FEATURE:
Ricky Don’t Lose That Number
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1972 aged fourteen/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Getting Kate Bush’s Music Into the World
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I am not sure whether it happens….
IN THIS PHOTO: David Gilmour and Kate Bush performing together in 1987/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport/Getty Images
so much now in this digital age but, for many artists, getting their record deal relied on a lot of hauling demos tapes around. Handing them to D.J.s, clubs, promoters, agents, fellow artists and anyone else. Few were given a leg-up or a hugely easy ride. That is the case with Kate Bush. Even if she did not experience an arduous trek like so many artists, it was still not handed to her. Getting her music into the right hands in the 1970s was a matter of some luck, foresight and some family connections. Ricky Hopper was a man who made a big move. Even though David Gilmour was aware of Kate Bush before 1975, that year was a crucial one. You can see a detailed timeline here. Where Ricky Hopper had this great demo tape and passed it along to a man who would instantly take a shine to a teenage Kate Bush. Recognising true talent the minute he heard her! This article from 2023 gives us some background to that fateful moment back in ’75:
“By 15, she had amassed over 50 songs. With the help of her family, a self-made demo tape ended up in the hands of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, and the rest was history.
Ricky Hopper, a friend of the Bush family, passed her demo tape onto the Pink Floyd guitarist, who was immediately impressed. He was so impressed, in fact, that Gilmour himself paid for Bush to go and record a more professional track, leading to her being signed to EMI.
Just as Bush met Gilmour in 1975, Pink Floyd were working on their ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here.
During one of their album sessions, 15-year-old Kate Bush was invited along. “I was absolutely staggered,” Bush later wrote in a book celebrating the famous studio. Best known as the eponymous studio behind The Beatles album, artists including Aretha Franklin, Little Richard, The Zombies, and more have all recorded at the studio. To this day, Abbey Road remains a landmark, with acts like Nick Cave, Blur, Amy Winehouse, and Spice Girls adding their names to history over the last few decades.
To a teenage Kate Bush, the studio seemed like a dream: “I really thought I would never be able to record in a place like Abbey Road.”
I am going to talk more about Ricky Hopper. How he was key when it came to getting Kate Bush’s music to David Gilmour. And soon enough it would be shared with the world. Before that, this PROG article from last year discussed how David Gilmour saw that promise from the demo tape he was handed. It must have been a magical and unforgettable moment for the iconic musician:
“One afternoon in the mid-70s, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd decided to play one of the many demo tapes he received each week. This one had been given to him by Ricky Hopper, a friend of his and of the family of the artist. Although the quality of the recording was poor, Gilmour discerned something special within it.
“The songs were too idiosyncratic,” he remembered, talking to Jason Cowley of The New Statesman in 2005. “It was just Kate Bush, this little schoolgirl who was maybe 15, singing away over a piano. You needed decent ears to hear the potential, and I didn’t think there were many people with those working in record companies. Yet I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent.”
He got Bush into a studio and assisted in the recording of more demos, with Andrew Powell – a Cambridge friend who’d worked with Henry Cow, Cockney Rebel and The Alan Parsons Project – producing. Three songs, including The Man With The Child In His Eyes, were then presented to EMI. They weren’t averse to listening to anything recommended by Gilmour, who’d made them a few quid in his time.
They signed the young woman instantly. One of the great careers in British music history was about to burst into life. But not quite yet: EMI put Bush on a retainer with an advance for two years, feeling that if her music didn’t take off, she’d be too young to handle it. And if it did take off... she’d be too young to handle it”.
Gilmour too has said, “When I first met Kate she was this shy little schoolgirl, but very quickly you could see that she’d have arguments with producers if they didn’t do things the way she wanted them to.” The success of Wuthering Heights gave her the subsequent creative freedom that’s made her oeuvre what it is”.
I do love that period. Because this year is fifty years since David Gilmour received Kate Bush’s demo and the two headed to AIR studios that June to record professionally, it is important to mark that period. Such a magical moment. I wonder how both reflect on it now. Whether Ricky Hopper is known by Kate Bush fans. A key part of her history, it is great that he (Hopper) and Gilmour were connected. Kept that number close. I guess it was only a matter of time before Kate Bush and David Gilmour worked together. Bush hadn’t really experienced Pink Floyd in 1975. Her sitting in to hear Wish You Were Here being recorded was one of her first tastes of their music. In later years, she said how much she loves 1979’s The Wall and has named it one of her favourites. Some of her album tracks nod to Pink Floyd. The outro to The Saxophone Song (from 1978’s The Kick Inside, it was one of the songs recorded at AIR in 1975). Bits of Breathing (from 1980’s Never for Ever). I think quite a bit of Hounds of Love too. Anyway, Bush’s family knew that she was special. The transition from these earliest demo recordings and how David Gilmour came into her world. Before continuing, I want to bring in part of this article from Dreams of Orgonon that was published 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”.
This passage - “What started as a "private thing between her piano and imagination", according to brother Jay, resulted in an ever-expanding songbook, copyrighted through self-addressed mail, captured on an Akai tape recorder. Plugger, Ricky Hopper, a Cambridge friend of Jay’s, circulated the tapes. Labels rejected them as "morbid, heavy and negative". But Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour immediately heard a "remarkable talent". He recorded her several times, alone at the piano, and in August 1973, with Unicorn’s rhythm section at his Essex home studio. ‘Future Army Dreamers’ B-side, ‘Passing Through Air’, comes from these sessions; doe-eyed, dreamy soft rock, remarkable for the barely 15-year-old Bush” – from a 2023 article explains how these beautiful-yet-lo-fi recordings mesmerised a musician who was used to working in professional studios. He noted the nuance and promise of these songs. I will end by coming back to Ricky Hopper. When Kate Bush was at Abbey Road during the recording of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Gilmour knew she had something. At age fifteen, Bush’s repertoire expanded from thirty to fifty compositions. In 1999, when speaking with Q, Gilmour said: “I had her up to my studio and recorded some things (Passing Through Air and Maybe, with Peter Perrier and Pat Martin of Unicorn, a band he was A&Ring, on drums and bass). I decided that the way she sung and played piano, on its own, was not going to be very effective for convincing A&R men at record companies of her value”.
However, Gilmour bankrolled demos that provided a more expansive and panoramic view of her talent and potential. Starting from these sparse demos that has twinkles of future genius but were not quite big and varied as a set, Gilmour was confident enough that Kate Bush was worthy of a record deal. And so it transpired. Gilmour knew that one of Bush’s songs needed an orchestral backing. Producer Andrew Powell – who produced Kate Bush’s first two albums – was contacted and they, alongside an all-star cast including Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, realised that in June 1975 at AIR with The Man with the Child in His Eyes. It wasn’t a first-time success when it came to Kate Bush’s demo tape. Earlier, in 1972, Hopper (who was close friends with Bush’s brother John/Jay) tried to circulate some demo tapes. It is amazing that he saw promise in her when she was so young (thirteen/fourteen). Maybe a footnote to some and unknown to most, we cannot forget Ricky Hopper and his role in getting Kate Bush’s music to the world! He persevered and used his connection with the music industry to get her music to David Gilmour. Someone Bush knew about only through Pink Floyd but not on a personal level, things changed. Things begin earlier than 1975. 1973 was a key year. As the Kate Bush Encyclopedia note, this was a year when the first glimpses of her brilliance were noticed by David Gilmour:
“In 1972 and 1973 Kate recorded several tapes of songs. Reports vary about the amount of songs that were recorded, but there must have been dozens. 20 to 30 of these demos were presented via Kate’s brother John Carder Bush‘s friend Ricky Hopper, first without success to record companies. Ricky Hopper then presented the songs to David Gilmour. Gilmour noticed her talent, but also the bad tape recorder quality. This led to one or more recording sessions with David Gilmour present, but with a better recorder. According to Kate: “Absolutely terrified and trembling like a leaf, I sat down and played for him.”
At Gilmour’s insistance, another recording session took place in the summer of 1973”.
Even if Kate Bush fans mark other events in her timeline as being more significant, there is no overstating how important someone like Ricky Hopper was. Making that introduction or at least being part of it. By 1975, Bush was in a position where she was given the money so that she could record at AIR studios and record songs that were far more polished and professional than those demo tapes. There was no turning back. I drift my mind back to 1975 and Ricky Hopper. If Bush was not truly aware of David Gilmour and Pink Floyd when she first met him – less Progressive/Contemporary Rock in her life as a teen perhaps -, she did at least know their name. She later heard The Dark Side of the Moon and realised how exceptional Pink Floyd and David Gilmour were! It was a marriage meant to be! From this child and young teen with an exceptional talent, her tapes then found their way into the hands of David Gilmour. It truly was…
A seismic event.