“My all-time favourite single”: The John Lennon song that transformed Kate Bush
“That’s what all art’s about,” Kate Bush once said, “A sense of moving away from boundaries that you can’t in real life. Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really – to do something that’s just not possible. But you try to do as much as you can within those physical boundaries.” That dreamy epithet about the purpose of art could quite easily have been uttered by John Lennon too.
His boundary-breaking might not have pertained to dancing, by all accounts he had two left feet, but he did try to waltz the centre of pop culture closer to the avant-garde edges, making off-kilter stars like Kate Bush possible. As David Bowie once said, “I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock ‘n’ roll, and also ideas. I felt such akin to him in that he would rifle the avant-garde and look for ideas that were so on the outside of, on the periphery of what was the mainstream and then apply them in a functional manner to something that was considered popularist and make it work.”
Through this distinct modus operandi, there is a clear kinship between Bush and Lennon, and no song showcases the influence that the former Beatles had on the ‘Cloudbusting’ star than his track ‘#9 Dream’ from 1974’s Walls and Bridges album. From the oozing production to the oddly visceral ethereality and even the return to childhood’s strange spiritualism in the lyrics, there are few tracks that show-up more clearly as an influence in the wailing welter of Bush’s work than this Lennon single.
This was something that Bush was more than happy to admit when she was tasked with DJing a selection of her favourite tracks on New Year’s Eve 1980 (going into 1981) by the BBC. “For me, it’s just magic,” she said by way of introduction. “His voice; the production – it’s the most incredible production; the little backwards voices. They’re really things that I love. And just, the song and everything – it’s wonderful.”
All those elements amounted to making it the track she loved most in her life at that time. “My all-time favourite single?” she mused in the same broadcast. “Very, very difficult question, it really is, because just trying to compare songs, you know, let alone trying to put one higher than all the others… I think I would say at this point in time John Lennon’s ‘#9 Dream‘ – for lots of reasons.”
She would later say, “It was well ahead of its time, and didn’t really get the attention it deserved.” It mused in complex psychological matters in a manner that eclipsed most traditional ‘pop’ of the age, deeply inspiring Bush’s later work.
At the time of that proclamation, Bush was only 22. The Beatles had called it quits when she was only 12. Thus, you could’ve forgiven her for not fully grasping the gravity of Lennon’s passing a few weeks earlier; however, as someone who had been interested in music, and specifically how moving it could be, from an early age, she expressed: “I think probably people of about sixteen or seventeen, that’s the age where it wouldn’t really mean that much. But even at my age, they really meant so much.”
Continuing: “I wasn’t aware of them first happening and them being the ‘new thing’, but I was aware of them as the most incredible source, and of Lennon being the most fantastic songwriter. He really was one of my favourite artists – not as The Beatles, but as Lennon. And in fact, in compiling this list a couple of months ago before the news, I’d chosen this track as one of my favourites. So it wasn’t meant as a tribute, it was genuinely planned as one of the tracks.”
She finally concluded: “One of the dozen or so most important human beings of my lifetime so far: John Lennon.” Her music ever since has been a testimony to this. “He’s left the biggest hole in the business that we’ve known yet, I think,” Bush said after his passing. Thankfully, his knack for creative exploration with a sense of giddy abandon was certainly fueled by young Bush and her dazzling sound.
