FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Tour of Life
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Something Like a Song: Inside Her Extraordinary Early Demos
_________
I have discussed…
Kate Bush’s demos before. I wanted to revisit them because I wonder whether they will ever be made available on streaming sites. There are YouTube versions of many of her demos, though it would be great hear remastered versions of these songs. Kate Bush has reissued and remastered her studio albums. The live album for 2014’s Before the Dawn. She has also revisited songs from 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes for 2011’s Director’s Cut. I do wonder whether Bush holds much affection for her demos. Whether she considers them worthwhile. It would be great for fans to hear a compilation of them. Even if some are pale compared to songs that appeared on her 1978’s debut album, The Kick Inside, they are valuable and essential. Part of her history and story. So many fans do not know about the demos. Whether you have heard of The Cathy Demos and know about the songs (some I will highlight later), there does need to be a wider release. This Early Demos compilation is perhaps the most expansive. There are articles that examine and discuss these amazing demos and this very young talent who would soon go on to become a hugely successful and adored artist. I would love to own this compilation of recordings primarily made in 1974 at Kate Bush’s family home. This amazing glimpse into some of her earliest songs. With Bush still a teenager, these are some of the first glimpses into her remarkable, once-in-a-generation talent. I think that there should be some sort of revival and excavation of these demos. They show what a prodigious talent the young Kate Bush was. Her piano playing superb. Having learnt from her father and developed a bond with the instrument as a young child, that combination of her playing, developing (yet sublime) voice and mature songwriting really stands out.
Whilst a song like Atlantis might sound a little high-pitched or wild, others such as Cussi Cussi are more level-headed and grounded. You Were the Star and Something Like a Song are two of my favourite Kate Bush early demos. Passing Through Air ended up as a B-side of Army Dreamers in 1980. It is an astonishing song where Bush shows so much command. Not only are the 1974 demos recordings worth listening to. During 1976 and the early part of 1977, Bush was recording a new batch of demos. At least two tapes were made. Many of the songs have leaked out. The largest collection of such recordings (and thanks to Rob Jovanovic’s Kate Bush biography) came from the Phoenix Broadcast. In 1982, a radio station in Phoenix, Arizona, KTSM, aired twenty-two Kate Bush demos. The D.J. on the show was John Dixon. He worked at EMI when Bush was working on her debut album. Songs he played were taken from several different sources. He played numbers that were taken from her first two albums, 1978’s The Kick Inside and Lionheart, plus seventeen unreleased songs. Some of the songs played were from 1973. Tracks Bush was still considering when she signed with EMI. These tracks made their way onto The Cathy Demos that were released as vinyl E.P.s in 1989. Among the demos are Rinfey the Gypsy (a.k.a. Playing Canasta in a Cold Room) and Snow. Something Like a Song allows Bush to show more variation in her piano player. If a lot of the tracks were quite similar and would not have hugely appealed to record labels, other demos showed more depth and different shades. Earlier versions of Kite and Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake were circulated. These songs, backed by a band, showed how she had matured and extended her musical range. The early version of Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake sound like a live take. Another song on the demo tape, Scares Me Silly (a.k.a. Really Gets Me Going), is a gem that should have appeared on The Kick Inside.
One listens to the demos – whether from 1973/1974 or 1976/1977 – and wonders which artist inspired her. Maybe childhood heroes like Elton John. As a child, she grew up around various musical influences. Her mother’s Irish side. Summers at Dungarvan. County Waterford, where the family would take the ferry and then drive by car to Bush’s (Cathy as she was known then) grandparents’ cottage. Uncles who would be playing accordions and fiddles. At the family home, East Wickham Farm, Bush loved artists like A.L. Lloyd. He specialised in drinking songs and sea shanties. Her brothers, especially Paddy, introducing their sister to Folk music and music from around the world. A mix of English and the unconventional. Bands like King Crimson, The Beatles and T.Rex. Her favourite album Elton John’s Madman Across the Water, arrived in 1971. Her brother Jay (John) was a great poet and opened up his sister’s mind to new themes and realms. Paddy’s love of the more esoteric and unusual. A family home filled with so much diverse music, literature and art. Think about the early songs. An art harmonium, manufactured in Paris by Victor Mustel, was in the barn at East Wickham Farm. It was this Mustel pump organ that gave a young Bush the opportunity to develop and experiment with chord progression. Even if Bush couldn’t read music and didn’t want to learn – and she was not particularly skilled at maths -, she practised endless, had this incredibly curious mind and was very dedicated. Thanks too to Tom Doyle and his Kate Bush biography, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. All of these early experiences and influences led to her demos. By age nine, Bush was intensely curious and wanted to create. It heightened by the age of eleven. Feeling misunderstood or thinking more like an adult than child, this sense of frustration and alienation saw the young Kate/Cathy Bush escape into songwriting.
You can hear this imagination and passion in her earliest demos. Whilst she was not particularly happy at school, she did develop a love and interest in poetry. Five or six hours a day, seven days a week, Bush would shut herself away and play piano. Her first song would have been written about the age of eleven. Bush felt it was terrible and overdone. By thirteen or fourteen, she developed a real interest in songwriting and advanced in terms of quality and concision. Remember Bush wrote The Man with the Child in His Eyes at the age of thirteen! Bush approached songwriting like poetry. A pivotal moment was when Elton John’s Your Song was released in 1970. Something that had always been brewing inside of her was released to the surface. Her musical hero opened her heart and eyes. I will discuss the piano more for another feature. How few artists around the time Bush started were idolised because they played piano. Bush’s father Robert marvelled at how his young daughter could summon songs from nowhere. He invested in an expensive AKAI reel-to-reel recorder. Songs were copyrighted by her and her father as they would post songs back to themselves with a time and date stamp from Royal Mail. By aged sixteen, Bush felt she was on a mission from God. Her positivity and ambition can be heard in the early demos. Bush’s brother Paddy would often accompany her on mandolin. Brian Bath (a family fiend who was part of the KT Bush Band) recalled his diary entries from 1972 how he would witness Paddy playing on Kate’s songs. He was even invited to play guitar on various occasions. Bath recalled how beautiful the songs were. Chord progressions that were like nothing else. Songs that were worlds of their own. By 1972, Kate Bush had amassed over fifty songs. She was writing about two songs a day. She reckoned she might have had a couple of hundred stacked away.
Tom Doyle highlights a few standout demos from the early years. Ones more formed such as Sunsi, and ones that were promising but a little flawed (Cussi Cussi as an example). In the 1980s, a West German record company, Wild Wind, announced the release of a ten-track demo album, The Early Years. White label vinyl copies were pressed up. When Bush and EMI caught wind of this release, they issued a cease and desist. By 1997, these demos were online. Maybe Bush feels it is not worth officially releasing the home demos because they have been out there and she has passed that stage in life. Songs not studio-made and incomplete in a way, she puts emphasis on mastering her studio recordings and ensuring that her recorded work sounds as good as possible. These sketches and demos might be the opposite of all that. However, as historical artefacts, they are incredibly important and striking. This blog post looks at some of those early demos. So much fascinating and revealing context:
“The act of performing a critical analysis of the Cathy demos has a tinge of historical revisionism. It inherently goes against how these songs were meant to be heard. These are home demos which became audition tapes—recordings which were circulated to impress record labels (and for a while didn’t.) These songs weren’t recorded with thoughts of royalties and press eventually coming into the picture. Cathy wasn’t writing for an audience (arguably, she never has been), although the praise of her family was welcome. While the tapes were shared for the purpose of getting an audience, they weren’t written with this in mind. These songs give us a snapshot of the mind of a young creative finding her voice. So what did Cathy sing about at home?
Let’s listen to “Cussi Cussi,” which demonstrates that these songs are a learning experience for their creator. “Cussi Cussi” is a sprawling thing, less coherent than the songs we’ve previously covered. It’s a schizoid song, afraid of losing someone—is the singer trying to keep their identity in the face of adversity? Rather than pitch straight empathy, “Cussi Cussi” has a slightly despairing tone — its melody is tumultuous and complex, never committing to a single mood and always in conflict. The singer is begging the subject not to leave them, not to waste their life. “And I’ve noticed in your eyes/a sadness I don’t like/to recognize/you are feeling a heavy side of your ecstasy” is suggestive of a star being eaten away by their commitment to excess.
Yet the song itself also gets caught up in excess in messy ways which don’t quite land, albeit the tone remains pleasantly bemusing. The “cussi cussi” of its refrain is a bit hard to decipher. “Cussì” appears to be a word in the Romantic language Friulian for “so” (perhaps bringing the song’s title close to Spanish’s “así- así” for “so-so”?) It’s an interesting, obscure little track, but it’s not hard to see why it doesn’t have a second take in the Phoenix sessions. To be sure, it’s not boring—it’s an intriguing hot mess, and melodically it’s astonishing. If your weaker compositions at 15 sounded like this, you were in good shape.
It remains astonishing that we have 31 of Cathy Bush’s demos. This is the happy product of some tapes changing hands several times. The first person to circulate these songs was music publicist Ricky Hopper, a friend of Cathy’s brother Jay, who was given between twenty and thirty songs to send to record companies. No luck was had attracting labels, although Bush would eventually get lucky via other avenues. None of Bush’s demos were publicly available for years until tapes made their way into the hands of DJ John Dixon, who had acquired them at EMI around the time Bush signed to the label in 1976. Six years later, he broadcast twenty-two of the songs from his Phoenix-based KSTM radio station (this was around the time Bush was putting out The Dreaming. For David Bowie fans, this would be like hearing “The Laughing Gnome” when Scary Monsters came out). Gradually, the earliest demos were released, with the Cathy demos surfacing in 1997. So there’s our point of origin.
There is no First Kate Bush song. We established off the bat that “Wuthering Heights” is not the beginning of the Kate Bush story by choosing to begin the blog with “Something Like a Song.” This is designed to give a fuller picture of her music. In its beginnings, the Bush story is tumultuous and malleable. It’s reasonably well-documented for what it is, but still trying to shape itself like any young person trying to express themselves for the first time. Recording dates are uncertain — we have a small handful of demos recorded in 1973 called the Cathy Demos, and several more dating from around 1976 dubbed the Phoenix Demos (after the aforementioned broadcast). There’s an overlap in material from the two sessions, leading to us having two demos each for some songs that were never professionally recorded. Even the titles of the songs were applied retroactively, and not by Bush herself. To navigate this labyrinth of obscure music, the Bushologist must choose a trajectory and follow it. I chose “Something Like a Song” for the first post because of its relative malleability and accessibility; there’s not a lot to unpack in it, which allowed me to sketch out the approach of the blog. With “Queen Eddie” (or “The Gay Farewell,” whatever you wish to call it), another early Cathy song from both the Cathy and Phoenix sessions, we’re free to play around a little with ideas.
“Queen Eddie” is a surprisingly sharp and melancholy song. It’s multifaceted in its thematic concerns and has a grasp of rhythm and melody that “Something Like a Song” doesn’t quite. In “Something,” we had a singer who admired someone from a distance, who they didn’t quite understand. “Queen Eddie” is more mature: it’s about the singer finding out that someone they already know is more complex than they previously realized. In short, it’s a song about learning to empathize.
And Eddie in dire need of empathy. “I’ve never seen/such a sad queen as Eddie,” ponders the singer. “I’ve seen him raving/maybe even in pain/but never weeping like a baby.” Eddie isn’t some macho hero to sweep the damsel off her feet (indeed, he may not even swing that way). He’s a frightened young person whose life is falling apart for reasons not specified in the song. He’s a person who’s noticeably pretty, and on Saturday evening transforms into a drag queen. Bush’s music often displays a strong interest in the feminine side of men, and this is the earliest musical manifestation of her concern. Eddie is someone with no time for masculinity. Everything from the effeminate adjective of “pretty” to the fact he’s saying goodbye to “his boy” points to that (who’s his boy? Is he breaking up with a boyfriend, or is he transitioning?) Even the song’s varying titles, in all probability not penned by Bush, point to a queer reading of the song (“The Gay Farewell” is a pretty wretched pun even by my standards). There’s an element of fetishization here — Eddie is denied an identity outside of his gender and sexuality in a way that’s genuinely harmful. For all that the empathy on display is genuine, so is the singer’s privilege”.
I wanted to spend some time with Kate Bush extraordinary early demos. Where things began. Those who might know Kate Bush from The Kick Inside onwards might not be aware of these demos. Whilst some show Bush still finding her feet, there are some gems that many people have not heard. I would love for them to either appear on streaming sites or for there to be a new official album with a selection of twenty or twenty-five of these amazing demos. Bush’s reluctance to release outtakes, demos and rarities sets her aside from other artists. It is all about the new from here on perhaps. However, she should consider giving new light and lease to these…
BEAUTIFUL and engrossing demos.