England’s Dreaming
PLUS KATE SPEAKS!
“I’d never wanted to be famous!”
IN the Essex countryside, between Harlow and Roydon, lies a mock-Tudor house called Woodley. In August 1973, it was home to David Gilmour. The guitarist had installed a modest studio just off the lounge; no control room, just an eight-track reel-to-reel on half-inch tape, a Wurlitzer and a slightly out-of-tune upright piano. On this auspicious day in the height of summer, Gilmour was joined by two members of the folk-rock band Unicorn, who had travelled up from Guildford in their Transit, and his new prodigy. “Scared?” Kate Bush later admitted to Unicorn bassist Pat Martin. “I was bricking it.”
Cathy Bush – as she was then – first met Gilmour earlier that year. The guitarist had received a demo tape from a mutual friend and, intrigued, visited her parents’ house, East Wickham Farm in Welling, Kent, to hear Bush first-hand. Accompanying herself on the piano, Bush had played well enough for Gilmour to arrange this informal recording session with Martin and drummer Pete Perryer. The session fee was a meatloaf made by Gilmour’s then wife, Ginger.
“Cathy was very shy,” says Martin. “She went to the piano crossed her legs as she sat down. All she had ever done was write songs in her bedroom. She’d never played with other musicians. We said, ‘Look, just play your songs. We’ll join in when we get what is going on and if you don’t like what we are doing, tell us.’ She started on the first number and you could see her grow. She went from looking down at the floor to really getting into it. She’d never experienced before what you got from playing with other musicians.”
Four-and-a-half years later, Cathy had become Kate and her self-assurance had grown. “Wuthering Heights” was not much like the other music made in 1978. Its ravishing eccentricities and antic spirit made it among the most thrilling and strangest debut singles of all time. Bush performed it on Top Of The Pops on February 16, 1978 – the first of five appearance as the song went to No 1 and stayed there for four weeks. When she couldn’t appear in person, there was a video: Bush in a white gown, kohl-eyed and dancing, a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life.
“We knew the song was extraordinary, but the instant success took everybody a little by surprise,” says Duncan Mackay, who played keyboards on Bush’s 1978 debut LP The Kick Inside. “When ‘Wuthering Heights’ came out, there wasn’t anything like it. But that was Kate being Kate. I’d never worked with a singer like that and when something like that turns up you don’t question it, you just enjoy it – because it doesn’t happen often.”
Soprano Glenys Groves sang backing vocals on Bush’s 1979 tour, and draws a parallel between the Tour Of Life and the impact of “Wuthering Heights”. “In the pop world even now, if you want to stand out you need to be different,” she says. “That’s what she was, and that came across in the shows. It was like nothing else people had seen before. She was a pioneer and that cemented her appeal to the public. It’s why I am as proud of having worked with her as I am with Domingo and Pavarotti.”
The journey from hesitant neophyte to “Wuthering Heights” took in Covent Garden dance classes, Oxford Circus studios, the Whitechapel Art Gallery and pubs in Lewisham. It found Bush reinterpret formative influences, from family and Catholicism to a love of folklore, nature and the physicality of human existence, themes that fed the songs on and beyond. Her visionary music emerged from an unlikely congruence between past and
