FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Never for Ever at Forty-Two
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and extra between takes filming the video for Breathing/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Breathing: Stepping Inside One of Her Finest Closing Tracks
__________
RECORDED over the course…
of three days in 1980, Breathing (which I last discussed earlier in the year) is a masterpiece closer to Never for Ever. That album is forty-two tomorrow (8th September), and this will be my final anniversary feature about it. Alongside Never for Ever, both The Dreaming (13th) and Hounds of Love (16th) have birthdays. I am pacing myself after today and readying my hands for a slew of anniversary features next month – as many of her studio albums have anniversaries in November. Breathing is a perspective of nuclear annihilation and terror, largely told from the perspective of a fetus. That idea of the unborn child breathing in their mother. There is a bit of irony and clever imagery. That fear of a post-apocalyptic birthday but, also the fetus absorbing nicotine from the mother's smoking. Smoking provides this danger of a smaller scale. Put that alongside the large-scale apocalypse, and this is a fraught and terrible start to life! Bush is very proud of the song. Rightly so! She put it out as the first single from Never for Ever on 14th April, 1980. Four months or so before the album came along, we got as single unlike any she had ever put out. This was next level stuff in terms of the politics, production, and sound! Pairing the song with the almost-unheard and fantastic The Empty Bullring, it reached number sixteen in the U.K. and stayed on the chart for seven weeks.
Although it wasn’t a massive chart success, it was an impressive placing. Compare Breathing to the final U.K. single from her previous album, Lionheart, and they are different. Wow was released in March 1979. A short time after that single came out, the public got something altogether of another world from the always-unpredictable Kate Bush! I hope there will be a remix album or tribute album where we can hear new versions of Breathing. It is a song that could be interpreted and reworked in different ways. Bush only performed the track live once, during a Comic Relief concert on 25th April, 1986. It was a solo piano version. Because Never for Ever is forty-two on 8th September, I wanted to round off the anniversary features with the album’s biggest and, perhaps, most moving song. Bush did speak about Breathing in various interviews. There are some that I want to source, as they underline how inspired Breathing is. Bush claims it to be one of the best songs she had written to that point. Few could argue with her:
“From my own viewpoint that's the best thing I've ever written. It's the best thing I've ever produced. I call that my little symphony, because I think every writer, whether they admit it or not, loves the idea of writing their own symphony. The song says something real for me, whereas many of the others haven't quite got to the level that I would like them to reach, though they're trying to. Often it's because the song won't allow it, and that song allowed everything that I wanted to be done to it. That track was easy to build up. Although it had to be huge, it was just speaking - saying what had to be put on it. In many ways, I think the most exciting thing was making the backing track. The session men had their lines, they understood what the song was about, but at first there was no emotion, and that track was demanding so much emotion. It wasn't until they actually played with feeling that the whole thing took off. When we went and listened, I wanted to cry, because of what they had put into it. It was so tender. It meant a lot to me that they had put in as much as they could, because it must get hard for session guys. They get paid by the hour, and so many people don't want to hear the emotion. They want clear, perfect tuning, a 'good sound'; but often the out-of-tuneness, the uncleanliness, doesn't matter as much as the emotional content that's in there. I think that's much more important than the technicalities. (Kris Needs, 'Fire In The Bush'. Zigzag (UK), 1980)
I wanted to write a song, and I came up with some chords which sounded to me very dramatic. Then up popped the line, 'Outside get[s] inside,' as I was trying to piece the song together, and I thought it would be good to write a song about a baby inside the womb. Then I came to a chorus piece, and decided that the obvious word to go there was 'Breathing', and I thought automatically that it had been done before. But asking around, I couldn't understand why it hadn't, because it's such a good word. Then 'breathing' and the baby turned into the concept of life, and the last form of life that would be around - that would be a baby that was about to be born after the blast. It was a very personal song. I thought at the time that it was self-indulgent, and it was something I just did for myself, really. For me it's a statement that I hope won't happen. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, April 1980)
It got to the point when I heard [Pink floyd's The Wall] I thought there's no point in writing songs any more because they'd said it all. You know, when something really gets you, it hits your creative centre and stops you creating... and after a couple of weeks I realized that he hadn't done everything, there was lots he hadn't done. And after that it became an inspiration. 'Breathing' was definitely inspired by the whole vibe I got from hearing that whole album, especially the third side. There's something about Floyd that's pretty atomic anyway. (Colin Irwin, 'Paranoia And Passion Of The Kate Inside'. Melody Maker (UK), 4 October 1980)”.
One of the most individual and different anti-war songs of the early-‘80s, The Guardian ranked Breathing Kate Bush’s tenth-best single. Far Out Magazine placed it in the same position earlier this year; Classic Pop ranked it fifteenth in 2021. This is what Dig! said last year when selecting Bush’s most essential songs:
“Recorded in early 1980 and released as Never For Ever’s lead single in April that year, Breathing is written from the perspective of a foetus preparing to enter a post-apocalyptic world. As she told Smash Hits at the time of the single’s release: “It’s about a baby still in the mother’s womb at the time of a nuclear fallout, but it’s more of a spiritual being. It has all its senses: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing, and it knows what is going on outside the mother’s womb, and yet it wants desperately to carry on living, as we all do of course. Nuclear fallout is something we’re all aware of, and worried about happening in our lives, and it’s something we should all take time to think about. We’re all innocent, none of us deserve to be blown up.” Again, despite the foreboding subject matter, it’s a gorgeous-sounding entry among the best Kate Bush songs – a sumptuous prog masterpiece that showed her musical ambition”.
It is a shame Bush only performed Breathing live once. Maybe not fitting for 2014’s Before the Dawn residency, it would have been great to hear on a new tour a few years later. Many asked Bush, when 1982’s The Dreaming was released, if she’d tour. That was the hope. The exhausting effects of that album and a need to rejuvenate and change things – that led into 1985’s Hounds of Love – put pave to that notion. With some backing vocals (powerfully done!) by the legendary Roy Harper – Bush featured on Harper’s track, You (The Game Part II), on 1980’s The Unknown Soldier – and prophetic words from Larry Fast, we get some chilling words:
“ In point of fact it is possible to tell the
("Out!")
difference between a small nuclear explosion and
a large one by a very simple method. The calling
card of a nuclear bomb is the blinding flash that
is far more dazzling than any light on earth--brighter
even than the sun itself--and it is by the duration
of this flash that we are able to determine the size
("What are we going to do without?")
of the weapon. After the flash a fireball can be
seen to rise, sucking up under it the debris, dust
and living things around the area of the explosion,
and as this ascends, it soon becomes recognisable
as the familiar "mushroom cloud". As a demonstration
of the flash duration test let's try and count the
number of seconds for the flash emitted by a very
small bomb; then a more substantial, medium-sized
bomb; and finally, one of our very powerful,
"high-yield" bombs”
There is beautiful musicianship throughout Breathing. It is this symphony that could have featured on Hounds of Love! Bush’s vocals are raw and almost strangulated when near the end. Imploring heavens or the bomb-droppers to let her breathe; to give the people some hope and life! Such a powerful thing that is undoubtedly one of greatest ever songs, Breathing will never lose its relevance or potency. A happy forty-second anniversary to Never for Ever on 8th September. It’s haunting closing track – so different to its springing and almost uplifting opener of Babooshka – is still unbearably moving, impressive, important, and accomplished…
ALL these years later.