THE quality of Bush’s first two records and the vast stockpile she had amassed of songs in a similar style suggest that she could have gone on making albums like The Kick Inside and Lionheart indefinitely. That idea, however, held no appeal. These were works on which she essentially felt she only shared authorship; almost as though the words were hers but the pictures belonged to somebody else. “I don’t really think that Lionheart expressed the true phase I was in at the time, whereas all the others have,” she later reflected. “[It] could have been a lot better.”1
The first two albums are collections of – often exceptional – group performances, the sound in the room rendered more or less faithfully. She longed to move away from this method of aural documentary and develop a more stylistically adventurous approach. Over the course of a three-year period of almost continuous recording, resulting in a final, conclusive creative breakthrough, she began to see and hear her music in dramatically altered ways, while gradually wresting control of the technology that would finally allow her albums to keep pace with her vision. Never For Ever edged towards a more experimental sonic palette, flirting with the idea of using the studio as an instrument; The Dreaming completed the transformation. She was no longer simply pointing a camera towards her subject. Now, she was becoming an auteur.
Following a short period of post-tour decompression, by August she was peering back through the lens. Bush entered Abbey Road’s Studio Three with Jon Kelly to mix the tapes from the Hammersmith Odeon show and select four tracks – ‘Them Heavy People’ as the lead, backed with ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’, ‘James And The Cold Gun’ and ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’ – for the On Stage EP, released on September 3. But that was old news. Already, she had her eyes fixed on the horizon. “I haven’t really begun yet,” she said during the mixing sessions for the EP. “I’ve begun on one level, but that’s all gone now so you begin again …”2
You begin again. She was as good as her word. From Abbey Road, the sessions spilled almost seamlessly into AIR studios and she found herself starting work on a new album with a new set of rules and goals. Most significantly, her relationship with Andrew Powell had, amicably, run its course. “I think she just wanted to move on,” says Powell. “She wanted to be in control, really, of the whole shooting match, pretty much like the live show.”
Yet this was to be a relatively benign, perhaps even tentative autocracy. Never For Ever is a fascinating record, divided as it is almost exactly down the middle, torn between capturing where Bush had been and where she was heading. The musicians, production set-up, studios, song choices and even the chronology of the record captured this dichotomy precisely. Never For Ever mixes players from her own live band with those who had performed on her first two albums and features old songs alongside some stunning, pioneering new compositions; the sessions even started at the end of one decade and spilled over into a new one. It was, in all senses, a record created on a cusp.
Alan Murphy and Brian Bath shared duties on guitar; Del Palmer played the majority of the bass (Bush had also asked David Paton to contribute but he was pre-booked on another album session) and Preston Heyman most of the drums. Ian Bairnson popped in to add vocals. Paddy was there, as ever, strumming, plucking and crooning, alongside newcomer Max Middleton, the highly regarded keyboard player who had been in the Jeff Beck Group and on the landmark Blow By Blow album. He arrived as something of a sceptic. “I’d thought ‘Wuthering Heights’ was a bit gimmicky and thought, ‘She won’t last long,’” he says. “But the more I worked with her and listened to her lyrics, the more I thought she was very clever and wrote lovely melodies. I got more and more impressed, every track was so different and had something [special] about it. That combination of talent and being a lovely person is rare, but [that’s] not to say she’s not eccentric.”
Middleton had been recommended by Jon Kelly who, as a kindred spirit and a trusted pair of hands technically, had been retained by Bush as co-producer. “She had control then, she could pick and choose, and lucky for me she asked me to work for her,” says Kelly. “The past didn’t haunt her or anything, but I remember her saying, ‘Now we – she would always say ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ – have control of what we do’. We played them for days, some of these songs, but under no pressure. We just played them for the joy of playing and seeing where they developed. I just remember it being such a creative time.”
Nonetheless – or perhaps understandably – the album took some time to find its feet. Bush was creatively spent after the tour and she initially struggled to compose. At AIR she started off with the songs that were already written. On ‘Violin’ she wanted to capture some of the residual energy from the tour and bring it into the room, stripping the sound down to two electric guitars, bass and drums, with Kevin Burke’s fiddle weaving in and out of the arrangement. It featured one of her most extraordinarily gone vocals, and while in the studio she lived out every word. “When she sang it it was like she was performing it onstage,” says Middleton. “In the sound box she didn’t just stand there and sing, it was 200 per cent effort every time, really like a performance. I was very impressed with the way she went about doing those things.”
‘Egypt’ travelled from stage to studio less successfully, losing a little of its snap en route. An opaque, opiatic erotic reverie in which the “Land of the Pharaohs” takes on the characteristics of the female body, the complex time signature tied everyone in knots. “It was in 9/8, or 11/9 or something, and nobody could play it,” says Brian Bath. “Nobody!” The methodology at AIR was much the same as on her previous records. Bush would play the song to the band and then everyone would follow her. Even a track like ‘Egypt’, serpentine as a sidewinder, was recorded live in the room with any additions – Bush’s vocals, Middleton’s mini-moog – overdubbed afterwards. Without Andrew Powell calling the shots, and with an artist as self-critical and insistent on emotional veracity as Bush, such an approach tended to be highly labour intensive.
“She would do lots and lots of takes and I could never understand why, that was a little difficult for me,” says Middleton. “It sounded good in the end, but normally with other musicians we’d do it again because it was too fast or slow or you’re playing the wrong chord – something very definite – but she was looking for something a little bit nebulous that was hard to pinpoint: the atmosphere or the feeling of the song. She always knew what she wanted, but she’d just say, ‘Let’s do it again,’ and you’d think, ‘I wonder why?’ We didn’t talk about the content of the songs, I don’t think she was into dissecting music too much, I think she wanted it to come together naturally. She wasn’t doing it again out of sheer belligerence, she was looking for something.”
‘Blow Away (For Bill)’ was a whimsical but unengaging tribute to Bill Duffield, a creaky conceit about rock stars congregating in some backstage holding area twixt life and death. Aside from Buddy Holly the musicians she mentioned were all recently deceased: Marc Bolan died in 1977, Keith Moon and Sandy Denny in 1978, Sid Vicious in early 1979, while the inclusion of Minnie Riperton dates the writing of the song to no earlier than July 12, 1979, the day Riperton died, and no later than November 18, 1979, when Bush performed it live at the Albert Hall during the concert for the LSO. Riperton is an unusual inclusion in a song otherwise dedicated to rock legends, but Bush may have felt a particular affinity with a woman whose songs – particularly the huge 1975 hit, ‘Lovin’ You’ – were also notable, and often derided, for the extraordinary high pitch of the vocal.
‘Blow Away (For Bill)’ was a banal song, the weakest on the record. ‘The Wedding List’, by contrast, was the standout track of the early session. Another mini-movie, another four-minute psychodrama, it told the story of a bride whose husband was murdered just after their wedding – “You’ve made a wake out of our honeymoon” – and who then wreaked vengeance on his killer. Loosely inspired by Truffaut’s 1968 movie The Bride Wore Black, in which a grieving widow embarks on a killing spree, hunting down the five men she blames for her husband’s death, the song was loaded with highly charged imagery. Like the stage version of ‘James And The Cold Gun’ it made explicit the link between guns – a recurring Bush fascination, objects she describes as “fantastic, beautiful”3 when detached from their deadly purpose – and sex, mixing the language of violence with the language of lust. In the song, hunter and hunted “come together” in the same room, and when the drama is played out she rolls him over “the butt of my gun.”
It’s a fabulous song with a lovely dramatic pause, a little sigh, where Paddy’s harmonica wail drops in, and from the punning title on down it’s filled with an irresistible black humour which spilled over into the recording. “She wanted me to sing with her at the end so we went in and I was in hysterics, I just could not stop,” says Bath. “In the end she said, ‘Brian, you’ve got to stop laughing, we’ve got to do this now.’ I had to really pull myself together. She had the most incredible sense of humour. We used to be in hysterics, rolling on the floor, we were having such a good time.”
Completed studio mixes of these songs – minus orchestral overdubs – were ready by late autumn, and they formed the backbone of a 45-minute Christmas television special Bush recorded for the BBC. Kate featured ‘Violin’, ‘The Wedding List’, ‘Egypt’, as well as the ‘Ran Tan Waltz’ – a relative throwaway which, musically, sounds like a dry run for ‘Army Dreamers’; the 3/4 time signature is the same and the instrumentation very similar – and ‘December Will Be Magic Again’, a sweetly evocative seasonal song released as a Christmas single in 1980, with a fine original picture sleeve by Nick Price.
The television special was an odd construct. Clearly intended to mark a progression from the tour, it’s likely that, embroiled as she was in the early stages of Never For Ever, Bush was never quite able to give it the time and devotion it required. Stewart Avon Arnold, again paired with Gary Hurst as one of Bush’s dance partners, can’t remember a single thing about making it. Kate ended up as more of a scrawled footnote to the ‘Tour Of Life’ than a next chapter.
Broadcast on December 28, the show featured revised versions of ‘Them Heavy People’, ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, ‘Symphony In Blue’ and ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’, as well as the new material. A mixture of pre-filmed sequences, dramatic in-studio setpieces and a handful of straight, at-the-piano musical performances, some of the footage, admittedly, was marvellous. ‘The Wedding List’ was a highlight, a crazed Bush in bridal white gunning down cheroot-smoking double-dealer Paddy.
Much of the rest, however, ended up looking cheap and rather silly. The routine for ‘Egypt’ almost begged to be mercilessly parodied: it’s the Turkish Delight advert with a social conscience, a future French & Saunders routine in the making. Bush, in a billowing pink number with a black band across her face, drifted in front of a rather over-literal backdrop of stock film showing pyramids and camels, intercut with grittier scenes of poverty and squalor, awkwardly underscoring the distance between illusion and reality. ‘Them Heavy People’ was a diluted version of the tour routine, while the choreography for ‘Ran Tan Waltz’ was plain bizarre.
Still, it’s worth watching for two unforgettable, never-to-be-repeated moments. Bush sang ‘Another Day’, Roy Harper’s beautiful song of domestic fracture, as a moving duet with Peter Gabriel (heralded, inevitably, as the “Angel Gabriel”), who later reappeared to perform an equally stunning solo version of his own ‘Lost In The Flood’, which rather stole the show. Again, Bush said nothing to the audience throughout. This time, however, the suspension of disbelief was a little harder to hold.
* * *
The new decade brought a new perspective, a new studio, and some landmark new compositions. “EMI had asked us to record four songs, I think, before Christmas,” says Kelly. “Then we agreed between us that she should write some more, because these four songs were still from the early Kate Bush Songbook. So she went off and wrote some new songs. I can remember going to her flat just after Christmas and she played me ‘Babooshka’.”
‘Babooshka’ was loosely inspired by the folk song ‘Sovay’, in which a young woman dresses up as a highwayman and robs her lover in order to find out whether he will hand over the gold love ring she gave to him. Even threatened with his life he refuses to part with it, and Sovay thus feels certain of his devotion. In Bush’s song, the conclusion is less upbeat. An older woman tests her husband’s faith by tempting him with scented letters and finally dressing up as a younger version of herself to meet him in the flesh, “incognito”, and he succumbs. The title, borrowing and misspelling the Russian word for grandmother, also brought to mind Matryoshka dolls, or Russian dolls, often incorrectly known as ‘Babushka dolls’. Bush claims the title came to her out of the ether, but the notion of an older figure hiding a series of other, younger figures within herself seems peculiarly apt for these ruminations on age, trust and sexual identity.
There are in existence two early demo versions of one of Bush’s best known singles, dating from late 1979. The first and earliest features ‘Babooshka’ in its raw infancy, just her piano and voice with a single harmony vocal overdubbed on the title phrase. It’s a wonderful two minutes of music, beginning with a great bluesy flourish, the piano reminiscent of the opening passage of Bob Dylan’s ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’, and even a jarring bum note on the keyboard can’t dull its obvious ebullience. On a later demo she had added – significantly, for rhythm was becoming an essential part of her writing process – a simple electronic drum pattern, while the song’s signature keyboard motif was now present. The vocal harmonies became more complex, and the listener can hear what she’s trying to do with the song and where it’s heading. It’s a fascinating insight into how advanced these songs were before they even arrived in the studio, a vital link between how they began and what they would later become.
Jon Kelly recognised a hit single from the very start. “It had such a rising chorus and such an impact,” he says. “She had that little piano riff right from the beginning, that little motif, so it had all these ingredients. I thought it was great and would be a single, which of course damned it! It had a little bit of a stigma attached to it throughout the recording. Kate had realised that it was going towards being a single and was thinking, ‘Oh God! Promotion, release, press, charts, Top Of The Pops,’ and thinking that’s not where she wanted to go. She wanted to go towards making proper albums.”
Despite the fact that it was finished before it came anywhere near the studio, it was not necessarily an easy song to capture as the album sessions moved into EMI’s famous Studio Two at Abbey Road in January 1980. “When we did things like ‘Babooshka’ we were in there for days,” says Brian Bath. “We played ‘Babooshka’ for three days non-stop and I think there were about 12 bass players, they were just coming and going: ‘It’s not working out, we’ll get someone else.’”
Bath is exaggerating for effect, but the second part of the Never For Ever sessions marked the beginning of Bush’s habit of ‘casting’ for parts, selecting musicians solely for specific tracks, picking and choosing according to a song’s needs and the strength and style of each player. As the notion of having a studio band began to evaporate, even Del wasn’t immune. On two tracks, ‘Babooshka’ and ‘Breathing’, the rhythm section of John Giblin – a highly regarded session man with a distinctive fretless bass sound who had been recommended by both David Paton and Peter Gabriel – and Bush’s old friend Stuart Elliott was preferred to Del and Preston Heyman. Bush felt the songs needed a different approach, a lighter touch. Egos were sometimes bruised, albeit temporarily.
“I remember this voice coming over from the control room: ‘Brian, could you come into the control room a moment?’” Bath recalls. “I got there and she said, ‘Brian, it’s not really working out, maybe you should sit this one out.’ ‘Oh, OK then.’ Then all of a sudden the intercom goes and Preston is asked to sit out, too. Preston said, ‘I’ve never been taken off a session in my life!’ There were a lot of shocks all round. When we were doing ‘Babooshka’ Del was taken off. I couldn’t believe it. He was a bit … Del swears a lot. That’s what he’s like, Del. He’s so funny, so straight with it. He does speak his mind!” Despite such unflinching decisions, Abbey Road was a bustling, happy, highly creative environment. Friends and family, including Roy Harper, Peter Gabriel and Keith MacMillan, dropped in most evenings to listen, watch and hang out, and Bush would scamper around making everyone cups of tea.
As the sessions progressed, she became more and more alive to the possibilities offered through new technology. In particular, she fell head over heels for the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument (CMI), a digital sampling synthesiser designed by two Australians, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, in 1979. It was a bulky, clunky brute of a thing, a mainframe computer with an eight-inch floppy disc drive whirring away noisily, a green-screen monitor and a touch-sensitive keyboard attached. By today’s standards the sounds were astonishingly lo-fi and crunchy and the set-up a little crude, but musically it was a glimpse of the future, the first stirrings of the digital age we now all inhabit.
The Fairlight enabled musicians to sample short sounds and play them back at different frequencies, either direct from the keyboard or by programming a sequence of notes. You could record anything – a cough, a broken twig – or use some of the machine’s library of preset samples – a cello, a violin, or the infamous Orch5, a fragment of Stravinsky’s Firebird, which became perhaps the most over-used sound in early days of digital samples – and hear the whole synthesiser ‘become’ that sound. It was musical animation. A given today, a revolution 30 years ago.
There were only three Fairlights in the UK at the time. Peter Gabriel had formed a company with a relative, Steve Payne, called Syco Systems which was involved in importing electronic instruments to Britain; he, almost inevitably, had his own machine. Syco owned the other two, one of which they loaned to Richard Burgess and John Walters of electronic group Landscape (best known for their 1981 hit ‘Einstein A Go-Go’) on the understanding that they would demonstrate the Fairlight to potentially interested parties on Syco’s behalf.
Bush learned about the instrument through Gabriel and, immediately intrigued, requested a demonstration. In the end Walters and Burgess loaded the ungainly instrument into the back of Burgess’ old BMW and brought it – shaken but still working – into Abbey Road on four separate occasions, whereupon the ensemble set about adding a variety of textures to the existing tracks. On ‘Army Dreamers’ they sampled Jay cocking several guns and rifles from his weapons arsenal and then played the results back on the Fairlight keyboard, adding a menacing percussive snap to the song. Much time was spent sampling voices on ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’: the breathy ‘usss’ is a sample on the Fairlight, as is the opening and closing doors on ‘All We Ever Look For’. It was a wholly democratic adventure. Everyone took turns.
“What I liked was her and Jon Kelly’s willingness to try anything and go down blind alleys without any limitations,” recalls Richard Burgess. “At the same time she was decisive and helpful with directions.” Burgess, a drummer by trade who moved successfully into production, would tend to play the more rhythmic parts; synth whizz Duncan MacKay handled most of the string and clarinet parts on the keyboard, while Bush added her own contributions. The Fairlight was not, says Burgess, particularly “player or user friendly”, so it was a case of trial, error and enormously enjoyable experimentation.
“We spent a lot of time in the studio control room with Kate and Jon Kelly trying it out on pretty well every track,” says John Walters. “We created a huge mess in Abbey Road Studio Two, smashing glasses and sampling them, recording and saving the best-sounding noises as digital files in the Fairlight’s memory. We then played them back over ‘Babooshka’ from the keyboard. Listen to the very end: that’s Richard playing a slow ‘arpeggio’ of smashing glass from the Fairlight keyboard. The whole experience was inspiring.” The canteen staff at Abbey Road were apparently less impressed by the wanton destruction of their crockery, and had to be mollified with individual boxes of Belgian chocolate.
Once Bush grasped what the Fairlight could do she was keen to try it on all sorts of things in all manner of ways, but many of her ideas didn’t make the final mix. Because of the technical limitations of this new machine, several of the sounds on the album that might at first appear to be samples – Hare Krishna chants, countryside noises, random spoken voices – were actually ‘flown in’ by Kelly using a tape recorder, which at the time gave a much better sound quality.
“I think Kate would have liked to use it for a lot more things,” says Walters. “She responded instinctively to all the sonic and cultural implications of the Fairlight, she was naturally ahead of her time and, of course, went on to do much more with it as the instrument developed. She made the most of it for her own idiosyncratic music.”
For someone who had struggled on her first two records to articulate her feelings through sound, discovering the Fairlight was like stumbling into an Aladdin’s Cave of sonic possibilities, opening a door into a new world. It mapped out her future and changed irrevocably the way she thought about her music, offering the ability to “layer sounds as she layers ideas.”4 It dovetailed with her desire to use cutting edge technology to access deeply atavistic feelings; to “apply the future to nostalgia”, as she put it.5 Where before she was tied to the piano and had to manipulate her voice in order to try to communicate the full richness of the world of each of her songs, now she could add anything – strings, waterfalls, sunbursts – during the writing process itself. It was a massive expansion of her musical palette, giving her the ability to immediately conjure up images and characters within her music. “As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have one, and it was going to become a very important part of my work,” she said. “What attracts me to the Fairlight is its ability to create very human, animal, emotional sounds that don’t actually sound like a machine. I think in a way that’s what I’ve been waiting for.”6
Not everyone was quite so enamoured of this new toy and the techniques it offered. Kelly, an endlessly relaxed and patient foil, admits it threw him a little. “I was brought up so old school,” he says. “I was so precious, everything had to be recorded with the best mike in the best room, I wasn’t as open minded as Kate.” Some of the musicians were a little bemused, too. “She had recorded this penny whistle which Paddy could play and then played it on the keyboard, and I thought it was a bit of a strange circle,” says Max Middleton. “Why not just play the penny whistle?!”
Ian Bairnson came in to sing on ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’, a beautiful if strikingly odd tribute to the English composer Frederick Delius. The song had been inspired by Ken Russell’s film Song Of Summer made for the BBC’s Omnibus series, which the young Bush watched at East Wickham Farm when it was first broadcast in 1968. As a young man Delius had caught syphilis and, when he eventually became wheelchair bound in later life, a devoted fan named Eric Fenby became his amanuensis, writing down his compositions as the enfeebled master dictated them to him (hence the song’s closing line, “In B, Fenby”). This oddly touching, mutually dependent partnership captured Bush’s imagination and she wrote a lovely hiccupping song about it. Two points are of note: she was just ten when she watched the Omnibus show, which shows a certain degree of intellectual precocity; and what a capacity she has for preserving the tingle of recalled inspiration – more than a decade after the television viewing, her childhood feelings were still wholly accessible to her as an adult writer. Bush later met the aged Fenby on The Russell Harty Show, where he made polite if rather bewildering noises about ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’ and opined that “art is pure emotion”, an epigram which could have come straight from Bush’s lips.
Bairnson loved the song but noted that “the technology was going quite wild at the time. I don’t think she’d be upset if I said that at one point she was confused on Never For Ever. In Abbey Road there were four or five multi-track machines all loaded up and she had God knows how many tracks, she kept overdubbing things on it. It’s that thing about having too much choice. There were synths around, the Fairlight, it was all happening.” From Bush’s point of view, however, not enough was happening. To her regret, the Fairlight arrived a little too late to transform Never For Ever, but it gave her a clear vision of where she needed to go next.
They were gruelling sessions. She was a nocturnal creature by nature and the days often stretched long into the night and through to the morning; sometimes she was working 20 hours at a time. Much of the post-studio socialising would occur at Paddy’s flat at Bush HQ on Wickham Road, where the likes of Roy Harper might drop in to unwind into the early hours; she would often creep upstairs while everyone else was still chatting to grab a little rest, but she was a poor sleeper and struggled to switch off. In the studio, “she smoked [dope] but it didn’t seem to affect her,” according to Max Middleton. “Creativity comes from knowledge, not from being stoned. All her knowledge comes from her family, from reading. I think it just relaxed her, that’s probably the most you can say.”
The album’s obvious masterpiece, its “little symphony”7 was ‘Breathing’, the first time in Bush’s career that the experimental truly connected with the emotional. It was a powerful fusion. The lyric was sung from the perspective of a foetus in the womb breathing in not only its mother’s nicotine but also radiation “after the blast”. The unborn child had lived in a previous incarnation and is therefore aware of how beautiful the world once was; this time it doesn’t want to come out into this ruined, post-apocalyptic version of it. It was a complex, intensely beautiful song, full of love, terror and foreboding. Bush described it as a warning, “a message from the future.”8 ‘Breathing’ was also the song on which her voice finally broke through to a different level, climaxing in a raw howl of pain and suffering. It was a tantalising preview of the vocal riches to come on the next two records, and a metaphorical blowing away of all the TV mimics and their squeaky imitations.
Capturing and communicating the song’s many emotional nuances in five minutes did not come easy. “We did ‘Breathing’ and I must have played the same guitar bit 200 times,” says Brian Bath. “They must have got through spools of tape. I don’t know [what she was looking for], just trying to get it better.” Each time they played it Max Middleton insisted on adding a persistent discordant note which set everyone’s teeth on edge – ‘You OK, Max?’ ‘Yeah, fine’ – until gradually the musicians began to notice that it actually worked. “The song had changed, there was this extra thing happening in it,” says Bath.
This is precisely what Bush wanted. She demanded that the band push beyond simply mastering the technical aspects of the song until they connected with its human resonance, to play with their hearts rather than their heads. “The session men had their lines … but at first there was no emotion, and that track was demanding so much emotion,” she said. “It wasn’t until they actually played with feeling that the whole thing took off. When we went and listened, I wanted to cry.”9 ‘Breathing’ underscores not only the intensity of the sessions at Abbey Road, but also Bush’s established hierarchy of priorities in the studio. Her relentless work ethic and stubborn pursuit of an ideal is all about finding the moment of transcendence, of getting as close as possible to the sound in her head and that precious moment of mystery, magic and emotional truth. She is a perfectionist only in terms of protecting the purity of her vision, rather than wanting to smooth all the rough edges of her music into something technically perfect. Kelly recalls how she “loved a happy accident. I think that’s a massive strength. She was completely open minded about what was happening.”
That’s why – still – it takes so long and is so hard.
* * *
The anti-nuclear content of ‘Breathing’ and the message of ‘Army Dreamers’, a deceptively spry little waltz lamenting the high and enduring personal price of war on generations of society’s young and undervalued – would-be fathers, MPs and rock stars who didn’t even survive their teens – were greeted by reviewers as examples of a new-found political strain in Bush’s writing. As she pointed out several times, however, these were songs in which the initial spark was intensely personal rather than polemical. “It’s only because the political motivations move me emotionally – if they hadn’t it wouldn’t have gotten to me,” she said. “It went through the emotional centre, when I thought, ‘Ah, Ow!’ And that made me write.”10
These two songs did, however, illustrate an opening up and out in her writing. Her reluctance or inability to grapple with social issues and live in The Real World had certainly not gone unnoticed at the time of her initial impact. In the aftermath of punk, scribes in the weekly rock press in particular expected any ‘serious’ artist to have a socio-political agenda and to be engaged with what was happening around them. It was a time when anger and the desire for change were the prevailing sources of artistic impetus in music, and Bush’s positivity was viewed with great suspicion and often real contempt. When Danny Baker interviewed her for NME in October 1979 during the early stages of the Never For Ever sessions, he was briskly dismissive of her spacey hippie-chickisms and “creative energy” chat. She appeared to him to be little more than a polite, pampered rich girl who wrote about the most indulgent, frivolous things, someone for whom working in Woolworths constituted a ‘real’ job. She didn’t watch the news or read the papers, she seemed disengaged and uninformed about the wider world. The gist of his recounted experience was: ‘Fine, fine, but nothing this girl is saying – or singing about – really matters.’
It would be overly convenient to imagine that Baker’s implied criticisms gave Bush pause for thought, but within a year she had released ‘Army Dreamers’ and ‘Breathing’ and was discussing her ‘protest songs’ on the BBC’s current affairs show Nationwide, while the more socially aware compositions on The Dreaming were just around the corner. None of these, however, were remotely comparable to explicitly political songs like The Beat’s ‘Stand Down, Margaret’ or Elvis Costello’s ‘Pills And Soap’, nor were they the beginning of a flood of issue-led material. She has certainly never been keen to pin her colours to the mast. An appearance at a benefit concert for Amnesty International and a televised appeal in 1990 for the same organisation, in which she looked like she was auditioning for a job reading the Nine O’Clock News, spoke of the broadly compassionate world-view already apparent from her songs, but nothing more defined.
As the Eighties rolled on, and the Falklands War and Miners’ Strike and the grip of Thatcherism rumbled all around her, Bush remained – rather wonderfully, in retrospect – miles above the scuffle and fray. “I’ve been tucked away in the studio during the riots,”11 she said at the height of Britain’s inner city race violence of 1981, a line that acts as a neat summation of her general position regarding music and the wider world. When an interviewer from Hot Press tried to goad her into being indiscreet about Margaret Thatcher in 1985 she was not forthcoming. She fudged the issue; she was not a “political thinker”. Nor would she define herself as a feminist. “When you hear ‘feminist’ you go ‘Ummgh!’” she said. “You get all these terrible images, like women with hairy legs and big muscles. I mean, you just think of butch lesbians.”12
If this all made her sound detached and even rather ill-informed within the highly politicised context of the times, it proved to be nothing but beneficial to the music, which soared above and beyond such considerations. The great pay-off was the complete absence in her songs of knee jerk sloganeering, hectoring, proselytizing and cause-hopping from one album to the next. Embracing any creed or cause was too limiting. She was a metaphysical poet in a roomful of hollering three-chord revolutionaries, and she has remained so. Bush’s lack of engagement, particularly in early interviews, could be more than a little wearing, but her gifts are intuitive. She has never sought to hone them to present a watertight argument or world-view, so they remain dazzling, infuriating, sometimes contradictory abstractions. Rather than taking on the taint of day-to-day surface life, her music is about the politics of the heart. There’s an enormous amount of trust in her songs, which is rare; they are unguarded and unposturing, which is even rarer. It’s one of the reasons she has steadily retreated from the press. The utter sincerity and openness with which she discussed her art when she started out was almost painful, and made her an easy target. Raised in a nurturing environment, she was ill-prepared for being ridiculed for her creative ideas and the way in which she was prepared to share them. The realisation kicked in around the time she was making her third album that she was presenting her work to the world, rather than herself.
“We would have conversations about it, it [became] more of a frustrating thing for her, the press,” says Jon Kelly. “I remember on Never For Ever she came in one day and had decided that there were two Kate Bushes. She’d managed to separate herself. I often use it as an example to artists now: it’s good if you try not to confuse the artist who you present to the public and the one you take home. People confuse the strangeness of her songs with the way she lives her life, [but] in person she’s very down to earth, girl next door.”
As if to prove Kelly’s point, during the album sessions she took a break to appear in a demure, high-collared dress – very Abigail’s Party – on the Delia Smith Cookery Course television show, discussing her vegetarian tastes. In the peaceful, verdant surroundings of East Wickham Farm she chatted happily to the doyenne of British cuisine and introduced a series of non-meat dishes prepared by Jay’s wife Judy, showing off her fruit salad, brown rice, yoghurt with honey and a Waldorf salad – even finding room to reference a Fawlty Towers gag, quipping “that one’s got waldorfs in it!” – before concluding, “I really do think there’s a lot in vegetables!” It’s not easy to reconcile this woman with the one who had just made a video for ‘Babooshka’ in which she portrayed a sword-wielding nymphet with very little left to the imagination, or the one who sings “the more I think about sex the better it gets.” The confusion was too much for some. For the tabloids, which by 1979 had already given up trying to understand what Bush was doing creatively, it was all about ‘raunchy Kate’, the ‘sexpot’. That remained their agenda until she became less visible, whereupon she became a ‘troubled recluse’, pop’s resident weirdo. Within a black-and-white world where the grasp of culture is forever governed by the lowest common denominator, Bush would always be trapped somewhere between Miss Whiplash and Miss Havisham.
Even the music papers were far from immune. Record Mirror’s review of the opening night of the ‘Tour Of Life’ lingered over her “unabashed obsession with sex” and “soft focus porn”. In hindsight she felt the experience of the ‘Tour Of Life’ had been invasive, and it had a profoundly significant affect on her subsequent view of her own femininity. “By the end of the tour, I felt a terrific need to retreat as a person,” she said. “I felt that my sexuality, which in a way I hadn’t really had a chance to explore myself yet, was being given to the world in a way which I found impersonal.”13 She must, of course, take at least some responsibility for this. As the ‘Babooshka’ video clearly conveyed, her work offered her the chance to be the things she sometimes felt, the things, in truth, that most of us privately feel at one time or another, but the fact that she portrayed these feelings in her music so vividly, so publicly – and yes, so sexually – with no apparent inhibitions, caused considerable confusion over the years. The manner in which her public expressions have encouraged assumptions about her private nature as a woman has clearly been an active factor in her decision to make herself less and less publicly available.
Much of the time in 1980 she was simply the young, unaffected person evident in the Delia Smith clip, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, usually alternating between Benson & Hedges and John Player Specials, living not on yoghurt and fruit but mostly on chocolate, tea, toast and chips, and spending almost all of her time either writing and recording or watching television and movies with her boyfriend in her relatively humble flat in Lewisham. She was almost a normal person, but it wasn’t quite that simple. Normal people weren’t offered the part of the Wicked Witch in Wurzel Gummidge, or had a driver at their beck and call, despite being able to drive herself. Bush had certain expectations about what she would and wouldn’t do which came as an inevitable consequence of fame, but at the same time she was still taking her laundry round to her mother’s house. She was never comfortable when asked to pull the levers on the star machine and genuinely took fright at industry parties, which she described as “unhealthy, disgusting”.14
Her old friend David Paton recalls bumping into her at Abbey Road on November 12, 1981, during a party marking the studio’s 50th anniversary, which she attended alongside luminaries such as Paul McCartney and Sting. Paton was recording in Studio Three at the time. “There was a lot of people giving her a lot of attention and she wanted to escape from it all, so she said to me: ‘Have you still got Studio Three? Can we go up there, I just need a break?’” he says. “I took her up there and we spoke for about half an hour about lots of things, her relationship with Del and stuff, until two or three people discovered we were sitting in Studio Three and before you know it there are more people in there than at the party! She didn’t like it. She didn’t like it at all. She liked one-to-ones or being on her own a lot of the time.”
Lyrically the songs from the Never For Ever sessions were notable less for their political content than for Bush’s continued determination to reject and subvert conventional gender roles. Attuned to her own ‘masculinity’ as an artist, time and again she deployed the kind of twists more often found in old folk songs, where a blue-buttoned cabin-boy turns out to be a lusty young maiden already four months gone. ‘The Wedding List’ renounced the traditional image of the blushing bride by turning her into a vengeful killer, aroused by her own blood lust, while in ‘Babooshka’ Bush sided – surprisingly – with the unfaithful husband, on the grounds that it’s the jealous wife whose “boredom breeds suspicion”15 and whose initial lack of trust kills the relationship.
‘Ran Tan Waltz’, which eventually turned up as the B-side to ‘Babooshka’, was another tale where the traditional roles were switched. Loosely derived from the old folk song, ‘Oh Dear, Rue The Day’, and bawdily comic in tone, it told of a young husband left at home holding the baby while his wife is out drinking and philandering, forlornly predicting that she’ll return only when she “picks on a dick that’s too big for her pride.”* Again, the sympathy falls on the male.
Most daring of all was ‘The Infant Kiss’, a beautiful song rather sorrowfully examining sexual feelings from an adult towards a child; where one might expect the adult in such a scenario to be portrayed as male, in ‘The Infant Kiss’ it was a woman who became attracted to a schoolboy. This being Kate Bush, however it wasn’t quite that simple. The song was inspired by the 1961 film The Innocents, itself a take on Henry James’ novel The Turn Of The Screw, in which Deborah Kerr plays a governess who believes the ghost of her predecessor’s dead lover is trying to possess the bodies of the children she is looking after. There is a scene in the film where she kisses the boy on the lips, and in the song, too, the child’s body is inhabited by a demonic older male – he becomes, in effect, the child with the man in his eyes. It’s a fearless, complex song, venturing into uncharted ground for a female pop singer, and the music perfectly captures the mood. Using only piano, guitar, strings and voice, Bush builds the tension and momentum as the woman’s feelings tumble and torment. As ever, no judgement, no blame. And how often she sings of love and sexual desire as a form of possession, a taboo, a terrifying and unwanted ghost-demon stealing into our heart and bones.
* * *
The Never For Ever sessions ended in June, with the album release held back until September 8 to avoid competing with two other major EMI records, Paul McCartney’s McCartney II and the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue. Bush promoted the record with some gusto. She made personal appearances by car and train at record shops around the UK (in Manchester she kissed each and every fan, amounting to over 600, presumably few of whom have washed since) and embarked upon brief hit-and-run missions to Europe, where she performed dazzling new routines to ‘Army Dreamers’ and ‘Babooshka’ on television. In the UK there were several major print interviews and a fascinating appearance on Paul Gambaccini’s Radio One show, where over two evenings she played some of her favourite music, including the Bothy Band, Delius, Bert Lloyd, Allegri’s Miserere, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Steely Dan, Alan Stivell and Rolf Harris. Very little of it could be called pop music.
The hard work in and out of the studio paid off. Never For Ever went straight to number one, making Bush the first British female solo artist ever to have a number one album in the UK charts. Review coverage was extensive though decidedly mixed, and even the praise was sometimes grudging. Julie Burchill in The Face conceded that “at last I have to admire Kate Bush” (Bush was surely overcome with gratitude), while Record Mirror went as far as to opine that “by no stretch of the imagination could one describe Bush and her music as inspiring. Never For Ever, in fact, is as depressing an album as one might find all year.”16 She still confounded critical consensus, inspiring extreme reactions on either side of the fence.
A pair of singles roved ahead, forming a particularly irresistible advance party. The first was ‘Breathing’, a deliberately bold choice which reached number 16 in the UK charts, while the second release, the more obviously commercial ‘Babooshka’, climbed to number five over the summer of 1980, her biggest hit since ‘Wuthering Heights’. A third, ‘Army Dreamers’, released in September, also entered the Top 20.
The title of the album was a tantalising nod to one of the great ‘lost’ Bush songs. “We did record ‘Never For Ever’ for Lionheart, and I thought it was a killer song but it never appeared,” says Andrew Powell. “Fantastic vocal, really good song. She wasn’t quite happy with something … so we eventually agreed we wouldn’t use it and we’d save it for the next album. In the end all that got saved was the title, which must have been a mystery to some people.” The beautiful ‘Warm And Soothing’, played on the piano as a simple run through in order to acclimatise herself when she first entered Abbey Road, was another wonderful song relegated to B-side status. It was almost as though she now found this kind of thing too easy, too conventional, and therefore viewed it with suspicion. Occasionally one wondered whether she was tossing away some of her most affecting material. “I think her best stuff, the ultimate thing with Kate, is her singing and playing the piano,” says Ian Bairnson. “It’s stunning, it just goes straight to you. It’s there from the first note. It’s really about her and the piano and the rest of us could all go take a hike!”
The cover art, meanwhile, was a remarkably frank piece of creative expressionism, a stunning coloured pencil drawing by Nick Price depicting Bush with her hands folded behind her head as a stream of alternately angelic creatures (rainbow butterflies, swans) and demonic beasts (strange fantasy creations with bats’ heads and snakes’ bodies) pour out from under her raised skirt. “She was quite particular about what she wanted,” says Price. “The idea of all these light and dark characters coming out from under her skirt, that was the run of it, the light and dark balancing each other out. In fact, the image was taken from a photograph that John had taken of her in that position. I remember when she mentioned that it was all coming out from under her skirt I asked her to repeat that: ‘From under your skirt?’ She just said, ‘Yeeeeah!’ There was a [sexual] aspect to it, but I’m not quite sure what it meant.” She told Kelly that that was where all her songs came from.
She quickly recognised, before the paint was even dry, that Never For Ever was an incomplete metamorphosis, a partial revolution. It was a “new step”,17 the beginning of her embracing a more contemporary sound and adding adventurous layers of instrumentation to her songs, but it was an album in which the possibilities were only unveiled as the sessions wore on and the ultimate prize remained beyond her grasp. “I couldn’t take the last and decisive step then, because I lacked courage and specialised knowledge,” she said. “You need an enormous amount of strength to control your own musical work.”18 Control was the next step. Controlled chaos.
* A ran tan – and its derivative ‘ran-dan’ – means to go on a debauch or spree.