Such a BrightLight
Prolific, precocious, KATE BUSH’s journey from girl genius to multifaceted art-pop phenomenon involved unlikely stops on the shelf at a sceptical label and the outer reaches of London’s pub rock circuit. Meanwhile, between her early demos and Never For Ever, childhood enthusiasms morphed into adult insights over music bold and bewitching. Still, for Bush, turning her visions into records would never be straightforward: “It’s frustrating to see something that you have been keeping transient for years suddenly become solid.”
THE YOUNG CATHY BUSH PRESSED THE ‘PLAY’ AND ‘RECORD’ BUTTONS ON THE Akai reel-to-reel tape machine and her songs began to flow. Sat at the grand piano in her family home, East Wickham Farm in the suburb of Welling, south-east London, she began to capture the many, many compositions that she’d accumulated by the age of 14. “I was writing a song, maybe two songs a day,” the grown-up Kate Bush later told MOJO. “I must have had a couple of hundred. I would put stuff onto tape, but I was the tape machine. I used to practise, practise, practise in order to remember the stuff.” Having first begun songwriting at the age of nine, she’d developed fast. One of her earliest lyrics was themed around a typically childlike fascination with colours, but it went on and on for far too long. When she played it to her family, she noticed them growing bored. “They could only take so much before they had to leave the room,” she noted in the foreword to the 2023 paperback of her How To Be Invisible lyric anthology.
“An honest response can be a very useful thing, so I worked on trying to make the next songs a little shorter.”
From here, Bush’s early compositions were more carefully edited, while at the same time increasingly involving an entire universe of her own creation, filled with elaborate world building and vivid character creation. When these home-recorded tapes – much to her annoyance – were inevitably bootlegged in the ’80s and then leaked online in the
’90s, they offered a fascinating glimpse into the early flights of imagination of a unique talent.
Some of these works-in-progress, later abandoned, deserved to have been completed. Something Like A Song, demoed in 1973, matched a wordless “ooo-ooo-ooo, aaa-aaaooo” chorus to descending piano chords, punctuating verses in which it seemed a vision of the god Pan appeared to the young singer in her garden, piping a haunting melody that she attempted to voice. In another song, Atlantis, Bush imagined a drowned world (an early draft of the one that later appeared in A Coral Room on 2005’s replete with shoals of herring swimming through the sails of sunken ships, to the accompaniment of her ornate arpeggios.
Other pieces were sketchier. Cussi Cussi spoke of some secret knowledge shared with the titular individual. The vaguely religious Sunsi found her drawn to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. You Were The Star was a pretty paean to a fallen idol, with hints of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock. Queen Eddie detailed the emotional turbulence surrounding the breakup of a gay couple.
Having access to a reel-to-reel also allowed Bush to conduct her first playful experiments in sound: recording a vocal melody, then reversing the tape, phonetically learning it backwards before recording it again so that when played forwards it took on an eerie quality.
Cathy Bush was clearly a startling, precocious talent. But capturing her complex song worlds on record would prove an endless challenge, and it was years before she’d be remotely satisfied with the results.
ON MAY 26, 1972, BRIAN BATH, A 19-year-old guitarist friend of Bush’s elder, folk fan brother Paddy, drove to East Wickham Farm for the first time to have a jam with him. Surprising Bath on more than one level, Paddy’s 13-year-old sibling joined in.
“I went to Paddy’s, and he had his mandolin and my amp,” Bath recorded in his diary. “His little sister sang through a mike and amp and sounded really incredible.” Two weeks later, he was invited back. “Fit some guitar on Paddy’s sister’s song,” he wrote. “Really feel honoured to do it.”
“She had loads of songs,” Bath said in 2018. “I remember a few of her family were in the room and she was on a grand piano. She was really sweet and pleasant. She had this great voice, and her songs were really kind of interesting and beautiful. They were a bit special.”
Kate’s eldest brother, John, brought her homemade tapes to the attention of his friend, Ricky Hopper, a record plugger. Hopper was to become the singer’s earliest champion, touting these lo-fi recordings around labels and publishers, though to no avail.
Then, Hopper played a cassette to his old friend from Cambridge, David Gilmour.
“I listened to it with him,” Gilmour remembered, “and he said she was brilliant, and I said I agreed. I thought a bit more was needed to be brought out of it. She was a girl plonking away on a piano with a rather squeaky voice and I didn’t trust most of the A&R men that I’d come across to be able to spot what was in it.”
In 1973, the Pink Floyd guitarist travelled to the farm with his own recording equipment and taped upwards of 50 of Bush’s songs. Selecting a handful, in August, he organised a session at his home 8-track studio involving drummer Pete Perrier and bassist Pat Martin of Surrey country rock band Unicorn, with himself on guitar and Bush moving between acoustic and electric pianos. One track, Maybe, had been originally titled Davy and appeared to have been born of the now-15-year-old’s love of David Bowie. Another, Passing Through Air, bore the stylistic imprint of her other hero, Elton John (and was the only officially released cut from the session, later appearing on the Bside of the Army Dreamers single in 1980).
“They didn’t really achieve what was required,” Gilmour reckoned of the demos. Two years on, in the summer of 1975, massively upping the ante, he offered to fund a full-scale master session at George Martin’s AIR Studios, situated four storeys above Oxford Circus in central London.
Gilmour enlisted Andrew Powell, a producer and arranger whose recent credits included Leo Sayer and Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, to oversee the recording. Three tracks were laid down: The Saxophone Song, Maybe and, astonishingly, what would prove to be the master version of The Man With The Child In His Eyes, recorded live by the 16-year-old Kate with the accompaniment of a 30-piece orchestra.
When EMI’s Bob Mercer popped into Abbey Road the following month to visit Pink Floyd during the mixing of Wish You Were Here,
Gilmour pulled him into another room to play him the AIR recordings. Mercer immediately expressed interest in signing Bush and at this point Gilmour effectively stepped away, and was later reimbursed for his initial investment.
“Then it sort of sat for two years,” the guitarist noted. “This has generally come out as looking like they were nurturing her. There seems to be an element of revisionist thinking in the things I’ve read about it, because it seems to me that [EMI] then [considered] nearly every record producer who produced girls. Because for some reason they didn’t want to use Andrew Powell.”
Gilmour bumped into Mercer at a party and remembered the latter telling him, “‘C’mon, this one just isn’t working. You found the only good songs.’ Or words to that effect. I said, ‘Well, why don’t you go back to Andrew Powell?’ and he sort of ummed and ahhed. Eventually, they did go back to Andrew Powell and that’s when it all started rolling.”
“I went to Paddy’s, and he had his mandolin and my amp. His little sister sang and sounded really incredible.” BRIAN BATH’S DIARY
In the February 1977 issue of EMI’s in-house magazine Music Talk, A&R man Nick Mobbs was interviewed, revealing the company’s plan for their new artist – the eventual release of her debut single still nearly a year away. “Kate was signed in the knowledge that releases may not be immediate,” he said. “But we have a belief in her long-term potential and are anxious to give her a chance to blossom even more.”
It was a challenge for Kate Bush to blossom in the side room of a south London pub, but that became the next part of the plan. In urgent need of some live experience, on March 17, 1977, the 18-year-old first stepped on-stage at the Rose Of Lee pub in Lewisham, fronting the KT Bush Band, comprising Brian Bath on guitar, Del Palmer on bass and drummer Vic King.
For the most part, their set consisted of the era’s standard covers band fare: Honky Tonk Women, Come Together, Free’s The Stealer, along with Robert Palmer’s funky slant on Little Feat’s Sailin’ Shoes and Shirley & Company’s disco smash Shame, Shame, Shame. A recording, made in a Catford studio, later surfaced of the singer’s take on the Abbey
Road opener, sounding unmistakably Kate Bush and with not a trace of Lennon in her deliver y.
At the same time, some of her own songs crept into the set, with the rocking James And The Cold Gun designated as the set’s climax. Here Bush developed the stage routine she would later use in her 1979 Tour Of Life, involving her mockshooting the rest of the band and even audience members with a fake rifle.
“She was just brilliant,” Del Palmer recalled to Kate Bush fan magazine HomeGround. “She used to wear this big, long white robe with coloured ribbons on, or a long black dress with big flowers in her hair. She did the whole thing with the gun, and they just loved it.”
Bob Mercer caught the show one night at the Rose Of Lee and, impressed by the dynamic James And The Cold Gun, put Bush and the band in De Wolfe Studio in Soho in April ’77. None of the tracks were ever to be released from what was essentially a test recording, including a lost song titled Dear Dead Days concerning the notion of trying to slow the passage of time. Similarly, none of the musicians were destined to be involved in the sessions for The Kick Inside, commencing in July.
In the meantime, alongside their residency at the Rose Of Lee, the KT Bush Band played other pub and club shows in King’s Cross, Tottenham, Putney and Chelsea, before venturing further afield for one-nighters in Essex and Sussex. Graham Hewison was a bassist for a rival south London pub rock band, Stage Fright, who caught the KT Bush Band at the Lewisham pub.
“We were doing the same circuit and we were just checking out other bands,” he remembers. “One of our band said, ‘Well, there’s the KT Bush Band.’ We thought, Never heard of them, but we’ll go and have a look.
“It wasn’t a rock band… it was obviously way more theatrical. I guess there were probably 150 people there. She had this kind of chiffon-y dress on, and she was floating around and through the audience.
“We all looked at each other, like, What the hell is all this? No one had ever seen anything like it before.”
“We all looked at each other, like, What the hell is all this? No one had ever seen anything like it before.” GRAHAM HEWISON ON THE KT BUSH BAND