FEATURE:
Finalising the Deal…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush on holiday in Kent in 1972/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
Kate Bush and the Summer of 1976
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I feel a fiftieth anniversary…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1977/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
is very important, so I am especially keen to mark any that applies to Kate Bush. Last June, I wrote about her recording The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Saxophone Song (known as Berlin at the time) at AIR Studios. In June 1975, those two songs, alongside Maybe, were recorded and overseen by Executive Producer, David Gilmour. The tracks appeared on her 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside. I am once more turning to Gaffaweb and their invaluable timeline for assistance when it comes to celebrating fifty years of Kate Bush fundraising a record deal with EMI. The broader summer of 1976 was very important. In August, she passed her driving test on the second attempt. That allowed her freedom and this independence important for such a budding and ambitious young artist. In July, just after her eighteenth birthday, there was this hugely important event: “Kate finally settles a recording deal with EMI. The contract is for four years, with options at the end of the second and third year. Kate receives a 3,000- advance [and 500 Pounds for publication rights]. EMI are content for Kate to take time to write songs, sharpen her lyrics, train her voice and generally have time to "grow up”. Earlier in the year, the EMI deal begins to take shape. A publishing contract is settled first. However, in that summer of 1976, Kate Bush signed a major record deal and passed her driving test. Although the former is more significant than the latter, I feel that both are very important. There was discussion with EMI before 1976, though Bush turned eighteen, so it was probably deemed she was an adult and could navigate a record desal and the demands on her. She would step into AIR Studios tie record the remainder of The Kick Inside in the summer of 1976.
Almost a year to the day since that deal with EMI was finalised, Bush was in the studio and recording one of the most extraordinary and important debut albums in music history. It would have been hugely exciting for her. That idea that there were options at the end of the second and third years of that four-year deal. An option is a clause allowing a record label to extend the agreement for additional periods or albums. It allows the label the exclusive right to require the artist to produce more music, without the label being obligated to do so, usually used to keep an artist signed while limiting the label's risk. £3,000 in 1976 is roughly around £28,000 to £33,600 today. That was quite a lot for a teenage artist. It did give her some flexibility to record or go to dance classes. Use that money towards things that would help her career. Buy instruments or whatever she needed. I think that by this time, Bush was living at 44b Wickham Road, Brockley. Her brothers, Paddy and John, occupied the below and above flats (though I am not sure whom lived in each). It is quite cute having three siblings living above and below one another. Closer to London and now good to drive, the summer of 1976 was an unusual but important one. Other women her age were probably going to university or more likely the world of work. Instead, Kate Bush was looking ahead to realising a dream that she had. To make an album. Rather than being famous or chasing any sort of wealth, she wanted to complete an album and have that in her hand. It seems so strange that we are marking fifty years of that EMI deal. Such a significant moment, I am not sure if anyone else will write about it. I want to discuss something else that she did in the summer of 1976 that is mentioned in the text I am dropping in. It is from a 2022 feature that Classic Rock published. Discussing Kate Bush’s long road to Hounds of Love (her 1985 album):
“In this most open of households, her earliest explorations were encouraged. By 13 she had already set her poems – including The Saxophone Song and The Man With The Child In His Eyes – to primitive piano chords. “I could sing in key but there was nothing there,” she told Trouser Press. “It was awful noise, it was really something terrible. My tunes were more morbid and more negative… they were too heavy.”
By the following year she had recorded several cassettes’ worth of demos and song sketches on her dad’s Akai reel-to-reel tape machine. Impressed, her family enlisted Ricky Hopper, a record plugger friend of John Bush’s, to hawk them around the labels in the hope of getting a publishing deal.
After all the majors had turned them down as “uncommercial”, Hopper contacted his old Cambridge University buddy David Gilmour. The Pink Floyd guitarist was sufficiently impressed to invite Kate to record a demo at his Essex home studio, backed by him and the rhythm section from Unicorn, a band he was also nurturing. “I was convinced from the beginning that this girl had remarkable talent,” Gilmour later said.
After that didn’t work either, Gilmour decided the only way forward would be to record three properly arranged songs. Putting up the money himself, he booked time at London’s AIR Studios in June 1975, bringing in arranger friend Andrew Powell, who had worked with Cockney Rebel, Pilot and Alan Parsons. They recorded The Saxophone Song, The Man With The Child In His Eyes and Maybe, with members of the London Symphony Orchestra (the first two songs would appear on her debut album, The Kick Inside).
Gilmour played the demo to Bob Mercer, then head of EMI’s pop division, who was impressed enough to sign her up. A deal was eventually sealed by July 1976. Having left school with 10 ‘O’ Levels, Bush set up a company to manage her affairs – a precocious glimpse of the total control that would come later in her career.
EMI were willing to give the young singer time to craft her songwriting and performance. Ever the maverick, she began to study with Lindsey Kemp, the provocative mime artist who had been a mentor to the young David Bowie. Under Kemp’s tutelage she began to imbue her music with character and movement – magic extra ingredients in her presentation”.
Alongside that deal being finalised, there was also this developing of her dance talent. Dance so important to Kate Bush, the summer of 1976 was a time when she took some big steps regarding training. Going back to Gaffaweb and their chronology from July 1976: “Kate pursues her dancing, first at the Elephant and Castle, South London. But after seeing Lindsay Kemp perform in Flowers, she attends his classes at the Dance Centre in Covent Garden. After Kemp goes to Australia, Kate trains with Arlene Phillips, choreographer of Hot Gossip. [It is probably at this time that Kate's association with Gary Hurst and Stewart Avon-Arnold, her longtime dancing partners, begins.]”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris
That switch in terms of the locations around London. How important Lindsay Kemp was. However, she stuck with dance and studied under Arlene Phillips. I do like that Kate Bush had such a productive and interesting summer of 1976. Especially that July. I also appreciate how tough it would have been to find the energy in the summer of 1976. July 1976 was exceptionally hot, forming part of a brutal heatwave with an average temperature of approximately 18°C to 18.2°C. The summer (June-August) was one of the hottest in over 350 years. Temperatures in southern England regularly exceeding 32°C (90°F) for fifteen consecutive days, peaking at 35.9°C (96.6°F) on 3 July in Cheltenham. It must have been quite scary in a way! Regardless, Kate Bush had a music career to focus on. She was still developing her piano playing and singing. As we learn, her late-night practising ruffled the feathers of her neighbours: "I'd practice scales and that on the piano, go off dancing, and then in the evening I'd come back and play the piano all night. And I actually remember, well, the summer of '76 which was really hot here. We had such hot weather, I had all the windows open. And I just used to write until you know four in the morning, and I got a letter of complaint from a neighbor who was basically saying "Shuuut Uuuup!" cause they had to get up at like five in the morning. They did shift work and my voice had been carried the whole length of the street I think, so they weren't too appreciative”. I have used a photo of Kate Bush as a girl for the main image, as this is something that she would have thought about at this age. Maybe not knowing what a record deal was. I mean, getting to a point where her curiosity of music and expressing herself through that medium was realised in this way. The summer of 1976 was such a transformative time for her, so I wanted to celebrate fifty years of this pivotal and significant time. The biggest event being the finalisation and completion of the record deal with EMI. Truly, no looking back. It was a moment Kate Bush as the artist, debatably, was born and started. From here, she could realise…
THE kick inside.