1978-"The Kick Inside"

Kate Bush: The enduring fascination of this woman’s work over four decades

Forty years ago this month, Abba's Take a Chance on Me, was knocked off the Number 1 spot by a teenager's self-penned tribute to an Emily Bronte novel. Graeme Ross chooses this and nine other classics in his playlist of favourite Kate Bush songs

It's one of those jarring, stop-you-in-your-track moments when you suddenly realise that a memory or an event of some kind that is still fresh in your mind actually happened rather a long time ago. And that was certainly the case for me when the penny dropped recently that it is now exactly 40 years since Kate Bush exploded onto the music scene and the nation's consciousness with her unforgettable debut single, Wuthering Heights.

Seemingly from nowhere, a rather eccentric 19-year-old girl with a squealing, high-pitched voice entranced the nation and transcended the prevailing musical trends of punk and disco with a song based on a classic novel from the 1840s that most who bought the record would never have read (indeed Bush herself only read the novel after she had written the song).

Wuthering Heights spent four weeks in March and April of 1978 at number 1, launching Bush's celebrated career as one of the most imaginative musical auteurs of the rock era, a career that has produced some challenging, eccentric, but brilliant music with Bush effortlessly balancing the fine high-wire act between art and pretension.

A child prodigy born into a musical family, Bush was discovered and mentored by Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour and signed to EMI aged 16 with a large cache of songs already written. It was evident from the beginning that this was a unique talent, and EMI nurtured Bush, allowing her to develop until her first album The Kick Inside - containing many of her stockpile of songs, Wuthering Heights included - was released in January 1978.

With every subsequent release it became clear that Bush liked to do things on her own terms and brooked no boundaries for her songs. By her fourth album she was self-producing and was in complete command of her own career.

She had studied mime and dance and this led to a series of lavish, pioneering music videos that luminously illustrating her songs. In the decades since Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush has beguiled, perplexed and fascinated so many of us with her unique, visionary art. She has hardly been prolific, just 10 studio albums over those four decades, but this woman's work is enduring, important and hugely influential, with every increasingly rare release greatly anticipated.

Famously, Bush had only toured once at the very outset of her career until the 2014 Before the Dawn tour, universally lauded as a triumph and, along with her most recent studio album, 2011's 50 Words For Snow, only her second of new material since 1992, demonstrated that this most innovative of artists had lost none of her unique lyrical, musical and conceptual powers.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Wuthering Heights and Kate's imminent 60th birthday (another stop-you-in-your-tracks realisation), here is my list of Kate Bush's 10 greatest songs.

10. Misty (From 50 Words for Snow, 2011)

A young girl builds a snowman which comes alive and visits her at night. It's a familiar story, but Raymond Briggs was never like this. Over a stately 13-and-a-bit minutes, Bush weaves a spare, piano-led, erotic tapestry that, as in Briggs' fantasy, can only end one way. More than 30 years after she first rose to fame with Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush proved with 50 Words for Snow, her last studio album to date, that she was still a singular talent. In other hands, Misty would have been an absurd premise, but, with a dream rhythm section in ace session drummer Steve Gadd and double bass legend Danny Thompson, lush but never intrusive orchestration and Bush's deep, husky vocals, Misty is a fantastical experience, as challenging and ambitious as any of her finest works.

9. Breathing (Never for Ever, 1980)

Kate adopts the persona of a foetus fearful of being born in the midst of a nuclear holocaust. With the Cold War intensifying, this was a pertinent, typically ambitious, risk-taking song and a highly unlikely hit single from Bush as she conjured yet another startlingly unique performance.

8. This Woman's Work (The Sensual World, 1989)

"This woman's world/Ooh, it's hard on the man/Now his part is over/Now starts the craft of the father", Bush sings tenderly at the outset of an incredibly moving performance. More evidence of that wonderful Bush empathy and humanity on a song written specifically for the soundtrack of the 1988 movie She's Having a Baby. This time it's the expectant father, whose wife's and unborn baby's lives are in danger, who is the object of Bush's compassion. Bush recut the song for 2011's Director's Cut album with her 13-year-old son Bertie's angelic chorister-like vocals a particular highlight.

7. Army Dreamers (Never for Ever, 1980)

Behind the childlike vocals and the mandolin-led waltz melody lies a powerful anti-war message as Bush laments the waste of young, unfulfilled lives ("He never even made it to his twenties") in the form of a mother mourning her dead soldier son. Time hasn't diminished its impact and resonance and Army Dreamers remains a song for all ages and all wars.

6. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) (Hounds of Love, 1985)

Beginning with 1982's The Dreaming, Bush began to self-produce and had also constructed her own recording studio at her country home. She had also mastered the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, one of the first sampling machines, and all this resulted in complete artistic freedom and a blossoming of her unique talents. The result was the Hounds of Love album, the peak of her creative and commercial success. Four hit singles, all making good use of the Fairlight and backed by stunning videos, emerged from the album, the first of which was Running Up That Hill, her biggest hit since Wuthering Heights. Complex, adventurous and more mature vocally with a memorable drum track, Running Up That Hill relates to the song's two lovers swapping genders to experience the other's emotions and understand one another better - the deal with God of the subtitle.

5. The Man with the Child in His Eyes (The Kick Inside, 1978)

The maturity and grace of the follow-up to Wuthering Heights erased any lingering suspicions that Kate Bush was a one-novelty-hit wonder. Composed when Bush was just 13, The Man with the Child in His Eyes is an achingly romantic, hugely affecting ballad, its simplicity in direct contrast to the pomp and circumstance of her debut single. Contrary to speculation, it probably wasn't about one man in particular, more likely being an early example of Bush's intrinsic perception and observation. Bush herself has claimed that the song was about how men in general seemed to her to hold on to the little boy inside them.

4. Cloudbusting (Hounds of Love, 1985)

Stunning in conception and realisation, Cloudbusting, based on the loving relationship between unconventional psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich - who was imprisoned in the USA in the 1950s after conducting rain-making experiments with a "cloudbusting" machine - and his young son, really is an amazing, magical record. Bush masterfully conveys the boy's innocence and wonder, not just on the record but in the groundbreaking video that accompanied the hit single in which she played the son.

3. Hounds of Love (Hounds of Love, 1985)

The title track from Bush's magnum opus draws on the classic 1957 Jacques Tourneur horror film Night of the Demon for its "It's in the trees ... it's coming!" sample at the beginning of the song and is full of vivid imagery with love taking the form of hounds. Beware the hounds of love, says Bush, they will rip you to shreds, but courage, courage. With a stentorian drum track imitating the pulsing of the heart, Hounds of Love is about fearing to commit when love comes calling and the inevitability that when it does, you are powerless to resist.

2. Moments of Pleasure (The Red Shoes, 1993)

Beautifully revisited on 2011's Director's Cut, this is one of Bush's most personal and moving songs on which she remembers friends and family who have passed on and in doing so, she allows the listener rare access to her own past and inner circle. Life is sometimes a hard gig, Bush says, and it is remembering fleeting moments from the past - like lying on a beach with a loved one, or a quirky little saying of her mother's - that smooth the ride. But it never seems intrusive and the listener is encouraged to make their own moments of pleasure for their loved ones to remember in this life-affirming masterpiece.

1. Wuthering Heights (The Kick Inside, 1978)

In a year when Scotland's World Cup song, Ally's Tartan Army, The Smurfs and the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band challenged the domination of punk, disco and the Grease movie soundtrack, Wuthering Heights was dismissed in some quarters as a novelty hit. How ridiculous that assessment looks now. But there is no doubt Kate Bush's haunting epic was unlike anything ever heard before. Famously, Bush had never read Emily Bronte's novel before composing the song, based on a brief glimpse of a BBC adaptation when she was a child, but the portents were there. She had been christened Catherine and the book's heroine was called Catherine Earnshaw; even more bizarrely, Kate shared a birthday with Bronte. Hugely theatrical, Wuthering Heights almost never made it as the lead-off single from her debut album as Bush, displaying what would become her trademark single-mindedness, had to fight EMI for its release. When she performed it on Top of the Pops, Bush later described her performance as "watching herself die", but the instant impact of Wuthering Heights, with its highly original subject matter and distinctive musical treatment along with the otherworldly quality of Bush's remarkable four-octave voice, set Kate Bush apart as a uniquely individual artist who has continued to follow a fearless and uncharted path.

"People thought that song was feminist which disappointed me. It was actually saying we should go a bit easier on men because we are the ones with survival inside us, we carry the next generation, we have the will to keep going, we keep bouncing back.

"I don't know it that's anti-liberationist but I wouldn't say femininity was very strong in my songs. I've always felt there was something lacking in my feminine ... role, do I mean? Being brought up with two brothers I'd sit philosophising with them while my girlfriends wanted to talk about clothes and food. Maybe it's the male energy to be the hunter and I feel I have that in me."

'Room For The Life' portrays woman in exactly that way: 'Plaiting her hair by the fire, women/ With no lover to free her desire/ how long do you think she can stick it out/ How long do you think before she goes out, women/ Hey get up on your feet and go get it now'.

"When I'm writing . . . I've tried to explain this and people think I'm weird . . . I've been playing something for a couple of hours and I'm almost in a trance. At two or three in the morning you can actually see bits of inspiration floating about and grab them (she mimed it, like snatching at a fly). Someone comes in and says 'Hello' and I hit the calling I'm so shocked. I think in that state I'm almost split from my body and I'm not conscious of being female. Playing the piano, it's leading you too, it's the heart speaking and it's not male or female, it could be an animal, a glass, a piece of stone."

Out on the wiley, windy moors, Kate Bush sings new praises to Emily Brontë

Poems set in stone mark Brontë legacy in West Riding, between the sisters’ birthplace and the parsonage where they grew up

The Kate Bush song Wuthering Heights is a testament to the singer’s feeling for Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel – and its passionate lyrics have already stood the test of time.

But now the much-loved musician has written fresh lines in a poetic tribute to Brontë that will have to endure the wind and rain that lash down on the very section of the Yorkshire moors that the great Victorian author once wandered.

A new poem by Bush has been carved into one of four stones placed across the West Riding, spaced out between the sisters’ birthplace in Thornton and the parsonage in Haworth, where the three writers lived and worked with their brother Branwell and their father, the Rev Patrick Brontë.
Advertisement

Once again, Bush’s words play with the lonely memory of the novel’s lost soul, the wilful Cathy Earnshaw, and with the image of a single window. But this time the tone is more measured and it is the ghostly spirit of Emily Brontë who is also roaming lost on the moor.

Her famous book in hand, the young author is pictured standing, at the poem’s opening:

“Her name is Cathy”, she says

“I have carried her so far, so far

Along the unmarked road

from our graves...

Bush, 58, was commissioned alongside the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the Scottish national poet or makar, Jackie Kay, and the novelist Jeanette Winterson as part of the Bradford literature festival, which closes this weekend.

Duffy has written lines in praise of Charlotte, the eldest surviving Brontë daughter and author of Jane Eyre. Kay has written about Anne, the youngest daughter, who wrote the less well-known novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Bush was given the chance to write again about her literary heroine Emily, who was born 200 years ago this month. Winterson’s poem marks the Brontë legacy as a whole.

This weekend, Bush said she was delighted to be involved: “To be asked to write a piece for Emily’s stone is an honour and, in a way, a chance to say thank you to her,” she said. “Each sister being remembered by a stone in the enigmatic landscape where they lived and worked is a striking idea. Emily only wrote the one novel – an extraordinary work of art that has truly left its mark.”

The permanent installation of the stone bearing Bush’s new text also marks the 40th anniversary year of the release of her No 1 single, Wuthering Heights, when Bush was only 19. With the famous haunting refrain “It’s me, Cathy, come home”, her lyrics then were an early indicator of Bush’s distinctive use of narrative language in a pop song.

Bush’s stone and its new poem are available to see, set into the landscape from Sunday. Duffy and Winterson’s stones have now also been set into position, but the unveiling of the fourth stone – the one representing Anne – has been postponed until later in the year because of what is described as “the complexity of the installation at the Brontë Parsonage Museum”.

It will eventually stand in the grounds of the parsonage where the writer spent almost all of her life. “The Brontës are part of the literary landscape of this country,” Kay said. “The stones are exciting in that they will make the past new again, opening up along the way new paths for different readers to follow. I particularly loved writing about Anne – she’s the most underrated writer in the family, the pioneer about whom people know the least.”

Visitors who set out in search of the Brontë stones can use hand-drawn maps, created by Yorkshire cartographer Christopher Goddard. The man behind the project is Michael Stewart, who first had the idea for the stones five years ago. “I live in Thornton and have long wanted my village to receive recognition for its place in the Brontë story,” he said this weekend.

“All three sisters and their wayward brother were born here. They were a happy family, but very shortly after their move to Haworth in 1820 tragedy struck. First the death of their mother, then the two oldest siblings. I was aware that Anne Brontë was buried in Scarborough many miles from the rest of her family and I wanted a stone to mark her return.”

"Somehow the story one person tells has to become a story many people can claim as their own"Jeanette Winterson

The sisters originally wrote under the men’s names of Curra, Ellis and Acton Bell, but their true identities were fairly soon uncovered in literary circles. Winterson, who grew up in Lancashire during the 1970s, said she also walked her surrounding hills “feeling both passionate and misunderstood”. Reading the sisters’ books had shown her that “hearts beat like mine, that the struggle to know who you are happens across time and generations, and gender, and that writing needs the power of the personal behind it – but that somehow the story one person tells has to become a story many people can claim as their own. And the Brontës are women. As a woman I needed those ancestors, those guides. I still do.”
Advertisement

Syima Aslam, director of the Bradford festival, said the Brontës are an integral part of the literary landscape of Bradford: “It’s a matter of great pride for us that the stones will stand in some of the most beautiful places in the county, bearing these moving, mysterious and playful literary works that the public can enjoy for years to come.”

The festival and the stones project have been supported by Provident Financial Group PLC, alongside Bradford Council and the Arts Council of England

The Brontë stones poems

Emily, by Kate Bush
She stands outside
A book in her hands
“Her name is Cathy”, she says
“I have carried her so far, so far
Along the unmarked road from our graves
I cannot reach this window
Open it, I pray.”
But his window is a door to a lonely world
That longs to play.
Ah Emily. Come in, come in and stay.

Anne, by Jackie Kay

These plain dark sober clothes
Are my disguise. No, I was not preparing
For an early death, yours or mine.
You got me all wrong, all the time.
But sisters, I will have the last word,
Write the last line. I am still at sea.
But if I can do some good in this world
I will right the wrong. I am still young.
And the moor’s winds lift my light-dark hair.
I am still here when the sun goes up,
Still here when the moon drops down.
I do not now stand alone.

Charlotte, by Carol Ann Duffy

Walking the parlour, round round round the table,
miles; dead sisters stragglers till ghosts; retired wretch,
runty, pale, plain C.Brontë; mouth skewed, tooth-rot.
You see you have prayed to stone; unheard, thwarted.
But would yank your heart through your frock,
fling it as a hawk over the moors, flaysome.
So the tiny handwriting of your mind as you pace.
So not female not male like the wind’s voice.
The vice of this place clamps you; daughter; father
who will not see thee wed, traipsing your cold circles
between needlework, bed, sleep’s double-lock.
Mother and siblings, vile knot under the flagstones, biding.
But the prose seethes, will not let you be, be thus;
bog-burst of pain, fame, love, unluck. True; enough.
So your still doll-steps in the dollshouse parsonage.
So your writer’s hand the hand of a god rending the roof.

The Brontës, by Jeanette Winterson

Brontesaurus
Fossil record of a miracle
Bone by Bone
Word for Word
Three Women writing the Past into the Future
Line by Line
Listen to the Wildfell of your heart
Do not betray what you love
The earth opens like a book
You are come back to me then?
Brontissimo

"Elle se tient dehors
Un livre dans ses mains
«Son nom est Cathy», dit-elle
«Je l'ai portée jusqu'à présent, si loin
De la route désolée qui part de de nos tombes
Je ne peux atteindre cette fenêtre
Ouvrez-la, je vous en prie."
Mais sa fenêtre est l'entrée d'un monde de solitude
qui n'aspire qu'àu jeu.
Ah Emily. Entrez, entrez et restez. "

Les Hauts de Hurlevent

Dans la lande sournoise et venteuse
Nous roulions et tombions dans la verdure
Tu avais un tempérament, à l'image de ma jalousie
Trop vif, trop avide
Comment as-tu pu m'abandonner
Quand j'avais besoin de te posséder
Je t'ai haï. Je t'aimais, aussi

De mauvais rêves dans la nuit,
Ils m'annonçaient que je devrai capituler
Et renoncer à mes Hauts de Hurlevent,
Hurlevent, Hurlevent

Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy
Je rentre à la maison. J'ai si froid
Laisse moi entrer par la fenêtre

Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy
Je rentre à la maison. et j'ai si froid
Laisse moi entrer par la fenêtre

Oh que tout n'est qu'obscurité, tout n'est que solitude
Dans l'Au-Delà, loin de toi
Je me languis, je trouve
Que tout espoir s'effrondre sans toi
Je reviens, mon amour
Cruel Heathcliff, mon unique rêve
Mon seul maître

Trop longtemps j'ai erré dans la nuit
Je reviens à ses cotés, pour en finir
Je rentre à mes Hauts de Hurlevent,
Hurlevent, Hurlevent

Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy
Je rentre à la maison et j'ai si froid
Laisse moi entrer par la fenêtre

Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy
Je rentre à la maison et j'ai si froid
Laisse moi entrer par la fenêtre

Oh laisse moi l'attraper
Laisse-moi arracher ton âme
Oh laisse moi l'attraper
Laisse-moi arracher ton âme
Tu sais, c'est moi, Cathy

Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy
Je rentre à la maison et j'ai si froid
Laisse moi entrer par la fenêtre

Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy
Je rentre à la maison et j'ai si froid
Laisse moi rentrer par la fenêtre

Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy
Je rentre à la maison et j'ai si froid.

, Kate Bush, femme d’un milieu musical gangrené par les hommes, a lutté sans relâche pour se faire entendre.

LA Public Library: Mining Gold From The Music Stream: Kate Bush - The Kick Inside

The songs are complex and cerebral, but not cold and soulless like some of the progressive rock of her contemporaries.

Aaron M. Olson

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Though she's recognized as one of the biggest solo artists ever in the UK, Kate Bush somehow didn't break through in the US in quite the same way and remains somewhat of an oddity in the American pop echelon. That's not to say that she's unheard of or unpopular at all Stateside; rather, the American view of Bush is one of a witchy weirdo outsider who occasionally scratches at the pop charts, while in her native England she's revered and celebrated as a visionary, trailblazing pop icon. Even just considering chart performances there is quite a disparity from one continent to the other, her early single "The Man With The Child In His Eyes," from her debut album, The Kick Inside, charting at numbers 8 in the UK and 85 in the U.S. How is it that the same sounds—the unique chord progressions and leaping melodies, the inventive arrangements and subject matters, the wiley, high-pitched voice—can be received as genius and instant gospel in one place while being accepted but quickly filed away as quirky or niche in another? A passage from composer-theorist John Cage's landmark book, Silence, comes to mind.

"Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."

Perhaps on this side of the Atlantic we have not truly listened to Kate Bush—we've nodded our heads along saying, "Yes we hear you, Kate, and that's interesting and all..." but we haven't actually listened, we haven't taken the artist seriously. Bush's music comes from and exudes a powerful femininity—a femininity that has always been defined by Bush herself, and not by the men and money around her. She sings in a distinct, high voice, which naysayers like to call "shrill." Is her voice any more shrill than Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant's, one of the most celebrated rock singers of all time? She sings about love and life from a woman's perspective, the menstrual cycle and phases of the moon (see "Strange Phenomenon"), and all things witchy and magical, which naysayers also like to count against her somehow. Again, Led Zeppelin sings about explicit male sexuality and Hobbits and it comes off as tough, powerful, rock n' roll, and is unquestionably popular around the world. Perhaps it's that we're not as accustomed to that kind of female power here, having had fewer women in as high-up positions of political power as the UK for example, and maybe in turn we fear it? Or maybe her promotional efforts weren't as good here, which would raise many questions as to why that might be? Regardless of which road led us here, Kate Bush has ended up at the eccentric outsider's table at the illustrious pop music party in America, heard by the many but taken seriously and actually listened to by far fewer. Those that do listen, though, are devoted fans to the core, and we'll gladly talk your ear off about our Kate—About how she started writing songs at the age of 11, started producing her own albums in her early 20's, incorporated all kinds of alternative and exploratory dance and movement into her live shows and music videos, was the first musician to use a wireless headset microphone on stage, wrote a song about π in which she melodically sang the number to its 78th decimal place, was the first woman to have a number 1 hit in the UK with a self-penned song, and just simply made awesome music.

The Kick Inside, Kate Bush's 1978 debut album, was made up entirely of original songs written by Bush between the ages of 13 and 19, her age at the time of its release. An impressive feat for anyone so young, this album has proven to transcend the novelty of its creator's youth and stands the test of time as a trailblazing, genre-defying piece of audible art. The songs are complex and cerebral, but not cold and soulless like some of the progressive rock of her contemporaries. The arrangements allude to something rock n' roll, but the songs rarely fall prey to the trappings and limitations of the genre—chords and melodies journeying off in unexpected directions with lyrics touching on all things explicitly not rock n' roll from modern dance to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. She does sing about sex, but popular culture has decided that sex from a woman's perspective is not very rock n' roll, not like Led Zeppelin's sex is (Nothing against Led Zeppelin, here! They're just a clearly masculine brand of rock n' roll, easy for comparison purposes). As a young woman in a fiercely male industry, Kate Bush set out firmly on her own path with The Kick Inside and has followed it ever since, creating an incredible body of work along the way. Kate Bush's music makes no apologies for being strong, defiant, individual, and feminine, as it shouldn't, and maybe it's time we start asking ourselves why we choose to file it as "other." We can start by listening. We might find it fascinating.

Pierre a écrit:notamment sa super choré pour "Them Heavy People"...

Renaud a écrit:Allez, il n'y a aucun mal à se faire du bien !!!

Le processus d'inversion de phase annule tout ce qui a été mixé en mono dans le mixage stéréo, de sorte que vous n'entendez que ce qui a été mixé spécifiquement à gauche ou à droite (plus l'écho). Cela apporte souvent une expérience d'écoute totalement nouvelle . Ce que vous entendez est le morceau classique original sans overdubs

On 12 May 1978, the Dutch broadcaster TROS broadcast a 20 minute Kate Bush television special, recorded at the Dutch amusement park Efteling. On 10 May 1978, Efteling was ready to open the Haunted Castle, the most expensive attraction it had ever constructed, and they wanted to promote it as much as they could. Ton van der Ven, who designed the castle, appeared in a popular talk show and in April a documentary featuring the Haunted Castle was made by filmmaker Rien van Wijk, who was eager to shoot in the latest attraction before it officially opened. Kate, who just had a big hit with Wuthering Heights, was approached for a television special that would promote both Efteling and her songs. The special was filmed in April, a month before the official opening of the castle.

The Efteling TV Special songs:
• "Moving" was filmed in the square in front of the Haunted Castle
• "Wuthering heights"; Kate can be seen inside the Haunted Castle. Among other things, a smoke machine was used.
• "Them heavy people" was filmed at 3 locations; in the attic of the castle, at the entrance with the oriental spirit and outside in front of the entrance of the well that is part of the attraction 'The Indian water lilies'.
• "The man with the child in his eyes" was filmed by the lake with gondolettes and swans
• Strange Phenomena, has the double shot with the mirror image and was filmed in the castle's catacombs.
• "The Kick Inside". Kate has gray hair in this shot and is lying in a boat surrounded by flowers on the lake and sailing away. This scene conjures up images of Elaine and The Lady of Shalott, classic poetic figures from the Arthurian legend.