Free Waiting for Kate Bush by John Mendelssohn

want to do.’” Before using one of her own songs, though, she worked up an elaborate routine for Paul McCartney’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ after what she described as a day of living in its world.
    She fell contentedly into a daily routine. She’d get up in the morning and practise the piano until it was time to set out by train for London. Commuters were being blown to bits by IRA bombs left in unattended bags at the time, and you could cut the paranoia on London public transport with a knife, but Kate – as she’d begun calling herself, seemingly to draw a line under the first part of her life – revelled in it. Indeed, the danger somehow enhanced her feeling of being on a mission. In the evening she’d commune with her feline roommates Zoodle and Pye (wacket), and play the piano and sing until she could barely keep her eyes open.
    It was a broiling summer, that during which British punk was effectively born, and she left all her windows open. Some poor bugger down the street whose shift work compelled him to rise at five in the morning sent her her first fan letter, advising that, while he enjoyed her singing,
he would bloody well prefer not to have to listen to it night after
bloody night when he was trying to kip, thanks so much
.
    It got cooler and she closed her windows, but she wouldn’t stop composing late at night, not if everyone in Lewisham wrote her an irate letter. One midnight in the following March, while looking out at the full moon for inspiration, sniffling and dribbling with a frightful cold, she happened to remember something she’d seen as a child, a telefilm adaptation of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
. Years later she’d speculate that the memory had remained because the spirit in the story, who slashes herself with broken glass at the end, was called Cathy, just as she had been. But if that’s what made her remember the story, what enabled her to put lines from the novel in her song when she’d never read the novel? In times past, a girl could have got herself drowned as a witch for less, but in the enlightened times in which we live, she would suffer nothing worse than the Bronte Society’s emphatic scorn.
    Actually, by that full-moonlit midnight in the early spring of 1978, it was a wonder she had any time to compose, as she was busy rehearsing with the band that Paddy, apparently thinking that she’d benefit from singing to live punters, had assembled around her. The presumably hygiene-minded Brian Bath played guitar, Charlie Morgan drums, and Del Palmer, as smitten with the songwriter as he was with her songs, was on bass. Their repertoire – ‘Brown Sugar’, ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, ‘Sweet Soul Music’, ‘Sailin’ Shoes’, ‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘Come Together’, and the nearest Kate would ever come to a bog-standard rock song, ‘James And Cold Gun’ – wasn’t much more imaginative than the name Paddy had come up with – The KT Bush Band. (One might have hoped for rather more from one who’d had an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery of weird, sometimes unplayable instruments, some of them with arms and legs, others made of unusual materials, he’d made at the London College of Furniture!) No callow amateurs, these – Bath, Morgan, and the smitten Del had all been members of Conkers, who’d had an actual recording deal (albeit a dodgy one) with Cube Records.
    Their uninspiring name aside, they had in mind from the very beginning such enhancements as dry ice and a light show – not to mention the flower Kate wore behind her ear in homage to Billie Holiday. The first night, at their local, The Rose Of Lee in Lewisham, there were more of them on the tiny stage than in the audience – at least until Jay and Dr. Bush materialised just before last orders. The next week, though, the audience numbered a dozen. And after that, the place was heaving.
    Having outgrown Lewisham, they headed for the bright lights ofPutney, there, injudiciously, to