Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  Unlike her work at the Dance Centre, which she continued until right before the recording sessions and for a short period afterwards, there was no overtly physical side to her musical expression. Paton recalls, with a distinct gleam in his eye, the way she used to limber up in the studio during sessions, but when she was singing she stood still and concentrated. She wasn’t one, says Powell, “for doing the dance of the seven veils while she was doing her vocals.” Somewhere deep inside, however, gears were shifting. She consistently delivered, indeed exceeded, the expectations of what her producer and her fellow musicians asked her to do, but she found ways to make the process a little smoother, to ease the metamorphosis. “I remember her smoking an awful lot of joints in the studio,” says Paton. “That was a strange influence for such a ‘public school’ girl. I think she needed it to relax. Dope was kind of taboo then, it was still ‘illegal’.”

  “She did smoke quite a lot,” adds Jon Kelly, while Andrew Powell, three decades on doing a convincing impression of a sighing, eye-rolling but essentially indulgent schoolmaster, recalls: “It did definitely happen. It was just a fact and you had to work with it. There were times when one had to hide the stuff: ‘You can have it back when you’ve finished this vocal!’ What can one do? Most of the time it didn’t get in the way, but sometimes you could hear the voice starting to suffer and drying out – so it was sometimes hidden! It could have been [nerves]. A confidence booster? Dutch courage? It’s hard to judge.”

  The sense of camaraderie and respect in the room grew as everyone realised that this was no ordinary singer songwriter and that they were working on something truly special. There may have been a vague feeling among the band of mind-your-language, but nobody was standing on ceremony. She was, says Bairnson, “just one of the lads. She’s a very modest person, anyway, she’s not an extrovert. She definitely leant on us, and we supported her. Whenever she got a bit nervous we came out with various strains of humour, generally based on Monty Python, which always seemed to do the trick. Her getting nervous, there was no drama to it, you just sensed it.”

  Despite her innate quietness, her inner strength, her sense of poise and self-assurance was apparent to everyone. “I didn’t think she was vulnerable at all, I thought she was very intelligent, a lot more intelligent than your average musician, and I thought she’d be able to look after herself,” says Paton. “I think you have to be confident to carry that off, to sit in front of these accomplished session musicians and say, ‘This is what Ido.’ I would find it daunting myself. She must have known how good she was to be able to do that in front of us.”

  Once again, there was a reluctance – part shyness, part manners, part something more primal, some deep protective instinct – to let too much light into her motives and ambitions. Already well versed in the standard patterns of behaviour within the music business, the musicians all appreciated her lack of prattling self-obsession, and the absence of the kind of hollow boasting that afflicts the truly insecure. “If you just met her as a stranger you would have no idea what she is capable of, and she has never thrust that in your face, either,” says Bairnson. “If you’re absolutely comfortable with what you do, then there’s no need to start blowing your trumpet.”

  “She didn’t say, ‘I want to do this and that, me, me, me, me …’,” adds Paton. “She wasn’t that kind of person at all and that in itself was very refreshing. A lot of artists you work with you usually find that they’re besotted with themselves. Like Freddie Mercury, all he could do was talk about himself all the time, but she wasn’t like that at all. She kept her vision to herself.”

  Her songwriting had never been open to general scrutiny, and on The Kick Inside she was consummately prepared, having been working privately towards this specific moment for many years. The songs were topped, tailed and more than ready before they were publicly presented. Nobody saw her extemporise or improvise – not even the lyrics would be altered once the song was being played in the studio. She was very careful not to reveal anything until she was certain it was complete.

  There was an astonishing depth of material, even after Powell and Bush had met several times to cull the 120 songs she had available into a less unwieldy shortlist. “The songs just appeared, she seemed to have an endless supply,” says Paton. “She would sit at the piano sometimes and play songs and say, ‘I might do this, I might not.’” According to Powell ‘Wow’ was already written, and was considered for The Kick Inside but not pursued, which “tells you the quality of what we had to keep off. I’ve often tried to think where I would have put ‘Wow’ on that album. I just don’t think it would have fit. And I know one day we did three voice and piano tracks, only one of which, ‘Feel It’, ended up on the album.” In the end it was decided to add two of the three songs from the 1975 AIR session, ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ and ‘The Saxophone Song’. They recorded another version of ‘Maybe’, the third, but it didn’t make the cut, a good song destined to always be the bridesmaid.

  Another track recorded but never used during the sessions was ‘Scares Me Silly’, preserved on tapes of the early album outtakes. Musically it’s unremarkable, the kind of song the record company may have been encouraging her to write. A chugging, upbeat track with a rather clunky new wave intro, a reggae breakdown and a clear, uncomplicated chorus hook, it was probably only included on the shortlist to make sure there were enough up-tempo numbers in the running. Lyrically, however, ‘Scares Me Silly’ is extremely interesting, a real-time depiction of Bush’s mental, physical and emotional processes as she is singing – or more accurately recording – a song.

  Numerous artists have been afflicted by stage fright through the years and some, such as The Band, have even written about it, but far fewer have ever described so graphically being affected by studio sickness, which here takes the form of acute self-consciousness. ‘Scares Me Silly’ begins in the studio, just as the lights are going down. Bush licks her lips and begins singing the opening line, but already she is overtaken by the idea that in order to perform she must become somebody else (“How can this girl be me?”), as though her everyday self is in danger of obstructing her performing alter ego as she strives to “keep the mood”.

  The sensation of singing is not depicted as a pleasant experience: it’s a tightrope walk. Bush describes a sense of “vertigo” and a feeling of sickness as she tries to balance her emotions and force herself into another take – and yet, though it scares her half to death, it also “gets her going”.

  There’s much on which to chew in there. The mix of terror and pleasure that performing – even in the studio – engenders mirrors the act of love (indeed, the chorus phrase of the song is a rather less poetic echo of the impulse behind ‘Hounds Of Love’). Then there’s the necessity of “goading” herself to keep going; the “need to lose;” the idea of holding the mood, like an actress, for the length of the take. Fascinating. An early unveiling of the complex and draining ritual she goes through in trying to honour the exact requirements of each song she sings. No mention, oddly, of sitting primly at the piano with a big fake smile for the cameras.

  In terms of her songwriting, nobody had any real inkling about where it was all coming from. This was the summer punk went pop, but musically The Kick Inside was very much pre-Sex Pistols in its leanings: a bit flared, a bit hairy, weed rather than speed, a little bit prog-rock, even, with its floating melodies, classically influenced piano, shifting time signatures, tight musicianship and poetic, occasionally cosmic lyrics. It was beautifully played, but what was it exactly? Some elements the casual observer could objectively attribute to acknowledged sources. The “big brass bed” in ‘James And The Cold Gun’ is also part of the furniture in Dylan’s ‘Lay, Lady Lay’; Om Mani Padme Hum was a Tibetan Buddhist prayer, uttered in ‘Strange Phenomena’ as an ode to the unseen “hand a-moulding us;” the ‘Goose Moon’ is a concept from Native American Cree culture, where the flight of the geese heralds the coming spring. The nods to Gurdjieff, traditiona
l folk songs, classic literature and lilting reggae, very much the hop-on-hop-off genre of choice at the time, all place it in pre-punk lineage, but already at its core her work was without obvious precedent, bearing the distinct mark of a unique psychic imprint.

  “You can’t say she comes from Carole King or Joni Mitchell or Kiri DeKanawa,” says Powell. “There’s bits of everything. The backing vocals on ‘Moving’ sound like ‘Queen Of The Night’ from The Magic Flute. There are all sorts of things going on there, [but] she didn’t talk about it a lot.” ‘Moving’ and ‘Kite’ both reflected the physical release and psychological transformation she experienced through dance. The “moving stranger” is Lindsay Kemp, and the fact that he “crush[ed] the lily in my soul” is a positive thing, reflecting the way that movement has empowered, rather than weakened her.

  However, control room chit-chat and canteen conversation rarely touched on such matters, while the band generally steered clear of discussing her lyrics. Songs like ‘Strange Phenomena’ tended to put the frighteners on the session men. “I didn’t like to ask her, ‘What’s this song about – tampons and things like that?’” says Paton, although Jon Kelly remembers vague discussions about whales and, in reference to ‘L’Amour Looks Something Like You’, “her love”. He was most struck by the title track, a truly beautiful song of forbidden passion between a brother and sister, sung moments before the pregnant girl commits suicide, “giving it all in a moment for you.” “I remember mixing that in Studio One, it was one of the songs that was left until last because we’d done some orchestra on it,” he says. “As I’m mixing it the lyric just hit home to me. It got to me, it was so powerful. I found it quite an emotional song to listen to and to work on.”

  The album has a generous scattering of these moments. Heard today, The Kick Inside is simply an extraordinary record, most particularly in terms of its lyrical content. Her desire to ‘masculinise’ her muse, to sing from a strong, bold place, is clearly evident, and yet it is one of the most profoundly female albums ever made. She is the ‘hungry’ woman of Dylan’s songs – fully awake, sensual, quiveringly alive – utterly without shame, astoundingly bold in her declaration of her appetites and fears. This is raw femininity in mind and body, but expressed in a very muscular way. It’s an astonishing alchemy. She sings as the woman she is inside and out, and also as the child she often seems to want to remain. It has all the deep wisdom of youth, of experiences real and imagined, earned and unearned, of knowing without knowing, but this is not the realm of fantasy. It’s all real. It’s all emotionally true. “I wasn’t a daydreamer,” she later said. “Writing songs and poetry is putting into words and music my real feelings.”4

  The language is something new for a female artist. The Kick Inside is lit up with the ecstasy and fear of puberty and sexual awakening – everywhere you look there’s a sense of a body growing, changing shape, immensely powerful but also terrifying: “Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o;” “Room for a life in your womb;” “This kicking here inside;” “Sticky love inside;” “Stars that climb from her bowels;” “Your warm hand walking around.” Elemental, primal. The title track is a sympathetic gaze at an incestuous relationship; ‘Strange Phenomena’ ties in the menstrual cycle to the waxing and waning of the moon; ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a supernatural psychodrama. These are no run of the mill boy-meets-girl songs. Even the many romantic shadowplays are sensually drawn, with a fine eye for lace and stockings, fire and candlelight, fact and fancy, almost teetering on the edge of Mills & Boon erotic-cliché (“My stockings fall onto the floor;” “We move into the boudoir”) but usually saved by a poetic turn of phrase or a flash of genuinely inspired imagery (“You came out of the night wearing a mask in white colour”), or a dash of daft, endearing humour.

  The album’s crowning glory almost missed the boat. ‘Wuthering Heights’ was written on the eve of going in to record the album, beneath a full moon on a clear, midsummer night in 1977, looking out through the open window over the rooftops of south London. “It was only written a few days before we went into the studio,” says Powell. “Kate came round to my place and said, ‘What about this one?’, and sat down at my piano and played it. I said, ‘Um yeah, I think we should use that!’ It hit me straight away as really extraordinary. She’s doing some very interesting things with her voice. I loved it.”

  It was one of the final pieces in the jigsaw, a bold confirmation of her intent. The song wasn’t directly inspired by reading Emily Brontë’s novel of 1847, but rather by catching the final ten minutes of a 1970 movie adaptation starring future James Bond, Timothy Dalton. Indeed, she wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’ before she had read the book in its entirety. Interesting that, even with this most seemingly literary of songs, it was direct – and accidental – visual stimulus that, as so often seemed to be the case, provided the initial creative spark. “I’d just caught the very end of [the film],” she said. “It was really freaky, ’cos there’s this hand coming through the window and whispering voices and I’ve always been into that sort of thing, you know, and it just hung around in my head. I had to write a song about it.”5

  With its stirring combination of the supernatural and the sheer bloody-minded power of obsessive love, with a not insignificant personal connection (“It’s me, Cathy!”) thrown in for good measure, ‘Wuthering Heights’ is a fine insight into the how and why Bush writes. It was the instant connection, rather than the detail, that was important. The impetus isn’t intellectual (it’s a world away from someone like Sting name-dropping Nabokov for pure effect), but entirely emotional. Brontë’s novel doesn’t tiptoe around the pretty feelings on the surface, but rather digs around amongst the churning currents below. Bush related to Cathy’s hidden depths, her youthful passion, her violence. Once hooked, she climbed inside and truly embodied the song. “This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff,” she said. “Great subject matter for a song.”6

  And so it transpired. When it came to recording the song at AIR, Andrew Powell pulled rank and wrote and played the bass part, much to David Paton’s chagrin. “As a consolation prize he says, ‘Davie, you can play 12-string.’ Hmmm!” Powell knew a good thing when he heard one. The piercingly high vocals were partly the result of Bush’s attempts to improve her vocal technique. She had started writing in keys beyond her range in order to expand her vocal reach. The songs started climbing; she wanted them to fly. But the vocal is also a deliberate piece of characterisation, signifying Cathy as a spirit rather than flesh and bone. The track was topped off by Ian Bairnson’s stunning solo, stretching out over the horizon and disappearing deep into the mists, ringing into eternity.

  However impressive the results, ‘Wuthering Heights’ was never intended to be the first single. EMI wanted ‘James And The Cold Gun’ because, according to Bob Mercer, “I thought it was a cleverer song and more accessible. She didn’t agree with me and nailed me to the floor. She asked to come and see me and burst into tears. I backed off, and I said at the time, ‘Look Kate, it’s of no consequence or importance to me what the first fucking single is. I don’t think you’re a singles act, you’re an albums act, and I think it could take at least three albums for us to gain any traction at all. So by all means put ‘Wuthering Heights’ out first. It’s not the most important thing.’ She was an albums act as far as I was concerned, in those days there tended to be a clear distinction between the two. Frankly I wouldn’t have minded if someone had suggested we didn’t put out a single at all. Thank God we didn’t [do that]!”

  Bush has always disputed Mercer’s claim that she “burst into tears,” but whatever way the drama unfolded, it was a significant dust-up for several reasons. It showed that this ‘girl’ who attracted any number of unintentionally patronising adjectives from her peers – ‘innocent’, ‘sweet’, ‘shy’, ‘lovely’ – possessed deep reserves of strength and fortitude when it came to fighting for her art, even with those within the EMI family
for whom she had great affection. It also gave her instant power. Once ‘Wuthering Heights’ became a number one single, a hit as unlikely as it was all-encompassing, her insistence on it being the first single seemed like a stroke of genius, almost spooky in its prescience. Who was going to have the courage to argue with her next time? It bought her a freedom she used, usually wisely, always wilfully. “There was really never another fight,” says Mercer. “To be honest, I pretty much lay down after that. After the fight, I realised what kind of artist I was dealing with and that my role here was to keep out of the way and not knock over the scenery. I didn’t have any [more] disagreements with her.” When it came to the second single Bush wanted ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, in order to showcase her singing and songwriting talents and prove that she wasn’t a mere gimmick. EMI, who favoured ‘Them Heavy People’, said – ‘Sure, whatever you want.’

  Of course, Bush hadn’t fought for ‘Wuthering Heights’ because of her certain belief in its innate commerciality, but primarily because she felt it was far more representative of what she did – who is she? – than ‘James And The Cold Gun’ which, though a decent theatrical rock song which neatly broke up the mood of the album and really came into its own onstage, was a little two-dimensional and formulaic. She burst into public consciousness at almost exactly the same time as Debbie Harry and Blondie, whose ‘Denis’ was working its way up the charts at the same time as ‘Wuthering Heights’, and she intended to set herself apart from the start. She had an inkling ‘Wuthering Heights’ might turn a few heads, for better or worse. Far from the doe-eyed hippie chick with nothing but disdain for commercial considerations, she was acutely aware of the importance of making a splash. “I felt that to actually get your name anywhere you’ve got to do something that is unusual, because there’s so much good music around and it’s all in a similar vein,” she said. “It had the high pitch and it also had a very English storyline which everyone would know…. I ’m into reaching more than the ordinary market.”7