The back story to the creation of my 1980 Wuthering Heights Song Cycle is quite complicated and unlikely but I think it's worth mentioning.
In March 1977 my family purchased a small macadamia nut hobby farm at Kuranda on the tablelands behind the coastal city of Cairns North Queensland Australia where I was born to a Southern Ireland racial background mother and a Kalgoorlie Western Australia ex Suffolk England background father. I was unemployed at the time so agreed to give it a go alongside my retired father and Branwell Bronte like younger brother.
In early 1978, during one of my regular weekly discussions about the latest issue of the New Scientist Magazine with a good for a yarn neighbour, the conversation unexpectedly sidetracked into fiction and he insisted on telling me about a Rudyard Kipling short story he had just read called "Perchance To Dream" [1]
The plot, as I remember him telling me, was as follows: Man has reoccurring dream of living in a foreign country walking down a country lane when he meets a girl singing an unusual song. After a few years the reoccurring dream experience stops. Decades later the man finds himself in a foreign country and is surprised to discover he was walking in the same lane from his dream. He comes across a woman who looks like an older version of the girl in his earlier dreams She is singing the song from his dream. He nervously approaches her and she says when she was younger she had a reoccurring dream of someone who looked like him listening to her singing. They climb onto a white horse and ride away into the sunset.
I listened politely but without much interest. Too Mills and Boon and chick flick for me but it was repeated it the next time I visited and the next until I mentally registered the story sequence despite my objections to the waste of memory space.
Shortly afterwards while watching an episode of Countdown, the Australian Broadcasting equivalent of the British Top of the Pops show, I saw a video for newcomer Kate Bush's song “Wuthering Heights”. I thought her red dress dancing in what could have been a cow paddock [watch where you're stepping miss] was a bit ridiculous but something about the opening rift sounded familiar. I later searched my cassette tape archive and found a piano improvisation that I had recorded [c1973]. It ended in a tape sped up rift that, to me, sounded similar to the “Wuthering Heights”song intro.
In 1966 I'd started writing free verse poems after I experienced regular visual disturbance migraine headaches. Included in the thirteen 1970 poems (2) was “Wuthering Heights” written from the point of view of Heathcliff, the Earnshaw child who died early but not before warning his sister Catherine of the fatal consequences of getting involved with “an orphan as mad as Hess” “a travelling salesman [3] with a table tennis set and born under the sign of Taurus” [4]
The most intriguing thing about the situation was a loose idea floated by that suggested my 1970 poems appeared to be giving a closed heart cynical male response to the open hearted female lyrics and situations of Kate Bush's songs most of which were written when Kate Bush was about the age I was when I wrote my 1970 words. They also seemed to fill in many of the details that happened "off camera" in Bush's lyrics.
The alter ego idea has gently simmered over the years even though I knew there are many extra situations and images mentioned in my poems that are not in the Kate Bush songs but maybe a third person has written poems or recorded lyrics that are the bridge to both situations.
In October 1978 it was announced that Kate Bush was coming to Australia to promote her “Kick Inside” album. I didn't have the funds for a trip to Sydney or the will to go but scratching a persistent mental itch I eventually rang up EMI Sydney and told them my "coincidence" story. I was very surprised to actually get a hearing from their A&R man, Rob Walker.
I told Rob I could send him a copy of my 1970 poems to give to Kate Bush. He encouraged me to do so. Later I decided to include a personal photo and my far more light hearted 1974 verse collection. [5]
Rob said he would give Bush my poems and promised me a personal phone call from her when she came back from a brief New Zealand promotional visit. He asked me for my phone number and for some reason I gave him two. One was my current farmhouse telephone number the other was that of my living in Cairns mother.
Kate Bush of course passed on the decision of which number to ring. She hadn't time to waste on fan games. There was a second album to finish off and promote and a tour to organise. Rob later said she would write to me but that never happened totally understandable in the circumstances especially given the cryptic and thoroughly non-commercial content of my 1970 poems [if she read them!]
The following year I decided to go to Sydney for a holiday. While browsing around the city I came across a cluttered bookshop. I had a strong hunch there was a item of importance for me in there. Entering the shop I was confronted with shelves packed floor to ceiling. Where to start looking and for what title? Then my attention drifted to a long ladder leaning against one shelf. I thought there would be as good a place as anywhere to commence the search.
On the shelf where the ladder rested I noticed a small book with dull blue grey binding and no cover. The book was an anthology of Emily Bronte poems for young readers called "A Peculiar Music [6] compiled by Naomi Lewis. I opened the book on the page showing a poem called "Aye There It Is" and was struck by the simple but powerful words. I later went to the Sydney Library and read all the Emily Bronte poems held there. I found as I read I was mentally pasting the poems to various scenes of the "Wuthering Heights" novel. A song cycle perhaps?
But how to work out the music I 'heard” when I read those words? After sleeping on the question for a few nights I thought of a way. I realised a plain song approach would most likely work best in a mode reminiscent of the medieval German compositions of former Velvet Underground singer Nico [7] rather then Kate Bush's more contemporary style.
Around this time another brother [I have three] gave me a 1950's lp of J S Bach compositions transcribed for an orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy he found in a second hand shop near Walsh's Pyramid Gordonvale. What if Emily Bronte's father was J.S. Bach I then thought while memories of Christmas time visits to a former housemates isolated property on a windy windy moor land behind Lake Barrine a volcano crater lake gave me a suitable visual setting to day dream in. (8)
In between farm work duties It took me a couple of months to work out the music for a cluster of E B poems I thought had the strongest words, the most relevance to the Wuthering Heights story line and a general significance to the human experience. It was all falling into place relatively easy so I was certain the value of the project would soon get recognised and recorded by “real musicians” [9] and it could be the start of a composing career but that never happened.
So 40 years down the track my very rough demos, with hopefully the spirit of the initial creative impulse still detectable, are gradually being posted onto my You Tube channel and let's see if the cycle finally finds its intended audience. YK
Notes:
[1] Some decades later I discovered an anthology paperback called "Perchance To Dream" which contained the Rudyard Kipling short story that Peter described. The tale was actually called “The Brushwood Boy”.
[2] At the time “ocker was a slang term used to describe an Australian male with “insensitive” social behaviour attitudes. I probably chose that subject for my 1970 creative writing exercise after being impressed by Lou Reed's earthy lyrics on the first Velvet Underground and Nico album which I'd bought the year before.
[3] In real life my father was once, in the early years of his marriage to my mother, a vacuum cleaner travelling salesman so the image is not completely random.
[4] It was the end of the sixties man, we didn't fret if a poem make little logical sense. It just had to sound “interesting”. I've since come to suspect the stream of consciousness images thrown up by my mind were a lot more deliberate then I realised at the time.
[5] One poem in my 1974 file had a reference to “Peter Pan” which, as before, had its origins in a real life incident involving my father [his finding, during World War 2 military service in Egypt, of a fossilised starfish on the road to Damascus]. On Kate Bush's later released follow up LP “Lion Heart” there is a song called “In Search of Peter Pan” which quite likely had already been recorded by the time of her visit to Australia.
[6] Charlotte Bronte described her sister Emily's poems as having “a peculiar music” “that stirred the heart like a trumpet”.
[7] I had an strong liking for Nico's 'Desert Shore” album in the early 1970s to the extent that I once performed a basic instrumental version of her track “Mutterlein” at a Cairns Oddfellows Folk Club meeting after dragging a full size church harmonium into a small audience room for my one and only pre Internet exercise in “going public”.
(8) The Barrine property had a very similar landscape to that of the red dress video especially the tuft of trees. The photo that was passed on to Kate Bush was taken on a friend's property close by.
(9) I had five years private piano training starting at age 9. My teacher realised I was better at improvisation then formal work so she let me have my creative way during scheduled lessons. This annoyed my mother who grew up with a player piano that stuck rigidly to the given notes. I used both approaches with the W.H.S.C. material. A syllables to music poem code that demanded no divergence from the indicated tones with a few melodic necessary exceptions followed by an improvised summary theme using the opening bars of J. S. Bach's “Little Fugue in G Minor” as a leitmotif. <>
