15 September 2014

Thinking about that line in Simon Reynolds' Kate Bush piece about her not quite being cool...

That's how I remember it, although I'm roughly a year younger than KB's recording career so my impressions are from the late 80s(?)/early 90s. And therefore essentially without authority. But I remember that KB seemed to be Of The 80s in a way that made her popular apparently only with dweeby French language assistants. There was a point where a terrible UK punk-metal band covered Heathcliff, and it was definitely covered in the weeklies as a transgressive, cool-risking maneuver. Not Therapy?, someone even greyer and gristlier.

Theories – because KB was associated with/championed by Dave Gilmour, which post-Pistols had a similar dynamic to being someone your dad likes on Jools Holland? Because having been signed with a major label so young there was a sense of dues unpaid? That was held against Pixies I think, who signed a deal and hit the college radio playlists without having Got In The Van and done their time in the post-punk trenches like so many other bands had who knitted together the scene bookended by The Ramones at one end and Nirvana at the other. Otherwise, maybe just a snowball groupthink effect from some damning early screed tossed off on a speed comedown by someone at MM/NME.    

  

4 comments:

Phil Knight said...

Definitely the Gilmour link.

It's the same with "Music For Pleasure" by The Damned, which was castigated as a disaster despite the fact that it sounds exactly the same, with the same kind of songs, as their debut.

People just hated the idea that it was produced by Nick Mason.

Greyhoos said...

@ Phil, re: "Music For Pleasure": Agree about how the record sounded. But wondered years ago why it was the one Damned album that no one ever talked about. My guess was that the generically "new wavey" cover graphics put a lot of people off.

Phil Knight said...

Funny that you should say that, because for years I leafed over it in second hand records shops because I didn't realise it was a Damned album - I just thought it was by some wacky group that had been forgotten.

"Beggars Banquet" is another one - I thought the toilet on the cover meant it was a collection of out-takes, and not, actually, "Beggars Banquet".

-blessed holy socks, the non-perishable-zealot said...

God blessa youse -Fr. Sarducci, ol SNL