Interviews: Pull of the Bush

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of the bits and pieces that I--and hopefully you--find interesting.

                                                          Kate Bush

I fell in love with Kate Bush when I heard her scream. Eccentric, English, as beautifully comforting as a cup of tea and milk on a rainy day in a cottage in the Cotswalds, as much performance artist as pop star, a pagan ambassador from the Wiccan Hyperborean, a familiar of wood nymphs and Gaelic satyrs, a vertiginous voice that could scrape Aeolian cleft heights as well as plod through swampy bass bottoms, and with a Poe-ish sense of the macabre, how could anyone not love her? Which is why, as editor of the humble magazine RockBill, I decided to put her on the cover instead of—what was her name, oh yeah, Madonna (no offence to Madge). But it was that scream that startled my neurologic circuits and microwaved my heart. It came hurtling out of the mist in the chorus of the flagship song, “Pull Out The Pin” on her masterpiece album, The Dreaming. The story—for with Kate there is always a story—concerns the life or death decision of a Viet Cong farmer/freedom fighter, grenade in hand, confronting his surprised, “pink-faced” Tunnel Rat American counterpart in a godawful patch of jungle “with my silver Buddha and my silver bullet.” But the scream, “I love life,” coming as the two mortal enemies, both as ignorant of each other as they are willing to kill each other, stand off in a Vietnamese showdown. Who exactly is screaming “I love life?” Both of them, certainly, but aren’t we also joining in the chorus? If you had to boil down all the philosophies of all the religions of all the cultures of this world, wouldn’t the essence at the bottom of the pot be that desperate, pleading scream, “I love life?” When I did interview Kate, I professionally wrapped my palpitating heart in layers of gauze and asked her the questions I thought I had to—the career, the songs, influences, the political paradoxes of indigenous peoples, blah blah blah—not realizing that a more true, deeper, and soul-enrapturing intimacy had already taken place. She cradled my head and whispered into my ear, and—to paraphrase from “Houdini,” another song on the album, she gave away the secret to all great escapes, including the greatest escapes from the illusions we lock ourselves into—with a kiss she passed the key: “I love life.” Kate and I would meet again. There would be more talking. There would be wine and roses. But her tongue had already done its damage. “There’s just one thing in it, me or him. And I love life, so I pull out the pin.”