When Kate Bush proved to me that songs can save us
A powerful track by the singer resonated for Jude Rogers at a time of crisis
Sometimes a song can carry a person’s grief for a few precious minutes, absorbing sadness in the weight of its notes, rhythms and silences. This happened to me very powerfully when I was a new mother, struggling after a difficult pregnancy and birth, when my grief for my late father had returned. I was a parent thinking of another parent who wasn’t there anymore.
Nostalgia radio stations like Absolute 80s, which were full of songs I had enjoyed during tough times in my life, soothed me. I would sing Yazz’s 1988 No 1 hit, The Only Way is Up – a song I had loved as a 10-year-old – to my baby in the kitchen, feeling every line resonate. “We’ve been broken down,” I sang. “Hold on, hold on.” A song from my past became a place of familiarity, almost as if it had its own powers of empathy.
Another song that alleviated my grief more profoundly came later, at my dream gig – Kate Bush’s first concert for 35 years, at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. I’d been asked to review it, so left my baby behind with my husband. Early on, Bush played two of my favourite songs of hers live for the first time – Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill. For a while, I had felt unable to immerse myself in these songs I knew so well – they had felt like they were from another world, and another version of me. But then a new track came along and upturned me completely.
She played Among Angels, a pianoand-vocal track from her 2011 album, 50 Words For Snow. Bush’s lyric was directed at someone in great need. “I might know what you mean when you say you fall apart,” she sang.
I cried buckets that night, and have revisited the song regularly since; it created a world in which other people knew how I felt and could give me comfort. When I hear it now, I think of my father as the angel Bush sang about, shimmering on the edges of my life, helping me along. Songs can provide ideas to console us, I have realised, and give us strength.
We all experience grief in our lives, and many of us will have found some support, however momentary, in a song. This is because 95 per cent of people experience musical stimuli as something that provides or produces pleasure; only five per cent have a condition called musical anhedonia, where brain structure from birth or subsequent injury impairs those neural connections.
A song can therefore appear in our saddest moments as a solid set of rungs to grip onto. This is partly because we usually hear songs on the radio or in the formats on which they were released – in other words, in the same form as when they were recorded. The song isn’t changing in the space of live performance. Its familiarity is reassuring. When we hear the same notes placed in the same way, we are unconsciously remembering all those previous instances in which that song gave us succour. A song carries our previous selves when it is repeated.
But if a new song has grabbed us when we are grieving, something different has happened. Out of the blue, a new moment of understanding has arrived.
Songs at funerals also often give us opportunities to remember people for whom we grieve. In more secular services, songs are often chosen to capture an element of the deceased’s personality, or a person can even choose a song themselves, if they are suitably prepared. In 2018, my friend Pat Long, a music journalist turned editor, died of a brain tumour at the age of 41. He had typed up his funeral wishes, including three songs, one of which was played as his memorial service came to a close.
The song was Pressure Drop, the 1970 reggae hit for Toots and the Maytals, lifted by a high-tuned crisp snare and a lean, sprightly bassline. As it played, we felt our limbs stir and our feet twitch. I talked to Pat’s wife – the author Kat Lister, who has herself written powerfully about grief – about it later. “A lot of the lyrics are heavy, but there’s a momentum and lightness there,” she said. “It was important to have that mood in the room on that day… and that all came from him.”
Many people contacted Lister about the song after the funeral, saying that it had lingered in their minds in the days that followed – and that it had continued to pick them up. I felt the same.
Listening to it alongside The Only Way is Up and Among Angels, it reminds me that songs are not just about soaking up loss. They are about savouring life.
Jude Rogers’s ‘The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives’ is out now. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk to buy for £16.99
95 per cent of people experience musical stimuli as something that provides pleasure