“IT wasn’t until I left school that I found real strength inside,” Bush later said.1 The events of 1976 and 1977 bear out these sentiments a hundred times over. The next two years are a blur of creative evolution in fast forward, and each time the show reel stops spinning it throws out a host of seemingly conflicting images.
When the light falls a certain way an unlikely pub singer comes into focus, embarking on an enforced, somewhat delayed apprenticeship. Fronting the KT Bush Band, she was a characteristically vivid turn as a lounge bar chanteuse, singing the likes of Hall & Oates’ ‘She’s Gone’, Steely Dan’s ‘Brooklyn’, Arthur Conley’s ‘Sweet Soul Music’ and Free’s ‘The Stealer’ to a less than select crowd of lager drinkers, corporate low-rollers and sports aficionados. “We played Tottenham Football Club, where they thought she was the stripper,” says the band’s drummer, Vic King. “At a pub in Putney on the day [before] Scotland beat England at Wembley we had dry ice machines that set off the fire alarm. There was a bit of a riot and a panic. It was a really good evening!” He pauses. “But not really her thing, no.”
Look again and she has become the profoundly private writer, largely hidden from sight, pouring herself into an almost unending stream of superb new songs, sometimes writing all through the night. Prior to going into the studio in July 1977 to make The Kick Inside, Bush handed producer Andrew Powell a vast amount of material which gave him – in football parlance – a serious selection headache. “I’ve still got some of the cassettes,” he says. “I must have 100 songs here, pre-Kick Inside, some of which I still wish she’d done. The process was difficult.”
This picture, too, dissolves to reveal another view: the dedicated dance and mime student of tutor Robin Kovac’s recollection, the girl with the “beginner’s body” who “made herself wonderful. I have a picture of her in pigtails, of all things. She was really sweet, she still had baby fat in her face, [but] she was determined to be a dancer.”
Yet another angle shows the deceptively “calculating” – her word – careerist, setting up with her family a series of limited companies with which to keep tabs on her song publishing rights, her future earnings, setting in place her control strategy long before fame and fortune struck. “She ain’t daft,” says Brian Southall, EMI’s former Head of Press and later in charge of Artistic Development. “People shouldn’t be fooled by the mystical, hippie stuff. This girl is very, very tough.”
At the centre of it all, unifying these diverse characters, is the independent young woman, leaving the family home at 18 and pushing out towards freedom. Hers was a characteristically sensible departure, reasoned and well planned. Owned by her father and divided into three spacious flats, 44 Wickham Road* in Brockley was a rather grand red-brick Victorian building set back off the road, far enough from home to enable independence, close enough to maintain family ties. In any case, it was already a fiercely tight-knit Bush fiefdom in the south of the city: Jay lived on the ground floor with his teacher wife Judy and their two children; Paddy occupied the middle apartment; and Kate moved in to the top floor with a second-hand upright piano and a couple of cats, Zoodle and Pyewacket. In time, boyfriend and bass player Del Palmer would join her. For now, she luxuriated in her freedom.
Emerging from a period where she wondered whether she would ever be able to break free and channel her feelings into something truly liberating, suddenly she found she was able to do everything all at once: dancing, writing, exploring mime, even performing live. Leaving an old way of life behind and embarking on a new phase, the sense of transformation was vividly, almost physically, apparent to her. Embracing vegetarianism at 16 – “I don’t believe in eating life”2 – leaving school, throwing herself into dance, learning to drive (though she rarely did), living alone; all these steps forward were synthesised in what she regarded as symbolic change in her preferred Christian name. “I used to be called Cathy and I became Kate, and that was a very different stage for me,” she said, adding. “The first part of my life was so difficult.”3
In hindsight it all happened rather quickly, though at the time it didn’t seem nearly fast enough. All her pursuits were leading towards one inexorable conclusion: recording an album. In 2005 she looked back and claimed she felt she was on a “mission from God.”4 It’s a purposely tongue-in-cheek phrase, but it accurately captures her drive and sense of growing momentum. Suddenly, the future was wide open, and she stepped gratefully inside. She later remembered it as one of the happiest times of her life.
* * *
After nearly a year of to-ing and fro-ing, in the summer of 1976 Bush finally concluded a deal with EMI. Initially, it was a straightforward direct artist agreement: EMI paid for all the recording and up front costs and owned the results. The deal included Europe and Canada but not the United States, where EMI America would have first option on Bush’s albums but were under no obligation to release them.
At Bob Mercer’s insistence recording expenses would not be deducted from Bush’s advance on the grounds that such a practice was “immoral”, a concept not normally acknowledged within the industry. A straight-talking, humorous, larger-than-life figure, Mercer was widely regarded as a decent man who, after joining the company in 1971, had somewhat belatedly ushered in the era of T-shirts, long hair and growing artist power at Manchester Square following several decades of suits, ties and received pronunciation. He rapidly became an avuncular figure in Bush’s life, a role he happily fulfilled, from a distance, until his death in May 2010. He was another in the line of significant, powerful, kindly older men who made up her extended musical ‘family’.
EMI offered a four-year contract paying an initial, non-recoupable advance of £3,000, with an additional £500 for publishing, with options at the end of the second and third year. This last detail was crucial. It enabled Bush to renegotiate her contract from a position of strength following the huge success of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and The Kick Inside, with the result that she was able to retain ownership of all her later recordings, only leasing them to EMI for agreed periods of time. This move, allied to a stubborn adherence to her unflinching vision, gave her real power and has allowed her to retain tight control of her music throughout her career, as well as protecting her image and her legacy. “It was renegotiated very early on so she owned her own music,” recalls Brian Southall. “That was unheard of for an act that early on in their career. To their credit, when she started selling records they rewarded her. Bob was very fair in that respect, he was a good man. It was unusual for EMI to do a license deal. Many other acts wanted similar deals and they were turned down.”
How did she pull it off? The immediate success of ‘Wuthering Heights’ certainly afforded her enormous bargaining power, but even before then every move was made with deliberate and careful forethought. Pink Floyd had carved out significant creative independence, albeit only after prolonged ascendency, and the family sought advice from their manager Steve O’Rourke and David Gilmour, as well as taking advantage of Jay’s legal learning and his experience in publishing. They set up a company, Novercia Holdings Limited, later expanded to include Kate Bush Songs Limited, Noverica Limited and Novercia Overseas Limited. All five principal family members were named as directors and Bush, Paddy and Jay became shareholders, the brothers owning ten per cent each and Bush the remaining 80 per cent. They brought on board an accountant and a top industry solicitor, Bernard Sheridan, in advisory capacities. All contracts went through this route, discussed by the family and rubber stamped by the suits. “The whole thing is really to just structure it so that the final decision on anything becomes Kate’s, which tends to be unusual in rock music – especially when somebody has just become popular,” Jay explained.5
This was not an uncommon set-up among established rock stars with real clout, but it was almost unheard of among new acts. It was designed to ensure that Bush would never be one of the industry’s hard luck stories, either artistically or financially. The accounts of her company show highly astute financial management, with substantial sums (£223,000, for example, in 1992) set aside for pension contributions, establishing a considerable nest egg, a significant factor for someone who has paused as long between releasing records as she frequently has. They also show that all the company directors have been well rewarded for their roles in helping to run her career. The money has always been kept firmly within the family. The Bushes may have had a pronounced bohemian streak, but like many other middle-class artists they understood the absolute necessity for control. In this regard they were unsentimental and clear-sighted in negotiating contracts and helping her stick to her guns. If she made mistakes, she was determined that they would be her own. “The most important thing seemed to be that I had control,” she said. “Because one of the worst things that can happen to one’s product – that terrible word – is that you become manipulated.”6
She couldn’t call the shots just yet. EMI didn’t want her to record straightaway, and Bush spent much of the next two years in a strange kind of limbo: something was going to happen – but what? And when? The gap, though frustrating, enabled her to think long and hard about her appearance, her expression, her songs, her body, her style. Andrew Powell, for one, thinks that “it was inordinately helpful that we didn’t straight away make an album. She discovered a lot about herself in that time, working a lot of stuff out. She certainly wasn’t wasting time.”
The big surprise, and in retrospect one of her most astute moves, was that she focused the greater part of her energy on dance and physical movement, not simply for its own sake but quite consciously in an attempt to make it work in tandem with her music. Though she had danced at St Joseph’s – it was another compulsory step in the great quest to become A Lady – the tuition had, once again, been rather formal and she “didn’t really get on with the dance teacher”.7 At Wickham Farm she could at least move freely to her own internal pulse. Retreating to her room, she would work out routines to songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – hardly the most upbeat material – showing typical dedication, practising for days and days until it was right.
She loved dancing, but it was another private passion. The penny didn’t really drop until she was knocked sideways by Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers, an intensely powerful re-imagining of Jean Genet’s Notre Dame Des Fleures. A world away from the niceties of ballet, Flowers was populated by drag queens, pimps, murderers and sailors; it was orgiastic, erotic, oppressive, violent, funny and thoroughly homosexual in its aesthetic – Kemp played ‘Our Lady’. It would not have been allowed within 100 yards of the gates of St Joseph’s. In its earliest showings it was often raided by the police.
Bush went to see the show when it played at the Collegiate Theatre in Bloomsbury in 1975 and again during its later, long run at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, north London. This was no teenage girl trotting off dutifully to Covent Garden to gaze at Swan Lake, and even for an adolescent as accustomed to the avant garde as Bush, Flowers felt thrilling and even slightly illicit. And tremendously powerful. The visceral impact of her first viewing directly inspired her to leave school and follow her burgeoning love of physical movement. “I couldn’t believe how strongly Lindsay communicates with people even without opening his mouth,” she said. “It was incredible, he had the whole audience in his control … I’d never seen anything like it, I really hadn’t. I felt if it was possible to combine that strength of movement with the voice then maybe it would work, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”8
She had already realised that “there was something missing from the expression” in her music,9 that just sitting down and playing her songs at the piano wasn’t going to be enough. She was influenced in this regard by Gurdjieff’s ‘Fourth Way’, the idea that mind and body are not separate creative entities and that the key to personal and creative breakthrough lies in learning how to fuse the two, using the one to feed off the other. Seeing Lindsay Kemp in action vindicated the notion of using movement as “as an extension of my music”10 and, crucially, gave her practical instruction as to how it could actually be achieved. After leaving school she had tried to enrol at dance school, but without any formal qualifications nobody would admit her. Instead, in 1976 she began taking mime lessons at Kemp’s drop-in classes, 50p per session, each one lasting as long as three hours at a time.
Kemp was no stranger to the music world. A 38-year-old former enfant terrible whose previous highlights included studying with Marcel Marceau, starting his own dance company and making a splash at the 1968 Edinburgh festival, he was a teacher, choreographer, dancer and actor whose style – a unique and seductive blend of Butoh, mime, burlesque, drag and music hall – was highly personal and often confrontational. His teachings had already had a profound influence on another of his students, David Bowie. “I taught him to exaggerate with his body as well as his voice, and the importance of looking as well as sounding beautiful,” said Kemp in 1974. “Ever since working with me he’s practised that, and in each performance he does his movements are more exquisite.”11 Kemp wasn’t interested in escapism or pretence. His central mission was to “free what is already there. Everybody has that dove flying around inside them, and to let it fly is a fabulous experience. That’s why Isadora Duncan danced, and Pavlova danced – because they loved the moment when they actually became swans, not just impersonating them as actors do.”12
It’s also why Bush danced. The sense of transformation is what she keyed into. It wasn’t about who or what you were; it was about what you could become. The experience of freeing from within her a series of multi-faceted personae was profoundly liberating and had an obvious affect on the way she has both written and presented herself throughout her career. “For me, the singer is the expression of the song,” she said. “An image should be created for each song … the personality that goes with that particular music.”13 It’s not acting, it’s emotional amplification; finding the right part of her character to accentuate in order to represent the emotion of the songs, dissolving the fixed parameters of the corporeal into an amorphous, ever-changing “moving liquid” alter ego, bursting through boundaries and rolling over obstacles. “She’s a lot stronger [than me],” she once said of her other self. “I wouldn’t be as daring as her.”14 What may look like an escape into other characters is, in actual fact, the direct opposite: a means of deeper self discovery and release.
Guitarist Ian Bairnson recalls being particularly struck by this aspect of her work when they were recording The Kick Inside. “She did everything with such conviction, and she seemed to adopt different personas within the album,” he says. “She’d sing the lead vocal with one voice and do the backing vocals in a completely different character and you’d think, ‘There’s a cast of people in there!’ That’s what so amazing about her – everything she does hits home. Whether she is putting on an unusual voice, it still comes across as genuine and we accept it, and that’s what makes her stand apart. The fact that her talent has so many facets to it and each one is so believable.”
When Kemp went off to tour Australia, Bush started studying with the American mime artist Adam Darius, another renowned performer with a global reputation who, between professional engagements, taught at the Dance Centre on Floral Street in Covent Garden. When Darius left the Dance Centre and began taking smaller private classes in Elephant and Castle, she followed him. It was here that teacher first really noticed pupil, recalling an “eagerness and enthusiasm about her. Not in an attention-grabbing way, not at all, but she was very absorbent in the best way that a student can be. One sees things in a person’s eyes, and she was drinking in a very thirsty manner.”
Like Kemp, Darius worked in the area of expressive mime and his methods – though different – were also designed to unlock something personal from within each individual. “I cultivated this rippling, liquid quality where the movement begins centrally, in the solar plexus, and radiates outwards to all the extremities, to the head and the hair follicles, and the arms, hands, fingertips and beyond,” he says. “When done well, it’s a very hypnotic way of moving. Kate absolutely absorbed it, to the manner born.”
At the same time, and for the same reasons, she began taking dance classes, also at the Dance Centre. For over a year she studied with several tutors, attending a number of drop-in classes five days a week. The classes gave a new shape and purpose to her life; she would later talk about how much she loved travelling into central London every day, how she felt herself becoming an individual for the first time, taking control of her own life, shaping her future. Afterwards she might dive into Watkins’ occult bookshop at Cecil Court on Charing Cross Road for a root around, or head off for vocal practice.
Although dancing taught her “discipline and humility”15, she characteristically gravitated towards the visceral rather than the formal. She tried ballet but found it “very hard to get on with the people in the room.”16 She came to the conclusion that she was willing to sacrifice a degree of classical technique in order to get to the raw emotions, that “feeling of movement and freedom … like suddenly breaking through a barrier.”17
One of her key tutors in this regard was Robin Kovac, a graduate in English Literature, Dance and Drama from Florida State University. Kovac remembers Bush as “a gentle soul, a special person. I was fond of her from the beginning, I loved having her in class. You love anyone who is keen and determined and working hard. A teacher recognises someone dead keen and concentrated, [and] even at the time I thought the best of her.”
The classes at the Dance Centre attracted students of all levels. Initially, the standard of Bush’s dancing was not impressive. “I was useless,” she said. “I looked an idiot for months and I used to get very depressed because I couldn’t do it, but challenge is very important to me and I was really tough with myself.”18
She was being characteristically harsh, and applied herself unsparingly. She soaked up everything and improved rapidly, although Kovac recalls “a real beginner’s body. She came straight fresh in, and the feet have to be trained, the legs, the arms, everything has to be trained. It takes 10 years to be a good dancer. She jumped out before she was fully trained, but she was a wonderful, fluid mover.”
Kovac taught a contemporary style, with touches of jazz, heavily influenced by Martha Graham’s ‘contractions’. Anyone who has seen Bush’s early videos and live performances will immediately recognise the following description. “Contractions begin in the stomach, as if someone knifed you, and you just press back, rounding the back,” says Kovac. “It’s not that you’re getting smaller, you’re actually getting bigger in the back, like a bow, but it’s called a contraction because you’re lifting up and away from the legs. The body must flow through that, because you’ve started an impulse, spreading ripples through the body.”
It was “creative movement”, within a clear dramatic context. Kovac also taught drama at Rose Bruford College in Sidcup, not far from Welling, and her class at the Dance Centre attracted many actors. It made sense, therefore, that it was Kovac to whom Bush turned when she later needed to work out a routine for the ‘Wuthering Heights’ video at extremely short notice. Kovac charged her £30, and in her tiny flat in Archway Road they worked out the soon-to-be famous routine as Bush sang the song a cappella for her tutor.
“It was her tiny little voice and nothing else, on the spot and we worked on movements that would match what she sang,” she says. “Breaking in the window and doing the cartwheel. She didn’t say, ‘This is for a video clip that’s coming out in a short time that’s going to launch me.’ She just said I need you to choreograph [something] for me. Next thing I know she’s flashed all over television with my choreography! In an interview where she was asked who choreographed ‘Wuthering Heights’ she said she was influenced by Lindsay Kemp, which I do think is not in order. Shame on her! It wasn’t that I would have asked for more money, but I would have liked to have had the credit.”
If true, it’s a rare example of an uncharacteristic lack of good manners and scrupulous accreditation on Bush’s part. It does, however, highlight an early instance of her enduring gift for using – in the nicest possible sense – the talents of her peers and mentors. She has an eye for spotting talent, and absorbing it into her own work; nothing goes to waste. Soon after the ‘Wuthering Heights’ episode, Kovac moved to Switzerland, where she remains today, producing, directing and choreographing her own musical theatre productions. In the early Eighties, Bush learned of her sense of aggrievement and “wrote a very sweet letter” of apology; she also made a point of mentioning Kovac in a couple of major interviews around the same time. Her old tutor, Bush recalled, was a “wonderful lady”19 who “had a big influence on me. She certainly gave me that strength to develop my own style.”20 How typical of her to try to right a perceived wrong. There appears to be no lasting hard feelings. “Kate is a creative genius,” says Kovac. “I’m thrilled if I was any influence on her at all.”
The ability to harness the physical side of her creative energy was terribly significant. Perhaps no one thing about Kate Bush is as misunderstood as her dancing. Easily mocked as the physical manifestation of an apparently floaty, flighty brain, whatever its objective merits her movement has never been a mere adjunct or afterthought, nor a simple matter of routine. Certainly, it allowed her to embellish the songs in her videos and to enrich and enliven her rare public performances, but it would be a mistake to focus on the skimpy costumes, swirling arms and big, round eyes and overlook the underlying impetus.
“My father told me I used to dance to music on the telly,” she said. “I remember it vaguely. It was completely unselfconscious and I wasn’t aware of people looking at me. One day some people came into the room, saw me and laughed, and from that moment I stopped doing it. I think maybe I’ve been trying to get back there ever since.”21
Dancing, then, became a means of defeating her inhibitions, of accessing her inner emotions as a writer, of returning to a pure source. Through movement she was better able to circumnavigate her sense of self-consciousness (initially non-existent, as with most children, but which grew and became quite acute in grammar school) and fully access her feelings. “Suddenly I became a human being – just learning to move!”22
This chimes perfectly with Adam Darius’ overarching ethos. “What I teach is emotional release,” he says. “Most people, once they’re not children any more, become more and more restricted by the teachings of societies, and if you want to be an artist this is the death knell. You can’t be an artist if you can’t express fully what you feel. Kate was grateful for that philosophy of my teaching, helping her to release herself emotionally. When you get that release in one area, then you are capable of releasing it in other areas. It infiltrates whatever area they are pursuing, and Kate is a marvellous example of that.”
As Darius implies, the invigorating effects lingered and were channelled directly into her music. It is surely no coincidence that Bush’s most productive, and arguably most accomplished spells as a writer – between 1976 and 1977, and again from 1983 to 1984 – occurred during spells of intense, almost regimented dance instruction.
She was certainly writing in a torrent throughout this period, stimulated by a happy balance of all her artistic pursuits, perhaps a little lost in her own creative world, oblivious to the practical concerns of the comparatively mundane lives ticking over all around her. “I’d practise scales … on the piano, go off dancing, and then in the evening I’d come back and play the piano all night,” she recalled. “The summer of ‘76 … we had such hot weather, I had all the windows open, and I just used to write until four in the morning. I got a letter of complaint from a neighbour who was basically saying ‘shuuut uuup!’ because they had to get up at five in the morning. They did shift work and my voice had been carried the whole length of the street, I think, so they weren’t too appreciative.”23
Almost every day something would emerge, if not a fully fledged song then something. There were songs about ‘Dali’ (with one superbly Austenesque line: “‘Oh, I prefer absence,” said she, “My heart grows fonder alone’.”), songs about Rinfy the Gypsy, Joan of Arc and being stranded at the moonbase; lovely, romantic, beautiful songs, most of them containing at least a grain or two of magnificence. Dozens of the recordings she made at 44 Wickham Road are preserved on bootlegs, good quality voice-and-piano recordings, some of them early attempts at future favourites: ‘Hammer Horror’, ‘Violin’, ‘Kashka From Baghdad’, ‘Oh, To Be In Love’, ‘The Kick Inside’, its lyric based on ‘Lucy Wan’, the traditional ballad of incest and death, and a song called ‘Pick The Rare Flower’ which has most of the melody of ‘James And The Cold Gun’ but a completely different set of lyrics.
In ‘Them Heavy People’, also written at this time, she related with great candour her ongoing personal transformation, describing how her teachers entered her life at an “inconvenient time”, forcing her to stop “hiding” and instead encouraging a process of intense self-examination. After the lows of St Joseph’s here is an explicit account of her restored faith in the power of knowledge, of being shown rather than told, revelling in the gift of opportunity and acknowledging the importance of taking it.
Compared to the songs taped in 1973 there is a world of difference in the detail. The adolescent angst and cinder-smudged melancholy of yore have been overtaken by a palpable verve and spark in the writing, stronger melodic hooks, clear improvements in her voice and piano playing, and a greater sense of humour (although the initial version of ‘Hammer Horror’ didn’t yet end in that flurry of corny puns: “I’ve got a hunch” and “get your own back”). She is also learning to project fragments of her own personality into the songs, to take on roles rather than surrender into the will of the music and words.
Given the quality and quantity of the material she was, not unexpectedly, in a rush to get going. “Once I got the contract I presumed things would happen,” she said. “I didn’t go on holiday in case they called me to do some recording. But nothing happened.”24 The official line about this waiting game is that it constituted a mutually agreed strategy between EMI and the Bush camp, mainly because of her age. More likely, it was instigated by the record company, who weren’t entirely sure what they had or what to do with her. Bush herself later felt they signed her simply so nobody else would get her first, and they felt in no rush to hustle her into the studio. For a small investment they were prepared to bide their time and see what unfolded. In the event, the strategy, whether intended or not, worked to perfection.
She was undoubtedly fortunate in her long term relationship with EMI, specifically with Bob Mercer and later his successor David Munns, but they were, after all, running a multinational business, with all that that entailed. Brian Bath recalls having conversations with Bush around this time where she complained that “EMI want me to write a hit.” The idea, according to Brian Southall, was to “get her to write less but more. She was prolific, but maybe it was a case of calm it down a bit and write ten songs as opposed to 100.” She was always regarded as an albums artist and Mercer actively embraced the fact that her “songs were obviously tremendously personal and unique to her, that was what I liked and it was certainly what I encouraged,” but even before she signed a deal he was closely monitoring her progress, trying to nurture her potential into something more solid and commercial. Less air. More hooks. “I bought her taperecording equipment, a simple Grundig thing, and left it with her to come and see me every couple of months or so with whatever she’d been writing,” he says. “That’s what we did for the next year or two.”
Partly it was a question of technical ability. Unicorn’s Pat Martin recalls thinking during the 1973 session that she “wasn’t a brilliant piano player, not accomplished or anything, but she had her own style,” and Mercer claims that she later “spent quite a lot of that time, at my suggestion I must say, having formal piano lessons.” She also visited a vocal coach, Gordon Farrell, for 30 minutes each week to practise her scales, improve her breathing, stretch her range and play him her new songs. “She needed to broaden her musical scope, which would obviously benefit her writing,” says Mercer. “Her musical skills weren’t that developed at that time – her musical instincts were tremendous, but not her skills at that age. That’s what she did over that year, 18 months. And then I let her go into the studio.” The word ‘let’, in this instance, is a small but significant one.
Aside from the matter of honing her musical skills, hanging in the air was that familiar question: Who is she? Whether or not they were directly expressed, there were significant disagreements and tensions on this score. EMI saw her as a serious songwriter with a pretty face who would perform in an uncomplicated, straightforward manner. Bush, on the other hand, ever the shape-shifter, felt her musical urges came from a very ‘male’ place. “Being brought up with two brothers I’d sit philosophising with them while my girlfriends wanted to talk about clothes and food,” she said. “Maybe it’s the male energy to be the hunter and I feel I have that in me.”25
She talked often of this primal ‘hunting’ instinct, and was rather disparaging about female singers who would “sing about heartbreak and keep a big smile on their faces.”26 Specifically, she cited Lynsey DePaul and Carole King … “that lot. When I’m at the piano I hate to think that I’m a female because I automatically get a preconception. Sweet and lyrical.”27 She saw herself as doing something quite different, something that didn’t neatly fit with any preconceived notions of what a female artist should or could be. Much more David Bowie than Joni Mitchell.
Given her looks, her high voice and obvious femininity, this caused EMI a degree of consternation and indeed confusion. “She was with the record company but she was shelved, and I do remember her telling me that she was disappointed that they wanted her to be a ‘Joni Mitchell’ and sit at the piano and sing,” says Robin Kovac. “That’s why she was doing classes. She was not just going to [do] as they wanted. She was determined to get her body together to be a mover and not just a singer.”
The hiatus led her to consider her options. At one stage, she was approached by friends in her dance class with an offer to go to Germany to work in nightclubs. Unsure if the longed-for album was ever going to appear, she momentarily contemplated throwing in her lot with dance as a profession. In the end, she decided – probably correctly – that she wasn’t good enough, but she looked at other escape routes. Her ex-boyfriend Steve Blacknell had begun working for Decca as a record plugger, and he passed on her demo tape to his friend and colleague Jeremy Thomas, who had also worked at Decca and now ran his own label, Electric/Cube Records. “Steve, who either was or had been going out with Kate Bush, played me her tape, saying she was unhappy with EMI and perhaps I could sign her,” says Thomas. “I listened to the tape, thought it pretty good but, then again, it was only my friend’s girlfriend. Later, ‘Wuthering Heights’ was released and I was gutted for not having taken him – and her – more seriously.”
Above all, EMI wanted to see her perform. In fact, they insisted upon it. Selling records, of course, was still all about putting the hours in on the road. “This was an artist that I’d worked with for a couple of years and never, ever seen perform live,” says Mercer. “You’d naturally assume in those days that anybody you signed would have to be able to do a live show. I was anxious to get her out there and working her chops.” With little room for manoeuvre, for once she did as she was bid.
* * *
One of the most delicious anomalies of Kate Bush’s entire career is the short period of time she spent singing live in the pubs and clubs around London. The KT Bush Band in their initial incarnation existed as a gigging entity for only a matter of months, between April and June, 1977, and apart from Bush comprised Vic King on drums, Del Palmer on bass and Brian Bath on guitar, three old friends from Charlton Secondary School who bonded back in the late Sixties over an almost irrationally obsessive love of Free. Even today, they excitedly recall the night they witnessed the first ever performance of ‘All Right Now’.
Between four and five years older than Bush, the trio were already veterans of the south London music scene by 1976 and had played in numerous groups – both with and without one another – and experienced the industry’s standard doling out of brief highs and crushing lows. From clattering around in bedrooms and youth clubs to enduring bad record deals, good bands that petered out and promises that came to nothing, they had always retained their love of playing music.
Bath, of course, had known Paddy Bush for several years and was well aware of his little sister’s talent. She was also aware of his attributes. Aside from his frequent jam sessions with Paddy at the farm, Bush had seen Bath play with a hastily assembled band consisting of Vic King and another friend, bass player Barry Sherlock, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1976. She was there to perform at Paddy’s final year show for his course in Music Instrument Technology at the School of Furniture, which was situated just across the road, and as part of the presentation she danced to classical music “wearing some woollen type suit with a big trumpet thing coming out of her head,” recalls Bath. “You couldn’t actually see her. Paddy had some wacky ideas, he really did. He wanted us to do duelling basses with a band.”
This showpiece was an early prototype of the memorable routine later reprised during ‘Violin’ on Bush’s ‘Tour Of Life’. Indeed, although her time with the KT Bush Band proved to be her sole experience of the dubious, stale-sweat-and-watered-down-beer romance of small scale live performance, and although it was an essentially contrived exercise in which, considering she had already signed a record deal, very little was actually at stake, nonetheless a line can be drawn between what she was doing in 1977 in places like the Rose Of Lee in Lewisham and what she did almost exactly two years later to wild acclaim in the theatres of Europe.
Vic King recalls that after their “basic rock’n’roll” performance at Whitechapel, Bush came up to the band, said that she enjoyed their set, and asked whether she could sing with them. Bath remembers the approach somewhat differently, as a clear response to Bob Mercer’s diktat about the necessity for Bush to perform live. “Paddy left a note at my house with my mum, saying ‘Get in touch, something has come up,’” he says. “I phoned him up and he said, ‘I’ve got to see you, it’s about my sister. She wants to form a band because she needs the experience of playing live. Could you do it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think so!’”
One of Bath’s previous bands, Shiner, had recently split up and he decided to enlist Del and Vic and stick with a similar set: Motown, Beatles, some rockier material from the likes of Free and The Rolling Stones; songs that everybody knew and which made few demands on the audience. The first band practice was in a boiler house in the local swimming baths at Greenwich, in “a little dungeon of a rehearsal room they used to hire out,” says King. Bush arrived fully prepared, having learned the lyrics to ten songs, including ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ and ‘Sweet Soul Music’. They all enjoyed themselves but agreed that a boiler room in the public baths wasn’t necessarily conducive to locating the creative spark, so Bush suggested they relocate to the barn at the bottom of the garden at the farm. “We went up there, moved all the furniture out, swept the floors, cleaned it up and played all afternoon,” says King. Once again, the old grain store became her creative playground.
Through the late winter of 1976–77 and into spring the group rehearsed regularly at Wickham Farm, drumming up a 20-song set. Working on their music, fortified by Hannah Bush’s legendary hospitality, breaking off for games of football and as much tea and cake as they could reasonably consume, they got to know one another. King was the oldest of the male trio, socially set slightly apart (he was dubbed ‘Nosmo King’ for his aversion to cigarettes), and he became the band’s de facto organiser: buying the equipment, organising rehearsals, picking up, dropping off. He often collected Bush from her dance classes in his Hillman Imp and brought her to gigs or rehearsals. Bath was the musical dynamo, a gifted player and songwriter who had won a deal with Essex Music, one of those vastly talented musicians always just a whisker away from seizing their big chance. Many years previously he had taught his close friend Del the rudiments of 12-bar blues on the bass, and Palmer had progressed from there. A plain speaking extrovert with a lively sense of humour, Del “was naturally rhythmic, he won dancing competitions,” laughs Bath. “He used to do Mick Jagger impersonations. Del was obviously up for it. Del’s just really solid, you know there’s a bass player there when Del’s playing, he’s got such a heavy anchor point. A tremendous player, he can really hold it down.”
The 18-year-old Bush made an immediate impression on her new bandmates. “She stood out from other girls, she was different,” says King. “Not overtly sexual, [but] there was something about her. Shy as shy can be, wouldn’t say boo to a goose. She just wanted to sing and play without all the trappings.” Palmer, meanwhile, later recalled that he fell for her almost immediately.
None of them, perhaps with the exception of Bath, realised initially how deep her involvement with EMI went. It was not a frequent topic of discussion. “It didn’t come out at first, it came out later that she had been paid some money to stay at home and write,” says King. “We didn’t have to pay for anything at the time, I remember that. The petrol was all paid for.”
They rehearsed, according to Bath, for “ages”. In common with most fledgling bands, they argued most vociferously over what to call themselves. Bush wanted to give the band “some strange name”, and when King came up with the KT Bush Band she shrieked, ‘Ooh no, that’s terrible!’ But that’s what it became. Her opposition may have been simple diversionary tactics. There was a certain reluctance on her part to leave the age-old sanctuary of the barn and surrender herself to her first ever taste of live performance, but finally Bath used his contacts to organise a residency at the Rose Of Lee, a popular local pub at 162 Lee High Road in Lewisham*, beginning in April 1977.
“I went down and said we were getting a new band together, we’ve got a fabulous looking girl singer, we’d got a really strong band,” says Bath. “I said the first week you’ll get a handful of people, but by the fourth week you won’t be able to get them in the door. And sure enough, it was exactly as I predicted.” Around 20 people turned up to watch the first Tuesday night gig, split into two 45-minute sets, for which the band were paid the princely sum of £27. “I was so scared, I really was,” Bush later recalled of her live debut.28 “The first time was a little bit daunting [for her], but it got to be great fun,” says King. “The following week you couldn’t move – and then the week after that you couldn’t get in. It was just heaving. It was great!”
The KT Bush Band very quickly became a success on its own terms, and their nights at the Rose Of Lee were highly anticipated by both the crowd and the rest of the group, if not necessarily by Bush. Bath tended to handle most of the talking and general audience interaction, traditionally the role of a band’s lead singer. Bush – mostly just standing and singing, without the natural defence of a piano and keyboard – was reluctant to communicate directly to the crowd. “She was very nervous,” says King. “Sometimes you had to push her on there, but once she was on she was fine. Singing in these smoke-filled rooms … wasn’t really her scene, she didn’t really frequent pubs. I don’t think it was 100 per cent enjoyable, but she wanted to do it because she had to learn stage presence and projecting and playing in front of a band of musicians.”
There’s little doubt that if Bush had been willing to perform earlier she would have found a more direct route to a record contract, though at what price creatively it’s hard to say. Although King says he envisaged the KT Bush Band progressing along the lines of a group like The Pretenders, more straight ahead and rocky, with less emphasis on the arty angle, even in 1977 they stood out. At the time pub-rock was all the rage, its foundations laid deep in US roots music – blues, folk-rock, country, R&B – and a set of aesthetic values that stopped at jeans and plaid shirts. The emphasis was on raw energy and accomplished – solid as opposed to flashy – musicianship over anything so presumptuous as a performance or spectacle. In this landscape, the KT Bush Band was a strange beast indeed.
Bush’s involvement brought an extra tantalising twist to standard pub fare. Her innate Englishness made everything from across the Atlantic change hue rather charmingly. They even tried to turn ‘Nutbush City Limits’ into ‘Kate Bush City Limits’ but it “didn’t quite work!” According to King, “We had this strange little way of playing and performing. The vocals were very high, she was very young and the strength of the vocal wasn’t quite there, but people’s eyes were popping because she used to wear very flimsy, floaty dresses, rather than jeans and a T-shirt. It was something south-east London hadn’t seen, especially the Rose Of Lee.”
As word spread and the gigs at the Rose Of Lee and other venues like the Royal Albert in New Cross Road became more successful, they began to feel energised by the group’s progress. Although for Bush the experience was ultimately just about “doing [some] thing so my time would be full”29 while she waited for the moment of ignition, along with her bandmates she took it seriously and invested considerable reserves of time, energy and emotion into it.
“We formed very strong links between us all,” she recalled.30 It was like an extended family, “a good, kind of chummy thing”, according to Brian Bath, and everyone mucked in. Lisa Bowyer and her boyfriend Rob became unofficial roadies; Rob worked for a printing firm and offered the services of his van for shifting equipment and personnel. Paddy helped out with the lights and would drop in on guitar and mandolin. Del and Brian cooked up some hand-drawn posters for gigs and had T-shirts printed with the KT Bush Band daubed on the front – the singer, sadly, wouldn’t wear one – while King splashed the group’s name across his kick drum. In honour of Bush’s great love of The Muppet Show, he was tentatively nicknamed ‘Animal’.
Rather quickly, Bush’s natural urge to push the envelope and her burgeoning notions about performance – which were being fed daily by her sessions at the Dance Centre – began to rise to the fore. They had rehearsed her song ‘James And The Cold Gun’ right from the beginning, and it was so cold in the barn that sometimes they would decamp to the front room at Wickham Farm, putting the drums on the hearth rug and playing with acoustic guitars. Because there was a piano in the room, they started rehearsing more Bush originals, and the band of seasoned semi-pros was given a direct insight into her astonishing gift.
“Kate used to write a lot each week and come up with these ideas and bounce them off you,” says King. “I don’t know how many songs she had for the first album that weren’t used. [I remember] some strange song about ‘tick tock the clock …’ She had a unique style of writing and composing music. Books, stories, films – she loved The Red Shoes – it was that world of art and portraying characters, detectives with trilby hats and old raincoats, old Forties and Fifties films. It became something to write about. From our point of view, it was just chords and rhythms and beats.”
Del Palmer, meanwhile, was also impressed and intrigued. “The songs always started off in a way I found instantly familiar, but then suddenly they’d leap off somewhere completely different and I’d think, ‘How could you possibly think of going to there from where you were originally?’” he said. “I would never have thought of doing that, and yet it always works! … I’ve never had any desire to work with anyone else since.”31
There was no shortage of material, but only the songs that most obviously lent themselves to the standard band format – and the ones that stood the most chance of being easily digested by a pub crowd – made it into the set. The strange beauty of ‘Them Heavy People’, ‘James And The Cold Gun’ and ‘The Saxophone Song’ insinuated themselves into the cracks between Marvin Gaye and the Stones. On these songs, Bush would bring her plastic portable keyboard to the front of the stage and add her piano playing to the band; her own songs somehow seemed to require her direct musical participation where ‘Honky Tonk Women’ did not.
On other numbers, she started putting into practice some of the things she was learning through Lindsay Kemp, Adam Darius and her teachers at the Dance Centre. ‘James And The Cold Gun’ in particular became a showpiece, complete with fake gun. “Rob got a dry ice machine from somewhere,” says Bath. “We used that onstage for ‘James And The Cold Gun’ and it looked great. We had a bit of a show going! Kate did a costume change, she’d put on a bloomin’ Western cowgirl dress for the second set! The theatrical thing was starting to get there. She wasn’t shy onstage. She would move around, she didn’t stand there like a prop. She was pretty dynamic, she used to live it all.” Del Palmer recalls that “she was just brilliant, she used to wear this big long white robe with coloured ribbons on or a long black dress with big flowers in her hair. She did the whole thing with the gun and [the audience] just loved it. She’d go around shooting people.”32
As the band’s circle grew wider, they began amassing more equipment, a bigger PA system, and signed a contract with Len Fletcher’s South Eastern Entertainment Agency to play nightclubs at £60 a show. “Once they came to see us they were just ringing up all the time,” says King. “We did build up a following, especially in the London scene. It was great driving around and seeing our posters on the hoardings.” At Tiffanys in Harlow they played a Sunday afternoon cabaret spot in a restaurant where fake palm trees gazed back at them forlornly and faded photographs of distant beaches adorned the walls. They were asked back but declined. If they were playing places like the Target in Greenford, west London, on the way home they would park Vic King’s Hillman Imp and Bath’s Morris 1000 van and stop off at Mike’s Diner, an all-night eatery in New Burlington Street, off Regent Street. Over 4 a.m. omelettes and cups of tea and strong coffee, they would dissect the night’s gig and discuss plans for the next day: Shall we meet tomorrow at the farm? Does Kate have any new songs?
Aside from meeting to play and rehearse, there wasn’t a huge amount of this kind of social interaction. They would sometimes pop around to Bush HQ in Wickham Road for a plate of spaghetti and a pow-wow, but she retained a customary detachment between the band’s life and her own existence. “She liked to turn up, hide as much as possible, hide again and then go home,” says King. “She didn’t really drink, she might have had a glass of wine but when we were doing the gigs I don’t remember any of that. She didn’t really like to hang around and talk to lots of people. She had her little entourage, always secluded. Lisa and Rob, Jay or Paddy, her parents came along to the gigs sometimes. She didn’t have a boyfriend that I knew of. I think she might have been seeing a few people, but nothing serious.”
That was to change when she and Del Palmer became an item. Neither of them, it seems likely, were initially aware that this was going to be a long lasting attachment. “I felt Kate was more dedicated to singing and writing, to being on her own, rather than being attached to someone,” says Vic King, bearing out Bush’s earlier feelings about settling down too early. Palmer, however, was to become one of the key figures in her life story. Their romantic relationship would last 15 years, and their working relationship still thrives today.
Palmer recalls feeling an instant attraction from the very first rehearsal at Greenwich Baths. “I felt a little nervous because, you know, I felt a particular emotional involvement coming on right from the word go,” he later said.33 “Kate used to travel with Vic in the Hillman Imp and I used to travel with Brian and we’d follow along and I used to sit in the van raging because I was so envious of Vic that she was travelling with him.”34 When he began hearing her compositions these feelings only intensified. In some deeply subconscious way his love of her work and the woman were bound together. “It was a phenomenon because it was so completely different from what anyone else was doing,” he said. “I knew I just had to get involved in some way because this was going to be mega.”35
The initial steps of their pas de deux are long forgotten, but Brian Bath and Vic King recall two separate moments of ignition. “We played a nightclub in Lewisham, the Black Cat or something like that, and [afterwards] we were all talking,” says King. “Then they started talking a bit more between themselves than me and Brian. We assumed something might be happening, and obviously at the next gig something was happening.”
“After a couple of times at the farm you could see there was something going on between Kate and Del,” says Bath. “Really quickly they just ran at each other and that was it, they were off – during one of the rehearsals, I think. I thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s going to be trouble here!’ She was just a member of the band, and this was the first time we’d ever had a woman in the band, but it worked out OK. We all got on with each other.”
She was 18, he was 24, born on November 3, 1952. When he moved into her flat on Wickham Road later in 1977 it was “all a bit hush-hush and keep-it-careful,” says Bath. Charlie Morgan, who had played with Del in one of their previous bands, Conkers, and later drummed for Bush, recalls that the prospect of another male entering the tight-knit Bush circle wasn’t necessarily welcomed by all the family. “I think there was a bit of friction between Del and John,” he says.
Palmer’s influence, however, was unquestionably good for her, both personally and professionally. Talented as Bush undoubtedly was, there was a tendency towards a blanket acceptance of everything she did as being outstanding, particularly when it came to her family’s views. Even her mother occasionally made interjections on Bush’s behalf if she felt her daughter’s interests weren’t being represented as well as they might be. “I do remember Kate coming to me after we’d mixed ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ [in 1975] and saying that her mum didn’t think the strings were loud enough!” says Andrew Powell. “And I said, ‘Mmm, OK, but I think it’s all right.’ If I thought they weren’t loud enough I would have turned them up.”
Charlie Morgan recalls another time, shortly after The Kick Inside, when “everything that she did was just amazing according to the family and everyone around her: ‘Kate, that’s incredible!’ We were listening to these [new] songs and everyone was going, ‘Oh, that’s great! That’s got to be on the album! That’s fantastic!’ But nobody writes fantastic songs all the time, and a couple of times I said, ‘You know, that one’s not as good as that one.’ I got these horrified looks from the family, that I’d dared to imply that one of Kate’s songs was substandard. I was just trying to be pragmatic and as objective as possible. I think Del was able to cut through some of that adoration factor … and say, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s the best thing you’ve ever done. You’ve got better in you.’”
This would sometimes result in a butting of heads. “I don’t like hearing very truthful things about myself,” Bush admitted. “I get really indignant, I put a lot of defences up, and I can be stubborn.”36 The fact that Del remains her engineer and sounding board today, long after the end of their personal involvement, suggests that unlike many at the higher echelons of rock and pop she has learned the value of hearing the unvarnished truth on occasion, no matter how unpleasant it may be. She can also be severely self-critical.
Like her best friend Lisa, Palmer was another of those funny, no-nonsense extroverts who took the lead socially, whose behaviour allowed Bush, to a certain extent, to take the back seat in public situations. A working-class south Londoner with few airs and graces, he was able to balance the more serious, academic and ‘arty’ side of her family’s input with a more grounded, pragmatic route to creativity. “Well, Del swears a lot,” laughs Bath. “Del just knocks it right down to the basics, he’s very blunt with it. He can bring it down to normality, but at the same time it could bring the whole thing down. It can get on your nerves, but he does push it down to reality, which is a good thing, a good attribute for a bass player. He’s an anchor point all the way across.”
From the outside, it looked like an odd pairing. With his passion for motor racing and fast cars – Hugh Padgham, the producer who worked with Bush on The Dreaming, recalls, “My friend several years later sold Del a Ferrari S40, a pretty happening car, and he crashed it on the way home” – there were certainly those who always found Bush’s relationship with Palmer a little perplexing, and who were not immune to pondering aloud what exactly it was she saw in a man who would talk excitedly about 4 × 4 cars while wearing a double-breasted suit and sporting a lavish moustache. Everyone agreed he was a nice guy, but he didn’t particularly seem her type.
In fact, as much as Bush has ever had a ‘sort’, Del seemed to fit the bill. From as far back as her earliest romances she has preferred older men – “I don’t think I could find a younger man attractive,” she once said37 – from backgrounds often very different to her own. Even their names give off a solid, no-nonsense ring: Steve, Al, Del. Her current partner and the father of her son, Danny McIntosh, falls into a similar category. Direct, grounded, supportive but unafraid to offer criticism of her work.
“Danny and Del – they’re both very down to earth,” says Stewart Avon Arnold. “I think she needs that. I call her a space child – if she was with someone who was similar to her I think they’d be on another planet by now, mentally. I think Del and [now] Danny ground her, in a sense. Like all couples it works if there’s the right combination of energies. It does seem to work for Kate, because she went out with Del for many years, and he is the kind of person that calls a spade a spade. Del was a normal cockney guy, very talented musician, and also very funny, a right laugh. And Danny is very similar, in a sense. Very down to earth. A fantastic musician, but not a Keith Moon type character, let’s put it that way. He’s very organised!”
* * *
The KT Bush Band’s reign of glory lasted for a grand total of 20 gigs. Their last few engagements were, at least, memorable. On Friday June 3, 1977, they played the Half Moon in Putney, a well established music venue, on the eve of the England v. Scotland football international which ended, famously, in the victorious Scotland fans rampaging over the Wembley turf and breaking the goals. “They were mad, they were just mad,” said Bush, recalling a night that may well have put her off performing for good. “They had flags waving everywhere, and no one could see the stage because all the guys were getting up on the stage and putting their arms around you!”38
“Oh, it was a riot!” remembers Bath. “They were getting up onstage, some guy was all over Kate. I’m not a hard nut, but I went over and pushed him out of the way, off the stage area. Del didn’t do anything! It was mental, but we got through it. We did OK.” The following Monday, June 6, they were at The Ship in Brighton, a “lager-drinking pub [which] wanted something completely different to us,” says King. “After an hour we were asked to stop.”
And stop they did. EMI were finally calling their terribly patient prodigy into the ring. Brian Southall was the first representative of the record company to see the band, and he had come away convinced that she was ready for active service. “I went to some pub in Lewisham and I remember having a long conversation with her mum, who kept giving me sausages,” he says. “Lovely lady. Mad, eccentric Irish woman. I left the pub and drove with some excitement – we’re talking midnight, 1 a.m. – straight to the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington where we were having a reception for The Shadows, to tell my boss Bob Mercer and other colleagues that I had just seen a little magic moment.”
Mercer and Andrew Powell later ventured to south London to check up on Bush’s progress and the former, at least, seemed to concur with Southall’s verdict. (Powell was less than impressed. “It’s what people do early on in their careers,” he shrugs. “Stockhausen spent his early years playing piano for a conjurer.”) Mercer was happy with her ability to cut the mustard, even if he already sensed a reticence, something held back. “Those gigs were great, just great,” he says. “I always wanted her to do an album of covers, and the main reason for that was having seen her do some covers in her show and realising how good her voice was just as a performer, away from her material. [But] she was never that comfortable. You always knew that she was ‘performing’ the performance, if you know what I mean. Other artists you’d see bound on to the stage and everything took over. She didn’t have the obvious enjoyment of it.”
Bush was scheduled to go into the studio in July 1977. As her career snapped out of the leisurely camaraderie of playing pubs and suddenly became serious again, there was a lingering sense, however unfair, that she was simply a little rich girl merely ‘playing’ at being in a noisy rock group. This was bound to create a degree of resentment and confusion among some of her bandmates as things wound down.
Vic King claims that there was an expectation that they would play on The Kick Inside. They had made four-track recordings at De Wolfe studios in Wardour Street which King calls “the pre-demo of the first album: ‘Them Heavy People’, ‘James And The Cold Gun’…. One day she had a really terrible cold, she’s done better things than that, but it was to hear her songs and her voice maturing so they could be taken to whoever was producing the first album with a view to orchestration and ideas for the final album.” In this respect, at least, the session was a success. The arrangement of ‘James And The Cold Gun’ used on The Kick Inside – where the tempo is reduced to half pace at the end and comes out with a guitar solo – was King’s idea and was first used at KT Bush Band gigs. “Being her band [on the first album] was mentioned, but then they started getting session guys in,” he says. “Bye bye band! Word came across: ‘I’ve got to go into the studio and I’m sorry to say they are going to get session musicians in. I have tried to fight it, but they insist.’”
Colin Lloyd-Tucker, who later befriended Bush and Paddy and collaborated extensively with them both, was working at De Wolfe studios at this time and recalls the session was booked by EMI, so perhaps there was some discussion of the possibility of her band playing on the album. Brian Bath, however, recalls being made clear about the limited life span of the enterprise from the very start. “I think her dad said at the beginning, because he had a lot to do with things, that this is not going to go on forever,” he says. “It’s probably going to last a few months. I don’t think there was [any talk of us doing the album] because that process had already begun. But what a shame. It was a really good band.”
It’s probable that Bush would indeed have preferred to use her band on The Kick Inside, given that she lobbied hard for them to appear on the follow-up, Lionheart, and kept them on board for promotional duties after the album’s release. There was also the fact that her boyfriend was the bass player. At the time, however, she lacked the power to call those kinds of shots.
Other issues left a less than sweet aftertaste. Aside from the studio recordings, many of the band’s gigs were filmed, taped and photographed, but almost none of this material has ever come to light. According to Brian Bath, an attempt to release a single of the KT Bush Band’s “really good” version of Johnny Winter’s ‘Shame Shame Shame’, which they had cut at Graphic Sound studios in Catford during a recording session designed to capture some of the highlights of their live set rather than Bush originals, was later halted because “there was some opposition about it.” He may be being diplomatic. “Everything had to be confiscated – ‘or else’, I think the phrase was,” says Vic King. “They were all confiscated and disappeared. I was told at the time that nothing else could be put out, they didn’t want anything ruining her impact. Whether it was EMI or the family, word got around. I think Del said to Brian that if anyone has anything hiding they’re not able to use it for profit or gain. ‘If you’ve got anything could you hand it back.’”
Bush wasn’t at all keen on her earliest experiments in live performance being unearthed and held up to the world, although she was in no way dismissive of the band members themselves or their contributions. In an expanded incarnation the band would go on to play a significant part in her early career, she made sure of that. For now, however, the focus shifted to the studio. At last, it was time.