FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Deep Cuts
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Coffee Homeground
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THIS particular Kate Bush song…
was one of only a few that she wrote new for her second studio album, Lionheart. That was released in November 1978. The issue was, as I have written about a lot, is that EMI were so eager to get another album out following the success of The Kick Inside – released in February 1978 – that it gave very little time for Kate Bush to write new material. So busy promoting her debut, she was only really able to write new songs on the go. Penning what she could when she had a free moment. The other two songs that were new, Symphony in Blue and Fullhouse, are incredible. Symphony in Blue especially is a wonderful and beautiful song. There is something distinct about Full House with its sound of paranoia and fear. Maybe an insight into the mind of Kate Bush. Perhaps someone herself feeling stressed or like she had no space or freedom at that time.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush ‘Red Head'. This was an out-take from the back cover series of portraits that Gered Mankowitz shot for Lionheart in August 1978
It was definitely a sonic move away from songs on The Kick Inside. Even if most of Lionheart’s tracks were older numbers that were perhaps overlooked for The Kick Inside, what she wrote new for her second album was quite different in terms of style and subject. The final two tracks on Lionheart sort of deal with a sense of darkness and horror. Hammer Horror is dramatic and sweeping. That ends the album. It was the first single released from Lionheart. The penultimate track is Coffee Homeground. In terms of the composition, it is vastly different to anything Kate Bush had recorded to that point. Some of the most interesting lyrics she ever wrote. I would have loved to have seen this released as a single, as a really good video could have accompanied it. The long-running Kate Bush fanzine, HomeGround, took its name from that song. A high honour for a track that few people really know about. You never hear it played in radio.
If Fullhouse was, in Bush’s own words, relating to a lot of the emotions she was feeling at the time – including paranoia and anger -, then there is a continuation of that on Coffee Homeground. This is a track that Bush wrote whilst she was in the U.S. in 1978. Promoting The Kick Inside – though there were no live performances or T.V. spots -, it is quite exciting imagining Bush in the U.S. in general at that time. It must have been quite scary and lonely, though there is something romantic thinking about her writing a track in a private moment. The background of Coffee Homeground is intriguing. Bush wrote the song whilst in the U.S. in May 1978. Only a month later, she was in Japan for some promotion. It shows how she was being dragged from pillar to post in an intense time. A couple of months after The Kick Inside came out, she was in America. A nation that she had no intention of breaking or wanting big success in, there was a challenge getting The Kick Inside shifting units there. It did not do much at all. Even so, I guess it was expected any artist at the time would go to America. With some wonderful synthesiser work from Duncan Mackay, Coffee Homeground is one of the standouts from Lionheart. Wild, weird and woozy, this is what Kate Bush said about the inspiration behind the song:
“[‘Coffee Homeground’] was in fact inspired directly from a cab driver that I met who was in fact a bit nutty. And it’s just a song about someone who thinks they’re being poisoned by another person, they think that there’s Belladonna in their tea and that whenever they offer them something to eat, it’s got poisen in it. And it’s just a humorous aspect of paranoia really and we sort of done it in a Brechtian style, the old sort of German [vibe] to try and bring across the humour side of it.
LIONHEART PROMO CASSETTE, EMI CANADA, 1978”.
Bush addresses someone that might be lonely and, as a way of keeping people around, poisons them. A grim way of preserving people and keeping them trapped. Slipping poison into coffee and food, Bush, as the narrator, is wise to the plan. Despite it being loosely inspired by a cab driver in the U.S., it seems like another song that references her position and state at the time. After the anger and paranoia of Fullhouse, we have a song where someone is wary of dangers and traps. Maybe the sheer pressure and expectation on her at the time – she was still a teenager when she wrote Coffee Homeground – bled into the song. You can definitely read some of the lyrics as Bush having to refuse offers or dealing with those who don’t want the best for her. Some of the lyrics are among the most vivid and visually arresting that she ever created: “Offer me a chocolate/No thank you, spoil my diet, know your game!/But tell me just how come/They smell of bitter almonds/It’s a no-no to your coffee homeground/Pictures of Crippin/Lipstick-smeared/Torn wallpaper/Have the walls got ears here?/Well, you won’t get me with your Belladonna – in the coffee/And you won’t get me with your aresenic – in the pot of tea/And you won’t get me in a hole to rot – with your hemlock/On the rocks”.
I have seen Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground discussed a few times here and there but, by and large, it is a song overlooked. Some magazines have placed it fairly high in their rankings of Bush’s songs, though I feel many do that to put something more obscure in the pack. It would be nice if Coffee Homeground got some radio airplay once in a while. It is a wonderful song. Coffee Homeground has been immortalised through the decades-running fanzine. It was also one of the tracks performed during 1979’s The Tour of Life. Normally the second song of Act 3, at least many fans got to see this song come to life. I am interesting seeing how it was staged and what concept Bush went for when she brought it to the stage. There is an interesting discussion about Coffee Homeground on the Dreams of Orgonon website from 2019.
“Coffee Homeground” comes at the tail end of Lionheart, when the album’s slower and quieter tracks have all trailed off. As the album’s penultimate track, it provides Lionheart with a relatively bombastic and staunchly theatrical climax. For all that Lionheart explores stagefright and theatrics in depth, it’s a much quieter album than that description might suggest. There are few especially up-tempo songs on it, and Bush’s piano guides her backing musicians through her songs. “Coffee Homeground” almost sounds out of place on the same album which has “Oh England My Lionheart” and “In the Warm Room,” with Bush’s camp attempt at a German accent and Kurt Weillian orchestral scoring. It’s by the grace of Lionheart’s strong thread of camp that “Coffee Homeground” is allowed to work, exploding into full blown theatrics at the end of an album which previously treated them as something more to be discussed than outright embraced.
As we’ve discussed at length in this blog, Kate Bush is a consistent purveyor of camp. Her mime training, her focus on character in her songwriting, and a constant awareness of form are camp attributes of her songs thus far. When we get to the Tour of Life, we’ll see just how far she takes that. Bush’s camp instincts to come a head in “Coffee Homeground,” is one of her most unreservedly theatrical songs. It’s hard to overstate just how theatrical this song is. Bush as a singer is always expressionist; in “Homeground” she takes this camp tendency to its logical conclusion by doing a funny accent. Her play at a German accent is willfully funny, one of the silliest things on Lionheart. Bush was often mocked for her gurning and high-pitched vocals (by such comedians as Faith Brown and Pamela Stephenson), and “Homeground” suggests she’s in on the joke to some extent, or least just as capable of having fun with it. On the track she engages in Sprechgesang, a kind of singing in which a singer rapidly moves back and forth between speaking and singing. This a natural move for Bush, who’s done this sort of thing before — moving back and forth between speech and song is a stylistic norm for her. But it’s worth investigating just what brings her to it this time around.
Bush’s use of Sprechgesang, her mimed German accent, and an unusually playful orchestra make up a hat tip to the early 20th century German theater team of playwright Bertolt Brecht, composer Kurt Weill, and singer Lotte Lenya. This collective is one of the most influential in 20th century theater, and we could get a whole book out of talking about any one of them. Let’s start with Brecht, as his writing is useful for discussing Bush’s storytelling in “Homecoming.” Brecht’s great contribution to dramatic theory is “Epic Theater,” which, like glam rock, revels in its status as artifice and production. Jack Graham has written about Epic Theater as applied to Doctor Who before, so for a more thorough take on the subject you should read his post. Suffice it to say here that “producedness,” as Jack puts it, is a key aspect of both glam rock and Epic Theater. Both are conscious of form and actively embrace it, taking no care to hide the fact of their creation, as opposed to more realist modes of theater. The two forms are thus resultingly compatible on some levels.
Yet there’s an element of Epic Theater which Bush neglects altogether: its strident anti-capitalism. Brecht was a Marxist who used the theater to shatter an audience’s preconceptions of how a capitalist society works. Bush has never been very interested in subverting the established social order. Even when she’s an actively subversive songwriter, she’s still essentially being one in the position of a well-to-do middle-class heterosexual white woman. This lack of political intent makes “Coffee Homeground” feel like it’s missing a key ingredient (and I’m not talking about hemlock). It’s not clear why this song has to be a Brechtian homage — it makes the song more striking, but it’s not clear what Bush is trying to say.
Resultingly, Bush’s engagement with Epic Theater is a purely audible one. “Homeground” owes more to Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya than it does to Brecht, as it’s their sound Bush pillages. Bush’s trill becomes a half-spoken warble as she strives to sound like Lenya for a track. It’s not a bad impression — sure, it sounds nothing like Lenya’s voice, but Bush doesn’t do the worst job of imitating her speech patterns. Musically, the strongest resemblance to Brecht and Weill’s work here is the morbid subject matter applied to carnivalesque scoring. The melody contains huge leaps and never sounds quite the same, as the intro and bridge repeat essentially the same phrase in a different key every time they appear. There are little discordant details such as the use of the non existent #VII chord of B flat (A), which doesn’t appear in B flat major or B flat minor. The pre-chorus will make a play at being in A before transforming into some mode of B (possibly mixolydian, or anything with a flattened seventh). Even if “Homeground” lacks conceptual clarity, it’s far from banal.
The decrepit house of “Homeground” is as much a stage for the song itself as it is for Bush. In a period where she’s torn between the obligations of touring and her desire to give her songs the time they need, “Coffee Homeground” is the sort of song Kate Bush is bound to produce. Her shortcomings and her ambition clash violently, and the result is as fascinating and vexed as anything she’s ever made. This has been a challenging period for Bush, and as we’ll see in the next two weeks, it’s about to climax.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Recorded July-September 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Nice. Released as B-side of “Hammer Horror” on 27 October 1978 and on Lionheart on 12 November 1978. Performed live on Tour of Life in 1979. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano. Stuart Elliott — drums, percussion. Ian Bairnson — rhythm guitar. Duncan Mackay — synthesizer. David Paton — bass”.
A magnificent and hugely interesting song from Kate Bush, it was an early – if masked and fictional – insight into her mindset in 1978. A song that different from themes of love and romance. This was Kate Bush taking us somewhere unusual and dark. One could say she did that with songs like Wuthering Heights. Coffee Homeground is a different beast altogether. It is a deep cut that warrants new love and some overdue exposure. The penultimate track from one of her most underrated albums, it is a gem from Lionheart. If you have not heard the wonderful Coffee Homeground, then do go and…
CHECK it out.