FEATURE:
It Started with a Kick
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in Hilversum performing Wuthering Heights on the Dutch series, TopPop, on 25th March, 1978
The Making of Kate Bush’s 1978 Debut
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THE final feature…
that marks Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside, at forty-seven takes us to the beginnings. If anyone wants to read more about The Kick Inside, I would suggest this book from Laura Shenton. There has not been a lot written about Kate Bush’s 1978 debut. In book form, anyway. It is such an important album it is surprising that more has not been published. It is my favourite album ever. It was released on 17th February, 1978. It introduced the world to a truly unique artist. I am going to finish with a couple of features around the extraordinary The Kick Inside. AIR Studios is now located at Lyndhurst Rd, London NW3. It used to be situated in Oxford Circus by the tube station. It was a central location that was convenient for artists of the time. However, it being the heart of London meant there was this bustle and smog that surrounded the space. Even so, it was a perfect studio for Kate Bush. Opened in October 1970 by George Martin, it was this legendary studio space. Bush had began recording The Kick Inside before she recorded the majority of it in the summer of 1977. In June 1975, Bush entered AIR Studios to record The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song (plus the unreleased track, Maybe/Humming). Bush reflected on her time at AIR Studios in June 1975. It would have been intimidating for any artist to step into that studio, let alone a sixteen-year-old. When she spoke to Tom Doyle in 2005, she recalled how brave she was. She was certainly brave. Determined even at that age, it was a wonderful experience overseen by David Gilmour. In July and August 1977, Bush was back there to complete the remaining eleven songs on the album. It was a very happy and exciting time. Bush learning new disciplines and working alongside seasoned musicians.
With comparative veterans like Ian Bairnson, David Patton and Stuart Elliott used to band work and no strangers to studios, there perhaps was this perception that Bush was this hippie chick that was going to be nothing special. This would be something routine and quick but not last in the memory. However, when Bush sat at the piano and started playing songs like Wuthering Heights, jaws nearly hit the floor! It was a revelation for these musicians. They were not used to an artist like Kate Bush. Even so, there was not a lot of trouble with communication. They bonded well and there was this mutual affection and trust. The routine would involve Kate Bush at the piano playing through the next song. The musicians would take it in before producer Andrew Powell handed out the chord charts. It was this disciplined and wonderful time where established musicians were perhaps learning in a new way. What was astonishing is the complexity of the songs. Compared to Pop music of the time, subjects tackled by Bush were by no means ordinary and predictable! Even when she wrote about love and lust, there was something poetic and almost classical about it. Harking back to an older time. From the pages of fiction. These immersive and engrossing worlds. Even though Andrew Powell produced The Kick Inside, he wasn’t guiding the recording like others would. In the sense an artist would largely be directed by the producer. Instead, Bush was giving the musicians these complete songs. A drummer like Stuart Elliott playing to her vocal. Responding to that top line and melody. These players probably used to not performing around a vocal. Having to playing a backing track and the vocal being dropped on top of it. It was almost like a live album. If later albums seemed more studio-bound and intense when it came to multiple takes and the use of technology, The Kick Inside is professional and polished but it also has a loose feel. As though all the songs were recorded live with very little modification.
Unlike other albums, Bush had performed these eleven songs over and over. There was very little new creation in the studio. It meant the sessions were productive but not over-long. Backing tracks took four days. There was an incredible chemistry and energy. A connection and respect between Bush and her musicians. One of the most notable aspects of The Kick Inside is how her distinct vocal techniques, layers and sounds were there from the start. Tracks like Them Heavy People and Room for the Life. A blend of the strange and humorous. A cast of characters being woven into songs. Even if the band Bush played with were traditional in the sense of drums, guitars and bass, there were more unusual instruments mixed together. Beer bottles, boobams, clavinet and mandolin. Bush bringing in influences from her childhood. Her brother Paddy playing on the album no doubt opened her mind to sounds and sensations beyond the charts and commercial radio of the 1970s. Wuthering Heights was a revelation. Recorded during a full moon in March 1977, when the song was played back in the studio, Bush was moving and dancing along. Working out choreography that, with the assistance of Robin Kovac, would be used in the videos for the song. Or live performances at least. If the media and comics at the time found Bush ripe for parody after she released Wuthering Heights, Bush knew that she had written a song based on this passionate love affair. This incredible story written by Emily Brontë. EMI wanted James and the Cold Gun released as the debut singles. There were other ideas from label men but few suggested Wuthering Heights. Bush fought for it. It was during a heated meeting when EMI’s head of promotions, Terry Walker, entered the room that things changed. He came in, put something on the desk, and said “Oh, hi, Kate. Wuthering Heights…great first single”. Perhaps the best timing in music history! Thanks to Tom Doyle’s Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush.
Before finishing, I will bring in a couple of reviews for The Kick Inside. First, I want to drop in some words from Kate Bush from 1978. I was interested in this interview from Melody Maker published in June 1978. Bush undertook so many interviews in 1978. A lot of them were quite sexist and obsessed with her looks. There are a few that stand out as being quite serious. This is one of the more respectful and interesting interviews:
“I think you can kid yourself into destiny. I have never done another job. It's a little frightening, because it's the only thing I've really explored, but then again, so many things are similar. They all tie in. I really feel that what I'm doing is what everyone else is doing in their jobs.
"It's really sad that pressures are put on some musicians. It's essential for them to be human beings, because that's where all the creativity comes from, and if it's taken away from them and everybody starts kneeling and kissing their feet and that, they're gonna grow in the wrong areas."
Everybody associates the whole star trip with material gains.
"But it's wrong. Again, the only reason that you get such material gains from it is because it's so media-orientated. If it wasn't, you'd get the same as a plummer.
"I worry, of course, that it's going to burn out, because I didn't expect it to happen so quickly and it has. For me, it's just the beginning. I'm on a completely different learning process now. I've climbed one wall and now I've got another fifteen to climb, and to keep going while you're in such demand is very hard. It would be different if I had stayed unknown, because then it would be progressing."
Kate Bush is a frequently sensuous woman but she has no wish to be hooked as a sex symbol or anything concerned with selling her body (metaphorically speaking) to achieve ambitions. She has, for instance taken a meticulous interest in EMI's promotion campaign to ensure that the sex angle isn't played.
"The sex symbol thing didn't really occur to me until I noticed that in nearly every interview I did, people were asking: 'Do you feel like a sex symbol?' It's only because I'm female and publicly seen. The woman is tended to be seen on that level because it gets them through quicker, like the actress who sleeps with the producer makes it.
"That seems so dated, because we're all shifting to a different level now. The woman's position in music is really incredible now. It's getting more and more accepted, if not more than men at the moment. God, there's so many females in the charts.
"I felt very flattered that those people should think of me in those sex symbol terms. That was my first reaction, but it can be very destructive. For a start, there are so many incredibly good-looking women around, and their craft is in that. They're either models or acting, so their physical image is important. What I really want to come across as is as a musician, and I think that sort of thing can distract, because people will only see you on a superficial level."
She would like to think, too, that being female has nothing to do with her success and that she is being judged primarily as an artist. She has very strong views on the matter.
"When I'm at the piano writing a song, I like to think I'm a man, not physically but in the areas that they explore. Rock'n'roll and punk, you know, they're both really male music, and I'm not sure that I understand them yet, but I'm really trying. When I'm at the piano I hate to think that I'm a female because I automatically get a preconception. Every female you see at the piano is either Lynsey DePaul, Carole King...that lot. And it's a very female style.
"That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical, but it doesn't push it on you, and most male music -- not all of it, but the good stuff --really lays it on you. It's like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall, and that's what I'd like to do. I'd like my music to intrude. It's got to. I think that anything you do that you believe in, you should club people over the head with it!
"Not many females succeed with that. Patti Smith does, but that's because she takes a male attitude. I'm not really aware of it as a male attitude. I just think I identify more with male musicians than female musicians, bucause I tend to think of memale musicians as...ah... females. It's hard to explain. I'd just rather be a male songwriter than a female. What it is, basically, is that all the songwriters I admire and listen to are male."
She loves Steely Dan and David Bowie ("I wish I could write constructions like his.") But she was probably most influenced by Bryan Ferry, during his days with Roxy Music and Eno. "It was the moods of the songs. They had a very strong effect on me, because that had such atmospheres.
"I really enjoy some female writers, like Joni Mitchell, but it's just that I feel closer to male writers. Maybe I want to be a man," she laughs. "I like the guts than men have in performing and singing --like the punks. Like the way Johnny Rotten would use his voice was so original, and you get very few females even having the guts to do that, because they unfortunately tend to get stereotyped if they make it.
"I really enjoy seeing people doing something that isn't normal, you know. It's so refreshing. It's like that guy, you know, 'Cor baby, that's really free.' John Otway. It was amazing watching him perform and you just don't get females like that."
What surprised me most about Kate, and it shouldn't have because she's only nineteen, was her awareness of the new wave. She seemed to regard new wave bands as contemporaries, and her comments about those bands in relation to her work seems to emphasise that.
"I don't regard myself as a rock'n'roll writer. I'd love it if someone said they thought I wrote rock'n'roll songs. That'd be great, but I don't think I am. Some of the punk and new wave songs are so clever. Quite amazing, really. It's a modern poetry idiom. Some of the lyrics are fantastic, so imaginative, not sticking to a reality level, shooting off and coming back again."
She mentioned the Boomtown Rats as "amazing" and was genuinely ecstatic when I told her of the Rats' fondness for her music.
"Do they? Really? Oh, I didn't think they'd be into me. Great! Fantastic! I wonder if really beautiful punk groups like that -- I think the Stranglers are really good, too, there are so many -- I wonder if they think I'm...not so much square, but whether they think... ah...square...Sort of oblong.
"I really admire those bands, and I really admired the Sex Pistols tremendously. I don't know if I liked them that much, but some of their songs were great. I admired them so much just for the freshness and the guts, although I did get a hypey vibe off it, and that they were in fact being pushed around, because it seemed more an image that was being forced upon them, from what people were expecting.
"I feel apart from those bands, because I feel I'm in a different area, but I really like to think that they get off on me like I do them. That's why I don't see them as contemporaries, because I'm apart. It's not a matter of being above or below them, but if it was, I think I'd be below them.
"I think they're on a new level, inasmuch as...it's hard to explain. They're definitely hitting people that need stimulation. They're hitting tired, bored people that want to pull their hair out and paint their face green. They're giving people the stimulation to do what they want, and I think I'm maybe just making people think about it, if I'm doing anything."
Do you see that as the main difference between your role and others'?
"Yeah. I'm probably, if anything, stimulating the emotional end, the intellect, and they're stimulating the guts, the body. They're getting the guts, jumping around. That's a much more direct way to hit people. A punch is more effective than a look. Teachers always give you looks."
Would you like to have that effect on people?
"I don't think I could becase..." She stumbles over the next bit. "...it's not what...I'm...here to...do. I really love rock'n'roll. I think it's an incredible force, but there's something about it that I don't get on with when I write it, maybe because I'm very concerned about melodies in my music, and generally I find rock'n'roll tend to neglect it a bit because it's got so much rhythm and voice that you don't need so much music.
"Some of the new wave, though, is so melodic. Like the Rich Kids {early EMI-produced new wave band led by Midge Ure}. I'm not really a rock'n'roll writer yet. I'd like to be, though, and I hope I'll become more that way orientated.
"Mind you, I identify with new wave music. We're both trying to stir something in the attitudes we've got, but I honestly don't know if I'm doing it. I guess I'm more interested in stirring people's intellects. It's longer lasting but not so much fun as new wave.
"The good thing about people like the Boomtown Rats is that not only is it really good, but it's really exciting and fun, and maybe my things are sometimes a bit too intricate to become fun. They're more picking pieces out and examining them. There's very little music on my album that will make you want to stamp your feet violently and hit your head against the wall.
"To actually understand what I'm about you have to hear the lyrics, which is a lot to expect; whereas in something like the Boomtown Rats, it's the complete energy that knocks you over”.
I will wrap up with a couple of reviews. The first, from the BBC from 2008 states how The Kick Inside is a one-off. No album since it sounds the same. That is true nearly seventeen years after the BBC review. For those who do not know about the album need to listen to it:
“The tale's been oft-told, but bears repeating: Discovered by a mutual friend of the Bush family as well as Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Bush was signed on Gilmour's advice to EMI at 16. Given a large advance and three years, The Kick Inside was her extraordinary debut. To this day (unless you count the less palatable warblings of Tori Amos) nothing sounds like it.
Using mainly session musicians, The Kick Inside was the result of a record company actually allowing a young talent to blossom. Some of these songs were written when she was 13! Helmed by Gilmour's friend, Andrew Powell, it's a lush blend of piano grandiosity, vaguely uncomfortable reggae and intricate, intelligent, wonderful songs. All delivered in a voice that had no precedents. Even so, EMI wanted the dullest, most conventional track, James And The Cold Gun as the lead single, but Kate was no push over. At 19 she knew that the startling whoops and Bronte-influenced narrative of Wuthering Heights would be her make or break moment. Luckily she was allowed her head.
Of course not only did Wuthering Heights give her the first self-written number one by a female artist in the UK, (a stereotype-busting fact of huge proportions, sadly undermined by EMI's subsequent decision to market Bush as lycra-clad cheesecake), but it represented a level of articulacy, or at least literacy, that was unknown to the charts up until then. In fact, the whole album reads like a the product of a young, liberally-educated mind, trying to cram as much esoterica in as possible. Them Heavy People, the album's second hit may be a bouncy, reggae-lite confection, but it still manages to mention new age philosopher and teacher G I Gurdjieff. In interviews she was already dropping names like Kafka and Joyce, while she peppered her act with dance moves taught by Linsdsay Kemp. Showaddywaddy, this was not.
And this isn't to mention the sexual content. Ignoring the album's title itself, we have the full on expression of erotic joy in Feel It and L'Amour Looks Something Like You. Only in France had 19-year olds got away with this kind of stuff. A true child of the 60s vanguard in feminism, Strange Phenomena even concerns menstruation: Another first. Of course such density was decidedly English and middle class. Only the mushy, orchestral Man With The Child In His Eyes, was to make a mark in the US, but like all true artists, you always felt that Bush didn't really care about the commercial rewards. She was soon to abandon touring completely and steer her own fabulous course into rock history”.
I will end by featuring most of a Pitchfork review from Laura Snapes. She notes how The Kick Inside might seem like a young woman (nineteen when the album came out) likening her work to birth. The songs her children. In fact, it was a middle finger to that lazy assumption. So unlike many of her peers, these songs were almost profound and against what was expected from modern Pop artists:
“What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her.
And if there is trepidation in the arrangement of “The Man With the Child in His Eyes,” it reflects other people’s anxieties about its depicted relationship with an older man: Will he take advantage, let her down? This is the other teenage recording, her voice a little higher, less powerfully exuberant, but disarmingly confident. Her serene, steady note in the chorus—“Oooooh, he’s here again”—lays waste to the faithless. And whether he is real, and whether he loves her, is immaterial: “I just took a trip on my love for him,” she sings, empowered, again, by her desire. There’s not a fearful note on The Kick Inside, and yet there is still room for childish wonder: Just because Bush appeared emotionally and musically sophisticated beyond her years didn’t mean denying them.
“Kite” unravels like a children’s story: First she wants to fly up high, away from cruel period pains (“Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o”) and teenage self-consciousness (“all these mirror windows”) but no sooner is she up than she wants to return to real life. It is a wacky hormone bomb of a song, prancing along on toybox cod reggae and the enervating rat-a-tat-tat energy that sustained parodies of Bush’s uninhibited style; still, more fool anyone who sneers instead of reveling in the pure, piercing sensation of her crowing “dia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-mond!” as if giving every facet its own gleaming syllable.
“Strange Phenomena” is equally awed, Bush celebrating the menstrual cycle as a secret lunar power and wondering what other powers might arrive if we were only attuned to them. She lurches from faux-operatic vocal to reedy shriek, marches confidently in tandem with the strident chorus and unleashes a big, spooky “Woo!,” exactly as silly as a 19-year-old should be. As is “Oh to Be in Love,” a baroque, glittering harpsichord romp about a romance that brightens the colors and defeats time.
She only fails to make a virtue of her naivety on “Room for the Life,” where she scolds a weeping woman for thinking any man would care about her tears. The sweet calypso reverie is elegant, and good relief from the brawnier, propulsive arrangements that stood staunchly alongside Steely Dan. But Bush shifts inconsistently between reminding the woman that she can have babies and insisting, more effectively, that changing one’s life is up to you alone. The latter is clearly where her own sensibilities lie: “Them Heavy People,” another ode to her teachers, has a Woolf-like interiority (“I must work on my mind”) and a distinctly un-Woolf-like exuberance, capering along like a pink elephant on parade. “You don’t need no crystal ball,” she concludes, “Don’t fall for a magic wand/We humans got it all/We perform the miracles.”
The Kick Inside was Bush’s first, the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. Despite her links to the 1970s’ egime egime, she recognized the potential to pounce on synapses shocked into action by punk, and eschewed its nihilism to begin building something longer lasting. It is ornate music made in austere times, but unlike the pop sybarites to follow in the next decade, flaunting their wealth while Britain crumbled, Bush spun hers not from material trappings but the infinitely renewable resources of intellect and instinct: Her joyous debut measures the fullness of a woman’s life by what’s in her head”.
On 17th February, 1978, Kate Bush released her flawless debut album. In fact, there is one other feature I want to bring in before closing. It is from 2023 and argues how The Kick Inside kicked Punk into touch. A rather direct and simple genre, Bush’s music was much more complex, beautiful, accomplished and interesting. It is no surprise that sexist critics couldn’t comprehend a genius when they heard one:
“Punk was so straightforward that in an age of complex prog rock, it was difficult to comprehend. In fact, in Charley Walters’ scathing Rolling Stone review of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ he just about inadvertently defined the punk movement: “The music is overly simplistic and rudimentary,” he correctly wrote in the same way that a spade review might say that it is only good for digging. Before adding for good measure, “It’s also not very good.”
But suddenly, this rogue clan of spiky-haired loons began kicking up a storm—a maelstrom so unique that it was wrestled with and intellectualised as a musical statement that beheaded the bourgeoisie with an axe of pure individualism and blunt expression. Thus, it’s perhaps no surprise that when Kate Bush arrived as yet another curveball right in the middle of all this, she too was a missed point.
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr play The Beatles' 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'
She wasn’t yet 20 when her masterful debut album, The Kick Inside, arrived in 1978. But the starlet didn’t fit into the narrative and as such, she was seen as a fly in the ointment. Her reviews at the time were scathing. The Guardian called her an “odd combo of artiness and artlessness,” and dismissed her as a “middlebrow soft option.”
And NME followed up the barrage with the following: “[Kate Bush] all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era…. [Bowie manager] Tony DeFries would’ve loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago, maybe I would’ve too. But these days I’m past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself.”
Now, however, The Kick Inside is rightly regarded as a masterpiece. What happened? Well, the zeitgeist moved on quickly from the punk kickstart. It was a necessary lightning flash, and it changed the world, but after five short years, it had mutated into new wave for the most part. Oddly, the much-maligned Bush effort proved to be a pivotal moment of diegesis in this story.
You see, ultimately, Bush was the pinnacle of punk: if the movement was all about breaking away from the stilted norm in an individualistic and expressive fashion, then it doesn’t get much more profound on that front than the wailing ways of ‘Wuthering Heights’. As John Lydon proclaimed himself in a BBC interview: “At first, it seemed absurd, all that aaaaah and weeee, it was way up there,” Lydon commented. “But it wasn’t that at all. It fits. Those shrieks and wabbles are beauty beyond belief to me”.
The majestic The Kick Inside turns forty-seven on 17th February. Often seen as a stepping stone to better work from Kate Bush, it needs to be reassessed as an album as worthy, brilliant and necessary as Hounds of Love (1985). I hope people celebrate The Kick Inside in the coming days. A mighty and hugely original album, I still can’t quite get to bottom of its layers and nuances. It offers something new every time I pass through it. Even though she was nineteen when her debut arrived, Kate Bush’s career…
STARTED with a kick!