Kate Bush discusses the outsider star no punk groups could compare to: “He’s the original”
In the weird and wonderful world of Kate Bush, there is a wailing welter of eclectic influences. She was a pop star purely by virtue of the fact that her songs contained catchy hooks, and many had an air of danceability, but for all other intents and purposes, she has remained an avant-garde entity defined to a genre that includes her and her alone.
Part of the reason for this is that she always offered an open appraisal of artists beyond the mainstream rhetoric. She cited Roy Harper as the greatest English songwriter, went off the beaten track with The Beatles and espoused that John Lennon’s ‘#9 Dream’ was actually her favourite single, and the artist she claimed that the punks could never match was the former child sculpting prodigy, Captain Beefheart.
“When you look at a lot of the new wave groups and the punk groups, they’re really nothing compared to Beefheart,” a young Bush explained on BBC radio. “He’s the original. And for me, he’s a natural poet. I mean, he’s incredible. I’ve heard a beautiful quote of his. When he was backstage one day, there was someone hanging around who he didn’t want to be there, and he told them to get out. And when someone said, ‘Why didn’t you want me here?’ He said, ‘He’s had too much to think’.”
This wit and bite was effuse in his wild work. As Bush eagerly continues: “If I may just quote a couple of lines from one of his songs called ‘Bat Chain Puller’, it’s about a Voodoo train. His poetry is incredible. It says: ‘A chain with yellow lights that glisten like oil-beads’. And another line: ‘It whistles like a root snatched from the dry earth. Sod-busting rakes with grey-dust claws announce it’s coming in the morning’.”
After a moment of inaudible gasping that Bush utters as a mark of appreciation, she finally summons the sentence, “He is a poet. Then listen out for the line in this song, which is called ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’, and it’s, ‘Like two flamingos in a fruit fight’.”
While her focus was on his words, as she previously hinted, his wild ways also had a remarkable bearing on the punk that unfurled after his carnival collected the weirdos of the 1960s. As John Lydon recently told us in an exclusive interview, “I mean, one of my favourite American artists of all time will be Captain Beefheart.”
Speaking about the way the late, great Don Van Vliet played with form in a manner ahead of its time, Lydon continues: “He could get tunes together, which is interesting in itself, but Trout Mask Replica is taking music completely outside of itself. It’s regurgitating it in this shambolic exploration, I suppose, like deconstructing a building, you know, all the pipes are on the outside, but the heart and soul is inside. It works in music. It doesn’t work so well in architecture.”
He continues: “And lyrics to die for? It’s just insanely entertaining. It showed me such an open mind to all of life’s possibilities, and it’s not narrow or insular or fashionable.” Indeed, the record was a trend-bucking oddity, avant-garde in the extreme, but if you listen to the perfect blues-adjacent pop songs like ‘Observatory Crest’ that Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band also mustered, it displays a mastery of songwriting that Trout Mask Replica was reconstituting. And there is something decidedly anarchistic about that middle finger to form that you can imagine Lydon and Bush adoring.
