‘Lionheart’: The album Kate Bush is “not really happy with”
Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, boomed her to success. Becoming the first woman in the UK to earn a number one with a self-written track, ‘Wuthering Heights’, amongst other album cuts, instantly caught the attention of the music industry and the world over. The album sold over a million copies, so when it came to Bush’s sophomore album, the pressure was on.
It’s a pressure that a lot of artists feel. The stereotype of the difficult second album is talked about plenty, putting artists in a tricky dilemma between doing more of the same to try and replicate their initial success or evolving into something new. So often, musicians stumble at this hurdle and never quite manage to live up to their debut. Kate Bush desperately didn’t want that to be her fate.
However, the external pressure put on Kate Bush following the success of The Kick Inside was immense. Bush barely got any time to breathe between the release of her debut and the start of her second album, Lionheart, leading to lingering regret about how the album was handled.
Keen to ride the coattails of the success of her debut, Bush’s label EMI pushed her back into the studio almost instantly. While most artists take an extended break between albums to reset and reconfigure how they want their sound to evolve, Bush wasn’t afforded that rest as she found herself recording album two in July 1978, a mere five months after the release of The Kick Inside. Her second album, Lionheart, was then released in November 1978, only nine months after her debut.
It wasn’t something Bush necessarily wanted or felt comfortable with, describing it as “a difficult situation”. In the album’s liner notes, she can hardly hide her disappointment surrounding the process, writing, “I felt very squashed in by the lack of time and that’s what I don’t like, especially if it’s concerning something as important for me as my songs are, they’re really important to me.”
Featuring fan favourite tracks like ‘Wow’, ‘Hammer Horror’ and ‘Symphony In Blue’, Lionheart is by no means bad, with Bush herself calling it a “bloody good album”. But in interviews since the release, the musician is open about her disappointment in it, admitting to being “not really happy with it”.
It seems the lack of creative space and the pressure to simply get Lionheart done quickly led to an album that Kate Bush feels disappointed in and disconnected from. “Even though they were my songs and I was singing them, the finished product was not what I wanted,” she said in 1985. “That wasn’t the producer’s fault. He was doing a good job from his point of view, making it sound good and together. But for me, it was not my album, really.”
But Lionheart taught her a valuable lesson that may well have led to her later masterpieces. “I wasn’t powerful enough basically to be able to say, ‘Look, I’m producing this myself. This is what I do.’ And that’s what I do now,” she said in 1985, reflecting on Lionheart after the release of Hounds Of Love. Lionheart ended up being the last Kate Bush album that was produced by someone other than her, going on to take the reins for all her future albums.
No lesson learnt is ever wasted, but it’s sad to think that Kate Bush is disappointed in any of her work.
