FEATURE:
Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow
Unbelievable!
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in Amsterdam in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Barry Schultz
Reappraising Kate Bush’s Early Work
___________
I want to add to a feature…
that I wrote a while back. I was also listening to Stuart Maconie on BBC Radio 6 Music on 25th September. He said that, when he interviewed Bush years ago, she was shocked that he liked her second album, Lionheart. Here is an excerpt from his 1993 interview with Bush:
“Which of your old songs make you wince?
"My God, loads. Absolutely loads. Either the lyric's not thought out properly or it's just crap or the performances weren't well executed. But you have to get it in context. You were doing it at the time and it was the best you could do then. You've got to live with it. Some of those early songs, though, you think, 'What was I *thinking* about? Did *I* write that?'"
Like what?
"I can't name one. There's not just one. There were too many to mention. But I was very young, so I can be gentle on myself for that. Having said that, I think some of my lyrics were just, well, mad, really. And why not! You've got to be prepared to fail and get a bit hurt or bruised along the way."
As someone who's written a very stirring song about England (Oh England My Lionheart), will you always be happiest here?
(Astonished:) "Do you like that one? That's one of the ones I meant. It makes me just want to die. There's just something about that time. It's such an old song. Ooh God, I haven't heard it for so long. Must have been on tour in 1979. Anyway, England, yeah, I am happiest here. We're a funny race, we give each other such a hard time, don't you think? One thing we take very, very seriously is this whole business of taking the piss, the whole stuff about irony. I think there's a real integrity about us under all the layers and our sense of humour is so strong. I've always felt pulled to Ireland because my mother was Irish, but whenever I've gone, I've never felt very at home. So I've played with the idea of staying there. I'm not sure I really could live anywhere else but here. But it might be interesting. For a while”.
I am going to bring together a few reviews. One each for her first three studio albums. I think that these albums are among her best. It seems that, in interviews after their release, Bush distanced herself and was not too convinced. Maybe she felt her music was not as developed as it could have been. She co-produced Never for Ever with Jon Kelly. I suppose, when she started producing and got more ambitious, the earliest work sounded a little simple - like she was part of the process and not leading it. I think that Bush saw herself as a very different artist on The Kick Inside (1978), Lionheart (1978) and Never for Ever (1980). I have said how it would be great to have reissues of her studio albums with demos and rarer tracks. I do feel that we need to reappraise the earliest albums. One does not hear too many of the songs on the radio. Maybe we’ll hear Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside) or Wow (Lionheart). Although there has been some positive retrospection regarding her first three albums, the reviews are not entirely glowing. Drowned in Sound reconsidered Bush’s first four albums in 2018. I will source their review of The Kick Inside, Lionheart and Never for Ever. I think their interpretation is more balanced and fairer than many other reviews. This is what they say about The Kick Inside:
“In the beginning she was seen as a prodigy, not an enigma, but this would change as she gradually faded from view. The touring stopped first, the interviews became less frequent and less revealing; eventually, after 1993, she dropped out of sight altogether, only reconnecting with the world unexpectedly, at great intervals.
We are currently experiencing a minor reconnection. There is no new album, or live show, but there is, How to Be Invisible, a book of her lyrics, plus her albums remastered and reissued as three boxed sets.
Part of me frets this ordering of her legacy might be a coded retirement – would she do this if a new record was underway? The less tinfoil hat bit of me notes she has always tinkered with her back catalogue, and that there’s probably no higher meaning beyond some fairly typical pre-Christmas action from a heritage artist.
Anyway, whether by accident or design, Volume One binds the leotard years up as a distinct phase. The Kick Inside, (1978), released when she was just 19, and The Dreaming (1982), which came out when she was 24, are vastly different records, but they were marked by a relatively cohesive aesthetic that she’d largely leave behind afterwards.
I am banging on about leotards because again, it’s much easier to stick to mundane facts than actually explain Kate Bush. And ‘Wuthering Heights’, her debut single, most famous song, and sole number one, sounds borderline comical if you stick to the mundane facts.
You can call it a musical adaptation of Emily Brontë's sole novel, but is that really why it works? It’s easier to laugh it off as an eccentric endeavour than really interrogate its power, than admit the way she sings the word "window" is genuinely astonishing, than contemplate the fact she’s somehow drilled her way into deeper emotional chambers simply inaccessible by most artists. I think maybe the key to ‘Wuthering Heights’ - and most of her music - is that it goes too far: the voice, the dance, the subject matter; anybody else would have stopped way before; it’s Wagnerian in scale and intensity, only tangentially bound to the mortal form of a pop song. It’s beyond most artists’ imaginations to write this sort of stuff, and I think it’s beyond most writers’ imaginations to write about this sort of stuff.
I am absolutely including myself in that, btw. But her PR has sent me these lovely vinyls and I guess I need to pass critical comment, so here we are, maybe let’s not drag this out.
One funny thing about The Kick Inside is that from the atmospheric bleed in of ‘Moving’, it sounds like a Kate Bush-produced album - which of course it isn’t, the little-known Andrew Powell doing the honours.. There is a maturity to the songwriting that is matched by the musicianship: it doesn’t feel like there’s any attempt to patronise the teenager, or market her as such. I think it must have been a pretty extraordinary record to hear at the time. Peculiarly, though, The Kick Inside is almost dated by the strength of its fundamentals: in some respects it sounds like a less good version of what she’d do later, and I wonder if a less slick version of her debut might have stood up a bit better, historically. But detail and polish were always her thing, in a good way, and to say she'd bottled nothing of her youth would be wrong: both ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘The Man with the Child In His Eyes’ have a gorgeous gaucheness. At the end of the day it still just about nudges classic status, but it would be eclipsed soon enough (plus sue me but the ’86 ‘Wuthering Heights’ is way better). (8)”.
Lionheart has never got a lot of love or respect. Many who have reviewed it negatively compared it to The Kick Inside. Even if their assessment is not overly-glowing, Drowned in Sound did commend some moments on Lionheart. This is an album that I have battled for; one that we need to listen to more closely and respect:
“One of the funny things about The Before Time when you had to buy music to listen to it is that ropey critical reputations could really put you off ever listing to certain records, even by artists you loved. It took me years to get around to Lionheart. And you know, sure, it’s the weakest Kate Bush record but that doesn’t make it bad. If anything the fact it’s routinely dismissed as a rushed follow up to The Kick Inside means it doesn’t have the pressure to compete with the stronger later records. The luminous ‘Wow’ is obviously the best and most memorable song, but seriously, check out those elaborately layered vocals on opener ‘Symphony in Blue’. The songwriting is a bit hazy compared to the laser-definition of later albums, but musically and texturally it’s a really beautiful record - the only Kate Bush album that is content to be pretty and not ask you to commit to it, and there’s something to be said for that, I think. (7)”.
Even though they wrote Never for Ever incorrectly (they put it as Never Forever), there was some positivity from Drowned in Sound regarding an album that, to me, is among her most underrated:
“You listen to all of these records in sequence and good as The Kick Inside is, it’s just very apparent that the songwriting has gone up a gear with Never Forever. Strident, diverse, and intense Never Forever is the last Bush album with batshit mental prog art, the last album with an outside producer (though she co-produced with Jon Kelly), and the last record before she started using her beloved Fairlight synthesiser/sampler. It was also her third album in three years, that preempted the first meaningful gap in her career - you could point at the ways in which it predicts The Dreaming and call it a transitional album, but the truth is Never for Ever feels like the [apotheosis] of Leotard-era Kate Bush. The songs are just dazzlingly strong and distinctive. There are singles: ‘Babooska’ is a lot of fun, and the closing one-two of the eerie ‘Army Dreamers’ and the apocalyptic ‘Breathing’ is remarkable. But there’s a hell of a lot of little-remembered gold amongst the album tracks: the breakneck ‘Violin’ and tongue-in-cheek murder ballad ‘The Wedding List’ are really extraordinarily good pieces of songwriting. (8)”.
Kate Bush is unlikely to re-release her earliest albums or discuss them too much. I get the feeling she connects with Hounds of Love (1985) and feels like her music prior to that was inferior or not as good as it should have been. Music is subjective…though one can definitely hear brilliance on her first three albums. Her fourth, The Dreaming (1982), has got more acclaim - and I don’t think it is as overlooked as the albums it followed. Go and listen back to these albums, and I know that you will enjoy them. I have a special appreciation for The Kick Inside. There is a whiff – from critical reviews – of minor praise regarding that album. There has been some reappraisal, though many consider it a promising debut but not as wonderful as future albums. Lionheart is almost dismissed completely, whereas Never for Ever has got mixed reviews – in spite of the fact the songwriting is phenomenal and there is such a range of music and lyrical themes. It is a pity that Kate Bush herself is less enamoured of these albums than, say, Aerial (2005) or Hounds of Love. I will go in to bat for Lionheart again on a different day. For now, I wanted to get us to consider her first three albums and give them more love. If you listen to them and give them time, their beauty and quality…
WILL shine through.