The idiosyncratic, mercurial, talented and tenacious Kate Bush. An acquired taste for some, a musical goddess for many others. Her debut album The Kick Inside was released in 1978 when she was still only 19, but its origins were laid years before with some of these songs written when she was just thirteen.
The story goes that Kate’s family helped her produce a demo while still at school, but there was very little interest from record labels. It wasn’t until Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour heard the tapes courtesy of a mutual family friend that the wheels began to turn. Gilmour financed a three track demo produced by Andrew Powell (Al Stewart, Chris Rea, Alan Parsons Project) and engineered by Geoff Emerick (who engineered the Beatles albums from Revolver onwards) – that’s some serious production muscle right there!
EMI were impressed and signed Bush in 1976 by putting her on a retainer before finally releasing The Kick Inside two years later. It’s worth noting that when Bush was signed punk was only in its infancy, but by the time her debut was released the punk scene had exploded. I’m not convinced that EMI would have still signed Kate Bush in 1978 when punk bands were all the rage, but they’d already made a financial commitment so perhaps you, me and Kate (not to mention EMI) were lucky. Kate maintains that EMI only put her on a retainer (often referred to as warehousing) so that no other label could steal her. It proved to be a wise investment.
Still when you think about it, the debut single Wuthering Heights was weird enough on its own, but how much more alien could it have been when Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols had been released only two months earlier and the debut from The Clash only a few months prior to that! Reportedly Johnny Rotten became intrigued with Kate’s voice and later sent her a song – she turned it down. Kate Bush was beyond punk, she defied categorization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW3gKKiTvjs&list=RDBW3gKKiTvjs
Wuthering Heights was weirder than weird, it was out there. That vocal – what register was this woman singing in? On the helium scale it was somewhere between an eerie apparition and a Theremin. Given that Catherine is pleading to Heathcliff from the grave in Emily Bronte’s novel the vocal was an inspired interpretation. It was both otherworldly and theatrical, as was the performance. You can’t mention this song without talking about that video. There were two clips shot for the song, one with Kate in a studio in a white dress with minimal visual effects, the other in a red dress and stockings dancing through a field with a few trees in the background. It’s the latter film that captured the public’s attention in a big way and the one I remember being played on television. As one of the early music promo clips it was brilliantly conceived in its simplicity and is still one of the most memorable and mimicked videos in pop music history. In the 21st century this four and a half minute piece of celluloid even has it’s own annual event, ‘The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever’ where fans dress up in red en masse and swan around ala Ms. Bush circa 1978. It’s quite a sight, particularly the bearded blokes.
The album opens dramatically (well it is Kate Bush!) with the sound of a whale song winding its way into the sensual Moving, a tribute to her mime teacher Lindsay Kemp (who also worked with David Bowie early on). The song was released in Japan as a single where it went to the top of the charts and you know how much the Japanese love those whales (purely for scientific purposes).
The whale song tails out from Moving into the Saxophone Song, one of the three tracks that Dave Gilmour produced for the demo that scored Kate her record contract. Kate says the song is not about a sax player (rumoured to have been inspired by Bowie), but the instrument itself, in which she likens the sound to a woman – rich and mellow. Still it makes you wonder about the origins of the song when you read the lyrics:
You’ll never know that you had all of me
You’ll never see the poetry you’ve stirred in me
Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly
I’ve never known or felt, in myself, so rightly.
Kate describes Strange Phenomena as a song about unexplained coincidences, although there are strong overtones of the essence of the female spirit in the lyric too (women’s intuition?), while Kite inspired the album’s artwork.
The Man With The Child In His Eyes was the second single from the record. It dates back to when Kate was thirteen, an incredibly perceptive lyric for one so young about the boy inside the man. As Kate says “men are more or less just grown up kids… whereas a lot of women go out and get far too responsible”. This gorgeous song was produced by David Gilmour for Kate with a full orchestra when she was just sixteen. No wonder EMI wanted to sign her.
Side two opens with the funky James And The Cold Gun. As the closest thing to a straight forward rock song on the album it was the original debut single choice by EMI but Kate was determined that it would be Wuthering Heights. Kate 1, EMI 0.
Three love songs then follow, the sensuous Feel It (a fairly explicit depiction of an amorous encounter); Oh To Be In Love and L’Amour Looks Something Like You “All the time I’m living in that evening with that feeling of sticky love inside” – need I say more?
Kate Bush always felt Them Heavy People should have been a single (it was in Japan), but she was never particularly happy with the album version of the song. As a song dealing with personal belief and conviction she says it’s a “very human song” but felt that it should have had a much looser arrangement.
Room For The Life is one of the more stunning melodies on The Kick Inside, a song expressing Kate’s views on womanhood. Essentially that women have a strong survival mechanism because they have the capacity to reproduce:
“There’s room for a life in your womb woman, inside of you can be two, woman.”
The title track closes the album and is a suicide note. An incredibly difficult subject to broach on its own, but devastatingly more so in this case as it deals with incest. The song is about a brother and sister who are in love, but when the girl becomes pregnant she takes her own life rather than bring shame on her brother or family. It’s an extraordinary song for a teenager to write and yet again highlights the remarkable maturity of this young artist.
When you consider the originality of her music, the depth of her ideas, the poetry of her lyrics and the visual inventiveness of Kate Bush is it any wonder that she so quickly built a devoted, and in many cases fanatical following? The Kick Inside is an incredibly impressive debut from a female artist who not only wrote her own material, but who would also later that year begin to take on production responsibilities too with its follow up Lionheart.
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