FEATURE:
Only the Fools Blew It
Inside Kate Bush’s Breathing
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THE first single….
from Kate Bush’s third studio album, Never for Ever, Breathing was an incredibly important track. Maybe keen for people to see her more as an artist who is politically engaged and ‘serious’, the song concerns a nuclear war/fallout from the perspective of a fetus. It is a brilliantly dark and evocative. There was still a lot of parody and ridicule around Kate Bush in 1979. Feeling her debut, The Kick Inside, and follow-up, Lionheart, were not serious or odd-sounding, she was still being seen as this high-pitched and almost novelty artist. I think it was an interview with Danny Baker not long before the release of Never for Ever where he sort of questioned her seriousness. Whether she was engaged with politics. Subjected to sexism and patronising views from journalists, Breathing is this reaction. Kate Bush was always invested in people and politics. On her first two albums, it was only natural she would want to focus on other themes. At a time when Punk was raging and there was this wave of bands bringing political subjects to the fore, it wasn’t perhaps what Kate Bush was prioritising. Not the sort of sound and music she was interested in. She did know it was important to bring heavier subjects into her music. Never for Ever also featured Army Dreamers. The third and final single, that is about a young man needlessly being wasted on a battlefield. A victim of war. Breathing seemed to react to the threat and fear that was in the air in the late-1970s. The Cold Wat and people feeling that the world could be blown away through the push of a button.
Rather than Breathing being this raging and aggressive song, it is almost a symphony. Kate Bush creating this epic and sweeping song that was matched with a memorable video (directed by Keef/Keith MacMillan). I think the last time I wrote about Breathing was this time last year. I want to revisit it without repeating myself. Every single deserves to be written about on its anniversary. Breathing is among Bush’s most powerful and brilliant records. Released on 14th April, 1980, we look ahead to its forty-fourth anniversary. With its amazing and underrated B-side, The Empty Bullring, accompanying one of Kate Bush’s most important songs, this wonderful record reached sixteen on the U.K. singles chart. Quite an impressive position for a song that must have delighted and divided in equal measures. Critics and the press never quite sure what to make of Kate Bush or approach her music. A burden and prejudice she faced for years! Thanks to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for collating interviews where Bush spoke about Breathing. I have sourced a few:
“It’s about a baby still in the mother’s womb at the time of a nuclear fallout, but it’s more of a spiritual being. It has all its senses: sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing, and it knows what is going on outside the mother’s womb, and yet it wants desperately to carry on living, as we all do of course. Nuclear fallout is something we’re all aware of, and worried about happening in our lives, and it’s something we should all take time to think about. We’re all innocent, none of us deserve to be blown up.
DEANNE PEARSON, ‘THE ME INSIDE’. SMASH HITS (UK), MAY 1980
When I wrote the song, it was from such a personal viewpoint. It was just through having heard a thing for years without it ever having got through to me. ‘Til the moment it hit me, I hadn’t really been moved. Then I suddenly realised the whole devastation and disgusting arrogance of it all. Trying to destroy something that we’ve not created – the earth. The only thing we are is a breathing mechanism: everything is breathing. Without it we’re just nothing. All we’ve got is our lives, and I was worried that when people heard it they were going to think, ‘She’s exploiting commercially this terribly real thing.’ I was very worried that people weren’t going to take me from my emotional standpoint rather than the commercial one. But they did, which is great. I was worried that people wouldn’t want to worry about it because it’s so real. I was also worried that it was too negative, but I do feel that there is hope in the whole thing, just for the fact that it’s a message from the future. It’s not from now, it’s from a spirit that may exist in the future, a non-existent spiritual embryo who sees all and who’s been round time and time again so they know what the world’s all about. This time they don’t want to come out, because they know they’re not going to live. It’s almost like the mother’s stomach is a big window that’s like a cinema screen, and they’re seeing all this terrible chaos.
KRIS NEEDS, ‘FIRE IN THE BUSH’. ZIGZAG (UK), 1980
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and extras (including Paddy Bush) between takes filming the video for Breathing/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
From my own viewpoint that’s the best thing I’ve ever written. It’s the best thing I’ve ever produced. I call that my little symphony, because I think every writer, whether they admit it or not, loves the idea of writing their own symphony. The song says something real for me, whereas many of the others haven’t quite got to the level that I would like them to reach, though they’re trying to. Often it’s because the song won’t allow it, and that song allowed everything that I wanted to be done to it. That track was easy to build up. Although it had to be huge, it was just speaking – saying what had to be put on it. In many ways, I think the most exciting thing was making the backing track. The session men had their lines, they understood what the song was about, but at first there was no emotion, and that track was demanding so much emotion. It wasn’t until they actually played with feeling that the whole thing took off. When we went and listened, I wanted to cry, because of what they had put into it. It was so tender. It meant a lot to me that they had put in as much as they could, because it must get hard for session guys. They get paid by the hour, and so many people don’t want to hear the emotion. They want clear, perfect tuning, a ‘good sound’; but often the out-of-tuneness, the uncleanliness, doesn’t matter as much as the emotional content that’s in there. I think that’s much more important than the technicalities.
KRIS NEEDS, ‘FIRE IN THE BUSH’. ZIGZAG (UK), 1980”.
Before rounding things off, I am going to come to a couple of features around a pivotal and crucial Kate Bush song. After her first two albums, where there was a distinct sound, Breathing announced more depth and variety. An artist that could not be easily defined. After the triumph of 1979’s The Tour of Life, Bush co-produced Never for Ever with Jon Kelly. She was definitely moving towards solo-producing – something that would be realised on 1982’s The Dreaming. Treble wrote about Breathing in 2022. Kate Bush confronting nuclear war:
“Cold War in the 1960s, with songs like Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” offering potential warnings of the inevitable destruction that would occur between two or more countries engaged in a nuclear arms race. But in the ’80s, when tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union came ever closer to a boiling point, Cold War anxiety dominated popular music in a way that sometimes revealed itself in subtle ways, like on Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” or Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” and in more overt ways as well, as on Time Zone’s “World Destruction.” For a couple years the threat of total annihilation even seemed to preoccupy Prince, who released both “Ronnie Talk to Russia” and the end-of-the-world party anthem “1999.” If you turned on the radio in the ’80s, there’s a good chance you’d be hearing songs about a coming apocalyptic scenario, whether you realized it or not.
It’s a terrifying thought. Even more so when taken into account that, at least according to the lore, a made-for-TV-movie made the matter one of utmost urgency for then president Ronald Reagan. But then again who can be blamed when the idea of having your nation destroyed somehow becomes real, however absurd the method of communication. Personally, I find Kate Bush’s take on the matter much more devastating.
Five years before releasing her blockbuster Hounds of Love, featuring her iconic single “Running Up That Hill”—which ended up back on the singles charts this year thanks to Stranger Things—Kate Bush released her own song addressing our potential impending destruction, “Breathing.” The final track on Never For Ever, an album that also contained the much more playful “Babooshka,” “Breathing” looks at nuclear destruction from the perspective of an unborn fetus, one that, if it survives, will inherit a world that’s essentially gone, and at best nearly uninhabitable.
True to much of the pop songs with fear of World War III on their mind at the time, “Breathing” isn’t scary on an aesthetic level—and Kate Bush can do scary. Check “Waking the Witch” or any number of moments on 1982’s The Dreaming for proof of that. It’s not tense and climactic like Iron Maiden’s “Two Minutes to Midnight,” either, though Bush’s sense of scale and theatrics at times could stand toe-to-toe with the best of the decade’s metal bands. “Breathing” is, instead, a characteristically dramatic ballad for Bush, one of the most powerful songs she’d written just two years into her career, made all the more unnerving by a closer read of the details within the song. Its first line tells us the stakes, the fate of the child wholly dependent on the life of the mother. “Outside gets inside,” she sings, at once extolling the safety of the fortress inside the womb, while offering reminders of the vulnerability therein, like breathing in the nicotine from her cigarettes.
The sense of doom and desperation grows deeper into the song, Bush lamenting, “We’ve lost our chance, we’re the first and the last” in its third verse, and in its final chorus—just before the image of a not-subtle-at-all mushroom cloud in its Bush-in-a-bubble music video—she desperately pleads, “Oh God, please leave us something to breathe.” Bush scales up from the most intimate and vulnerable to a more universal appeal for mercy, from the fetus that’s at the mercy of the life of its mother—which in this scenario is arguably every bit as helpless—to the civilization at large that stands to be wiped out with the press of a button.
It’s a masterful kick in the gut. Bush described the song as her “little symphony,” and though she’d released songs prior that carried a similar sense of ambition and grandeur, all of that escalated on “Breathing.” The thread of fear and anguish, as well as a subtle sense of anger at the power-hungry world leaders in dark rooms that would seal millions of innocent people’s fates without remorse, persists at every point, including its spoken-word bridge, describing the differences between a small nuclear bomb and a large one—the irony and even black humor of its placement serving only to emphasize that you’d have to be a psychopath to greenlight that kind of devastation. But ultimately it all comes back to that one very basic idea of defenselessness, whether it’s the child, the mother, or simply Kate Bush herself, desperately grasping for air in the fallout, and their pleas falling on deaf ears.
“Breathing,” heavy as the subject matter might have been, was the lead single from Never For Ever, and in doing press for the album, Kate Bush described a moment of revelation about the gravity of living during a time of continued threat of nuclear war. “Til the moment it hit me, I hadn’t really been moved,” she said in a 1980 interview. “Then I suddenly realised the whole devastation and disgusting arrogance of it all. Trying to destroy something that we’ve not created – the earth. The only thing we are is a breathing mechanism: everything is breathing. Without it we’re just nothing”.
It is worth moving to Dreams of Orgonon and their feature about Breathing. A deep and fascinating look inside a song that holds relevance today, I learnt a few things about the track and the inspiration behind it. The final track from Never for Ever, I sort of think about The Beatles’ A Day in the Life ending Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bush ending an album with a song that simply could not be followed (similar to The Beatles in 1967):
“Breathing” is the most unified and conceptually coherent work of Kate Bush’s career. Each aspect of its composition and production strives in a single accord. Its mastering of the techniques it uses can be found as much in its broad strokes as its fine details. Bush’s songwriting makes a huge leap in quality, achieving a new standard. It is one of the greatest British singles of the early 1980s, and its reasonable chart standing (#16 in the UK) is as baffling as it is delightful. Without “Breathing,” there is no The Dreaming or Hounds of Love or Aerial. There are two major discernable eras in Bush’s career: before “Breathing,” and its aftermath.
As a conventional and sane member of society, Bush achieves creative apotheosis through a fetus’s perspective of nuclear fallout. Again, that’s not hyperbole — that is actually what the song is about, if not straightforwardly. “Breathing” contains astounding clarity, with its premise explicitly stated through lyrics such as “outside/gets inside/through her skin,” “last night in the sky/such a bright light,” and “breathing my mother in.” It’s rather clear what’s going on: a fetus (probably human, but easily headcanoned out of specieshood) knows that a nuclear bomb has exploded and is experiencing the slow irradiation of its mother’s body with horror. Its fears are expressed in primal terms. It hasn’t gone to school. Nobody has told it what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All it perceives is a bright light that destroys everything that even its mother can’t protect it from. Bodies are destroyed — the emotional reality takes over, and no rational mind will help.
On a technical level, “Breathing” is Bush’s magnum opus. Her mastery of her own voice is as impressive as the achievements of The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. Throughout the first verse, she sounds as if she’s holding her breath (“out-SIIIIIDE” sounds like shallow inhalation), crooning in a way that’s both innocent and haunting. The two refrains largely follow the first verse’s lead, while the second one sees Bush push her range upwards, making “we’ve lost our chance” a guttural invocation. By the song’s coda, she’s outright screaming at the top of her lungs for breath.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Lichfield
Melodically and rhythmically, “Breathing” is on similarly breathy wavelengths. It’s in Eb minor, excepting a few detours into Eb major: the verse commences with the i chord (Eb minor), joins an augmented fifth to it (B) to create a VI chord, and then inverts the i chord with its parallel major (a favorite technique of hers — see also “The Infant Kiss”). The verse ultimately comes out largely to i-VI-I-iv-I (with some tricky slash-chord articulates of E flat major). Rhythm is consistent throughout the verse, with shifting time signatures of 2/4, 4/4, and 3/4 changing by the measure, at a pace consistent with breathing. The refrain is almost entirely in common time, excepting its final measure (2/4). The refrain’s breathing is done by its chord progression (i-III-VI), rising and falling, like an agonized chest not quite inhaling enough oxygen to keep living. Sonically, there are echoes of earlier rock songs: the bridge sounds like Bowie’s similarly cosmic “Space Oddity” in places, and a mechanical hum in the second verse evokes memories of Pink Floyd’s luddite threnody “Welcome to the Machine.”
If your reaction to this isn’t “hey, Kate, who’s your dealer?”, you are a liar and you should be ashamed of yourself. But as we aren’t in East Wickham’s social circle of 1980 and thus lack access to whatever strain Bush smoked at the time, we can interrogate more pertinent issues of why the fuck Bush is using this perspective to explore nuclear war. Since the emotional state of fetuses is pertinent to some deluded members of society, we should probably address that particular discourse. If “Breathing” were released right about now, the pro-life crowd wouldn’t latch onto it (it’s much too weird for a group of people who are busy mutilating their eardrums with MercyMe), but one could see its subject matter being twisted for reactionary ends. The song does cope with fetal autonomy, or lack thereof, but it’s incredibly abstract and fails to resemble abortion in any way (the metaphor would be weird, too: “hey Del, you know what abortion reminds me of? The fucking H-bomb!”). Furthermore, abortion, while still a major topic of conversation in the UK, where abortion was only legalized in Northern Ireland in 2019, is a fundamentally different conversation than it is in the United States.
Bush was clandestine about her thoughts on abortion, although one can deduce through an interview where she opines “that life is something that should be respected and honored even in a few hours of its conception” that her private opinions on the matter are on the reactionary side. But that’s not the subject of the song. The issue goes deeper than that — to the dredges of consciousness, the origins of human life, and the human mind’s need for survival.
Bush claimed that the political content of “Army Dreamers” and “Breathing” only served to “move [her] emotionally.” Characteristically, Bush is both wrong and insightful here. The idea that songs are less political because you’re emotionally invested in the political issues they discuss is utter nonsense. But… of course political issues are emotional. Bush even acknowledges this in the next part of the quote, saying “it went through the emotional center… when I thought ‘ah, ow!’ And that made me write.”
Perhaps nothing is more political than personal emotions. Emotions are always present in a person’s values, decisions, choices, and aesthetics. Human beings are ventilation devices for emotions. Perhaps without realizing it, the entity that moved Bush is the radical politics of emotion in the service of bodily liberation. Emotions are political. Everything is political, as no man is an island. And crucially, breathing, and who gets to do it, is political.
Recorded in March 1980 at Abbey Road. Released as a single on 14 April 1980, then as the closing track of Never for Ever on 7 September that year. A censored version of the music video was aired on Top of the Pops on April 14. Performed live by Bush (solo) at a Comic Relief concert in 1986. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, piano, production. Stuart Elliott — drums. Jon Kelly — production, engineering. Max Middleton — Fender Rhodes. Alan Murphy, Brian Bath — electric guitar. Larry Fast — Prophet. Morris Pert — percussion. Roy Harper — backing vocals. Image: Hiroshima immediately after the dropping of “Little Boy” (photographer unnamed)”.
Released on 14th April, 1980, it is almost forty-four years since Breathing came out. This is a song that was written after The Tour of Life. A track that was not taken on tour or performed live much. It is a shame, as one can only imagine her mounting this song on a large stage. The video is incredible though. One that stays in the mind! A song that heralded a new sound and direction for Kate Bush, it also showed that she could be deeper than many thought. React to the horrors and important issues from around the world. It is a shame that a fear that should be a thing of the past still burns today. That feeling that world leaders and dictators can damage the world and cause massive destruction. In 1979/1980, when the world was in the grip of nuclear threats, Kate Bush composed a majestic and haunting song. Breathing surely ranks alongside…
HER greatest work.