FEATURE:
A Rocky Road
Kate Bush’s Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake
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THIS is another Kate Bush feature…
where I am promoting and defending an underrated song. Many have seen her second studio album, Lionheart, as a bit rushed or an inferior version of The Kick Inside. I really like the album, thought here is a feeling that Bush was being hurried into a follow-up to her successful debut to capitalise on her fame and popularity. With only a few new songs written for Lionheart, Bush had to rely on some older tracks. I think Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake is one that might have been considered for The Kick Inside but, perhaps, it was seen as too Rock-orientated and hard – although James and the Cold Gun is quite a Rock-y song. In terms of a song from Lionheart, there are two officially released versions: the album version and the live version from Hammersmith Odeon, which appears on the On Stage E.P. Coming between Wow and Oh England My Lionheart on Lionheart, Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake is a nice change of gears. Some have highlighted it as one of the weaker songs on Lionheart but, with a nod to Patti Smith, I think it was a great track. The lyrics are a lot different to what we heard on The Kick Inside. That album, I think, draws more from a romantic view of love, whereas Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake is more oblique. It is a song about heartache and avoiding spinning out of control: “Emma's come down/She's stopped the light/Shining out of her eyes/Emma's been run out on/She's breaking down/In so many places/Stuck in low gear/Because of her fears/Of the skidding wheels/(The skid of her wheels she feels)/Skidding wheels/(The skid of her wheels she feels)/Spinning wheels/(Wheel-skidding feeling)/Her heart is there/But they've greased the road/Her heart is out there/But she's no control”.
Other artists have used images of vehicles and the road to describe love and pain and, whilst not her most accomplished or memorable songs, I think Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake is a song that should not be overlooked. Bush performed the song on the Leo Sayer Show on 17th November, 1978 and on the 1979 Christmas special. The song was also included in the setlist of The Tour of Life. Dreams of Orgonon had this to day about Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake:
“It’s hard to imagine The Kick Inside functioning with “Heartbrake,” which is more blatantly goofy than anything on that album. In the first verse, Bush has a mental breakdown on a motorway expressed through a series of car puns: “breaking down,” “stuck in low gear,” “fears of the skidding wheels.” It’s a vague emotional spiral, construed as a barrage of automotive verbiage. A character called Emma has been left high and dry by someone called Georgie, and responds to this loss by losing her shit on the road. Fittingly enough for this premise, “Heartbrake” is a melodically bizarre machine, moving from a tingling piano-led intro to kookiness, eventually landing on a bawdy, brass-accompanied shoutfest of a chorus (“don’t put your BLUES where your SHOES should be!”). Yet “Heartbrake” is so noisy it obscures whatever point it attempts to make. Additionally, it’s too undisciplined for its volume to even work, becoming white noise rather than grabbing attention with spectacle. The thematic dubiousness of Lionheart extends to the album’s quality, and the it suffers as a result.
In lieu of an immediate musical analogue for “Heartbrake,” let’s compare this song to a more famous piece of media centered around a person’s internal state shattering on a motorway: J. G. Ballard’s controversial novel Crash. Ballard is legendary for his interrogations of modernity: his masterpiece The Atrocity Exhibition features a piece called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” which literally landed him in court. He frequently positions large social structures, such as high rises, the mass media, and motorways, as analogous to the human body and symptomatic of deep-rooted entropy. This is… not terribly far from where Bush lands, at times. Sure, Bush overlooks the whole “nightmare of modernity” thing (indeed, “Heartbrake” is one of the few Bush songs to unambiguously take place in the late 20th century), but physical experience is crucial to the narrative of her music. Tuning into one’s own body to find spiritual liberation is one of the recurrent ideas in Bush’s discography so far. Whereas The Kick Inside took this freedom and operated it with unbridled optimism, Lionheart is the sobering moment in which Bush has to figure out what to do when the initial high of becoming an adult subsides. Sometimes growing up entails crashing a car. But if you’re going to do it, you might as well be romantic about it”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in Liverpool in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
There are a few Kate Bush albums that are not given as much consideration and time as others. Although there are one or two weak moments on Lionheart, I don’t think it is the failure that many (including Bush to an extent) paint it as. Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake might have worked a little better if it was after Oh England My Lionheart - so that it ended the first side with a rush. As it sits on Lionheart, it is an interesting song where we hear Bush’s voice rawer and faster than on most other songs on that album and The Kick Inside. We would hear more of this vocal style on her next album, Never for Ever, and tracks such as Babooshka and Breathing. For an album that was fairly hurried and where Bush wasn’t given sufficient time to create new direction and ideas, there are a lot of strong tracks on Lionheart that seem like an evolution and step forward. On an underrated album is this underrated song that deserves another spin. Whilst not peak Kate Bush, Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake is still…
A solid and interesting track.