FEATURE:
Flying By the Seat of Her Pants
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush at Abbey Road Studios
Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty
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PILFERING and pillaging the pages…
of MOJO’s recent edition where Kate Bush features heavily, I was interested in their feature about Sat in Your Lap. There are a couple of other aspects I want to dive deep into when it comes to that MOJO spread but, as The Dreaming’s lead single is forty on 21st June, it is worth exploring it a bit. In the feature where Victoria Segal interviewed some of the people in Bush’s team. In the video for Sat in Your Lap, as Segal notes, she is on the shoulders of a roller-skating minotaur (as you do!). She looks shaky and precarious. Some may interpret that vision as the singer being unsure and teetering but, as was noted, Sat in Your Lap was Bush “seizing the reins of her work with new intent: a song about the search for knowledge, the battle between hubris, self-sabotage and despair”. Although The Dreaming was not released until 1982, its opening single came over a year before the album arrived. Today, this sort of things would be rare but, perhaps feeling that some would feel Bush had disappeared if she had left too big a pause between singles – her third album, Never for Ever, came out in 1980; hardly a lifetime to wait is two years! -, the single bursts with energy and new-found knowledge. The song was written after Bush watched Stevie Wonder in concert at Wembley. She had writer’s block to that point so, maybe, she wanted the song out there because it captured a moment where she was freed and alive with this fresh impetus and direction!
It might have been quite a bolt of lightning for people in 1981. Though previous singles like Babooshka had raw vocals and a strange majesty, the tribal drums and bolder nature of Sat in Your Lap was a preface to the transformation we hear on The Dreaming. Rather than there being this similarly frantic and jester-like energy in the studio, rather splendidly, each morning there was two large bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and some weed ready. Not the subscribed diet for a talented singer but, in order to add some phlegm and gravel to her voice, chocolate (and milk) did help that. Bush was no stranger to weed prior to Sat in Your Lap. Smoking it recreationally, it no doubt helped calm her. Bush wanted to create a shock and shake herself at the same time. Sat in Your Lap, in a way, closed the door on her earlier sound where she was less of an integral part of the machine. She was now emerging as a producer in her own right who was taking back some form of control over her creative direction. The Dreaming was recorded at several studios around London, though Townhouse Studios was a sacred space where the likes of Peter Gabriel had recorded. His third eponymous album of 1980 was recorded there (in addition to Manor Mobile, Bath). The drums sound that can be heard on, among other songs, Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight, was brewed in the studio’s ‘stone room’.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Rapport Photography
Bush was definitely intrigued and felt that that sort of sound could benefit her music. Bush met engineer Hugh Padgham when she was singing backing vocals on Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers (from the aforementioned album). She wanted him to engineer The Dreaming. Padgham spent some weekends on the album but, busy with other albums, he suggested instead that Nick Launay take over. As the article explores, Launay had worked with Public Image Ltd. and, as a fan of the rhythms of Flowers of Romance, Bush needed little convincing. It is interesting to read Launay was only twenty when he started working with her (she was twenty-two). Because there was no strict budget for studio time and recording, the eager and excited young engineer and artist were sort of flying by the seat of their pants. Padgham laughed when interviewed and explained how “I’d probably be more tolerant of that now than I was then”. Maybe it was a release from the years of working with other producers and not having a tremendous amount of personal freedom when it came to decision and recording. Bush had had a busy and tiring past few years and, with a new song in her mind and a chance for her to produce alone, one can forgive her for not having a set plan and wanting to play around a bit and experiment. Despite the impression that Bush was quite laidback at the time, she wanted her musicians to be in the studio by ten in the morning on a Sunday.
As keyboardist Geoff Downes remarked: “She really wanted to be ahead of the game technologically as much as she was artistically”. He was asked to provide ‘stabbing horn part's’. Not that Bush was limited or conventional prior to 1981. The fact is that there are a lot of great and disparate sounds that go into the collage that is Sat in Your Lap. Rather than being this hippy chick that many in the media had her pegged at around the time of The Kick Inside and Lionheart (in 1978), Bush was now entering a new phase. That said, as Segal observed, lyrics such as “Give me karma, mama!” suggested Bush had not entirely abandoned her past. Engineer Nick Launay felt that going into the studio each day was like being in a fantasy land. With technology like the Fairlight CMI offering new avenues and possibilities, it must have been a dream having this sort of equipment at the fingertips! There are contrasts and dichotomies through Sat in Your Lap. The duality of laziness and forward motion sits with “high-end technology and post-punk wilderness”. Though there were probably designs to have The Dreaming ready for release in 1981, sessions did drag - and it was not until September 1982 that it emerged. One can also forgive that as Bush was producing alone and two years between albums is hardly that long! The results were more than worth the wait. Maybe she had set the bar high and was taking on a lot, but one only needs to listen to Sat in Your Lap – with its unconventional piano and percussion rhythms and Fairlight CMI – to realise that Bush…
HAD struck a golden vein.