How Kate Bush’s ‘The Kick Inside’ kicked punk into touch
Punk was so straightforward that in an age of complex prog rock, it was difficult to comprehend. In fact, in Charley Walters’ scathing Rolling Stone review of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ he just about inadvertently defined the punk movement: “The music is overly simplistic and rudimentary,” he correctly wrote in the same way that a spade review might say that it is only good for digging. Before adding for good measure, “It’s also not very good.”
But suddenly, this rogue clan of spiky-haired loons began kicking up a storm—a maelstrom so unique that it was wrestled with and intellectualised as a musical statement that beheaded the bourgeoisie with an axe of pure individualism and blunt expression. Thus, it’s perhaps no surprise that when Kate Bush arrived as yet another curveball right in the middle of all this, she too was a missed point.
She wasn’t yet 20 when her masterful debut album, The Kick Inside, arrived in 1978. But the starlet didn’t fit into the narrative and as such, she was seen as a fly in the ointment. Her reviews at the time were scathing. The Guardian called her an “odd combo of artiness and artlessness,” and dismissed her as a “middlebrow soft option.”
And NME followed up the barrage with the following: “[Kate Bush] all the unpleasant aspects of David Bowie in the Mainman era…. [Bowie manager] Tony DeFries would’ve loved you seven years ago, Kate, and seven years ago, maybe I would’ve too. But these days I’m past the stage of admiring people desperate to dazzle and bemuse, and I wish you were past the stage of trying those tricks yourself.”
Now, however, The Kick Inside is rightly regarded as a masterpiece. What happened? Well, the zeitgeist moved on quickly from the punk kickstart. It was a necessary lightning flash, and it changed the world, but after five short years, it had mutated into new wave for the most part. Oddly, the much-maligned Bush effort proved to be a pivotal moment of diegesis in this story.
You see, ultimately, Bush was the pinnacle of punk: if the movement was all about breaking away from the stilted norm in an individualistic and expressive fashion, then it doesn’t get much more profound on that front than the wailing ways of ‘Wuthering Heights’. As John Lydon proclaimed himself in a BBC interview: “At first, it seemed absurd, all that aaaaah and weeee, it was way up there,” Lydon commented. “But it wasn’t that at all. It fits. Those shrieks and wabbles are beauty beyond belief to me.”
And that, in essence, was the premise of her own movement—one that ran parallel to punk. It was all emotion and heart and that has enamoured everyone from Lydon to Big Boi of Outkast fame. As the latter commented to Ameoba: “Music is supposed to evoke emotion and make people feel a certain way whether it’s happy or sad or make you think.” Punk was doing that too in a very pointed fashion, but it was a rather monochrome world. A flowery mellow punk song is about as rare as a loquacious American in Hollywood; it just doesn’t happen.
In truth, punk exploded so quickly that it had no time to set out a plan, so people began following the leader. This made the angular revolution very edgy but, ultimately, not all that diverse. Bush picked up on its exuberant youthful energy and then gladly sat well to the left of it. She might have been cast out as an artistic pariah at first, but soon she started attracting a curious crowd with her hymnal humming, and shortly after, new wave married the two.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Punk Newsletter
All the latest Punk content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.