‘Oh England, My Lionheart’: Kate Bush’s sloppy ode to Englishness
Englishness has long held a prominent position in the imagination of the English, and yet it remains a rather ambiguous concept. For some, it evokes repression and traditionalism; for others, it’s a marker of eccentricity, creativity and ingenuity. Perhaps that’s why musicians are so frequently drawn to it as an idea. The Beatles, The Kinks, The Clash, Madness and The Libertines were all, in their own way, fascinated by what made the English tick, Kate Bush equally so.
In 1978, Kate Bush released her debut single ‘Wuthering Heights’. The single is a retelling of Emily Brontë’s classic gothic novel of the same name, an unusually passionate and elemental Victorian novel set on the windy Yorkshire moors. It was pure Victoriana and, perhaps for that reason, failed to make Bush a star in America. That didn’t stop her from releasing ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’ shortly afterwards.
Featured on Bush’s 1978 Lionheart album, the song was an incredibly bold choice considering punk’s year zero had just blown the doors off anything remotely astral. Both sickening in its nostalgia and quietly critical of modernity, ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’ could only have been written by someone gazing at England from a distance. Gilded with lush harmonies, baroque recorder arrangements and touches of harpsichord, it was described by Bush as being “about the Old England that we all think about whenever we’re away, you know, ‘ah, the wonderful England’ and how beautiful it is amongst all the rubbish, you know. Like the old buildings we’ve got, the Old English attitudes that are always around.”
Bush would later dismiss the track, but at the time of Lionheart, she defended its existence to the last. Like The Kinks ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’, it’s very hard to tell if Bush is celebrating the “very heavy emphasis on nostalgia that is very strong in England” or poking fun at it. From her comments in 1978, it would seem the former is more likely. “It’s very much a part of our attitudes to life that we live in the past,” she continued. “And it’s really just a sort of poetical play on the, if you like, the romantic visuals of England, and the second World War… Amazing revolution that happened when it was over and peaceful everything seemed, like the green fields.”
Bush was clearly anxious about how the single might be received. Speaking to Melody Maker in 1978, she said, “A lot of people could easily say that the song is sloppy. It’s very classically done. It’s only got acoustic instruments on it and it’s done … almost madrigally, you know. I dare say a lot of people will think that it’s just a load of old slush but it’s just an area that I think it’s good to cover. Everything I do is very English and I think that’s one reason I’ve broken through to a lot of countries. The English vibe is very appealing.”
Bush seems to have recognised that ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, was a song out of time. By this point in the ’70s, the green renewal promised by the hippie generation had failed to apparate, and the urban nihilism of the punk generation had far more cultural cachet. Bush offered a more nuanced view of modern life in the big city, conjuring up the same disillusionment driving the punks movement while harking back to a simpler, quieter, greener time.
Revisit the track below.
