Delius (Song of Summer) (Patreon)

 Delius (Song of Summer) Dr. Hook Russell Harty

Segueing from “Babooshka” into its following track without a fade, Never for Ever continues its exegesis of British storytelling with “Delius (Song of Summer).” A sparse track whose runtime spans a mere 2 minutes and 51 seconds, “Delius” homages the English composer Frederick Delius with taciturn suggestions and discordant fragments of sound. Built around the conga-esque rhythm track of a Roland drum machine and animated by Paddy Bush’s shimmering sitar, “Delius” is a spectral track with lyrics embodied by snatches of phrasing, many of which are just Kate Bush singing Delius’ name. With its strident off-ness, embellished by such quirks as the outrageous rhyming of “syphilis” with “genius,” as well as the peaceful coexistence of a drum machine and sitar, “Delius” is an anomaly of Bush’s early career while setting a precedent for Bush to create works like “Watching You Without Me” (to which its rhythm track bears similitude) or A Sky of Honey.

Built on a verse that primarily shifts between the I and IV chords of B (B major 7th and E), “Delius” is melodically simple, working in rigid parameters to homage its subject. Providing an understated biographical statement of the composer while not actually disclaiming any of his life’s events, it communicates Delius’ legacy with both parsimony and a surprising amount of depth. To explain what Bush doesn’t, Frederick Theodore Albert Delius began his career as a full-time composer in 1896’s Paris, channeling the influence of black music (which he discovered while failing to manage a Florida orange plantation) and European composers such as Wagner and Grieg into his own orchestral pieces. By the 1890s, he had become popular in Imperial Germany due to the promotional efforts of German conductors. It took longer for Delius’ music to take off in his native Britain, but eventually it gained enough popular heft for London to hold a six-day Delius festival in the late 1920s. By that point, Delius was a shell of his formerly productive self — years before, he had contracted tertiary syphilis from extramarital affairs he’d conducted in Paris, to the natural devastation of his somewhat bafflingly loyal wife, Jelka. In the final stage of his life, tended by Jelka, who gave up a promising art career to be his caretaker, Delius was blind and paralyzed, unable to compose on his own. Yet even with his devastating syphilis, he remained creative. From 1928 to 1934, Delius was assisted in his compositional efforts by a fellow Yorkshireman, a musician named Eric Fenby. For the duration of that time, Fenby served as Delius’ amanuensis, assisting him in the composition of some of his better known pieces, such as the tone poem A Song of Summer, one of the more useful pieces for our purposes. 

“Delius (Song of Summer)” contains flashes of that life. “Oh, he’s a moody old man,” muses Bush, referring to Delius’ volatile behavior as reported by Fenby, then referencing Delius’ work by adding “song of summer in his hand.” The song plays out like a duet between Fenby and Delius — Fenby’s reserved nature and devout Catholicism often led to the young man becoming overwhelmed by his employer’s secularism and cantankerousness (Paddy Bush is heard gruffly saying “ta-ta-ta” and “in B, Fenby!”, quotes from Ken Russell’s film Song of Summer). The chorus, a sequence of Latin or Latin-ish phrases, sounds like a despairing yet awed prayer of elegy by Fenby: “Delius/Delius amat” (Bush continues to fail at foreign languages by attaching the third-person present “amat” to “Delius), and the genuinely gut-busting rhyme of “syphilis/deus/genius,” the latter of which she pronounces in Latin. “Delius” is neither hagiographical nor harshly critical of its song — it simply evokes his ethos and how the people in his orbit perceived him.

Or at the very least, it perceives Delius according to filmmaker Ken Russell’s treatment of him. “Delius” is heavily indebted to Russell’s 1968 BBC film Song of Summer, an adaptation of Eric Fenby’s memoir Delius As I Knew Him. The film is told through the perspective of Fenby (a young Christopher Gable, who Doctor Who fans might recognize), who initially approaches Delius as an admirer and quickly becomes a distant and subordinate collaborator to him. The Delius of the movie (Max Adrian, and yes Song of Summer doubles as a trivia game for Doctor Who fans) is not a legend nor a booming celebrity, but a foul-tempered geriatric shell of his former self, confined by his illness and domineering personality. This could easily turn into a cynical story about how young creatives should never meet their heroes, but Song of Summer is smarter than that. While it doesn’t understate the fact that Delius was plainly an asshole, he has dimensions beyond that. There are some gorgeous bits in the movie where Delius becomes fully animated by the power of music and creation, and Fenby, while still alienated from his hero, is equally drawn in. Russell depicts two men whose struggles are both reconciled and exacerbated by the creative process. The script is imbued with psychological realness, which is granted to every character — Jelka Delius finally gets justice in an astonishing scene where she breaks down over her husband’s infidelity and cruelty. As Ken Russell’s work often is, Song of Summer dishes out ambivalence and clarity in equal measures. Of the films Kate Bush has touched to date, this may be the best.

And “Delius (Song of Summer)” is shockingly faithful to Ken Russell’s Song of Summer. Imparting none of the movie’s plot while making it clearly exactly who Delius was is quite a feat. To an extent it’s a matter of Bush choosing the right words to evoke Delius’ life, but she weds her recent musical style to a keen understanding of Delius’ work. Delius’ music boasts his passion for Wagnerian grandioseness: it is huge, sentimental, and (pardon the word) “Epic,” often fixating on landscapes and seasons and elevating them into the stratosphere. While composing Song of Summer, Delius famously and instructed Fenby to imagine the composition in bombastic terms (later filmed faithfully by Ken Russell):

“I want you to imagine we are sitting on the cliffs of heather and looking out over the sea. The sustained chords in the high strings suggest the clear sky and stillness and calm of the scene… You must remember that figure that comes in the violins when the music becomes more animated. I’m introducing it there to suggest the gentle rise and fall of the waves. The flutes suggest a seagull gliding by.”

The words of a creator who knew exactly how he wanted his work to sound, to be sure. And it’s not too far from the ideas embodied by Bush’s “Delius” — each instrument carries out a specific duty. The drum machine, piano, and sitar suggest an ethereal place where echoes of Delius and Fenby happen. Bush has simply filled out a space that was molded by the duo, as well as Ken Russell. Her love for Delius’ a-cappella songs “To be sung of a summer night on the water” makes its way into the track, and not just through Bush’s direct mention of its title in the second verse. In a both literal yet starkly surprising move, her music video for the song becomes the default visual for the song. It depicts Bush surrounded by trees and water and clad in a swan dress (and, like, I’m not going to say that Bush is directly responsible for Björk’s aesthetic because anybody who makes such a claim deserves to be shot, but there’s frankly no way Björk wasn’t aware of this video). There’s even a stand-in representation of Delius, a man in a wheelchair (a la Max Adrian in Song of Summer) whose face is obscured by a huge cutout of a sun (really). It’s a strange choice that balances the video out enough to make its more literal tendencies work while also serving as the second best cinematic representation of Watership Down’s solar deity Frith. If certain images come to mind for this song, they’re going to be Swan Girl and Sun Man. 

While “Delius” is far from Bush’s most complex work, its adeptness at both ethereality and silliness is refreshing and surprising. Over the course of the next few posts, we’re going to take a look at some dark songs, so it’s healthy to have some parsimonious fun in the meantime. This song is neither a throwaway nor a landmark in Bush’s career. It’s somewhere in between, as the best ideas often are: it makes room for the future while tarrying in the right moment in its timeline.