Rush arrived this month—heavy metal, heavy manners. They didn't like us much—too welfare soft and idle; we didn't like them at all—too stupid, too rich. The shape, I guess, of some of the things to come: laissez-faire rock, the triumph of will.

What's happening here is an election campaign. Sometime soon—either October or next Spring—we're going to have a Nixon regime of our own. The Conservatives are in favor of law 'n' order and the family; they're against blacks, gays, hoodlums and lying around smoking dope. When she wins (she will, she will), Ms. Thatcher is gonna lead the move back to domesticity and hard work. Good news for small businessmen like Rush, bad news for PUicS'?nd hiPPies and me.

as year of the streets and

the Jubilee; British rock was suitably public and noisy. 1977 is going to mean retreat, digging in, curfews and heavy state forces patrolling the discos. The Summer of '79, as Tom Robinson already sings it, is going to be bleak, and record companies are getting some soothing sounds ready for us. Get ready for the romantic revival. Paul McCartney is a national institution now and Wings are the happy family (royalty is in bad odour currently, what with Princess Margaret having a thing with a failed pop star).

But the most unexpected success of the year is Kate Bush. Her single, "Wuthering Heights," and album, The Kick Inside, swamp the airwaves; her picture shines out from every London bus, every underground poster, every empty shop. "Wonderful," the ads say, "mysterious, brilliant, unique." She's got thick, dark hair, fuzzily photoed, with narrow eyes and a blank mouth. Not much like Poly Styrene or Ariana of the Slits, more like the heroine of a 1930's romantic thriller.

"Wuthering Heights" is an oddly faithful song of the film of the book. Kate is Cathy, wandering the moors, calling for Heathcliff; her voice swoops and spirals like a wuthering bird and wfyat starts out as an operatic mess ends up as a brilliantly conceived pop single—not a normal number 1 but a natural, and with all the advantages of surprise. Who is Kate Bush? Why is everybody buying her record? Why isn't she a punk?

It turns out, now the publicity machine has begun to roll, that Kate Bush is a teenage prodigy singer/ songwriter who was discovered three years ago by Dav6 Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Since then, she's been nurtured by EMI, Motown style. She's been pictured, packaged, imaged, sent to mime school, arranged, rehearsed, developed, dressed and briefed. Out of nowhere, in Kate's case, means a portfolio of songs and sights and sounds, pre-tested, guaranteed successful. Ms. Bush's chart conquests (she will, she will) are a triumph of the romantic will. Her voice, with its shifts from little girl shrill to young woman blue, and her songs, with their nervy equations of sex and the soul, are designed for lonely listening. Unlike most British pop women, Kate Bush hasn't been designed as cute or brassy or accessible or matey. Her talents are remote, fragmentary, dreams to sustain her house-bound listeners through the dark winters to come.

EMI (ever cautious) have also got something completely different—another strategy, another set of dreams. The Tom Robinson Band has emerged from the punk masses as the most public, the most political, the most militant against racism and fascism of all the new wave—Rush wouldn't like them at all. Musically, TRB aren't really punks at all, but an articulate middle class rock band (Tom Robinson was once, as a member of Cafe Society, a protege of Ray Davies). Their shows are as much dominated by Danny Kustow's traditionally flashy guitar as by Tom's voice.

But (a big but), Tom Robinson is gay and to be gay in rightwards-moving Britain isn't a matter of camping it up or acting cute, Elton John style, it's a matter of struggle, of rousing the dispirited. Hence, TRB's militant music —militant not just for gays, but for punks and blacks, for women, for fun-lovers generally. Hence, the phenomenon of regular boys and girls chanting, in halls all over Britain, that they're "glad to be gay." Tom Robinson lays down the battle lines even more clearly than the Clash. His audiences jeer the National Front, cheer Rock against Racism, refuse to get down; the TRB use music hall singalongs and pogo-punched solidarity to keep the sense of rock community going. And as the weeks go by and the blue meanies sense their days to come, Tom Robinson's shows (and the Clash's and Sham 69's and Steel Pulse's and X-Ray Spex') seem less like rock cliches, more like acts of bravery.

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So far, Tom Robinson's only recorded impact has been "2-4-6-8 Motorway," a superb chanting road song which didn't mean too much except that radio stations preferred it to "Glad To Be Gay" and "Right On Sisters." But the TRB have ordinary ambitions (only the message is new) and EMI are behind them (not to mention Pink Floyd's management team—that connection again) and now the album's due we can expect some of the Kate Bush treatment. I hope it's as successful. EMI may be able to cover all the bases but we can't and what we're going to need most in the next twelve months is not music to brood by, but music to take to the halls, the voting booths, the hustings.