When I first heard Kate Bush’s debut single “Wuthering Heights” I had no idea what she looked like and her screechy, witchy vocal gave me a mental picture of some batty old woman who spent too much time locked up at home with her cats and frightened the local children. But then this poster started appearing around London which just goes to show how wrong you can be. Very happily wrong in this case.

But even though she turned out to be young and smoking hot Kate still had a touch of the dotty old bat about her — the polite English term for this is “eccentric” — with her peculiar songs, outside-the-box individuality and penchant for funny costumes and interpretive dance. In his book “England Is Mine” Michael Bracewell described her as “pop’s equivalent of the mad girl in the attic…covering the territory of Angela Carter’s A Company of Wolves in the guise of a pre-Raphaelite raised on Jackie” (if I wrote a line that good I’d retire.) But what do you expect from someone who spend her childhood dressing up like this?

Judging by these photos Kate had a rather bohemian and free-spirited childhood, growing up on an old farmhouse with a piano-playing father, folk-dancing mother, musicians and poets for brothers and lots of costumes and make-believe — it sounds like something out of Dodie Smith’s “I Capture The Castle.” The sort of atmosphere that would produce a girl precocious enough to write and record something as amazing as this when she was only 16.

Download: The Man With The Child In His Eyes – Kate Bush (mp3)

I had a Kate Bush poster on my bedroom wall but it wasn’t because I was such a huge fan of her records (hint: she was wearing a leotard), though I loved a lot of her singles I had a hard time making it through a whole album and could only take her in small doses. She was like the sexy girl you meet at a college party who dazzles you with her passion for music, poetry, art, and theatre, but after a while her moody drama queen act, Ophelia complex, and habit of reciting Sylvia Plath poems out loud gets really annoying and you yearn for someone a bit less “interesting” — you only stayed with her as long as you did because the sex was amazing.

Still, you’ve got to love someone who mentions Gurdjieff in a pop song and writes one as beautifully elegiac about the old country as “Oh England My Lionheart”.

Download: Them Heavy People (live) – Kate Bush (mp3)
Download: Oh England My Lionheart (live) – Kate Bush (mp3)

Been a while since we’ve had a random Pauline Murray track so here’s something off Penetration’s much-maligned second album “Coming Up For Air” from 1979.

Download: Shout Above The Noise – Penetration (mp3)

Like every other group of old punk pensioners these days Penetration recently re-formed and have been touring, they’ve even recorded a couple of new songs (“Guilty” and “The Feeling”) which you can hear on their MySpace page. To be honest I don’t think the new songs are that brilliant and I’m usually highly dubious about bands trying the recreate the glory days but I must admit this live video of them doing “Don’t Dictate” is pretty great. Glad to see Pauline is still looking good after all these years too.

I recently came across these wonderful photos (lots more at the link) taken at the Riverside School in Thamesmead between 1976 and ’78. I don’t have many photos of myself from that era so it’s like discovering a lost window into my own past, the nostalgic glow coming off these is almost blinding.

It’s easy to develop a rosy and cozy, jumpers-for-goalposts view of your schooldays but there’s a reason most kids hate it when grown-ups tell them it’s the best years of their lives, when you’re actually there it seems a long way from heaven. I bet that behind the awkward smiles and nylon shirts in these photos are a few kids whose lives are being made miserable by the casual cruelty kids can inflict on one another, either verbally or physically. Along with a happy one who can’t wait for home time so he can go to the record shop and buy the new Jam single there’s another who’s dreading it because he knows some piggy-eyed thug of a bully will be waiting for them outside the school gates to knick their bus fare or do something worse.

Download: I Was A Pre-Pubescent – Jilted John (mp3)

The school I went to I went to had a bad reputation (the local legend was that all new kids had their head stuffed down the toilet, not true as it turned out) and, though I did OK, wasn’t exactly a temple to academic excellence. A lot of kids left at 16 to get jobs with the gas board or digging up roads for the Council and by the time I got to the Upper Sixth there were only two of us left taking A-Levels. We also had our fair share of “problem” boys given to outbursts of violence like beating up one of the Prefects so badly he ended up in the hospital or shooting someone in the playground with an air gun. Of course there were also the sadistic, ex-army PE teachers who took great delight in picking on the fat, the skinny, and the asthmatic — cross-country running in freezing rain isn’t much fun at the best of times without one of those bastards coming up and literally kicking you in the behind to make you run faster — and sneered at the note from your mother excusing you from games as a sign of your pathetic weakness.

Download: Baggy Trousers – Madness (mp3)

Don’t get me wrong, on balance I did like school, especially the Sixth Form where we didn’t have to wear uniforms and were allowed to smoke in the Common Room, and it was probably an idyllic sanctuary compared to some these days, at least nobody got murdered over their mobile phone. The only drugs we had at school were cigarettes and the illicit trade was in wank mags (my mate Gary’s Dad owned a newssagent and he’d come to school with a sports bag full of Penthouse and Men Only) which seems so innocent now. These days they’re probably smoking crack behind the bike sheds and watching hard-core porn on their video iPods.

There wasn’t any ceremony when I left in 1980, I just walked out of the gate after my last exam (A-Level English, I passed) and that was it, school was over. No fuss, no goodbyes, nothing official, out the door and I was gone. I can’t remember how I felt that day apart from sweet relief that my exams were over, you’d think it would have been some big emotional event but all I remember is that it was a sunny day — the first day of the rest of my life.

Download: If The Kids Are United – Sham 69 (mp3)

We never had any of these creatures at my school though. Girls, I believe they were called.

Download: More Songs About Chocolate and Girls – The Undertones (mp3)