The Secret History of Kate Bush: And the Strange Art of Pop (And the Strange Art on Pop) [Paperback]

Music Sales Corporation (Author), Fred Vermorel (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 94 pages
• Publisher: Omnibus Press (December 12, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 071190152X
• ISBN-13: 978-0711901520
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.5 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,097,804 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nice pictures, but take the rest with a pinch of salt, June 10, 2001

By 

k-e-v (England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret History of Kate Bush: And the Strange Art of Pop (And the Strange Art on Pop) (Paperback)

I very much like Kate Bush and her music, so I was thrilled when my brother spotted this book at a car boot sale and bought it for me. The first thing I noticed was the name of the author, Fred Vermorel. Now, having read various Kate Bush fanzines over the years, I'd formed the opinion that Mr Vermorel is, how can I put it, 'not very popular' with Kate Bush fans. This is because of a previous book he had written entitled 'Kate Bush: Princess of Suburbia', which was apparently less than complementary. It was therefore with some trepidation that I started reading 'The Secret History of Kate Bush'.

At 94 pages the book it quite short, so it'll take no more than a couple of days to read it. A significant part of the book deals with Kate's family history, concentrating on a couple of interesting ancestors - Henry Bush who apparently scandalised the Victorian village of Pebmarsh, and Joe Bush who apparently served time in Wormwood Scrubs for being a conscientious objector during the First World War. All of this makes interesting reading, but one can't help but wonder how much of it is accurate. Since Kate and her family had no involvement in the research behind the book, I would imagine that this potted history is at best economical with the truth, and at worst 99% fiction.

Another part of the book attempts to analyse the name 'Kate' with various quotes from songs and literature. It doesn't succeed because you can't apply meaning to something as abstract as a name. Likewise I found the passages about 'suburbia' to be equally tedious and nonsensical.

The latter part of the book concentrates on Kate's childhood and school days, including some quotes from childhood friends and classmates. Once again the credibility of these quotes is questionable, but if genuine they paint the picture that Kate was maybe a bit lonely - probably because she was just too nice for her own good.

I didn't find anything in the book that was particularly uncomplimentary or disparaging towards Kate, which I had expected, other than the possibility of the 'history' narrative being closer to fiction than fact. Ultimately this book is an unsatisfying read, not least because of Mr Vermorel's lack of credibility due to his previous book, but also because if you discount the legitimacy of the historical narrative, there's little else which is of interest, apart from a few dodgy quotes. Still, my brother only paid 50p for it. I think he should've haggled.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For fans only !, July 8, 2000

By 

Eirik Kvilten (Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret History of Kate Bush: And the Strange Art of Pop (And the Strange Art on Pop) (Paperback)

Well, what can I say. This informative book is not what I would call a beginners guide to Kate Bush-fans, but I'm sure it wasn't meant to be either. Lots of great pictures not only of The Godess of Music herself, but also of some of her ancestors. You see, half the book is about Kates father, and her fathers father etc. So if you're looking to find out why Kate is Kate, this is the book for you. At the same time I have to say that this is not a biography. It contains a discography, but the book was released in 1983... In other words not nearly a complete discography. All in all a good book by Fred Vermorel, but as I mentioned earlier -not for Bush-beginners.

4.0 out of 5 stars The Strange Art of Grandpop, January 28, 2012

By 

PatB (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secret History of Kate Bush: And the Strange Art of Pop (And the Strange Art on Pop) (Paperback)

What is the Art of Pop, anyway? It is, says Vermorel, "the only art which really counts today". He was writing in 1983, but it was a stretch to make that claim even then, because we're talking about an era that was already vanishing. Essentially it's an era where what was most popular was also what was best. And Kate Bush in her Babooshka phase might have been its last gasp.

In my view, Britain was the only place this "art of pop" ever existed, and only for fifteen years or so. What he calls "contingent art" or an art "fraught with the moment" began when the Beatles put away their suits and pudding-bowl haircuts, stopped writing about luuurve and started writing about what they saw, what they heard, what they read, what they bumped into. Soon you had the Kinks and the Who riding the same trail, and you could talk of a truly vital art then, one rooted in the life of the people, which could thrive in the commercial world while keeping it at arm's length.

But an art "fraught with the moment" depends upon perpetual revolution, obviously. With the Punk holocaust no doubt fresh in his mind, Vermorel observes that pop "concentrates an anxiety that haunts most of our art one way or the other: that the centre might succumb to its edges: imagination enact its utopias and nightmares". Vermorel is a near-contemporary of mine - for all I know, we shared a joint at the barricades - and the image of the Huns gathering on the frontier is dear to us. So I'm not surprised to find him talking this way. It all seemed possible then. But increasingly quality and celebrity have gone their separate ways, and Kate Bush's retreat is a living metaphor for the process. Talent and the cameras aren't on speaking terms any more. In the new century the edge that has taken over the centre is best represented by Simon Cowell's question to some hopeful X-Factor contestant: "Who do you think you could sell more records than?" We're back to luuurve.

So, that alone dates the book. The art of pop hasn't turned out the way the author hoped. But the interesting thing is what happens to the dreamers when the dream evaporates. In Vermorel's case things have turned a little...toxic. There are two videos on Youtube, uploaded by him under other names, relating to his 30-year obsession with Kate Bush, and his various methods of intruding on her privacy. He posts in the comments section under multiple identities when his critics are giving him a hard time, which is most of the time. They're embarrassingly easy to spot, being full of praise for the stalker, while the attitude towards "wee Mz Bush" is superior and dismissive. Here is his latest flourish, where he adopts the semi-literate style of the average YouTuber: "I really do despaire at how thick some people are he is no more a stalker than kate bush' is a baboushka, or an army dreamer or a' bank robber or a cloud only she hides her fun & games with pretty sighs & prancing. FV is pointing to a more interesting theme than KB ever did the way everyone today is a voyeur and the fact that every paparazzi is a lisensed stalker."

He's turned the tables on wee Mz Bush, you see. Now the fan has become the artist. The "art fraught with the moment", which was once her art, is now his. It puts a disturbing retrospective spin on this sentence from Chapter VII: "We are now close to those dark places where Hinckley stalked Jodie Foster and Chapman waited for Lennon." Quite so. In the more tortured forms of fandom the urge to swap roles with the artist morphs into a belief that the artist has stolen the fan's identity. However, lest you take alarm, I should add that in Vermorel's case it isn't dangerous. His lunacy is not of the homicidal variety. Rather than high-powered rifles, he aims high-powered lenses through Bush's kitchen window and calls it "performance art". In support, he (or his alter egos on YouTube) are fond of quoting Craig Saper:"The fan as stalker comments on the society of the spectacle in a disturbing performative criticism. While celebrities enter your home through the television, the fan returns the favour as a stalker. If the star demands attention, then the stalking fan demands attention and demands a response."

You're bound to spot the flaw. In her case it's AVOIDING attention that demands a response, apparently. Babooshka was a long time ago, and the "star" has become just a professional musician with a small-to-medium following, who gives an interview once every ten years and won't lift a finger to promote her own work. Could there be a more inappropriate target for a "performance art" aimed at the cult of celebrity?

At this point you just have to cut through the bollocks. The name "Kate Bush" rings only a faint bell with the average person these days, and the paparazzi long ago struck camp and moved elsewhere. But for the hardcore fan she is as powerful an object of fascination in her current seclusion as in her erstwhile stardom. The fan-club has its fair share of nutters, and Vermorel has tried to pass himself off as a parody of the type, pursuing satire through imitation, but the conceit has worn a little thin after three decades. The difference between him and the other nutters is that he knows some big words, that's all.

Which doesn't mean this book isn't any good - though if it had been one of those Look Inside books, I'd have looked inside, read the first page and declared it not worth buying. It's where he tries hardest for that kind of firecracker prose that has me wincing: "As frank as Cliff, as crisp as the Floyd, as potent as the Pistols". If you shook a boxful of adjectives and picked three at random, you might end up with those. And if you shook and picked again you might get "As stiff as Cliff, as pink as the Floyd, as holstered as the Pistols." To steal Truman Capote's witticism, that's not writing, it's typing.

And there is more typing to come, though not as much as I'd feared. In fact, by the halfway point it had earned at least a 3-star rating from me by nothing more than the accumulation of traditional virtues. First, unlike other examples from the modern pop-bio word-factory, it isn't a cut-and-paste job leeching off other people's labours. It's all his own work. Second, Vermorel gets out and about. In pursuit of his subject's ancestors he hacked his way through ancient registers, interrogated pub landlords, photographed old buildings, trudged down country lanes, and at some point, in homage to Henry Bush, threw himself into a ditch. He built a picture of rural Essex through the ages by dint of sheer legwork, and quite a vivid and absorbing one it is too.

The problem is, even though that section constitutes half the book, it's got very little to do with Kate Bush, who is connected to it by a mere accident of genealogy. There is no cross-talk between the two halves, unless you count a small section at the end where he focuses briefly on her "Englishness". Perhaps that loops back to the first half, but it's pushing it to say so. It looks to me like a book that doesn't know what it wants to be, or else it's two books joined end to end.

However, the second half (or second book), focussing on Kate herself, has the same virtue as the first - to wit, plenty of legwork. The Acknowledgements at the back contains a long list of interviewees, mostly unnamed in the main text, whose testimony enables Vermorel to paint a picture of her early life that is not only fascinating in itself, but also illuminating, shedding light on the songs. And on that subject, this bit on The Dreaming's title song had me applauding: "The sharp percussive sound was made by rhythmically smashing two pieces of marble in the Townhouse's 'live' stone room. These gradually splintered, adding extraneous sounds which were gated out. Other percussion effects were also explored, bemusing the canteen staff who wondered why Kate Bush wanted their pots and pans, and also the navvies whose nearby building site was looted for odd pieces of timber..." More please, I'm thinking. I can put up with the occasional critical theorists' tosh-word ("teleological", "phenomenological"), in return for tangible, informative stuff like that.

It has its yuk moments, apart from the tosh-words: "So I turn Kate's glossy pages, crackling and soapy to the touch, paper which seems limp and heavy and wet with realism, as if her images were oozing and perspiring into my fascinated inspection." (He's taking the pisht, but only partly).

It has its occasional Pseud's Corner pretentiosities: "...refining her technique into an emotional spectrum as discriminated as Schoenberg's Stimmung". Come off it, mate. I've been a classical nut since my early twenties, but even I couldn't sit through Stimmung without wanting to stick my fist through the speakers. Who amongst your readership has even heard of it?

And it has its incorrectnesses: Stimmung is by Stockhausen, not Schoenberg; and the living British composer mentioned in several places is "Tavener", not "Taverner".

But that's nit-pickery. I liked this book a lot more than I hated it. And time is pressing on with Kate Bush. It's unlikely now that Vermorel's flawed bio will be superseded in terms of the amount of personal testimony it contains and the unexpected professionalism of its approach. He got as close to his subject as anyone is ever likely to get. In the light of that, the response to it by many Bush fans seems to me ungracious. I, at least, was stimulated enough to put it in the queue for a second read. And the photos are fabulous.