Kate Bush is a unique artist.
From her art rock 70s beginning through her revolutionary 80s output,
to her sporadic recluse releases, each new album brings new ideas, new characters and new sounds.
No other artist could fit the radio-ready singles of “Running Up That Hill”,
“Hounds of Love” and “Cloudbusting” on the same LP as a 26-minute
musical journey that follows a woman’s death-hallucinations drowning under ice.
Her influence can be heard in the works of The Cocteau Twins, Tori Amos and Bjork
as well as more recent aspirants like Bat For Lashes, FKA twigs and Perfume Genius.
But like everyone else, she had to start somewhere. And again, no other artist entered
the music world like Kate Bush, taking to the stage in 1978 with
the haunting classic literature-themed love song that was her debut single.
This is New British Canon and this is the story of “Wuthering Heights.”
Born in 1958, Catherine Bush grew up in Kent, England. She took to piano from an early age,
and wrote prolifically throughout her teens. Early inspirations for Bush were helped along
by the listening habits of her elder brothers, namely the more flamboyant and arty side of pop music:
David Bowie, Elton John, Pink Floyd and especially Roxy Music and Brian Eno.
As further evidence of her avant garde tastes,
Bush’s favourite Beatles album growing up was Magical Mystery Tour.
Traditional English and Irish folk music also made an impact on her,
their characterisations, storytelling and sensuality bleeding into Bush’s later work.
"[It’s] the sort of music my mother, who's Irish, would have listened to and danced to,
and used to play for me when I was very little. It's probably my biggest musical influence;
I really like that feeling folk music has--classical music,
too--that timeless feeling you experience from the joy of just playing."
During her early teens, a friend of the family sent a selection of her initial compositions around labels
in an attempt to get her signed, but for the most part this failed.
However, that tape caught the ear of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour.
He arranged to have her record some more professional demos with a
full band at AIR Studios in June 1975. This session produced three tracks,
including the versions of “The Man With a Child in His Eyes”
and “The Saxophone Song”
that would be used on her debut album three years later.
While Floyd were working on Wish You Were Here at Abbey Road, Bob Mercer from their label EMI
heard Bush's three track demo and decided to sign her.
Problem was that Bush was still only sixteen, had never played live
and though incredibly prolific, her piano skills were still rather rudimentary.
Not wanting to put too much pressure on her straight away,
she was put on retainer for two years,
giving her time to refine her skills and mature as an artist.
During this time, Bush finished school and moved to London.
As well as constantly writing at a battered second-hand upright piano,
Bush filled her days with drop in dance and
mime classes from respected artists such as Lindsay Kemp,
who’d previously tutored David Bowie in giving a suitably expressive
performance as Ziggy Stardust. Kemp would prove an ongoing influence on Bush
and especially her movement in her music videos. It was also around this time that Catherine left
behind her childhood moniker of Cathy, and started going by Kate.
From the Spring of 1977, she joined the three piece of Del Palmer, Brian Bath and Vic King to
play pub gigs around the London-area.
They became known as The KT Bush Band,
their first show at the Rose of Lee pub in Lewisham which consisted of varying motown,
country and pop standards.
Sets would later be augmented by prototype versions of “James and the Cold Gun” and “Them Heavy People.”
The group only managed 20 performances, before EMI called Bush, now 18, to record her debut.
Recording for Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside started in July 1977.
It was produced by Andrew Powell, who’d previously composed and arranged for The Alan Parson’s
Project and was a friend of David Gilmour. Through their pub-circuit shows Bush had grown
creatively comfortable with the KT Bush Band, but instead Powell enlisted a group of session
musicians, namely bassist David Patton and guitarist Ian Bairnson of the band Pilot
as well as drummer Stuart Elliott and keyboardist Duncan MacKay of Cockney Rebel.
Though Bush fought for her band to be on the album,
being untested and unknown she had limited bargaining power and was unsuccessful.
Though other members of the KT Bush Band would work with her on future projects, Vic King never forgave her.
Aside from that unpleasantness, the album sessions went well, Bush impressing those
around her with her unexpected talent. Especially with the stunning disconnect
between the lowkey sweet Kate Bush the person and the flamboyant wide-eyed Kate Bush the artist.
”After we did a couple [of songs] we were thinking ‘What's coming next?’
She pulls out these characters that aren’t there when she’s not singing or performing.
There was no formula there, they were all truly original songs,
and the thing that pulls it all together is her.” This shyness and unease with unfamiliar musicians
was tempered by a fair amount of marijuana, engineer Jon Kelly mentioning that on several occasions
her joints had to be hidden so that vocals could be recorded.
And this point she'd written over two-hundred songs, these were pared down to 13 for the album.
But the song that proved to be most essential to Bush’s career was a late addition.
“Wuthering Heights” was written past midnight within the space of a few hours in March 1977,
Bush had looked to the full moon and been struck with inspiration.
Lyrically it was loosely inspired by the Emily Bronte book of the same name,
and in fact quotes it several times,
though at the time of writing she had not read it in full.
The spark of the idea had come from elsewhere. She told the Denis Tuohy of Tonight:
Despite being born 150 years apart, Bush no doubt related to Bronte. Not only did they share a birthday,
but Bush has said of her spiritual writing partner
“This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff.”
This description works just as well for Bush as Bronte. Where a lot of rock’n’roll
speaks from one’s own experience, with “Wuthering Heights” Bush is Cathy,
the ghostly apparition back from the dead to plead for forgiveness from the dark and brooding
Heathcliff, her love eternal. In a way it's an evolution of
David Bowie’s character work, trading a rock’n’roll alien
for a lovestruck spectre.
Showing the newly written track to her producer, Powell suitably impressed,
recorded and mixed it in a frantic overnight session to showcase to EMI.
Powell even wrote and recorded the bass part on the track as well as the Celeste,
which mimics the piano introduction and pre-chorus to make it extra twinkly and dreamlike.
But the track's real power comes from Bush's otherworldly vocal performance.
The skyscraping falsetto initially an experiment with her purposefully
attempting to reach keys way beyond her grasp to expand her range.
"In the case of 'Wuthering Heights', she was imitating this witch,
the mad lady from the Yorkshire Moors, and she was very theatrical about it.
She was such a mesmerising performer — she threw her heart and soul into everything she did —
that it was difficult to ever fault her or say 'You could do better.'"
However, the men at EMI didn’t see the track’s commercial potential.
Bob Mercer, who later masterminded the Now! Series of compilation albums,
wanted to release the more archetypal rock track, “James and the Cold Gun” as her debut single,
believing “Wuthering Heights” to be too weird sounding to be a hit.
Bush though was adamant that “Wuthering Heights” needed to be her first single to get her noticed,
and a more accurate example of her as an artist.
"I felt that to actually get your name anywhere, you've got to do something that is unusual,
because there's so much good music around and it's all in a similar vein.
It was, musically, for me, one of my strongest songs.
It had the high pitch and it also had a very English story-line
which everyone would know because it was a classic book."
Mercer saw Kate Bush as an
album artist that might in time gain a following; what they released as her first single wouldn’t
really matter long term. Despite the 19 year old artist having little say in the matter,
because she fought for it, he would let her have her way with the logic that when “Wuthering Heights” inevitably failed,
he would prove to her that he knew how to do his job better than she did.
“Wuthering Heights” was initially going to be released in November 1977,
but Bush vetoed the initial single sleeve design that focused on her
cleavage a bit too prominently. As such the release was held back
until January 78. This proved lucky
two-fold as one: EMI’s major December single release was Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre”
which became one of the best selling singles of all time in the UK, consuming all in its wake.
as well as promotional copies of "Wuthering Heights" had already been sent out to radio stations.
While most were happy to follow EMI’s request to not play the song until its actual release,
Capitol radio playlisted it, building hype for a single that listeners couldn’t yet buy.
The track entered the UK charts at number 41 on the 11th of February.
Soon afterwards Bush would appear on Top of the Pops for the first time.
Due to musician union guidelines, as Kate Bush was a solo artist and not a band,
she would have to sing along to a version of her song composed by the house orchestra.
During the performance, Bush was shaky, still relatively inexperienced with playing live and
not quite gelling with this alien backing track.
This started her dissatisfaction with the whole process of promotion that would define her career:
"My first Top Of The Pops I didn't want to do. I was terrified. I'd never done television before. Seeing the
video afterwards was like watching myself die. That was when things started getting very
difficult for me because until then it had all been very creative work,
writing, recording, learning to dance. [But now] I was talking to press, talking to
television, and I couldn't express myself easily. I was up against a different beast."
But as “Wuthering Heights” was rising in the charts,
not everyone understood what Kate Bush was doing. And with her song inspired by a Victorian classic,
her kooky interpretive dance moves and operatic voice,
so far removed from other chart fodder, some saw her as a novelty, or a joke.
Worse though, because of her age, unease in expressing herself in interview
and promotional materials focus on her sexuality, others deemed her a puppet.
"People weren't even generally aware that I wrote my own songs or played the piano.
The media just promoted me as a female body.
It's like I've had to prove that I'm an artist in a female body."
Others compared her to the other female singer songwriters that were successful at the time,
artists that Bush could not hear in her work: "Every female you see at a piano is
either Lynsey de Paul or Carole King. And most male music – not all of it but
the good stuff – really lays it on you. It really puts you against the wall
and that's what I like to do. I'd like my music to intrude.
Not many females succeed with that.” But Kate Bush was definitely succeeding
in making an impact on music listeners. “Wuthering Heights” was so thrillingly
different from anything else on the radio. Bear in mind that 1978 was the year that punk
was hitting the UK charts in force, but Bush was revolutionizing in her own singular way.
And surprisingly Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten loved it:
But despite vocal wobbles, snide remarks and the press’s focus on her body, her song shone through,
“Wuthering Heights” reached number one in the second week
of March and stayed there for four weeks. It was the first time a woman had topped
the UK charts with a self-penned tune. And not only that it was a top twenty
hit in 12 other countries. And because of this,
counter to what the man at EMI thought, Bush was now in a lot more of a powerful position.
She almost supernaturally predicted her career in a way that they couldn’t see.
This made it so she could push “The Man With the Child in His Eyes” as her second single,
refuse future appearances on Top of the Pops and get the KT
Bush Band in to record her follow up album, Lionheart, at least in part.
The years after would confirm to everyone that she was more than a novelty,
and in fact an artist of rare genius. A national treasure of immense influence.
But “Wuthering Heights” was her beginning, and presented her career in microcosm.
Where she would continue to fight for as much control of her music and image as she could.
Where she would be dismissed, doubted and mocked by critics, but always prove them wrong.
Each album a different challenge, with new music, sounds and technology to explore.
When asked in 1979 what she had left to do careerwise, Kate Bush immediately answered:
“Everything. I haven’t really begun yet.
I’ve begun on one level but that’s all gone now, so you begin again.”
Thanks for watching. Big thanks from Grace of What’s So Great About That? who supplied
her vocal talents on this episode. Check out her channel if you’re looking for a better
quality of video essay on animation, on horor, on video games or digital
culture. I’d like to give an additional shout out to my new top-tier members:
Jessica Ervin-Hang, Kristen Cochrane, Matt. Thanks a whole lot and I’ll see you soon.