‘Feel It’: How Kate Bush fought against her strict schooling
Born and raised in Kent to a nice family in a nice area, Kate Bush was always a good girl. While her home life was always artistic with parents and siblings who encouraged her creativity, her days were the exact opposite as she put on her uniform and went off to St Joseph’s Convent Grammar School for a classically strict education. But when she broke out with her debut album, she rallied against all her teaching.
When Bush was a teenager, her life was split in two. During the weekdays, she was getting the exact kind of education you’d expect from a convent school; women should be covered up and conservative, sex was bad and sinful, and songs singing about it were the devil’s work with women dancing as his temptresses.
But at home, Bush’s creativity was free to roam. She spent her late teenage years rushing back from school to work on demo tapes, collaborating with David Gilmour to finish her early songs and gaining record label interest off the back of them. Those early recordings and those years spent writing songs as she finally finished school and was free from its strict teachings track Bush’s transformation in real-time.
While her earliest songs are as innocent as a person would expect from a teenager, the final tracks written for her debut, The Kick Inside, are the works of a woman defying anything she’d been taught about sex, sin and being provocative.
It came first as a reclamation of herself. When she received her first label advance, she spent part of it on dance lessons, learning how to move her body in a way that was expressive and freeing, casting off any guilt about whether a woman should or shouldn’t perform in a certain way. Then, when she wrote ‘Feel It’, it was the final rallying cry against the conservative lessons that she saw as squandering to her desire and her expression of that.
“It’s not such an open thing for women to be physically attracted to the male body and fantasize about it,” she told Phil Sutcliffe in 1980. But to her, ‘Feel It’ was her freeing herself of that expectation and allowing herself to write a deeply lustful track, adding, “To me, the male body is absolutely beautiful.”
In some ways, her entire debut is a stand against the cold lessons she learnt as a girl that told women their longings and wants were sinful. With each song dealing with inner desires in some way, the release of the record brought them all to light, with Bush explaining it felt like desire being “so bottled up you have to relieve it, as if you were crying.”
Once free from the mental shackles of her school days, her debut album, including ‘Feel It’, launched her into a world of pure artistic freedom, where sex, desire and forbidden longings often found their way into her work to be expressed through various sounds, characters and stories in her bold discography.
