Album Reviews # 94 Kate Bush - The Kick Inside

 

Kate Bush is someone I've grown to love over the years. It wasn't an immediate thing. When she first  appeared in 1978 and I was 13 she didn't appear to be conforming to the script of that particular musical moment. She was all dancing round fields in Pre-Raphaelite dresses just as New Wave and skinny ties were kicking in.Debbie Harry had more appeal.

Four years later and I was seventeen and The Dreaming came out she still seemed hardly essential. I remember watching her on The Old Grey Whistle Test being horribly patronised by its privately educated presenters Mark Ellen and David Hepworth about the fact that bird impressionist Percy Edwards and didgeridoo player Rolf Harris appeeared on the record. My attention was still elsewhere. Somehow she seemed liked older sibling fare.

In time I've learned to let all of this go and appreciate Kate for all the wonder and rich adventure she epitomises. Her records are magical imaginative journeys in the same ways as an Angela Carter novels are. There's no one quite like her regardless of the vast extent on her influence of others.

1978's The Kick Inside has a good claim to be the most progidious debut ever produced by a British artist. I'd give it top billing with Aztec Camera's  High Land, Hard Rain, (essentially an expression of Roddy Frame's genius). The Kick Inside is not completely realised but is a brilliant statement of astonishing talent and genuine arrival.

'Ridicule is nothing to be scared of. Kate was never remotely scared of it. She was from the off a phenomenally brave artist. From those first preposterously over the top performances on Top of the Pops and that vaguely ludicrous but still astonishing promo for Wuthering Heights. 

This was a most un English attempt to capture the majesty of perhaps the greatest un-English novel ever written. What's more it pretty much did so.

The Kick Inside seems less a coherent statement than a declaration of blazing, extraordinary talent. There were moments that early Kate lost me and I found her plainly over the top and theatrical. Babooshka would be first exhibit for the prosecution. But there's plenty of altogether wonderful stuff on these first few records.

So she's not a Punk but a nice Home Counties girl. But the Number One Punk John Lydon certainly understood and saluted her talent.The Kick Inside doesn't stay still for a moment. 

It's mad as a box of frogs but it's certainly never dull. Recorded over the previous couple of years, it's the definition of prodigious. It has no restraint. Just look at the cover.

Strangely, the Kate album that's most feted, The Hounds of Love does little for me. I don't care for its sterile state of the Eighties art production and the singles have never really floated my boat. 

I prefer the early albums, The Dreaming in particular, which was generally dismissed at the time and what came after that, particularly Aerial.

Anyhow, this is an utterly joyous debut, going resolutely against the grain. It's an act of quite remarkable vocal and imaginative acrobatics. Kate would make better albums but this one still stnds the test of time pretty effortlessly. National Treasure is a much overused term but here it's entirely apt.