FEATURE:
Remember Genie from the Casino?
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performs James and the Cold Gun during 1979’s The Tour of Life/PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Still/Redferns
Kate Bush’s James and the Cold Gun
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AS Kate Bush’s…
PHOTO CREDIT: Ellen Poppinga - K & K/Redferns/Getty Images
debut album, The Kick Inside, turns forty-four next month, I am spending some time with various songs from it. I have not really spent much attention on a song that was hoped to be the first single. James and the Cold Gun was the song EMI wanted to release first. A track Bush has performed with her group, the KT Bush Band, at various pubs and clubs in the South of England, it could have had a fantastic video! As it was, the song was performed during The Tour of Life in 1979 - though it is never seen as a fan favourite. As it was, Wuthering Heights was Bush’s choice for her debut single. I think that, if EMI had prevailed, James and the Cold Gun may not have reached number one (as Wuthering Heights did). Maybe it would have been a top ten song. Bush was write to go with the more unusual Wuthering Heights. Even so, James and the Cold Gun is a great song that is among the more Rock-orientated and dramatic on The Kick Inside. Sort of Progressive Rock, I feel James and the Cold Gun is a track that truly comes to life on stage. Not based around James Bond or a specific person, it is a song that boasts some wonderful lyrics (“Remember Genie from the casino?/She's still a-waiting in that big brass bed/The boys from your gang are knocking whisky back/'Til they get out of hand and wish they were dead/They're only lonely for the life that they led/With their old friend”).
As this article from the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia explains, some of the choreography and routine from the KT Bush Band days was translated to The Tour of Life when it came to performing James and the Cold Gun:
“Song written by Kate Bush in the first half of the Seventies and it became one of the songs performed by the KT Bush Band during their performances in the pub circuit in 1977. Brian Bath, member of the band, recalled later: " Rob got a dry ice machine from somewhere. We used that on stage for 'James And The Cold Gun' and it looked great. We had a bit of a show going! Kate did a costume change, she'd put on a bloomin' Western cowgirl dress for the second set! The theatrical thing was starting to get there." Del Palmer recalled: "She was just brilliant, she used to wear this big long white robe with coloured ribbons on or a long black dress with big flowers in her hair. She did the whole thing with the gun and [the audience] just loved it. She'd go around shooting people."
The song was recorded in the studio in 1977 and released on her debut album The Kick Inside. When she embarked on the Tour of Life in 1979, the live performance of 'James And The Cold Gun' used and enhanced elements of those original performances from 1977”.
Whilst the live version has a bit more electricity and tension, I don’t think that the studio version is too clean and lacking. Perhaps the production of Andrew Powell does not suit a song that is quite wild and intense. Even so, I have a lot of love for James and the Cold Gun. Opening the second side of The Kick Inside, it takes us in a different direction after Wuthering Heights ends the first side. With some great guitar from Ian Bairnson and organ from Duncan Mackay, there is plenty of drive and spirit through James and the Cold Gun. I am glad that Bush brought it to the stage for The Tour of Life, as the song acted as this epic finale. One of the most extravagant and thrilling numbers on the tour, Bush would tout her gun and shoot down everyone in her wake! Perhaps one of the more overlooked songs from The Kick Inside, one does not hear it on the radio all that often. We associate The Kick Inside with Wuthering Heights or The Man with the Child in His Eyes. Bush showed, on James and the Cold Gun, that she was a very broad songwriter who could not be pinned down! I feel the setting of James and the Cold Gun is in the 1930s or 1940s. Maybe a gangster’s mob is chasing the hero. Enjoyed best as a live performance from the Hammersmith Odeon in 1979, James and the Cold Gun is a hot track…
FROM a wonderful debut album.