FEATURE:
With the Mice at East Wickham Farm…
PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush (taken from his book, Cathy)
Kate Bush and Her Earliest Songs
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I realise I am sort of serialising…
Tom Doyle’s new book, Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush. It is such a fascinating read, I have been compelled to write another piece. I am going to come back to the book once more when writing about Wuthering Heights. Kate Bush’s debut single is forty-five in January. Doyle writes beautifully about the song, and there are some observations and angles I want to incorporate in a feature or two. One I want to do now literally takes us back to the start of Bush’s music fascination and bond with the piano. I am particularly interested in the earliest songs from Bush. Dating as far back as 1969 – when she would have been ten or eleven -, the remarkably prolific and prodigious Cathy had this key moment in the bran at East Wickham Farm. An old and slightly discarded harmonium was housed in the barn. Tom Doyle opens a chapter about Bush’s early songs by asking whether Bush could play and bond with the harmonium before its bellows had been gnawed by mice! There is something romantic and rustic about this barn having mice running around it chewing at this and that! One would almost imagine Bush would write a song about it! In any case, this old Mustel pump organ (which was one of five-hundred Victor Mustel had made before his death in 1890). The young Cathy would spend hours figuring out chord patterns until “her ankles ached”.
I know her father, Dr. (Robert) Bush, would play piano and she would have watched him in wonder as a young child. I wonder what compelled her to venture into the barn and tackle the harmonium! Quite an unconventional instrument, maybe she was attracted to its age or the fact it was quite lonely. Perhaps the unique sound or the fact that it was being eroded by mice and a spot in the barn at East Wickham Farm that could have seen much light or heat! I almost get these visions of Bush animated like she is in The Snowman. Waking up and running to the barn and shutting the door behind her. Instruments offer no instruction or voice, so everyone who approaches them has to figure them out and almost unlock a puzzle. As Doyle writes, Bush “learned that she moved one finger in a three-note cluster to another key, it opened up doors leading to other doors”. I imagine the young Bush smiling as these amazing sounds came out because of her! She told Doyle that the chord was the most exciting thing in her life. Able to change and defining a song, I think these very early experiences with the harmonium directly feeds through her music to now. If there is anything animated to Kate Bush’s music, I hope we go right back and to her childhood where she was in the barn and had this solace and quiet.
One of the most important moments in her life, Bush couldn’t read or write music (and had no interest in learning), so she was doing this all by feel and instinct. Sadly, the mice did defeat the Mutsel. She then had to go back into the farmhouse and resume piano. I do feel that a lot of her early songs and demos can be traced back to what she learned in the barn. The size and shape of the harmonium itself directed and influenced the notes she played and her fascination. The piano has a different timbre and personality, and yet both played their parts. Even if she was writing songs as early as eleven, by her own admission, they were not brilliant. By thirteen or fourteen, Bush took songwriting to the next level. Taking a poetic approach to her lyrics, she would spend hours at the piano in search of that perfect sound or a score to words she had written. Let us not forget that Bush was thirteen when she wrote The Man with the Child in His Eyes – which appeared on The Kick Inside in 1978 -, so you could see how much she’d developed and honed her remarkable talent. If the young Bush’s vocal style was acrobatic and very high-pitched on some of her very early songs, you can hear more depth, control, and range on many of the songs through The Kick Inside. Those short-sighted and ignorant critics who defined Bush as witch or banshee-like after her debut came out clearly were not listening to songs like The Saxophone Song and The Man with the Child in His Eyes! An early hero of hers, Elton John, put out Your Song in 1971. That thing about subdued intensity changed everything for Bush!
Elton John was particularly important and motivational regarding Bush’s voice and the piano. Her family provided a lot of support. Her brother Paddy would accompany her at various times (probably on mandolin), and the Bush family were agog at how the youngest sibling could summon up stanzas, verses, and whole songs just like that! Her rate of progress was astonishing! Even though Bush was this emerging songwriter with a clear desire and passion, she did not have ambitions to go on stage and perform at school. Family friend (and someone who played with Bush on her albums) Brian Bath recalled in 1972 how he heard a then-thirteen-year-old sounding really incredible. By 1972, Bush had fifty original compositions. She would be in a great position when her name and music was being passed closer towards David Gilmour and EMI not long after. One of the great tragedies is that there are some wonderful early songs that were either recorded in demo form or made it to the studio but were never released. I think the earliest recordings that exist and can be heard online date back to 1973. Tom Doyle wrote in Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush about his favourite five songs from the many early offerings. There have been bootlegs and unofficial releases of these early songs, but no official release or compilation from Bush and EMI. It is a shame, because we can hear this fast-developing talent who was blossoming. Two songs that Doyle picks out, Something Like a Song and You Were the Star, are also among my favourite of the earliest songs.
Bush would have been keen to keep her earliest recordings private, but they did make their way into the Internet in the 1990s. Perhaps anything pre-debut album was her personal recordings and cannot be considered cannon or for anyone else to hear. You can hear so many Cathy Bush songs on various websites, so there would be a demand to have a selection included on an album. I am not sure whether Bush, now sixty-four, would be too fond for people to hear songs that she recorded as a child. I realise there is a quality control issue. Maybe feeling these songs do not represent her best work, it is one of those sad things. But fans will understand! I am endlessly intrigued by her recordings from 1972 and before and what she was writing about. That chapter where Tom Doyle writes about some of those songs is brilliant. But he also discussed the harmonium in the barn where Bush used to play. That is so vivid and wonderful to imagine! To think of Bush playing the harmonium and piano at such a young age and her mind and horizons being widened. The way he eyes would have widened and she would have had this huge smile! Although some of the early songs are patchy or do not warrant repeated listens, so many of them are brilliant. So talented and assured at such a young age, this would only heighten and solidify by the time Wuthering Heights came out in January 1978. I will write about that song closer to its forty-fifth anniversary but, for now, another dip back into Tom Doyle’s essential Running Up That Hill: A Deal with God. Every time I pass through the book, I learn something new about…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush poses at East Wickham Farm in September 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Moorhouse/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
THE beguiling Kate Bush.