The song that earned Kate Bush a record deal
Long before she struck fame with her seismic impact on the pop charts in 1978, Kate Bush was writing songs since her early teens. Born into a musical family that valued the arts and creative pursuits, her brothers helped nurture Bush’s natural gift for songcraft and assisted with several rough demos of around 50 compositions. Knowing an industry connection via her elder brother, John, Ricky Hopper unsuccessfully passed the tapes around to several labels before taking a chance on a friend, and Pink Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour.
Naturally, he was impressed. During the recording of 1975’s Wish You Were Here, Gilmour travelled to her Bexley family home to meet her parents and offer his assistance. Financing enhanced versions of the home demos, several songs were cut at London’s AIR Studios and boasted The Beatles’ sound engineer Geoff Emerick to further persuade Pink Floyd’s EMI label to sign the then 16-year-old Bush.
Armed with the flashier demos, Gilmour struck a chance to share his discovery with EMI’s honchos: “I think we had the record company people down at Abbey Road in number three… I said to them, ‘Do you want to hear something I’ve got?’, and they said ‘Sure’. So we found another room and I played ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ and they said ‘yep, thank you, we’ll have it’.”
Still at school, EMI placed Bush on a two-year retainer to ensure an appropriate time to acquire her O-Levels. She was also afforded a hefty advance, leading to enrolling for interpretative dance classes taught by acclaimed choreographer Lindsay Kemp, which would aid her theatrical impact that awaited around the corner. While recording The Kick Inside, Bush corralled Del Palmer, Brian Bath, and Vic King to play her KT Bush Band in numerous gigs around London.
Bush’s explosive debut single ‘Wuthering Heights’ was a relatively late addition to her voluminous songbook. Resisting EMI’s push for ‘James and the Cold Gun’ as her introductory number, Bush’s instincts proved correct, with her ode to Emily Brontë’s titular novel shooting to number one on the UK Singles charts and stunning the pop landscape with its arresting orchestral rock and evocative lyrical stir.
The next UK single sought to confound expectations and saw her reaching back to the AIR Studios’ ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’, which was cut as the second single.
The track eschewed chamber-pop theatre for quiet sensuality with its haunting piano balladry and delicate minimalism, showcasing Bush’s knack for nuance as well as complex arrangements. Without any extra overdubs or studio polish, the original 1975 recording overseen by Gilmour was deemed powerful enough, included on The Kick Inside without any revisions, and penetrated the American market at a respectable 85 on the Billboard Hot 100.
While ‘Wuthering Heights’ is the number that’s seared into popular consciousness, ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ cemented Bush as one of the era’s eminent songwriters, a song that signalled to all those in her creative orbit that she’s set to bring the artworld and the mainstream closer across the 1980s.
