FEATURE:
Kindle for the Flames
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at the launch of Never for Ever in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Never for Ever: The Next Kate Bush Album That Warrants Fonder Investigation
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IT is a happy coincidence that…
I wrote about the need for more Kate Bush books and literature last year and, within a few months, there has been a few new books released! I recently published a feature that detailed the two books that have just come out. Having just ordered a book that looks at Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside, in detail, I have been thinking about another album that deserves a forensic publication. If you are a Kate Bush fan and want to know more about her debut, then The Kick Inside: In-depth by Laura Shenton is worth some pennies. The Kate Bush News website provided details and gave their thoughts:
“The publishers were kind enough to send me on a review copy and the author sets out her approach in the preface – that no weighty personal opinions or analysis will be included from her, rather that “throughout this book you’re going to see lots of quotes from vintage articles.” And this 112 page book is indeed a rich smorgasbord of quotes; from interviews, articles, KBC fan club magazines, TV appearances and promotional materials – a resource writers and researchers now enjoy thanks to the vast archives of fan-curated info on the likes of Gaffaweb and the Kate Bush Encyclopedia site. All quotes are cited up front right there in the text.
In fact, the author relies so much on the quotes to do the heavy-lifting of narrating the story of Kate’s first album that perhaps she assumed they cover the whole album “in-depth”. This approach falls short of that; the songs L’Amour Looks Something Like You, Feel it and Room For The Life aren’t even discussed, which is a pity. There is a lot to be said for the tried and trusted track-by-track approach most other books take when considering albums. On the plus side, while I originally wondered why so much space was given to discussing Lionheart and that album’s singles, it actually feels very appropriate in the light of the later pages covering the Tour of Life – a big part in the story of The Kick Inside, after all. I only noticed a couple of factual errors in the text (not every song from The Kick Inside was performed in the 1979 shows – Oh To Be In Love wasn’t) and the 8-page photo section includes some nice photos of the various album cover and single cover variations from 1978/79. The book is published 12th March 2021 (priced at £14.99) and can be ordered direct from the publishers at the Wymer Publishing site here or on Amazon Kindle edition here”.
I am writing this on 7th March. I will have a copy of the book by the time that this feature is published. I think that every Kate Bush album deserves to be investigated and brought to life in a book - though many would argue that would be excessive. To the best of my knowledge, The Kick Inside is the first Bush album that has been discussed in this book series.
I know that others have written about Hounds of Love, but it would be fascinating to hear more of her albums opened up and dissected in such a way. I feel that the next album, if there was a series, should be Never for Ever. Like The Kick Inside, Never for Ever is underrated and it is an album full of treasures. It is an important release, as it was the first where Bush co-produced and got more of a say in her sound and direction. I still think there should be a book that looks at all of the albums and we get details, stats and background about these amazing works. I think that Bush underwent her first real transformation in 1980’s Never for Ever. After two albums in 1978 and a lot of promotional duties, one could have expected Bush to have a bit of time off and not launch into anything new. Perhaps in an effort to assume some more control of her music and career, she embarked on the international success that was The Tour of Life. With two albums under her belt, this was the first major live exposure for Bush. She was used to television appearances prior to 1979, though The Tour of Life was a different beast. A multimedia/facet event, it incorporated mine, stunning visuals and amazing concepts. I am going to write about the tour more in a few weeks as it really impresses me. Bush had a loyal and great team bringing things together, though she did make a lot of decisions and have a big input.
There must have been this mix of personal excitement and commercial pressure when Bush stepped into the studio in 1979 to record. 1978’s Lionheart was a less successful and acclaimed response to her debut. Never for Ever was the first time Bush had a real vote regarding her music. Producing with Jon Kelly, there is much more diversity on Never for Ever. A more personal album, I think there are talking points that could be explored in a book. Not only was this Bush entering a new creative phase and going straight from a successful tour to a new album; it is an album that, over forty years since its release, remains undervalued. The Fairlight CMI was introduced to Bush by Peter Gabriel. Whilst it doesn’t play a major role in Never for Ever, we do hear it on tracks like Babooshka and Army Dreamers. It would be used a lot more on the follow-up, The Dreaming (1982). Bush was producing on the album - she would go on to produce The Dreaming on her own. With more access to the studio and a new lease of life, I think Bush’s third album is fascinating. I admit that there are some flaws to the album. I love the political songs, Army Dreamers and Breathing, though the lyrics aren’t quite as startling and impactful as they were in 1980 – compare Bush’s songs to many Punk acts at the time were producing and there is a marked difference. There are one or two songs that, whilst not weak, have divided people (Blow Away (For Bill), Egypt and Violin are examples).
I will round up soon, but I want to source from a great feature from The Quietus. They marked forty years of Never for Ever last year. It goes to show that, in spite of the fact it is not as accomplished as an album like Hounds of Love (1985), it was hugely important and worthy of dissection and discussion:
“By late 1979, Bush was long used to battling EMI. If the label had gotten its way three years previously, her first release would have been the fun-yet-forgettable ‘James And The Cold Gun’; Bush pushed for ‘Wuthering Heights’ instead, and duly became the first woman to hit No 1 with a self-written single. Still, there were only so many fights a 19 year old could win in a sexist, stuffy industry. After the success of 1978’s The Kick Inside EMI demanded an instant follow-up, giving her only weeks to write new material and forcing her to mostly use years-old compositions. Worse, they then backed producer Andrew Powell’s decision to again replace her group, the KT Bush Band, with session musicians. The patchy Lionheart, released nine months after her debut, left her cold. “Though they were my songs and I was singing them, the finished product was not what I wanted,” she later told Keyboard.
Never For Ever would change all that. Draining as it was, Bush’s gruelling Tour Of Life gave her the chance to co-produce 1979’s On Stage EP with engineer Jon Kelly, convincing her they could handle a full album together. She ousted Powell and combined the session hands with her band members, swapping them in and out like rolling subs and making them record take after take. Another Bush biographer, Rob Jovanovic, estimates she spent an unprecedented five months writing and demoing at Abbey Road, honing new and old ideas alike, while keyboardist Max Middleton told Thomson the sessions were so exacting because of her obsession with finding “something nebulous that was hard to pinpoint”. For Bush the autonomy was worth savouring, no matter how painstaking the process. “It was the first step I’d really taken in controlling the sounds,” she said, “and being pleased with what was coming back.”
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Listen now and you can still hear that fundamental shift Bush spoke of, the birth of some new, peculiar magic. It starts with ‘Babooshka’, in which a paranoid wife impersonates a younger woman to test her husband’s roving eye, and ends up destroying her marriage. It’s a wonderfully wicked premise: Bush based it on the cross-dressing, happy-ever-after hijinks of the traditional English folk ditty ‘Sovay’, but her revamp is less a cheeky romp than a surreal, bitter farce, pitched somewhere between Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Tales Of The Unexpected. Most startling, though, is the way it sounds, like unearthly Russian folk music: there’s something both archaic and futuristic about its echoey keys, eerie synths and the ethereal strings of her brother Paddy’s balalaika, as uncanny as a Cossack band playing on the Mir space station. Bush sings like two different people, flitting from coy trills to operatic shrieks, and eventually her world comes crashing down in a crescendo of squalling guitars and the Fairlight’s splintering glass.
Although Never For Ever was largely well-received, a few reviews were grossly sexist, and less egregious offenders nonetheless harped on tired, gendered criticisms. Speaking to ZigZag, Bush blamed the reservations of NME’s reviewer on old hangups regarding her supposed naivety. “He saw me as this chocolate-box-sweetie little thing who had no reality in there, no meaning of life,” she said. It was a common misconception. Naysayers called her twee, but she boldly centred female desire; they dismissed her as cloying, yet The Kick Inside’s title cut wrestled with incest and suicide; they insisted she was whimsical, as if her biggest hit wasn’t about horny teenagers as much as gothic ghosts. Yes, Bush was imaginative, inventive, fantastical. But she didn’t lack substance.
Like ‘Wuthering Heights’, Never For Ever made history: the first No 1 album by a British female solo artist. Yet its significance transcends chart milestones. For the next decade Bush would build on its potential to become, as she joked to Q in 1989, the “shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet”. Whereas her first three albums were squeezed into two-and-a-half years, the subsequent three spanned nine. The next one, the bewildering, avant-garde masterpiece The Dreaming, was the first she produced entirely by herself; soon after, she built a studio-come-sanctuary near her family home and hunkered away to make the flawless Hounds Of Love. Each record introduced new inspirations, new instruments, new collaborators and new methods, all indebted to Never For Ever’s triumph of bloody-minded determination. It doesn’t belong in her imperial period, but that imperial period wouldn’t exist without it.
Whenever people told Bush they didn’t understand Never For Ever’s title, she patiently explained it encapsulated her belief that all things, good and bad, eventually passed. “We are all transient,” she declared in her fan newsletter, and it’s hard to think of a finer choice for an album that, even now, exists in a glorious state of flux. Never For Ever proved how great Bush could be when given the control and freedom she craved. More tantalisingly still, it promised the best was yet to come”.
I will be interested to see if there are any siblings of the new book, The Kick Inside: In-depth. Ann Powers did release a study of The Dreaming for the 33 1/3 series…but I think it is not in print anymore. It seems odd that even Hounds of Love has been omitted regarding deep study! Last year, I mused whether there would be any more Kate Bush books that take a very passionate approach to her albums. We have one this year and, over the past few months, two books have been published that look at all of her songs. I do feel that the amazing and hugely important Never for Ever…
IS worthy of its own book.