Dimery features Kate Bush, but her later albums. Which is fair enough, but her debut is something of a phenomenon (but not a Strange Phenomenon), and a solid album to boot, so it seems like an unusual one to omit. This is the fourth of my suggestions for the Seventies.
Famously, this features some material that she started to compose when 13 (The Man With The Child In His Eyes, for example), and was promoted by David Gilmour – Gilmour also has production credits. The bulk of the album was recorded when Bush was 17-19 years old, and for that is an impressive achievement.
Wuthering Heights made a big stir when it first appeared – like nothing else in the charts at the time. Compare to the likes of Joy Division or Public Image Ltd., all of the punk and post-punk and New Wave, and Bush was seen as deeply uncool, but also interesting for her difference. Here’s this waif of a girl wafting around in a floaty white dress, singing in a soprano voice as the ghost of a character from a Gothic novel from 1847. And yet the public evidently knew talent when it heard it as it was a big hit.
The rest of the album is able to stand against this juggernaut, mixing in a range of musical styles including little bits of reggae and rock, but mostly tending towards more of a classical bent; there’s a touch of Carole King singer/songwriter about it. For the most part, Bush fulfils the "traditional female" role that the music industry has created by writing and singing about love and relationships, but quite often taking a non-traditional take on it. Some songs like Feel It or the lush Moving have quite an erotic physical element to them, others have a delicate vulnerability, like The Man With The Child In His Eyes, or L’Amour Looks Something Like You.
The album closer and title track, The Kick Inside, rivals Wuthering Heights with its tale of transgressive love, a suicide note written by a sister to her brother when she finds she’s pregnant by incest. Listening to it again, I wondered if it was based on a Greek myth, with the line “I’ll send your love to Zeus”, but then I’d always assumed that since she sings of them both learning mythology on the father’s knee it was a private joke between them. According to Wikipedia it’s based on a folk tale/murder ballad Fair Lizzy. So much is packed in to three and a half minutes, and Bush’s voice is at her best here of the entire album, in my opinion.
There’s a big collection of session musicians behind her, including brother Paddy, with Andrew Powell having the biggest role. But it’s Bush who provides the main piano, and her own backing vocals. In places it feels a little over-produced; the better tracks are the simpler ones, and maybe a couple of tracks on Side Two are little more than variations on the same theme, but to me this is a strong album and worthwhile including to show where Bush starts, compared to where she develops, and also how she contrasts to the prevailing sentiments of 1978.
Comments
Post a Comment