SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

By: Bishakh Som
July 12, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite unfinished masterworks, legendary obscurities and cherished almost-weres.

Illustration by the author.

KATE BUSH, FIRST DRAFT

Way before I knew I was trans, sitting on the lime green carpeting of my bedroom, playing vinyl on our little “Dansette”-style record player, I was drawn into the world of Kate Bush, into soundscapes that spoke of multifaceted femininities: swirling eddies of intimacy, strength, vulnerability, warmth. Kate’s first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart, spoke to me of the qualities of being femme, which I found at the time simultaneously unattainable and familiar. Now I was by no means a Kate completist like her more rabid fans, but I sought out bootlegs when I could and was more than a little verklempt, one day at a record stall in London’s Kensington Market, to come across a cassette called Cathy’s Album (the artwork for which seemed to have been created on a dot-matrix printer) containing Kate songs I’d never heard before. What were these? It was 1989: no online research or instantaneous answers to private musings. The recordings on this tape were scratchy and old but suffused with an ardor and longing that I recognized from her early albums. Kate, ever precocious, had recorded these songs as a teen — these were tunes that failed to make the cut onto her official records but I found in them the same sweetness with which I was familiar, though the contraction of the music to just Kate’s voice and piano seemed to distill this essence.

A decade or so later, eating lunch at my desk at work and trawling through the internet, I came across an old-school website devoted to Kate, all sparkly fonts and tiled backgrounds, with a tantalizing link buried within paragraphs, winking at me in violet type: The Phoenix Demos? A click took me into a treasure trove of MP3s — all the songs from my old bootleg cassette plus twenty-odd others, heretofore undiscovered. It was like having lived in a house for your whole life, only to be drawn up to the attic one day to unearth a steel trunk containing all your gran’s old jewels. Here were all the emotional flourishes I loved from Kate’s catalogue but in embryonic form: her portrayals of gay men (as evidenced in Lionheart’s “Kashka in Baghdad”), whose energy seemed to me to be femme-adjacent (“Hey, boy, you’re so young / to be a queen weeping / You’re just a little princess / Oh, Eddie, don’t!” from “The Gay Farewell”), and her sketches of intimate moments, filtered through a crystalline innocence (“I know how you like to kiss / I’ll ask you what you’re thinking / Silvers in our dark hair / The sheets are soaked by your tiny fish” from “Craft of Love”).

I come back to these songs time and again, when the tumult and crassness of our modern world brings me down, and I retreat into a Kate-world of bedrooms, gardens, lace and chintz, heaving sighs, fumbling eroticism and femininity — a psychic landscape which I thought I’d never have access to, until Kate gave me the key.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)

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