FEATURE:
He'll Never Make The Sweeney
Kate Bush’s Wow at Forty-Five
_________
I am looking ahead…
to 9th March. One of Kate Bush’s biggest and most incredible singles, Wow, turns forty-five. Even though Bush does not mark anniversaries and would not take to social media to mark forty-five years of a classic, I know that so many fans would. Wow was a really important single. The third song from her second studio album, Lionheart, this is a track that Bush had ready long before recording the album. It is a song that could have appeared on The Kick Inside. Lionheart is an album that has never really gained the respect and love that it deserves. Many might know it for Wow alone. Rather than put out the most instant and most ‘radio-friendly’ song from the album first, Hammer Horror was released. Charting at forty-four in the U.K., it was an unsuccessful first release from an album that a lot of people were looking at with scrutiny. After the success of The Kick Inside – which had two major singles In Wuthering Heights and The Man with the Child of His Eyes -, Lionheart was quickly recorded and was not really what Kate Bush wanted or had in mind. Obviously, Wow was always going to be a single, though I often wonder why it was not the first one out. Even though Hammer Horror is a great song, maybe Bush and EMI felt that this was distinct enough from The Kick Inside. Rather than release something similar to the songs on that album, Hammer Horror is very much Kate Bush stepping into new sonic territory. Wow has elements of the sound and vibe of The Kick Inside, yet its subject matter is completely different. When it was released on 9th March, 1979, it was less than a month before she started The Tour of Life (the first date was 2nd April).
Kate Bush performed Wow live quite a few times. It was in the setlist for The Tour of Life. She also performed it during an ABBA T.V. special in April 1979. There does seem to be some confusion over the release date of Wow. Some say 5th March, 1979, whereas others say 9th March, 1979. On 5th March, 1979, the video for Wow was shown on television for the first time on The Kenny Everett Video Show. The tickets for The Tour of Life go on sale the same day (except for certain venues, which are to cause much embarrassment by jumping the gun). As we see, Bush is interviewed on 6th March, 1979 about her new single. As part of a new Arts programme on BBC 2, Musical Chairs, a documentary recording the making of the Wow video, is shown. Bush would not have time to perform Wow on Top of the Pops, so intense were the rehearsals for The Tour of Life. When The Whole Story was released in 1986, a video was made of Wow which was a compilation of Bush performing the song live. The original video for the single is Kate Bush in a blackened studio with a light behind her. It was directed by Keef (Keith MacMillan). Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for providing detail about the track. The critical response of Wow are pretty mixed:
“Critical response
The music paper Sounds seemed a little underwhelmed by ‘Wow’: “I hear this mediocre chanteuse crooning her way through this silly song. (…) I realise that a lot of people would like to go to bed with her, but buying all her records seems a curious way of expressing such desires.” Meanwhile, The Guardian called ‘Wow’ the “undisputed highlight” of the Lionheart album. “An eerie gentle number with perceptive lyrics. The verses still sound a little muddled but get better with playing” said Record Mirror. And Melody Maker added: “The most precisely focused Kate Bush single since Wuthering Heights despite the self-indulgent lush production.”
Kate about ‘Wow’
I’ve really enjoyed recording ‘Wow’. I’m very, very pleased with my vocal performance on that, because we did it a few times, and although it was all in tune and it was okay, there was just something missing. And we went back and did it again and it just happened, and I’ve really pleased with that, it was very satisfying.
LIONHEART PROMO CASSETTE, EMI CANADA, 1978
‘Wow’ is a song about the music business, not just rock music but show business in general, including acting and theatre. People say that the music business is about ripoffs, the rat race, competition, strain, people trying to cut you down, and so on, and though that’s all there, there’s also the magic. It was sparked off when I sat down to try and write a Pink Floyd song, something spacey; Though I’m not surprised no-one has picked that up, it’s not really recognisable as that, in the same way as people haven’t noticed that ‘Kite’ is a Bob Marley song, and ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’ is a Patti Smith song. When I wrote it I didn’t envisage performing it – the performance when it happened was an interpretation of the words I’d already written. I first made up the visuals in a hotel room in New Zealand, when I had half an hour to make up a routine and prepare for a TV show. I sat down and listened to the song through once, and the whirling seemed to fit the music. Those who were at the last concert of the tour at Hammersmith must have noticed a frogman appear through the dry ice it was one of the crew’s many last night ‘pranks’ and was really amazing. I’d have liked to have had it in every show.
KATE BUSH CLUB NEWSLETTER, SUMMER 1979”.
With Full House as its B-side, Wow is one of Kate Bush’s finest singles. Reaching fourteen in the U.K., it can be considered a success. The musicians on the track are incredible. Lionheart was an album with a blend of musicians. Kate Bush wanted her band to play on the album though Andrew Powell, the producer of The Kick Inside and Wow, wanted the same musicians from her debut. In the end, Bush’s band had to be sent home. However, on Wow, we get Brian Bath on guitar and the late Del Palmer on bass. Both were in the K.T. Bush band and were among her chosen musicians. Ian Bairnson (the late great), who was on The Kick Inside, was on electric guitar. Paddy Bush, her brother – who too was on The Kick Inside -, played mandolin. With Charlie Morgan on drums and Duncan Mackay on synthesiser, it is a song that apparently took quite a few takes. Kate Bush never truly happy with her vocals, she endlessly searched for a perfect take. In 2012, The Guardian discussed how Lionheart was a rushed disappointment, though it had a clear highlight in Wow:
“Wow was the second single from Kate Bush's difficult second album, Lionheart. It was difficult not for the usual reasons – overindulgence, procrastination, artistic crises – but because it was rushed. Lionheart came out only nine months after her debut, The Kick Inside, and frankly, it's a bit of a stinker. It's fortunate she was starting out in the late 70s rather than the impatient music scene of today, or we may never have enjoyed the rich pickings of her subsequent work.
In late 1978 the 20-year-old Bush still seemed an ingenue and it was always going to be tough following an album that contained Wuthering Heights and The Man With the Child in His Eyes. She later complained she felt under pressure from EMI to release Lionheart too early, a problem she made sure she never experienced again. But Wow was always a song that stood on its own merits. It contains many of her trademarks: enigmatic intertextual lyrics, unfeasibly high-pitched vocals that fall unexpectedly to an absurd low note (the last "wow" of each chorus is particularly amusing), tantalising verses followed by a cascading chorus. Musically, Wow is typical of her early work, with pretty woodwind, piano and strings complementing a lyrical bass line.
The song, as far an anyone other than its author knows for certain, appears to be about struggling actors and the disappointments of fame. In the video its most famous lines – "He'll never make the scene/ He'll never make the Sweeney/ Be that movie queen/ He's too busy hitting the vaseline" – were expressed through her much-parodied mime-the-lyrics dancing style. The word "Sweeney" was accompanied by her firing a gun and "hitting the vaseline" by her tapping her backside. Viewers were invited to draw their own conclusions.
Bush is such a singular talent it has become too easy to dismiss her as an eccentric, peripheral figure. It was around the time Wow was released that the pastiches began, most famously by Pamela Stephenson on Not the Nine O'Clock News”.
On 9th March, it will be forty-five years since Kate Bush’s Wow was released. I do think that this is a song whose video deserves the HD treatment. One of her most distinguished and fascinating singles, it is arresting, cheeky and distinctly Kate Bush. Maybe not played as much as it should be, I hope that people revisit the song ahead of its anniversary. This entrancing and hypnotic gem is…
SIMPLY unbelievable!