The two Kate Bush songs produced by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour
When Kate Bush first emerged, nobody had ever seen anything quite like her. At a time when punk was the radical movement stealing the headlines, she struggled for attention and was often swept aside by cynics. However, as a member of Pink Floyd, David Gilmour was aware that any musical radical is well worth an ear, even if they are concurrent with the current trend. After all, that’s precisely what makes them radicals in the first place.
So, while Gilmour was scouting around for acts in the mid-1970s, he was open ears about hearing an avant-garde teenager pairing pop, indie and theatricality with a sprinkle of Captain Beefheart. When he first heard her, he knew instantly that she was years ahead of her time, in both senses. It was 1972 when a tape arrived on his desk; he was immediately intrigued by the 13-year-old talent on the scratchy demos.
So, he decided to pay her and her family a visit. One vital piece of advice he soon offered was that she was too young to enter the industry at present and that he would help safeguard her from the grubby mitts of the big labels. So, when her debut album, The Kick Inside, did eventually arrive in 1978, Bush wrote: “The album is something that has not just suddenly happened. It’s been years of work because since I was a kid, I’ve always been writing songs and it was really just collecting together all the best songs that I had and putting them on the album, really years of preparation and inspiration that got it together.”
Her Self Portrait notes continue: “As a girl, really, I’ve always been into words as a form of communication. And even at school I was really into poetry and English and it just seemed to turn into music with the lyrics, that you can make poetry go with music so well. That it can actually become something more than just words; it can become something special.”
And then she honoured the hero who had not only ushered her to this point but produced two brilliant tracks on the record that survived from wayback when. “Maybe another interesting thing about this album is that two of the tracks, ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ and ‘Saxophone Song’ were recorded about three years ago. This was in fact my initial plunge into the business, as they say, with the help of Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd,” Bush continues.
Concluding with thanks: “I managed to get through to him through a contact of my brothers’ and at that time he was looking around for unknown talent. He came along and heard me and we put some things down and he put up the money for me to make my first demo in a proper recording studio with arrangements. I owe to him the fact that I got my contract and that I’m where I am now. Two of these original tracks that we had on the demo are on the album, so maybe that helps with the variation.”
Thus, what we also hear with the masterful The Kick Inside, is not only musical innovation from the naive wellspring of youth but also a document of Bush’s adolescence. The album shows an artist growing, honing, refining, and also proudly supporting that initial childhood impetus, ultimately creating a record like no other in every which way. The Kick Inside has always been resplendent with the dreamy golden reverie of youth in motion, and that’s borne from autobiographical sincerity.
