The musicians Kate Bush hopes to meet in the afterlife
As Kate Bush’s music so regularly deals in drama, it’s easy to miss the heartfelt sentiments they hold. Her albums weave a colourful web of characters and stories, but still at the core of her lyrics are comments from the songwriter about her life, friends and family. One song in particular is a moving tribute to a lost loved one.
“One of the band told me last night / That music is all that he’s got in his life / So where does it go?” Bush sings on ‘Blow Away’, a track sitting on her 1980 album Never For Ever. In the opening lines, she unfurls a question for all musicians, music lovers and music fans. Where does that passion end up after life has run out?
The actual title of the track, as written on her website, is ‘Blow Away (For Bill)’. Dedicated to one friend and music fan in particular, Bush penned the song in honour of Bill Duffield, her lighting director, who died on the opening night of her Tour of Life in 1979. Duffield was setting up the stage when he tragically fell 20 feet. Bush was left grieving but also terrified, grappling with a fear of death after seeing someone so close to her go so suddenly and accidentally.
Afterwards, she said that this song “had to be written as a comfort to those people who are afraid of dying,” counting herself within their ranks as she tried to reconfigure her thoughts towards the end. To soothe her worries, she began to reimagine the afterlife as one grand meeting place where your passion sorted you into your perfect afterlife to mingle with legends and friends alike.
“So there’s comfort for the guy in my band, as when he dies, he’ll go, ‘Hi, Jimi!’” she explained the scene. “It’s very tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a great thought that if a musician dies, his soul will join all the other musicians, and a poet will join all the Dylan Thomases and all that.”
Throughout ‘Blow Away’, Bush’s wistful verses on the end of life find a hopeful grounding in their busy choruses. “Please don’t thump me / Don’t bump me,” she sings as she imagines a bustling ground at a gig up in heaven. And who’s in the crowd?
“Hello, Minnie, Moony, Vicious, Vicious, Buddy Holly, Sandy Denny,” she says, reeling off names of her legends. In the afterlife, Bush is hoping to get the chance to say hi to Minnie Riperton, Keith Moon, Sid Vicious, Buddy Holly, Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny, and T. Rex leader Marc Bolan or even dance along with them at a grand show in the show.
‘Blow Away’ stands out as something different on the record. Not only is it lighter and sweeter in sound and style, but in message, too. The rest of the album deals with impermanence as the name itself, Never For Ever, declares that nothing and no one will last. Even though ‘Blow Away’ is about death, a lingering thing that forever reminds us of our mortality, Bush wants us to look at it with a more hopeful eye.
According to Bush, passion and love will live forever, way beyond any of us. She said, “‘Blow Away’ is a comfort for the fear of dying and for those of us who believe that music is perhaps an exception to the Never For Ever rule.”
