FEATURE:
Kate Bush’s Never for Ever at Forty-Five
a few anniversary features about Kate Bush’s Never for Ever where there are debates around the exact release date. I have seen some say it is 5th September, 1980. Others 7th September. I am pretty sure it is 8th September, but it is frustrating that there is not that clarity regarding the exact release date! We shall say 8th September, 1980 for the purpose of these features. Turning forty-five soon, I will come to a couple of promotional interviews/features from 1980. It is amazing to think how underrated this album is. Consider the brilliance of singles like Babooshka and Breathing. How phenomenal the album is and how different it is to anything else that was released in 1980. Never for Ever was the first-ever album by a British female solo artist to top the U.K. album chart, as well as being the first album by any female solo artist to enter the chart at number one. It is such an important album. Before getting to a couple of interviews, I want to start out with some features that look inside the album. I am going to start out with The Quietus and their fortieth anniversary feature from 2020. They argued that, whilst it is not her most celebrated, it might be her most pivotal. I would agree with that:
“Listen now and you can still hear that fundamental shift Bush spoke of, the birth of some new, peculiar magic. It starts with ‘Babooshka’, in which a paranoid wife impersonates a younger woman to test her husband’s roving eye, and ends up destroying her marriage. It’s a wonderfully wicked premise: Bush based it on the cross-dressing, happy-ever-after hijinks of the traditional English folk ditty ‘Sovay’, but her revamp is less a cheeky romp than a surreal, bitter farce, pitched somewhere between Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Tales Of The Unexpected. Most startling, though, is the way it sounds, like unearthly Russian folk music: there’s something both archaic and futuristic about its echoey keys, eerie synths and the ethereal strings of her brother Paddy’s balalaika, as uncanny as a Cossack band playing on the Mir space station. Bush sings like two different people, flitting from coy trills to operatic shrieks, and eventually her world comes crashing down in a crescendo of squalling guitars and the Fairlight’s splintering glass.
Then, before the debris has cleared, she drifts into the wispy beauty of ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’, which recounts how Frederic Delius’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby, took down his idol’s compositions from dictation after he was waylaid by syphilis. All the same, if “moody old man” Delius was difficult, there’s no rancour in its shimmering reverie of hazy sitar and bubbling percussion: it hums with the heady buzz of the olde British countryside, and Bush’s vocal has the crisp, bucolic freshness of dandelion and burdock. Both tracks size up the album’s big themes – the push-and-pull of thorny relationships, the constant churn of emotions – but one bursts into thunder, and the other floats on the breeze.
Never For Ever is a starting point, not a zenith, and those miraculous opening six minutes aren’t as groundbreaking as her later innovations. But it is, I’d argue, the first of her LPs that’s genuinely experimental. Paddy’s greater involvement brought weird new instruments – zithers, kotos, musical saws – although Peter Gabriel introduced Bush to the Fairlight, the sonic equivalent of a Jedi being handed their first lightsaber; there were only three in the UK, and while she wouldn’t master it until later, her instant obsession speaks to how determined she was to bend her ornate style into bizarre new shapes. ‘All We Ever Look For’, her happy-go-lucky reflection on knotty parent-child relationships, mutates into several different forms by itself: it jumps between lurching, whistling synths, the koto’s fluttering strings, and a mishmash of Foley-style noises including chirping birds and hurried footsteps. “The whims that we’re weeping for/ Our parents would be beaten for,” sings Bush over its jaunty, oddball din, like the ringmaster at a baroque big top”.
I am going to come to this PROG article that talked about the diversity of the album. How it was this incredible album that was beyond a traditional Pop album. In terms of what Kate Bush was writing about. More unusual and original than what was around her:
“It was her 70s swansong, which opened up all manner of possibilities for her 80s explosion. Much as 1979’s The Tour Of Life remains legendary in the collective memory/imagination, afterwards Kate Bush avoided live concerts until her triumphant return with the Before The Dawn shows some 35 years later. She had been uncomfortable with EMI’s visual emphasis on her sexuality, and felt she’d been rushed on her previous album, Lionheart.
So after the Christmas 1979 TV special, where she’d premiered some of these Never For Ever songs, she began to ease away from promotion (thus acquiring priceless mystique) and took control, with her family, of her business affairs. In the studio, she became an auteur. The success of Never For Ever was therefore a crucial confidence boost, lighting the pathways for her subsequent transcendent work.
It was the first album by a British female solo artist to top the UK album chart (straight in at No.1), and the first by any female solo artist that wasn’t a compilation. She had a lot more up her skirt than the cats, bats and butterflies pictured on the sleeve, but here was where her swans truly took flight.
BABOOSHKA
A more bitter than sweet love story, coming from somewhere between Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac and Rupert Holmes’ Escape (The Pina Colada Song). Bush told Australian TV that the wife of the tale tests her husband’s loyalty by sending him “scented letters” from a young temptress, but he becomes so besotted with the fictitious creature she’s dreamed up that their relationship is ruined. (Nowadays they’d just Snapchat each other.)
The traditional English folk song Sovay, involving a woman in disguise, was another inspiration, having fascinated Kate since childhood. In the video, she played the wife, while the double bass symbolised the man (John Giblin’s fretless bass was a key element of the track). The sound of glass breaking at the end (she smashed up crockery at Abbey Road, later apologising with chocolates to the studio’s kitchen staff) was an early use of a sample made on the spanking new Fairlight CMI synth to which Peter Gabriel had introduced her. (There were only three in the UK at the time.)
The song became a UK Top Five hit, and thus her biggest since Wuthering Heights. Kate’s admitted that she didn’t realise that ‘babushka’ is the Russian word for grandmother, and many shared her misapprehension that the word signified a series of dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. ‘Matryoshka’, the technically correct phrase for that, wouldn’t have scanned or been half as catchy.
ARMY DREAMERS
This insistent waltz decries the effects of war, centring on a mother, rattled
by guilt as she grieves for the loss of her son who was killed on military duty. She wonders if he could’ve been a rock star or a politician, if she’d been able to afford him a guitar or ‘a proper education’. Weirdly, the single was longer than the album track (which fades). Insanely, it was banned by the BBC during the 1991 Gulf War. Bush rocked camouflage gear in the video. The song’s been covered in numerous languages, from Hebrew to Finnish.
“I wanted the mother to be a very simple woman who’s obviously got a lot of work to do,” she told Flexipop! at the time. “She’s full of remorse but has to carry on, living in a dream. Most of us live in a dream.” She also told interviewers that it wasn’t “specifically” about Ireland. “I’m not slagging off the Army,” she said to ZigZag’s Kris Needs. “It’s just so sad that there are kids who have no O-levels and nothing to do but become soldiers, and it’s not really what they want. That’s what frightens me.”
BREATHING
An eerie, thoroughly prog trip back to the womb was a curious choice as the first single and teaser for a new project (it stalled at No.16), but uncompromisingly confirmed that Bush was now taking a firmer hand in decision making. Again her telly watching played a part as she cited a documentary she’d seen on the perils of nuclear fallout (fragments of spoken word describing the flash from a nuclear bomb can be heard). It’s interwoven with fears that the mother’s smoking may also damage the foetus (as if the kid didn’t have enough to worry about, with the apocalypse and all). No wonder Kate, in the video, wants to get out of that rather low-budget plastic bubble. ‘We’re all going to die!’ cries a background voice.
Upon release, in the fan club letter, she called it “a warning and plea from a future spirit to try and save mankind and his planet from irretrievable destruction”. She told ZigZag it was “the best thing I’ve ever written, the best thing I’ve ever produced – my little symphony”, while Smash Hits elicited the quote, “We’re all innocent. None of us deserve to be blown up.”
Roy Harper had a backing vocals credit. Talking to Melody Maker’s Colin Irwin, Bush said, “When I heard Pink Floyd’s The Wall I thought there’s no point in writing songs any more because they had said it all. When something really gets you, hits your creative centre, it stops you creating… After a couple of weeks I realised that [they] hadn’t done everything […] Breathing was definitely inspired by the whole vibe I got from hearing that album, especially the third side. There’s something about Floyd that’s pretty atomic anyway”.
I think I might move to the interviews now. However, I would advise you read this fascinating article that provides some different perspectives and angles that highlight the importance of Never for Ever. I think it may be Kate Bush’s most underrated albums. In the second anniversary feature for Never for Ever, I shall go deeper with the production and the finer details. In September 1980, the Evening Standard ran an interview with Kate Bush. It is interesting reading the print interviews that came out around the release of Never for Ever. Whilst few are insightful or anything beyond empty and somewhat inane, it is beneficial providing this sort of context. Promotion was a big part of the album process. Trying to sell it to people. It is a shame a lot of the interviews are not better:
“KATE BUSH would be less than human if she did not sometimes marvel at the attention she has received over the last three years.
She says: "Sometimes I see myself in the paper and it's hard to associate with the name Kate Bush. She is this well-known person who has almost become like a brand name like Maxwell House coffee or something. Meanwhile, I'm just working on my music and my life."
Somehow she remains an awkward personality to categorize. One newspaper has described her as Britain's top pop sexpot while a new, unauthorized biography about her life opted for the title Suburban Princess.
Even now she comes over in person as part pop star and part ordinary girl from East Welling in Kent, firmly in the south London commuter belt, while her conversation ranges between traditional pop world cliches to perceptive comment.
Her guilelessness and insistence on being eager to please almost offers a challenge to find some kind of hidden dark secret to her life. However, nothing rarely emerges.
"I often think people are looking for something in my life that they can't find," she comments. "A number of performers, I suppose, come from working-class families or their parents were divorced, perhaps that gives them the urge to go out and struggle for something.
"But basically I have always had a normal, very happy life with my family. I never went out and beat up old ladies or became an alcholic at school.
"I think the public have become conditioned to want to know who is sleeping with who, or how many marriages somebody has had, but as far as I'm concerned it's totally irrelevant. I'm really very normal and there is nothing sensational to uncover. I wouldn't talk about some private things to my mother so why should I to anybody else."
Nevertheless one still feels impelled to broach the subject of sex, especially as many of her songs seem to incorporate underlying sexual themes.
According to Kate: "I think music and love are very similar. They're both natural energies, they have the same kind of all-embracing freedom, the elation.
"The communication of music if very like making love. If you play a piano, for example, you're so united it's really a beautiful thing."
Now 22-years-old, the singer has accomplished almost everything the pop world has to offer except in the U.S.A. as yet. She has performed at the Palladium, made frequent appearances in the charts, and been given almost every major award available.
POWER PLAY
A new album due out next week has been held back for three months by EMI since they regard it with such importance that they did not want it's appearance to clash with other major releases this year by Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones.
When we arranged to meet this week one could feel the power-play of the record business grinding into action as a car whisked one off to her hotel to meet the singer on her return from a television appearance in Germany.
While she remarks that she has felt more grown up of late, she has always appeared untouched by the pressures and difficulties that can accompany fame and fortune.
"I can see why people do have nervous breakdowns and so on, but it all depends on the person rather than what you happen to be doing.
"Sometimes I have felt that I'm losing control and that it's all running away with me, but all I have to do then is say to myself 'well leave then, give it up' and I know I never would because my life is really music and I love it so much.
"I would like to survive like people like Cliff Richard or Paul McCartney. If you look at them they're so strong and solid and happy, they'll be able to go on for as long again as they have already. They're happy because they're doing exactly what they want."
One particular buffer against the outside world would seem to be the Bush family. Her father, a former family doctor, and her three [three?] brothers are involved in different levels of her career.
FAMILY AFFAIR
One brother, Paddy, plays an assortment of instruments on her new album, while Novercia Ltd., the company that has been formed to look after her interests, has no fewer then five Bush family members as directors.
"I'm lucky to have a family I love who can give me advice when I need it. I like to think of myself as director of the force, but I'm not a business woman, for example, and when it comes to legal jargon I need some help.
"They're obviously people I trust and not just motivated by money, because if they wanted some, I'd give it to them anyway.
"Right at the beginning they weren't that involved, though they were always interested. It's just been something that's evolved as there has become a need for it.
"My parents weren't keen on me giving up school at the beginning to go into singing and dancing, but once they saw I was serious about it they gave support.
"I was quite stubborn about my decision and in the end they realised it was for the best”.
Before wrapping up, I want to actually source a weeklong diary Kate Bush wrote for teen magazine, Flexipop, around the release of Never for Ever. It is a really interesting piece where we are getting this personal account from Bush and what her week consists of. Perhaps more useful and illuminating than a lot of the interviews from that year:
“Friday
One hell of a day. I get up at about half ten. I don't have breakfast--I never do. Just a cup of tea. The first thing on the agenda is an interview with Paul Gambaccini. Before I leave I read my post, which is mostly business. Most other mail goes to my fan club, which is really well organized now. Fantastic. My driver picks me up at about noon. We go to a small studio in Soho. I can't drive. Apart from my driver I go everywhere unaccompanied. The reason I use the driver now is that it was getting ridiculous with cabs, it really was. It's so much easier now, it's just wonderful. [Actually Kate did obtain a drivers license, after one failure, in 1976.]
About three o'clock we go from Soho to Round Table at the Beeb, which Gambaccini also does. [This is a radio programme in which celebrity musicians and critics sit around to listen to and review new records.] We get there about four-thirty. A couple of kids outside--one who's always there every time I go to the BBC. His name is Keith. Must be in his early twenties. He always shows me things I've never seen before, like posters out of record shops. Old magazines. A picture of Pink Floyd before Gilmour was in it--I went WOW. I was really surprised, you know--they were all autographed and everything. I sign a few things, and then go in.
I don't have a go at anyone on the show. There's never any reason to do that. After, I have to go down to Abbey Road studios to re-mix the new single. We get there at about eight-fifteen. About this time I have my first bite to eat of the day--a toasted sandwich and chips. And of course, lots of cups of tea. The only way I can tell if I need food is when I feel sick. I smoke more at night, but I still usually get through less than twenty a day. John Player Special at the moment. We're still at it at three a.m. and I feel fine, but the engineer wants to call it a day. He's a great engineer, and I know he can finish it tonight, so I talk him into it. Come seven a.m. I'm not exactly perky, but I'm still not at all tired. I'm very much a nocturnal creature. My driver picks me up and I get to bed about seven-thirty a.m.
Saturday
I live alone--in southeast London--and today I don't get up until late: perhaps one or two p.m. A friend of mine from the Hare Krishna temple rang me up about eight-thirty, but I was too tired to natter much. About three o'clock I go over to my parents'--they live twenty minutes' drive away, in Kent. I'm doing a TV show in Germany on Tuesday [the programme was RockPop, and the taping was in mid-September, 1980] and my Mum's got some clothes to lend me. I'm going to do two numbers for the show. Army Dreamers is one, and I want to dress up as a cleaning woman. My mother lends me a headscarf, an old apron, and lots of my old jumble clothes. The song is about a mother who lost her son overseas. It doesn't matter how he died, but he didn't die in action--it was an accident. I wanted the mother to be a very simple woman who's obviously got a lot of work to do. She's full of remorse, but he has to carry on, living in a dream. Most of us live in a dream
I stay round my parents for a few hours--after all, you can't just go round, take all the clothes you want and rush off--drink lots of tea and eat chocolate eclairs and sandwiches, the sort of things that mothers like to fill you up with. I feel absolutely delightful after that, and I go back to start work on my routines for Tuesday.
What I do is have a little cassette machine with the mixes I'm going to work on, and I go into my back room where I have four mirrors propped up against the wall, and I rehearse in front of them. It's all very well to work out the routine for Army Dreamers, but the two dancers I work with [Stewart Avon-Arnold and Gary Hurst] are busy--one's in Godspell and one's in France. So I needed people who would be able to perform. Paddy, my brother, he does pretty well. And the guys from the band, who are natural performers anyway. I am pretty wiped out still, and I don't get as much done as I could have. After working out for a while I don't feel too good, so I have a bath and try some more. I work out for two or three hours, then cook a meal for myself.
I'm not a bad cook. I love making bread. It's such a wonderful thing to do. So I watch the telly--the late-night movie: guys having their eyes pulled out, or something really awful. Paddy has come back by now, so we have a long chat and I get to bed about three o'clock. [Apparently Kate was still sharing the family's Lewisham building of flats with her two brothers. She has since moved to a house of her own, situated nearer her parents's home in Kent, and she uses a third building as a private dance studio.]
Sunday
Sunday is definitely the day that I have to physically work out. When I get up I can hardly stand up. My calves are beginning to feel sore from the night before.
Again, I get up around early afternoon. I don't bother buying Sunday newspapers--I don't read newspapers much at all, though if there's one around I'll read it. I don't read books very much either. I have a big guilt thing about that--I'm missing out so much, I read fact rather than fiction, usually when I'm on holiday. I tend to read religious things or theories on the universe. [This sounds like an early reference to Stephen Hawking, whose book, Kate has since explained, partially inspired her 1989 recording, Deeper Understanding. Another example of the long gestation periods typical of Kate's work.] I love Don Martin (of Mad magazine), he cheers me up. And if there's a Beano around, I've just got to look at it. When I was a kid that was really my thing. The illustrations are really great.
I spend all the day working out the routine for Babooshka. All Sunday is working out--dancing and miming. For miming you have to get the inflexions exactly right. I don't do that in front of mirrors, though. I hate watching myself sing. It's really weird. I also do more work on Army Dreamers. Gary, the dancer who's in Godspell, rings me up--and I've been sending out messages for him to ring me all day. We have this weird telepathic thing with the telephone. Whenever I want him to ring and whenever he wants me to ring him I get these 'messages'. So he rings up and says, 'I've been getting these messages all day, what's the matter?' I tell him that we've been trying to work out these routines, and quite honestly it would be useful to know what he thought of them. He says he wants to see me anyway, so he comes around at about midnight. He gets home at about five or six in the morning. I have a bath and go to bed.
Monday
I have to get up early because the single is being cut. I have to be at Abbey Road at two o'clock, and while I do the cut, the band go off to get their army gear for Army Dreamers. Then we all go over to my parents' to rehearse--there's no room for full-scale rehearsal in my flat. We do it in the garden. That song is pretty well tied up by the evening, so I go home. I generally get stuff ready for the trip. I don't take huge amounts of stuff with me, just hand luggage. Waiting for luggage at the terminal roundabouts is such a drag. Again, I get to bed around four a.m.
Tuesday
The car for the airport leaves at eight-fifteen, so I'm pretty wiped out. No one hassles me at the airport. A few years ago there used to be loads of photographers, but they don't bother me anymore. It makes things a lot easier, not having to walk up a corridor with everyone going 'OOOH LOOK'.
We arrive at about half one, and go straight to the TV station. I'm not very successful in Germany, and it's a big market, so it's an important show for me. Problems straight away. The stage has three tiers, which are going to get in the way. It has a big glass section they want me to work on--I work ninety-nine per cent of the time in bare feet, and there's this huge chunk of broken glass in the middle. I say, 'no way, you'll have to get rid of it'. It takes them half an hour to take it apart, and then I notice all these huge staples sticking out of it, so I ask this guy to pull them out.
The show starts at about eight--I fill in the time doing my make-up, sewing up little bits and pieces of my costumes that are falling to bits. I like to do that myself, it saves time. I'm so pleased when the show is over, and it went well. We go for a lovely meal courtesy of the record company. Things like that normally aren't lovely but I enjoyed this a lot--really nice. Leave the restaurant about one, go to the hotel, have a FANTASTIC bath and go to bed about three.
Wednesday
We have to be ready downstairs by half eight, and go straight to the airport. Flying doesn't bother me too much--only when I fly a lot in a short space of time, because then the odds seem to get higher. I try to be philosophical about it--once you're in the plane there's not too much to be done. Arrive in London later than morning. Do an interview at the Heathrow Hotel, and have some photos taken. Then I go home and feel wiped out again, so over to my parents' to sit in the sun. I recuperate, and go home again. I slob around, clean the flat up--it's in awful shape...I feed the cats, Zoodle and Pyewacket. Even when I'm that tired, I still don't get to bed till three or four. I spend a lot of time on the phone.
Thursday
Radio all day. I was meant to start with Luxembourg, but they pulled out, so I go straight to Capital. [Capital Radio is the independent station that broke Kate in 1977 by playing Wuthering Heights months before its official release date.] There for three, a very short chat. Then I do Radio One, then hang around a bit to do Brian Matthews on Radio Two. I leave about nine, and go home. On the way I pick up a Chinese takeaway. I don't need a bodyguard or anything for stuff like that. If people do recognize me they're not too likely to smother me in kisses or anything. Get home about ten, look through some photos with my brother [this would be John Carder Bush], and natter about odd bits of business. If I've got nothing to do I have a quick tinkle on the piano, which I try to get to all the time. Bed as usual three a.m.
Kate Bush (1980)”.
I am going to end things there. On 8th September, it will be forty-five years since Never for Ever was released. This record-setting third studio album from Kate Bush, I do hope it gets written about a lot soon. It is a terrific album that contains some of Bush’s best material. I am looking forward to writing the second anniversary feature. From 1980, Bush’s continued to layer and change her music. It would become more ambitious and change shape. In some ways, Never for Ever was that bridge between her first two albums – The Kick Inside and Lionheart of 1980 – and The Dreaming in 1982. Anyone who has not heard this stunning album needs to…
EXPERIENCE it now.