The one verse Kate Bush wanted no one to ever hear: “Boring”
Meticulous doesn’t even begin to describe the kind of process that Kate Bush had every single time she went into the studio.
Everyone would have tried to crack the whip and say that she needed to make as many songs like ‘Wuthering Heights’ as possible, but there’s a good chance that whoever said that would have had their ass handed to them if they saw what she did on her own. All of Bush’s albums were only going to come out when they were ready, and she wasn’t going to settle for anything less than perfection when she made any of her tunes.
That said, some of those tunes were definitely a lot weirder than others whenever you listen to her albums in context. Hounds of Love might have been an absolute masterpiece when it came out, but The Dreaming did have more than its fair share of strange moments. None of those songs were meant to be traditionally commercial, but that’s not really what Bush signed up for when making her first songs.
No one gets signed by David Gilmour with the intent of making merely decent pop songs, and some of the biggest pieces of her career have been about challenging the status quo. No one would expect to hear someone cover Elton John and make it sound as strange as her version of ‘Rocket Man’, but when you look through all her albums, it’s hard to think of any of her tunes being any more perfect than they already are.
But some records were definitely more challenging than others every single time she got into the studio. She could have worked with anybody by the time that she worked on records like The Red Shoes and The Sensual World, but when you listen to her songs, you can also hear the hours that it took to make every single song as well.
Tunes like ‘Love and Anger’ don’t just fall out of the sky whenever someone’s in a certain groove, and while all those songs work well together, ‘Between a Man a Woman’ was a much more painful birth. It certainly helps to have some of the best session players in to work on the record, but compared to everything else that she was working on, Bush felt that adding a second verse to the song would have completely ruined the song.
She had built up this song to be one of the biggest tunes on the record, and she wasn’t going to let a bunch of fluff get in the way of the tune, saying, “We actually had a second verse that was similar to the first, and I thought it was really boring. I hated it, so it sat around for about six months. So I took it into a completely different section, which worked much better. Just having that little bit on the front worked much better. Quite often, I have to put things aside and think about them if they just haven’t worked.”
It doesn’t make the most logical sense to throw out an entire section, but the number-one rule was never being too precious with an idea. There are plenty of tunes that could have had a verse and chorus that repeated, but Bush knew it was more than okay to just erase one of her tunes and come back with something better if she felt that it suited the song a lot better than time-wasting verses.
The same could be said of a lot of the records that she made later in her career as well. 50 Words for Snow might not be the most animated record in her catalogue or anything, but you can feel the power in every single second whenever she gets behind the microphone. A lot of Bush’s best records are like watching someone paint a masterpiece, so she wasn’t going to let one fly in the ointment ruin everything she had worked towards.
