John Lydon on the moment pop music changed: “Kate Bush is a true original”
It usually doesn’t take very much to get on the bad side of John Lydon. If you so much as breathed air in the wrong direction as him, he was more than likely to string you up for every fault in the book, whether you weren’t punk enough or you weren’t playing music for the correct reasons. While there’s probably a laundry list of insults that Lydon has for every pin-up star in Hollywood, he never had a bad word to say about Kate Bush.
Then again, Kate Bush is not exactly the first person you would think of as being a favourite as one of the reigning kings of punk rock. Whereas Lydon got his foot in the door singing about the ills of society in the sharpest tongue you had ever heard, Bush was known for creating little separate worlds with her music half the time.
While she had already made some of her biggest hits before most of us had had our first drink, the adventure was just beginning for the rest of us. Throughout each album she made, Bush seemed to be toying with what made pop music so interesting to begin with, featuring her adopting the same mannerisms of someone like David Bowie by never making the same album twice.
Whereas most casual fans know tracks like ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Running Up That Hill’, Lydon was more interested in the kind of sonic spaces she created. Despite wearing the famous ‘I HATE PINK FLOYD’ shirt, a lot of Bush’s records are also aided by David Gilmour, usually bringing a certain sheen to the guitar work on albums like The Red Shoes.
Whereas Lydon was responsible for bringing rock back to its roots, he admitted to never knowing anyone who could touch what Bush could do, telling Q, “Kate Bush is a true original. It’s not nice that she’s been imitated Torrid Aimless, sorry Tori Amos. But Kate Bush is a genuine talent. She went through the same shit I did when she started: ‘Oh, that’s not singing’. Who the fuck wrote the rules about music?”.
Then again, anyone accusing Kate Bush of not having a good voice seriously needs to get their ears checked. While her voice does take a bit of getting used to, her way of narrating these open-ended tales in her songs is something that only the Bob Dylans have yet to master, and even then, Dylan was always this detailed in his descriptions.
Even when you see Bush’s imitators out in the wild, they are hardly known for sticking to one genre for an extended period of time. While some may see it as comparing apples and oranges, the closest we’ve seen to someone with as far a reach as Bush in recent years is probably Bjork, who also manages to create her own little world to play around in whenever she makes one of her records.
While there’s hardly any overlap between Nevermind the Bollocks and The Dreaming, for instance, both of them do have one singular thing in common. They were meant to challenge the system they were brought up in, and innovators always tend to recognise their fellow musical mavericks who want to turn things on their heads.
