Cloudbusting by Kate Bush
Dear readers, It hasn’t always been on my playlist. It has been a bit “out of ear, out of mind” over the years. It is now, though. According to Spotify, it was my third or fourth most listened to song in 2023. My mother would dance around the kitchen to it while preparing the Sunday roast, and I would sit at the kitchen table for mum to keep an eye on me, ensuring that I would, maybe, attempt to do my homework. I would hover around taking in the aromas of roast lamb, pork, beef or chicken with potatoes and veggies in the oven, but also in the hope mum would do my maths and business studies homework, because I didn’t have the spark or motivation for that nonsense, but I did for football, budgerigars, computer games and Oasis. Yes; regrettably, I was a lazy oik at school. English and PE were the subjects what I rolled out of bed for. Maths I hated, and it is still a weakness today. I miss crucial cognitive numerical problem-solving tools, mathematically dyslexic so to speak, meaning my calculator or Chat GPT to do the brain work, as it does for billions more humanoids these days. Robots are taking over. You’ve been warned. If my memory serves correct, the first time I heard the song was on a wintery afternoon. It was greyish and cold outside, and there was something on BBC Radio 4 with Kate Bush talking of her inspiration behind the song. I don’t remember if it was a Desert Island Discs episode, which I think usually aired on Sunday, but I remember mum being captivated by it and I was curious why. I can’t recall my age, but I guess I was still in junior school; anywhere between 7 and 11. But it was that afternoon I heard the song for the first time, and the looping orchestral rhythm of the “dum da da dum, da da dum, da da da da da dum…” which became a lifelong ear-worm that will happily echo in my mind until my death. The song comes and goes from my life, but it seems to return when I pass through a major life event. It certainly did so when my father passed away. The song certainly eased with the grieving process, as highlighted in one of my previous blog posts, A Game of Grief. There is something very harmonic about the song. It is rich and varied, using lush chord voicings and harmonic progressions that create depth and complexity. There are extended chords, which I researched are in major 7ths and suspended chords, adding colour and texture to the song’s palette. Bush uses strings and synthesisers and percussions, along with her voice, to give the song a melodic texture, something atmospheric. All these ingredients give Cloudbusting a strong emotional impact; it’s haunting. It is also storytelling, which I will come to shortly. The chorus and dramatic build-up convey a yearning, a connection, a transcendence, between the listener and the narrator. Kate Bush reminds me of David Bowie, a real musical artist, mixing elements of pop, rock and avant- garde genres, with inventive lyrics and innovative production techniques. She was 19-years-old when she burst onto the scene with Wuthering Heights in the late 1970s, and she has retained a certain esteem among the masses and the music industry. Cloudbusting was released in 1985, but it has a timeless quality. It’s relevant today and is an inspiration amongst contemporary artists, thanks to the unconventional and catchy rhythm. Only great artists can do that: produce music, novels or portraits that are relevant for many generations. Kate Bush’s music is just that: evergreen. One of her other songs, Running Up That Hill, returned to the public ears a couple of years ago thanks to the Netflix show, Stranger Things, becoming a hit with younger generations for similar reasons: its evergreen pull. When I first heard the song, I admit, it wasn’t the lyrics that caught my attention, which is odd as words and narratives often hook me more than the music itself. As stated, it was the looping tempo: a lifelong earworm that I often nod my head in rhythm to as it plays out in my mind while working or waiting in a supermarket queue. I guess I was too immature to grasp the lyrics at the time. They are based on Peter Reich’s memoir, A Book of Dreams, about his father Wilhelm Reich, evoking themes of imagination, longing and the power of human spirit. My sister bought me the book for Christmas in 2022, and I gobbled it up by New Year’s Eve. It is an emotive read with a kind of “us against the world” narrative that Bush cleverly discloses in her lyrics to her song. It also focuses on a cloudbusting machine invented by Wilhelm that produced cloud formations and rain to arid areas using orgone energy, something as new to me as it is to you. I enjoyed the book. As stated, I ate it up in a week. My mum and sister also gifted me with a print of the song which is currently in storage in Malvern as I sort my life out. I can’t go on without a bit more context of Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst known for his controversial theories and contributions to science. Initially associated with Sigmund Freud, Reich developed the concept of “orgone energy,” presenting it as a universal life force found in all living organisms. He founded orgonomy, a branch of psychotherapy focused on orgone energy’s role in emotional and physical well-being, and created orgone accumulators for therapeutic purposes. Despite initial prominence, Reich’s work faced widespread criticism for lacking empirical evidence, leading to legal troubles with the U.S. FDA, which ultimately resulted in his imprisonment and death in 1957, which his son focuses on in the memoir, as does Bush in her song. Back to the lyrics: it is storytelling. So colourful
The Game of Grief
Dear readers, As you can guess from the title, this post is an alternative type of a jolly festive read. I’m sprinkling it all with a bit of jest and dark humour, which is the language I love best. That’s my first disclaimer. The second is that I’m not a qualified counsellor or psychologist, but God help my poor patients if I would ever decide to become one: their spiral might forever descend if their lives were put into my hands. The third disclaimer is that this post has no objective to obtain sympathy or empathy of any sort. I don’t need it. I write through personal experience, logging the journey and memories of mourning in order to support others who have also suffered a loss of some sort, whether it be a death or separation from a loved it, or anything that gives a sense of mourning or disappointment. It is also in dedication to my father, Stephen Arthur Rogers, who passed away on 9th October 2022. As romantic as it sounds, and I know he’s rolling his cynical eyes at me right now while I write these very words, but I feel he’s pushed me to write this. Or in any case, he’s certainly inspired it. Over a year has passed. I haven’t written much publicly about my father other than expressions of grief on social media. I guess it might be that I’ve had too much to say or on my mind, and I didn’t have a blog or the correct medium to express it. I’m not in the business of drama dumping the world with my thoughts. Fuck no, I save that for my nearest and dearest. If we talk about the different stages of grief; by Jaysus, there are anywhere between 5 to 7 to a zillion steps to pass through depending on what and where you read it. On some level, I guess this post is my own way of coming to terms with it: the Acceptance stage. But what I write in the below paragraphs may contradict the last sentence. Because the process of grief is more complex than a step-by-step process. I knew a little something about the grieving process. Just before my father’s death, I was going through separation from my former partner. From that experience alone, I was going through tremendous loss, and as a way to find relief and emotionally and mentally prepare for the pending divorce, I read up on the grieving process to gain insight on what to expect and when. It’s not as though I was walking into it blindly; I’d heard of the 5 or 7 or however many stages there are of grief beforehand, but it all seemed simplistic and unrealistic. We all know, emotions are wretched to grasp, comprehend and control at the best of times. When a big life event comes along, it’s an emotional boxing match: blows all over the body, especially the head. The majority of the websites and self-help guides on grief have their disclaimers before launching into the “5 steps of horrendous mental suffering”, by stating that grieving is never linear, which is very good of them, but also wholly accurate. Grief isn’t linear whatsoever. But still, I felt it was lacking that je ne sais pas quoi. As mentioned above, my father passed away on 9th October. He battled a short but intense fight against lung cancer. I remember in the weeks after the initial diagnosis in early August, I was learning all these terms and what they meant, like CT scans and the use of different dyes and colouring. I learned this-or-that scan may impact if Dad could receive chemotherapy, or that the effects of this-or-that treatment may make dad more poorly for a day or two. There were different types of diagnosis which I never knew existed, and then there was the dreaded term nobody wants to hear about themselves or a loved one: palliative care – end of life. There were different types of nurses and hospital units and treatments flowing through the conversations, and consequences and ifs-and-buts if this-or-that happens: it confused me more, as well as being the worst dictionary exercise ever. My brother and sister were grand, talking me through everything in layman’s terms. They are professional doctors and have witnessed some of this in their day-to-day jobs. It couldn’t have been easy for them having to regurgitate the spiralling bad news and information from the doctors’ technical jargon into words that the rest of the family could comprehend. That comes with its own traumas. Something I will always be grateful to them for. This was all happening during a British autumn. I was not used to the wind and drizzle and greyness, being that these days I am very much a tropical animal, thriving on vitamin D and rays del sol. Still today, in Honduras, on the rare day when temperatures drop and there’s a little drizzle, it evokes something of a melancholic trauma of those final weeks. The dampness and rain and clouds and sitting in cafes at the Royal Worcestershire Hospital drinking shitty coffee waiting for shitty news; I fucking hate those memories with a passion. It still sits in my system rather uncomfortably. I remember the first pangs of grief hit me some weeks before my dad even passed. I sat down for a pint with my best mate Stuart Harbourne in a bar in Birmingham, and he kind of confirmed what I already knew, “Lung cancer: it’s one of the bad ones”. It causes a little sense of guilt in my low moments, that I somehow premeditated or manifested the worst-case scenario. What might have happened if I’d used the power of positive thinking? Would things have turned out differently? Silly, really, I know. Very irrational and absurd. The devil’s work, procrastinating such things. I’m able to rationalise it; don’t worry. After all, I’m not sure how positive-thinking medically prevents the spread of aggressive cancerous