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58: KATE BUSH
Army Dreamers/
Delius/Passing Through Air
(EMI, 1980)

IN MY teens, I spent far too much time worrying about what people thought about me and whether I was cool enough. (I needn't have bothered - I wasn't.) This, however, had the effect of making me periodically step off of the carousel, as it were.

Much as I loved rock music in all its manifestations and subdivisions I just got tired of it sometimes, and needed a fortifying, palate-cleansing infusion of something different. Ideally, something which seemed to use a vocabulary entirely separate from rock's codifed and compartmentalised strictures, which pressed us all into style tribes and imprisoned us in the appropriate uniforms.

Kate Bush fit the bill perfectly as far as I was concerned, because she didn't really fit anywhere. She seemed like an old-school, high-born hippy chick on the face of it - recomended to EMI by David Gilmour, no less - but her eagerly exploratory melodies, unusual lyric preoccupations, unfettered femininity and general "otherness" put her beyond the reach of easy labelling.

Army Dreamers is an illuminating case in point - a song which no one else could or would have written in 1980, a gentle, folksy, nodding pastorale sung from the point of view of a grieving mother whose son has been killed abroad in an unspecified war.

Effective anti-war songs were written before and have been written since, of course, but Army Dreamers derives all its strength from its restraint - a method also employed by Elvis Costello on Shipbuilding.

The courtly, non-judgemental musical setting, and Kate's airy, pinning-out-the-washing vocal, somehow make her lyrics all the more powerful and unbearably poignant:
Our little Army boy
Is coming home from BFPO*
I've a bunch of purple flowers
To decorate a mammy's hero...
On listening to Army Dreamers, you realise that most anti-war songs tend to be written either from the viewpoint of a finger-pointing protester or a powerless conscript. Giving a bereft mother a voice was an inspired stroke which invests the song with overwhelming emotional impact; and the sweet dignity with which the mother conducts herself just serves to make the whole male business of war seem even more regrettably farcical.

*BFPO: British Forces Posted Overseas

3:27pm Friday 29th February 2008

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