FEATURE:
Kate Bush: Something Like a Song
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz
Moving (The Kick Inside)
_________
I am back to…
The Kick Inside. That is Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album. I have been thinking about her opening tracks and which album has the best one. I would put The Kick Inside right up there. Moving is this beautiful and sublime song that I think ranks alongside her best songs. I am following a series by Spectrum Culture, where they are ranking Kate Bush’s songs. They have placed Moving low. It is good that they have discussed the track, though I disagree with what they say in general. There are a few reasons why I am fascinated by this song. It is the first track from her debut album, so it is special because of that. I am always considering the characters in Kate Bush songs. Whether you class it as a character or not, Bush does sing about this “moving stranger”. I know Bush very much had Lindsay Kemp in mind when writing this. I will come to an article from Dreams of Orgonon that I have sourced before. It is fascinating reading their interpretation and analysis of this track. I am also fascinated by the live performances of Moving. It has this wonderful history. It is to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for some invaluable background to The Kick Inside’s opening gem:
“The song is a tribute to Lindsay Kemp, who was her mime teacher in the mid-Seventies. She explained in an interview, “He needed a song written to him. He opened up my eyes to the meanings of movement. He makes you feel so good. If you’ve got two left feet it’s ‘you dance like an angel darling.’ He fills people up, you’re an empty glass and glug, glug, glug, he’s filled you with champagne.”
‘Moving’ opens with a whale song sampled from Songs of the Humpback Whale, an LP including recordings of whale vocalizations made by Dr. Roger S. Payne”.
Soon after the release of The Kick Inside, Bush performed ‘Moving’ alongside with ‘Them Heavy People’ on 25 February 1978 on the BBC TV show Saturday Night at the Mill.
On 12 May, she took part in a Dutch special TV show dedicated to the opening of the Haunted Castle, the new attraction of the amusement park Efteling. She performed six songs in six videos filmed near the castle and across the park.
In June 1978, Bush sang ‘Moving’ at Nippon Budokan during the Tokyo Music Festival. The performance was retransmitted on the Japanese television on 21 June and was followed by a 35 million audience. She won the silver prize alongside with the American R&B band The Emotions.
Kate also performed ‘Moving’ on the Japanese TV programme Sound in S.
In 1979, Bush included ‘Moving’ on her first tour, The Tour of Life. Her performance can be seen on the video Live at Hammersmith Odeon”.
I am dropping in a few Moving live performances. A wonderful track performed in multiple countries, I do wonder what people outside of the U.K. thought of it. Maybe the lyrics and background did not mean much to them. I do want to bring in that interview that the Kate Bush Encyclopedia referenced. In 1980, Kate Bush was interviewed by Phil Sutcliffe for Sounds:
“I asked Kate about Moving, the first song on 'The Kick Inside' and her most fitting blend of word and sound so far. It's a complete evocation of the movement of the dancer, speaking with his limbs, sense through sensuality, as sexy as his 'beauty's potency', the dancer and the watcher in harmony like lovers.
So I asked her what whale noises were doing in there. "Whales say everything about 'moving'. It's huge and beautiful, intelligent, soft inside a tough body. It weighs a ton and yet it's so light it floats. It's the whole thing about human communication -- 'moving liquid, yet you are just as water' -- what the Chinese say about being the cup the water moves in to. The whales are pure movement and pure sound, calling for something, so lonely and sad...
"On the ground they're ppff (splodging sound), but in the water they're 'wahooo!' Which is the way with a lot of dancers."
The song/dance dovetail is one of the ideals she's pursued in her stage show, TV special, and videos. She can trace her love of movement back to when she was a tot.
"My father told me I used to dance to the music on the telly. I remember it vaguely. It was completely un-selfconscious and I wasn't aware of people looking at me. One day some people came into the room, saw me and laughed and from that moment I stopped doing it. I think maybe I've been trying to get back there ever since."
'Moving' is dedicated to Lindsay Kemp who led her into rediscovering herself with an inspiring performance and a series of 50p lessons in the public classes he gave.
"He needed a song written to him. He opened up my eyes to the meanings of movement. He makes you feel so good. If you've got two left feet it's 'you dance like an angel darling.' He fills people up, you're an empty glass and glug, glug, glug, he's filled you with champagne."
With dance, mime, and elaborate costume, Kate's performances are hardly your standard rough and ready rock shows. They are rehearsed down to fine detail and she values exact execution far above 'spontaneity', which again scores black marks against her name in some books. So it was interesting to hear her reactions to the last night of the tour when nothing went according to plan.
"The roadies were all very creative people and suddenly as a sort of goodbye to us, they were all joining in the show. There were crowds of cowboys and indians, a crocodile. During Egypt a panto camel walked in. I went after it and it tried to run away, but I got it by the tail, pulled it back and there were these voices protesting from inside, 'Leggo!' "
That is, she loved it. Kate Bush wants to create an illusion, not a machine”.
I don’t think that people discuss or write about Moving much. In terms of ranking it alongside the all-time best Kate Bush song. I think it is wonderful. I want to move now to Dreams of Orgonon, as I always learn things. Think about Kate Bush’s music in a different way. The fact that the track opens with whale song makes me love it even more. How unusual that would have been for a Pop artist in 1978. The perfect way to open Kate Bush’s debut album:
“Bush has credited multiple instructors in the development of her dancing skills, including jazz-influenced instructor Robin Kovac and American mime Adam Darius. But her most influential teacher is one of the world’s most famous mimes, Lindsay Kemp. Kemp’s legacy is enormous, boasting experience teaching and working with David Bowie, maintaining a status as a gay icon, and his extravagant theatrical performances. One of these stage shows is particularly crucial for Kate Bush. In 1975, she saw Kemp for the first time in a performance in Bloomsbury. Flowers, an adaptation of Jean Genet’s proto-Beat debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers, is an astonishing vision of decadence, material brutality, and bodily liberation. Presenting everything from masturbating prison inmates to literal angels onstage, Flowers is Kemp’s magnum opus, an outrageous exhibition of maximalism and sex. Flowers has command of several aesthetics at once, from ragtime to classical music to Luigi Russoli-an proto-noise music. It’s totally outrageous and works precisely because it has the flourishing courage of its convictions.
Naturally, Kate Bush was utterly compelled by Flowers. Its lack of restraint in aesthetics and public displays of sexuality are visible influences on huge swaths of Bush’s work. She was subsequently instructed by Kemp in his dance classes, and he’s remained an influence on her work. Years later, Bush was still praising Kemp in interviews, and of course she paid her respects upon Kemp’s death last year. It’s easy to feel she never really got over that first performance of Flowers. This display of eroticism, veneration of physical beauty, and dedication to surrealism would remain useful to Bush, staying visible all the way from The Kick Inside to 50 Words for Snow.
“Moving” is explicitly Bush paying her debt to Kemp, applying his lessons to her work in the same way she’s channeled the songwriting of Bowie or Ferry into her music. Bush’s anti-gnosticism in particular is inherited from Kemp, viewing dance as an art form that can be radical, liberating, and innovative. “You give me life/please don’t let me go,” says the hedonistic Bush, “you crush the lily in my soul.”
Salient in “Moving” is a use of aqueous language. From its whale sample onwards, it fixates upon water as a metaphor for dance. “Moving liquid/yes, you are just as water,” Bush realizes about her partner, as if she’s realized he has the face of a genius. She invests greatly in malleability, letting motion transform her — Bush has explained the “moving liquid” lyric by explaining it as “what the Chinese say about being the cup the water turns into” (this also touches on George Gurdijeff’s Fourth Way, in which an essence is governed by the form is takes. We’ll get there soon). For “Moving,” form is as crucial as substance.
Bush gives “Moving” a tricky melody, as she typically does with her songs: the eccentricities are in the details. The track is in D minor, starting with an interesting progression of i-VII-VI-III (D-C-B flat-F), with a digression into chords like E major (a chord raised a 6th above D minor’s ii chord, E diminished) and D major (not found in D minor). The chorus drifts through i-v-iv-III (D-A-G-F), with an A7 and G major thrown in to satisfy Bush’s obligation to out-of-key chord selections, while the post-chorus hits upon the root chord of C sharp and drifts into the A of D harmonic and melodic minor. “Moving” chooses chords conservatively at times but will throw a pebble into the midst of the song at an instant, causing musical ripples.
Like “Wuthering Heights,” “Moving” is a thesis statement: it’s the inaugural track of Kate Bush’s debut album, the opening song of every concert on her only tour, and was released as a single exclusively in Japan, where it failed to chart. Clearly Bush considered the track a tone setter, the beginning of the duet of music, sex, camaraderie, and motion that shapes much of her work. Her subsequent music doesn’t always sound like “Moving,” but Bush clung to its sensibilities for a long time”.
I will end with Spectrum Culture and their recent feature, where they continued their ranking of Kate Bush’s tracks. It is disappointing that they placed Moving at 131. I think that it should be in the top fifty at least. I do feel like there is still this dismissiveness of Kate Bush’s earliest work. So many people not appreciating how special it is:
“Major events in artists’ careers often include things they didn’t do. Bush signed her first record deal at 17; The Kick Inside wasn’t released for another two years. It’s worth imagining a timeline in which her debut came out in 1976—what it might have sounded like, how it might have been received.
Accounts differ as to the reason for the delay, but it’s clear how she used the time: gigging in pubs, furthering her education, growing up. Her studies consisted of both routine teenage schoolwork and more esoteric preparations for a life in the arts, including classes with Lindsay Kemp, the uncategorizable dancer and actor to whom “Moving,” Kick’s opening track, pays tribute.
Famous for lush, stylized, overtly homoerotic productions drawing on ballet, mime, drag, kabuki and avant-garde theater, Kemp helped Bush develop the (ahem) distinctive approach to movement on display in her earliest videos. He also provided a permission-giving example of a capital-R-Romantic sensibility unafraid of seeming ridiculous or over-the-top. Bush credited Kemp with teaching her to “express things with my body”—not a fun or easy process, as the line “you crush the lily in my soul” indicates. Instead of protecting your delicate interiority, the song suggests, maybe mash it up a bit, see what it smells like.
“Moving” begins with the keening of a humpback whale—the interpretive dancer of the seas?—but then sputters. As in other low-ranked early songs, its conventional arrangement pairs poorly with Bush’s swooning take on her outré subject: it seeks to soften her purple lyrics and mannered vocals, making the excesses seem accidental, which they are extremely not.
Bush did better by Kemp by casting him in The Line, the Cross and the Curve, her loopy companion film to The Red Shoes—a great showcase for his idiosyncratic genius. – Martin Seay”.
I would urge people to buy Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory by Deborah M. Withers. It is a fantastic read, but what she writes about Moving is thought-provoking and you can appreciate new depths and layers. I am going to end here. I love Moving. It is the opening track from my favourite album ever. Whilst it never really makes it into features where her best songs are ranked – if it does, it is very low -, I think that we need to show more love for this amazing track. Kate Bush fans know she is a genius. That was evident right from the start when The Kick Inside was released in 1978. This unique and spellbinding talent. The utterly staggering Moving is song that will always be special and dear…
TO me.