Memories of the days when Kate Bush, now revered worldwide as a song writer and singer, was a miserably bullied schoolgirl – with hooligan instincts – have resurfaced in an article she wrote 34 years ago for the 1980s music magazine Flexipop!
Bush, who returned to performing in 2014 for a string of concerts 35 years after her last tour, recalled the miseries of being a shy outsider at St Joseph’s Convent grammar school in Bexley, south-east London, bullied psychologically and occasionally physically, further tormented by unrequited crushes on beautiful boys.
“I was too shy to be a hooligan but inside I had many hooligan instincts,” she wrote. “I became very shy at school. There were people who picked on me and gave me a very hard time. It was a very cruel environment and I was a loner.”
“My friends used to play this game whereby they’d ‘send you to Coventry.’ My friends sometimes used to ignore me completely and that would really upset me badly. I still tend to be vulnerable, but I’m much better at fighting back if people are nasty to me today.”
“I used to get the most terrible crushes on boys, always much older than me. And it was terrible. I used to think they were so beautiful. But I’d never get anywhere with them. Just the old fantasy trip of getting off on someone, was what it was about.
“My life as a teenager was interesting and difficult. And it was important, because it stirred up all sorts of things in me. But I was very lonely. And even after I left school, there were times when the loneliness became desperate.”
Bush was writing in 1982, four years after her first number one chart hit with Wuthering Heights. Her home made demo tape was turned down by numerous record labels before EMI signed her, and she released her first album, The Kick Inside, in 1978, at the age of 19. She went on to scoop up Brit, Grammy and Ivor Novello awards for her writing and performing, and was awarded a CBE in the 2013 New Year honours list.
Her article appeared in the cult music magazine of the early 1980s. The first 27 issues appeared with a floppy plastic single taped to each front cover, often eclectic – and now highly collectable – recordings by artists including Genesis, Blondie, the Cure, and a cover version of the Village People’s YMCA by Adam and the Ants.
The glory days of the magazine, including Bush’s contribution, are celebrated in a new book, which comes complete with a flexidisc featuring tracks by Marc Almond and Spandau Ballet.
