FEATURE:
Moving Strangers
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in Japan in June 1978
Kate Bush and the Tokyo Music Festival, 1978
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I discussed Kate Bush’s 1978 trip to Japan…
in a feature a couple of years ago. Amidst the hecticness of 1978 and the success of Wuthering Heights and her debut album, The Kick Inside, she undertook a promotional blitzkrieg like nothing else! I cannot imagine how straining and discombobulating it would have been to travel all around the world and perform at so many different locations. Alongside the live performances, there was a load of press and T.V. interviews. Air travel was not something Bush ever liked. I can imagine that, after 1978, she came to like it less and less. By the end of the year, she had travelled as far as Australia and New Zealand. Her trip to Japan was, I guess, to help build her name there. As The Kick Inside is forty-four on 17th February, I wanted to publish a run of features about the album and 1978. Bush released singles strictly for the Japanese market. Moving was released in February 1978; Them Heavy People (titled Rolling the Ball) was issued in May 1978. Both singles did well in Japan, and, by all accounts, she was someone who was taken to heart very readily and quickly. Aside from appearing in a watch commercial for Seiko and having photos taken in Japan, one of the biggest promotional tasks of her career to that point took place at the Tokyo Music Festival. I am thinking what her biggest and best-attended live performance would have been to that date. I guess some of her appearances on Top of the Pops drew quite a crowd. In terms of the sheer number of people in front of her in a live setting, the Tokyo Music Festival was a real test of nerves and courage!
It was an odd one-off that I don’t think she would do in any other country. Maybe she did have a curiosity about Japan and wanted to visit. In any case, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia gives us some information about the festival:
“Annual music festival in Japan. On June 18, 1978, Kate Bush performed her song Moving live at the Seventh Tokyo Song Festival with a band of Japanese musicians before an audience of 11,000 at the Nippon Budokan - with a television audience of something like 35 million watching at home. Kate shared the Festival's Silver Prize with an American rhythm-and-blues group called The Emotions, popular at the time for their hit single 'Best Of My Love'.
I guess the slightly unconventional and different style of Kate Bush would have resonated with a country who embrace the more unusual. Whilst she was in the country, she also did other promotional duties. She performed several tracks by The Beatles for Japanese T.V. (She's Leaving Home, The Long and Winding Road and Let It Be). I know that Bush performed Let It Be live in for Sound in S, on 23rd June, 1978. As Far Out Magazine wrote last year, Bush not only performed Moving at the Tokyo Music Festival. Advertising was not something she did a lot after 1978. Allowing her song, Moving, to be used to promote Seiko was an unusual step:
“As Flashbak points out, Bush was performing the track at the seventh annual international Tokyo Music Festival inside the Nippon Budokan arena when the ‘Hounds of Love’ became an overnight sensation.
Bush’s performance was screened through Japanese television on June 21, 1978, and was broadcast as an estimated 35 million watched on—it secured her cult status and saw Bush instantly gain fame in the country where her off-beat show would be appreciated.
The track, written by Bush and produced by Andrew Powell, is considered a tribute to Lindsay Kemp, her mime teacher of the time. Kemp was an integral member of Bush’s team and can be widely attributed with offering up her unique performance style. ‘Moving’ has a little more nuanced, opening up with a whale song sampled from Songs of the Humpback Whale, an LP. It encapsulates an artist who was not afraid to push the envelope.
The song became an extremely rare 7″ vinyl due to the fact it was only ever released in Japan as part of a well-crafted marketing campaign involving a commercial for Seiko watches. It meant that the song’s desirability only grew alongside Bush’s. There were two pressings made in limited numbers but, where the song truly found fame – and intrigue looking back – was during its use in the Seiko watch adverts”.
Rather than dissect the Japan trip again, I wanted to look at the Tokyo Music Festival. Looking terrified whilst performing, I suppose that this was an idea from EMI to get her music to a massive audience very quickly. The gamble, in that sense, paid off. Bush definitely became a star then. Whilst Symphony in Blue (from 1978’s Lionheart) was the last single released solo in Japan, Bush did swiftly win the affection of the nation. Perhaps the scariness and pressure of the Tokyo Music Festival accounts for Bush not engaging in music festivals. Aside from her own The Tour of Life in 1979, Bush’s live performances would be for T.V. or as part of her own residency. Promoting her debut album with such passion and a real lack of ego, her appearance at the Tokyo Music Festival shows how far (quite literally) she was going to get her music heard. This article from 2019 argues why Bush being a largely studio-based artist post-1978 was a benefit:
“It doesn’t entirely work out for her. I mean, Bush won a silver medal at the Tokyo Music Festival, but the highest honor went to Al Green (which is hard to get upset about. If Kate Bush is going to lose to any singer, Al Green is an honorable choice). Yet she never engages with mainstream pop in the same way again. Bush will remain popular in the charts, but she doesn’t pursue the festival circuit as an artistic path. Soon she’ll retreat even further inward, abandoning a career that involved touring for a studio-bound career. Yes, this has led to tragedies like no songs from The Dreaming ever being performed live. Yet with the slightly hollow and rushed showmanship of her excursion to Japan, it’s hard not to feel like Bush benefits from staying close to home”.
Ahead of The Kick Inside turning forty-three, I am going to take some excursions and look at what Bush was doing to promote the album; go deeper with some of the songs and explore a remarkable debut from a number of angles. Not often talked about and explored, her 1978 appearance at the Tokyo Music Festival is…
BIZZARE and beautiful in equal measures.