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.    

  

Burial (John Wyndham)

"
By midsummer, and a cold midsummer it was, the town had become very quiet. The gangs had gone; only the obstinate individuals remained. They were, without doubt, quite numerous, but in twenty thousand streets they seemed sparse, and they were not yet desperate. It was possible to go about in relative safety again, though wise to carry a gun.

The water had risen further in the time than any of the estimates had supposed. The highest tides now reached the fifty-foot level. The flood-line was north of Hammersmith and included most of Kensington. It lay along the south side of Hyde Park, then to the south of Piccadilly, across Trafalgar Square, along the Strand and Fleet Street, and then ran north-east up the west side of the Lea Valley; of the City, only the high ground around St Paul's was still untouched. In the south it had pushed across Barnes, Battersea, Southwark, most of Deptford and the lower part of Greenwich.

One day we walked down to Trafalgar Square. The tide was in, and the water reached nearly to the top of the wall on the northern side, below the National Gallery. We leant on the balustrade, looking at the water washing around Landseer's lions, wondering what Nelson would think of the view his stature was getting now.

Close to our feet, the edge of the flood was fringed with scum and a fascinatingly varied collection of of flotsam. Further away, fountains, lamp-post, traffic-lights, and statues thrust up here and there. On the far side, and down as far as we could see of Whitehall, the surface was as smooth as a canal. A few trees still stood, and in them sparrows chattered. Starlings had not yet deserted St Martin's church, but the pigeons were gone, and many of their customary perches gulls stood instead. We surveyed the scene and listened to the slip slop of the water in silence for some minutes.
"

John Berger: Tumblr and Pinterest, Museums of Modern Art

 

Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room's inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 30