Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  Given time and space to develop, Bush by the age of 14 had amassed an impressive catalogue of songs which she recorded in batches on her father’s AKAI tape machine. Impressed with the mounting evidence, the family decided to seek the advice of Ricky Hopper, a friend of Jay’s from his days at Cambridge University who was now working as a record plugger.

  With his long blond hair and palpable music biz aura, it was Hopper who really made the initial inroads on her behalf. Unicorn, a progressive rock band signed to Transatlantic Records, would often bump into him on the lower rungs of the industry ladder. Bass player Pat Martin recalls Hopper frequently beating the drum on Bush’s behalf. “Ricky was a really nice guy who I think never gets his dues, because he was always banging on about her,” says Martin. “First of all, he said that her brother kept trying to get him to listen to her, and I got the impression he was a bit worried that she might not be very good and it would be a bit embarrassing. Eventually, he went round there and listened to some tapes of her playing the piano and singing. He just seemed really impressed with her, I think he liked her innocence. He was always trying to get people to listen to her.”

  It was Hopper who hawked her first, painfully lo-fi recorded efforts around all the major music publishers and record companies. For a period of time there was a belief that Bush, already a prodigious writer but not yet a truly assured singer nor – it seemed even then – naturally inclined to the limelight, might become a composer rather than a performer. In a sense, that’s how it has eventually turned out. However, the manner in which her songs were presented to the industry – she had up to 100 of them distributed over a number of cassettes, around 30 on each, all featuring just piano and vocal – alongside her obvious rawness meant it would have taken no small amount of dedication to spot a distinctive talent. There were no takers.

  “You wouldn’t be able to hear a thing, just this little girl going ‘yaaaaa yaaa’ for hours on end,” she later said of the tapes. “[The songs] weren’t that good. I could sing in key but there was nothing there. It was an awful noise … terrible. My tunes were more morbid and negative … too heavy. You’re younger and you get into murders….”19

  She was being overly hard on herself. Certainly, the handful of songs dating from this period that exist in bootleg form are far more than mere curios. Brian Bath, who had been in a number of bands since the late Sixties and whose group, Conkers, had their own record deal, remembers hearing her compositions for the first time. “One day Paddy said, ‘Kate’s got lots of songs. Would you like to come around and have a listen, bring your guitar and play along?’” recalls Bath. “She played all these really strange chords, I couldn’t fathom it out. They were really odd songs, but she was great. She would have been about 14 or 15. I sat and worked with her a little bit, but I felt I couldn’t really add anything. I went away from there and thought, ‘God, I’ve got so much more to learn.’ She was brilliant just on her own, she sounded fabulous.”

  At the very least, the songs announced a bold and unusual artistic voice, filled with a strange, seductive poetry. ‘Eddie The Queen’, aka ‘The Gay Farewell’, has a hauntingly sad melody, a song of homosexual love that looks forward to ‘Kashka From Baghdad’, while ‘Something Like A Song’, with its ululating siren call – “Oohoo, ahoo, oohoo, ahoo, oohoo, ahoo, hoooo” – is a truly wonderful piece of music that merited further development. Already a distinct sensibility is taking form; polished and knocked into shape, some of these songs would not have sounded out of place on The Kick Inside. But taken as a whole there is an undeniable one-dimensional quality to the rhythms and themes, a cumulative lack of pace and a certain uniformity in the melodic structures not helped by the fact that these are simple piano-and-voice recordings made on fairly rudimentary equipment. With the benefit of hindsight, listening with the knowledge of what Catherine Bush would become, it’s easy to convince oneself that any A&R man would be mad to reject this material, but it’s equally easy to hear how this might have been a hard sell commercially. Listening to them in a continuous sitting they tend to merge into an extended, mellifluous single entity without a cutting edge.

  Hopper played the songs to David Gilmour, the Pink Floyd guitarist and another old friend from his Cambridge days.* Gilmour’s interest was immediately piqued, but he was pragmatic. “The demo was not saleable,” he later recalled. “The songs were too idiosyncratic: just Kate, this little schoolgirl who was maybe 15, singing away over a piano. You needed decent ears to hear the potential and I didn’t think there were many people with those working in record companies. But I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent.”20

  The idea that Gilmour ‘discovered’ Bush or deliberately sought her out is not quite true. Pink Floyd had just gone stratospheric with Dark Side Of The Moon, released in March 1973, and, like good hippie-god patriarchs, were looking to spread the sunshine all around. Bush became one of several pet projects Gilmour was pursuing. He installed an eight-track recording studio at his home in Royston in Essex and was actively looking for talent to foster. Unicorn was another of the lucky recipients. They had played at Hopper’s wedding and, after Gilmour and Chris Jagger got up and jammed on a Neil Young song, Gilmour offered the band some free recording time at his studio. Later they signed with Floyd’s manager Steve O’Rourke.

  If he was generally playing the philanthropic rock patron, there’s still no doubt that Bush’s raw demo tape, placed in his hands with a personal recommendation from a friend, made an impression on Gilmour despite its commercial limitations. It’s likely that he went around to East Wickham Farm at least once around this time, possibly to record Bush, certainly to meet and hear her music. “Absolutely terrified and trembling like a leaf, I sat down and played for him,” she recalled.21 “He was great, such a human, kind person – and genuine.”22

  In the late summer of 1973 Gilmour called bassist Pat Martin with a suggestion. Keen for Bush to have a better quality recording to “punt around,” he asked if Martin and Pete Perrier, Unicorn’s drummer, would help him record a demo as a favour. In August the three musicians assembled at Gilmour’s home studio where, after about an hour, Bush arrived with Ricky Hopper. “She came in more or less looking at the floor,” says Martin. “She was dreamlike, she had this distant look in her eyes. She didn’t know how to go about things but David was really good: ‘Just play them like you’re at home,’ he said. ‘We’ll just listen to them and as we think of things we’ll bring them in.’ I remember her sitting at this Wurlitzer electric piano with her legs crossed, she looked very demure, this schoolgirl. She’d never played an electric piano before and she was quite fascinated by the sound and feel of it, she really liked it. I was immediately impressed. I was worried in case she wasn’t very good and it would be embarrassing, but it wasn’t.”

  The men did their best to make her feel at ease. Bush had never played with other musicians before, indeed she had barely played her music in front of anyone else. “We made her laugh quite a few times, little quips and musician jokes to help her relax,” says Martin. “There were a couple of times where we might have said something very, very slightly risqué, in no way obscene or anything, and she was slightly sort of pretending that she wasn’t quite as innocent as she made out.”

  They ran through four or five numbers and recorded the ones that gelled most quickly. They certainly played ‘Humming’ – also known as ‘Davy’ and ‘Maybe’ during its lifespan – and a very lovely song, particularly in its solo piano incarnation. The most notable recording, however, was ‘Passing Through Air’, simply because it’s the only recording from that day that has survived, unexpectedly turning up many years later on the B-side of ‘Army Dreamers’, like a long lost child suddenly reunited with its more sophisticated family.*

  ‘Passing Through Air’ is a strange beast. It’s a catchy little song but lacks spark. The arrangement is generic and the performances are solid but stiff, betraying the fact that the players were effectively feeling their
way into the song as they went along. Only on the unvarnished solo piano version of the same song – often called ‘Need Your Loving’ – which can be heard on bootlegs can you really hear a glimpse of something hinting at greatness. Even then, it is faint.

  On the band version Bush’s voice is pretty but unremarkable, and though recognisably her it’s very firmly in the mould of other female singer-songwriters of that time: there’s more than a little Kate & Anna McGarrigle, a touch of Judee Sill, Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, even a little Elkie Brooks and Linda Lewis. Certainly no great swoops and soars. “When ‘Wuthering Heights’ first came out a few years later I was a bit surprised, because I don’t remember her sounding quite like that,” says Martin. “I don’t know if they did something to it or deliberately made it sound weird, but that’s not how I remember how she sounded in those sessions. It was more Joni Mitchell-like, that was obviously an influence.”

  But think of the thrill! After only a few hours she came away with a tape of herself playing with a professional band, one of whom was a member of Pink Floyd, her songs coloured in, beefed up and fleshed out, springing to life outside of her own head and home. She even got to overdub for the first time. “I put this little electric piano thing down, and I remember thinking: ‘Ooh! I like this!’”23

  Afterwards they all sat down in another room, had some tea and, flushed by the experience, Bush “opened up a bit more, she was gaining in confidence,” according to Martin. “It was hard to make small talk. It was on a musical level, about the fact that the electric piano had a vibrato and stuff like that.” Straightaway she loved the input of other musicians, hearing the drum and bass lock the song down, stretching the parameters of what she could achieve, even if at this point she didn’t have the time, confidence or the capability to articulate what it was she wanted. From that point on, making a record became something close to an obsession. For the first time she began to get an inkling of the almost limitless possibilities of the recording process, and began to experiment at home, beginning a process that could later be heard on songs like ‘Leave It Open’ and ‘Watching You Without Me’. “Her dad had this other machine – if you pressed one button, it played everything at exactly the same speed but backwards,” says Brian Bath. “It was amazing, and Kate used to try to learn how to sing backwards. She’d go, ‘Nygg Haaa Shy Woo’, record it, then play it forwards. I think she still does it now! She used to do things like that.”

  Bush and Gilmour kept in touch. Martin claims that some short time after the band session Gilmour went “in a room with just her and her piano and recorded everything she could play on a TEAC four-track. I did have that tape at one point and there’s some amazing stuff on there, some of those famous songs in really early form.” If this is the case, this solo session, usually thought to have happened at Wickham Farm before the band demo, actually happened shortly afterwards. Certainly, it seems that between 1972 and 1974 she made several different recordings of her huge stockpile of songs, only a fraction of which have ever surfaced.

  She might pop in to see Gilmour at Britannia Road Studio in London, where she got to prod around on Rick Wakeman’s mellotron and was amazed – “Wow!” – at the sounds it could make, or visit him during the sessions for Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd’s follow-up to Dark Side Of The Moon, recorded at Abbey Road in St. John’s Wood during the early months of 1975. He in turn kept abreast of her progress, but there wasn’t much to tell. She had no profile other than the songs: she didn’t perform live, she had no band, and her tape was making no waves. Often, it went unheard. “In the early-to-mid Seventies, David Gilmour asked me if I wanted to hear a tape of this amazing girl singer he’d discovered,” recalls celebrated folk-rock producer Joe Boyd. “I was trying to be a film producer then and avoid getting sucked back into the studio, so I told him not to even play it to me. That, of course, was Kate’s demo tape.” In the end Gilmour offered, with enormous generosity and foresight, to pay for a professional recording session at EMI’s AIR studios on Oxford Circus. Bush, ever mindful of the correct way of doing things, later paid him back. “We spent a bit of time working on what the best way of moving her forward, or getting her what she wanted, which was to make records,” he said. “[We] made some demos, proper ones. I mean, we didn’t make them as demos, we made proper master recordings of three tracks. I didn’t actually really work on that stuff myself. I chose the songs out of piles of stuff that she had and then employed other people to do the work. And it worked brilliantly.”24

  Gilmour picked six songs and phoned his friend Andrew Powell, a hugely talented player, arranger and producer with a classical background, perfect pitch and a degree in music from King’s College, Cambridge, who had edged into the pop world, working with Cockney Rebel, the Alan Parsons Project, Al Stewart and Gilmour himself. Powell agreed to meet Bush at Floyd’s offices. “She was shy but quite intense and very impressive,” he remembers. “Dave played me the songs he had recorded, but I went away with just Kate’s voice and piano demos. That’s the way I prefer to work, just strip it down to the song without any other preconceptions. Dave said, ‘Look, go into the studio and do it and I’ll listen to it when Iget back’, or words to that effect. He put up the money for the initial sessions, he just thought she was something really special.”

  In June 1975 they convened at AIR Studios on Oxford Circus in central London. She was 16, approaching her seventeenth birthday and, not surprisingly, “very nervous, [but] Andrew was fantastic. He was completely in control of it.”25 Powell confirms that, of course, Bush was nervous, but it was an excited, anticipatory nervousness. “She was fascinated by everything that was going on around her, absolutely intrigued.”

  He had recruited some quality session players. Bruce Lynch, not long arrived from New Zealand and a regular with Cat Stevens; Barry De Souza on drums; Paul Keogh and Alan Parker on guitars; and Alan Skidmore blowing some rather freeform sax on ‘Berlin’ – later called ‘The Saxophone Song’ – a slinkily erotic nightclub fantasy of “a sensuous shining man being taken over by the instrument”26 while the sole observer of this emotional striptease, Bush, is happily seduced. Powell played keyboards.

  For some, the session made no great impact and was just another day at the office. “I got a call – ‘D’you wanna work?’ ‘Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?’ – and you’d just turn up and get stuck in,” recalls Lynch. “She was young, but I’ve never taken much notice of age, really.” Skidmore’s recollections are similarly blank. This was, after all, 35 years ago. Engineer Geoff Emerick, on the other hand, recalls the day vividly. “She was a breath of fresh air,” he says. “Me and Pete Henderson, my assistant, were sitting there and this sweet little shy girl came in and said, ‘Have you got something to drink?’ She was very thirsty and wanted some water. We sat in the control room waiting for Andrew, making small talk.”

  When Powell arrived they recorded three songs in two three-hour sessions: ‘Berlin,’ a new version of ‘Maybe’, and, crucially, ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’. ‘Wuthering Heights’ may have been the song that catapulted Bush to stardom, but it was ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ that really made the people who mattered sit up and listen. Early, embryonic versions of the song dated back to at least 1973, possibly earlier. “Fragments of her early songs which became hits were already finding their way out of Kate’s head by the time she was just 13,” said Dr Bush.27 Mysterious, secret and sensitive, it certainly shared many characteristics with the poetry she was writing in her first few years at St Joseph’s. David Gilmour mentions the song as being among the early batch he heard, and Pat Martin recalls running through a “basic version” of the song at the 1973 session. “It didn’t sound the way it did when she finished it,” he says. “It was just her and a piano, and I vaguely remember the chord sequences were different. It wasn’t the one that stuck out to me.”

  She chipped away at it until a final version was ready. As soon as Andrew Powell heard it in piano-and-vocal form he was riv
eted, describing it as the “outstanding one. I was very impressed at that song. When you think about it, it’s an extremely mature song for someone of that age, and rather odd. Definitely not a band song. I think drums would have killed it.” True to his instinct, he decided to record it live at AIR studios with just Bush and her piano accompanied by string players from the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Katz. “I insisted upon it, and it really did work,” he says. “I wouldn’t have made her do it if I didn’t think she was up to it, but she was. It’s a fantastic vocal performance and I think that’s partly because of the whole tension there.”

  For Geoff Emerick, a man who had worked on all the major Beatles recordings post-1966 and would go on to produce Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney among many other luminaries, it was a revelation. “That was one of my favourite recordings of all time,” he says. “We knew when we recorded it that it was one of the most beautiful records we’d made in a long time. Those sort of things happen once every eight or 10 years for me. It made a very deep impression.”

  Aside from its luminous melody and swooping chorus, ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ is one of the first examples of the extraordinarily positive way in which Bush views men. She 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. “It’s not such an open thing for a woman to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasise about it,” she once said. “I can’t understand that because to me the male body is absolutely beautiful.”28