Coffee Homeground
Only part of the essay again. Sorry, everyone. I've been frantically jobhunting and struggling with mental health, so writing's become a lot more difficult lately. Glad to be back on Orgonon though. And excited we're almost done with the second chapter of the blog too - after this it's just Wow and the Tour of Life. Should be a fun time.
Coffee Homeground
Tour of Life
“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. But it’s worth investigating just what brings her to it this time around.