FEATURE:
I've Been Doing It For Years, My Goal Is Moving Near
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a single cover outtake for Sat In Your Lap/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty-Three
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THERE is something distinct…
about Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap. The brilliant first single from 1982’s The Dreaming, it was actually released on 21st June, 1981. The Dreaming arrived in September 1982. I feel there was an urgency from EMI for Kate Bush to release a single following 1980’s Never for Ever. Keep her name in the mind. It must have been strange getting a first single from an album that would not arrive for nearly fifteen months later! I guess we have examples of that today. Singles will come out and then an artist will put out the album a long time later. For Kate Bush, this was new and a bit strange. I wanted to make the approaching forty-third anniversary of one of her defining songs. Perhaps the most single-worthy release from The Dreaming, it went to eleven on the British single chart. It is a song that was different from anything Bush put out previously. More percussive and almost tribal, it is faster and rawer than anything from her first three albums – The Kick Inside (1978), Lionheart (1978) and Never for Ever (1980). There are interpretations as to what the title could mean. Maybe that knowledge falling in your lap is a book or inspiration. Graeme Thomson, in Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, speculated it could be to do with enlightenment through sex. Sat in Your Lap features Preston Heyman on drums. They were recorded in the stone room at the Townhouse Studio 2. It is a huge contribution and one of the defining sounds of song. I am going to include some information I have previously used in other features about Sat in Your Lap. I shall add new details as I wrap up. It is worth knowing more about the video and the song itself. The Kate Bush Encyclopedia provides details about the video. We also get words from Kate Bush regarding the genesis of Sat in Your Lap:
“Music video
According to Kate, “The video was filmed over two days, one part at a video studio, the other at the audio studios. The former provided the quick, easy technical sides to be performed, the latter provided the space and presence. The large parquet floor was to be a feature, and Abbey Road’s past, full of dancing and singing spirits, was to be conjured up in the present day by tapping feet to the sound of jungle drums – only to be turned into past again through the wonder of video-tape. The shots were sorted into a logical order: all long shots were audio studio, all others were video studio. A storyboard was drawn up and was very closely worked to, being hung on the wall on days of shootings. The editing was a long, difficult job, as it was comprised of many sections which had to be edited together (just like the big musical one). The editor worked all day and into the next morning with great skill and patience, and only when someone told us did we find out it had been his birthday and he’d worked it all away. One of the exciting things about making the video was the “accessories” we used, such as the lovely costumes and props. The jerk-jacket which we used in ‘Army Dreamers’ was used again for a short sequence, and although there’s a silver wire, it feels like flying. Out of the harness and into the light of a timeless tunnel, as a little magician’s box springs to life and the room is filled with laser and skaters.”
Kate about ‘Sat In Your Lap’
I already had the piano patterns, but they didn’t turn into a song until the night after I’d been to see a Stevie Wonder gig. Inspired by the feeling of his music, I set a rhythm on theRolandand worked in the piano riff to the high-hat and snare. I now had a verse and a tune to go over it but only a few lyrics like “I see the people working”, “I want to be a lawyer,” and “I want to be a scholar,” so the rest of the lyrics became “na-na-na”‘ or words that happened to come into my head. I had some chords for the chorus with the idea of a vocal being ad-libbed later. The rhythm box and piano were put down, and then we recorded the backing vocals. “Some say that knowledge is…” Next we put down the lead vocal in the verses and spent a few minutes getting some lines worked out before recording the chorus voice. I saw this vocal being sung from high on a hill on a windy day. The fool on the hill, the king of the castle… “I must admit, just when I think I’m king.”
The idea of the demos was to try and put everything down as quickly as possible. Next came the brass. The CS80 is still my favourite synthesizer next to the Fairlight, and as it was all that was available at the time, I started to find a brass sound. In minutes I found a brass section starting to happen, and I worked out an arrangement. We put the brass down and we were ready to mix the demo.
I was never to get that CS80 brass to sound the same again – it’s always the way. At The Townhouse the same approach was taken to record the master of the track. We put down a track of the rhythm box to be replaced by drums, recording the piano at the same time. As I was producing, I would ask the engineer to put the piano sound on tape so I could refer to that for required changes. This was the quickest of all the tracks to be completed, and was also one of the few songs to remain contained on one twenty-four track tape instead of two!
KATE BUSH CLUB NEWSLETTER, OCTOBER 1982”.
I want to bring in a brilliant incisive and analytical feature from Dreams of Orgonon from 2020. Looking deep inside Sat in Your Lap, we get a real understand as to why this track is so incredible. A real departure and evolution from Kate Bush. Still regarded as one of her best singles ever. No denying why it is so popular. It is still played on the radio today:
“The aftermath of Never for Ever was a period of burnout for Bush. Prone to depressive burnouts after the completion of projects, she found herself drifting into a nadir of fruitless ennui, which she deemed “the anti-climax after all the work.” Completing Never for Ever in May 1980, Bush, not for the last time, put significant space between herself and the public, taking a holiday after an exhausting several months of recording. By the time Never for Ever was released in September, Bush was only just recovering from her creative inertia. Her timing was auspicious, as Never for Ever not only became her first #1 LP in the UK but the country’s first ever #1 studio album by a female solo artist ever. Never for Ever’s success was accompanied by heaps of promotion by Bush, including the usual run of performing songs on talk shows as well as signing albums for hundreds of fans at a time. Now she had more creative agency than she had previously, touting Never for Ever as “the first [album] [she] could hand to people with a smile.” Kate Bush the prodigy who sang “Wuthering Heights” was already a distant memory, transforming into Kate Bush the great 1980s British songwriter.
Yet Bush’s listlessness and struggle to write songs persisted for some time. It’s not hard to see why — the stress of Never for Ever’s production and the attention of the British public would be enough to put a damper on anyone’s creative output. It took seeing other musicians at work to get her motivated again. In September, Bush and her boyfriend Del Palmer attended a Stevie Wonder concert at Wembley Arena. Wonder was in a period of creative renewal himself. Having recently turned out a rare Motown flop in the distinctively titled Journey Through “the Secret Life of Plants”, he’d rebuilt confidence with his delightful Hotter than July LP. The concert broke Bush out of her writer’s block — “inspired by the feeling of his music,” as she later wrote, Bush got back to work on her songs, and forged a path towards her next album.
“Sat In Your Lap” wasn’t always Bush’s first self-produced song. For a time, she entertained bringing in experienced producers, including long-standing David Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti, going so far as to spend a day in the studio with him. The collaboration went nowhere, and Visconti has grossly remarked “all I can remember is the Bush bum.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush decided to take on the producer role herself, with the intensive collaboration of a series of engineers. The first set of sessions for the album that would be The Dreaming were staged at Townhouse Studios in May 1981. Her collaborating engineer was Hugh Padgham, a producer for Phil Collins and XTC known for the “gated drum” sound that would define 80s pop (compress the drums, use a recording console’s “gate” to remove their reverb, resulting in a kind of sound vacuum. See Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”). Bush and Padgham’s time in Townhouse was productive yet short-lived. Padgham is rare among Bush collaborators in having negative feelings about working with her, grumbling about her tendency to overpack a mix and experiment rather than having a concrete, straightforward vision. After laying backing tracks for three songs, Padgham moved on, dissatisfied with his latest gig but having indelibly marked the sound of The Dreaming.
Bush’s ad-libs, piano riffs, and rhythm track came together quickly in the studio, quicker than any other song on The Dreaming. Having a drum-centric engineer like Padgham was incredibly useful for her, as the early recording of Bush’s rhythm track showed. “Sat In Your Lap” is heavily percussive, built around its drum sound and brass section (initially synthesized on a Yamaha CS-80). The partially syncopated drumbeat (“dum-DUM-dum-DUM”) is Preston Heyman’s most memorable to date, a fine translation of the demo. The frantic, almost pharyngeal rhythm track has a kick drum so guttural and suppressed (though not apparently gated) that it can easily be mistaken for one of Bush’s vocal onomatopoeias. The track’s sonic menagerie (Bush’s recurring motif of musical instruments as bodily extensions lives to a maniacal extent), a veritable ensemble of screams, tinny horns on the Fairlight CMI, swishing bamboo sticks (thanks to Paddy Bush and Preston Heyman) childlike whispers, “HO-HO-HO’s,” and bellows of “JUST when I think I’m king!”
What better to bring Bush out of a period of creative stagnation than a missive to psychological stagnation? Or even better, a tremendously loud, busy, and clamorous one. Amidst the song’s sheer volume is a narrative of inertia and stillness. Bush deploys a childlike whisper in the verses, a canny juxtaposition with the rhythm track’s masculine percussiveness, indicating juvenile trepidation as she watches adults go about their lives: “I see the people working/I see it working for them/and so I want to join them/but then I find it hurts me.” The verses are terse observations from an unmoving figure, grounded in a desire to catch up and have a powerful mind: “I see the people happy/so can it happen for me?,” “I want to be a lawyer/I want to be a scholar/but I really can’t be bothered,” “I want the answers quickly/but I don’t have no energy.”
The verses are similarly sclerotic, sticking to its home key and mode of Ab Dorian closely, with an incessant chord progression of i-VII (Abm7-Gb), a relatively conservative doublet of chords that seem paranoid about wandering away from the key’s tonic (limiting a verse to its key’s tonic and subtonic is uncharacteristically parsimonious for Bush), and even staying in 3/4 the whole time. The refrain sees a return to Bush’s harmonic and rhythmic weirdness. Her predilection for following up a key’s tonic chord with the tonic of the parallel key lives as ever, as she maneuvers from Ab minor’s IV chord (Db) to Ab major’s iv (Db minor). The refrain otherwise sticks to a fairly conventional Ab minor (IV-iv-i-IV), with a smattering of Bushian time signature changes (it mostly sticks to 4/4, with a bar in 2/4 at the tail end of “some say that knowledge is something sat/in your lap” and “ho, ho, ho”). The post-chorus breaks with Ab Dorian, modulating to Db Mixolydian (a major key alternative to Dorian mode) with “JUST when I think I’m KING!”, dallying with chords not present in the key (A) and owning its unified disjointedness.
“Sat In Your Lap” conveys both frantic motivation and fearful inaction — it is enticed by the busy and productive activities of people and intimidated by the energy exerted in them, perhaps suggesting a character outwardly compelled to be a productive adult too soon (it’s possible Bush could relate). It is at once rapid, careening at 146 BPM, and petrified with fear. The music video (Bush’s first without director Keef Macmillan) swerves between stillness and freneticism. During the verses, Bush is mostly seated in a white dress, while the refrains see her cavorting with dancers in dunce caps. Former “gifted and talented” children drained by adults’ external compulsion to excel may encounter a kindred spirit in “Sat In Your Lap.” Yet even in its inertia lays a search — despite the emotional shutting down, the desperate need for knowledge and truth is genuine and constant.
The incessant refrain, consisting of Bush screaming (with occasional variations) “some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap/some say that knowledge is something that you never have,” makes the preoccupation with knowledge clear. Holy shit, says Bush, look at all this cool stuff adults do! And all these neat religious and philosophical paths! “Some say that heaven is hell/some say that hell is heaven!” Is anyone right? The sheer quantity of faiths can be incredibly disorienting to an adult. The comparable power that spirituality can have over a child is often formative.
Spirituality often works at a snail’s pace. Things that become deeply engrained in a young believer’s mind at an early age will only become clear to them several years later. A child confronted with gods can have a variety of emotional responses: indifference, awe, fear, befuddlement, joy. Sometimes a child is deeply moved by what they witness and feel. Yet with that, there can be complete physical inertia — shock and over-saturation, or interior silence and contemplation. For instance, the Hebrew Bible’s prophet Ezekiel responds to his first apocalyptic vision by sinking into days of catatonia. Bush’s answer to the mind-body problem is a symbiotic one — it’s an ouroboros, with no strict origin point, the body and the mind depending on one another. Once “Sat In Your Lap” taps into this idea of
Complicating this is the partial secularity of the song’s search. Her questions aren’t any less spiritual for it — some of the most spiritually complex people I’ve ever met are confirmed atheists, and Kate “I don’t think I’ve really found a niche” Bush hardly seems like a Bertrand Russell-esque non-believer. Ever the aesthete, Bush claims that she’s primarily drawn to the iconography of faith: “such powerful, beautiful, passionate images!” as she said of her Roman Catholic upbringing. Her first ever published writing was a poem about the Crucifixion. In a 1979 interview, she prodded a possible belief in a God, opining that God was “a label for people to put all their belief and love into,” and that putting such emotional effort into one’s relationships with people causes one to “reach an aim.” For all the theological crudeness of this idea (it boils down to little more than a hippie’s plea for everyone to just get along), Bush is (characteristically) unintentionally right. There’s a deep emotional center to faith and prayer. Contemplative and meditative traditions are built on unifying one’s emotional state with spirituality. This doesn’t make the experiences any less real — feelings are facts of life. An empirical understanding of any societal phenomena has to grasp its emotional basis: the values and emotions it appeals to.
As the only answer to the unanswerable is sublime incoherence, the song’s coda is hermetic descent into sensory overload. Iconography blurs (“Tibet or Jeddah,” “to Salisbury/a monastery”) in a tendency that’s strong in the last couple verses, as Bush inverts Psalm 23 (“my cup, she never overfloweth”), dabbles in desert-dwelling, monasticism, cathedrals, and with “some grey and white matter,” the human brain (grey and white matter oversee the brain’s connection to the spinal cord). “Sat in Your Lap” concludes with inconclusiveness: its dance is in the terrifying glory of befuddlement. Asceticism is a cerebral process as well as physical: the brain responds to the body’s state. Bush is engaging with some genuinely fascinating systems of thought here: for all the approaches to the mind/body problem that have been formulated, responding to it with “isn’t scholastically-caused sensory overload a kind of asceticism?” is new.
Recorded at Townhouse Studio 2, Shepherd’s Bush in May 1981; mixed through June. Issued as a single 21 June 1981; released again as the opening track of The Dreaming on 13 September 1982, over a year later. Music video also released in July ’81. Like every other song on the album, never performed live. Kate Bush — vocals, piano, CMI, production. Hugh Padgham — engineer. Nick Launay — engineer (mixing). Preston Heyman — drums, bamboo sticks. Jimmy Bain — bass. Paddy Bush — backing vocals, bamboo sticks. Ian Bairnson — backing vocals. Gary Hurst — backing vocals. Stewart Avon-Arnold — backing vocals. Geoff Downes — CMI trumpets”.
Turning forty-three on 21st June, I felt it important to revisit this song. One that created minor tremors. Very different to what people might have been expecting, it was a glimpse into The Dreaming. The sign that Kate Bush was experimenting more. More rhythmic and percussive than anything she had released as a single, I am glad that it was a success. Sat in Your Lap is one of her best tracks. Earlier this year, MOJO ranked it as her sixth-best song:
“Out-there outrider for The Dreaming.
Organised chaos: the African drum-charging thunder, the rigid piano lurch, the synthesized trumpet section’s blare – and then Bush sings some kind of six-characters-on-the-run-from-their-author wildness and overrides all that big pushy noise. Breathy Bush and squawky Bush alternate before transubstantiating into the dominatrix dictator – Thatcher pastiche? – declaiming “just when I think I’m king…” Meanwhile, her subject is knowledge, work, idleness, frustration, “’tis I that moan and groaneth”. You’re gobsmacked, but you’ve gotta laugh too”.
In 2018, The Guardian put the song in eighth place. PROG, in a feature from last year, included Sat in Your Lap among her forty best tracks. A wonderful single from Kate Bush, it still sounds so fresh and urgent forty-three years after its release. No sense of it being dated at all. I really love the track. Opening The Dreaming, fans were in for this sonic treat. The rest of the songs on the 1982 album perhaps experiment even more. In terms of ‘weirdness’ or a lack of convention. This was Kate Bush producing music that was perhaps more ‘serious’ than before. Perhaps reacting to continued critical reaction. That patronising and diminishing viewpoint they had of her as someone unserious. Almost child-like. The Dreaming was Bush producing art. Sat in Your Lap was the first sign from that album. Everything was about to change. On 21st June, 1981, she released into the world…
A huge musical statement.