FEATURE:
All My Barriers Are Going…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980 signing a copy of Never for Ever
Record-Breaking and Underrated: Kate Bush’s Never for Ever at Forty-Two
__________
BECAUSE Kate Bush’s…
third studio album, Never for Ever, turns forty-two on 8th September, I am revisiting it. I have already written a feature about its shortest track, Night Scented Stock. This is a bridge between two other songs, The Infant Kiss and Army Dreamers. For this feature, I am going to bring in a number of things. I want to mention three tracks that were not singles but I think deserve wider airplay and investigation. I am also going to source a couple of reviews. The reason for that is because I feel Never for Ever is underrated. Bush’s sound and production – she co-produced Never for Ever with Jon Kelly – changed dramatically when she solo-produced The Dreaming (1982). When people consider the best Kate Bush albums, Never for Ever sort of comes in the middle of the pack. Consider the fact singles like Babooshka and Breathing are among her greatest work, there are also terrific deeper cuts like Blow Away (For Bill), All We Ever Look For and Violin. More political-minded songs like Breathing and Army Dreamers (also a single) sat alongside some of her most exceptional vocal performances and most intriguing songs. I think, up until Hounds of Love, Never for Ever contains the strongest set of Kate Bush singles. The Dreaming sort of had poor fortunes in that market but, with its first and third singles (Breathing and Army Dreamers) hitting sixteen and Babooshka reaching number five, this was a solid outing. Also, in Babooshka, Bush created one of her finest and most spectacular opening tracks. Not only is the song one of her most catchy, powerful and interesting. Its video sees her practically unleashed into a warrior in the chorus. It is most certainty eye-catching!
Never for Ever was Bush’s first number one album. It was also the first album by a British female solo artist to top the U.K. album chart, as well as being the first album by any female solo artist to enter the chart at number one. Before coming to a couple of reviews concerning Never for Ever, a trusted source in the Kate Bush Encyclopedia allows me to include interviews where Kate Bush talked about the exceptional Never for Ever:
“Now, after all this waiting it is here. It's strange when I think back to the first album. I thought it would never feel as new or as special again. This one has proved me wrong. It's been the most exciting. Its name is Never For Ever, and I've called it this because I've tried to make it reflective of all that happens to you and me. Life, love, hate, we are all transient. All things pass, neither good [n]or evil lasts. So we must tell our hearts that it is "never for ever", and be happy that it's like that!
The album cover has been beautifully created by Nick Price (you may remember that he designed the front of the Tour programme). On the cover of Never For Ever Nick takes us on an intricate journey of our emotions: inside gets outside, as we flood people and things with our desires and problems. These black and white thoughts, these bats and doves, freeze-framed in flight, swoop into the album and out of your hi-fis. Then it's for you to bring them to life. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush signs an autograph in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Mirrorpix/Getty Images
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)”.
I do genuinely think Never for Ever is underrated. Consider the fact it is filled with variety and wonderful production. Although the Fairlight CMI (a relatively new technology Bush was introduced to by her friend Peter Gabriel) was only part of the album process late on, it adds to songs like Babooshka (the breaking glass sound) and Army Dreamers (the gun cocking). There are three gems (among the many) from the album I want to highlight for particular consideration. Whilst there is a lot of half-arsed praise and three-star reviews for an album that warrants so much more, others have provided greater depth and appreciation of a 1980 classic. Although PopMatters gave an excellent write-up of Never for Ever on its fortieth in 2020, there is a little too much ‘what was to come’ about it: like this was a stepping stone. Although Bush’s work would become more adventurous and ambitious, Never for Ever is the sound of a remarkable artist who co-produced something masterful. Consider the fact she was only twenty-two when Never for Ever was released on 8th September, 1980:
“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.
“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
The penultimate “Army Dreamers” is a lamentation in the form of a waltz, sung from the viewpoint of a mother who’s lost her son in military maneuvers. Here, the samples of gun cocks add a percussive and forbidding element to the arrangement. The sound is restrained but menacing when coupled with the shouts of a commander in the background. Plus, “Army Dreamers” is one of the more political songs in Bush’s repertoire, though situating it inside a personal narrative keeps it from becoming polemical.
The album’s closer, “Breathing”, is a more overtly political song. It was Bush’s crowning achievement at the time, a realization of everything that had led her to this point. The song is told from a fetus’s perspective terrified of being born into a post-apocalyptic world: “I’ve been out before / But this time, it’s much safer in”. Bush plays on the words “fallout” and the rhythmic repetition of breathing—“out-in, out-in”—throughout.
Synthesizer pads and a fretless bass build to a middle section in which sonic textures take precedence over lyrical content, as Bush’s vocals fade to a false ending at the halfway mark. Ominous, atmospheric tones play over a spoken-word middle section describing the flash of a nuclear bomb. The male voice is chilling in its dispassionate delivery, and the bass comes to the foreground once again in a slow march to the finish as the song reaches its final dramatic crescendo. Here, Bush’s vocals, which admittedly can be grating at times, perfectly match the desperation of the lyrics. “Oh, leave me something to breathe!” she cries, in a terrifying contrast to Roy Harper’s monotone backing vocals (“What are we going to do without / We are all going to die without”).
“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”.
Before moving to three gems I have a very soft spot for, I wanted to bring in a few segments from The Quietus’ fortieth anniversary celebration of Never for Ever (many sources say the album came out on 7th September, 1980; Bush’s official website says 8th September, so that is the one I am going with!).
“Never For Ever would change all that. Draining as it was, Bush’s gruelling Tour Of Life gave her the chance to co-produce 1979’s On Stage EP with engineer Jon Kelly, convincing her they could handle a full album together. She ousted Powell and combined the session hands with her band members, swapping them in and out like rolling subs and making them record take after take. Another Bush biographer, Rob Jovanovic, estimates she spent an unprecedented five months writing and demoing at Abbey Road, honing new and old ideas alike, while keyboardist Max Middleton told Thomson the sessions were so exacting because of her obsession with finding “something nebulous that was hard to pinpoint”. For Bush the autonomy was worth savouring, no matter how painstaking the process. “It was the first step I’d really taken in controlling the sounds,” she said, “and being pleased with what was coming back.”
Listen now and you can still hear that fundamental shift Bush spoke of, the birth of some new, peculiar magic. It starts with ‘Babooshka’, in which a paranoid wife impersonates a younger woman to test her husband’s roving eye, and ends up destroying her marriage. It’s a wonderfully wicked premise: Bush based it on the cross-dressing, happy-ever-after hijinks of the traditional English folk ditty ‘Sovay’, but her revamp is less a cheeky romp than a surreal, bitter farce, pitched somewhere between Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Tales Of The Unexpected. Most startling, though, is the way it sounds, like unearthly Russian folk music: there’s something both archaic and futuristic about its echoey keys, eerie synths and the ethereal strings of her brother Paddy’s balalaika, as uncanny as a Cossack band playing on the Mir space station. Bush sings like two different people, flitting from coy trills to operatic shrieks, and eventually her world comes crashing down in a crescendo of squalling guitars and the Fairlight’s splintering glass.
Then, before the debris has cleared, she drifts into the wispy beauty of ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’, which recounts how Frederic Delius’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby, took down his idol’s compositions from dictation after he was waylaid by syphilis. All the same, if “moody old man” Delius was difficult, there’s no rancour in its shimmering reverie of hazy sitar and bubbling percussion: it hums with the heady buzz of the olde British countryside, and Bush’s vocal has the crisp, bucolic freshness of dandelion and burdock. Both tracks size up the album’s big themes – the push-and-pull of thorny relationships, the constant churn of emotions – but one bursts into thunder, and the other floats on the breeze.
Never For Ever is a starting point, not a zenith, and those miraculous opening six minutes aren’t as groundbreaking as her later innovations. But it is, I’d argue, the first of her LPs that’s genuinely experimental. Paddy’s greater involvement brought weird new instruments – zithers, kotos, musical saws – although Peter Gabriel introduced Bush to the Fairlight, the sonic equivalent of a Jedi being handed their first lightsaber; there were only three in the UK, and while she wouldn’t master it until later, her instant obsession speaks to how determined she was to bend her ornate style into bizarre new shapes. ‘All We Ever Look For’, her happy-go-lucky reflection on knotty parent-child relationships, mutates into several different forms by itself: it jumps between lurching, whistling synths, the koto’s fluttering strings, and a mishmash of Foley-style noises including chirping birds and hurried footsteps. “The whims that we’re weeping for/ Our parents would be beaten for,” sings Bush over its jaunty, oddball din, like the ringmaster at a baroque big top”.
I will do another feature or two before Never for Ever’s forty-second anniversary on 8th September. There are three cuts from the eleven that, whilst not singles and songs that are played on the radio much (if at all!), they definitely warrant your attention. I shall be back with you to round up afterwards. For this, again, I am quoting from the invaluable treasure trove that is the Kate Bush Encyclopedia.
“So there's comfort for the guy in my band, as when he dies, he'll go "Hi, Jimi!" It's very tongue-in-cheek, but it's a great thought that if a musician dies, his soul will join all the other musicians and a poet will join all the Dylan Thomases and all that.
None of those people [who have had near-death experiences] are frightened by death anymore. It's almost something they're looking forward to. All of us have such a deep fear of death. It's the ultimate unknown, at the same time it's our ultimate purpose. That's what we're here for. So I thought this thing about the death-fear. I like to think I'm coming to terms with it, and other people are too. The song was really written after someone very special died.
Although the song had been formulating before and had to be written as a comfort to those people who are afraid of dying, there was also this idea of the music, energies in us that aren't physical: art, the love in people. It can't die, because where does it go? It seems really that music could carry on in radio form, radio waves... There are people who swear they can pick up symphonies from Chopin, Schubert. We're really transient, everything to do with us is transient, except for these non-physical things that we don't even control... (Kris Needs, 'Lassie'. Zigzag (UK), November 1985)”.
“‘The Wedding List' is about the powerful force of revenge. An unhealthy energy which in this song proves to be a "killer". (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)
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)”.
“Song written by Kate Bush. It was inspired by the gothic horror movie The Innocents, which in turn was inspired by Henry James' novel 'The Turn Of The Screw'. The story is about a governess who believes the ghost of her predecessor's dead lover is trying to possess the bodies of the children she is looking after. The song was released on the album Never For Ever.
Versions
There are two versions of this song: the original album version and a French version, entitled Un Baiser d'Enfant, released two years later.
Music video
American Kate Bush fan Chris WIlliams made a video for 'The Infant Kiss' using scenes from the movie 'The Innocents'. According to Kate, who contacted him after she saw the video, he'd chosen the exact scenes that were in her head upon writing the song.
Cover versions
'The Infant Kiss' was covered by Kat Devlin.
Kate about 'The Infant Kiss'
'The Infant Kiss' is about a governess. She is torn between the love of an adult man and child who are within the same body. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, September 1980)”.
On 8th September, Kate Bush’s marvellous third studio album, Never for Ever, is forty-two. Although September (specifically 13th) is all about The Dreaming on its fortieth anniversary, one cannot overlook the magnificent Never for Ever. September is a busy month in general for Kate Bush album anniversaries, as Hounds of Love is third-seven on 16th. I wanted to use this opportunity to praise and show proper respect to a…
VERY special album.