FEATURE:
How They Underestimated Her!
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Was the Music World Ready for Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside in 1978?
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I have touched on this before…
when it comes to thinking about Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside. Having watched the three-part documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, it makes me wonder what it would be like if there was that sort of intimate and revelatory footage of Kate Bush recording an album. Many fans would have their own opinion as to which album/period would be best served in a similar way. Many would say Bush recording Hounds of Love (1985) would provide the biggest thrills and pleasure. I actually think the excitement and intrigue of her debut album would be best. I feel there is misconception from some that her 1978 debut is this young and naïve artist taking tiny steps and feeling her way into music. Released on 17th February, this was the arrival of an artist who was not only fully-formed and realised. The complexity of some of the vocal arrangements, the depth and accomplished lyrics were definitely ahead of their time. Whilst she was a teenager when The Kick Inside was released, the songs suggested an artist who was far older and had been in the industry a lot longer. There was this sense of sneering from some critics. Other slagged off the high-pitched and gymnastic vocals. Others were condescending when it came to Bush writing about sex and love in a somewhat literary, classic and, at times, a bit embarrassing, way. For anyone who wants to know about The Kick Inside and its making, I would recommend this book from last year.
Ahead of its forty-fourth anniversary next month, I wanted to explore and dissect The Kick Inside through a variety of features. Whilst albums like Hounds of Love gained a lot of praise (in the U.K. rather than the U.S.), The Kick Inside is an album that has not won over everyone. I keep looking back at the reviews and press in 1978. Although there was a lot of love for Bush and her originality, there was a section that was more hostile, dubious and patronising. Writing her off as being eccentric, slight or a novelty. As I have said before, songs like Wuthering Heights gave a false impression of who Bush was as an artist. Many simply defined her based on that track. I wonder how many reviewers in 1978 really took time to take apart The Kick Inside, study the lyrics, and appreciate the vocal layers and the incredible musicianship? As a middle-class artist from a slightly well-off background, was Bush troubled enough? Was her music invalid unless she was struggling or from a less-well-of background? The Kick Inside is not an album from someone trying to make a lot of money or waste their time. It is a stunning and startling album that is as raw, fascinating and beautiful as anything released in 1978. This interesting article from 2018 argues how Bush was underestimated from the start:
“Growing up in Bexleyheath, Kent, in the southeast of England, Bush began writing songs when she was 11 years old, the most prodigious talent in an intensely musical family. Her mother specialized in traditional Irish dance, and her brothers were active in the Kent folk scene; in fact, brother Paddy plays mandolin on The Kick Inside. Her family produced a tape of 50 demos of her original songs and shopped it around to record labels, with very little luck. Eventually the tapes—which have since been widely bootlegged—found their way to David Gilmour, guitarist for Pink Floyd, who helped secured a contract with EMI. The label placed the teenager on retainer until they felt she was old enough to release an album and handle her success.
Perhaps they underestimated her. Bush emerges as a headstrong and even visionary artist almost from the start, with very rigid ideas of how she wants to present herself and her music. EMI originally wanted to release “James and the Cold Gun,” a rock-inflected tune that suggests a more aggro Carole King, as the first single previewing The Kick Inside. Bush not only objected but managed to convince them to release “Wuthering Heights” instead. It was a risk: The song is based on Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, sung from the point of view of a ghost haunting the moors and pining for living lover. It was hardly a formula for chart success, especially when Bush postponed the single by a month when she was unhappy with the artwork EMI provided. When it was finally released in January 1978, Bush was vindicated. By February “Wuthering Heights” was the number one song in England, and she made history by becoming the first woman to top the UK charts with a self-penned song.
Released in March 1978, The Kick Inside reveals a young artist positioning herself strategically between the ancient and the modern, between folklore and pop music. Sounding very much of its moment, it is nevertheless an album populated by ghosts and spirits. Not goth but certainly gothic, it is an album of hauntings. Some are literal: That’s Catherine Earnshaw’s spirit tapping at the window in “Wuthering Heights.” Other are figurative: The spellbinding music she describes in “The Saxophone Song” seems to have supernatural origins and powers, and the mysterious lover in “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” only appears “when I turn off the light.” Remarkably these ghosts are not diminished by the modern sound of The Kick Inside. Rather, they thrive in that friction between the old and the new”.
Not only was there some criticism and narrow-mindedness towards Bush in 1978. All these years later, there are a lot of people who consider The Kick Inside to be a minor album. Bush as this artist still trying to find her feet. I want to end with an article from Stereogum. They marked The Kick Inside’s fortieth anniversary in 2018 by talking about why Hounds of Love gained Bush the recognition and appreciated she deserved all along. They also state that, whilst underestimated and under-appreciated, albums like The Kick Inside have inspired so many other artists:
“Of course, first we need to address what will make most people either adore or despise TKI: That Voice. As the album begins, a wailing, impossibly-high-pitched voice grabs (or repels) the listener as it sings that opening line “mooooooviiiiiing straaaangeeeer.” Deborah Withers, author of Adventures In Kate Bush And Theory, wrote that the pitch of her voice is “an assault on the normal parameters of vocal modulation.” I feel it is no coincidence that, within a music criticism field dominated by straight white men, her most acclaimed album is 1985’s Hounds Of Love, on which her voice deepened enough for them to be able to handle it. Dismissive and condescending quotes from male critics about Bush’s early work, both from the ‘70s and now, are too numerous to collect here, but Suede frontman Brett Anderson’s assertion in the BBC’s The Kate Bush Story that in her early work she was “finding her way … she hadn’t quite found herself and all that early stuff of her dancing around in leotards is a little bit am-dram” (is he forgetting how he dressed in the early ‘90s?) and that Hounds Of Love is “the zenith” of her artistry, typifies the traditional critical approach to Bush’s work.
Kate Bush wasn’t fumbling or “finding her voice” — TKI establishes her voice as not just a voice but also as an instrument. Throughout her entire career Bush almost never used backup singers, and instead created her own backing vocals herself by singing in different pitches, in discordant and revelatory ways. This is displayed to great effect on almost every TKI song: turn the volume way up and marvel in how the backing vocals on each song swoop upwards and swoon downwards to create a landscape seemingly independent from the main vocals, especially in “L’Amour Looks Something Like You,” “Moving,” and “Kite.” Bush uses her four-octave range as an instrument most famously and strikingly in “Wuthering Heights,” in which she sings in an almost dog-whistle-like pitch to embody the character of Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost in Emily Brontë’s novel. For most musicians, the voice is what they use to express words; for Bush, it is a remarkable tool that helps contribute to unique soundscapes.
TKI is also revolutionary because it establishes Bush’s narrative style as fluid and multiple; her songs are short stories each written from a different narrator’s perspective rather than from her own point of view. This writing style stands in stark contrast to the traditionally personal style of music focusing on love and heartbreak that continues to dominate the charts. “I often find myself inspired by unusual, distorted, weird subjects, as opposed to things that are straightforward. It’s a reflection of me, my liking for weirdness,” she said in 1980. Unlike the majority of pop/rock artists, The “I” in Bush’s music is rarely Bush. Her songs are not confessional, but are rather short stories told from the points of views of a diverse range of narrators. From Bush’s songs, we can know about themes that interest her, but Kate Bush herself rarely speaks in her work; her narrators, who occupy multiple genders, races, and historical times, do instead. This is a deeply radical break from traditional “confessional “ songwriting, especially for women up to that point. Consider that the most acclaimed female musician of the time, and probably of all time, Joni Mitchell, is most-lauded for her confessional album, Blue.
Perhaps most importantly, beginning with The Kick Inside she has inspired a wide array of artists to “let the weirdness in.” Lady Gaga covered Bush’s duet with Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Give Up,” because she wanted to “make something that young people would hear and learn something about Kate Bush”, and her theatricality has its roots in Bush’s so-bizarre-they’re-brilliant live performances. Björk frequently cites Bush as a pivotal influence on her musical “form”, saying “I remember being underneath my duvet at the age of 12, fantasising about Kate Bush,” and even sent Bush of a demo of herself covering Bush’s “Moving” in 1989. Lorde played “Running Up That Hill” before the shows on her Melodrama tour, and Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan said of Bush, “As an artist myself, [she’s] helped me to not be frightened to put my vulnerability as a woman [in my work] and in that, be powerful.” Bush’s influence is also felt in hip-hop, especially due to her early use of sampling, best seen in her sampling of the Gregorian chanting from Werner Herzog’s film Nosfertu The Vampyre in Hounds Of Love’s “Hello Earth.” One of her biggest champions is OutKast’s Big Boi, who has repeatedly called her “my favorite artist of all time,” and Tricky from Massive Attack said of Bush’s song “Breathing,” which features the line “breathing my mother in,”: “I’m a kid from a council flat, I’m a mixed-raced guy…totally different life to Kate Bush, but that lyric, ‘breathing my mother in,’ my whole career’s based on that.” Even Chris Martin “admitted” that Coldplay’s “Speed Of Sound” “was developed after the band had listened to Kate Bush”.
Forty-four years later, and I have to ask whether perception has shifted that much. The Kick Inside has definitely improved in terms of critical respect, although there are plenty of people who overlook it and see it as this album with a few promising songs – and the rest of it is quite forgettable. As a singer, writer and complete artists, Bush’s magnificent 1978 debut was like nothing else. Those who gave it short shrift did not appreciate or understand a complex and original artist who was offering the world something fresh and different. Not just white male critics, there were more than a few who were unkind towards Kate Bush. All these years later, I maintain The Kick Inside is a misunderstood masterpiece that will only be fully understood and loved years from now. It’s forty-fourth anniversary is on 17th February. I hope that, on that day, there are plenty of writers and fans who show The Kick Inside…
A lot of love.