FLASH BACK
Kate Bush’s early portraits, by the snappers who took them. “Give her a space and she’d burn it up,” they tell
IN 1978 Gered Mankowitz went to a meeting at EMI and they played him a song by a new young female artist. “That was Wuthering Heights,” he remembers. “I was knocked sideways by the sound of it.” EMI wanted a publicity portrait, so Mankowitz, whose vibrant use of colour and composition spawned iconic ’60s shots of the Stones and Jimi Hendrix, advised: “We need to make a picture that people will want to see again, the same way you want to hear the music again and again.”
The 19-year-old Bush was energetic and enthusiastic, photographed in his studio wearing a pink leotard that “reflected the dance and movement so important to her expression” – an image EMI had plastered on buses and billboards.
“Kate had strong, collaborative ideas and presented a sensual image,” says Mankowitz, who went on to shoot definitive photographs of the singer – folded in a box for the US edition of A Kick Inside; dressed in theatrical animal costume for
Lionheart, haloed in red on the single sleeve for Hammer Horror. “The photo sessions were always exciting and energetic. Give her a space and she’d burn it up, make it her own."
Bush was happy to do informal pictures as well. In May 1978, Barry Plummer went to East Wickham to take snaps for Melody Maker. “The brief was, ‘Just go and get some pics,’” he recalls. There were soft, ethereal shots of her sitting on a doorstep and at the grand piano, but most bizarre was a shot of the singer posing with a rifle on a bearskin rug. “For some reason she picked that up from the mantelpiece,” says Plummer. “I learned later that she’s against guns, but she used it spontaneously like a prop.”
As a young Record Mirror photographer, Andy Phillips remembers going to the EMI office in 1980 and Bush’s PR giving him the keys to a garden in Manchester Square. “I went with Kate; no hair, no make-up, no stylist, just the two of us. That would never happen with artists now – you’d have six lawyer meetings and an approval form.”
Wearing a zippered Vivienne Westwood top and leather boots, Bush propped herself against a tree and said with a grin, “They expect me to be wacky Kate.”
As the ’80s progressed Bush demanded more control over her image and made herself much less available. “I felt very flattered that people should think of me [as a] sex symbol,” she told Melody Maker. “But what I really want to come across as is as a musician, and I think that sort of thing can distract.”
Those early snappers realise now how lucky they were. Brian Aris, for instance, whose striking 1978 image graces MOJO’s cover this month. “I got her to pose as a dancer,” he says, “with that combination of boldness and power. She was very experimental.”
For Gered Mankowitz, Bush’s emergence coincided with a peak time for pop visuals. “It was fantastic, a new avenue for expression,” he says. “And Kate was at the centre of that.”
“There was no hair, no make-up, no stylist, just the two of us. That would never happen with artists now.” ANDY PHILLIPS
IN THE SUMMER OF 1977, KEYBOARD player Duncan Mackay was sitting in the control room at AIR London alongside his Cockney Rebel drummer bandmate Stuart Elliott, plus bassist/guitarist David Paton and guitarist Ian Bairnson of the Scottish pop-rock band Pilot. Moonlighting from their regular groups, the four were booked as a session team to play on the debut album by an unknown singer named Kate Bush.
“Andrew Powell hadn’t turned up yet, so we were just having a chinwag,” Mackay remembers today. “This little girl comes into the studio and says, ‘Hello, would anybody like a cup of tea?’ And we went, ‘Yes, please,’ and carried on chatting away to each other. We thought she was the studio tea girl.
“Three or four minutes later, Andrew Powell turned up and led her in and said, ‘So, hi guys, have you met Kate?’ (laughs)
“She was a most delightfully down-to-earth, ordinary person, no airs and graces. Then she sat down at the piano and opened her mouth, and you went, Holy shit…”
“She was 19, I was only 24,” Stuart Elliott recalled to MOJO in 2018. “She was this little hippy chick. We thought nothing of it, y’know, another session. Then as soon as she sat at the piano and started playing songs like Wuthering Heights, our jaws dropped. We just thought, Flipping hell, this is unbelievable.”
The team quickly developed a modus operandi: they’d listen closely to Bush play through a composition, working out the chords and absorbing the lyrics, and then immediately try to evoke the song’s atmosphere in their parts. From the off, they were cutting three tracks a day.
“It was really led by Kate because it was a complete picture,” Elliott said.
“I just sat down at the drums, and I largely played to her vocal.” In particular, the drummer imaginatively accompanied Bush as she slipped through the changing time signatures in the chorus of Wuthering Heights that lent the song its entrancing effect, like mist on the West Yorkshire moors. “Everything I did was in response to her top line melody,” he stressed, “and in the gaps she would leave, I’d jump in with a little fill.”
Mackay was for the most part employed to play supportive electric piano and Hammond organ, while on Strange Phenomena he added fast-moving synth sequences to enhance Bush’s twinkling piano and narrative involving curious coincidences and moon-phased menstruation. As one piano player viewing the skills of another, Mackay was wholly impressed.
“Kate just played 100 per cent the correct stuff for what she was singing,” he says. “I probably would have played something slightly different, and it wouldn’t have been as good.”
Meanwhile, Bush was soaking up every last detail of the recording process. “You couldn’t keep Kate away from the sessions even if you had wild dogs and bazookas,” engineer Jon Kelly later recalled to Sound On Sound writer Richard Buskin. “She was just drinking it all up, learning everything that went on. The first moment she walked into the control room, I could tell that’s where she wanted to be, in control of her own records. She was so astute and intelligent.”
Stylistically, it was clear that Kate Bush was not to be easily poured into the piano-based, female singer-songwriter mould of a Carole King or Lynsey de Paul. In an interview with Melody Maker’s Harry Doherty shortly after the release of The Kick Inside, she stressed that “all the songwriters I admire and listen to are male. I feel closer to male writers.”
At the same time she expressed a certain amount of creative frustration when it came to
“By the end of the second record, I was thinking, I don’t want to be produced by somebody who sees it differently from me.” KATE BUSH
the indelible aspect of the record-making process.
“There’s your expression going down there, and there’s no way you can change it,” she gently fretted. “It’s there forever. It’s very frustrating to see something that you have been keeping transient for years just suddenly become solid. It’s a little disconcerting… but exciting.”
QUIETLY DETERMINED TO EXERT MORE INFLUENCE over the recording of what would become her second album released in 1978, Lionheart, Kate Bush invited Brian Bath over to the flat where she was now living in Brockley, to work together on arrangements and guitar parts.
“I’d sit with her at the piano, and we’d go through songs. I’d write up some rough kind of bar charts and we’d tr y to knock them into order. Like, ‘Where’s the intro, Kate? Are you really going to use that chord?’ And we’d suss out what the chords were and just work out where we were with the guitar.”
One of Bush’s newest creations, Coffee Homeground, rendered in a Brecht-Weill style, centred on a character visiting someone they are convinced is secretly trying to poison them by slipping arsenic or belladonna into their drinks.
“It had really heavy guitars on it, and that idea wasn’t used in the end,” Bath recalled. “The lyric was so interesting: ‘Where are the plumbers/Who went missing here on Monday?’ Her subject matter was just outrageous.” The singer herself described the song as being about the “humorous aspect of paranoia”.
Bush convinced EMI and Andrew Powell to use the latest lineup of the KT Bush Band – Brian Bath and Del Palmer, along with new drummer Charlie Morgan – for the Lionheart album sessions at Super Bear Studios, tucked away in the mountains northeast of Nice. But only two satisfactory backing tracks, for Wow and Kashka From Baghdad, were cut before the label and the producer forced a rethink.
“We started doing our versions of the songs and they gave us a good go for a couple of days,” Bath said. “It was really hot outside but freezing in the studio. You’d open the door up, the hot air would come in, and all the instruments kept going out of tune. Things started not working out and there were a few meetings about what was going to happen and what was not going to happen.”
The Kick Inside team of Elliott, Paton,
Bairnson and Mackay were quickly sent to
France to complete the Lionheart sessions. “She went out with her band,” says Mackay, “and probably Andrew said, ‘I want my chaps because I know how to talk to them to get them to play better.’ I’m not saying [the others] played rubbish, but obviously that plan didn’t work. And then we flew out and entered the album.”
Mackay instantly proved his value by adding spooky synth arpeggios to Wow. In the overdubbing process, he felt Powell was relaying Bush’s ideas. “I’d be speaking more with Andrew and assume, rightly or wrongly, that he was coming across with instructions from Kate. Everybody was in the room to make the best piece of music.”
Thematically, the songs on Lionheart moved from Wow’s study of the artifice and loneliness of performance to the adult corruption of childhood wonder of In Search Of Peter Pan. The quasi-title track Oh England My Lionheart, meanwhile, took a rose-tinted look at the nation and its past and, as Bush put it, “how beautiful it is amongst all the rubbish.”
Elsewhere, in Symphony In Blue (“The colour of my room and my mood”) and the self-admittedly “probably quite autobiographical” Fullhouse there were glimpses of the mental pressures Bush was suffering: “paranoia, anger, that sort of thing,” she confessed to writer Colin Ir win. As much as she hid it at the time, the making of
Lionheart was a frustrating one for the singer.
In a recorded interview for EMI, issued on cassette as a promo for the album, she admitted it had presented for her a “difficult situation… I felt ver y squashed in by the lack of time. That’s what I don’t like, especially if it’s concerning something as important for me as my songs are.”
“By the end of the second record,” Bush later told MOJO, “I was thinking, I don’t want to be produced by somebody who sees it differently from me. So I thought, if I could, I would try and take over.”
Del Palmer witnessed Bush’s creative determination break dramatically to the surface. Invited to New York to appear on Saturday Night Live in December 1978, she was rehearsing a performance of Them Heavy People with the show’s house band when she suddenly stopped to tell the drummer he was playing his part wrong, before proceeding to demonstrate the correct beat. She didn’t know, or care, that the drummer was Billy Cobham.
“When she found out she just said, ‘Well, he wasn’t doing it right,’” Palmer told HomeGround magazine. “An awe-in
spiring musician and she says, ‘No, that’s not how I want it. I want it like this.’ Says a lot about her.”
ALTHOUGH EXHAUSTED BY THE MAKING OF two albums and the 24-date Tour Of Life, which ended at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in May 1979, Kate Bush was back in the studio by September of that year, notably co-producing her third record with Jon Kelly. As a result, Never For Ever was arguably the first of her albums that sounded like her.
“Yeah, I think so,” she said in 2005. “I discovered things like the Fairlight, and I was using the musicians that I wanted to use. No offence to the musicians on the second record.
“I mean there were obviously restrictions because we were paying a studio. It took six months to make that record, which is actually very quick for me. But at the time it was a very long time to spend making a record. It was really fun working with the musicians that we had on that album as well. It was a laugh again, I suppose.” The core players Bush used for the initial tracks recorded for
Never For Ever – The Wedding List, Blow Away (For Bill), Egypt and the stomping, Roxy Music-ish Violin – were those who’d appeared on Tour Of Life: Brian Bath, Del Palmer, guitarist Alan Murphy and drummer Preston Heyman.
“The band was a real good working unit,” said Bath, “and a couple of the songs we’d actually performed live already, although the arrangements were changed for the album. You could see it was taking a new direction. There was the influence from the Steely Dan type of thing. It had a different kind of spark to it.”
When the sessions moved from AIR to Abbey Road in January 1980, Steely Dan-like standards of precision were much in
evidence, along with a similar revolving door policy when it came to sourcing exactly the right musicians for specific parts.
“It was always a problem with the bass or the drums,” Bath said. “We’d all be sitting around waiting for the next player to turn up. There’d be logs of names of people turning up at the studio and we’d run the song and if it didn’t work… they’d get another one.
“But finally Stuart Elliott came in, and he’s very orchestrated. Fabulous drummer. He’s so inventive and he gives you hints of where you could put things afterwards.”
“I came in halfway through,” Elliott remembered. “That’s when we recorded Breathing and Babooshka. It was not a case of, y’know, the hits have all been recorded, we’ll just do a few album tracks. That was one of the most fruitful sessions.”
When it came to learning further nuances of the recording process, Bush had also gained outside experience with a key mentor. Ahead of the Abbey Road leg of the record, Bush had become a friend and collaborator of Peter Gabriel, contributing spectral backing vocals and counterpoint melody to No Self Control and the “jeux sans frontières” hookline to the UK Number 4 hit Games Without Frontiers, both from his third self-titled album.
But while Gabriel was thanked by Bush in the credits of Never
For Ever “for opening the windows”, she claimed to Melody Maker he had been less a direct musical influence and more someone who had “let some light in for me”, particularly in the sense of being able to maintain a public face and yet also a regular personal life. “Offstage he’s very normal,” she told Record Mirror, “and that’s the kind of thing I believe in.”
Gabriel was a central figure in her 44-minute-long BBC2 TV special, simply titled Kate, which aired on December 28, 1979, and featured songs from her first two albums and three already recorded for the work-in-progress Never For Ever. If its shot-on-video, lit-forTV production values lent it an am-dram quality at certain points, it was both an addendum to Tour Of Life and a signifier of where Bush’s next live production might have been heading.
It opened with full band performances of Violin, Symphony In Blue and Them Heavy People, before Gabriel first appeared as special guest for a powerfully stark, voice-and-electric-piano reading of Here Comes The Flood from his first, 1977 solo album. Kate, wearing a weirdy beard, then debuted Ran Tan Waltz (set to be the B-side of Babooshka), a comedic folk tune in which the hapless narrator is a lad left holding the baby as his wife goes out gallivanting. Next, at the piano, she sang her festive piano ballad December Will Be Magic Again (released as a single the following year).
Aside from a Play For Today rendering of The Wedding List, in which the singer cast herself as a new bride moved to murderous revenge when her husband is shot, the standout moment came with the return of Peter Gabriel for a duet cover version of Another Day from Roy Harper’s 1970 album, Flat Baroque And Berserk.
The TV performance of this song of regret for a fading love affair depicted them as a worn out couple sitting at either end of a fold-down table, as an alternative scenario blue-screened into a picture frame on the wall revealed the former to be a desperate and violently angry man (and likely the source of their troubles). An important staging-post in Bush’s quest to give pictorial life to the dramas of her songs.
“I think music is very visual,” said Bush in 2005. “On Never For
Ever there was quite a bit of that, trying to imagine being there. It’s that thing of being in this place, isn’t it? That you’re talking ➢
“I think music is very visual. On Never For Ever there was quite a bit of that, trying to imagine being there.” KATE BUSH
about or singing about, so you’re trying to create what it looks like and who’s there.”
WITH NEVER FOR EVER, KATE BUSH seemed poised to fully realise the kinds of characters and scenarios she’d been reaching for since her childhood songwriting. But she was both inspired and disheartened midway through its recording by the release of Pink Floyd’s double album opus,
The Wall, in November 1979 – particularly side three, from Hey You to Comfortably Numb.
“When I heard it, I thought, There’s no point in writing songs any more,” she admitted. “Because they’d said it all. When something really gets you, it hits your creative centre and stops you creating.”
After two weeks in which her sense of purpose was temporarily lost, Bush set her bar higher. The ominous, apocalyptic Breathing benefited from stately Floyd-like pacing. Elsewhere, the sampling marvel that was the Fairlight was put to good use, rendering rifle cocks as a rhythmic component of Army Dreamers.
“What an extraordinary machine at the time,” Duncan Mackay says of the Fairlight, which he played – at Bush’s prompting – on Army Dreamers and All We Ever Look For. “There was a viola sound that obviously would have been sampled within the range of what that instrument plays. But then I started messing around with it. And I played some part that was much, much, much higher than the instrument and this strange and completely unique sound appeared. And people said, ‘What the bloody hell’s that?’ I said, It’s meant to be a viola. But it sure ain’t (laughs).”
A similarly exotic soundscape was created over the analogue beatbox pulse and piano base of Delius, with Paddy Bush adding sitar strums and the imagined bassy voice of the titular composer. The song’s lyric was inspired by Bush’s TV viewing of Ken Russell’s 1968 film Song Of Summer, detailing how Frederick Delius, with tertiary syphilis, had spent his final years croaking his last compositions to an amanuensis, Eric Fenby. The tale of creative frustration and resolve stuck in her mind. Remarkably, she was only 10 when it first aired.
Now, incredibly, upon the release of her third album on September 8, 1980, she was still only 22. Soon Never For Ever would be her first UK Number 1; also the first chart-topping album by any British female solo artist. But it caught her at a critical point, where she was finally on the right path creatively, but still unsure as to what to make of her own celebrity.
“I’m not a star,” she insisted, although the lengthy queue of fans down Oxford Street waiting to have copies of Never For Ever signed by her at a Virgin Megastore appearance on September 12 told a different story. “My name is, but not me,” she added. “I’m still just me.”
It appeared to be true. To those around her, Kate Bush hadn’t changed at all.
“That was the delightful thing,” Duncan Mackay attests. “Kate would still say, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’”