“They were all very concerned”: How Kate Bush overruled EMI to launch her career
Kate Bush was just a teenager when she shot to fame under EMI’s representation, with a voice so unique that it intrigued listeners to bring her debut single to number one.
At 19 years old, the songwriter, fresh from Kent, surprised everyone in her production with the determination she possessed in calling the shots.
After being scouted by none other than the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, the precocious prodigy had quite a path open ahead of her. Gilmour had been handed her tape when she was only 16, and after becoming “intrigued by this strange voice”, as he told the BBC, he helped her to get signed with EMI. With more than 40 songs already written, the British record label didn’t falter in finding potential in the hot prospect, but failed to fully understand her singularity at first.
Bush had hoped that the song to spearhead her first album, The Kick Inside, would be ‘Wuthering Heights’, a track inspired by the tempestuous eponymous novel. She anticipated it to be her best bet as a debut single since it demonstrated her vocal versatility and spanned an impressive pitch range, while appealing to an audience who’d recognise the bucolic English literary references.
The label, though, was hesitant to use such an unusual, haunting single as the world’s first impression of the singer’s talent. They pushed the upbeat, rock pop ‘James and the Cold Gun’ to be the leading song on the album instead, a song similarly inspired by an English novel, Frederick Forsyth’s thriller ‘The Day of the Jackal’, but Bush was stubborn to have the Brontë inspired song be her first release, a song she had written in just a few hours late into the night, and that she had recorded in one take.
Her association with Gilmour, as well as the album’s producer Andrew Powell, may have influenced the label to lean into Bush’s influence, releasing ‘Wuthering Heights’ before the rest of the album in 1978.
According to Powell, the song was “a complete performance”, and he was emboldening the young artist’s determination. He even encouraged the session musicians to take directions from her, as Bush recalled, “They were all very concerned about what I thought of the treatment of each of the songs”.
Following their artist’s request was a smashing success for the label. The song topped the charts, making the 19-year-old the first female solo artist to become a UK number one with a self-written song. The song’s success bolstered the whole album, which arrived at number three in the UK.
Bush’s career followed in a straight line upwards after that push, proving that a young act new to the industry can still make decisions for what they believe. Her powerful, peculiar voice skilfully won over audiences from all generations, with her literary quotes bringing her erudite recognition. It’s impressive to imagine someone as young as her to be capturing parallels between the living and the afterlife, between love and longing, and to compress them into such a gothic package that’s still so radio-friendly, but maybe it was her eerie fairy tale element that was so universally appreciated.
