Maximum conviction
It felt unlike anything else that had come before, a cultural phenomenon sui generis, arriving as a fully-formed, utterly coherent, wholly original artistic vision. The ethereal, swooping voice sounded almost other-worldly. Inspired by Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, the song was sung from the perspective of the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, pleading at Heathcliff's window to be allowed in. Kate Bush hadn’t even read the novel, she’d just walked into the room and caught the end of a TV serialisation. "I just managed to catch the very last few minutes where there was a hand coming through the window and blood everywhere and glass.” she recalled later. “And I just didn't know what was going on and someone explained the story." She became the first woman to reach number one in the UK with a self-written song, “the first star to embody twenty-first century pop” as Anne Powers puts in, “in all its genre-defying, techforward, theatrical, profoundly feminine glory”.
The rest of course, is history. The Kick Inside (1978), Lionheart (1978), Never for Ever (1980), The Dreaming (1982), Hounds of Love (1985), The Sensual World (1989), The Red Shoes (1993), Aerial (2005), Director's Cut (2011), 50 Words for Snow (2011)… We know the indelible mark she left on music, and on our hearts, even if we weren’t actually alive at the time of its first arrival. But history always appears inevitable only because we know the outcome and what actually happened.
Because there was also Pink Floyd's David Gilmour who listened when family friend Ricky Hopper played Bush’s demo tape for him. Gilmour later recalled, "I was intrigued by what I heard. It was peculiar and unlike anything else around. Her voice was very different, and her songs were very different.” Gilmour helped her cut her first professional demo and then lobbied EMI to sign her.
There were also people like Terry Slater, who was the manager of EMI's pop division and Bob Mercer, who was EMI's head of A&R. They were instrumental in EMI committing in developing Bush’s artistry for two full years before releasing any music. Bob Mercer explained the unusual decision: "We recognized that Kate was an exceptional talent who needed time to mature. This wasn't about creating a pop star; it was about nurturing an artist who could redefine what popular music could be.” So EMI also gave Bush the time and space (and money) to continue her education while developing her craft. "We wanted her to have time to grow not just as a musician, but as a person. The usual approach would have been to rush out a single, but everyone agreed that would have been a mistake with Kate.”
There was also the mime artist, dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp, with whom Bush starting working in 1978. Kemp had already enjoyed a successful collaboration with David Bowie, staging the Ziggy Stardust concerts at the Rainbow, in Finsbury Park. "Lindsay didn't just teach dance," Bush later recalled, ”He taught me how to express the music through my body. He showed me that performance isn't just about the voice - it’s about becoming the song”.
And so inspired, guided, and encouraged by Kemp, Kate Bush learned to actually inhabit the personalities in her songs. As she explained in an interview: “Lindsay taught me that every song is a little theater piece. He helped me understand how to become the characters in my songs, how to live inside the stories I was telling.” All of that was poured into and is so vividly, weirdly, authentically, and unapologetically evident in the music video that accompanied the release of ‘Wuthering Heights’ as her first single, and in the artistic career that followed. As Bush put it later "Lindsay showed me that what others might see as eccentric could be my greatest strength. He encouraged me to push further into my natural inclinations rather than suppress them.”
Kate Bush had talent, artistic vision, and determination aplenty. We should remember that for all their belief in Bush’s talent, the folk at EMI didn’t believe that a single inspired by a novel written in 1847 would be a sure-hit. But Bush was adamant that ‘Wuthering Heights’ should be her debut and EMI eventually relented. Writing in The New Yorker Margaret Talbot put it beautifully:
“Female pop geniuses who exercise their gifts in rampant, restless fashion over decades, writing, performing, and producing their own work, are as rare as black opals. Shape-shifting brilliance and an airy indifference to what’s expected of you are not the music industry’s favorite assets in any performer, but they are probably easier to accept in a man than in a woman. And such a musician, even today, is subject to the same pressures that have always hindered women’s artistic expression. Like the thwarted writers whom Virginia Woolf described in A Room of One’s Own, the female pop original is “strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that” - by the refusal to please and accommodate that only a deep belief in one’s own gift can counteract. “What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society,” Woolf writes, “to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.”
But it takes nothing away from her indisputable talent to also observe that Bush was lucky to have encountered people who rather than try and commodify and shave the edges off her art and persona in the name of a quick win, committed to her for the long term, invested in her development both as a human being and as an artist, and encouraged her to fully embrace all the glorious eccentricities and sensibilities that made her so utterly unique.
Sometimes we already know (even if that truth is acknowledged only tacitly) who we are, and just need or want somebody to encourage us to manifest that as fully as possible, with maximum, uncompromised conviction.
“To hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.” Virginia Woolfe’s words find echoes in the famous words of Dan Wieden when he said “Nike didn’t discover the power of advertising, Nike discovered the power of their own voice.” Of course it’s fair to say that in recent years Nike had not held fast and had lost that sense of self. 2024 was arguably Nike’s annuus horrablis. Sales had declined year over year for the last three quarters, across all geographies. After the company’s miserable June earnings call, the share price fell 20% in a one day, torching some $28 billion in shareholder value, and by the end of the year, Nike stock was down almost 60% from its November 2021 high. Nico Harrison, general manager of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and Nike veteran who had led its North America basketball division, commented on how the business had lost sight of itself: “I know athletes who feel Nike’s become transactional. Whereas back in my day, we weren’t perfect, but if you were in Nike basketball, you were part of the Nike family, and that meant something. And when everything becomes transactional, it no longer means anything.” There’s nothing like a lack of self-belief to corrode not just one’s one ability to operate effectively, but also one’s relationships.
In December 2024 on his first earnings call as the newly-installed CEO, Elliott Hill was clear that the Nike business had lost its way and needed to remember who it was: “We lost our obsession with sport. Moving forward, we will lead with sport and put the athlete at the center of every decision… I also see that we've shifted investments away from creating demand for our brand tocapturing the brand demand through performance marketing for our digital business. We will reinvest in our brands to create stories that inspire and emotionally connect with our consumers during important sports moments and critical product launches… With sport as our North Star, we will reenergize our culture and identity. We believe we have one of the strongest mission statements of any one and that is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. To me, inviting 8 billion athletes into sport is a pretty powerful purpose.”
Far, far too many books, posts, articles, think-pieces, though-leadership attempts, and presentations have been written on the art of building and nurturing valuable and valued brands. And yet none of that advice - not a single word of it - comes even close to the clarity, challenge, and utility of Dolly Parton’s words when she said “Find out who you are, and do it on purpose”.
The fact of the matter is whether as a human being, business, or brand, conviction born of self-knowldege is the thing that gets us through uncertainty, adversity, and turbulence. It is the root of agency, because it clarifies choices and decisions. Being deliberate and decisive, having real intention and doing things on purpose is impossible without self-knowledge, self-belief, self-respect and the resultant conviction. Without it, we’re just a victim of circumstances, responding and adapting to events as they happen, to bad advice, or to other people’s opinions, agendas, and actions without ever asking whether this is valuable, healthy, sustainable, desirable, meaningful for us.
There’s a truly excruciatingly tragic scene in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Morgan Spurlock's advertisement-within-a-movie-within-an-advertisement about product placement and marketing in moviesIn the scene he asks the Ban deodorant client team "What are the words you would use to describe Ban? Ban is…’blank'?" Time ticks by, the silence becoming ever louder and more akward, the executives sitting utterly flummoxed, unable to articulate their brand. Let’s not be like that.
Parents, friends, coaches, teammates, therapists, lovers, husbands, wives, partners, accomplices, marketing leaders, business owners… and yes, strategists, we must cultivate, encourage, inspire, and create the conditions for maxiumum conviction. Because no good ever came from a lack of self-knowledge, self-belief, or self-respect. From a lack of conviction. Rick Rubin has talked about how he doesn’t see sees his role as being about imposing his ideas, but simply helping people achieve the best version of themselves and their art. “I’ll spend time with an artist and listen very carefully to what they tell me and get them to talk about their true goals, their highest, highest goals." he says. "We’ll go back to the heart of why they started doing what they are doing in the first place.” Let’s do more of that.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. Every human, every business, and every brand has a superpower within them. Dolly Parton gives us all the wisdom and direction we’ll ever need. “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” Because, to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, with feet in our shoes, brains in our head, and conviction in our heart, oh, the places we’ll go.
Looking to (re)discover who you really are and what drives your organisation or business?
Does your brand need help (re)discovering its conviction?
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