Under the Ivy

by Graeme Thomson

  Her year as a travelling salesman is characterised by the experience of performing at the San Remo Film Festival, early in 1979. “It was bizarre,” she later recalled. “Up in the morning, over to Verona, and walk out on this stage. I’m facing the cameras and a few hundred people who I assume are the audience. Then the stage and the whole set starts to rotate and I realise that it’s a huge circular stadium and out front there are thousands and thousands of people. I’ve never seen so many people in my life! Anyway I mimed ‘Wuthering Heights’, bowed, and flew off home again.”3

  It was like being part of a circus, and was entirely at odds with what she wanted to do. However, the idea that from the outset she habitually loathed all forms of promotion isn’t quite true. “I think she did quite enjoy the promotion,” says Brian Bath. “There wasn’t the pressure of doing it all live, and if you can mime you can do other things: dress up and start to introduce all your other ideas and mime and things from a visual point of view. That’s what counts on TV.”

  She was fascinated with shooting the early videos, rushing off to make ‘Wuthering Heights’ in the middle of the night with the innovative director Keith MacMillan and seeing the results broadcast on Top Of The Pops only a few days later. She quickly came to regard the embryonic art form as an essential part of what she did and therefore longed to control it. That would come. For now, she was learning from “an early pioneer, a creative genius,” according to MacMillan’s lighting engineer John Henshall.

  She also enjoyed attending some of the awards bashes back home, where she could chinwag at length with comedian Rowan Atkinson or have to be rescued from the clutches of Bob Geldof and Phil Lynott – “these two wild Irishmen,” says Southall, “leching after this young lady, and her naively going to chat to them not realising that they didn’t have the best of intentions!” –at the Melody Maker 1978 Poll Awards, where she won Best Female Vocalist and Brightest Hope. And there was always room for a little covert radicalism. Previewing a new song on mainstream TV show Ask Aspel, she politely explained that she had intended to sing ‘In The Warm Room’ but, on reflection, felt its sexual subject matter was perhaps inappropriate for the show. Instead she sang ‘Kashka From Baghdad’, a song about two homosexual lovers. On Saturday Swap Shop, she even managed to cajole Noel Edmonds into a halfway intelligent conversation about Emily Brontë.

  But the novelty quickly began to pall. She hated flying, and the long trips later in 1978 to Japan, Australia and New Zealand sapped her energy. They were made without her band and she missed their company, and Del. Above all, she hated the impact it had on her work. By Christmas 1978 she was already lamenting, “I miss being by myself very, very much but it’s very difficult because you can’t just ask people to leave, they don’t understand. I can’t remember the last time I was alone for any length of time, even a day. It must be well over a year.”4 This most intensely private of artists, who once said she couldn’t contemplate writing a song with somebody else in the room, no longer had the time, space or sense of inner and outer quietude to write. The sanctuary of Wickham Farm and her flat in Wickham Road seemed a long way away.

  There was no peace. There was no time. And there were no songs. For a writer like Bush, this was all a kind of nightmare. The very thing she had been determined not to do –get snagged in the riptide of the music industry, allowing the strong surface currents to dictate the direction of her art –was happening in front of her eyes. “I was really taken away from making music, which was a very hard thing to come to terms with,” she said. “I kind of had to take a hold of that and reverse the whole situation.”5

  That reversal happened too late for Lionheart. Somewhere amid all the self promotion she had to write and record her second album, a tightrope walk she never quite managed to master. Loose plans for a UK tour had already been shelved due to lack of time and a feeling that it would be more beneficial to concentrate on making more ‘product’. “We talked about dates,” says Brian Southall. “She had performed as the KT Bush Band, she had a band, but she wanted to focus on making records. She wasn’t keen, and we were happy to focus on the second album.”

  Eager to capitalise on the enormous success of The Kick Inside, EMI booked Bush into a favoured haunt of Pink Floyd: Superbear studios in the mountain village of Berre-Les-Alpes in the Alpes-Maritime region, near Nice in the south of France. With recording due to start on July 7, she found she had less than four weeks in which to get material for the album together. In the end, there was precious little in the way of new songs. ‘Coffee Homeground’, written in the US in May, was a rare example of her being able to compose while in transit. She had also written ‘Symphony In Blue’ and ‘Full House’, but the rest of its 10 tracks were by necessity reclaimed from the past: ‘Wow’ had been considered for The Kick Inside; ‘Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake’ had been demoed with the band in 1977; ‘Hammer Horror’ and ‘Kashka From Baghdad’ dated back to the solo recordings of 1976, while ‘Oh England, My Lionheart’, ‘In The Warm Room’ and ‘In Search Of Peter Pan’ were very obvious reshapings of earlier songs: slow, beautiful piano ballads, by turns sensual and sad, of which she had a plentiful supply.

  In May, and again in late June and early July after returning from Japan, she and her band demoed the songs for the album. While she had been fulfilling her promotional duties around the world, her father, Paddy and the group (who had been kept on modest retainers: “We were just paid here and there, it was a bit of a struggle,” says Brian Bath. “Her dad paid us bits and pieces”) had been constructing a studio at Wickham Farm. “We would turn up every day and while Kate was away we built the studio in the barn at her parents’ place,” says Charlie Morgan. “The summer of 1978 we were there doing all this work –it was quite an idyllic situation, we were all so wrapped up in Kate’s talents.” Armed with hammers and saws, they put in the stud work, built screens, filled the studio door with sand and put Rockwool in the walls to soundproof the building. Dr Bush did all the wiring. “Then we started messing around doing demos,” says Morgan.

  Brian Bath was very much the musical director. “When Kate had a few songs she’d phone me and say, ‘Brian, do you want to come over and work on the songs so we can present them to everyone?’ I’d go over to Wickham Road and sit at the piano with her, work out the chords and basic progressions and write out these bar charts so that everyone could understand them. When Kate went to Japan for promotion [or] she disappeared for a week or so, we’d start a track or be overdubbing when she wasn’t there.”

  It was barely a year since they had all been scooting around London in the Morris 1000 and fighting off rampaging Scotsmen in the pubs of Putney, but the band dynamic had shifted in an almost imperceptible yet profound manner. Bush was remarkably unaffected by stardom, and never bought into the diva-like notion that it made her in any way superior to anyone else or gave her an excuse to act appallingly. She had her own personal standards of behaviour which she has maintained throughout her career, but fame brings its own inevitable distance. “All of a sudden she was cocooned in this dream state,” says Brian Bath. “It was like when the KT Bush Band wound down, there was this separation. It was most peculiar. There was a difference in some way. All of a sudden you were a different kind of working partner: she’s the boss, you’re not. But we used to still have a laugh at the farm when we were recording these demos for Lionheart.”

  She badly wanted her own band to play on Lionheart, partly for her own artistic reasons, and partly as a repayment for all their hard work and loyalty. Andrew Powell, however, who was again producing, saw no need to depart from the template that had proved so successful last time. “Andrew was very keen to use the same band, and I can’t blame him, it had worked very well,” says Jon Kelly. “Kate was more experimental. In between the albums she’d been playing the songs with her own musicians.” It boiled down to a fundamental difference in the aspirations for the new record. The company wanted another The Kick Inside, whereas Bush really wanted the n
ext album to be a reaction against her first. In the end, neither quite got what they desired.

  The Kick Inside had been an astonishing success on its own terms: unique, unusual songs played sympathetically by an excellent group of musicians and a remarkable singer and performer. It sounded like nothing else and there are many fans today for whom it still remains her finest hour, her most accessible and timeless piece of work.

  But she held a very different view. Within a matter of months of finishing the record and even before it was released, she indicated a less than satisfied attitude towards it, not so much in terms of the songs but in terms of the execution. “It could have been so much better, there were so many more things I could have done,” she lamented as early as February 1978.6 She was troubled by that odd sensation many musicians feel when they first start recording, the shock of hearing ideas you have held in your head for so long take on a solid, robust form. There is an almost inevitable sense of dislocation and disappointment. She came to regard herself as a mere participant in her debut rather than its architect: they were her songs, it was her voice, but it was not her vision that she heard coming back at her when it was all over.

  It was 1978, and although Bush would never be a punk by either sound or sensibility, she expressed admiration for The Stranglers and The Sex Pistols, admiring their aesthetic if not entirely loving their music, eulogising the way they “laid it on” the listener.7 She yearned for her own music to have a bit more bite and punch. More guts. She dismissed The Kick Inside as “airy fairy … I’m not pleased with being associated with such soft, romantic vibes. I guess I want to get basically heavier in the sound sense.”8 That masculine, ‘hunting’ instinct again.

  Using her own band would be a significant step towards realising this musical vision. Those who played on the initial demos recall they were often quite radically different from the versions of the same songs that ended up on Lionheart. “They were pretty noisy,” says Brian Bath. “I think ‘Wow’ was pretty close to the finished record. ‘Hammer Horror’ was a bit of a mush but there were good bits in it. The one about the poison, ‘Coffee Homeground’, we had a great version of that, it was a really good effort. The tunes were all over place! It was great, we all used to join in on backing vocals.”

  Jon Kelly, who was again engineering, was also impressed. “I didn’t get to hear them until many, many years later,” he recalls. “I had a friend who had some demos from those rehearsals and they were very good.” “Musically they were fantastic,” adds Charlie Morgan. “A lot of the times the demos we did with Kate were pretty experimental. We’d really throw a lot of ideas in. It’s hard to be diplomatic about it; all I can say is that we trod new ground.”

  They had fun, too. When they recorded the demo for ‘Hammer Horror’ at the farm, Bush insisted that she needed to be genuinely frightened in order to ‘get into the role’. Paddy had the idea of “blacking the studio out and having all these strange things going on outside,” says Bath. “She started singing and Paddy threw some matches past the windows, we made some [ghost] noises, and she went ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhh’! She actually lost her voice, she couldn’t sing any more. She came back a couple of days later to sing it again.” By now, her band understood –and indeed were rather devoted to –her eccentricities. “She’d always have a very descriptive or illustrative version of how a song should be,” says Bath. “She’d say, ‘I want it to be mysterious sounding’ or something like that.”

  Pretending to be a ghoul in a blacked-out studio was not, it’s safe to say, the way that Andrew Powell preferred to work. However, to his credit he listened to her ideas and agreed to at least give them a try, but he had little real enthusiasm for the idea of using her group. “Kate really wanted her band very strongly, and I thought the easiest way to resolve something is to try both sides, which is basically what happened,” he says.

  He visited Wickham Farm shortly before they were due to set off for France and listened to the band do their thing. “Oh, I was so nervous, I’d never been so nervous in my life,” says Bath. “Kate’s dad gave me a couple of pills to calm me down. We’d worked so hard at it, doing the demos, building the studio, installing the tape machines and learning how to work it all. I felt kind of responsible, because I’d organised things. You could tell [Powell] wasn’t really into it, but I suppose it was agreed, or Kate insisted, that we should be there, so we were flown out there to Nice, up in the mountains. Huge villa, brilliant place. Really hot.”

  It was a slice of luxury compared to AIR, propped as it was atop a sparkling mountain range rather than grimy Oxford Circus. The studio was set in a vast whitewashed villa which housed not only the recording facilities but also the stylish residential quarters on the lower floor. There were two cascading swimming pools, video games, pool tables.

  The setting was idyllic, the recording process less so. The uneasy truce about which musicians to use was never built to last. Bush’s band recorded eight tracks during the first couple of weeks, but it was clear that some issues were unresolved and eventually had to be confronted. It would be too dramatic to see it as a power struggle over control of the album, but it was significant, particularly as this time Bush was credited as assistant producer, reflecting her desire to be more in charge of the overall direction of the record. “She wanted to have more input and it [became] a little bit more conflicted,” says Kelly. “I don’t remember it being confrontational at the time, but I’m sure it led to some tension.”

  Powell felt he had some legitimate musical concerns. The group lacked studio experience at this level, and what they sometimes regarded as the producer deliberately making their lives difficult may just as easily have been attributable to their struggle to adapt quickly enough to the laborious, piecemeal nature of making an album. “I would say it took the KT Bush Band a little longer to get their stuff together,” admits Charlie Morgan. “But we did get results. I think musically we were up to scratch, but our speed was maybe slightly slower.” There seemed to be constant obstacles. The arrangements they had worked on so assiduously at the farm changed markedly in the Alps; Powell would fiddle with the amp settings as they were playing; he would question their tuning. At one point he asked Paddy to ‘track’ (to exactly replicate the improvised part he had previously played) his playing of the Strumento de Porco on ‘Kashka From Baghdad’, which Paddy regarded as deliberately asking him to attempt the obviously impossible.

  There were no rows or great fallings out, but neither did there appear to be any great affection or even respect between the two camps. “They started pulling all the things we were doing apart,” says Bath. “There were various meetings. We were in there for days and it just didn’t seem to get any better. I remember playing a guitar line with three notes in it, and [Powell] said, twice, ‘The note in the middle is out of tune.’ I pretended to turn the string around, but I didn’t actually do anything, then I played it again and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s better, yes.’ It was exactly the same! So there were all these kind of mind games going on, really.”

  Powell’s explanation is simple. “Some of the tracks they did worked out rather well, others just didn’t work, frankly, so we redid them with the other guys,” he says. “My job and responsibility was to make sure that whatever personal things were involved, the songs were raised to their best possible level.” Charlie Morgan, however, refutes the suggestion that the band weren’t up to the job. “I think the problem was that Andrew Powell had to relinquish a certain amount of control, because it was a club that had already been formed and he wasn’t a member of it, whereas with his session boys it was a club that he had created.”

  Stuck in the middle, Bush was left in a ticklish situation. Hilary Walker, at the time head of EMI’s international division but soon to leave the company to become Bush’s PA, flew over and it was agreed that the musicians who played on The Kick Inside would come and complete the album, while Bush’s group would beat a retreat. She was essentially cornered into sacking her band, including he
r boyfriend, who had been playing bass. “It was a tricky conversation,” concedes Powell. “Del made it more tricky from my point of view –and hers. It wasn’t something that was specifically raised, I certainly wasn’t going to raise it, but it probably did make it a little bit more difficult from both sides.” In the press she later attributed the band swap to a “mix up in the organisation”9 and promptly changed the subject.

  They were told they were all welcome to stay, and they all did, enjoying the warm weather, the swimming pool, the odd trip to Monaco with Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright, who turned up during the proceedings with a car load of champagne and a desire to hit the casinos. Only Charlie Morgan flew home straight away, bumping into the band of replacement musicians as they arrived at Nice airport. “I left the morning that everyone else arrived,” he says. “Stuart [Elliott] was coming in and I had a 10-minute chat with him before I got on the plane at Nice. I told him what the kit was like and what he might need to do with the drums. I’d been doing a lot of freelance work so I was quite thick-skinned about the whole thing, whereas the guys in the band were absolutely devastated. They hung around for at least a week afterwards and possibly weren’t terribly productive to the making of the album. They wouldn’t have been helping the other musicians at all and there would have been this very vibey thing going on.”

  With the new band in place, the recording continued in France over the course of July and August. Although they were old friends and everybody got on, the atmosphere was “a bit awkward” at first, according to David Paton. “It was like, ‘Get out of the way, here come the big boys,’ and I wasn’t comfortable doing that to any musicians. What can you say? It was Andrew’s call. Andrew had confidence in us and producers like to work with the same musicians all the time, he knows how he can get the best out of them. Kate was happy for us to be doing the work. I think she realised her band’s limitations, and Andrew did as well. They had no studio experience, and there’s nothing better than studio experience. They weren’t performing live either.”