Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

“Oh, it was a riot!” remembers Bath. “They were getting up on stage, some guy was all over Kate. I’m not a hard nut, but I went over and pushed him out of the way, off the stage area. Del didn’t do anything! It was mental, but we got through it. We did OK.” The following Monday, June 6, they were at The Ship in Brighton, a “lager-drinking pub [which] wanted something completely different to us,” says King. “After an hour we were asked to stop.”

  And stop they did. EMI were finally calling their terribly patient prodigy into the ring. Brian Southall was the first representative of the record company to see the band, and he had come away convinced that she was ready for active service. “I went to some pub in Lewisham and I remember having a long conversation with her mum, who kept giving me sausages,” he says. “Lovely lady. Mad, eccentric Irish woman. I left the pub and drove with some excitement – we’re talking midnight, 1 a.m. – straight to the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington where we were having a reception for The Shadows, to tell my boss Bob Mercer and other colleagues that I had just seen a little magic moment.”

  Mercer and Andrew Powell later ventured to south London to check up on Bush’s progress and the former, at least, seemed to concur with Southall’s verdict. (Powell was less than impressed. “It’s what people do early on in their careers,” he shrugs. “Stockhausen spent his early years playing piano for a conjurer.”) Mercer was happy with her ability to cut the mustard, even if he already sensed a reticence, something held back. “Those gigs were great, just great,” he says. “I always wanted her to do an album of covers, and the main reason for that was having seen her do some covers in her show and realising how good her voice was just as a performer, away from her material. [But] she was never that comfortable. You always knew that she was ‘performing’ the performance, if you know what I mean. Other artists you’d see bound on to the stage and everything took over. She didn’t have the obvious enjoyment of it.”

  Bush was scheduled to go into the studio in July 1977. As her career snapped out of the leisurely camaraderie of playing pubs and suddenly became serious again, there was a lingering sense, however unfair, that she was simply a little rich girl merely ‘playing’ at being in a noisy rock group. This was bound to create a degree of resentment and confusion among some of her bandmates as things wound down.

  Vic King claims that there was an expectation that they would play on The Kick Inside. They had made four-track recordings at De Wolfe studios in Wardour Street which King calls “the pre-demo of the first album: ‘Them Heavy People’, ‘James And The Cold Gun’…. One day she had a really terrible cold, she’s done better things than that, but it was to hear her songs and her voice maturing so they could be taken to whoever was producing the first album with a view to orchestration and ideas for the final album.” In this respect, at least, the session was a success. The arrangement of ‘James And The Cold Gun’ used on The Kick Inside – where the tempo is reduced to half pace at the end and comes out with a guitar solo – was King’s idea and was first used at KT Bush Band gigs. “Being her band [on the first album] was mentioned, but then they started getting session guys in,” he says. “Bye bye band! Word came across: ‘I’ve got to go into the studio and I’m sorry to say they are going to get session musicians in. I have tried to fight it, but they insist.’”

  Colin Lloyd-Tucker, who later befriended Bush and Paddy and collaborated extensively with them both, was working at De Wolfe studios at this time and recalls the session was booked by EMI, so perhaps there was some discussion of the possibility of her band playing on the album. Brian Bath, however, recalls being made clear about the limited life span of the enterprise from the very start. “I think her dad said at the beginning, because he had a lot to do with things, that this is not going to go on forever,” he says. “It’s probably going to last a few months. I don’t think there was [any talk of us doing the album] because that process had already begun. But what a shame. It was a really good band.”

  It’s probable that Bush would indeed have preferred to use her band on The Kick Inside, given that she lobbied hard for them to appear on the follow-up, Lionheart, and kept them on board for promotional duties after the album’s release. There was also the fact that her boyfriend was the bass player. At the time, however, she lacked the power to call those kinds of shots.

  Other issues left a less than sweet aftertaste. Aside from the studio recordings, many of the band’s gigs were filmed, taped and photographed, but almost none of this material has ever come to light. According to Brian Bath, an attempt to release a single of the KT Bush Band’s “really good” version of Johnny Winter’s ‘Shame Shame Shame’, which they had cut at Graphic Sound studios in Catford during a recording session designed to capture some of the highlights of their live set rather than Bush originals, was later halted because “there was some opposition about it.” He may be being diplomatic. “Everything had to be confiscated – ‘or else’, I think the phrase was,” says Vic King. “They were all confiscated and disappeared. I was told at the time that nothing else could be put out, they didn’t want anything ruining her impact. Whether it was EMI or the family, word got around. I think Del said to Brian that if anyone has anything hiding they’re not able to use it for profit or gain. ‘If you’ve got anything could you hand it back.’”

  Bush wasn’t at all keen on her earliest experiments in live performance being unearthed and held up to the world, although she was in no way dismissive of the band members themselves or their contributions. In an expanded incarnation the band would go on to play a significant part in her early career, she made sure of that. For now, however, the focus shifted to the studio. At last, it was time.

  * The similarity of the address to Wickham Farm is confusing but, presumably, mere coincidence. The two properties were several miles apart.

  * It’s still there, now called Dirty South.

  “People confuse the strangeness of the songs with the way she lives her life.” – Jon Kelly. Washing up in the kitchen at East Wickham Farm, 1978. (EVENING STANDARD/GETTY IMAGES)

  “A refuge to which Bush has returned again and again in both body and song.” In the gardens at East Wickham Farm, 1978. (EVENING STANDARD/GETTY IMAGES)

  “The whole family were very unusual and artistic and spiritual, but all completely different.” – Stewart Avon Arnold. Hannah, Paddy, Kate and Jay, with canine friend, at the farm in 1979. (BBC)

  “A fiercely tight-knit Bush fiefdom in the south of the city.” 44 Wickham Road. Bush wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’ while living in the top floor flat. (G. THOMSON)

  “There were so many depths that she kept hidden, because the school would perhaps not have given her room for them to be expressed.” – Shealla Mubi. Bush in Fifth Form at St Joseph’s, pursuing her music largely in secret.

  “Within the school, the worst thing you could do was behave in an unladylike manner; that brought a very stern rebuke.” – Concepta Nolan-Long. The girls of St Joseph’s in their first year. Bush is second left on the bottom row.

  Poster advertising the KT Bush Band’s final gig at The Ship in Brighton: “A lagerdrinking pub which wanted something completely different to us. After an hour we were asked to stop.” – Vic King.

  “I said the first week you’ll get a handful of people, but by the fourth week you won’t be able to get them in the door. And sure enough…” – Brian Bath. The Rose of Lee in Lewisham, now called Dirty South, where the KT Bush Band played a residency in 1977. (G. THOMSON)

  “The theatrical thing was starting to get there. She wasn’t shy on stage. She was pretty dynamic, she used to live it all.” – Brian Bath. The KT Bush Band at the Rose of Lee, 1977. Vic King on drums, Bush on vocals, Brian Bath on guitar, and (out of shot) Del Palmer on bass. (COURTESY OF VIC KING)

  “She jumped out of dance lessons before she was fully trained, but she was a wonderful, fluid mover. I loved having her in class.” – Robin Kovac.

  “She was regarded by many as part of the axis of orthodoxy the Prince�
�s Trust and BPI set.” With Cliff Richard, Labi Siffre, compere Russell Harty and members of the London Symphony Orchestra on the steps of the Royal Albert Hall, publicising a show in aid of the LSO’s 75th Anniversary Appeal, November 14, 1979. (GRAHAM TURNER/KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES)

  Celebrating success with Bob Geldof at the Melody Maker Reader’s Poll Awards, November 28, 1979. (MIKE STEPHENS/CENTRAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGES)

  “She was harvesting gold and platinum discs from around the globe, and armfuls of awards from the industry and music magazines.” Weighed down with acclaim at the 1979 Capital Music Awards (RICHARD YOUNG/REX FEATURES)

  Scenes from the ‘Tour Of Life’: “She was incredibly nervous, but the show was just extraordinary. We didn’t quite know what we were letting ourselves in for, this extraordinary presentation of her music.” – Brian Southall. TOP LEFT: (ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS) TOP RIGHT: (JOE BANGAY/LFI) ABOVE: (ROB VERHORST/REDFERNS)

  “For all the flash and grab of the theatrical spectacle, in the end the show really was all about her extraordinary face. One minute she was Douglas Fairbanks, the next Lillian Gish, the next Lolita.” Copenhagen, April 26, 1979. (JORGEN ANGEL/REDFERNS)

  4

  Pull Out The Pin

  “I CAN remember saying to Kate, ‘You’re going to be so famous you’re not going to be able to walk down the street,’” says Jon Kelly. “I said that to her after the first week of recording, though she wouldn’t have believed it.”

  It was the kind of premonition guaranteed to give her nightmares. It was also true. The Kick Inside was recorded in AIR studios over a period of six very happy weeks in July and August 1977, with Andrew Powell producing and Kelly, the house engineer, as his right hand man. From the very start, everything seemed to click into place. “It was a fantastically creative atmosphere, we cut three or four tracks in the first day,” says Powell. “I remember we started off with ‘Moving’ and that got done in about two hours or less, and I thought, ‘Hmm, this is good!’ I think we did ‘Kite’ next, to mix up the fast and slow tracks. I remember … Jon Kelly said he came out of that first day and thought, ‘That’s it, I’ve peaked, it can never get any better than this!’ It was that kind of feeling.”

  Indeed it was. “It was fabulous,” says Kelly. “It was what I had gone into the business to do, to have those moments. They are few and far between. I remember her sitting at the piano singing those songs and it was just mesmerising. You could have put the mike anywhere in the room and recorded it on anything. It was an absolute joy, there was nothing to fix.”

  The musicians were a bespoke quartet assembled by Powell, pairing up two halves of two successful bands: David Paton on bass and Ian Bairnson on guitar, from Scottish group Pilot; and Stuart Elliott on drums and Duncan MacKay on keyboards, from Cockney Rebel. Powell had worked with both bands as an arranger and was aware that these players were far from the weary, clock-watching session musicians of rock lore. They had both had number one singles in 1975 with, respectively, ‘January’ and ‘(Come Up And See Me) Make Me Smile’, and were empathetic to a young songwriter with unique sensibilities. “I had no say, so I was very lucky really to be given such good musicians to start with,” she said. “And they were lovely, ’cause they were all very concerned about what I thought of the treatment of each of the songs. And if I was unhappy with anything, they were more than willing to re-do their parts. So they were very concerned about what I thought, which was very nice. And they were really nice guys, eager to know what the songs were about and all that sort of thing.”1

  It was the first of many times that the four would come together as a session band, and it proved an instantly fruitful blend. So much so that Bush worked with them all again – collectively and separately – several times over the coming years, and in Elliott she found a drummer who has provided her music with its polyrhythmic pulse all the way through to Aerial. “I knew Stuart Elliott would work well with Kate, he had a light touch,” says Powell. “He’s someone who really listens. He’d shout ‘Stop!’ in the middle of a take and say, ‘Can’t you hear what she’s singing? She’s singing this and we’re all bashing away.’ That’s what you want, someone who is really locking in and listening. He’s a very sensitive musician.”

  The musicians hadn’t heard any of Bush’s music prior to the session, and the fact that they came in cold made their subsequent reaction all the more emphatic. Paton recalls Powell had told him that her songs were “a bit wild, a bit wacky even,” but he wanted them to enter the studio without any firm preconceptions. Just as David Gilmour had done back in 1973, the producer said to Bush on the first day of recording, ‘Just play them the first song.’ It was ‘Moving’.

  “She sat down at the piano, said, ‘It goes like this,’ and just played,” recalls David Paton. “We were all gathered around the piano with our jaws dropped, because it was a stunning performance. Faultless, absolutely faultless, and she could do that time and time again. Every song she introduced was just faultless. I’d worked with a lot of musicians in the past and solo artists and it’s not very often you get that wow factor, [but] she had that as soon as she played the first few notes. Even her piano playing was so accomplished. I knew right away. I think we all did.”

  Most of the group performances on the album were cut this way – live, with overdubs added later. Bush would play a song at the piano and the band would “wrap ourselves around her, looking for ways to embellish it or give it direction,” says Ian Bairnson. Some direct stylistic touches – like the light reggae rhythm on ‘Kite’ – tended to evolve as the musicians bedded in the song. Others, like the half-tempo breakdown towards the end of ‘James And The Cold Gun’, were remnants of the KT Bush Band’s pub arrangements.

  Andrew Powell was very much the senior partner in the relationship, although early on there was a need for some gentle recalibrating of the producer-artist dynamic. Powell “at first treated me like a session musician,”2 said Bush, but “eventually gave me an incredible amount of freedom. I was lucky to be able to express myself as much as I did, especially with this being a debut album. Andrew was really into working together, rather than pushing everyone around.”3 Morris Pert, the eccentric Scottish musician brought in to add percussive touches such as the delightful Boo Bams (how could Bush have possibly resisted such an instrument? They are, a little disappointingly, merely tuned bongo drums) on ‘Room For The Life’, recalls that there was a general settling in period while everyone – including Powell, who of course had worked with Bush in 1975 – readjusted their expectations in light of the evidence in front of their eyes. “Even Andrew at the beginning was a bit flummoxed as to what direction she should be going in,” says Pert. “He let her take over gradually, because he was just a little bit flummoxed. It would have been criminal to bring in a producer who said, ‘Don’t do this, do it like that’. That would have been a nightmare, and Kate would have collapsed in a heap.”

  EMI left Powell to get on with things. He wasn’t even given a budget, another example of the record company’s largesse and faith in its debutante. Bob Mercer visited the studio only once, and on that occasion he telephoned ahead to say, ‘Do you mind if Ido? I don’t want to disturb anything.’ Such a careful, hands-off approach was astute – anything else was likely to have made Bush self-conscious and even resentful – but they were keeping a discreetly close eye on the proceedings all the same. Brian Southall recalls dropping into AIR to have “long conversations with Andrew.” Members of her family also frequently popped in.

  Generally Powell was sympathetic to both her sensitivity and her music, allowing the songs to grow and the arrangements to evolve. His presence was nonetheless a powerful one. He was, says Kelly, a “dominant producer”. He wrote parts for the rhythm section, played a variety of instruments, and generally had strong ideas about how the album should proceed. Bush may later have concluded that her debut album reflected – perhaps inevitably – at least as much of Powell’s artistic vision as her own, but whatever misgivings she had (
and it later transpired that she was unhappy with much of The Kick Inside, but wasn’t yet able to do very much about it) were kept to herself, stored away for future experience. She also recognised, as did everyone else in the room, that she was essentially in good hands. “Andrew was a very, very talented man,” says Kelly. “His writing and his musicianship, and his appreciation of Kate and his astuteness at getting the best out of her when she was so young and naïve – knowing what I know now of the business, that could have easily all gone so wrong. Andrew…. loved Kate and the songs, but he was determined to get it right.”

  She absorbed everything. She listened and watched and asked questions, showing infinite patience and enthusiasm. When it came time for mixing and sequencing, she was there every day, drinking it all in, spooling forward to the day when she could do it all herself. At the time, primarily she felt relief at finally being able to unburden herself of at least some of her vast store of songs, and not a little grateful that she was able to daub the canvas with her own stylistic touches. Her beloved whale song acted as a prelude to ‘Moving’ and effectively opened the album; she brought Paddy in to play some of his esoteric instruments and sing with her on several songs; and she was able to introduce her cast of vocal characters on backing vocals, growling and chiding to great effect in the background on ‘James And The Cold Gun’, rumbling theatrically on ‘Them Heavy People’, and generally adding much depth, flavour and personality to the tracks.

  All those present were immediately struck – and rather captivated – by the dichotomy revealed through working with her, the seemingly huge gulf between, as Paton puts it, this “very quiet girl, very down to earth, the first person to say, ‘Do you want anything, do you want a cup of tea?’,” and the hugely assured artist singing these songs of sex, love, lust, ghosts and cosmic philosophy, imploring and declaiming in a variety of strange, enchanting voices. It was a wholly alluring mixture of innocence and experience; the combination of, on the one hand, an understated personality and a vastly amplified performing persona. “After we did a couple [of songs] we were thinking, ‘What’s coming next?’” says Ian Bairnson. “She pulls out these characters that aren’t there when she’s not singing or performing. There was no formula there, they were all truly original songs, and the thing that pulls it all together is her.”