FEATURE:
The Doom of Eternity Balms.
Fifty Years of Kate Bush’s Passing Through Air
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IT almost slipped my mind…
but I was reminded by a Twitter friend that Kate Bush’s Passing Through Air was recorded in August 1973. Not long after Bush turned fifteen, this is the earliest of her recordings to be released officially. The band on that song played consisted of Pat Martin (bass), Pete Perrier (drums) and David Gilmour (guitar). At the time of recording, Kate had never played with other musicians before or played her music in front of anyone except her family. It might not have been considered for her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, but the song was released as a B-side of the single Army Dreamers in 1980. Rather than discuss this as a deep cut, I want to mark fifty years of an important song. I am not sure the exact day in August it was recorded. However, fifty years ago, laid to tape was a recording that would be the start of the career of one of music’s all-time best. Prior to this, Bush has written plenty of songs. She penned The Man with the Child in His Eyes when she was thirteen. By 1973, she had a considerable amount of songs that could be considered for recording. I will come to the lyrics of Passing Through Air. Prior to that, there are two great features that explore a Kate Bush song many might not be aware of. Passing Through Air was also released for The Other Sides a few years back. Sitting alongside other rarities like Ran Tan Waltz and Humming. As this momentous song was recorded fifty years ago, it is worthy of celebration and focus. Dreams of Orgonon dove into a sublime song back in 2018:
“Having a professionally recorded song makes our job much easier. What nuances are lost in the lo-fi recordings of, say, “Queen Eddie” or “Sunsi” are picked up in the clean sound of “Passing Through Air.” This is largely due to Cathy recording with professional equipment for the first time. She didn’t need it to shine before, of course—she’s simply honing her best work to date for a really, really important moment.
Artists rarely get a big break. A 15-year-old artist’s home demos getting picked up for professional recording was pretty much unheard of in the pre-Soundcloud age. For a young artist to be discovered by a musician coming off the back of releasing one of the bestselling albums of all time seems colossally unlikely. Yet this is an exaggeration—plenty of people had heard Cathy’s demos by this point, and she wasn’t the only artist David Gilmour had taken under his wing at the time. Coming off The Dark Side of the Moon’s massive success, Gilmour was nurturing about eight protégés, the luckiest of whom would hit #1 on the UK singles charts five years later. He’d found Kate via her brother Jay’s friend Ricky Hopper, who played Gilmour some tapes which struck him. Maybe it was the undercurrent of ethereal strangeness in Kate’s songs or her musical aptitude which struck him. After he’d worked on “The Great Gig in the Sky,” no wonder he was into this sort of thing.
Another Gilmour ward was the band Unicorn, featuring the rhythm section of bassist Pat Martin and drummer Pete Perrier. The two musicians readily agreed to record the Bush sessions (they did so without immediate payment, although they’d receive royalties when the song was released seven years later.) They proceeded to play a number of songs (the exact song count is lost to history), including “Maybe” and “Passing Through Air.” The accompaniment of Gilmour, Martin, and Perrier, while not daring or spectacular by any means, lends some musical texture to “Passing Through Air.” To date, Cathy’s songs have sounded like they were recorded in a vacuum, not just because of their sound quality, but in how they’re completely isolated from any human contact. Gilmour’s home studio is a huge step up for her—being able to work with an 8-track recorder, a 16-channel mixing desk, an upright piano, and a Wurlitzer electric piano must have been thrilling for her. She immediately takes advantage of the equipment—she seems to record her vocal with automatic double-tracking (two tracks of audio will be recorded simultaneously, but one will have a slight delay, giving the recording a thick, rich sound. John Lennon used this technique often). Cathy steps into the world of professional recording with impressive ease, and so she makes our job a little easier as well. Not only do we know the exact circumstances under which “Passing Through Air” was recorded and have a high-quality recording of the song—there’s even sheet music for it.
Lyrically, “Passing” isn’t a great departure from the demoed songs. Its subject is much the same as “Something Like a Song” or “Queen Eddie”—an elusive figure who makes things magical and exciting. Yet Cathy has honed her skills as a wordsmith to write her best lyric yet. The verses seem to take a spiritual walk through a green moor—Cathy spins poignant phrases like “you mix the stars with your arms” and rhymes them with stuff like “the doom of eternity balms.” The song briefly walks through phrases like this before exploding into G and realizing that what Cathy needs to write is a pop song. “Oh, don’t you throw my love away/I need your loving, I need your loving” is the remedy to the lugubrious tunes she’s composed to date. Finally she’s allowing herself to have fun within a song”.
In 2020, The Traveling Red included Passing Through Air in a feature. Even though it is a professional demo – so it has that quality and sustainability -, it is capturing a teenage Kate Bush before she recorded The Man with the Child in His Eyes. Many assume that June 1975 session at AIR Studios was her first professional recording. Passing Through Air, produced by David Gilmour, beat it by almost two years. The period between 1973 and 1975 is fascinating! Maybe an academic route was sought by her parents. This prodigy was destined for bigger things:
“Besides “Passing Through Air” a second version of “Maybe” was recorded. Kate later recalled, “And we went to Dave’s for a day, basically. And the bass player and drummer from Unicorn sat down and we just kind of put a few songs together. I remember it was the first time I’d ever done an overdub with the keyboard – I put this little electric piano thing down, and I remember thinking: ‘Ooh! [laughing] I like this!’ And, well, I mean really it was because of those tracks that I then went on to do the tracks which were then used – two of which were used to go on the first album. As far as I remember the tracks we did with this session in ’73… There was a track called “Passing Through Air”, which I think went on a b-side…” [“Passing Through Air appeared as the b-side to “Army Dreamers”.] A portion of the version of “Maybe” recorded at this session was played by Kate on the radio program “Personal Call”, BBC Radio 1, in 1979.
After the bit was played the announcer remarked: “Kate had a very wistful look on her face. Why was that?” Kate: “I was waiting for the flat note in the middle (laughs).
Announcer: “Ah, you mean we faded it just in time!” Kate: “No, you caught it actually, I’m sure.…” She later said the song was “pretty awful.
In June, 1975, Gilmour booked a professional studio (AIR London), brought Andrew Powell to arrange and produce the songs, and hired top musicians to back Kate. They recorded “The Man With the Child In His Eyes”, “The Saxophone Song”, and “Maybe”. This tape led to Kate’s breakthrough at EMI. The first two songs from this session appeared on her first album, “The Kick Inside”. Kate recalled, “Gilmour said: ‘It looks as if the only way you can do it is to put at most three songs on a tape and we’ll get them properly arranged.’ He put up the money for me to do that, which is amazing. No way could I have afforded to do anything like that. I think he liked the songs sufficiently to feel that it was worth him actually putting up money for me to go in and professionally record the tracks, because all my demos were just piano vocals and I had, say like 50 songs that were all piano vocals. And he felt, quite rightly, that the record company would relate to the music much in a more real way if it was produced rather than being demoed. So he put up the money, we went into the studio, recorded three tracks…”
The recording deal was discussed among Kate, her family, Gilmour and EMI and by July, 1976, it was finalized. During the first year of the EMI contract Kate made two further demo tapes. These are quite possibly the songs played during the infamous Phoenix radio broadcast (see below) and later from the various bootlegs”.
It is weird to think that fifty years ago, a very young Kate Bush (surely referred to as Catherine still by many) was laying down a song that was this professional thing. Overseen by a member of Pink Floyd, there must have been this belief she would go on to have a long career. In 2023, she is one of the most respected and loved artists in the world. The lyrics are among her most poetic and beautiful: “Passing through air/You mix the stars with your arms/Walking through there/The doom of eternity balms/Skies of gray are not today/Oh! Don't you throw my love away/I need your loving, I need your loving/Oh! Don't you pour down rain today/I need your love, I need your care/So much, so much, so much!/Laughing through smiles/You lick my love with the years/Walking for miles/You cool my brow with your tears/Skies of gray are not today”. That is the start of the song, but the rest is as sublime and gorgeous. The fifteen-year-old genius, in August 1973, created something very special with Passing Through Air. Even if we know she went on to great things, she could not have known…
WHERE it would lead.