FEATURE:
Some Grey and White Matter
Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty-Five
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EVEN if I have written…
about this song a bit recently, I need to come back to it, so forgive any repeats when it comes to information included. However, on 21st June, Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap turns forty-five. This is such an important song in her career. For a little background, Never for Ever was released in September 1980. That was her third studio album. Many expecting Bush to release an album soon after. It would be September 1982 when Kate Bush put out The Dreaming. Even though it is only two years, I feel there was pressure from EMI that she would follow up a number-one album with something sooner. That is not how inspiration works! Today, I do think that artists – especially major ones – are expected to put music out constantly. I guess Bush would have wanted music to arrive before 1982. Though she did get struck by inspiration and released this amazing single out on 21st June, 1981. Amazing that there was a gap of over fourteen months between Sat in Your Lap and The Dreaming! Sat in Your Lap is one of the most percussive-driven songs Bush ever released. It departed from Never for Ever and it gave a window into what The Dreaming would contain. Is Sat in Your Lap the most radio-friendly or commercial song on The Dreaming? It was successful as a single and reached eleven in the U.K. I will come to its amazing music video. It is worth dropping this archive from the Kate Bush Club Newsletter of October 1982. A music icon that kickstarted inspiration during a bit of a dry spell for Kate Bush:
“I already had the piano patterns, but they didn’t turn into a song until the night after I’d been to see a Stevie Wonder gig. Inspired by the feeling of his music, I set a rhythm on theRolandand worked in the piano riff to the high-hat and snare. I now had a verse and a tune to go over it but only a few lyrics like “I see the people working”, “I want to be a lawyer,” and “I want to be a scholar,” so the rest of the lyrics became “na-na-na”‘ or words that happened to come into my head. I had some chords for the chorus with the idea of a vocal being ad-libbed later. The rhythm box and piano were put down, and then we recorded the backing vocals. “Some say that knowledge is…” Next we put down the lead vocal in the verses and spent a few minutes getting some lines worked out before recording the chorus voice. I saw this vocal being sung from high on a hill on a windy day. The fool on the hill, the king of the castle… “I must admit, just when I think I’m king.”
The idea of the demos was to try and put everything down as quickly as possible. Next came the brass. The CS80 is still my favourite synthesizer next to the Fairlight, and as it was all that was available at the time, I started to find a brass sound. In minutes I found a brass section starting to happen, and I worked out an arrangement. We put the brass down and we were ready to mix the demo.
I was never to get that CS80 brass to sound the same again – it’s always the way. At The Townhouse the same approach was taken to record the master of the track. We put down a track of the rhythm box to be replaced by drums, recording the piano at the same time. As I was producing, I would ask the engineer to put the piano sound on tape so I could refer to that for required changes. This was the quickest of all the tracks to be completed, and was also one of the few songs to remain contained on one twenty-four track tape instead of two!
Among the many things to admire about Sat in Your Lap is the musicians. Preston Heyman and Paddy Bush dealing with percussion and sticks. I really love the backing vocals from Ian Bairnson, Gary Hurst, Stewart Arnold and Paddy Bush. Kate Bush on piano and Fairlight CMI. It is this wonderful blend of sounds. Kate Bush producing the song. That idea of people wanting knowledge and saying they will do these things to be better and get knowledge but not doing anything about it. This really interesting idea for a song! Perhaps some irony in the lyrics. Or what is the word? Kate Bush had writer’s block and could not solve it. Steevie Wonder unlocked something. I want to move to an article I have included before. Published by Dreams of Orgonon in 2020, I would love to see more articles like this that dissect the lyrics and themes of Kate Bush’s songs. Not that many people go that deep. A book that covers all of her tracks and goes into detail. We have the 33 1/3 book on Hounds of Love by Leah Kardos. Yet, other albums have not been covered. By reading this kind of analysis, I feel we get a greater appreciation of Kate Bush:
“Sat In Your Lap” conveys both frantic motivation and fearful inaction — it is enticed by the busy and productive activities of people and intimidated by the energy exerted in them, perhaps suggesting a character outwardly compelled to be a productive adult too soon (it’s possible Bush could relate). It is at once rapid, careening at 146 BPM, and petrified with fear. The music video (Bush’s first without director Keef Macmillan) swerves between stillness and freneticism. During the verses, Bush is mostly seated in a white dress, while the refrains see her cavorting with dancers in dunce caps. Former “gifted and talented” children drained by adults’ external compulsion to excel may encounter a kindred spirit in “Sat In Your Lap.” Yet even in its inertia lays a search — despite the emotional shutting down, the desperate need for knowledge and truth is genuine and constant.
The incessant refrain, consisting of Bush screaming (with occasional variations) “some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap/some say that knowledge is something that you never have,” makes the preoccupation with knowledge clear. Holy shit, says Bush, look at all this cool stuff adults do! And all these neat religious and philosophical paths! “Some say that heaven is hell/some say that hell is heaven!” Is anyone right? The sheer quantity of faiths can be incredibly disorienting to an adult. The comparable power that spirituality can have over a child is often formative.
Another animating tension of “Sat in Your Lap” is its emotional fluidity while nominally discussing knowledge: “some say that knowledge is something sat in your lap,” or knowledge is “something that you never have.” These are largely apophatic definitions of knowledge, defining it as an elusive force. The rampant emotiveness pervades a search for knowledge. “In my dome of ivory/a home of activity/I want the answers quickly/but I don’t have no energy” sees a desire for knowledge colliding with aporia and sensory overload. Without a clear path forward, sometimes the only trajectory is acceleration and exhaustion.
As the only answer to the unanswerable is sublime incoherence, the song’s coda is hermetic descent into sensory overload. Iconography blurs (“Tibet or Jeddah,” “to Salisbury/a monastery”) in a tendency that’s strong in the last couple verses, as Bush inverts Psalm 23 (“my cup, she never overfloweth”), dabbles in desert-dwelling, monasticism, cathedrals, and with “some grey and white matter,” the human brain (grey and white matter oversee the brain’s connection to the spinal cord). “Sat in Your Lap” concludes with inconclusiveness: its dance is in the terrifying glory of befuddlement. Asceticism is a cerebral process as well as physical: the brain responds to the body’s state. Bush is engaging with some genuinely fascinating systems of thought here: for all the approaches to the mind/body problem that have been formulated, responding to it with “isn’t scholastically-caused sensory overload a kind of asceticism?” is new”.
You can sense her videos and sound becoming more ambitious. In terms of the cast of characters and visuals, they became bigger and more filmic from Never for Ever onwards. Sat in Your Lap is so busy and eye-opening! It is one of Kate Bush’s best videos. The iconic Abbey Road Studios was the location for Sat in Your Lap’s video. More and more, I sort of lament the fact that Kate Bush never toured after The Dreaming. In the sense that a 1982/1983 tour could have featured tracks from The Dreaming. Seeing Sat in Your Lap performed on the stage as part of a larger concept. So many songs from The Dreaming would have been amazing on the stage! The video for Sat in Your Lap is an astonishing concept. In terms of what was done with it. Directed by Brian Wiseman, more people need to discuss this video. Here is some more information about Sat in Your Lap’s video:
“According to Kate, The video was filmed over two days, one part at a video studio, the other at the audio studios. The former provided the quick, easy technical sides to be performed, the latter provided the space and presence. The large parquet floor was to be a feature, and Abbey Road’s past, full of dancing and singing spirits, was to be conjured up in the present day by tapping feet to the sound of jungle drums – only to be turned into past again through the wonder of video-tape. The shots were sorted into a logical order: all long shots were audio studio, all others were video studio”.
I do think that all the technical details about Kate Bush’s song are compelling. Where songs were recorded and what instruments went into the mix. This behind the scenes thing. I wanted to draw from Classic Pop and their article from last year. Going inside the making of The Dreaming, the unorthodoxy of Kate Bush was producing genius results:
“She opted to self-produce, (Tony Visconti, who’d written her a Lionheart-inspired fan letter during Bowie’s Lodger, was briefly considered). In a Denmark Street demo studio, drummer Preston Heyman was introduced to Bush’s new methods. Sat In Your Lap’s piano riff reminded him of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, he played along accordingly. She then removed his cymbals, then his snare.
It morphed into a tom-tom pattern more akin to the Warrior Drums of Burundi (used on Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns). Eager to get the tribal, drum-heavy sound onto tape she headed to Townhouse Studios, specifically it’s ‘stone’ room. This was where engineer Hugh Padgham had created the colossal ‘gated reverb’ drums on PG3 with drummer Phil Collins.
Bush had been equally impressed with In The Air Tonight (a ‘masterpiece’). Padgham worked on Sat In Your Lap, Leave It Open and Get Out Of My House, giving Bush the rhythmic oomph she required, aided by the studio’s Solid State Logic console with its gates and compressors.
A hard, driving core aside (Rainbow’s Jimmy Bain played bass), these tracks weren’t ‘rock’ or ‘normal’ and Padgham was bewildered by Bush’s unorthodoxy. For Heyman, though, it was exactly this “weirdness that we rejoiced in”. For Sat In Your Lap, the drummer and brother Paddy Bush stood ten feet apart, swooshing bamboo sticks (a cracked one stayed in the mix too).
Space was found for one Chinese opera cymbal suspended from a rope, “throttled” periodically by Heyman. Struggling to replicate the demo’s CS80 parts, Buggles’ Geoff Downes supplied a Fairlight brass section (he was busy working at Townhouse on Asia’s debut).
In June 1981 Sat In Your Lap hit the shelves, unveiling Bush’s new direction in a white sleeve, ballet-dunce Bush glancing quizzically at a globe. Inside was a torrent of avant-garde pop; rumbling rhythms, philosophical head-scratching and a startling vocal ferocity.
Bush fretted, initial feedback was dumbstruck silence. But critics raved (“a superb blast of energy”), as did BBC’s Roundtable guest reviewers, Linx’s David Grant, and Rick Wakeman. It climbed to No.11, a year later it sat atop Trevor Horn’s all-time top ten, one of three Bush selections.
Meanwhile, The Dreaming’s sessions had steamed ahead. The in-demand Padgham left for Genesis’ Abacab, replaced by Nick Launay. His CV, including PIL’s The Flowers Of Romance, aligned the young engineer with Bush’s new almost post-punk edge”.
Sat in Your Lap turns forty-five on 21st June. It is one of Kate Bush’s finest songs. It was the introduction to The Dreaming. Nothing else on the album sounds like Sat in Your Lap. The remaining singles from the album (The Dreaming, There Goes a Tenner, Suspended in Gaffa and Night of the Swallow) did not fare well. However, that is not to take away from the brilliance of The Dreaming. A masterpiece album. Sat in Your Lap was sort of this bridge between her Never for Ever era and the start of the new one. The song proved what a hugely innovative songwriter and producer Kate Bush was. In June 1981, so few artists making songs like Sat in Your Lap. In 2018, when ranking Kate Bush’s singles, The Guardian placed Sat in Your Lap at four: “Even in a pop climate where the Associates’ Party Fears Two could become a hit, this sounded thrillingly unhinged: three and a half minutes of screeching vocals, frantic PiL-influenced rhythms and Fairlight-driven sampling overload”. We all have to salute this…
ICONIC song.