Review: 'Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush [Omnibus Remastered edition]'

Kate Bush seems to reveal so much of herself in her songs despite being more of a storyteller than a self-dissecting singer-songwriter. So much of her own intense connections to family, sex, love, and nature bleed through her tales of soldiers, ship-wreck survivors, ghosts, monsters, talking houses, and amorous computers. In reality, Kate Bush is an extremely private person, but the personal air of her music prompts a great deal of curiosity, empathy, and speculation in critics and fans alike.

Biographer Graeme Thomson is clearly a fan, though his work also requires him to be a critic. That work puts him in the tricky position of balancing his gasping admiration with professional distance, to respect the artist he so admires while also telling her story with honesty and thoroughness. He did an exceptional job of traversing that tightrope with Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush, which examines her life, music, work methods, and frustrating relationship with the media. Thomson waves away the rumors incessantly fluttering about her like moths. Ill-informed and disgruntled journos love to paint Bush as a pretentious thrush, a pampered rich girl, an airhead speaking in constant “Wows!” and “Amazings!”, a recluse, or all false impressions bundled together. The author calls out the less spectacular moments of her career (such as The Red Shoes) with all due frankness and as much tact as he can muster. He also gets deep into fascinating little side roads of Bush’s career, such as her collaboration with the late Donald Sutherland on the “Cloudbusting” video.

Thomson originally published Under the Ivy in 2010 when Kate Bush’s career may have seemed like it had wound down. She hadn’t released an album in five years at that point. A year after the book’s publication, Bush revisited some old material on Director’s Cut and released an album of new material, 50 Words for Snow. Since then she has done the unimaginable by staging concerts for the first time in 35 years with her triumphant “Before the Dawn” series at the Hammersmith Apollo. She's also enjoyed a major surge among younger listeners because of the prominent use of "Running Up That Hill" in the most recent season of Stranger Things. 

Under the Ivy was last updated in 2015, which was recent enough to deal with "Before the Dawn" but not recent enough to deal with such developments as the deaths of several of her past collaborators, the Stranger Things hullabaloo, or Bush's looooong overdue induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Expanded by an additional 25 pages, Under the Ivy, the Omnibus Remastered edition*, deals with them in deep detail. Thomson muses extensively on the current state of Bush's legacy, as well. The book also includes a new foreword by author Sinéad Gleeson, in which she explains how both Bush and the original edition of Under the Ivy wowed her, and an updated introduction by Thomson

[*Much like the Omnibus Remastered edition of Under the Ivy, this review is an updated version of a review I originally published in 2015]