FEATURE:
Them Heavy People
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush captured in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Kate Bush and Early Critical Perception
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AS the fortieth anniversary…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images
of Kate Bush’s single, Army Dreamers (the third and final release from her third album, Never for Ever), occurred on Tuesday (22nd), I was looking around for reviews and bits regarding the song and how it was reviewed at the time. I have seen that Kate Bush News has updated the HomeGround Audio Archive: clips and segments collating interviews and audio reviews of Bush’s work. You can check it out, and it makes for interesting listening! I was listening through the audio interviews and clips from 1980, and there is a Radio Lux review of Army Dreamers, in addition to a BBC Roundtable review. Whilst Bush received some praise for her Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again, in 1980, hearing reviews of Army Dreamers sort of set me back! Whilst there were a few kind words, a lot of people were quite dismissive and cruel. Now, there is this enormous squadron of fans who love what Kate Bush’s earliest work, but I think there was a lot of hesitancy and snobby attitudes, certainly prior to 1982’s The Dreaming. Maybe Bush was not as political as other acts in music when she put out songs like Army Dreamers, and Breathing, but I think so many people were pretty short and underwhelmed. Wow was reviewed in 1979, and the third track (and second single) from Lionheart got mixed reception on BBC Radio 1’s Roundtable.
Maybe it was a case of people not being able to appreciate an artist who was very different to everyone around, but it does shock me that there were so many reductive and negative comments. I have covered this area before but, when Bush arrived in 1978 and delivered Wuthering Heights to a world that had seen nothing like it – and a music scene that was very different-sounding -, I think there was this perception that she was lightweight and too arty. This article from The Guardian of 2014 explored this – and looks at a few choice singles where Bush developed and proved she was a truly diverse songwriters:
“This was partly a matter of timing. After a year of being developed by EMI, (who funded her while she "grew up", expanding her horizons and honing her craft) Bush emerged into a British music scene transformed by punk. Both her sound and her look seemed conventionally feminine when juxtaposed with ferociously confrontational performers such as Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene, who shredded expectations of how the female voice should sound and who shattered taboos with their lyrical content and appearance. Bush's fantastical lyrics, influenced by children's literature, esoteric mystical knowledge, daydreams and the lore and legends of old Albion, seemed irrelevant, and deficient in street-cred at a time of tower-block social realism and agit-prop. Her odd combo of artiness and artlessness, and the way she came across in interviews – at once guileless and guarded – made her a target for music-press mockery. Her music was often dismissed as a middlebrow soft option, easy listening with literary affectations.
Despite being as young or younger than, say, the Slits, Bush seemed Old Wave: she belonged with the generation of musicians who had emerged during the 1960s ("boring old farts", as the punk press called them). Some of these BOFs were indeed her mentors, friends, and collaborators: David Gilmour, Peter Gabriel and Roy Harper. Growing up, her sensibility was shaped by her older brothers, in particular the musical tastes and spiritual interests of Jay, 13 years her senior and a true 60s cat.
Punk often sneered at "art" as airy-fairy, bourgeois self-indulgence, but its ranks were full of art-school graduates and this artiness blossomed with the sound, design and stage presentation of bands such as Wire and Talking Heads. Yet Bush's music seemed the wrong kind of "arty": ornate rather than angular, overly decorative and decorous. It was the sort of musically accomplished, well-arranged, album-oriented art-pop that EMI had been comfortable with since the Beatles and had pursued with Pink Floyd, Cockney Rebel and Queen. They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.
1978: Wuthering Heights. Gothic romance distilled into four-and-a-half minutes of gaseous rhapsody, this was released as her first single at Bush's insistence in the face of opposition from seasoned and cautious EMI executives; wilfulness vindicated by the month it spent at the top of the charts.
1979: Them Heavy People (the radio cut from the On Stage EP), which namedropped the Russian mystic Gurdjieff and Sufi whirling dervishes, a celebration of being intellectually-emotionally expanded: "it's nearly killing me … what a lovely feeling".
1980: Breathing, a chillingly claustrophobic sound-picture of slow death through radiation sickness after the bomb drops: "Chips of plutonium/are twinkling in every lung." Swiftly followed by Army Dreamers: perhaps the best, certainly the most subtle of anti-war songs, inventing and rendering obsolete Let England Shake a couple of decades ahead of schedule.
1981: Sat in Your Lap. Avant-pop stampede of pounding percussion and deranged shrieks, a sister-song to Public Image Ltd's Flowers of Romance, but lyrically about the quest for knowledge: "I want to be a scholar!"
Not only was Bush facing a lot of resistance and scepticism from critics in her early years, there was a lot of people merely painting her a sex symbol and wanting to know about her private life. Even in 1983, broadcasters wanted to know about gossip and who Bush was dating, and very few were taking her seriously. What was behind a lot of the pushback and those who wrote Bush off? It would be easy enough to say that she was unconventional and many were expecting a traditional Pop artist or something more Punk-based. By the arrival of Hounds of Love in 1985, few could refute her brilliance and musical quality; an album that is strange and contains many moods, but perhaps it is more restrained – in terms of the vocal and pitch – and accessible than Bush’s first four albums (The Kick Inside – 1978/Lionheart – 1978/Never for Ever – 1980/The Dreaming – 1982).
The fact Bush is still recording and is more popular than ever shows that her music has endured and those who were imperious towards her between 1978-1982, hopefully, changed their tune when they heard her later work. I expect there was a degree of expectation in the late-1970s regarding female artists. Away from Punk artists and female-fronted Punk bands, Bush was neither Punk nor similar to her female contemporaries. Louder Sound talked about this in an article from 2018:
“There was, at the time, a striking novelty to her upfront expressions of lust and eroticism through the female gaze. You can sweat the details, cite Bessie Smith and Joni Mitchell, but it wasn’t yet the norm. And in an era when punk was on the rise, she was – at least technically – its very antithesis. Her moods, chords and theatricality (mentored by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour) had more in common with prog. Her songs swooned and sighed with romance and yearning – not a current hot ticket. What she did share with punk was a free spirit, a doing-her-own-thing drive – the same young generation who queued to get gobbed on at Damned gigs embraced her.
That debut was averse to self-editing; it was both unfettered and rhapsodic. Urges, fevers, visions, unfiltered. She somehow transcended the mundane categories of the here and now. She was atypical, not topical. Pansexual. We all know what an impressive musical career she’s gone on to have, keeping that differentness, that individualism. Along the way she’s evolved from TV light-entertainment regular and accidental sex symbol to arguably the most enigmatic recluse in the business, one who marches to her own eccentric drum beat.
“Every female you see at a piano is either Lynsey de Paul or Carole King,” Bush told Melody Maker in 1977. “And most male music – not all of it, but the good stuff – really lays it on you. It really puts you against the wall. And that’s what I like to do. I’d like my music to intrude. Not many females succeed with that.”
But almost everything about Kate Bush defies conventional reason. Those who routinely ridicule artiness and pretension make an exception for her. She’s very British, yet the British tick of sneering at the ‘different’ and their hifalutin ideas is set aside for her. People who profess to hate prog clasp their hands to their ears in denial if you point out how closely related her music and ideas, even her imagery, are to significant phases of Genesis and Floyd.
Her influence on other singers, musicians and performers who have surfed her slipstream during four decades is immense. Again, it’s not just the overt – Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, avowed fan St Vincent. It’s foolishly reductive to list just female artists as her legacy, her debtors, when there are as many men who, emboldened by her footprints, desire and require autonomy to function best. Kate Bush’s genre is, essentially, Kate Bush”.
Looking at all the artists Bush has touched and how she is perceived now is wonderful, but I still get irked by a lot of the reactions her image and music were afforded in those earliest years! I am going to write a few features regarding songs and events from Bush’s early career, as it is a period that really fascinates me. If some were not warm and open-minded to Kate Bush’s music when she came through, there is no denying that, today, there are very few who…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix
HAVE a bad word to offer.