“I CAN remember saying to Kate, ‘You’re going to be so famous you’re not going to be able to walk down the street,’” says Jon Kelly. “I said that to her after the first week of recording, though she wouldn’t have believed it.”
It was the kind of premonition guaranteed to give her nightmares. It was also true. The Kick Inside was recorded in AIR studios over a period of six very happy weeks in July and August 1977, with Andrew Powell producing and Kelly, the house engineer, as his right hand man. From the very start, everything seemed to click into place. “It was a fantastically creative atmosphere, we cut three or four tracks in the first day,” says Powell. “I remember we started off with ‘Moving’ and that got done in about two hours or less, and I thought, ‘Hmm, this is good!’ I think we did ‘Kite’ next, to mix up the fast and slow tracks. I remember … Jon Kelly said he came out of that first day and thought, ‘That’s it, I’ve peaked, it can never get any better than this!’ It was that kind of feeling.”
Indeed it was. “It was fabulous,” says Kelly. “It was what I had gone into the business to do, to have those moments. They are few and far between. I remember her sitting at the piano singing those songs and it was just mesmerising. You could have put the mike anywhere in the room and recorded it on anything. It was an absolute joy, there was nothing to fix.”
The musicians were a bespoke quartet assembled by Powell, pairing up two halves of two successful bands: David Paton on bass and Ian Bairnson on guitar, from Scottish group Pilot; and Stuart Elliott on drums and Duncan MacKay on keyboards, from Cockney Rebel. Powell had worked with both bands as an arranger and was aware that these players were far from the weary, clock-watching session musicians of rock lore. They had both had number one singles in 1975 with, respectively, ‘January’ and ‘(Come Up And See Me) Make Me Smile’, and were empathetic to a young songwriter with unique sensibilities. “I had no say, so I was very lucky really to be given such good musicians to start with,” she said. “And they were lovely, ’cause they were all very concerned about what I thought of the treatment of each of the songs. And if I was unhappy with anything, they were more than willing to re-do their parts. So they were very concerned about what I thought, which was very nice. And they were really nice guys, eager to know what the songs were about and all that sort of thing.”1
It was the first of many times that the four would come together as a session band, and it proved an instantly fruitful blend. So much so that Bush worked with them all again – collectively and separately – several times over the coming years, and in Elliott she found a drummer who has provided her music with its polyrhythmic pulse all the way through to Aerial. “I knew Stuart Elliott would work well with Kate, he had a light touch,” says Powell. “He’s someone who really listens. He’d shout ‘Stop!’ in the middle of a take and say, ‘Can’t you hear what she’s singing? She’s singing this and we’re all bashing away.’ That’s what you want, someone who is really locking in and listening. He’s a very sensitive musician.”
The musicians hadn’t heard any of Bush’s music prior to the session, and the fact that they came in cold made their subsequent reaction all the more emphatic. Paton recalls Powell had told him that her songs were “a bit wild, a bit wacky even,” but he wanted them to enter the studio without any firm preconceptions. Just as David Gilmour had done back in 1973, the producer said to Bush on the first day of recording, ‘Just play them the first song.’ It was ‘Moving’.
“She sat down at the piano, said, ‘It goes like this,’ and just played,” recalls David Paton. “We were all gathered around the piano with our jaws dropped, because it was a stunning performance. Faultless, absolutely faultless, and she could do that time and time again. Every song she introduced was just faultless. I’d worked with a lot of musicians in the past and solo artists and it’s not very often you get that wow factor, [but] she had that as soon as she played the first few notes. Even her piano playing was so accomplished. I knew right away. I think we all did.”
Most of the group performances on the album were cut this way – live, with overdubs added later. Bush would play a song at the piano and the band would “wrap ourselves around her, looking for ways to embellish it or give it direction,” says Ian Bairnson. Some direct stylistic touches – like the light reggae rhythm on ‘Kite’ – tended to evolve as the musicians bedded in the song. Others, like the half-tempo breakdown towards the end of ‘James And The Cold Gun’, were remnants of the KT Bush Band’s pub arrangements.
Andrew Powell was very much the senior partner in the relationship, although early on there was a need for some gentle recalibrating of the producer-artist dynamic. Powell “at first treated me like a session musician,”2 said Bush, but “eventually gave me an incredible amount of freedom. I was lucky to be able to express myself as much as I did, especially with this being a debut album. Andrew was really into working together, rather than pushing everyone around.”3 Morris Pert, the eccentric Scottish musician brought in to add percussive touches such as the delightful Boo Bams (how could Bush have possibly resisted such an instrument? They are, a little disappointingly, merely tuned bongo drums) on ‘Room For The Life’, recalls that there was a general settling in period while everyone – including Powell, who of course had worked with Bush in 1975 – readjusted their expectations in light of the evidence in front of their eyes. “Even Andrew at the beginning was a bit flummoxed as to what direction she should be going in,” says Pert. “He let her take over gradually, because he was just a little bit flummoxed. It would have been criminal to bring in a producer who said, ‘Don’t do this, do it like that’. That would have been a nightmare, and Kate would have collapsed in a heap.”
EMI left Powell to get on with things. He wasn’t even given a budget, another example of the record company’s largesse and faith in its debutante. Bob Mercer visited the studio only once, and on that occasion he telephoned ahead to say, ‘Do you mind if Ido? I don’t want to disturb anything.’ Such a careful, hands-off approach was astute – anything else was likely to have made Bush self-conscious and even resentful – but they were keeping a discreetly close eye on the proceedings all the same. Brian Southall recalls dropping into AIR to have “long conversations with Andrew.” Members of her family also frequently popped in.
Generally Powell was sympathetic to both her sensitivity and her music, allowing the songs to grow and the arrangements to evolve. His presence was nonetheless a powerful one. He was, says Kelly, a “dominant producer”. He wrote parts for the rhythm section, played a variety of instruments, and generally had strong ideas about how the album should proceed. Bush may later have concluded that her debut album reflected – perhaps inevitably – at least as much of Powell’s artistic vision as her own, but whatever misgivings she had (and it later transpired that she was unhappy with much of The Kick Inside, but wasn’t yet able to do very much about it) were kept to herself, stored away for future experience. She also recognised, as did everyone else in the room, that she was essentially in good hands. “Andrew was a very, very talented man,” says Kelly. “His writing and his musicianship, and his appreciation of Kate and his astuteness at getting the best out of her when she was so young and naïve – knowing what I know now of the business, that could have easily all gone so wrong. Andrew…. loved Kate and the songs, but he was determined to get it right.”
She absorbed everything. She listened and watched and asked questions, showing infinite patience and enthusiasm. When it came time for mixing and sequencing, she was there every day, drinking it all in, spooling forward to the day when she could do it all herself. At the time, primarily she felt relief at finally being able to unburden herself of at least some of her vast store of songs, and not a little grateful that she was able to daub the canvas with her own stylistic touches. Her beloved whale song acted as a prelude to ‘Moving’ and effectively opened the album; she brought Paddy in to play some of his esoteric instruments and sing with her on several songs; and she was able to introduce her cast of vocal characters on backing vocals, growling and chiding to great effect in the background on ‘James And The Cold Gun’, rumbling theatrically on ‘Them Heavy People’, and generally adding much depth, flavour and personality to the tracks.
All those present were immediately struck – and rather captivated – by the dichotomy revealed through working with her, the seemingly huge gulf between, as Paton puts it, this “very quiet girl, very down to earth, the first person to say, ‘Do you want anything, do you want a cup of tea?’,” and the hugely assured artist singing these songs of sex, love, lust, ghosts and cosmic philosophy, imploring and declaiming in a variety of strange, enchanting voices. It was a wholly alluring mixture of innocence and experience; the combination of, on the one hand, an understated personality and a vastly amplified performing persona. “After we did a couple [of songs] we were thinking, ‘What’s coming next?’” says Ian Bairnson. “She pulls out these characters that aren’t there when she’s not singing or performing. There was no formula there, they were all truly original songs, and the thing that pulls it all together is her.”
Unlike her work at the Dance Centre, which she continued until right before the recording sessions and for a short period afterwards, there was no overtly physical side to her musical expression. Paton recalls, with a distinct gleam in his eye, the way she used to limber up in the studio during sessions, but when she was singing she stood still and concentrated. She wasn’t one, says Powell, “for doing the dance of the seven veils while she was doing her vocals.” Somewhere deep inside, however, gears were shifting. She consistently delivered, indeed exceeded, the expectations of what her producer and her fellow musicians asked her to do, but she found ways to make the process a little smoother, to ease the metamorphosis. “I remember her smoking an awful lot of joints in the studio,” says Paton. “That was a strange influence for such a ‘public school’ girl. I think she needed it to relax. Dope was kind of taboo then, it was still ‘illegal’.”
“She did smoke quite a lot,” adds Jon Kelly, while Andrew Powell, three decades on doing a convincing impression of a sighing, eye-rolling but essentially indulgent schoolmaster, recalls: “It did definitely happen. It was just a fact and you had to work with it. There were times when one had to hide the stuff: ‘You can have it back when you’ve finished this vocal!’ What can one do? Most of the time it didn’t get in the way, but sometimes you could hear the voice starting to suffer and drying out – so it was sometimes hidden! It could have been [nerves]. A confidence booster? Dutch courage? It’s hard to judge.”
The sense of camaraderie and respect in the room grew as everyone realised that this was no ordinary singer songwriter and that they were working on something truly special. There may have been a vague feeling among the band of mind-your-language, but nobody was standing on ceremony. She was, says Bairnson, “just one of the lads. She’s a very modest person, anyway, she’s not an extrovert. She definitely leant on us, and we supported her. Whenever she got a bit nervous we came out with various strains of humour, generally based on Monty Python, which always seemed to do the trick. Her getting nervous, there was no drama to it, you just sensed it.”
Despite her innate quietness, her inner strength, her sense of poise and self-assurance was apparent to everyone. “I didn’t think she was vulnerable at all, I thought she was very intelligent, a lot more intelligent than your average musician, and I thought she’d be able to look after herself,” says Paton. “I think you have to be confident to carry that off, to sit in front of these accomplished session musicians and say, ‘This is what Ido.’ I would find it daunting myself. She must have known how good she was to be able to do that in front of us.”
Once again, there was a reluctance – part shyness, part manners, part something more primal, some deep protective instinct – to let too much light into her motives and ambitions. Already well versed in the standard patterns of behaviour within the music business, the musicians all appreciated her lack of prattling self-obsession, and the absence of the kind of hollow boasting that afflicts the truly insecure. “If you just met her as a stranger you would have no idea what she is capable of, and she has never thrust that in your face, either,” says Bairnson. “If you’re absolutely comfortable with what you do, then there’s no need to start blowing your trumpet.”
“She didn’t say, ‘I want to do this and that, me, me, me, me …’,” adds Paton. “She wasn’t that kind of person at all and that in itself was very refreshing. A lot of artists you work with you usually find that they’re besotted with themselves. Like Freddie Mercury, all he could do was talk about himself all the time, but she wasn’t like that at all. She kept her vision to herself.”
Her songwriting had never been open to general scrutiny, and on The Kick Inside she was consummately prepared, having been working privately towards this specific moment for many years. The songs were topped, tailed and more than ready before they were publicly presented. Nobody saw her extemporise or improvise – not even the lyrics would be altered once the song was being played in the studio. She was very careful not to reveal anything until she was certain it was complete.
There was an astonishing depth of material, even after Powell and Bush had met several times to cull the 120 songs she had available into a less unwieldy shortlist. “The songs just appeared, she seemed to have an endless supply,” says Paton. “She would sit at the piano sometimes and play songs and say, ‘I might do this, I might not.’” According to Powell ‘Wow’ was already written, and was considered for The Kick Inside but not pursued, which “tells you the quality of what we had to keep off. I’ve often tried to think where I would have put ‘Wow’ on that album. I just don’t think it would have fit. And I know one day we did three voice and piano tracks, only one of which, ‘Feel It’, ended up on the album.” In the end it was decided to add two of the three songs from the 1975 AIR session, ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ and ‘The Saxophone Song’. They recorded another version of ‘Maybe’, the third, but it didn’t make the cut, a good song destined to always be the bridesmaid.
Another track recorded but never used during the sessions was ‘Scares Me Silly’, preserved on tapes of the early album outtakes. Musically it’s unremarkable, the kind of song the record company may have been encouraging her to write. A chugging, upbeat track with a rather clunky new wave intro, a reggae breakdown and a clear, uncomplicated chorus hook, it was probably only included on the shortlist to make sure there were enough up-tempo numbers in the running. Lyrically, however, ‘Scares Me Silly’ is extremely interesting, a real-time depiction of Bush’s mental, physical and emotional processes as she is singing – or more accurately recording – a song.
Numerous artists have been afflicted by stage fright through the years and some, such as The Band, have even written about it, but far fewer have ever described so graphically being affected by studio sickness, which here takes the form of acute self-consciousness. ‘Scares Me Silly’ begins in the studio, just as the lights are going down. Bush licks her lips and begins singing the opening line, but already she is overtaken by the idea that in order to perform she must become somebody else (“How can this girl be me?”), as though her everyday self is in danger of obstructing her performing alter ego as she strives to “keep the mood”.
The sensation of singing is not depicted as a pleasant experience: it’s a tightrope walk. Bush describes a sense of “vertigo” and a feeling of sickness as she tries to balance her emotions and force herself into another take – and yet, though it scares her half to death, it also “gets her going”.
There’s much on which to chew in there. The mix of terror and pleasure that performing – even in the studio – engenders mirrors the act of love (indeed, the chorus phrase of the song is a rather less poetic echo of the impulse behind ‘Hounds Of Love’). Then there’s the necessity of “goading” herself to keep going; the “need to lose;” the idea of holding the mood, like an actress, for the length of the take. Fascinating. An early unveiling of the complex and draining ritual she goes through in trying to honour the exact requirements of each song she sings. No mention, oddly, of sitting primly at the piano with a big fake smile for the cameras.
In terms of her songwriting, nobody had any real inkling about where it was all coming from. This was the summer punk went pop, but musically The Kick Inside was very much pre-Sex Pistols in its leanings: a bit flared, a bit hairy, weed rather than speed, a little bit prog-rock, even, with its floating melodies, classically influenced piano, shifting time signatures, tight musicianship and poetic, occasionally cosmic lyrics. It was beautifully played, but what was it exactly? Some elements the casual observer could objectively attribute to acknowledged sources. The “big brass bed” in ‘James And The Cold Gun’ is also part of the furniture in Dylan’s ‘Lay, Lady Lay’; Om Mani Padme Hum was a Tibetan Buddhist prayer, uttered in ‘Strange Phenomena’ as an ode to the unseen “hand a-moulding us;” the ‘Goose Moon’ is a concept from Native American Cree culture, where the flight of the geese heralds the coming spring. The nods to Gurdjieff, traditional folk songs, classic literature and lilting reggae, very much the hop-on-hop-off genre of choice at the time, all place it in pre-punk lineage, but already at its core her work was without obvious precedent, bearing the distinct mark of a unique psychic imprint.
“You can’t say she comes from Carole King or Joni Mitchell or Kiri DeKanawa,” says Powell. “There’s bits of everything. The backing vocals on ‘Moving’ sound like ‘Queen Of The Night’ from The Magic Flute. There are all sorts of things going on there, [but] she didn’t talk about it a lot.” ‘Moving’ and ‘Kite’ both reflected the physical release and psychological transformation she experienced through dance. The “moving stranger” is Lindsay Kemp, and the fact that he “crush[ed] the lily in my soul” is a positive thing, reflecting the way that movement has empowered, rather than weakened her.
However, control room chit-chat and canteen conversation rarely touched on such matters, while the band generally steered clear of discussing her lyrics. Songs like ‘Strange Phenomena’ tended to put the frighteners on the session men. “I didn’t like to ask her, ‘What’s this song about – tampons and things like that?’” says Paton, although Jon Kelly remembers vague discussions about whales and, in reference to ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’, “her love”. He was most struck by the title track, a truly beautiful song of forbidden passion between a brother and sister, sung moments before the pregnant girl commits suicide, “giving it all in a moment for you.” “I remember mixing that in Studio One, it was one of the songs that was left until last because we’d done some orchestra on it,” he says. “As I’m mixing it the lyric just hit home to me. It got to me, it was so powerful. I found it quite an emotional song to listen to and to work on.”
The album has a generous scattering of these moments. Heard today, The Kick Inside is simply an extraordinary record, most particularly in terms of its lyrical content. Her desire to ‘masculinise’ her muse, to sing from a strong, bold place, is clearly evident, and yet it is one of the most profoundly female albums ever made. She is the ‘hungry’ woman of Dylan’s songs – fully awake, sensual, quiveringly alive – utterly without shame, astoundingly bold in her declaration of her appetites and fears. This is raw femininity in mind and body, but expressed in a very muscular way. It’s an astonishing alchemy. She sings as the woman she is inside and out, and also as the child she often seems to want to remain. It has all the deep wisdom of youth, of experiences real and imagined, earned and unearned, of knowing without knowing, but this is not the realm of fantasy. It’s all real. It’s all emotionally true. “I wasn’t a daydreamer,” she later said. “Writing songs and poetry is putting into words and music my real feelings.”4
The language is something new for a female artist. The Kick Inside is lit up with the ecstasy and fear of puberty and sexual awakening – everywhere you look there’s a sense of a body growing, changing shape, immensely powerful but also terrifying: “Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o;” “Room for a life in your womb;” “This kicking here inside;” “Sticky love inside;” “Stars that climb from her bowels;” “Your warm hand walking around.” Elemental, primal. The title track is a sympathetic gaze at an incestuous relationship; ‘Strange Phenomena’ ties in the menstrual cycle to the waxing and waning of the moon; ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a supernatural psychodrama. These are no run of the mill boy-meets-girl songs. Even the many romantic shadowplays are sensually drawn, with a fine eye for lace and stockings, fire and candlelight, fact and fancy, almost teetering on the edge of Mills & Boon erotic-cliché (“My stockings fall onto the floor;” “We move into the boudoir”) but usually saved by a poetic turn of phrase or a flash of genuinely inspired imagery (“You came out of the night wearing a mask in white colour”), or a dash of daft, endearing humour.
The album’s crowning glory almost missed the boat. ‘Wuthering Heights’ was written on the eve of going in to record the album, beneath a full moon on a clear, midsummer night in 1977, looking out through the open window over the rooftops of south London. “It was only written a few days before we went into the studio,” says Powell. “Kate came round to my place and said, ‘What about this one?’, and sat down at my piano and played it. I said, ‘Um yeah, I think we should use that!’ It hit me straight away as really extraordinary. She’s doing some very interesting things with her voice. I loved it.”
It was one of the final pieces in the jigsaw, a bold confirmation of her intent. The song wasn’t directly inspired by reading Emily Brontë’s novel of 1847, but rather by catching the final ten minutes of a 1970 movie adaptation starring future James Bond, Timothy Dalton. Indeed, she wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’ before she had read the book in its entirety. Interesting that, even with this most seemingly literary of songs, it was direct – and accidental – visual stimulus that, as so often seemed to be the case, provided the initial creative spark. “I’d just caught the very end of [the film],” she said. “It was really freaky, ’cos there’s this hand coming through the window and whispering voices and I’ve always been into that sort of thing, you know, and it just hung around in my head. I had to write a song about it.”5
With its stirring combination of the supernatural and the sheer bloody-minded power of obsessive love, with a not insignificant personal connection (“It’s me, Cathy!”) thrown in for good measure, ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a fine insight into the how and why Bush writes. It was the instant connection, rather than the detail, that was important. The impetus isn’t intellectual (it’s a world away from someone like Sting name-dropping Nabokov for pure effect), but entirely emotional. Brontë’s novel doesn’t tiptoe around the pretty feelings on the surface, but rather digs around amongst the churning currents below. Bush related to Cathy’s hidden depths, her youthful passion, her violence. Once hooked, she climbed inside and truly embodied the song. “This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff,” she said. “Great subject matter for a song.”6
And so it transpired. When it came to recording the song at AIR, Andrew Powell pulled rank and wrote and played the bass part, much to David Paton’s chagrin. “As a consolation prize he says, ‘Davie, you can play 12-string.’ Hmmm!” Powell knew a good thing when he heard one. The piercingly high vocals were partly the result of Bush’s attempts to improve her vocal technique. She had started writing in keys beyond her range in order to expand her vocal reach. The songs started climbing; she wanted them to fly. But the vocal is also a deliberate piece of characterisation, signifying Cathy as a spirit rather than flesh and bone. The track was topped off by Ian Bairnson’s stunning solo, stretching out over the horizon and disappearing deep into the mists, ringing into eternity.
However impressive the results, ‘Wuthering Heights’ was never intended to be the first single. EMI wanted ‘James And The Cold Gun’ because, according to Bob Mercer, “I thought it was a cleverer song and more accessible. She didn’t agree with me and nailed me to the floor. She asked to come and see me and burst into tears. I backed off, and I said at the time, ‘Look Kate, it’s of no consequence or importance to me what the first fucking single is. I don’t think you’re a singles act, you’re an albums act, and I think it could take at least three albums for us to gain any traction at all. So by all means put ‘Wuthering Heights’ out first. It’s not the most important thing.’ She was an albums act as far as I was concerned, in those days there tended to be a clear distinction between the two. Frankly I wouldn’t have minded if someone had suggested we didn’t put out a single at all. Thank God we didn’t [do that]!”
Bush has always disputed Mercer’s claim that she “burst into tears,” but whatever way the drama unfolded, it was a significant dust-up for several reasons. It showed that this ‘girl’ who attracted any number of unintentionally patronising adjectives from her peers – ‘innocent’, ‘sweet’, ‘shy’, ‘lovely’ – possessed deep reserves of strength and fortitude when it came to fighting for her art, even with those within the EMI family for whom she had great affection. It also gave her instant power. Once ‘Wuthering Heights’ became a number one single, a hit as unlikely as it was all-encompassing, her insistence on it being the first single seemed like a stroke of genius, almost spooky in its prescience. Who was going to have the courage to argue with her next time? It bought her a freedom she used, usually wisely, always wilfully. “There was really never another fight,” says Mercer. “To be honest, I pretty much lay down after that. After the fight, I realised what kind of artist I was dealing with and that my role here was to keep out of the way and not knock over the scenery. I didn’t have any [more] disagreements with her.” When it came to the second single Bush wanted ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, in order to showcase her singing and songwriting talents and prove that she wasn’t a mere gimmick. EMI, who favoured ‘Them Heavy People’, said – ‘Sure, whatever you want.’
Of course, Bush hadn’t fought for ‘Wuthering Heights’ because of her certain belief in its innate commerciality, but primarily because she felt it was far more representative of what she did – who is she? – than ‘James And The Cold Gun’ which, though a decent theatrical rock song which neatly broke up the mood of the album and really came into its own onstage, was a little two-dimensional and formulaic. She burst into public consciousness at almost exactly the same time as Debbie Harry and Blondie, whose ‘Denis’ was working its way up the charts at the same time as ‘Wuthering Heights’, and she intended to set herself apart from the start. She had an inkling ‘Wuthering Heights’ might turn a few heads, for better or worse. Far from the doe-eyed hippie chick with nothing but disdain for commercial considerations, she was acutely aware of the importance of making a splash. “I felt that to actually get your name anywhere you’ve got to do something that is unusual, because there’s so much good music around and it’s all in a similar vein,” she said. “It had the high pitch and it also had a very English storyline which everyone would know…. I ’m into reaching more than the ordinary market.”7
She did not become a star by mistake. Who ever did?
‘Wuthering Heights’ was finally released on January 20, 1978, after all manner of eleventh hour hiccups. Originally scheduled for November 4, 1977, it was delayed to avoid being trampled by the Christmas market – Wings’ ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ was coming out on EMI the following week, devouring all in its path – and also to allow the sleeve to undergo a complete revision as Bush wrestled for the first time with the realities of projecting herself to the public. Rather than sinking it, the delay in its release lent the single a crucial momentum. Promotional pressings had been sent out some two months before Christmas, direct from the factory to key radio stations and journalists via EMI’s Automatic Mailing List. They then attempted to put the genie back in the bottle, but it was rather like trying to thumb a plum Pontefract into a slot machine. “We did, for the first time in my knowledge, send the promotion people out asking them not to play our record,” laughs Brian Southall. “Most people obliged, bar two, one of whom was Eddie Puma, the producer at Capital Radio, and the other was his presenter Tony Myatt. They weren’t having any of it and continued to play it.”
Myatt’s dogged and genuine support of ‘Wuthering Heights’ ensured the song was an airplay hit over a month before it was released. “They said the switchboard lit up with people ringing up asking who it was, and they told people it was coming out in January,” recalls Southall. Bush never forgot this stroke of good fortune. Myatt and Puma were later given a gold disc by EMI and were guests of honour at the launch of Lionheart. As the snowball thickened and gathered pace, Bush observed its progress with a mixture of detachment and excitement.
“I remember going round to her flat when ‘Wuthering Heights’ was first played by that DJ on Capital and Kate said, ‘Oh, they’re playing my song tonight,’” recalls Brian Bath. “We were all sitting round there and [Myatt] said he’d found this really odd song. She couldn’t believe it was coming out of the radio. And he kept playing it. You could phone Capital to vote for the song you wanted to hear each day. I was round at the farm pretty much every day, there was always something to do, and Kate’s mum would say, ‘Have you phoned Capital radio yet? Use the phone, do it now!’ It kept getting played and played and all of a sudden it just exploded.”
In those days, there was such a thing as a gradual explosion in the music industry. Within a fortnight of its eventual release ‘Wuthering Heights’ entered the charts at number 42. It crept up, week-by-week: 27, 13, five, as the attendant clamour grew louder. The Kick Inside was released on February 17 and climbed to number three, further increasing the momentum. On March 7, the single reached number one and stayed there for a month. The media interest was astonishing, moving far beyond the music press and encompassing the tabloids, broadsheets, television and radio. Auberon Waugh weighed in appreciatively. Bush had already sold over 250,000 records and was, according to one of those great immeasurable statistics by which fame is measured, the most photographed woman in Britain. Suddenly all hell was breaking loose and she was wanted in a million different places simultaneously.
“As soon as ‘Wuthering Heights’ became a hit … my whole routine was just blown apart,” Bush recalled. “It was extraordinary how suddenly everything changed…. It happened, it was instant. It [was] frightening.”8
She had rounded up a revamped KT Bush Band to handle promotional duties and, one suspects equally as importantly, to lend her some much needed moral support. Since the recording of The Kick Inside Brian Bath had spent considerable time writing charts of all Bush’s songs, knocking them into shape for some future, as yet unspecified purpose. Vic King was still put out by the way the band ended –when The Kick Inside came out he refused to even look at the credits –and in his absence Bath had recruited Sergio Castillo on drums, who played in “a busy, Latin American style,” which must have done wonders for ‘Moving’. With Paddy occasionally joining in on guitar and mandolin, prior to the single and album release the band performed with Bush at some key EMI functions, notably a “pretty nerve-wracking” showcase of songs from the forthcoming album for EMI executives at the White Elephant on the River, a plush restaurant on the Thames Embankment in Pimlico, which “went down well,”9 as well as a “bun fight up at Turnberry”10 in January for record company representatives from all around the world. These cemented her reputation within the company, confirmed her as a cause well worth fighting for.
With ‘Wuthering Heights’ climbing the charts all over Europe, suddenly they were all swept off on a great adventure. When the last minute call came to go to Germany for the music show Bio’s Bahnhof, it became apparent that Castillo, a Cuban, wouldn’t get a work permit in time. Vic King was asked to rejoin the band but declined. “I said I was doing something else,” he recalls. “I was a little bit annoyed about being kicked out of the band, and I was thinking, ‘Should I help out and then be kicked out yet again?’ There was the abrupt ending, and not being involved on the first album, and then suddenly you get a phone call. Looking back I probably should have said ‘yes’ but the pride said ‘no’. If Kate had rung up to explain the situation it may have been a bit different.” Charlie Morgan –an old friend and a member of Bath and Palmer’s former band Conkers – took Castillo’s place with less than a day’s notice. Most of the group didn’t even have passports, but within two hours of visiting EMI HQ at Manchester Square they were ready to leave.
It was Bush’s first time in an aeroplane, an experience she never learned to love and quickly came to dislike and, in time, avoid if at all possible. It was her first ever television performance, too, consisting of a live version of ‘Kite’ played with the band on the back of a train –“poor Kate was so nervous,” says Charlie Morgan –and singing ‘Wuthering Heights’ to a backing tape, before battling gamely through an interview conducted entirely in jaunty German. The backdrop –supposed to evoke the rough majesty of the Yorkshire moors –featured a volcano. Welcome to the joys of European music promotion. For now, her smile, her giggle and her sense of wonder at this new, ridiculous world got her through.
And so it began. For Bush, it was the start of a year of utter mayhem. Off to the BBC at seven o’clock in the morning to record a performance for Magpie; playing on Saturday Night At The Mill and chatting briefly to presenter Bob Langley; off to Ireland for the legendary Late Late Show; introduced by Peter Cook on the short-lived music show Revolver, appearing on the current affairs programme Tonight, and being gently patronised about her ‘O’ level results on Ask Aspel.
Top Of The Pops was the big one. She made her first appearance on the BBC’s flagship music programme on February 16, when ‘Wuthering Heights’ broke into the Top 40 at number 27. What should have been a happy occasion turned into a nightmare. She discovered just prior to taping her performance that the show’s arcane rules dictated that, as a solo artist, she was not allowed to play with her band. Instead she would have to sing solo to a new, markedly inferior backing track of her song, knocked off that afternoon by the BBC orchestra. It was all dictated by stringent Musicians’ Union regulations. Robin Nash, the programme’s producer, came from a variety background (he was the man behind Terry And June and The Les Dawson Show, no less) and was unsympathetic to Bush’s plight. “He threw his weight around,” according to a member of the Bush entourage. “It was not a nice experience for someone who has bust a gut creating things properly and wants to be able to do it with backbone and honesty.”
All her band were there but they could only stand at the front and watch helplessly as the misery unfolded. “She had a terrible time with Top Of The Pops,” says Charlie Morgan. “If you had a sound like Kate had on ‘Wuthering Heights’, with this wonderful guitar solo by Ian Bairnson, and you want to use your own band but the BBC says, ‘Absolutely not, Kate is a solo artist and she will sing with the house band,’ –well, it was a really, really unpleasant experience for her. She had a horrible time, she was practically in tears. Her band would have given her huge moral support, if nothing else. We all felt for her and we were really dejected, because we knew she hadn’t done a fantastic performance and it wasn’t really her fault. It’s one thing being out of your comfort zone, but if you have an element of control it’s OK. But if you’re completely out of control and you’re 18 years old [in fact, she was 19] that’s not a very good experience.” She later memorably described seeing the performance played back as “like watching myself die.”11
These were merely the brutal opening skirmishes in her long battle with that most strange, destructive and vertiginous phenomenon: fame. Coming to terms with the odd process of observing yourself as seen from several different angles, losing control of your art, frequently feeling like a tin of beans rattling along a conveyor belt, besieged by doubt and self-loathing, the contours of your old life warped by the push and pull of constant motion. She had to learn quickly, chalking up the negatives to experience and making mental notes in her little black book: don’t do this next time. Avoid that. The fact that her career has always been defined as much by the things she refuses to do as those she embraces can be traced directly back to this time. Before the end of March she had appeared again on Top Of The Pops, a much more assured performance, this time from a number one artist. But she didn’t forget. “She was once bitten, twice shy, and she vowed never to let that happen again,” says Morgan. “Typical Leo: ‘I’m not going to let that happen again.’” Despite numerous invitations, she didn’t appear on the programme again until 1985, when she could do whatever she liked.
Dealing with the printed press proved perhaps her steepest learning curve. “That was when things started getting very difficult for me because until then it had all been very creative work, writing, recording, learning to dance,” she said. “[Now] I was talking to press … and I couldn’t express myself easily. I was up against a different beast.”12 She was thrown into the bearpit, offered to everyone from The Sun and NME to Vogue and The Vegetarian. Reading back over the multitude of interviews, much is made of her cigarette smoking and her high voice, her rather comical habit of punctuating each statement with a sincere ‘amazing’, a solemn ‘heavy’ or a simple, breathy ‘wow’. Gurdjieff’s name starts popping up, as does her vegetarianism, her belief in astrology, ghosts, ESP and reincarnation. Already you can see the outline of a caricature forming. Penny Allan, a columnist in the Guardian, castigated her for “cultivating a childlike voice and encouraging her audience to act like voyeurs.”
The tabloid hounds soon started sniffing around her private life. Only once, very early on, does she name Del as her beau. Thereafter, she throws out a number of red herrings. She will say she lives “alone” when in fact she was co-habiting; she invents a boyfriend –“an artist,” someone “not in the music industry” –for the benefit of Company magazine and the Evening Standard, while for others she breezily announces she is seeing lots of people and no one in particular. Always, she plays down marriage and kids, any hint of a “heavy” relationship. How much of this was down to protecting her privacy and how much to creating a sense of mystique – perhaps even an aura of availability –is open to debate. “I escorted her to lots of things as a kind of pseudo-boyfriend,” says EMI’s Brian Southall. “I don’t remember who made the decision –maybe it was Bob, maybe it was her –that she shouldn’t have a boyfriend and wouldn’t be seen with Del. It was a very Sixties thing to do. Del was very much in the background, which he seemed quite happy with, but of course we all knew.”
She was no shrinking violet. Self-possessed and opinionated when the mood struck, she often came across as genuine, ambitious and savvy. At times she seemed blessed with an intense self-awareness far beyond her years, watching herself constantly from some far away point, both fascinated and perpetually on guard against betraying any rock-starry traits; at other times she seemed astonishingly naïve in some of her comments. On her vegetarianism: “I do eat plants, and I know they’re living, and I’m fond of them, but … I don’t think plants mind being eaten, actually. I think they’d be really sad if no-one paid that much attention to them.”13 When asked about the songs she had written about incest she conceded, with inadvisable honesty, that “I see [my brothers] as men and I see them as attractive, but there is no sexual content in the relationship. I suppose there’s never been much physical contact.”14
Seeing her words thrown back at her having undergone various contortions was not a particularly pleasant experience for someone as essentially open and honest as she. “She got very wary of the media,” says Southall. “They didn’t dislike her, though they did take the mickey a bit, but she just wanted privacy. She was always obliging and friendly and affable, but she didn’t really want to do it. I don’t recall one specific thing that caused her to be resentful or mistrusting, but she grew up and realised that the world isn’t quite as nice as you think it is. It’s a fact of life. There was a kind of naïveté: ‘He said he was going to ask me about my video, but then he asked me some other questions …’ Well, yes! But that threw her I think. And there were a few bitchy writers.”
The extent to which her fame broke beyond the confines of the musical world and into mass culture hit her with the force of a mugging. The success of ‘Wuthering Heights’ made her a tabloid entity, when normally an artist of her type and inclination would not have been subjected to that kind of exposure. The strength of her image and the sheer eccentricity of the song and video made her easy prey. And she was a gift for comedians. To a bastardised version of ‘Them Heavy People’ entitled ‘Oh England, My Leotard’, she was mercilessly spoofed by Pamela Stephenson on Not The Nine O’clock News, the BBC’s hippest alternative comedy show. Some of it was clever and very funny.
‘Went to Cairo and I read the Gnostic
Apocryphon of John in the original Coptic
Korsakoff’s psychosis theories
And the Fibonacci series
Studied acupuncture and the Bible …
My cauliflower quiches were better than the bought ones
And I was thicker than two short ones.’
Impressionist Faith Brown parodied, much less subtly, her love of mime, her voice, and her use of language –“I’ve learned what ‘amazing’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘incredible’ are in 85 languages” –on her LWT show, before performing another rather accurate spoof called ‘Three Little Fishes’. She was a perfectly legitimate target for satire, but although Bush had a robust sense of humour and professed that she found this kind of thing more funny than upsetting, the implication in both cases that she was somehow stupid and contrived would have rankled.
The media preoccupations essentially boiled down to three things: sex, age and class. The fuss made over her age was baffling. She was 19, no longer a babe in arms when it came to the pop industry, certainly not in comparison to her male contemporaries at that time: Paul Weller was 18 when ‘In The City’ went into the Top 40; John Lydon was still only 21. But the discrepancy between the maturity of the songs and her physical youthfulness and occasional gaucheness was emphasised again and again, particularly coming from someone from such an apparently ‘sheltered’ background, the dancing doctor’s daughter from the suburbs who had never had a ‘real’ job. She was a young woman with big ideas, and thus someone, somewhere, must be pulling her strings. “The thing with her career is that it started off, and people were thinking there was obviously some man behind her success,” says producer Steve Lillywhite, who worked with her on Peter Gabriel’s third album. “With ‘Wuthering Heights’, you thought she had a lovely voice, but somebody else was doing all the work.” It’s hard to believe now, but there was no comparable artist on the British scene at that time: a young, beautiful female who wrote and performed her own words and music to great popular and artistic success. As the first through the gates, she took many brickbats.
It’s equally astonishing nowadays to recall the amount of emphasis placed on Bush’s sexual side, her erotic charge. She constantly sought to dampen down her sex symbol status, almost to the point of obsession. The kind of ‘Sexy? Who, me?’ disingenuousness she often displayed in these early interviews was rather ridiculous but understandable. It’s as though she was so wary of being defined by her sexual identity she would rather try and deny it entirely, put it down to a combination of unknowing instinct on her part and subjective interpretation on the part of the audience. This, of course, was nonsense. Her sexual presence is a very real and important part of her work as, occasionally, she has acknowledged. “So much of it comes from a sexual need, from inside me,” she said. “I’m very basic.”15 Jon Kelly, who worked closely with her on the first three albums, recalls a conversation about the Never For Ever album cover, which depicts a parade of beautiful and demonic beasts flying out from under her skirt. “That’s where she said her songs come from!” says Kelly. “That’s what she told me – that’s where all her ideas come from.”
Her attitude to sex and the senses was that of a poet, not a pop star. She certainly wasn’t ashamed of expressing her sexual side in her work, sometimes graphically, but she couldn’t seem to understand why those words and images would then seep into the public’s perception of her as a person. What she dreaded most was being defined by her looks, but if she wanted parts of her audience, and the British tabloid press in particular, to make the fine-toothed differentiation between the natural, earthy, instinctive sensuality of a ‘poet’ and the brash, blatant, come-and-get-it display of a ‘pop star’ she was in for a rude awakening.
It was always going to be an area where some difficulty would arise. Early on a Dutch photographer ‘tricked’ her into posing for a bondage-style photo, in which she was shot wrapped up in rope, presumably in the belief that this was art, not sex. Money was offered to stop the picture being printed in Record Mirror, but it was not accepted. “We had no idea, it was all a bit unfortunate,” says Brian Southall. “It was a warning to be a bit careful: people were looking for headlines.”
One picture in particular proved defining. Late in 1977, EMI had asked renowned rock photographer Gered Mankowitz to shoot their new protégé for the ‘Wuthering Heights’ single sleeve and the ensuing promotional campaign. Mankowitz heard the song, thought it “extraordinary,” and set up a session at his studio in Great Windmill Street. Learning of her love of dance he proposed a shoot themed along those lines, something very natural and raw. “I simply suggested we got leotards and woollen working socks and all that gear, and she seemed to like it,” he says. “I did a whole series of pictures, full length, three-quarter length and portrait, she looked absolutely stunning. When they were processed, the advertising agency that EMI had employed to promote the single came up with the campaign of putting the posters on the buses, and selected the one in the pink leotard and the nipples. The rest is history.”
The picture was used extensively. Several designs were rolled out for the poster campaign, the same infamous picture on each, with her name and The Kick Inside prominently displayed above the portrait in pink writing against a black backdrop, each one flaunting a single superlative below the picture: WONDROUS, AMAZING, MAGNIFICENT … These were cut to fit the front corners of London buses, and all four were combined to create a full-size poster for underground sites and billboards. They made a colossal impact and caused an extraordinary fuss, and not only in places like the Daily Express and Private Eye. Even before it was seen publicly, the picture divided opinion behind the scenes.
“There’s been a lot of controversy about it since, and I think the root of it is simply that her family didn’t like their daughter and sister being seen in a sexual way, they felt it was a distraction from her music,” says Mankowitz. “One of the brothers –I don’t think I met him and he certainly never came to my sessions, his input was in the background as far as I was concerned –but my understanding was that he objected to what I think they saw as a sexualising of her. The family did find it offensive, though nobody ever said anything to me and nobody ever stopped me working with her again.”
As Mankowitz suggests, the ‘nipple’ portrait became a kind of symbolic battleground for the playing out of the many tensions between the Bushes and the record company. From the very beginning the family had been her sounding board, and as the stakes grew higher their influence became more pronounced. In interviews, she would constantly refer to what ‘we’ were doing or planning next, ‘we’ being the Bush clan. “She had got herself into a situation where she had the protection of her family … who believed utterly in what she was doing and were willing to follow her to the ends of the earth to get the result,” says Charlie Morgan. “They all believed she was breaking new ground –and she was. EMI were fighting it all the time.”
For a few years early on there were many occasions where heads bumped and tempers frayed, when boundaries were crossed and roles became confused, when the conflicting interests of art and commerce and business and pleasure collided. The Mankowitz portrait became a trysting point for all these frustrations and misunderstandings. “I remember Jay objecting to the photograph we were using, and he stormed into my office saying we were sexualising her and so on, stuff that frankly had never fucking occurred to me,” says Bob Mercer, perhaps disingenuously. “Of all the things that you could have described her as, blatantly sexual wasn’t one of those in my mind. God knows, I was in the record business and perfectly capable of thinking that way, but not in this instance. I got very cross with him about that, because it was below the belt. We had a big row over that.”
Jay has since said that “to see every business meeting as a karate competition was probably silly,” but remains unrepentant about fighting for the protection of a “clear vision of Kate the Artist.”16 Partly it was about artistic control –the poet’s innate urge for complete autonomy –and partly an understandable sense of filial and parental protectiveness in an often cut-throat environment. From the moment EMI made advances, her eldest brother in particular played a central role in what he called the “coordinating process” of her career.17 The motives may have been honourable, but they didn’t always translate well. “The mafia! The bruvvers!” says Vic King. “The brothers might have been a bit [heavy-handed]. Never had any trouble with the parents, just as long as she was happy. It was mainly Jay, or Paddy. Very protective of their little sister.” Says Mankowitz, “I was aware of what was known as the Bush Family Mafia. I didn’t have any direct dealings with them. I have a vague recollection of meeting a brother at an EMI reception, and I remember a not very friendly person. They were very precious and protective.”
When it came to Mankowitz’s image, Jay also felt a professional as well as personal sense of aggrievement. As a photographer, he felt that this was, somehow, his natural habitat. The only person who appeared less than flustered by it all was Bush herself. She was uninhibited about her own body to the point of occasionally and inadvertently causing severe palpitations in others. “Kate never had any concerns about her body at all,” says Southall. “She could not work out what all the fuss was about –‘Well, we’ve all got those things.’ Before one [awards ceremony] we were in the small rehearsal studio at Manchester Square and I said, ‘Come on, Kate, get a move on! There’s a car outside,’ and she just took her top off [to get changed]. There was no embarrassment at all. I was in the corner quivering! She never understood that at all.”
Sticking to her early line of downplaying any sexual content in her work, she was initially relaxed about the image. “I suppose the poster is reasonably sexy just ’cos you can see my tits, but I think the vibe from the face is there,” she said in March 1978, seemingly convinced that the public would see beyond the surface titillation to the artist beneath.18 By 1985 she had wised up considerably. “I didn’t really see it objectively at the time, and I think now, when I see it, it’s quite embarrassing,” she said of the portrait. “It should have been cropped, and that’s something that we would certainly do now. Looking at it retrospectively, I can see that it was suggestive.”19
In this case, the family lost the battle but won the war. The photo wasn’t used, as originally intended, for the ‘Wuthering Heights’ single sleeve. Instead, it was replaced late on with a similar design to the album sleeve, which nobody outside of Bush’s circle much liked, featuring a red and orange Oriental theme –“concept by Kate Bush” –with a very small off-centre image of the artist flying on a kite. The back cover of The Kick Inside was designed jointly by Del and Jay. “Del played bass, and I didn’t know what John Carder Bush did,” says Mankowitz. “All I knew was that it was a dreadful cover, and everybody knew it. They didn’t understand what you have to have to make a good cover –you certainly had to have the artist up front.” Mankowitz’s photograph, on the other hand, remains genuinely iconic, revealing a stunning mixture of animal instinct and great intellect; the potential for the unleashing of great energy, but also classical repose. And, yes, it was sexy, but anyone who ended up lingering longer over her chest than her face was missing half the fun.
In order to try and prevent repetitions of these kind of scuffles, around the time of the release of ‘Wuthering Heights’ EMI became convinced Bush needed a manager to act as a buffer and field the enormous number of demands on her time. After a few options were considered –Steve O’Rourke, Marc Bolan’s former agent Tony Howard –Peter Lyster-Todd was hired, without much enthusiasm on her part. A photographer’s agent moving into the music industry, he had managed Sky but was, he readily admits, still “learning on his feet”. Though charming, well-spoken and genuine, Lyster-Todd was not quite attuned to the Bush family ethic. “He turned up with a big fur coat on,” recalls Brian Bath. “I thought, ‘Blimey, who’s this?’ He was really showbiz. I don’t think there was really any need for him at the time. I think Kate had enough support from everyone around her to do what she wanted to do.”
So it proved. Novercia Ltd. was already in existence and the company, with the help of Bernard Sheridan, dealt with all Bush’s contracts and royalty payments. It was a closed shop, and unlike virtually every other manager in the history of popular music, Lyster-Todd was never involved in the underlying financial aspects of his client’s career. His brief was simply to liaise with the record companies in Europe, organise promotion, sift through tour offers, and generally try to push his act as far as possible. This was what EMI wanted, but it seemed to the Bush family –who liked him, but this was business –that he had merely inherited a promising artist and was earning a healthy percentage on each deal without having to do terribly much. When ‘Wuthering Heights’ took off, after all, the momentum was generally self-perpetuating. In the end, their misgivings were encapsulated by two thoughts: What could any manager do that they couldn’t do themselves? And a deeply ingrained distrust of the species of Rock Manager in general. “I think most managers are crooks, greedy and non-musical,” Bush said on the eve of Lyster-Todd’s arrival, before adding less than convincingly, “I think Peter will be amazing …”20
He was gone by the end of May. “I was never able to establish that [article of faith] with the family, and what I did begin to notice after taking this or that meeting on behalf of Kate and EMI, was that one would arrive at conclusions and forge ideas and try to turn them into something –and thus, managing –and then in a kind of overnight way one would get the feeling that it was all being redistilled back in Welling and it would all be undone,” says Lyster-Todd today. “I did get the feeling I was managing by post-mortem. I don’t want to sound in any way grumpy or bad tempered about it. Kate is by definition unique, and I don’t think she would ever fall into that mould of an artist who is comfortable or happy to row the boat in tandem with their manager. That’s just a reflection on her nature creatively and intellectually. In a way, for Kate there isn’t a manager. It’s not pertinent for her, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating; look at everything she has accomplished.”
The end was swift and decisive. A note arrived from Bernard Sheridan “giving me the bum’s rush: ‘One way or t’other, we feel that this relationship is not exactly what we want….’ – I can’t remember all the details. Kate –and I guess the people immediately around her –felt that what I was doing wasn’t really the way they wanted to do things or the way they saw things going. That was sort of the gist of it. I couldn’t really give you a definitive reason. I remember getting back in touch with Bernard Sheridan, who was a very decent sort altogether, and making a case, but it became apparent that the die was cast and there was no going back. I was disappointed and hurt and perplexed, but you’ve got to stand up and accept it.”
With the benefit of hindsight, regardless of the details of each skirmish or the manner in which they may or may not have been conducted, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: the way the Bush family handled her career, the way they advised her, protected her, cared for her, loved her and fought for her artistic integrity all the way down the line was remarkably effective. It may often have been a distinct pain in the neck for those trying to drive her career from outside of that unit, but undeniably it worked. “Without any experience of the business we applied common sense, instinct and a determination not to get ripped off,” said John Carder Bush in 2004. “With the help of a courageous lawyer we braved the giants.”21
“I have to say with hindsight I think the family did a really good job,” says Charlie Morgan. “They didn’t do everything according to the book, but that was probably a good thing for Kate.” It’s hard to think of anybody who has dictated the narrative of their career so precisely, from start to present day, and has done so largely for the sake of her music rather than her ego or bank balance. To her credit, she never made EMI jump through hoops for the sheer hell of it. “She wasn’t bothered about the stuff of normal rock stars,” says Southall. “If you gave her a car she’d take it, but she didn’t care what it was. When she toured she wanted a nice room, but she wasn’t bothered whether it was the biggest or the suite on the top. It was quite refreshing. She wanted to be comfortable, to have quiet and peace and time to dance, that was all very important, but she didn’t need a manager to ring up and shout that it wasn’t a big enough car.”
Those kinds of hollow, ego-gratifying demonstrations of power would never mean a thing. She was fixated on a greater prize.