FEATURE:
Kate Bush: The Tour of Life
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris
Never for Ever: An Album on the Cusp?
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SOMETHING I have written about…
when discussing Kate Bush’s work in the early-1980s, there was this moment of transition and change. For Kate Bush feature 997, I am returning to Graeme’s Thomson’s brilliant Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. I like what he says about her third studio album, 1980’s Never for Ever. It was a crucial moment in her career. We can discuss the aftermath and legacy of the album. How it went to number one and there was this boost in terms of how EMI viewed her. Bush would solo-producer 1982’s The Dreaming and was given a lot of freedom. There is no doubt that Never for Ever is simultaneously a remarkably successful and brilliant album but one that remains underrated and very rarely discussed. It is a brilliant album that contains some of her best songs. Maybe not as daring and epic as Hounds of Love (1985) or as raw and layered as The Dreaming, it is one of her very best releases. You can definitely feel the bridge between her first two albums – The Kick Inside and Lionheart were both released in 1978 – and where she would head for The Dreaming two years later. In terms of creative leaps, few are bigger than what Kate Bush did between 1980 and 1982. One cannot compare a song like Blow Away (For Bill) from Never for Ever and The Dreaming’s final track, Get Out of My House. They are extremes. If some say Bush was transitioning in 1980 and Never for Ever is this centre point between a simpler style and sound and something more advanced, some like to think of it as her on the cusp. Producing with Jon Kelly on Never for Ever, there was more responsibility and freedom. However, she would be truly unleashed and set free for The Dreaming. Do some people think of Never for Ever as promising or a compromise?
Graeme Thomson describes (Never for Ever) as a “tentative autocracy”. Her working relationship with Andrew Powell (who produced her first two albums) had run the course – though he did arrange strings for The Dreaming’s Houdini -, and this was Kate Bush in control. Never for Ever seemed like a rebirth. Her first, anyway. Beginning again. After finishing work on her 1979 On Stage EP, Bush did say that she had not really begun. When working on Never for Ever, there were new rules and players. This was not going to be a similar experience to the one she had in 1978. After the success and experience gained for 1979’s The Tour of Life, new boldness and inventiveness came into Kate Bush’s work. New technology and lyrical directions. However, one can see Lionheart as an album that needed more time and room for Bush to create and The Dreaming as this new phase of her career. Never for Ever perhaps an awkward bit in the middle that nodded to where she came from and hinted at where she would go. The feeling about this being an album ‘on the cusp’ is mirrored by Graeme Thomson. In the sense that it marries older songs with new compositions (The Dreaming was the first album since The Kick Inside with all-new songs). It was released in 1980 but was being recorded in 1979 (and 1980). Spanning the old and the new in terms of compositions and decades, Bush also fused players from her live band and those who worked on her first two albums. This sense of the old and new. Does this make Never for Ever unfocused, unbalanced and lacking originality? I don’t think so. What we do have is an artist not repeating herself but not yet in a position to release something like The Dreaming. After the energy and planning it took to get her tour going and successful, Bush did not really have the headspace or time to labour in the studio intensely. Del Palmer, Paddy Bush, Brian Bath and Ian Bairnson part of the eclectic array of musicians Bush assembled.
As I mentioned in previous features, Bush cast players for Never for Ever. Even though the recording environment was not as intense as it was for The Dreaming, there were still many hours dedicated to some songs. Pushing her players to get the best performance. Maybe a bit of a diversion, but I am going to reframe Never for Ever. Rather than it being ‘on the cusp’ or a period of transition, it very much is this new creative period and iconic album. I am not going to source an interview. However, I did find something Kate Bush wrote for Flexipop that was published in September 1980. It is her weekly diary and gives you some idea of how she was living during the time of recording the album:
“Friday
One hell of a day. I get up at about half ten. I don't have breakfast--I never do. Just a cup of tea. The first thing on the agenda is an interview with Paul Gambaccini. Before I leave I read my post, which is mostly business. Most other mail goes to my fan club, which is really well organized now. Fantastic. My driver picks me up at about noon. We go to a small studio in Soho. I can't drive. Apart from my driver I go everywhere unaccompanied. The reason I use the driver now is that it was getting ridiculous with cabs, it really was. It's so much easier now, it's just wonderful. [Actually Kate did obtain a drivers license, after one failure, in 1976.]
About three o'clock we go from Soho to Round Table at the Beeb, which Gambaccini also does. [This is a radio programme in which celebrity musicians and critics sit around to listen to and review new records.] We get there about four-thirty. A couple of kids outside--one who's always there every time I go to the BBC. His name is Keith. Must be in his early twenties. He always shows me things I've never seen before, like posters out of record shops. Old magazines. A picture of Pink Floyd before Gilmour was in it--I went WOW. I was really surprised, you know--they were all autographed and everything. I sign a few things, and then go in.
I don't have a go at anyone on the show. There's never any reason to do that. After, I have to go down to Abbey Road studios to re-mix the new single. We get there at about eight-fifteen. About this time I have my first bite to eat of the day--a toasted sandwich and chips. And of course, lots of cups of tea. The only way I can tell if I need food is when I feel sick. I smoke more at night, but I still usually get through less than twenty a day. John Player Special at the moment. We're still at it at three a.m. and I feel fine, but the engineer wants to call it a day. He's a great engineer, and I know he can finish it tonight, so I talk him into it. Come seven a.m. I'm not exactly perky, but I'm still not at all tired. I'm very much a nocturnal creature. My driver picks me up and I get to bed about seven-thirty a.m.
Saturday
I live alone--in southeast London--and today I don't get up until late: perhaps one or two p.m. A friend of mine from the Hare Krishna temple rang me up about eight-thirty, but I was too tired to natter much. About three o'clock I go over to my parents'--they live twenty minutes' drive away, in Kent. I'm doing a TV show in Germany on Tuesday [the programme was RockPop, and the taping was in mid-September, 1980] and my Mum's got some clothes to lend me. I'm going to do two numbers for the show. Army Dreamers is one, and I want to dress up as a cleaning woman. My mother lends me a headscarf, an old apron, and lots of my old jumble clothes. The song is about a mother who lost her son overseas. It doesn't matter how he died, but he didn't die in action--it was an accident. I wanted the mother to be a very simple woman who's obviously got a lot of work to do. She's full of remorse, but he has to carry on, living in a dream. Most of us live in a dream
I stay round my parents for a few hours--after all, you can't just go round, take all the clothes you want and rush off--drink lots of tea and eat chocolate eclairs and sandwiches, the sort of things that mothers like to fill you up with. I feel absolutely delightful after that, and I go back to start work on my routines for Tuesday.
What I do is have a little cassette machine with the mixes I'm going to work on, and I go into my back room where I have four mirrors propped up against the wall, and I rehearse in front of them. It's all very well to work out the routine for Army Dreamers, but the two dancers I work with [Stewart Avon-Arnold and Gary Hurst] are busy--one's in Godspell and one's in France. So I needed people who would be able to perform. Paddy, my brother, he does pretty well. And the guys from the band, who are natural performers anyway. I am pretty wiped out still, and I don't get as much done as I could have. After working out for a while I don't feel too good, so I have a bath and try some more. I work out for two or three hours, then cook a meal for myself.
I'm not a bad cook. I love making bread. It's such a wonderful thing to do. So I watch the telly--the late-night movie: guys having their eyes pulled out, or something really awful. Paddy has come back by now, so we have a long chat and I get to bed about three o'clock. [Apparently Kate was still sharing the family's Lewisham building of flats with her two brothers. She has since moved to a house of her own, situated nearer her parents's home in Kent, and she uses a third building as a private dance studio.]
Sunday
Sunday is definitely the day that I have to physically work out. When I get up I can hardly stand up. My calves are beginning to feel sore from the night before.
Again, I get up around early afternoon. I don't bother buying Sunday newspapers--I don't read newspapers much at all, though if there's one around I'll read it. I don't read books very much either. I have a big guilt thing about that--I'm missing out so much, I read fact rather than fiction, usually when I'm on holiday. I tend to read religious things or theories on the universe. [This sounds like an early reference to Stephen Hawking, whose book, Kate has since explained, partially inspired her 1989 recording, Deeper Understanding. Another example of the long gestation periods typical of Kate's work.] I love Don Martin (of Mad magazine), he cheers me up. And if there's a Beano around, I've just got to look at it. When I was a kid that was really my thing. The illustrations are really great.
I spend all the day working out the routine for Babooshka. All Sunday is working out--dancing and miming. For miming you have to get the inflexions exactly right. I don't do that in front of mirrors, though. I hate watching myself sing. It's really weird. I also do more work on Army Dreamers. Gary, the dancer who's in Godspell, rings me up--and I've been sending out messages for him to ring me all day. We have this weird telepathic thing with the telephone. Whenever I want him to ring and whenever he wants me to ring him I get these 'messages'. So he rings up and says, 'I've been getting these messages all day, what's the matter?' I tell him that we've been trying to work out these routines, and quite honestly it would be useful to know what he thought of them. He says he wants to see me anyway, so he comes around at about midnight. He gets home at about five or six in the morning. I have a bath and go to bed.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980
Monday
I have to get up early because the single is being cut. I have to be at Abbey Road at two o'clock, and while I do the cut, the band go off to get their army gear for Army Dreamers. Then we all go over to my parents' to rehearse--there's no room for full-scale rehearsal in my flat. We do it in the garden. That song is pretty well tied up by the evening, so I go home. I generally get stuff ready for the trip. I don't take huge amounts of stuff with me, just hand luggage. Waiting for luggage at the terminal roundabouts is such a drag. Again, I get to bed around four a.m.
Tuesday
The car for the airport leaves at eight-fifteen, so I'm pretty wiped out. No one hassles me at the airport. A few years ago there used to be loads of photographers, but they don't bother me anymore. It makes things a lot easier, not having to walk up a corridor with everyone going 'OOOH LOOK'.
We arrive at about half one, and go straight to the TV station. I'm not very successful in Germany, and it's a big market, so it's an important show for me. Problems straight away. The stage has three tiers, which are going to get in the way. It has a big glass section they want me to work on--I work ninety-nine per cent of the time in bare feet, and there's this huge chunk of broken glass in the middle. I say, 'no way, you'll have to get rid of it'. It takes them half an hour to take it apart, and then I notice all these huge staples sticking out of it, so I ask this guy to pull them out.
The show starts at about eight--I fill in the time doing my make-up, sewing up little bits and pieces of my costumes that are falling to bits. I like to do that myself, it saves time. I'm so pleased when the show is over, and it went well. We go for a lovely meal courtesy of the record company. Things like that normally aren't lovely but I enjoyed this a lot--really nice. Leave the restaurant about one, go to the hotel, have a FANTASTIC bath and go to bed about three.
Wednesday
We have to be ready downstairs by half eight, and go straight to the airport. Flying doesn't bother me too much--only when I fly a lot in a short space of time, because then the odds seem to get higher. I try to be philosophical about it--once you're in the plane there's not too much to be done. Arrive in London later than morning. Do an interview at the Heathrow Hotel, and have some photos taken. Then I go home and feel wiped out again, so over to my parents' to sit in the sun. I recuperate, and go home again. I slob around, clean the flat up--it's in awful shape...I feed the cats, Zoodle and Pyewacket. Even when I'm that tired, I still don't get to bed till three or four. I spend a lot of time on the phone.
Thursday
Radio all day. I was meant to start with Luxembourg, but they pulled out, so I go straight to Capital. [Capital Radio is the independent station that broke Kate in 1977 by playing Wuthering Heights months before its official release date.] There for three, a very short chat. Then I do Radio One, then hang around a bit to do Brian Matthews on Radio Two. I leave about nine, and go home. On the way I pick up a Chinese takeaway. I don't need a bodyguard or anything for stuff like that. If people do recognize me they're not too likely to smother me in kisses or anything. Get home about ten, look through some photos with my brother [this would be John Carder Bush], and natter about odd bits of business. If I've got nothing to do I have a quick tinkle on the piano, which I try to get to all the time. Bed as usual three a.m”.
I want to source from two articles before finishing up. In 2020, to mark forty years of Never for Ever, Ben Hewitt wrote an article for The Quietus. He noted, though Never for Ever may not be her most celebrated, it is probably her most pivotal – “ the start of her transition from artist to auteur”:
“Another Bush biographer, Rob Jovanovic, estimates she spent an unprecedented five months writing and demoing at Abbey Road, honing new and old ideas alike, while keyboardist Max Middleton told Thomson the sessions were so exacting because of her obsession with finding “something nebulous that was hard to pinpoint”. For Bush the autonomy was worth savouring, no matter how painstaking the process. “It was the first step I’d really taken in controlling the sounds,” she said, “and being pleased with what was coming back.”
Listen now and you can still hear that fundamental shift Bush spoke of, the birth of some new, peculiar magic
Never For Ever is a starting point, not a zenith, and those miraculous opening six minutes aren’t as groundbreaking as her later innovations. But it is, I’d argue, the first of her LPs that’s genuinely experimental.
While Bush’s earlier albums are full of idiosyncrasies, these songs offer a fuller glimpse of the pioneer who’d make The Dreaming, Hounds Of Love and the rest: not just a wildly creative songwriter, but an intrepid explorer and studio perfectionist to boot.
In that sense, the LP’s final two tracks, despite being the most explicitly political Bush had ever written, aren’t quite the radical outliers they seemed back in 1980. For all their polemical grist, she saw them as personal, poignant stories just like all her others, and although most critics lauded them for reckoning with ‘real life’ in a way her older efforts didn’t, their power transcends such bogus rules of authenticity. They’re spectacular not because their subject matter is inherently weightier than yarns about paranoid Russian wives or grumpy syphilitic composers, but because Bush brings it to life with exactly the same kind of exquisite, singular imagination; they’re political songs that have been twisted and transmogrified so they can exist in her strange universe, not the other way round. If Never For Ever made her a bolder, sharper songwriter, it was still absolutely on her own terms”.
In 2022, PROG celebrated Never for Ever as this visionary album. Rather than it being a transition album, latchkey kid or merely promising, this was and is a groundbreaking album. One that was record-setting and influences artists to this day. I have taken sections that provide some insight into the recording in addition to the way Never for Ever was very much Kate Bush starting anew. She saw it that way. Rather than dismissing her first two albums, it was the first Bush could grasp creative control and make an album that stood and felt true to her vision:
“Never For Ever was an album of firsts for Kate Bush: her first co-production; her first release after renegotiating her EMI deal; her first time recording at Abbey Road, and her first use of the (then brand new to the country) sampling synthesiser Fairlight CMI, which was so to shape her material for the next decade.
Bush’s new-found confidence and step away from the machine (something she was soon to perfect) was to inform Never For Ever – an album influenced by death, technology, relationships and a 21-year-old simply bursting with ideas. “There are 10 tracks, and if there is a main theme, it’s about human communication and its difficulties,” Bush wrote in September 1980, a few months after her 22nd birthday. Although largely stylistically different, Never For Ever fitted into the pattern of the day for art rock experimentation crossing borders and genres. It is blessed with the same spirit as Robert Fripp’s Exposure, David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), Fear Of Music by Talking Heads, and Peter Gabriel’s third album. Never For Ever may not be the masterpiece that 1985’s Hounds Of Love is frequently cited as being, but, for many, it remains their favourite Kate Bush album, and one that unquestionably paved the way for future triumphs.
She had already established her own royalties company, Novercia, with eldest brother John Carder Bush (aka Jay) co-ordinating the business. Her family members were directors, and her new lawyer, Bernard Sheridan (who looked after artists such as Matt Monro and Pink Floyd), renegotiated her contract with EMI as a tape lease deal, meaning that she owned her recordings. Still a rarity then (as now, some would argue), the final decision on everything would be hers.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980 signing copies of Never for Ever/PHOTO CREDIT: Chas Sime/Central Press/Getty Images/File
In the studio, all the trappings were sheared away; although she was clear about who would have final say, Bush was in no doubt that she was dependent on the people in her team. And there was a cast of musicians: brother Paddy was there, as always, as well as fellow KT Bush Band alumni guitarist Brian Bath and bassist Del Palmer – who had played on Wow and on The Tour Of Life – were now in the pool of players, as were drummer Preston Hayman and guitarist Alan Murphy. Returning across the sessions from earlier albums were Ian Bairnson and Duncan Mackay. It was the first time for Peter Gabriel bassist John Giblin and keyboard player Max Middleton. It was very much a case of selecting the right player for the right song.
Never For Ever can be divided track and feel-wise by the studios in which they were recorded. Egypt and Violin (both premiered on The Tour Of Life); The Wedding List and Blow Away were all 1979 recordings at AIR. These are the most conventional-sounding tracks, imbued with the deep-brown shagpile carpet late-70s feel of her first two albums.
The move to Abbey Road (“the land of Beatles, tea, smiles and sticky buns,” she was to write) in January 1980 marked the quantum shift in the album and Bush’s work. “It was a very magical experience,” she told seasoned EMI publicist Brian Southall. “Being on your own in Studio 2 is fascinating… as I felt there were at least 10 other people with me; the place has tremendous presence. I don’t think it’s just the fact The Beatles recorded there, but a combination of all the people who have been there over the years and all their combined creativity.”
“It was a real home record for Kate,” Jon Kelly told Mojo in February 2003 – her first time at the St John’s Wood complex was marked by the studio being filled with flowers and plants.
Recording for Never For Ever was completed on May 10, 1980. It was readied for release in June, but EMI held it back until September to avoid other key releases of that summer, McCartney II and The Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue. In late June, another taster was offered as Babooshka was released as a single. A much more conventionally commercial song, it had a killer chorus, and was based on the traditional English folk tune Sovay. Its tale of intrigue with John Giblin’s fretless bass, and the breaking glass solo so gleefully arrived at Abbey Road, propelled the record to No.5 in the UK charts. It was Bush’s highest single placing since Wuthering Heights, and 11 places higher than Breathing.
Lionheart had the inscription ‘hope you like it’ etched into its run-out groove; almost underlining late teenage anxiety wondering if lightning would be able to strike twice. There was no such concern with Never For Ever. Emboldened by her tour, maturing with new friends, technology and allies, from Nick Price’s memorable cover illustration inward, Never For Ever was a grown-up record. Its sleeve notes and thanks were telling: to “all the musicians who have worked patiently and understandingly on this album to make it the way I always wanted it to be.”
“Kate was a joy to work with,” Larry Fast, who played the Prophet synth on Breathing, recalls. “I have the highest regard for her artistry and she was one of the nicest people that I’ve had the pleasure to be invited to work with.”
Never For Ever is the album on which Kate Bush grew up. The naïveté of her first albums was being replaced with a conscience, new wonders, and a hint of despair. The inexorable pull of art rock was intoxicating – there was something in the air – the rush of available, and in time, affordable technology, the freedom to discuss art in a way that seemed less pretentious than a decade earlier – it was like punk had shooed away the pixies and goblins and now one could talk of existentialism without fear of being attacked. Never For Ever proved that Kate Bush was a serious artist. It opened the Pandora’s box of the studio to her, and technology and sound became the vehicle in which she could best present her work.
Richard Burgess saw how she thrived in this environment and recalls his role in altering her sound with great affection: “I love being in the room with people who are more creative than me; the ideas start flowing and it just bounces back and forth: when a creative spiral starts to happen and you just start to take off. Definitely with Kate it was like that. There’s no barriers; no ego. If someone has a better idea, you are on it. Five minutes later you can’t even remember whose idea it was because it was all so seamless. It’s exhilarating in itself to be in that kind of environment, never mind the actual end result that you create.”
David Mitchell retrospectively calls Never For Ever “a cabinet of curiosities housing some highly desirable items.” It’s her transitional album and it benefits greatly from that; in fact, the recording spanned two studios and two decades, it was as if she was putting old diaries away and starting afresh”.
Released on 8th September, 1980, Never for Ever turns forty-five later this year. I hope that people reapproach the album and, rather than see it as a sign of what was to come, they do recognise it as a moment when Kate Bush announced herself as this serious artist. In the sense that her production, songwriting and vision was beyond fault or parody. That she was not the artist she was in 1978. Only twenty-two when Never for Ever came out, it is a remarkably mature and confident work. One that does not betray her past or radically departs from that early work, it is an album that is its own thing. A revolutionary album. Rather than Never for Ever being on the cusp or caught between the old Kate Bush and what would be, we have to acknowledge that Never for Ever is a groundbreaking work of genius that…
WARRANTS a lot more respect.