FEATURE:
Blown Away
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at a record signing for Never for Ever in Glasgow on 9th September, 1980
Kate Bush’s Never for Ever at Forty-One
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IT may seem odd to mark…
a forty-first anniversary, but there are three Kate Bush albums that were released in September that I am revisiting. Never for Ever was released on 8th September, 1980. As we read on her official website, it was a groundbreaking release:
“Never For Ever is Kate's third studio album and was released in 1980.
Never For Ever was Kate's first no.1 album. It was also the first ever album by a British female solo artist to top the UK album chart, as well as being the first album by any female solo artist to enter the chart at no.1.
It has since been certified Gold by the British Phonographic Industry.
Kate co-produced the album with Jon Kelly”.
Rather than examine each song, I want to spotlight a couple and give an overall viewpoint of Never for Ever. I have already written how Kate Bush’s third studio album is underrated and did not get the reviews it deserved when it was released. It is still undervalued and not really discussed as one of her best. Co-producing with Jon Kelly – the first time Bush was in the production chair (though she did assist on Lionheart) -, this was her making music that was more truthful; where she had greater say and was breaking away from her first two albums (1978’s Never for Ever and Lionheart). As a huge fan, I can feel Bush sounds more in control and ambitious. The compositions on Never for Ever are much broader than those on her previous albums. Even though, in years following Never for Ever’s release, she was not entirely happy with her work until 1985’s Hounds of Love, she should be very proud. Never for Ever, forty-one years after its release, is finding new audiences.
Before exploring my two favourite songs from the album and dropping in a review, it is worth reading about Bush’s perspectives on the album. The Kate Bush Encyclopaedia is at hand to assist:
“Each song has a very different personality, and so much of the production was allowing the songs to speak with their own voices - not for them to be used purely as objects to decorate with "buttons and bows". Choosing sounds is so like trying to be psychic, seeing into the future, looking in the "crystal ball of arrangements", "scattering a little bit of stardust", to quote the immortal words of the Troggs. Every time a musical vision comes true, it's like having my feet tickled. When it works, it helps me to feel a bit braver. Of course, it doesn't always work, but experiments and ideas in a studio are never wasted; they will always find a place sometime.
I never really felt like a producer, I just felt closer to my loves - felt good, free, although a little raw, and sometimes paranoia would pop up. But when working with emotion, which is what music is, really, it can be so unpredictable - the human element, that fire. But all my friends, the Jons, and now you will make all the pieces of the Never For Ever jigsaw slot together, and It will be born and It will begin Breathing. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)
It's difficult to talk about the album without you actually hearing it, I suppose it's more like the first album, The Kick Inside, though, than the second, Lionheart, in that the songs are telling stories. I like to see things with a positive direction, because it makes it so much easier to communicate with the audience of listener. When you see people actually listening to the songs and getting into them, it makes you realise how important it is that they should actually be saying something. (...)
There are a lot of different songs. There's no specific theme, but they're saying a lot about freedom, which is very important to me. (Deanne Pearson, The Me Inside. Smash Hits (UK), May 1980)
For me, this was the first LP I'd made that I could sit back and listen to and really appreciate. I'm especially close to Never For Ever. It was the first step I'd taken in really controlling the sounds and being pleased with what was coming back. I was far more involved with the overall production, and so I had a lot more freedom and control, which was very rewarding. Favourite tracks? I guess I'd have to say 'Breathing' and 'The Infant Kiss'. (Women of Rock, 1984)”.
I like that last interview and the tracks Bush selects as her favourite. If she was asked today, I am sure she would change her mind. The two that I think showcases Bush at her very best are The Wedding List and Babooshka. The latter is a hit single that most people know about. It is such a great song because one can hear a vocal that sounds different to anything she delivered before. With a bit of the newly-discovered Fairlight CMI and a classic video, it is a confident songwriter very visibly and audibly entering a new phase of her career. The Wedding List is underplayed and a track that I think should have been a single. It has a great story. I will start by highlighting Babooshka. Again, it is to the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia for some useful information:
“The music video depicts Bush beside a double bass (contrabass) which symbolises the husband, wearing a black bodysuit and a veil in her role as the embittered wife. This changes into an extravagant, mythlike and rather sparse "Russian" costume as her alter-ego, Babooshka. An illustration by Chris Achilleos was the basis for the costume.
It was really a theme that has fascinated me for some time. It's based on a theme that is often used in folk songs, which is where the wife of the husband begins to feel that perhaps he's not faithful. And there's no real strength in her feelings, it's just more or less paranoia suspicions, and so she starts thinking that she's going to test him, just to see if he's faithful. So what she does is she gets herself a pseudonym, which happens to be Babooshka, and she sends him a letter. And he responds very well to the letter, because as he reads it, he recognises the wife that he had a couple of years ago, who was happy, in the letter. And so he likes it, and she decides to take it even further and get a meeting together to see how he reacts to this Babooshka lady instead of her. When he meets her, again because she is so similar to his wife, the one that he loves, he's very attracted to her. Of course she is very annoyed and the break in the song is just throwing the restaurant at him... (...) The whole idea of the song is really the futility and the stupidness of humans and how by our own thinking, spinning around in our own ideas we come up with completely paranoid facts. So in her situation she was in fact suspicious of a man who was doing nothing wrong, he loved her very much indeed. Through her own suspicions and evil thoughts she's really ruining the relationship. (Countdown Australia, 1980)”.
One demonstration of Bush’s strength as a unique and hugely inventive songwriting came with The Wedding List. I do love the story behind my favourite song on Never for Ever:
“Song written by Kate Bush. The song was inspired by a François Truffaut's film called The Bride Wore Black ('La Mariée était en noir'). It tells of a groom who is accidentally murdered on the day of his wedding by a group of five people who shoot at him from a window. The bride succeeds in tracking down each one of the five and kills them in a row, including the last one who happens to be in jail.
Revenge is so powerful and futile in the situation in the song. Instead of just one person being killed, it's three: her husband, the guy who did it - who was right on top of the wedding list with the silver plates - and her, because when she's done it, there's nothing left. All her ambition and purpose has all gone into that one guy. She's dead, there's nothing there. (Kris Needs, 'Fire in the Bush'. Zigzag, 1980)
Revenge is a terrible power, and the idea is to show that it's so strong that even at such a tragic time it's all she can think about. I find the whole aggression of human beings fascinating - how we are suddenly whipped up to such an extent that we can't see anything except that. Did you see the film Deathwish, and the way the audience reacted every time a mugger got shot? Terrible - though I cheered, myself. (Mike Nicholls, 'Among The Bushes'. Record Mirror, 1980)”.
As a producer, Bush definitely changed things and started to make music in her own way. Feeling more of a leader and architect than an artist in the machine with others moulding her music. Whilst 1985’s Hounds of Love was the most realised and spectacular example of Bush’s production and songwriting brilliance, Never for Ever was the first sign. With some of her best songs – Babooshka, Breathing, Army Dreamers, The Wedding List, Delius (Song of Summer) and All We Ever Look For -, Never for Ever is a magnificent album! I want to end with an article from PopMatters. They celebrated forty years of Never for Ever last year:
“Never for Ever was a commercial success, yielding three UK Top 20 hits (“Breathing”, “Army Dreamers”, and “Babooshka”) and topping the UK Albums chart. She produced the album, along with engineer Jon Kelly. For some artists, this achievement would be enough, and they’d be content to churn out variations on a theme year after year. But not so for Kate. On Never for Ever, we see her evolve lyrically, hear her expand sonically, and get a taste of what’s to come. Bush’s influences may be hard to map, but Never for Ever plots a course to the frenzied experimentation of The Dreaming, the triumph of Hounds of Love,, and indeed to the rest of her career. Hence, Never for Ever serves as a bridge between where she started and where she was going all along.
It is on these songs, in particular, that listeners catch a glimpse of what’s to come. Tracks like “Delius”, with its dreamy and capacious soundscapes, are intermixed with tracks like “The Wedding List”, a sort of companion piece to “Babooshka”. With its dastardly narrative building to a dramatic chorus, “The Wedding List” is a showy vaudevillian number. But it relies on the conventional instruments and string arrangements of Bush’s earlier LPs and would have been at home on either one.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performed Delius (Song of Summer) on The Russel Harty Show on 25th November, 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
“Blow Away” and “All We Ever Look For” are sweet, sentimental songs that could also fit in the pre-Fairlight era. I particularly enjoy Kate’s voice on the latter, but the Fairlight samples of a door opening, Hare Krishna chanting, and footsteps seem to have been an afterthought. The samples add a narrative layer to the song, but the sounds are not integral to the arrangement.
“The Infant Kiss” is one of the highlights of the album, though it, too, is more of a throwback to earlier compositions. The eerie song was inspired by the film The Innocents, which was in turn based on the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw. Lyrically, the song is similar to the title track of The Kick Inside and “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” in its dealing with taboo sexuality. The song’s narrator is a governess torn between the love of an adult man and child who inhabit the same body. Or, as one critic called it, “the child with the man in his eyes.”
What sets this song apart is Bush’s production. Instead of overwrought orchestral arrangements of the earlier albums, Bush relies on restrained, baroque instrumentation to convey the song’s conflicted emotions. With Bush behind the boards, she begins to use the studio as an instrument unto itself. Her growing technical facility, combined with the expansive possibilities of the Fairlight and other synthesizers, allowed her to express her feelings through sound more fully.
“Breathing” is a full opera in five-and-a-half minutes, written, scored, arranged, and performed by an artist growing into herself and beginning to realize her full potential. It’s a fitting ending for Never for Ever, an album that sees Bush, only 23 years old at the time, leaving behind her ’70s juvenilia. At the turn of the 1980s, she was poised to scale new heights with her music, some of which would define the decade to come”.
Ahead of its forty-first anniversary, I wanted to return to Never for Ever. After the exhaustive The Tour of Life in 1979 (which was fulfilling and successful) and two years before she released her most experimental album to that point, The Dreaming, Never for Ever was a phase where Bush assumed more production control and delivered a more eclectic album. There are one or two tracks from the album that I do not always listen to…though that is only a minor slight. I love Never for Ever and think that we need to hear more from it. Such an interesting and strong album, go and listen to it in full. Forty-one years after its release, Never for Ever remains…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs Babooshka on French T.V. in 1980
A remarkable album.