FEATURE:
Huge Originality from the Start…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
How Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside Announced An Artist Like No Other
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I am briefly returning…
to Kate Bush’s amazing 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside. Not only did it turn forty-six earlier this month. It reminds me just how radical and original the album is! We often take for granted the fact Kate Bush is such an individual artist. I feel many do not appreciate how refreshingly different and original Kate Bush was in 1978. Still a teenager, she came into the music scene with a debut album that was far from conventional. Hugely feminine in some respects, The Kick Inside is also so accomplished in terms of its lyrics and vocal performances. Extraordinary range from Kate Bush, the sort of things she was covering on her debut album is mind-blowing. Not as heard and revered as it should be, many people do not respect The Kick Inside in terms of its boldness, bravery and beauty. Often open to mockery and ridicule by the music press, I don’t think anyone was ready for The Kick Inside. Not sure how to handle this extraordinary and unusual talent that was in front of them. I am compelled to come back to The Kick Inside, as MOJO recently marked its forty-sixth anniversary. They saluted its originality. An album that includes whale song, ancient murder ballads, gothic fiction and meditations on love and sex:
“The first sound heard is whale song, sampled from the 1970 The Song Of the Humpback Whale, recorded by pioneering bio-acoustician Roger Payne (excerpts were also included on the Voyager space probes’ Golden Records, both of which are now in interstellar space). Alien yet somehow familiar, they lead us into Moving. A rising, falling theatrical rock tribute to Lindsay Kemp – who didn’t know his pupil was a singer until she put a copy of the album under his door – it finds her soprano voice reaching out like lighthouse beams through the mist. Balletic and expressive, the suspicion that its lyrics could also be interpreted sexually are not assuaged by The Saxophone Song. Progressive pop with gutsy sax by British jazz ace Alan Skidmore, it’s earthy stuff, as she ladles on a fantasia of juxtaposed images that elude concrete interpretation: “It’s in me/And you know it’s for real/Tuning in on your saxophone… the stars that climb from her bowels/Those stars make towers on vowels”, before the static frenzy of the outro.
A vivid internal world made external, this is music which presents female experience and feeling to an intense degree (this writer was harshly informed by one female fan that not inhabiting the same biological reality as a woman means a man’s understanding of Bush’s oeuvre will remain incomplete). A feathery, hovering prog-pop question mark, Strange Phenomena contemplates menstruation, déjà vu, synchronicity, intuition and unconscious communications, and was portrayed by the singer dressed as a magician in a TV special filmed at the Efteling theme park in the Netherlands in May 1978.
The male gets a look-in on the next song, but the message is ambivalent. A Number 6 hit in July ’78, the orchestral, exquisite The Man With The Child In His Eyes was, it’s claimed, written for early boyfriend and future TV presenter Steve Blacknell, who was then working cleaning toilets at a Kent mental hospital. On that year’s US interview promo the Kate Bush Radio Special, she described the song as, “a theory that I had had for a while that I just observed in most of the men that I know: the fact that they just are little boys inside and how wonderful it is that they manage to retain this magic.”
Before offence can be taken by the liberated sensitive man of 2024 – does she actually mean me? - the ground zero of Wuthering Heights stops time, again. Sung in a morphing, trilling voice that straddles the world of the living and the dead, it’s quixotic, brilliant and utterly mesmeric. Surprisingly, it didn’t come from obsessive readings of Emily Bronte’s 1847 gothic romance, but was written in one night after watching a 1967 BBC TV adaption starring Ian McShane and Angela Scoular – later the wife of British screen cad Leslie Phillips – who died in 2011 after drinking drain cleaner. And this is just Side
Side 2 continues its sophisto-rock explorations via a unique artistic sensibility, with reflections on firearms and masculinity (James And The Cold Gun), sex and intoxicating romance (a non-prurient triple-punch of Feel It, Oh To Be In Love and L’Amour Looks Something Like You), spiritual enlightenment (Them Heavy People) and childbirth (Room For The Life). The closing title song’s voice, piano and strings arrangement is lulling and sweet, but death and madness lurk at its heart. Adapted from Lizie Wan, an old British song collected by folklorist Francis James Child, with added references to the Olympian gods, it concerns a sister killing herself after becoming pregnant with her brother’s child. Few other singers could pull off this sleight of hand, of lightness and something genuinely unsettling, so convincingly”.
In 1978, there was a particular scene and sound at the forefront. An industry still favouring and celebrating male artists, there was not a great deal of awareness and promotion of female artists. Aside from the Debbie Harry-led Blondie, a lot of the female artists in the charts in 1978 sounded a lot different to Kate Bush. Maybe Patti Smith was the only woman challenging a male-dominated year that saw albums from The Jam, Elvis Costello, Wire and Buzzcocks gain huge critical acclaim. There was not the sort of diversity we would see in years to come. Because of that, against a backdrop where you had a lot of male bands in demand and filling the scene, hearing a female artist of such distinction and originality come through must have been startling! Of course, there were those who applauded Kate Bush and were kind to her music – though there were plenty more who were not. Because she was not like anyone around her and was this beguiling and hypnotic voice, there was this cynicism and mockery. A voice that definitely was nothing like the edgier and masculine sounds of 1978, The Kick Inside did get a rough ride from some. Bush seen as quite screechy or eccentric. In fact, rather than her being this alien and strange thing, she was an extraordinary artist who would change music forever.
The Kick Inside did recently turn forty-six. Released on 17th February, 1978, maybe we take for granted today the fact that it is distinctly the work of Kate Bush. Not enough people discuss the album. In terms of its sheer and consistent quality, though also how strikingly and stunningly original it is. If one would expect a teenage female artist to discuss love on a debut album, you would be a little disappointed. Bush does do that. As she was influenced a lot by literature, there are these more evocative and imaginative songs. Spiritualism and self-examination stands alongside sex and meditations on womanhood and life-giving. Wuthering Heights sounds nothing like The Man with the Child in His Eyes. Moving is one of her most beautiful and stirring opening songs. Them Heavy People name-checks spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff. The Kick Inside did reach number three in the U.K. It got some positive reviews. However, I still feel that it was written off by many. And Kate Bush. Seen as this oddity that was not in keeping with what was expected in 1978. There has been retrospection in years to come. Perhaps not as much as there should be. I hope ensuing years recognises the brilliance and importance of The Kick Inside. An album that has influenced so many other artists. One that was hugely refreshing and important. From the transcendent whale song that opens the album – on Moving – to the haunted lines and piano that closes with the title track, The Kick Inside is this astonishing work from an artist like no other. I don’t think it quite gets all of the credit and respect…
THAT it deserves.