When Kate Bush sat in on Pink Floyd’s recording sessions: “I was absolutely staggered”
While the world didn’t hear Kate Bush’s unique voice until she was 19, the singer had been working on it since childhood. By 15, she had amassed over 50 songs. With the help of her family, a self-made demo tape ended up in the hands of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, and the rest was history.
Ricky Hopper, a friend of the Bush family, passed her demo tape onto the Pink Floyd guitarist, who was immediately impressed. He was so impressed, in fact, that Gilmour himself paid for Bush to go and record a more professional track, leading to her being signed to EMI.
Gilmour, it would seem, took Bush on as something of protégé. He saw so considerable promise, even when record labels doubted her. “It took better than the average A&R man’s ear to spot the talent,” he said in one interview, recounting how the pair met. Gilmour was so passionate about Bush’s potential that he even fought EMI over her. He explained: “The label at first were convinced I’d sold them a dud and wasted two years over it. They were difficult with producers for her and refused to use the guy I told them to use until I lashed out at them.”
But besides helping Bush find a producer, as he set her up with Andrew Powell, who would produce two of her albums, Gilmour greatly inspired Bush’s own creative vision. Through their friendship, Bush was handed an insight into the music industry as she witnessed the guitar player at work during the heyday of Pink Floyd.
Just as Bush met Gilmour in 1975, Pink Floyd were working on their ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here. In creating the follow-up to the epic 1973 concept album, Dark Side Of The Moon, the band had a big task ahead of them, trying to better their previous record and were stationed at Abbey Road studios to write and record.
During one of their album sessions, 15-year-old Kate Bush was invited along. “I was absolutely staggered,” Bush later wrote in a book celebrating the famous studio. Best known as the eponymous studio behind The Beatles album, artists including Aretha Franklin, Little Richard, The Zombies, and more have all recorded at the studio. To this day, Abbey Road remains a landmark, with acts like Nick Cave, Blur, Amy Winehouse, and Spice Girls adding their names to history over the last few decades.
To a teenage Kate Bush, the studio seemed like a dream: “I really thought I would never be able to record in a place like Abbey Road.”
However, Bush did make it there. Her second album, Never For Ever, was recorded and produced at the studio. It was even where the singer took her first foray into self-producing, sitting behind the control desk in Studio Two. “Being on your own in studio 2 is a fascinating experience, she said in Brian Southall’s book Abbey Road. I felt tremendous vibes in there, both positive and negative.”
To Bush, there was something magical and mythical at play, adding, “You know it’s built on key lines [Invisible, mysterious force fields such as those found at Stonehenge], which means there are very powerful forces at work. I even thought of coming in in the evenings just to write, but it would have been an enormously expensive way of writing.”
Achieving a dream that was once set thanks to a kind invite from David Gilmour and Pink Floyd, the band helped a teenage Bush imagine bigger and better things for herself that she’d one day make happen.
