But thanks to Bush’s maturing songwriting, inventive production, and tentative deployment of the Fairlight, Never for Ever was a more sonically adventurous and accomplished work than the underwhelming Lionheart.įollowing Gabriel’s lead, Bush banned the use of cymbals and hi-hats on Never for Ever. The Fairlight arrived too late in the process of recording Never for Ever to fully transform the album. Unlike the hurried Lionheart, Bush took more time to craft Never for Ever and began experimenting with the Fairlight CMI, an early digital sampler and synthesizer that Bush was introduced to by Peter Gabriel, whose third solo record featured Bush on backing vocals. “It’s every bit as much what the song is as the lyric and.I mean, it is the song.” “Obviously the production is such a big part of what the song is,” she told Claude Van Heye in 2005. It was a major step in Bush’s assertion artistic independence. On her next outing, Never for Ever, Bush took over the production reigns with the help of engineer Jon Kelly. The second record was made very quickly after the first. “Because with the first record, I’d had all the time from being 12, 13, right up until when I made the record, to accumulate a big pool of songs that I then chose the best ones from. “It’s not the way I would’ve done it,” she told Mojo years later. It kept Bush on the charts and in the headlines, but it was a creative and commercial step backwards. The resulting album, Lionheart, hit the shelves just nine months after her debut. She also was stuck working with The Kick Inside’s producer Andrew Powell, with whom Bush hadn’t always seen eye-to-eye. Without enough time to write new material, Bush had to draw on songs rejected for The Kick Inside. charts, the label rushed Bush back into the studio. While The Kick Inside’s second single, “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” was still scaling the U.K. The media just promoted me as a female body.”ĮMI’s attempt to capitalize on the success of The Kick Inside didn’t improve Bush’s critical standing. “People weren’t even generally aware that I wrote my own songs or played the piano until maybe a year or so after that. “I wasn’t looked at as being a female singer-songwriter,” Bush told NME in 1982.
Meanwhile, the overly sexist British tabloid press seized on Bush’s age and appearance to portray her as a shallow sexpot. Many rock critics dismissed her as an airy fairy hippie holdover.
charts it catapulted Bush to stardom.īut by the time she released Hound of Love seven years later, at the ripe old age of 26, Bush was portrayed by the press as a washed-up relic.įrom the beginning, Bush’s ethereal prog-pop was out-of-step with the punk movement of the late-1970s. When the album’s lead off single, “Wuthering Heights,” hit number one on the U.K. Editor)įamously “ discovered“ by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour when a family friend played her demo tape for the Floyd guitarist, Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside, was released in 1978. (Note: For all TBVO articles follow this page.
When Kate Bush decamped to her newly installed home studio in 1983 to begin recording Hounds of Love, the focus of the fourth TBVO, her career was at a crossroads.
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