FEATURE:
Oh, Leave Me Something to Breathe
Kate Bush’s Never for Ever at Forty-Five
__________
I feel as though…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris
I have covered all of the songs on Never for Ever before. Rather than readdress them for this feature, I am going to look more at the promotion and build-up around the album and its impact. Cover a little of what I have before but, as Never for Ever turns forty-five on 8th September, I am coming back. Updating my previous features. Let’s start out with some timeline before getting to a couple of promotional interviews. Let’s take things back to June 1980. A few months before Never for Ever was released, Bush released its second single. It is one of her best-known songs:
“June 23, 1980
Babooshka is released. Because the technicians at the BBC are on strike, the video cannot be shown. Babooshka, however, is Kate's most successful single since Wuthering Heights.
Kate takes a few weeks out to rest from her exertions on the album.
August, 1980
Kate puts down the first ideas for a new album, beginning the two-year project that would produce The Dreaming [which remains to this day the single greatest piece of music of the twentieth century (OK, so this chronology was transcribed by a Kate fanatic. Surprised?)].
September 8, 1980
Never For Ever is released. Kate undertakes a very heavy promotional schedule.
September 11, 1980
The album's head is wetted at a huge party for dealers in Birmingham. Kate is meanwhile engaged in a personal appearance tour, signing albums in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester (where she kisses over 600 fans), Birmingham and London (where the queue awaiting her stretches over 100 yards outside the record shop and down Oxford Street).
September 16, 1980
The album enters the official chart at number 1. Kate is the first British solo female artist ever to reach the number 1 position on the British album charts.
September 1980
During this same month, Kate promotes the forthcoming album (Never For Ever) in Germany and France. First, in Germany, she performs the famous "Mrs. Mopp" version of Army Dreamers, one of at least three quite different visual presentations that Kate has prepared for the song, on RockPop, along with a solo performance of Babooshka. Then she visits Venice, Italy, to perform a new version of Babooshka with her dancing partner Gary Hurst for a live broadcast which also features Peter Gabriel. After that, she returns to England to film the official video for Army Dreamers. While in England she polishes the final mix of Warm and Soothing.
Army Dreamers, the third single from Never For Ever, is released.
Back in London again at the end of the month, Kate attends a concert by Stevie Wonder. The energy of the event has a profound effect on Kate, and on the following day she puts down the first full demo version of Sat In Your Lap, the key to her next album, The Dreaming”.
I wanted to use this second anniversary feature to give people an idea of the promotion and lead-up. How busy a time it was. A bit about the impact and importance of Never for Ever. Perhaps I should have written a third feature that focuses in on the songs. However, I think we can get a good sense of the album and what it is about from the interview. I have picked part from two of my favourite examples. Sound International published an interview in September 1980. Pre-Never for Ever, there was this heavy association between Kate Bush and this idea of a strange thing. An odd creature with this high voice. Never for Ever made a lot of people stand up and respect her as a songwriter. An important breakthrough:
“There is a surprising amount of variation between the different media accounts of Kate's beginnings in the 'biz' so I shall endeavor to set the record straight. First attempts to get a reaction from record companies were made by a friend of Kate's armed with n early demo of some of her songs. He met a blanket of rejection until 1975 when he played the tapes to an old friend from Cambridge by the name of Dave Gilmour. The Floydian guitarist reinforced his reputation for giving help to new acts by advising Kate to cut finished masters of her best three songs for presentation to companies. The tapes are often referred to as "demos" but after exhaustive research (I read the sleeve notes on The Kick Inside) I can reveal that he Gilmour financed recordings provided two of the tracks which were to appear on Kate's first album some two years later. They were "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" and "The Saxophone Song". I asked Kate about all this as the album has a continuity that makes the two-year "gap" surprising.
"Yes, they do fit very well on that album, don't they? Maybe there's a few reasons for that. But the thing that I notice is the difference in my voice, that's the only thing that gives it away for me. They probably fit well because Andrew (Powell) was the arranger on all the tracks. I wonder how many people would notice that because no-one comment on hearing any difference, you're the first person to mention that. No-one's commented on that before so it's very interesting."
When Gilmour took Kate into Air Studios to record "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" and "The Saxophone Song" she was 16. When Gilmour played the tapes to an EMI executive they wanted Kate. EMI treated her well from the word go, though the media (true to form) stereotyped the situation with a standard: Big company manipulates and exploits the young innocent etc, etc.
The company did not rush Kate into completing an album although she has some 100 songs already written. Instead they advised her to get a lawyer, an accountant, and advanced her L3,000. Around that time an aunt of Kate's died and left her some money. Finding herself able to forget about immediate monetary problems she went about developing various aspects of her abilities. Lindsay Kemp had an ad in Time Out offering his services as a teacher of mime and dance. Kate responded and she was soon receiving group instruction for 50p a day from the magister artis. She was fascinated by singing in a high register and worked on singer higher and higher notes. She wrote more songs.
It was two years exactly before she returned to Air Studios to record the rest of the material for her debut album The Kick Inside. Virtually the last song she wrote for the album was "Wuthering Heights" - "The Man With The Child In His Eyes", for example, had been written some five years earlier. Apart from the general supportive role her family plays, they make individual specific contributions to her music and business affairs. As well as taking care of business, J also photographs Kate. His shots can be seen on the "Babooshka" sleeve as well as on the back of her new album. Paddy has played mandolin, guitar, mandocello, panpipes, and sung back-up on her albums. Kate says that her father remains a doctor first and foremost but ... "mulls over anything with negative and legal aspects."
She undoubtedly is a very together person. My impression is that she does use her family as a sounding board and frequently takes their advice. On the other hand I think she frequently listens carefully to their advice before she goes on to do exactly what her instincts had told her in the first place! There again, she does not display any of the signs of an ego which forces her to do thing her way for the sake of it. Her satisfaction comes from being good at what she does. Obviously the fact that she produced her new album - albeit with the technicalities handled by John Kelly - is the major point of interest. Before talking her about that I asked about her relationship with Andrew Powell who produced her first two albums.
"Dave knew Andrew. I don't know how, and he thought Andrew was a very competent arranger and would be quite capable of taking care of the production side. So we went into Air Studios, I was about 15 or 16 at the time."
Was she terrified? "Yes, I was very nervous. It's a big studio. Andrew was fantastic. He was completely in control of it. I was just a schoolgirl doing my exams at the time and reeled at the prospect of someone just working on my songs. The musicians did their own thing and Andrew wrote some beautiful strings. We managed to get it to EMI and they leapt at it. Then there was the situation obviously where I was only 16, totally naive to the business and everything and EMI were wondering what to do with me.
"They could either send me out into the world with the songs I had - a 16-year old - or hang on. I was more then happy to hang on because I didn't feel that I was ready. Although I was waiting to make an album for at any minute, after about six months I realised that it was a long-term project so I stated getting on with my own things. I decided to leave school and go fully into the business. Then I got a little group and we played around in pubs. After that came the album. And Andrew, of course, because he had done so well on the earlier tracks, was the first guy we thought of.
"As soon as I started the first album, already three years had passed from the demos (sic) to the album and I obviously gathered a lot more self confidence. I was beginning to understand what I wanted in my music. The songs were obviously maturing and I was getting around and understanding the business more. Andrew did a fabulous job on the album, he really did. Even at that stage I could feel that there were areas where he was taking the music that perhaps if I had been in control, I wouldn't. That's understandable. He was the producer and therefore - he was very good and always listened to what I wanted - he would obviously plant his feelings there.
Kate helped out with some vocals on Peter Gabriel's recently acclaimed album and I presume it was through Peter that she met Larry Fast. "We managed to get Larry before he flew off and he's a fantastic guy, wow. He's wonderful. He finished off "Breathing" for us. We got to the point where there was a deadline coming up for the release of the song as a single. So far up to then we'd been working on the tracks quite generously. When we had a guitar overdub to do we'd do all the guitar tracks for the album as you logically would. As we had a deadline for "Breathing" we put aside all the other tracks and worked on the one song until it was complete. Larry came in for a day and he was wonderful. We were all gathering such and intense vibe working on the one very nuclear song. We'd been working on it until about five or six in the morning each day for about a week. It was very intense in the studio and very nuclear. It felt just like a fallout shelter."
For those unfamiliar with Studio Two at Abbey Road it is a huge studio with a high ceiling. The control room looks down from a top corner giving a false impression of being underground. Also the decor is basic and deliberately unchanged since the days when the studio's prime users were the Beatles. "Larry came in in the middle of all this nuclear intensity and he was wonderful, " said Kate. "He's put on some incredibly right animation sounds. You see, I think of synth players like that. It's probably wrong because I'm thinking just in terms of my music. I see them as such an animation thing, they seem to complete the picture so beautifully. It's like they put on the colour on the track sometimes.
"So Larry was there for a whole day just working on the one track and built up some beautiful stuff, just sort of underneath the back of the arrangement. It was such a pleasure to work with him because I've always wanted to but he's such a busy many. I really hope I can work with him again. His standards are ridiculous, I mean he works to the clock. He'd say: 'Gosh, that took me 10 minutes and it's only supposed to take two!' and gets really upset. He's such a professional and he works so hard, I think a lot of people can learn from him" (see interview, SI March '80).
Kate wanted to put together the promo film for "Breathing" - and did. It became a visual presentation of the subject matter, and showed her as the unborn child at the time of nuclear attack. "We decided to make it very abstract. I had the image of me being a baby in the womb yet not a baby because it's like a spiritual being, surrounded by water and fluid in a tank because that's what a baby does, floats around inside this beautiful place."
Keith Macmillan is the man who has been interpreting Kate's ideas and actually getting them on film for the great part of the 2 1/2 years she has been releasing records. He explained one or two problems to her with this particular idea. Like she might drown. Also no insurance company would underwrite the risk. Kate has total faith in Macmillan and was happy to leave it with him to come up with an idea for overcoming the problems.
"He went away, he's got fantastic guys working with him who get all the props together. So he came up with he idea of inflatables which when filmed through would give a watery effect. So I would be inside one which would be inside maybe one or two others.
"Then we had a problem with the costume because an embryo is of course naked but we couldn't make it sexual because of the innocence and sincerity of the thing. And we had a few problems with that because it is very difficult to look clothed but not clothed. Because we were working with inflatables which were basically just plastic we decided to use the same material which would be pretty cool for an embryo because it would just be flesh that was amongst all the other. So we just wrapped polythene all around me and then the whole thing became this sort of transient stuff that wasn't either costume or inflatables. The next thing with the video was to get from the break into the end where the baby has come out of the womb. Because of the fallout the first thing that would happen is that the baby would be put straight into a protective suit, probably sprinkled with Fuller's earth. [??? Does anyone know what this is?]
"Again we tried to do that in an abstract way so that I would burst out of the bubble and land somewhere outside that was very weird. Then the two guys with the suns - the anti-nuclear sign - hand me the fallout suit as the symbolism of being in the outside world full of fallout. The end was getting as many people as I could in water - again water because that was the whole visual them - and say: 'What are we going to do without clean air to breathe?'
"It took us two days of filming, one to do the studio lot and one to do the end sequence with all our friends in the water and for the nice quiet scene at the end. It was really quite an epic compared with all the other videos I've done. It wasn't that extravagant or expensive, not that long and not that anything. But as I said it felt so important because that one song for me - and quite a few people who are close - was like a mini-symphony or something. So everything had to go into it even if it wasn't going to be a big hit and that's how we felt about it. OK, people say: 'It didn't get into the top five.'
"But I'm so pleased with how it went because for the subject matter I was dealing with, you know my previous associations with the public: that I'm a very harmless unpolitical songwriter."
"Singing is such an important thing for me. I have such a strange thing about it, probably like every other artist. I really often feel that I can't sing. I know I can sing but when I hear the track back it's not what I want, it's just not. I don't get paranoid but I do get very, very worried about it because it's so important to me that I express the perfect emotion of the word because they are telling a story, and unless I feel that I fulfil the character perfectly, I should get someone else to sing it. Especially as people have been kind enough to give me awards as a female singer that I have to try so hard to make it good for them.
"I think maybe I should relax a bit more about it, I am getting a bit paranoid. I love singing, it's just that when I hear it back on tape it is never quite perfect enough for me. But I'm sure you understand that. So many artists, like Eric Clapton, he probably thinks his solos could be better. He probably wouldn't say it but I'm sure that he feels that. But I wouldn't stop singing because I love it. All I need is for someone to say: 'That's great.' And then I can go: 'Really?' Then I feel all right, especially in the studio”.
The second promotional interview for Never for Ever was by Mike Nicholls for Record Mirror. He noted how Kate Bush “just spent six months producing a new collection of ten songs. Of these, four were recorded beforehand and another five already written before her long sojourn at Abbey Road Studios”. There is one track missing – as Never for Ever has eleven tracks -, but it does show how she was afforded more time to record and prepare news songs. 1978’s Lionheart came nine months after her debut, The Kick Inside. Bush had only the opportunity to write three new songs for that album:
“Since our last rendezvous at the beginning of the year, I'd heard that her father and brothers, ostensibly the greatest influences in her family-orientated life, were great believers in the Russian "magician" George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Thinking it might assist our dialogue, I spent some time before the interview swotting up on the guy, who in the early part of this century ran a school for wealthy mystics, that preached stuff like "We had better torture our own spirit than suffer the inanities of calm," and "Any unusual effort has the effect of shaking the mind awake."
Now there seems to be a certain amout of overlap between these observations and Kate's remarks about "shocks of emotion", but, perhaps fortunately for your good selves, she didn't seem into having a protracted natter about G. I. Gurdjieff (classic initials, what?)
Besides, it wouldn't entirely have suited the circumstances of our discourse. On a marginally sunny day, it seemed absurd to be cooped up inside some dusty office at EMI, particularly when outside their West One premises there is a little park. Now you might think that in talking to Kate Busdh in central London one runs the risk of attracting inquisitive stares from God knows how many passersby--especially when, during a photo-session on the same piece of greenery last year, Cliff Richard was besieged by scores of drooling school-kids.
But rate-payers (no quips about EMI's ability to retain this status, thank you very much) are allocated a key to the gardens, so Kate and I spent a chatty couple of hours locked within these leavy confines, and I was too much a gentleman to throw away the key.
Since the interview was for promotional purposes, it was hardly surprising that she was happiest talking about the new songs. And because these are the latest instalment of her life, questions were answered conscientiously and, of course, enthusiastically. With promotion being an extension of her work and hence her life, etc., it was illuminating to see how she handled interruptions to it. These came first from a couple of scruffy pubescents who athletically scaled the spiky railings to see if she really was who they thought she was, and then from a slightly lunched-looking gardener who reckoned it was us that had done the climbing.
Kate dealt with both in untypically peremptory fashion, even though in retrospect the distractions added a little light to the generally serious, if nonetheless enjoyable, shade of the proceedings.
Light and dark, good and bad. Both types of emotions flow out of Kate Bush and into her songs. Visually, it's all there on the sleeve of Never For Ever. Nick Price's Hieronymus Bosch-style cover shows a confused mass of bats and swans. The latter symbolise good, and on their backs ride the bad--all of them billowing out of Kate's dress, which is handsomely decorated with the clouds of her imagination.
The good emotions have produced songs like All We Ever Look For and Blow Away-- the one about liveing for music and being naively optimistic about death. The idea is that when she (or the musician she is purportedly singing about) dies, he will go and join all the other musicians in the sky. Hence, references to Keith Moon, Sid, Buddy Holly and even Minnie Riperton, who died around the time the song was being conceived.
It was based on an article she read in the Observer about people who had temporarily "died" through cardiac arrests. Apparently several members of the public interviewed about this experience reckoned they felt their spirits leave their bodies and go through a door, where they were re-acquainted with dead friends and relatives. When their hearts were resuscitated, it was almost with reluctance that they stepped back out of the room and returned to their bodies.
"So there's comfort for the guy in my band," Kate explains, "as when he dies, he'll go 'Hi, Jimi!' It's very tongue-in-cheek, but it's a great thought that if a musician dies, his soul will join all the other musicians' and a poet will join all the Dylan Thomases and all that."
Hmmmm. The darker side of her emotions shows the lady as down-to-earth as her surname befits. In fact, it's more than realistic: it's downright sinister. Hence The Wedding List and its obsession with revenge.
What happens here is that at the point two people are about to be married, the bridegroom gets shot. Who by is irrelevant, but the bride's need for vengeance is so powerful that all she thinks about is getting even with the villain. Since his death is the best wedding gift she could have, he goes right to the top of the (wedding) list.
"Revenge is a terrible power, and the idea is to show that it's so strong that even at such a tragic time it's all she can think about. I find the whole aggression of human beings fascinating--how we are suddenly whipped up to such an extent that we can't see anything except that. Did you see the film Deathwish, and the way the audience reacted evey time a mugger got shot? Terrible--though I cheered, myself."
Another film Kate saw recently was the highly publicised Elephant Man, which, though directed by loony humourist Mel Brooks (Blazing Saddles, and History of the World Part I), is ultimately a tragic movie. [Both Nicholls and Kate were mistaken on this point. The film was directed by David Lynch (Eraserhead, Dune, Blue Velvet). Mel Brooks merely produced Elephant Man, mainly because he was able to cast his wife, Anne Bancroft,in a leading role. Given Kate' increasing involvement in the craft and business of film direction since the time of this interview, however, it's unlikely that she still retains this misconception.] Ever ready to seek out the introspective angle, she philosophises as follows:
"I thought, 'How weird for a comedian to do such a serious film,' but if you think of the syndrome of the comedian who is hilarious onstage but really manic-depressive at home, it figures."
Of the few artists in her field whom she has met [Few?], she cites Peter Gabriel as one who is able to separate his public and private personas.
"Offstage he's very normal, and that's the kind of thing I believe in." Kate helped out with the backing vocals on his excellent recent album, and describes the experience of walking into someone else's work as "lovely--especially after the pressure of going out under your own name.
"I was thrilled to do it, and it's not often that I meet people in the same position that I can relate to. It' not like relating to people at EMI, as they're on a completely different side of the fence."
Does she not meet many artists at these notorious record-biz ligs?
"Well, I don't go to parties very often. Only if I'm invited (shame!) or I've got time, or there's someone there I want to meet. Often I don't like the hype of the situation and that worries me a lot--because there are things I do which I feel are hyped, but because there is a good motivation in there, I think you should do them. But it's a drag that there always has to be a forced situation."
Meeting Gabriel came about via different circumstances, but he's obviously had a profound effect upon Kate, and on the album sleeve he is thanked for "opening the windows". At the end of the interview, she offered (honest!) to sign my copy of Never For Ever, and included in the lengthy inscription 'Thank you for making me think.'"
I don't know about that--it seemed very much a case of vice-versa, and she does seem to do quite enough thinking already. As she pointed out herself, "I'm learning things all the time, and the more I learn, the more I see there is to learn, and that's so fascinating."
The more open the road, the broader the horizon, and each time I meet Kate Bush, the more there seems to be found out about her. There's more to the picture than meets the eye; and, particularly in her case, that's...fascinating?”.
I am going to round off in a second. However, Never for Ever was this shift. In terms of the sound and production. Andrew Powell, who produced her first two albums, was out. Bush co-produced with Jon Kelly. The newly-acquired Fairlight CMI was used in some parts of the album and would open windows and doors going forward. Used more widely on 1982’s The Dreaming. Bush creating this new sound and direction for her third studio album. No surprise that all of this resulted in her first number one album. Bush set a third record when Never for Ever was released. She was the first woman in Pop history to have an entirely self-penned song reach number one in the U.K. charts (Wuthering Heights, 1978); the first woman to write a million-selling debut album (The Kick Inside, 1978) and the first woman to have an album debut at number one in the U.K. (Never for Ever). Even though I think Never for Ever remains underrated and not considered as highly as it deserves, there is no doubt that it is held in high affection by many. I will end with a couple of reviews. In 2018, Drowned in Sound recognised the songwriting brilliance throughout Never for Ever:
“You listen to all of these records in sequence and good as The Kick Inside is, it’s just very apparent that the songwriting has gone up a gear with Never Forever. Strident, diverse, and intense Never Forever is the last Bush album with batshit mental prog art, the last album with an outside producer (though she co-produced with Jon Kelly), and the last record before she started using her beloved Fairlight synthesiser/sampler. It was also her third album in three years, that preempted the first meaningful gap in her career - you could point at the ways in which it predicts The Dreaming and call it a transitional album, but the truth is Never for Ever feels like the [apotheosis] of Leotard-era Kate Bush. The songs are just dazzlingly strong and distinctive. There are singles: ‘Babooska’ is a lot of fun, and the closing one-two of the eerie ‘Army Dreamers’ and the apocalyptic ‘Breathing’ is remarkable. But there’s a hell of a lot of little-remembered gold amongst the album tracks: the breakneck ‘Violin’ and tongue-in-cheek murder ballad ‘The Wedding List’ are really extraordinarily good pieces of songwriting. (8)”.
Based greatly on the success of Never for Ever, Kate Bush was voted Best Female Artist of 1980 in polls taken in Melody Maker, Sounds and the Sunday Telegraph. In 2020, Rolling Stone included Never for Ever in their 80 Greatest Albums of 1980 list. I will end by sourcing part of a feature from 2022 by PROG, who wrote how Kate Bush changed her career forever with the magical Never for Ever:
“Like her public persona at this time, Never For Ever is an album that still has one foot in ‘old showbiz’ (EMI protégé, Multi-Coloured Swap Shop guest, a target for prime-time TV parodies); yet the other displaying her development (working with established artists such as Roy Harper and Peter Gabriel, and the album’s unsettling subject matter). Commercially, her previous long-player, Lionheart, hadn’t been a roaring success, and its singles had not set the charts ablaze. It was time to change course.
Never For Ever was an album of firsts for Kate Bush: her first co-production; her first release after renegotiating her EMI deal; her first time recording at Abbey Road, and her first use of the (then brand new to the country) sampling synthesiser Fairlight CMI, which was so to shape her material for the next decade.
Bush’s new-found confidence and step away from the machine (something she was soon to perfect) was to inform Never For Ever – an album influenced by death, technology, relationships and a 21-year-old simply bursting with ideas. “There are 10 tracks, and if there is a main theme, it’s about human communication and its difficulties,” Bush wrote in September 1980, a few months after her 22nd birthday. Although largely stylistically different, Never For Ever fitted into the pattern of the day for art rock experimentation crossing borders and genres. It is blessed with the same spirit as Robert Fripp’s Exposure, David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), Fear Of Music by Talking Heads, and Peter Gabriel’s third album. Never For Ever may not be the masterpiece that 1985’s Hounds Of Love is frequently cited as being, but, for many, it remains their favourite Kate Bush album, and one that unquestionably paved the way for future triumphs.
Never For Ever was Kate Bush’s first studio recording after her groundbreaking The Tour Of Life in spring 1979, which had turned the notion of a live concert on its head. Fully choreographed by Anthony Van Laast, the sold-out 28-date tour was a visualisation of her first two albums, The Kick Inside and Lionheart. Much was made of it costing between £200,000 and £250,000 and employing 40 people – it was just at the very cusp of the touring industry being taken seriously. There was a BBC TV Nationwide special on the tour to coincide with the opening night at Liverpool Empire. Reporter Bernard Clark asked Bush, “Do you have a problem now: what next – how are you going to follow the success?” There seemed to be a feeling that, after only a year in the spotlight, Bush had achieved her goals. “You’re now just over 21 and you’ve made it,” Clark probes. “What is there left to do now?” Bush offered her gracious smile and replied: “Everything. I haven’t really begun yet.” How right she was”.
Released on 8th September, 1980, Never for Ever was such a pivotal moment for Kate Bush. Able to produce for the first time and given much freedom, you can feel her bringing new technology into her albums. That slight move from the piano sound of her first two albumns. A sonic shift and songs that felt different and had a new shape. More political in places but just Bush taking a step away from what she had done before. A number one album that set a record and gave her new confidence and fans, I do hope that there are other features published about this album on its anniversary. A remarkable moment in music history that people need to talk about more, go and spend some time with this…
STAGGERING gem of an album.