FEATURE:
The Whims That We're Weeping For
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s All We Ever Look
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I have covered most of…
Kate Bush’s tracks at some point through a feature. As far as I can see, I have not isolated All We Ever Look For. The fourth track from her third studio album, Never for Ever, I feel the positioning of the song is interesting. The album opens with the bold and brilliant single, Babooshka. We then get two slightly more ethereal and softer numbers in the form of Delius (Song of Summer) and Blow Away (For Bill). By the end of the third track, we have gone from something quite urgent and big to two songs that take things down and settle us. The first half of the album ends with the strange and beguiling Egypt. I feel the penultimate track on that side is a very important one. All We Ever Look For comes in at under four minutes (I like how the longest songs on each side come at the end and there is a nice balance when it comes to the running time). I am going to bring in an article that dove deeper into a fantastic song. One of the things I especially love about All We Ever Look For is the composition. By Never for Ever, Kate Bush was in control of the production more. Working alongside Jon Kelly, her confidence and curiosity was growing. The following album, The Dreaming (1982), found her producing solo and extending he experimentation and confidence. On that album, the Fairlight CMI was a big part of the canvas.
Whilst it can be heard through Never for Ever, it came in quite late in the day. On All We Ever Look For, we can hear Koto (Paddy Bush), acoustic guitar (Alan Murphy, Brian Bath), Yamaha CS80 (Kate Bush), timpani (Morris Pert) and Fairlight CMI (Duncan Mackay). I particularly love the synthesiser sound and what a spacey and fantastic quality they give the song. Whilst Bush’s voice was rawer on tracks like Babooshka, Violin, The Wedding List and Breathing, it is quite similar to other tracks on Never for Ever - in the sense that there is a heavenly and ethereal quality. On The Dreaming, alongside the technological and production shifts, Bush would bring in more accents and use her voice is very different ways. I really love her performance on All We Ever Look For. With backing vocals from Preston Heyman, Paddy Bush, Andrew Bryant and Gary Hurst, it is a layered and textured song. I will allude to elements of the song that I especially love. Before then, this article from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia provides Bush’s words regarding an underrated and lesser-known song from her cannon:
“Kate about 'All We Ever Look For'
'All We Ever Look For' is about how we seek something but in the wrong way or at wrong times so it is never found. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)
One of my new songs, 'All We Ever Look For', it's not about me. It's about family relationships generally. Our parents got beaten physically. We get beaten psychologically. The last line - "All we ever look for - but we never did score".' Well, that's the way it is - you do get faced sometimes with futile situations. But the answer's not to kill yourself. You have to accept it, you have to cope with it. (Derek Jewell, 'How To Write Songs And Influence People'. Sunday Times (UK), 5 October 1980)”.
Recorded in spring 1980 at Abbey Road Studios , All We Ever Look For is one of the rare tracks on Never for Ever where the new-found freedom, capabilities and possibilities of the Fairlight CMI are exposed and explored. This fascinating article from Dreams of Organon studies the lyrical meanings of the songs and the sounds used throughout. There are some really interesting observations. What is clear is the notable evolution of Bush’s sound: from the reliance on piano through The Kick Inside and Lionheart (1978), Never for Ever was a marked step forward:
“Upon the arrival of “All We Ever Look For,” everything changes once again. With its opening hook, a synthesized whistle overlaid upon an atypically minimal piano part, it immediately becomes clear that Kate Bush’s style of songwriting and composing has changed. Not only has her ubiquitous piano been relegated to a supporting role, the song sounds like it’s been built from its rhythm, which works like a frequently pausing, creaky wheel that thuds on every downbeat. Bush’s piano and an acoustic guitar are present in the mix, but the relationship of “All We Ever Look for” to conventional rock instrumentation ends there, with its menagerie of synthesizers and classical instruments. The world of Kate Bush has undergone another metamorphosis — the old world has gotten considerably stranger.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Bush’s churning vocal begins with a sermon on the nature of families: “just look at your father/and you’ll see how you took after him/me, I’m just another like my brother/of my mother’s genes.” She places emphasis on the downbeat of each bar, singing the lines as “just LOOK at your FA-ther/and you’ll SEE how you took after him.” Bush’s interest in the institution of the family is omnipresent in her work — the fate of the narrator in “The Kick Inside” ends her relationship with her brother and potential motherhood, “Wuthering Heights” is a couple’s reunion, and the second half of Never for Ever is a meditation on the limits of family under the stress of social collapse. The family is the central unit of Bush’s mythology, the central cell from which life and art spring. One could read this as an extension of Bush’s Catholic upbringing, as it aligns with the traditionalist Catholic positioning of the family as the fundamental unit of civilization. Certainly this favorability towards the family extends from Bush’s well-adjusted family life. A staple of her early interviews is her enthusiasm and gratefulness towards her family, especially her father and brothers, the latter of whom are frequently involved in her music (especially Paddy, whose role in this song we’ll cover later). Given this background, a worldview that positions family as its wellspring is hardly a surprise from Bush.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Claude Vanheye/LFI
In the first chorus, Bush lists what the previous generation has looked for: “a little clue,” “the truth,” and “a little bit of you,” fairly abstract expressions of a need for grounding. Meanwhile, the second and third choruses tell the listener what “we,” Bush’s generation, desires: “another womb,” “our own tomb,” “a drug,” and (my favorite) “a great big hug” among others. Sex, psychological gratification, Freudian solace, spiritual awakening, and getting high as fuck are all options. Bush makes her choruses into anaphoric lists of things to look for — yet every avenue is a dead end. The first chorus ends with “but they never did get,” while the second and third conclude on “but we never do score.” The difference is clear: one generation fails to attain things they could barely conceptualize, while the other sees the entire world and discovers that their search is futile. Burying one’s head in pleasures fails as wish fulfilment: one learns all about the world, but still arrives at a dead end.
Kate Bush is equally willing to find new musical ways of being a medium. “All We Ever Look For” is one of Bush’s first songs to be extensively constructed using a CMI Fairlight. For those unfamiliar with the machine, it’s an early sampler and synthesizer. Its user can use preprogrammed sounds or record their own sounds into the machine and play them on the Fairlight as a melody.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Phillips
For example, if you recorded yourself breaking a wine bottle, you could then play that sound as a series of notes. It’s the one situation where you can open a bottle of Château Latour in C major. In “All We Ever Look For,” the Fairlight is used to build the song’s hook: a sampled line of whistling. According to the website Reverb Machine’s phenomenal article on Kate Bush and synthesizers, the whistle sample comes from the Fairlight’s sound library, which suggests that Bush was still getting accustomed to the instrument after being introduced to it by Peter Gabriel and leaning into its databanks. The sample is layered with accompaniment by piano and a Yamaha CS-80 synth, so it’s distinctive while supported by instruments Bush is familiar with.
This is realized quite literally in the song’s utterly bizarre bridge. The song’s melody line is mixed to the background, while a pair of feet walk down a hall and open some doors. The doors play a mix of different sounds, with the first opening to a sample of Sanskrit-singing worshippers proclaiming the Maha Mantra, the next offering some chirpy bird song, and the final opening to thunderous applause. The singer closes all three doors. It’s a strange detour, if quite literal-minded — the three samples can be read as instantiations of the chorus’ searches. Yet the incarnations of Bush’s ideas are all onstage and capable of being represented by sound. The Fairlight CMI has made Bush’s music sound like her writing: a menagerie of strange and magical ideas animating the universe”.
There is so much to love about Never for Ever. From the fact it sounds more forward-thinking and modern than any Bush record before, there are also plenty of classical and ‘older’ sounds that create this balance – the spiritual, choral-like vocals on Night Scented Stock and the subject matter of Delius (Song of Summer) are obvious examples. Both sides are nicely balanced in terms of the songs’ running times, the subject matter/music tones and quality. There is never a sense of imbalance or two tracks next to each other sounding too similar. This is testament to Bush’s skills as a producer and her maturing as an artist. Jon Kelly helped enormously in terms of production and helping get the album sounding like it did. Never for Ever is a lot busier in terms of instruments and backing vocals. Look at what here brother, Paddy Bush, was playing, and how many musicians helped bring the songs together! That said, Bush is very much at the centre of Never for Ever. The album never seemed to crowded or cluttered. There are the ‘bigger’ songs such as Babooshka, Army Dreamers and Breathing…though one hardly hears any of the remaining eight tracks played. Each are very different. All We Ever Look For fascinates me because of its lyrics (as Dreams of Orgonon explained and dissected). For me, it is the work of the synthesisers and that amazing section from 2:12 that is dizzying and delightful! The sound if voices and birdsong; footsteps moving between rooms and there being this sonic collage that one tries to picture. It is a shame the song was not performed on T.V. or had a video made. I love how much is packed into All We Ever Look For. Bush said the song is not about her. From lines that could speak of lost dreams or deprivation – “All they ever want for you/Are the things they didn't do“ -, to the starkly explicit – “The whims that we're weeping for/Our parents would be beaten for” -, through to incredible poetry – “All we ever look for, a god/All we ever look for, oh, a drug/All we ever look for, a great big hug/All we ever look for, a little bit of you/All we ever look for, a little bit of you, too/All we ever look for/But we never do score” -, All We Ever Look For is such a gem! I wanted to highlight a wonderful and fascinating song that…
MORE people should hear.