The television special was an odd construct. Clearly intended to mark a progression from the tour, it’s likely that, embroiled as she was in the early stages of Never For Ever, Bush was never quite able to give it the time and devotion it required. Stewart Avon Arnold, again paired with Gary Hurst as one of Bush’s dance partners, can’t remember a single thing about making it. Kate ended up as more of a scrawled footnote to the ‘Tour Of Life’ than a next chapter.
Broadcast on December 28, the show featured revised versions of ‘Them Heavy People’, ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’, ‘Symphony In Blue’ and ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’, as well as the new material. A mixture of pre-filmed sequences, dramatic in-studio setpieces and a handful of straight, at-the-piano musical performances, some of the footage, admittedly, was marvellous. ‘The Wedding List’ was a highlight, a crazed Bush in bridal white gunning down cheroot-smoking double-dealer Paddy.
Much of the rest, however, ended up looking cheap and rather silly. The routine for ‘Egypt’ almost begged to be mercilessly parodied: it’s the Turkish Delight advert with a social conscience, a future French & Saunders routine in the making. Bush, in a billowing pink number with a black band across her face, drifted in front of a rather over-literal backdrop of stock film showing pyramids and camels, intercut with grittier scenes of poverty and squalor, awkwardly underscoring the distance between illusion and reality. ‘Them Heavy People’ was a diluted version of the tour routine, while the choreography for ‘Ran Tan Waltz’ was plain bizarre.
Still, it’s worth watching for two unforgettable, never-to-be-repeated moments. Bush sang ‘Another Day’, Roy Harper’s beautiful song of domestic fracture, as a moving duet with Peter Gabriel (heralded, inevitably, as the “Angel Gabriel”), who later reappeared to perform an equally stunning solo version of his own ‘Lost In The Flood’, which rather stole the show. Again, Bush said nothing to the audience throughout. This time, however, the suspension of disbelief was a little harder to hold.
The new decade brought a new perspective, a new studio, and some landmark new compositions. “EMI had asked us to record four songs, I think, before Christmas,” says Kelly. “Then we agreed between us that she should write some more, because these four songs were still from the early Kate Bush Songbook. So she went off and wrote some new songs. I can remember going to her flat just after Christmas and she played me ‘Babooshka’.”
‘Babooshka’ was loosely inspired by the folk song ‘Sovay’, in which a young woman dresses up as a highwayman and robs her lover in order to find out whether he will hand over the gold love ring she gave to him. Even threatened with his life he refuses to part with it, and Sovay thus feels certain of his devotion. In Bush’s song, the conclusion is less upbeat. An older woman tests her husband’s faith by tempting him with scented letters and finally dressing up as a younger version of herself to meet him in the flesh, “incognito,” and he succumbs. The title, borrowing and misspelling the Russian word for grandmother, also brought to mind Matryoshka dolls, or Russian dolls, often incorrectly known as ‘Babushka dolls’. Bush claims the title came to her out of the ether, but the notion of an older figure hiding a series of other, younger figures within herself seems peculiarly apt for these ruminations on age, trust and sexual identity.
There are in existence two early demo versions of one of Bush’s best known singles, dating from late 1979. The first and earliest features ‘Babooshka’ in its raw infancy, just her piano and voice with a single harmony vocal overdubbed on the title phrase. It’s a wonderful two minutes of music, beginning with a great bluesy flourish, the piano reminiscent of the opening passage of Bob Dylan’s ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’, and even a jarring bum note on the keyboard can’t dull its obvious ebullience. On a later demo she had added – significantly, for rhythm was becoming an essential part of her writing process – a simple electronic drum pattern, while the song’s signature keyboard motif was now present. The vocal harmonies became more complex, and the listener can hear what she’s trying to do with the song and where it’s heading. It’s a fascinating insight into how advanced these songs were before they even arrived in the studio, a vital link between how they began and what they would later become.
Jon Kelly recognised a hit single from the very start. “It had such a rising chorus and such an impact,” he says. “She had that little piano riff right from the beginning, that little motif, so it had all these ingredients. I thought it was great and would be a single, which of course damned it! It had a little bit of a stigma attached to it throughout the recording. Kate had realised that it was going towards being a single and was thinking, ‘Oh God! Promotion, release, press, charts, Top Of The Pops,’ and thinking that’s not where she wanted to go. She wanted to go towards making proper albums.”
Despite the fact that it was finished before it came anywhere near the studio, it was not necessarily an easy song to capture as the album sessions moved into EMI’s famous Studio Two at Abbey Road in January 1980. “When we did things like ‘Babooshka’ we were in there for days,” says Brian Bath. “We played ‘Babooshka’ for three days non-stop and I think there were about 12 bass players, they were just coming and going: ‘It’s not working out, we’ll get someone else.’”
Bath is exaggerating for effect, but the second part of the Never For Ever sessions marked the beginning of Bush’s habit of ‘casting’ for parts, selecting musicians solely for specific tracks, picking and choosing according to a song’s needs and the strength and style of each player. As the notion of having a studio band began to evaporate, even Del wasn’t immune. On two tracks, ‘Babooshka’ and ‘Breathing’, the rhythm section of John Giblin – a highly regarded session man with a distinctive fretless bass sound who had been recommended by both David Paton and Peter Gabriel – and Bush’s old friend Stuart Elliott was preferred to Del and Preston Heyman. Bush felt the songs needed a different approach, a lighter touch. Egos were sometimes bruised, albeit temporarily.
“I remember this voice coming over from the control room: ‘Brian, could you come into the control room a moment?’” Bath recalls. “I got there and she said, ‘Brian, it’s not really working out, maybe you should sit this one out.’ ‘Oh, OK then.’ Then all of a sudden the intercom goes and Preston is asked to sit out, too. Preston said, ‘I’ve never been taken off a session in my life!’ There were a lot of shocks all round. When we were doing ‘Babooshka’ Del was taken off. I couldn’t believe it. He was a bit … Del swears a lot. That’s what he’s like, Del. He’s so funny, so straight with it. He does speak his mind!” Despite such unflinching decisions, Abbey Road was a bustling, happy, highly creative environment. Friends and family, including Roy Harper, Peter Gabriel and Keith MacMillan, dropped in most evenings to listen, watch and hang out, and Bush would scamper around making everyone cups of tea.
As the sessions progressed, she became more and more alive to the possibilities offered through new technology. In particular, she fell head over heels for the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument (CMI), a digital sampling synthesiser designed by two Australians, Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, in 1979. It was a bulky, clunky brute of a thing, a mainframe computer with an eight-inch floppy disc drive whirring away noisily, a green-screen monitor and a touch-sensitive keyboard attached. By today’s standards the sounds were astonishingly lo-fi and crunchy and the set-up a little crude, but musically it was a glimpse of the future, the first stirrings of the digital age we now all inhabit.
The Fairlight enabled musicians to sample short sounds and play them back at different frequencies, either direct from the keyboard or by programming a sequence of notes. You could record anything – a cough, a broken twig – or use some of the machine’s library of preset samples – a cello, a violin, or the infamous Orch5, a fragment of Stravinsky’s Firebird, which became perhaps the most over-used sound in early days of digital samples – and hear the whole synthesiser ‘become’ that sound. It was musical animation. A given today, a revolution 30 years
ago.
There were only three Fairlights in the UK at the time. Peter Gabriel had formed a company with a relative, Steve Payne, called Syco Systems which was involved in importing electronic instruments to Britain; he, almost inevitably, had his own machine. Syco owned the other two, one of which they loaned to Richard Burgess and John Walters of electronic group Landscape (best known for their 1981 hit ‘Einstein A Go-Go’) on the understanding that they would demonstrate the Fairlight to potentially interested parties on Syco’s behalf.
Bush learned about the instrument through Gabriel and, immediately intrigued, requested a demonstration. In the end Walters and Burgess loaded the ungainly instrument into the back of Burgess’ old BMW and brought it – shaken but still working – into Abbey Road on four separate occasions, whereupon the ensemble set about adding a variety of textures to the existing tracks. On ‘Army Dreamers’ they sampled Jay cocking several guns and rifles from his weapons arsenal and then played the results back on the Fairlight keyboard, adding a menacing percussive snap to the song. Much time was spent sampling voices on ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’: the breathy ‘usss’ is a sample on the Fairlight, as is the opening and closing doors on ‘All We Ever Look For’. It was a wholly democratic adventure. Everyone took turns.
“What I liked was her and Jon Kelly’s willingness to try anything and go down blind alleys without any limitations,” recalls Richard Burgess. “At the same time she was decisive and helpful with directions.” Burgess, a drummer by trade who moved successfully into production, would tend to play the more rhythmic parts; synth whizz Duncan MacKay handled most of the string and clarinet parts on the keyboard, while Bush added her own contributions. The Fairlight was not, says Burgess, particularly “player or user friendly,” so it was a case of trial, error and enormously enjoyable experimentation.
“We spent a lot of time in the studio control room with Kate and Jon Kelly trying it out on pretty well every track,” says John Walters. “We created a huge mess in Abbey Road Studio Two, smashing glasses and sampling them, recording and saving the best-sounding noises as digital files in the Fairlight’s memory. We then played them back over ‘Babooshka’ from the keyboard. Listen to the very end: that’s Richard playing a slow ‘arpeggio’ of smashing glass from the Fairlight keyboard. The whole experience was inspiring.” The canteen staff at Abbey Road were apparently less impressed by the wanton destruction of their crockery, and had to be mollified with individual boxes of Belgian chocolate.
Once Bush grasped what the Fairlight could do she was keen to try it on all sorts of things in all manner of ways, but many of her ideas didn’t make the final mix. Because of the technical limitations of this new machine, several of the sounds on the album that might at first appear to be samples – Hare Krishna chants, countryside noises, random spoken voices – were actually ‘flown in’ by Kelly using a tape recorder, which at the time gave a much better sound quality.
“I think Kate would have liked to use it for a lot more things,” says Walters. “She responded instinctively to all the sonic and cultural implications of the Fairlight, she was naturally ahead of her time and, of course, went on to do much more with it as the instrument developed. She made the most of it for her own idiosyncratic music.”
For someone who had struggled on her first two records to articulate her feelings through sound, discovering the Fairlight was like stumbling into an Aladdin’s Cave of sonic possibilities, opening a door into a new world. It mapped out her future and changed irrevocably the way she thought about her music, offering the ability to “layer sounds as she layers ideas.”4 It dovetailed with her desire to use cutting edge technology to access deeply atavistic feelings; to “apply the future to nostalgia,” as she put it.5 Where before she was tied to the piano and had to manipulate her voice in order to try to communicate the full richness of the world of each of her songs, now she could add anything – strings, waterfalls, sunbursts – during the writing process itself. It was a massive expansion of her musical palette, giving her the ability to immediately conjure up images and characters within her music. “As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have one, and it was going to become a very important part of my work,” she said. “What attracts me to the Fairlight is its ability to create very human, animal, emotional sounds that don’t actually sound like a machine. I think in a way that’s what I’ve been waiting for.”6
Not everyone was quite so enamoured of this new toy and the techniques it offered. Kelly, an endlessly relaxed and patient foil, admits it threw him a little. “I was brought up so old school,” he says. “I was so precious, everything had to be recorded with the best mike in the best room, I wasn’t as open minded as Kate.” Some of the musicians were a little bemused, too. “She had recorded this penny whistle which Paddy could play and then played it on the keyboard, and I thought it was a bit of a strange circle,” says Max Middleton. “Why not just play the penny whistle?!”
Ian Bairnson came in to sing on ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’, a beautiful if strikingly odd tribute to the English composer Frederick Delius. The song had been inspired by Ken Russell’s film Song Of Summer made for the BBC’s Omnibus series, which the young Bush watched at East Wickham Farm when it was first broadcast in 1968. As a young man Delius had caught syphilis and, when he eventually became wheelchair bound in later life, a devoted fan named Eric Fenby became his amanuensis, writing down his compositions as the enfeebled master dictated them to him (hence the song’s closing line, “In B, Fenby”). This oddly touching, mutually dependent partnership captured Bush’s imagination and she wrote a lovely hiccupping song about it. Two points are of note: she was just ten when she watched the Omnibus show, which shows a certain degree of intellectual precocity; and what a capacity she has for preserving the tingle of recalled inspiration – more than a decade after the television viewing, her childhood feelings were still wholly accessible to her as an adult writer. Bush later met the aged Fenby on The Russell Harty Show, where he made polite if rather bewildering noises about ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’ and opined that “art is pure emotion,” an epigram which could have come straight from Bush’s lips.
Bairnson loved the song but noted that “the technology was going quite wild at the time. I don’t think she’d be upset if I said that at one point she was confused on Never For Ever. In Abbey Road there were four or five multi-track machines all loaded up and she had God knows how many tracks, she kept overdubbing things on it. It’s that thing about having too much choice. There were synths around, the Fairlight, it was all happening.” From Bush’s point of view, however, not enough was happening. To her regret, the Fairlight arrived a little too late to transform Never For Ever, but it gave her a clear vision of where she needed to go next.
They were gruelling sessions. She was a nocturnal creature by nature and the days often stretched long into the night and through to the morning; sometimes she was working 20 hours at a time. Much of the post-studio socialising would occur at Paddy’s flat at Bush HQ on Wickham Road, where the likes of Roy Harper might drop in to unwind into the early hours; she would often creep upstairs while everyone else was still chatting to grab a little rest, but she was a poor sleeper and struggled to switch off. In the studio, “she smoked [dope] but it didn’t seem to affect her,” according to Max Middleton. “Creativity comes from knowledge, not from being stoned. All her knowledge comes from her family, from reading. I think it just relaxed her, that’s probably the most you can say.”
The album’s obvious masterpiece, its “little symphony”7 was ‘Breathing’, the first time in Bush’s career that the experimental truly connected with the emotional. It was a powerful fusion. The lyric was sung from the perspective of a foetus in the womb breathing in not only its mother’s nicotine but also radiation “after the blast”. The unborn child had lived in a previous incarnation and is therefore aware of how beautiful the world once was; this time it doesn’t want to come out into this ruined, post-apocalyptic version of it. It was a complex, inte
nsely beautiful song, full of love, terror and foreboding. Bush described it as a warning, “a message from the future.”8 ‘Breathing’ was also the song on which her voice finally broke through to a different level, climaxing in a raw howl of pain and suffering. It was a tantalising preview of the vocal riches to come on the next two records, and a metaphorical blowing away of all the TV mimics and their squeaky imitations.
Capturing and communicating the song’s many emotional nuances in five minutes did not come easy. “We did ‘Breathing’ and I must have played the same guitar bit 200 times,” says Brian Bath. “They must have got through spools of tape. I don’t know [what she was looking for], just trying to get it better.” Each time they played it Max Middleton insisted on adding a persistent discordant note which set everyone’s teeth on edge – ‘You OK, Max?’ ‘Yeah, fine’ – until gradually the musicians began to notice that it actually worked. “The song had changed, there was this extra thing happening in it,” says Bath.
This is precisely what Bush wanted. She demanded that the band push beyond simply mastering the technical aspects of the song until they connected with its human resonance, to play with their hearts rather than their heads. “The session men had their lines … but at first there was no emotion, and that track was demanding so much emotion,” she said. “It wasn’t until they actually played with feeling that the whole thing took off. When we went and listened, I wanted to cry.”9 ‘Breathing’ underscores not only the intensity of the sessions at Abbey Road, but also Bush’s established hierarchy of priorities in the studio. Her relentless work ethic and stubborn pursuit of an ideal is all about finding the moment of transcendence, of getting as close as possible to the sound in her head and that precious moment of mystery, magic and emotional truth. She is a perfectionist only in terms of protecting the purity of her vision, rather than wanting to smooth all the rough edges of her music into something technically perfect. Kelly recalls how she “loved a happy accident. I think that’s a massive strength. She was completely open minded about what was happening.”
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