Waiting for Kate Bush
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1.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
When Kate Bush came out of nowhere in 1978 with her jaw-droppingly eccentric debut single 'Wuthering Heights', screeching like a banshee, flapping her arms as though trying to take wing, pulling alarming faces, people either adored or loathed her. One of the former was an American underwear model, Lesley Herskovits, who, in spite of his remarkable good looks, reserved his loathing for himself. By the time Kate had taken to keeping her fans waiting literally ages between albums, he'd found himself a boarding house near Kate's birthplace that accommodated only fervent Kate fans. Only his disinclination to miss her eighth album, after waiting more than a decade for it, kept him from leaping off a multi-storey tower block. In Waiting for Kate Bush - an unusual hybrid of satirical novel and music biography - the reader will not only laugh aloud at Herskovits' attempt to make sense of his life in an alien culture, but also learn in detail what Kate Bush - known alternately as "the barmiest bird in pop", "the Pre-Raphaelite nymph with Minnie Mouse's soprano" and "the greatest artist of the last 30 years" - has been up to in the silent decade-plus since the release of her last and best album.
Customer Reviews
Truly vile and poorly written
With a main storyline about a pathetic man who has delusions of grander (I didn't spell that wrong...he's got a terrible body image and thinks he's obese), this book has barely anything to do with Kate Bush at all. In fact, the passages about Kate feel like they've been patched together -- sometimes incorrectly -- from Wikipedia and the like. The only thing that the two parts of the book have in common is the main character's "love" of her work. This love is clearly not shared by the author of the book, who not only gets many of his facts wrong, but also skewers her fans maliciously. In his view, all fans of Kate Bush are middle-aged fat persons (or persons who think they're fat) who have no lives at all (or want to take their lives through suicide).
It's a charming trick, isn't it? The luring in of a famous person's devotees just to skewer them with a poorly written send-up? If you want a better Kate Bush book, try "Under The Ivy." And if you want better fiction, well then try anything else. Anything else at all.