How dancing was the making of Kate Bush’s music
In 1976, when EMI signed Kate Bush when she was a mere teenager, they gave her an advance of £3000. Today, that would be the equivalent of around £22,840. It seems like nothing, given the modern music world of six-figure-plus advances, but in the 1970s, it was a small fortune placed in the hands of a young girl as a key to unlock her vision. What did she spend it on? Dance classes.
The key here is that Kate Bush already had her vision. She didn’t need £3000 to help her out there. When The Kick Inside eventually came out in 1978, a portion of it had already been recorded and done before EMI handed over the contract. The official version of ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ features the voice of a 13-year-old Bush because they knew they’d never get a better take than the original demo recording. ‘The Saxophone Song’ is the same with the demo take merely being smarted up. ‘The Kick Inside’ and ‘Oh To Be In Love’ were also pretty much ready. So when it came to the actual music, the advance money wasn’t necessary as Bush not only had the sound there, ready and waiting, but she also had the people there to help her as the record, like most of her others, was largely made by a core team of her family and friends.
What needed to be figured out was who Kate Bush would be to the public. As a person, Bush was richly creative but somewhat shy. She’d lived a normal life up until this point as the daughter of an artistic and supportive family; she spent her days at school and her nights working on songs. She’d played a few shows with her brother and friends at local pubs and venues, somewhat beginning to understand her stage presence. But as EMI geared up to launch her into the world, she spent that advance on preparing herself by granting herself a new language: dance.
Of the money, a good amount of it was spent on dance classes with Lindsay Kemp, who previously worked with David Bowie. First walking into one of his classes as a 19-year-old, it was that move that changed Bush’s life, perhaps more so than her meeting with EMI or the release of her record, on which she honoured Kemp’s looming influence by dedicating ‘Moving’ to him.
It was in that dance class that Kate Bush became Kate Bush. Imagine it – imagine a world where she never danced. If there was a ‘Wuthering Heights’ music video, would the song have been as successful? If there was no expressionism in the way she moved on stage, would her songs ever have reached the theatrical heights they did on later albums like Never For Ever or The Dreaming? There would certainly be no music video for ‘Running Up That Hill’, stripping that beautiful piece of art away from her legacy as she never would’ve learnt to dance like that. There would definitely be no The Red Shoes as the album, its artwork and even its accompanying film, The Line, the Cross & the Curve, were all inseparably informed by her life as a dancer, maybe even more so than her life as a singer.
“The more you work, the more a certain type of character evolves. It was very much a phase that went with when I was working in dance,” Kate Bush told The Fader about the process she went through to find her voice as an artist. Stating it explicitly, Bush herself knows that dance was a crucial part of that as she said, “I wonder if, as I was exploring a technique of dance, I was also sort of exploring a technique with my vocals as well.”
At every turn, Bush’s career has gone hand in hand with movement. At the start, it was all on stage as her early tours were never just concerts; they were experiences with dancers surrounding her for full choreographed sections. Even during her comeback in 2014 for the Before The Dawn shows, they were elaborate performances that were more theatre than anything else. After the touring was done, Bush’s music videos became so essential to her legacy, with dance routines always being at the heart of it as the singer displayed her incredible skill in that world, a skill she’s honed just as carefully and passionately as her musical ability.
It is impossible to untangle the two as movement informs her output at each step. But when tracing right back to the start, to that moment right before the world knew her name when that £3000 was in her hand, it feels like the decision to walk into Kemp’s studio and hand it over to him was the making of the Kate Bush the world knows as those classes taught her how to perform and how to present herself, unlocking the vision for the star she would become to match the music she’d made.
