Album: Never For Ever
Kate Bush was one of pop's true originals and did so much to advance the status of women in music. With Never For Ever, her third LP, Bush became the first British female solo artist to top the UK album charts, building on the success of her brilliant debut, The Kick Inside. Creatively, Never For Ever is a huge artistic leap forward and its use of new technologies like the Fairlight synthesizer gives the album a rich, baroque sound. The marvellous album cover, depicting fantastical creatures flowing out from under Kate's cloud-patterned dress, and the dizzying array of string instruments and vocal acrobatics enhance the effect. Her sound is more a continuation of electric folk and progressive rock than anything related to punk, and the fantasy and fairytale aspects of her songs hark back to a more visionary, pre-industrial Britain. There's so much I love about Kate Bush, from her sublime songwriting to her smouldering looks; the fact I grew up in exactly the same area on the London-Kent border also deepens my affinity with her. One of my favourite authors, David Mitchell, sums up her unique talents much better than I ever could.
Artist: Kate Bush
Born: Welling, Kent
Released: September 1980
Genre: Baroque
Influenced: Madonna, Tori Amos, Radiohead, Joanna Newsom, Bat For Lashes
Babooshka is one of three Top 20 UK singles on the album, along side Breathing and Army Dreamers. In interviews at the time, Bush said that if there's one main theme to the album, it's "human communication and its difficulties" and that "each song has a very different personality, and so much of the production was allowing the songs to speak with their own voices". Babooshka tells the story of an insecure wife tricking her husband into infidelity and bears no relation to the mother of the Russian Revolution. Delius (Song of Summer) combines a drum machine with Bush's stunning vocals, and was inspired by Ken Russell's film about the legendary English composer Frederick Delius and his assistant, Eric Fenby (a story that also inspired David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas). As much as the brilliant songs, I also love how they all weave together, especially the sensual flow from The Infant Kiss into Night Scented Stock and then Army Dreamers, with its strident anti-war message. The sonic experimentation on Egypt and Violin is also magnificent, but the album's crowning glory is Breathing, which imagines a world after nuclear war and is written from the perspective of a foetus ("chips of plutonium are twinkling in every lung"). The song packs an emotional punch and also features backing vocals from Roy Harper, who Bush praises in the sleeve notes for "holding on to the poet in his music".
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