I’ll never forget how distraught the 17-year-old me felt when in 1992 my great hero of the time, Morrissey, draped himself in the union flag while playing a gig. How could the former Smiths frontman, who had stood up against Thatcher with such ferocious eloquence just a few years before, possibly think it was OK to flirt with what I saw as right-wing imagery?
If I remember rightly I stopped listening to his records in a pique of protest and bored anyone who would listen with over-the-top teenage outrage. I think I even wrote Morrissey a letter expressing my extreme disappointment in his “offensive” actions. All a bit mortifying now, of course. But at least I had the excuse of youth and inexperience.
I thought of this incident as outrage reached its peak over Kate Bush’s revelation that she is - wait for it - probably a Tory. Social media almost broke when news filtered through that the singer songwriter behind some of the most innovative and experimental music of the last 40 years, who is rarely seen in public and doesn’t give many interviews, was happy to talk about her admiration for Prime Minister Theresa May.
“I actually really like her [May] and think she’s wonderful,” the singer told a Canadian magazine. “I think it’s the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time. I will say it is great to have a woman in charge of the country. She is very sensible and I think that’s a good thing at this point in time.”
The existential cry that immediately sounded among the UK’s music and culture lovers, the majority of whom appear to be left-wing, was palpable, with many fans taking to Twitter and Facebook to express their extreme sense of sadness, loss and disappointment. “It’s like finding out that David Attenborough is a wife beater,” proclaimed one devastated tweeter. “When I saw Kate Bush trending I assumed the worse…first David bowie, then Leonard Cohen, now her. But it appears it’s worse – she’s a Tory.,” said another. “Kate Bush being a Tory is the final nail in 2016’s coffin.” Wow…unbelievable, as Kate no doubt said to herself in dismay, recalling her 1978 hit.
Talk about an over-reaction. As someone who has been a fan of Bush’s music for over 25 years, what surprised me about this whole affair wasn’t that a middle-aged, middle-class, woman who grew up and still lives in the English countryside might be a Tory, but that so many of her fans, most of whom will be middle-aged themselves, seemed to take it all so personally.
Such hysterical shrieking is a silly response on just about every level, of course, not least because Bush’s music is about as far from the mundanity of party politics as it is possible to get; she’s certainly no Billy Bragg. Instead, her art has always evoked more ethereal, other-wordly feelings that have the power to take you out of ordinary life. In Bush’s world, there’s no left and right wing.
But I suppose this last point is irrelevant and a bit silly, too. There should be no need to explain this away in terms of Bush’s music - why do we care how she or indeed any other musician might vote at all? Haven’t we moved on at all from the naivety of the 1960s, when the young thought music would change the world? Even by the 1980s, like our current wretched moment a time of extreme political division, when pop had matured enough to find a sophisticated political voice in bands such as The Specials, Pet Shop Boys and the aforementioned Smiths, the idealism was gone, replaced by a sense of alienation and bitterness. Such moments are rare and few musicians can pull off being simultaneously politically and musically exciting.
Music, the wordless patterns of notes that inexplicably cause our brains to react in a certain magical way, is in this sense surely the least political of all the arts. And in my mind it’s always the music rather than lyrics that should take precedence. That’s why no one should give two hoots what sort of political views the writer of any given piece holds.
Should housewives stop listening to Take That just because Gary Barlow supported David Cameron? Should orchestras stop performing Wagner because he was anti-semitic? Does the fact that Brian Eno writes rather worthy articles in support of Jeremy Corbyn mean we should stop taking him seriously as a musician? Of course not.
Social media, as always, has a lot to answer for here. We now appear to have reached the point where mature people who are probably perfectly reasonable in real life not only have a platform on which to vent childish and immature feelings of offence, but clearly believe it is their duty to do so.
If we’re not careful Twitter and Facebook will succeed in infantilising us to the point of no return. At that point perhaps not even Kate Bush’s beautiful, other-worldly music will have the power to comfort us.
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