“Not what I had in mind”: When Kate Bush rejected John Lydon
There have been a fair few strange collaborations over the course of music history. There was Nick Cave and Kylie, Lou Reed and Metallica, David Bowie and Bing Crosby. And there was almost John Lydon and Kate Bush as he revealed their failed attempt at working together.
Maybe it’s not so weird, actually. When thinking about it, Kate Bush could easily be considered a punk, even if it does open up the difficult question of how the genre or style is defined. Since the mid-1970s, when Sex Pistols broke out as leaders of the UK’s front-running punk scene, the sound and meaning of the music have been morphed and changed into so many different versions. But to take it at its simplest and boil it down to the core values, punk was always supposed to be about rebellion.
It emerged as a non-conformist, anti-authoritarian movement. Punk was anti-corporate, built off an accessible, do-it-yourself ethic that meant anyone could make music, and any music could make it. At the centre, there was one promise: never sell out.
Under those definitions, Bush could be the ultimate punk. When she broke out in the late 1970s, she made history as the first woman to top the charts with a self-written song, breaking down doors in a typically male-dominated space. But she didn’t just do it with any song. She did it with ‘Wuthering Heights’, a weird art-rock song based on a gothic novel.
From then on, Bush’s creative world couldn’t and wouldn’t be contained. While female artists were, and still are, pressured to fit certain boxes, sing about certain relatable topics, or market themselves in a widely desirable way, Bush has always stayed niche, strange and utterly herself. As she moved through her records and experimented with new sounds, never scared to push things into weird territories, it could easily be said that she was just as punk and pioneering as the Sex Pistols or any of their peers.
Lydon clearly recognised that. “I love and adore Kate Bush, I’ve always been a fan of hers,” he said. Even though the Sex Pistols were over before Bush broke out, the two have been on each other’s radar, seemingly seeing the impact each other had on music. At one point, they tried to bring that power together for a collaboration.
“I almost worked with her once,” Lydon remembered. “She asked me to put some song ideas together. I did and it was about rescuing parrots from the parrot trade in Brazil. I called it ‘Bird In Hand’. She said, ‘Um, not what I had in mind, John!’ I think she was looking for a ballad. The right idea but the wrong time, maybe.”
A song about a parrot trade actually sounds like the type of thing Bush might have been into if she was caught at a different point. Having sung about everything from romantic relationships with snowmen to narrative pieces on drowning, nothing is off-limits or too odd in her world. But this time round, the connection simply didn’t work.
“I was obviously just a tad too on the crazy side,” Lydon reveals, because while Bush is a musical punk, her polite, typically posh British mannerisms might not have aligned with the ex-Sex Pistol’s chaotic reputation.
