FEATURE:
Over the Lights, Under the Moon…
Looking Ahead to the Fiftieth Anniversary of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside
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EVEN though…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris
we are talking about 2028, I think that this celebration needs preparation and some planning. In terms of celebrating big Kate Bush album anniversaries, next year is a fallow year. 2027 is when The Dreaming turns forty-five. 2028 is a big one. Kate Bush turns seventy on 30th July. The Red Shoes turns thirty-five. However, the biggest two anniversaries happen at the start of the year. On 20th January, Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, is fifty. I know there will be a lot of celebration. Magazine articles and maybe some repeats. Kate Bush on the BBC or Top of the Pops. I am sure the song will get a streaming boost and there will also be something new. It would be great if there were podcast episodes or even something more in-depth, such as a book. However, on 17th February, The Kick Inside celebrates fifty years. It is the first fiftieth anniversary for any of her albums, so it is this big event. When Hounds of Love turned forty back in September, there were a few events but nothing huge. However, when an album turns fifty, it means more and I feel there will be more fuss. It is unlikely we will get any reissue of the album where Kate Bush reveals unheard songs or takes. Any rarities or anything incomplete. Even though I am excited to mark forty-eight years of The Kick Inside. However, I feel the fiftieth is too huge to ignore! There is a book from Laura Shenton that only costs a few quid. It takes us inside this album and provides a lot of depth and detail. As yet, there are no other books about the album. No entry in the 33 1/3 series. It is tempting to pitch it myself, because I am not sure anyone else will write it.
The Kick Inside is my favourite album ever. I am going to end with a couple of pieces about the album. Alongside side magazine features and some celebratory podcasts and the like, we do need an event and listening party. Wuthering Heights will get a lot of buzz on 20th January, 2028, and a few weeks later, there will be renewed fascination. I love events in small venues but, for an album like The Kick Inside, you need something bigger where loads of fans can get together. Inspired by a fiftieth anniversary panel of The Beatles’ eponymous album in 2018, I feel like there should be an event where there is a panel. I would not be at the centre but, with people in mind – such as journalist Laura Snapes (who I will quote soon enough), Kate Bush News and some mega fans of her work – and an opportunity to combine this with a listening party and musicians performing songs from The Kick Inside and providing their own stamp, it would be a wonderful evening. I think that somewhere as big as Alexandra Palace would be too expensive. This was a venue I think Kate Bush was scouting for potential live work. I can’t remember if it was for The Tour of Life in 1979 or 2014 for Before the Dawn, but she did consider this for performance. Even if the venue does not connect with The Kick Inside, it would be a great location. However, it may be too pricey. Union Chapel or The Roundhouse are alternative London venues. In terms of demand, you know that the fiftieth of Hounds of Love will get people flocking in. However, for a less popular album, is there going to be that demand? I feel, if there was a packed night where artists performed, there was a playback, discussion and some special guests, then it would make it worthwhile. In terms of those who I would love to involve, they include Gered Mankowitz (who photograpohed Bush between 1978 and 1979), Andrew Powell (who produced The Kick Inside), Duncan Mackay and David Paton (who played on the album) and family. Paddy Bush played on the album and John Carder Bush would be amazing to talk to!
think we will see something huge for Hounds of Love’s fiftieth, but that is a whole decade away now! The Kick Inside turns fifty in just over two years, but there is a lot to plan. It is going to be expensive getting a venue and people together. Also, it is asking a lot for people to brave a cold February night to go to an event, so it has to be something worth the trip! We can’t let such a huge anniversary go by with some articles and podcasts – as great as that would be. There are a couple of features/reviews that I want to source. To show why the album is so special and it deserves celebration on its fiftieth anniversary. Stereogum dived into The Kick Inside on its fortieth anniversary in February 2018. An album that helped change music forever:
“Released when Bush was 19 in 1978, it included songs she had written as early as age 13 and introduced the world into Bush’s wild imagination. Arriving in a year otherwise dominated by disco and punk (“Wuthering Heights” replaced Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” as the UK’s #1 single) this imagination felt “strangely out of time” and singular. The album’s focus on female sexuality, its use of voice as an instrument, and Bush’s unique storytelling techniques -- particularly her exciting use of fluid narrative identity, in which she changes identities and narrative point of view with every song -- created a new, unprecedented model for women in music. The Kick Inside (referred to as TKI from now on) made the world a safer place not just for women musicians but also for freaks and outcasts everywhere, and its anniversary is well worth celebrating.
Beginning with its title, which describes the sensation a pregnant woman feels as her fetus kicks, TKI is an album about bodies: the way they move (“Moving,” “Kite”), the desires they express (“The Man With the Child in His Eyes, ”“Feel It,” “L’Amour Looks Something Like You”), the way they both die and generate new life (“Room for the Life,” “The Kick Inside,”), and the way they sometimes return to haunt their lovers (“Wuthering Heights”). The album opener, “Moving,” invites listeners to move in order to free their minds: “As long as you're not afraid to feel… Don't think it over, it always takes you over/And sets your spirit dancing.” The importance of movement and the body is crucial to TKI, especially because Bush herself trained in dance prior to its release and performed elaborate, endearingly earnest dance routines in her performances and videos. Bodies and movement are an unusual focus for any album, much more so from one by a teenage British girl in 1978.
TKI is also revolutionary because it establishes Bush’s narrative style as fluid and multiple; her songs are short stories each written from a different narrator’s perspective rather than from her own point of view. This writing style stands in stark contrast to the traditionally personal style of music focusing on love and heartbreak that continues to dominate the charts. “I often find myself inspired by unusual, distorted, weird subjects, as opposed to things that are straightforward. It's a reflection of me, my liking for weirdness,” she said in 1980. Unlike the majority of pop/rock artists, The “I” in Bush’s music is rarely Bush. Her songs are not confessional, but are rather short stories told from the points of views of a diverse range of narrators. From Bush’s songs, we can know about themes that interest her, but Kate Bush herself rarely speaks in her work; her narrators, who occupy multiple genders, races, and historical times, do instead. This is a deeply radical break from traditional “confessional “ songwriting, especially for women up to that point. Consider that the most acclaimed female musician of the time, and probably of all time, Joni Mitchell, is most-lauded for her confessional album, Blue.
“That's what all art's about -- a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't in real life,” Bush said, explaining her writing technique. “Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really -- to do something that's just not possible.” As a result, Bush’s ever-changing but always unusual topics on this and all her albums enraptured many outcasts, weirdos, and freaks, and created space to, as she sang on her later album The Dreaming’s “Leave it Open,” “let the weirdness in” to popular music. Rufus Wainwright summed up her appeal for outsiders when he said, “She connects so well with a gay audience because she is so removed from the real world. She is one of the only artists who makes it appear better to be on the outside than on the inside.”
The song that perhaps best captures what makes TKI revolutionary is its title track, which merges all the aforementioned topics: use of voice as instrument, feminine agency, and Bush’s fluid, narrative-story writing technique on unusual topics. “The Kick Inside” is based on the English folktale “The Ballad of Lucy Wan,” in which a brother impregnates and then decapitates his sister. Bush’s take on the story is sneakily radical, especially from a feminist perspective. In the folktale, the sister only speaks briefly before her brother kills her, but Bush rewrites the story from the sister’s point of view, literally giving voice to a history of women silenced by male violence, and changes the story so that the sister actively chooses her own death instead of being her brother’s victim. Bush said in 1978, “The sister becomes pregnant by her brother. And because it is so taboo and unheard of, she kills herself...The actual song is in fact the suicide note.” While the death is still tragic, the fact that Bush re-envisions a violent narrative passed down through centuries of patriarchal generations from a woman’s point-of-view and places the story’s narrative action in the woman’s hands is a subversive act.
One might say that this act of feminist re-visioning parallels the narrative of Bush’s own career. Instead of drawing from normalized, “feminine” confessional-based musical forms, she created odd, polarizing sounds with her voice to tell stories of “Strange Phenomena”, and later took complete sonic control over her work as a producer and multi-instrumentalist in a still-predominantly male-dominated industry where women are often denied agency or forced to compete with one another (Britney vs. Christina, anyone?). Bush co-produced 1980’s Never For Ever, which was the UK’s first #1 album by a British female solo artist, and started producing her work completely on her own for the rest of her career starting with her 1982 masterpiece The Dreaming. Over the course of her career she has continued to break records: in 2014, she became the only artist besides the Beatles and Elvis Presley to have had eight albums simultaneously on the UK’s top 40 chart, and her 2014 Before the Dawn live shows -- her first live performances since 1979 -- sold out in minutes.
Perhaps most importantly, beginning with The Kick Inside she has inspired a wide array of artists to “let the weirdness in.” Lady Gaga covered Bush’s duet with Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Give Up,” because she wanted to “make something that young people would hear and learn something about Kate Bush”, and her theatricality has its roots in Bush’s so-bizarre-they’re-brilliant live performances. Björk frequently cites Bush as a pivotal influence on her musical “form”, saying "I remember being underneath my duvet at the age of 12, fantasising about Kate Bush," and even sent Bush of a demo of herself covering Bush’s “Moving” in 1989. Lorde played “Running Up That Hill” before the shows on her Melodrama tour, and Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan said of Bush, “As an artist myself, [she’s] helped me to not be frightened to put my vulnerability as a woman [in my work] and in that, be powerful.” Bush’s influence is also felt in hip-hop, especially due to her early use of sampling, best seen in her sampling of the Gregorian chanting from Werner Herzog’s film Nosfertu The Vampyre in Hounds Of Love’s “Hello Earth.” One of her biggest champions is OutKast’s Big Boi, who has repeatedly called her “my favorite artist of all time,” and Tricky from Massive Attack said of Bush’s song “Breathing,” which features the line “breathing my mother in,”: “I’m a kid from a council flat, I’m a mixed-raced guy...totally different life to Kate Bush, but that lyric, ‘breathing my mother in,’ my whole career’s based on that.” Even Chris Martin “admitted” that Coldplay’s “Speed Of Sound” “was developed after the band had listened to Kate Bush”.
Before getting to a conclusion, I want to bring in parts of Laura Snapes’s 2019 review/retrospective for Pitchfork. Perhaps one of the most female albums ever released, you can read other features that take us inside the making of The Kick Inside. It always lows me away that Kate Bush, aged nineteen when the album was released, was writing in such a mature way. Much more fascinating, insightful and fearless than so many of her peers. We do not discuss the influence of this album enough, in terms of how it empowered and ignited generations of artists that followed:
“That Kate Bush named her debut album The Kick Inside might make it seem like her music is the product of a maternal wellspring. Women artists likening their work to their children is one culturally accepted way for them to discuss creativity; it implies a reassuring process of nurture. Another is as a bolt from the blue, a divine phenomenon which they just happened to catch and transmit to a deserving audience; no need for fear of a female genius here. But Bush’s debut, released when she was 19, says “Up yours” to all that.
Yes, the song “The Kick Inside” is about childbearing, but the young woman is pregnant by her brother and on the cusp of suicide to spare their family from shame. Subverting the folk song “Lucy Wan” (the brother kills his sister in the original), it shows the depths of Bush’s studies and her everlasting curiosity for how far desire can drive a person. She was signed at 16 but her debut took four years to make, during which she engaged multiple teachers in a process of spiritual and physical transformation. She pays tribute to their lessons alongside rhapsodies on unexplained phenomena, delirious expressions of lust, and declarations of earthbound defiance. Rather than feminine function or freak accident, these are the cornerstones of creativity, she suggested: mentorship and openness, but also the self-assurance to withstand those forces. Her purpose was as strong as any of them.
Besides, Bush had always felt that she had male musical urges, drawing distinctions between herself and the female songwriters of the 1960s. “That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical,” Bush said of Carole King and co. in 1978, “but it doesn’t push it on you, and most male music—not all of it, but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It’s like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall and that’s what I’d like my music to do. I’d like my music to intrude.” (Evidently, she had not been listening to enough Laura Nyro.) That reasoning underpinned Bush’s first battle with EMI, who wanted to release the romp “James and the Cold Gun” as her first single. Bush knew it had to be the randy metaphysical torch song “Wuthering Heights,” and she was right: It knocked ABBA off the UK No. 1 spot. She soon intruded on British life to the degree that she was subject to unkind TV parodies.
What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her.
And if there is trepidation in the arrangement of “The Man With the Child in His Eyes,” it reflects other people’s anxieties about its depicted relationship with an older man: Will he take advantage, let her down? This is the other teenage recording, her voice a little higher, less powerfully exuberant, but disarmingly confident. Her serene, steady note in the chorus—“Oooooh, he’s here again”—lays waste to the faithless. And whether he is real, and whether he loves her, is immaterial: “I just took a trip on my love for him,” she sings, empowered, again, by her desire. There’s not a fearful note on The Kick Inside, and yet there is still room for childish wonder: Just because Bush appeared emotionally and musically sophisticated beyond her years didn’t mean denying them.
“Kite” unravels like a children’s story: First she wants to fly up high, away from cruel period pains (“Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o”) and teenage self-consciousness (“all these mirror windows”) but no sooner is she up than she wants to return to real life. It is a wacky hormone bomb of a song, prancing along on toybox cod reggae and the enervating rat-a-tat-tat energy that sustained parodies of Bush’s uninhibited style; still, more fool anyone who sneers instead of reveling in the pure, piercing sensation of her crowing “dia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-mond!” as if giving every facet its own gleaming syllable.
The Kick Inside was Bush’s first, the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. Despite her links to the 1970s’ ancien régime, she recognized the potential to pounce on synapses shocked into action by punk, and eschewed its nihilism to begin building something longer lasting. It is ornate music made in austere times, but unlike the pop sybarites to follow in the next decade, flaunting their wealth while Britain crumbled, Bush spun hers not from material trappings but the infinitely renewable resources of intellect and instinct: Her joyous debut measures the fullness of a woman’s life by what’s in her head”.
There is so much to discuss and dissect. I think the biggest pull will be finding artists who are inspired by the album. Maybe few directly as influenced compared to albums like The Dreaming, Hounds of Love or The Sensual World (I know Charli xcx is a fan of this album), that will be a challenge, as The Kick Inside is not as referenced as other albums from Kate Bush. However, there is a hunger from fans. There has not been a massive gathering of any significant size since 2014’s Before the Dawn. There might never be another Kate Bush concert and fan conventions are not really a thing in music anymore. I do think it is a perfect opportunity to go beyond The Kick Inside and talk about Kate Bush’s influence now. What’s to say massive artists like Charli xcx or Björk would object? Having them as part of the night would be amazing. Starting out with a discussion about Wuthering Heights, its video and the Top of the Pops appearance. Then listening to the album in full. A panel where there would be a couple of breaks for watching videos and live performances, before a couple of special guests (pre-recorded words from Kate Bush would be incredible!), before a final live performance would end a wonderful celebration. It will cost thousands of pounds to book a venue and bring it all together, so I am thinking a crowd-funding campaign would be needed. Fans could get reward for donating. Kate Bush’s influence is as strong today as it has ever been. We can trace it all back to her debut album, released on 17th February, 1978. No artist who cites Kate Bush as an inspiration can overlook The Kick Inside. To me, it is one of the most influential albums…
EVER released.