Shortly after the release of Never For Ever Bush bought a property on Court Road in Eltham, south London, a large, detached Victorian house set back from the road, hidden behind imposing entrance gates and surrounded by trees. Located just across the road from the rather opulent greenery of Royal Blackheath Golf Club, it was hardly a flashy locale: low-key, suburban, calm, sober and middle class, tucked out of the way and still within easy striking distance of East Wickham Farm. It became another Bush base camp, a hub for all three siblings. Paddy moved in next door, while Jay frequently used the property. It was 44 Wickham Road on a grander scale, offering security in numbers.
It also gave her music more room. She installed an eight-track demo studio in the house and throughout the rest of 1980 and into early 1981, between promotional appearances, she dedicated herself to writing, trying to orientate her new sound using a combination of piano, Yamaha CS-80 and electronic Linn drums. She had developed ideas for ‘The Dreaming’ and ‘Houdini’ during the latter stages of Never For Ever, but, significantly, this was to be the first of her albums where no pre-1978 songs would be included or indeed even considered. The record’s starting point (indeed, arguably the point) was rhythm and texture – the song itself was only the first footfall in a long, arduous climb. On Never For Ever she had again been troubled by the difficulty of adding a kick, a real rhythmic thrust to songs written on the piano – the stripped down rock band approach of a song like ‘Violin’ was too conventional, too solid, too grounded. For many of the new songs she reversed the compositional process, starting with the beat and then afterwards painting in the chords, melodies and words. “I felt as if my writing needed some kind of shock,” she said.2
She remained infatuated with the possibilities of the Fairlight, and was determined to use its varied sound palette on almost all the songs on the next album. At first she hired one from Syco Systems before finally investing heavily in buying her own instrument towards the end of making The Dreaming, recognising it as an indispensable addition to her arsenal. Although she was towards the head of the pack, Bush was far from alone in embracing new possibilities. It’s near impossible to overstate the manner in which technology was influencing music at this time. In the early Eighties a growing obsession with the sound rather than the song made for some arresting, strange and highly innovative pop music. Listen back to records made during that era by everyone from Public Image Ltd, Killing Joke and Buggles to Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Eurythmics and you will hear some sonically extreme, rhythmically interesting and downright odd pop records. Pared down duos such as Soft Cell and Yazoo became intrigued by the idea of juxtaposing the clinical sound of cutting edge technology with the exposed nerve ends of raw human emotion, of combining a machine-like chilliness with a warm, human presence. Bush had the same idea; she simply insisted on taking it to the furthest extremes.
Stevie Wonder apparently cleared her writer’s block. ‘Sat In Your Lap’ appeared almost without her trying, a fitting arrival for a song partly concerned with the slippery nature of knowledge and creativity. A flood of new material followed. She quickly came up with 20 songs for the album, writing in her home studio more or less spontaneously, coming up with a new song or a strong idea for a song almost every night. “I sat down at the piano, got a rhythm and just literally wrote the songs!” she recalled. “The words probably weren’t there, but the idea was there and all the tunes were there.”3 It was to prove the only part of the album process that happened quickly. Once she moved into the studio, all “the speed and spontaneity seemed to evaporate.”4
First, she had to decide upon the practicalities: Who? Where? How? She had concluded that she no longer wanted to work with her friend Jon Kelly, deciding with a typically firm resolve that it was time to sever all ties with the old order and finally strike out on her own. “She phoned me up and said how much she’d loved the album but she was going to try something different on this next one,” says Kelly. “I can’t remember what the words were but she said it beautifully. She went on to do The Dreaming and called me up to have a listen as soon as it was finished.”
From there, she toyed with hiring a big name producer. Tony Visconti had worked with David Bowie on most of his landmark records of the Seventies and also his most recent, 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps); according to Visconti’s admittedly rather vague recollection, he and Bush affected a somewhat strange but agreeable meeting to discuss working together. “During the making of Lodger [released in May, 1979] I was listening to Lionheart in my Montreux hotel room,” he recalls. “I was so moved by the album I wrote her a fan letter on hotel stationery, which she received and read. About a year or so later I received a phone call from her asking me to meet up with her to discuss working on her new album. Before we met I made a very specific astrological chart for her. I had been a dabbler for a decade by then. I gave it to her over lunch in a restaurant near her studio in the West End, and we spoke a lot about Bowie and Aikido, her family’s preferred martial art.
“After lunch we were driven to the studio and she played a track or two for me. Honestly, I can’t remember a note. She was bent over, leaning on the back of a chair in front of the console. I was sitting behind her on the couch, and all I can remember is the Bush bum swaying in my face. I’m sure I loved the music, too, and I told her I’d like to work with her. Afterwards we had two phone conversations. In the first she told me how accurate and amazing the astrological chart was – she used the word ‘amazing’ a lot. In the second phone call she said, ‘I’ve decided to produce the album myself. But, Tony, if there was a producer I’d work with it would be you!’ It was the sweetest rejection I’ve ever had.”
It is still possible to hear Bowie and Visconti’s influence on The Dreaming. The thrilling “I must admit …” section of ‘Sat In Your Lap’, in particular, is an astonishingly precise imitation of Lodger-period Bowie, a fine example of the style of singing he calls his ‘histrionics’. There are echoes, too, of the burbling Afro-beat of ‘African Night Flight’, while the song’s unconventional rhythm shares similarities with ‘Golden Brown’ by another of her favourite bands, The Stranglers, although this time Bush’s song came first.
It was to be another pioneering artist, however, who exerted a major influence on the record. The sleeve credits on Never For Ever were significant. Bush had thanked Roy Harper for ‘holding on to the poet in his music’ and Peter Gabriel for ‘opening the windows’. These artists, alongside Pink Floyd, who had just released The Wall, which she loved, had become her peers, exemplars of artistic excellence, intelligence, integrity and experimentation, though their detractors would just as quickly call them precious, pretentious, portentous and about as relevant as Copernicus. This was a line of criticism Bush, too, constantly courted.
Harper had been recording his Universal Soldier album in Abbey Road while she was making Never For Ever and he had come in to Studio Two to add backing vocals to ‘Breathing’; Bush happily returned the favour, singing a duet on his track ‘You (The Game Part II)’. It was the beginning of a lifelong and continuing friendship. Gabriel, meanwhile, was not only a personal friend, but his career path had provided Bush with the outline of a yellow brick road which she occasionally followed. The connection began at the Bill Duffield benefit and had been solidified through making the Kate Christmas special and subsequently popping into each other’s sessions. “He came in a few times when we were doing Never For Ever, listened to some stuff and was very quiet,” says Jon Kelly. “They were very similar. They were kindred spirits in the way they were experimental with their work and groundbreaking, not following the normal route.”
Some of those who worked closely with both artists at this time suggest that Bush was rather calculated in her befriending of Gabriel. “At the time she just wanted to be Peter Gabriel as far as I could work out – the female Peter Gabriel,” says producer Hugh Padgham, who engineered parts of The Dreaming. “That’s from me observing. When I worked with her on The Dreaming she w
as always trying to do things but she didn’t realise that it wasn’t as easy to be Peter Gabriel as she might have thought.”
“Kate, I think, had made a point of making Peter her friend,” adds Steve Lillywhite, Gabriel’s producer at the time. “I’m sure she was influenced a lot by Peter, and subsequently she went on and made art her career. That’s all you can ever hope for.”
Although Bush has several times displayed an uncanny knack of narrowing in on artists she admires and is far from reticent about approaching them to work with her, it’s unlikely to have been quite as calculated as it seems – after all, it was the tragedy of Duffield’s death that had initially brought them together. It’s certainly true, however, that in Gabriel she saw an artist whose sense of experimentation, use of new technology and ability to tackle non-traditional lyrical themes, all marshalled within a broad pop sensibility, matched her ambitions for her own music. “The only person I’ve met who is really into the same kind of approach to playing as I [have] is Peter,” she said. “He’s going for emotional content of the music and lyrics, and he changes his voice.”5
It was only a matter of time before they recorded with one another. During the Never For Ever sessions Bush was invited into the Townhouse studios to sing on Gabriel’s third album, often known as ‘melt’ due its distinctive cover image, adding atmospheric backing vocals to ‘I Don’t Remember’, ‘No Self Control’ and, most significantly, ‘Games Without Frontiers’, on which she was something of a last minute addition. “We had someone else sing the ‘Jeux Sans Frontieres’ line on ‘Games Without Frontiers’, and we realised that their accent wasn’t so great,” recalls Lillywhite, who refuses to name the singer who was replaced. “So Peter decided to ask Kate down. It was fantastic, [she was] this wonderful sort of hippie chick. She had that song, ‘Wow’, and I remember her saying “wow” all the time and I thought, ‘Well, that’s why she wrote that song, because that’s what she says!’ I just remember sitting around smoking joints with her and having a good time. It was easy, really, no more than half an hour in the studio.”
‘Games Without Frontiers’ became Gabriel’s biggest solo hit to date, released in February 1980 and rising to number four in March. Around the same time, EMI asked Bush and Kelly if they could hear some of the new Never For Ever material, and they travelled to the A&R department at Manchester Square – Bush was keen not to let the company suits into her domain – to play four songs, including ‘Babooshka’, ‘Breathing’ and ‘Army Dreamers’, all lined up as potential singles. “They were happy,” Kelly recalls. “And as they were making idle chat at the end, one of them said, ‘Have you heard that new Peter Gabriel song?’, and someone else said, ‘Yeah, that woman, I can’t understand what the hell she’s singing!’ Kate looked at me and we both struggled not to laugh. Poor bloke. Didn’t know it was her. I wonder how he felt when he found out.”
A little later they tried to write a song together called ‘Ibiza’, but it was not completed to their satisfaction. It’s difficult to imagine such a private, personal composer as Bush being a natural co-writer, but the process of befriending, observing and recording with Gabriel fed directly into her aspirations for her next album. She had been impressed by the Townhouse’s Solid State Logic (SSL) 4000 B console, a new development which integrated a studio computer system with an in-line audio console. “We had this SSL B desk, a prototype, with a lot of quirks to it,” says Nick Launay, an in-house engineer at the Townhouse. “It was very strange, it had compressors and gates on every channel, which had never been done before.”
More significantly, she had been blown away by the drums on Gabriel’s album. Although played by Jerry Marotta and Phil Collins, the sound was primarily the creation of Hugh Padgham, another house engineer at the Virgin-owned facility who is widely credited with creating the famous ‘gated’ drum effect at the Townhouse’s ‘stone room’ studio during his work with Steve Lillywhite. In simple terms, the drums are heavily compressed and then their natural reverb brutally cut-off using a ‘noise gate’ on the recording console, so that, in Padgham’s words, “when [the drummer] stopped playing it sucked the big sound of the room into nothing.”6 It can be heard to full effect on Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’.
This mixture of thunderous rhythm cannoning off the stone walls followed by an almost immediate, uneasy silence was the sound Bush craved. “Seeing Peter work in the Townhouse studio…. was the nearest thing I’d heard to real guts for a long, long time,” she said. “[It] was so exciting because the drums had so much power.”7 Tired of “a lazy acceptance of a drum kit”,8 she wanted something tribal, huge, with none of the conciliatory splash and sizzle of cymbal or hi-hat. This was to be the driving force behind her new music, onto which she could build structure and add detail.
Thus it was Padgham to whom Bush turned for the first sessions, and it was to the Townhouse that they decamped in May 1981. Most of the album’s backing tracks were recorded here over a period of three months using a small core of musicians, often just Preston Heyman or Stuart Elliott on drums and Del or Jimmy Bain, a former member of Rainbow turned session player, on bass. Bush played piano and Fairlight on almost every song. Brian Bath, Ian Bairnson and Alan Murphy played guitar, but most of what they added was never used; in the end, unusually, seven of the ten songs featured no guitar at all. The supreme – and supremely different – bass stylists Danny Thompson and Eberhard Weber later popped up on a track apiece. David Gilmour added backing vocals. Far more so than Never For Ever, it was to be an album defined by painterly overdubs, adding layers and layers of light and shade rather than relying on full-blown band performances.
It was not an auspicious start. Hugh Padgham is perhaps unique among humankind in that he doesn’t have terribly fond memories of working with Bush; the sessions lasted no more than three weeks before they parted company. “I couldn’t bear it after a bit, actually,” he says. “She didn’t really have any idea of the sonics, and didn’t understand why, if you put 150 layers of things all together, you couldn’t hear all of them. The whole thing with Gabriel is that everything had much more space around it. She would take 100 things and want them all to work together, and it didn’t. She didn’t really want to listen. As far as I was concerned, when we were doing those sessions it sounded shit. It pissed me off, actually.”
Bush, on the other hand, ever polite, recalled Padgham’s contributions as “positive” and “productive”.9 They worked together long enough to get a complete mix of ‘Sat In Your Lap’, which Bush hastily released as a stand-alone single on June 21, eager to preview her new sound. It was a song as complex lyrically as it was rhythmically, musing on the nature of enlightenment, cutting to the heart of her quest for spiritual advancement: is knowledge innate, instinctive and sexual (something literally “sat in your lap”), or can it only be gained through a lifetime of searching and striving (“The longest journey across the desert”), and even then possibly not at all? Heart or head; body or brain; nature or nurture; to look within or without? The single reached number 11, her last commercial success for some time, although its tribal statement was rather diluted by the impact of Adam & The Ants double-drum driven hits earlier the same year, ‘Stand And Deliver’ and ‘Prince Charming’, as well as the emergence of Bow Wow Wow and their highly stylised adoption of Burundi ritual music.
Padgham and Bush collaborated on two further songs, ‘Leave It Open’ and ‘Get Out Of My House’, but the engineer was busy and his enthusiasm for the project was, clearly, not engaged. Pencilled in to work on new albums by The Police, Phil Collins and Genesis, he was essentially engineering The Dreaming in his spare time and was happy to hand it over. “I had so much work going on at the time that I couldn’t really be bothered with it, it was just a pain in the arse,” he says. “I was doing it on my weekends off, and I think she wanted more attention, which was fair enough. I don’t remember every really having an argument with her – maybe a little one – but nothing major. The only other thing I can reme
mber is that she used to say a helluva lot of, ‘Skin up, Hugh!’ I certainly didn’t lose any sleep when I passed the thing on.”
He suggested to Bush that his friend Paul Hardiman take over, but he was otherwise engaged, so Padgham’s assistant engineer Nick Launay held the reins; the pair met and clicked both personally and creatively. Launay had just finished producing Public Image Ltd’s Flowers Of Romance album at the Townhouse, another album showcasing the famed studio drum sound to fearsome effect, and another album of unbounded sonic experimentation. Bush listened and liked. She had always admired the Sex Pistols (she has since established a long-running mutual appreciation society with John Lydon), and for Launay the connection was not as strange as it might first have appeared. “She’d go out and play stuff on the piano and she was so, so brilliant,” he says. “The way she played didn’t sound like rock’n’roll at all. It sounded like classical music, but it didn’t come over as prog rock, which I didn’t like. I came from the punk rock thing, and to me she was punk rock. She was doing stuff that was going against the grain.”
Launay was only 20, and she still just 22, and it “really was like the kids are in control – it was great!” he says. “There wasn’t a record producer, there was basically her, the musicians that she chose, and me. That was it. Making that record had no rules. We could try everything that came to mind, which worked well for me because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was hyper and imaginative, had all these ideas going round my head, and I think the combination was magical. We were both kind of in the same place: ‘I wonder what this does?’”
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