FEATURE:
He’s So Aware of All My Situations
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in March 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Jill Furmanovsky
Kate Bush’s June 1975
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I have looked inside…
this important month in terms of Kate Bush’s career though, as it was forty-nine years ago, I am coming back to it. It was an interesting point in her career. Bush was a couple of years away from recording her debut album, The Kick Inside. I am not only going to focus on June 1975. It will be the centrepiece. I want to look at the couple of years before and after. In June 1975, Bush was a month shy of her seventeenth birthday. At a time when most people of her age would leave school and would either be pursuing further education or going into work. I have been spending a lot of time discussing Kate Bush’s early career. I will move on to her later work in future features. I think it is fascinating look at 1973 onwards. So young at the time, she would get a professional nod and interest from EMI in 1974. The deal was completed in 1976. She would record The Kick Inside in 1977. It was a few years of real acceleration and growth. The reason why I want to focus particularly on June 1975 is that is when Kate Bush stepped into a professional studio to record her first tracks. Two of the three she would record appeared on The Kick Inside. The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song were from the voice of someone who was sixteen. Bush sounds so mature and composed. It must have been a nerve-wracking experience! At this time, she was being mentored by David Gilmour. The Pink Floyd legend had seen her potential and paid for the professional recordings. Acting as an executive producer, he was very instrumental in getting Kate Bush signed and in front of EMI. Gilmour knew that Bush’s family might have preferred her to continue education and not go into music so soon.
EMI knew this too. They were not asking Bush to record an album straight away. In fact, they encouraged her to take some time to grow and develop her music before releasing the album. This early signature and meeting. I am not sure how many major labels would do that in today’s climate! Bush would go onto tour small pubs and clubs in and around London (mainly) with the KT Bush Band just before being called into the studio. Early live exposure that would provide some useful experience. In terms of recording, prior to 1975, there were demos recorded by Bush at her family home. Sitting in East Wickham Farm and putting down these modest but beautiful songs, it was a big leap in June 1975. She had not done anything as huge as that before! Regardless, what we hear on The Kick Inside is what was recording in June 1975. So amazingly professional and mesmeric. This wonderful website takes us through 1973 and 1974:
“1973
Kate records at Gilmour's home studio. The backing band is comprised of Gilmour himself on guitar, and Peter Perrier and Pat Martin of Unicorn on drums and bass, respectively. The songs recorded at this stage include Passing Through Air (later to surface on the b-side of the 1980 single Army Dreamers) and a song now known as Maybe.
[Again, a bit more detail would have been welcome here. There is no mention of how many songs were recorded during these recording sessions. Incidentally, an excerpt of this version of the so-called Maybe, which presumably first appeared on Kate's original demos, was played by Kate during a radio programme called Personal Call. It should not be confused with the presumably more professional version of the recording which was made the following year (see below) but which has never been heard by fans.]
The new demos are again circulated to record companies with no result.
1974
With no progress in her musical ambitions, Kate seriously considers a career in psychiatry.
Kate takes her "O Level" examination and obtains ten "Pass" grades, with best results in English, music and Latin.
1975
Gilmour decides that the only way to interest the record companies in Kate's talent is to make a short three-song demo to full professional standards. He puts up the money.
It is interesting that Bush recorded at Gilmour’s home studio. That must have been quite intense. Though, with a trusted friend encouraging her, it perhaps prepared for going into AIR Studios. That is where she recorded the rest of The Kick Inside. June and July 1975 provided some real contrast. A headiness and first professional recording in June. Some reality and education in July 1975.
June 1975
Kate goes into Air Studios in London’s West End, with Gilmour as producer, Andrew Powell as arranger, Geoff Emerick as engineer. The three songs recorded are Saxophone Song (also known at this stage as Berlin), The Man With the Child in His Eyes, and a song which fans refer to as Maybe.
July 1975
Kate takes her “mock A Level” examinations.
While Pink Floyd are at Abbey Road Studios recording Wish You Were Here, Gilmour plays the three-track demo to Bob Mercer, then General Manager of EMI’s pop division. Mercer is impressed and negotiations are opened.
The deal takes some time to conclude. It is much discussed at meetings between Kate, her family, Gilmour and EMI.
I love the fact that in July 1975 Bush was taking exams and, at the same time, there was this movement around her professional career and record deal. It must have been a strange tussle! Having recorded a few songs in the studio the month before, Bush would have wanted to do more and spend time writing. I guess she had to do exams and have a fallback. It would have been strange and exciting at the same time.
I am going to bring in what happened in 1976 before focusing back on June 1975. There is a bit of confusion as to what exactly happened that year. What we do know is that Bush would not continue in education. She was set to follow a career as a musician:
1976
Kate gets a small inheritance, and decides to leave school to concentrate on preparing herself for a career in music. She buys an old honky-tonk piano for 200 Pounds and begins screeching into existence her unmistakable voice.
[This statement implies that the twenty-two demo-recordings which are now circulating among fans date from no earlier than 1976. I do not know what the basis is for Peter's assumption, however.]
The EMI deal begins to take shape. A publishing contract is settled first”.
June 1975 is a pivotal moment in Kate Bush’s career. In a future feature, I will discuss the relationship between Kate Bush and David Gilmour. How they found one another and continued to be in each other’s lives.
Prior to closing up, it is worth looking closely at the two songs recorded at AIR in June 1975 that made their way onto The Kick Inside. The Saxophone Song is one of the more underrated songs from her debut album. Dreams of Orgonon looked inside a song that was recorded by a then-teenage Kate Bush. A remarkable sonic experience:
“I’ve tried to avoid being proleptic with this blog, so as to evaluate songs as they may have sounded to a listener upon their initial creation. Sometimes that’s impossible. Later developments will demand we recontextualize a song. The public first heard “Saxophone Song” after “Wuthering Heights” caught everyone’s attention. Behind the scenes, “Saxophone Song” is the earlier track—recorded almost three years prior to the release of The Kick Inside. The take recorded in the 1975 session is the one that shows up on the album. It’s not quite one-of-a-kind—only this and “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” made it from the ‘75 session to the album, and their anomalousness is noticeable when they’re separated from the LP’s other crisper tracks. “Saxophone Song” seems like a simple Cathy demo at first glimpse—it’s loaded with the same obscure attempts at poetic phrases abundant in the early songs (“a sturdy lady in tremor/the stars that climb from her bowels”). The singer is once again excited by a mysterious stranger in a magical place, in this case a warm tavern in Berlin (which, incidentally, was the song’s original title). That Elton Johnesque fascination with showbiz as foreign spectacle isn’t gone. For a professional (and “canonical”) song, it’s not too far removed from Cathy’s juvenilia.
Yet “Saxophone Song” is unmistakably a Kick Inside track, one that arguably signals the transition from the central character of our blog from being Cathy to becoming Kate Bush. That’s not just because it’s on the album—it clearly fits with the general style which permeates the record. In part, this has something to do with Andrew Powell, the producer/arranger/keyboard player who oversees this track and rest of Kate’s first two albums (the song also features the first appearance of guitarist Alan Parker, previously of the band Blue Mink and a Kate Bush mainstay).
More broadly, the song’s themes gesture to both the past and future. Long-term concerns of Kate’s music such as spectatorship, place, and the tangible effects of music surface in “Saxophone Song”—the singer is captivated by this cool stranger in Berlin playing a saxophone. Yet it’s not simply a matter of watching a performer—the artist is interested in the relationship between audience and performer as a partnership, one in which the spectator participates as much as the player, as evidenced by the song’s framing of the listener’s experience (“there’s something very real in how I feel, honey”). The person playing the saxophone is fantastically talented, but they’re a vessel. What matters here is the magic their music awakes in the listener, and just as importantly, the source of the magic”.
I also want to stick with the same blog and their feature about The Man with the Child in His Eyes. One of the most beautiful and extraordinary songs Kate Bush ever laid down, many have interpreted the track as relating to David Gilmour. How important he was. Even though the truth is that the song relates to men in general who have a child-like quality, one cannot ignore potential links to Gilmour:
“So what we’re given with “Child” is that ever-so-rare thing in pop music: a young person’s vision of the world, undiluted by executive interference. In it Kate sings about a strange, wonderful man, older than herself but with an adolescent spirit that’s not unlike hers. The song is somewhat impenetrable, like any artistic work by a young person beginning to navigate the world, and it’s accessible and applicable and gorgeous. It’s rare for artists to pull this off successfully so early on, which may account for the limited amount of in-depth analysis on “Child”—Ron Moy finds little to say on the song in his book Kate Bush and Hounds of Love, and Deborah M. Withers’ classic Bushology text Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory skips the song altogether (frankly the best reading of the song hails from this Tumblr post). The most useful critical take comes from Graeme Thomson’s seminal biography Under the Ivy:
“[Kate] is surely unique among female songwriters in that her canon contains not a single song that puts down, castigates, or generally gives men the brush off. She has never been feminist in the bluntest sense — she wants to preserve and embrace the differences between the sexes and understand the male of the species. Many songs display a desire to experience fully what it is to be a man; she invests them with power, beauty, and a kind of mystical attraction which is incredibly generous.”
Thomson is straightforwardly doing his “male writer gotta male writer” thing (one has to eye-roll at his audible sigh of relief when he talks about how nice Kate is to men), but there’s a key point in there. Kate’s music is very generous to men, perhaps overly so (perhaps best demonstrated by “Babooshka,” in which the main character’s husband gets off scot-free for an attempt at infidelity). In interviews, Kate has made it clear that the song talks about just that internal spark. “It’s something I feel about men generally… that a lot of men have got a child inside them, you know. I think they’re more or less grown-up kids,” she explained in a 1979 appearance on the BBC One children’s programme “Swap Shop,” to an amused Noel Edmonds (yes, *that* Noel Edmonds) and vocal studio crew. Kate grasps the fine line between being childlike and childish (the latter being perhaps a more common quality). What she’s talking about is a childlike sense of adventure, a desire and willingness to play games and believe in fantastic things. “Nobody knows about my man/they think he’s lost on some horizon.” Only she gets him; this is a part of the man’s internalism he only shares with her. Nobody gets this. He’s at an age where his fantasizing is considered adolescent enough to be an eccentricity.
And the singer is at that transition point where the storyteller becomes as much of a point of interest as the story. In part, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes” is about someone learning what it’s like to have a person to themselves for the first time. They’re experiencing that magical feeling of being with someone who understands and who makes sense to them. It’s not clear what their relationship is—there’s an adolescent ambiguity to the song. “Maybe he doesn’t love me/I just took a trip on my love for him,” sings an almost-certainly-stoned 16-year-old in her award-winning lyric. But despite her lack of sure-footedness, there’s no danger here, no exploitative or sexual dimension to this relationship—it’s a mature but innocent dynamic, and a genuine, human, unmanufactured one”.
Forty-nine years ago, in June 1975, a young Kate Bush recorded three songs at AIR Studios. Two would appear on her debut album. At a moment when she was still at school and there was some doubts whether she would have a long-term career, these big steps were made. It would have been fascinating being in the studio and seeing Kate Bush recording. After that moment, it is was clear that…
NOTHING would be the same again.