrosse team alarming the opposing Vicarage XII.” The
Irish Post
exulted, “The
Sensual World
remains the most successful translation of literature into pop, the culmination of a process begun a decade earlier with ‘Wuthering Heights’.”

I loved it from the opening bars of the title track, which featured her sexiest vocal ever. ‘Reaching Out’, in which exultation alternated with reflection, demonstrated that she’d figured out how to be very dynamic without resorting to the histrionics that had made much of her early work unlistenable. When she was exultant, she sounded, with her Celtic accompanists, with her huge drum sound, like Enya times ten. Where on early albums, she’d very often come across as barking mad, she came across now, on ‘Deeper Understanding’, as charmingly neurotic. A
major breakthrough! And when she was melancholic or tender, as on ‘This Woman’s Work’, she absolutely shattered your heart.

* * *

It turned out that I didn’t have to hand Sir Ivor Praiseworthy anything at all, as the next day was slow for news or something. With no suicide bombings in the Middle East to report, no fatal attacks on American liberators or British peacekeepers in Baghdad, and no new developments in Ben Affleck’s and Jennifer Lopez’s storybook romance, the media were able to exorcise their fascination with Sir Ivor’s commercial without guilt. The
Guardian, Times, Observer
, and
Daily Telegraph’s
articles unanimously applauded it as the latest confirmation of the great man’s greatness. The
Guardian
spoke with particular eloquence of how it hoped that other, lesser men ashamed of sons who were crap at sport, or fat, or obviously homosexual, would follow Sir Ivor’s example, and learn somehow to love the boys.

The fast-moving
Daily Mail
had managed to conduct a poll, in which they’d determined that 83 per cent of the British public thought even more highly of Sir Ivor as a result of his commercial, while 12 per cent thought less of him, and five per cent reported no substantial change in their feelings. The
Mirror
had on its front page an article about the boy with whom Claude had allegedly been in love during his last year in school. He speculated that if there were such a thing as gay marriage, and if he hadn’t met someone he fancied rather more than Claude, whom he’d grown to find “too tubby,” he might have become Sir Ivor’s son-in-law. It almost made one wish for Bennifer news.

The afternoon chat shows were full of child psychologists talking about what a wonderful thing Sir Ivor had done, and effeminate, doughy-looking boys relating through their tears how their own dads, fatally ashamed, had tried to persuade them to run away from home. The BBC’s
5 O’Clock News
revealed there would be a huge
Thank You, Sir Ivor
rally in Hyde Park on Saturday. Apparently a huge group of fans in Bournemouth had pooled their money to buy him a new Yardis as a token of their appreciation. Ten Downing Street was said to be interested in having him, Claude, and Ivanka over for a tea prepared by Jamie Oliver.

By early evening, a backlash had already begun picking up momentum. Sir Trevor McDonald interviewed Sir Ivor’s two older sons, both playing in Division 2. Terence seemed an imbecile, but Hugo made some interesting points about his life to this point having been a loselose proposition. His team-mates and managers had always been sorely
disappointed in him for not being nearly as good as his dad, and now they were disappointed in him for not being completely useless like Claude, whose singing he admitted wasn’t his own cup of tea. His own taste ran to The Mutilators.

Sir Ivor’s lone daughter, fashion model Rhiannon, who made Terence seem like the president of MENSA, thought Claude’s singing was well super. She was proud not only of him, but of her other brothers as well, and of course of her dad and mum. She thought Ivanka just super too. Having realised that one couldn’t remain a model forever, she was contemplating her own career as a recording artist.

I
WADDLED over to the newsagent’s and discovered a wonderful new magazine called
Blush
, full of photographs of celebrities with their nipples or testicles inadvertently exposed, or with dark perspiration stains under their arms, crumbs at the corners of their mouths, or hideous cellulite. I signed Kate up for a gift subscription, and asked that the card included in her first issue bear the inscription
From You-know-who
, though I had no good reason to believe she would.

Cyril rang to tell me about the job for which he’d just been hired. In the wake of Ladbroke’s having identified Stevie, the little lesbian with the big voice who’d bellowed Kate’s ‘Breathing’ with remarkable aplomb on the previous show, as its favourite to win
Fab Lab
, her family had been getting harassed more and more brazenly by the gossiparasites. In hope that the others would be scared off, they’d hit on the idea of ruining the life of one such scumbag chosen at random. Cyril thought it would never work. In his view, it would be like imagining that if you squashed one cockroach in a kitchen then all the others would scurry off in terror. But if they were willing to pay, Cyril was quite happy to accept their money. He’d enjoy my company.

We took the train together down to Peckham to confer with the family. The dad, Clement, had thinning steel-coloured hair, a saucer-sized bald spot, a long, lank ponytail, earrings in both ears, a smoker’s light brown teeth, and too many of them, and a thoroughly engaging manner. His eyes twinkled with delight when we shook hands.

He suspected he’d been made redundant from his job as a car mechanic because of Stevie’s lesbianism. The wife of the guy who owned the garage was a Christian zealot, and thought she was doing her part thwarting Satan by getting her husband to break all associations with sexual deviants. “Cars are rubbish,” he said. “They’re forever breaking down. There’s no reason anybody who knows how to work on them should ever be out of work.”

His wife Dorothy, whose teeth were even uglier than poor Clement’s (she lit one cigarette from what was left of its predecessor), but who didn’t even make eye contact, feared for the well-being of the couple’s two younger children. Unscrupulous journalists had in the past week offered them sweets and cigarettes and even money for embarrassing stories about Stevie on their way home from school. “One day they’re offering money,” she predicted ruefully. “Who knows that the next they won’t be snatching them and holding them ransom?”

I hoped, since their only income now was from the singing lessons Dorothy offered when her emphysema was in remission, that Cyril would admit he thought their idea to ruin one random tormentor’s life unviable, but his lips were sealed.

“I blame myself,” Dorothy admitted, unbidden. “If I weren’t such a good vocal coach, Stevie probably wouldn’t be as good a singer, and none of this would be happening.” She began to cry. It was a bit embarrassing.

“It isn’t about her singing, though, love,” Clement said, putting his arms around her. “It’s about the way she looks at the camera, that wonderful expression of equal parts sexual arrogance and wariness and accusation. And it isn’t just me saying it, Dor. It was the bloke in the
Standard.”