[I wrote this review of Kate Bush's 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, in 2001. I was 30 at the time, looking back upon my teenage self. Now, at 44, I can see that another person wrote that review, too. It's also interesting to me now, given Kate's return to the spotlight after her very long absence. The photo is of Kate Bush as a child, taken by her father, Robert Bush; we used it in our original publication.]
I know what you are thinking—isn't that album a bit old?
Precisely my point. This album is old enough to take me back to my adolescence,
and to Kate Bush's as well. Indeed, most of the songs on this record (and by record,
I mean long
playing) were written when Kate Bush was but a girl herself. That must be
why I loved it so much when I was a girl, and why, when I listen to it now,
I revel in its innocence and charm.
I grew up in Boring Town, USA
during the Reagan years. It was a place full of self-righteous hicks who
condemned me to Hell for my thrift-store overcoat and purple hair, a place
where kids could do nothing but sit around and dream of escape—or, for the less
adventurous, prepare to assimilate as fast and as unnoticeably as possible. I
chose to dream, and I escaped into music. The import section of my local record
store was my Mecca, and I injected as much foreign vinyl as possible into my
veins back then. I ran the gamut, and a lot of it was extreme, but I was also a girl.
One night I saw Kate Bush "Live at the Hammersmith Odeon" (what an
exotic venue!) on USA's Night Flight, and there was no looking back. It
was one girl to another when Girl Power actually meant something.
I immediately ran to the
record store to get whatever I could by the tights-clad angel with two wacky
back-up brothers. All they had was The Kick Inside on a
domestic EMI-America release. It was already almost six years old. I plunked
down my $7.99 + tax and carried it home in the flat plastic bag. I tore the
wrapper off the album and gazed at the girl on the cover, all red leg warmers
and chestnut hair and dark eyes. The liner notes were on the back, the sleeve
inside merely white paper (what a rip-off!) I sat the record down onto the
turntable and carefully dropped the needle upon it. The opening strains of
"Moving" hit my ears, dolphinesque samples in an era before samples,
and then the voice of a spirit from another world, the most magical world I
could then imagine—the universe of perfect union spoken with a British accent.
When I was thirteen, The
Kick Inside sounded
so sophisticated. It was an album filled with dramatic and dreamy songs about
love set in Berlin bars and casinos and candlelit dinners and the dark brooding
passion of that classic misanthrope Heathcliff, all mixed up with the
philosophies of Gurdjieff and a Gnostic Jesus and Sufi darwishes and Om Mani
Pad Me Hom and a hippie-dippy new age vibe that somehow didn't offend me at
all. "Feel It" sounded positively dirty to me then, and I couldn't
stop playing it. The way that Kate sang about her dream lovers seemed so much
like my own idealized fantasies, it was as if she was reading my mind. The men
of "Moving," "L'Amour Looks Something Like You," and the
one and only "Saxophone Song" were so perfect and so real, I
desperately wanted to find them for myself.
I was so moved by that album
that I got inspired to do a little research about my new locally-unknown
musical discovery—harder back in the day, when all I had to work with was my local
county library stocked with back issues of Creem and Rolling Stone, and the occasional
import NME or Melody
Maker or
(get ready...) Smash
Hits which
I paid fortunes for on road trips to cities more worldly than my own. I learned
that Kate was just
a girl when
she wrote and recorded The Kick Inside, just around my age
when David Gilmor discovered her and gave her the chance to sing about
"The Man With the Child in His Eyes," just about my age
when she was able to kick out of her Kentish environs and enter the world of
London and music and life. My heart pounded faster—there
was hope for me, too!
I kept up with Kate Bush
obsessively, bought her entire back catalogue as soon as my record store could
special order it for me. I remember the day I bought the first new album she
released since I knew of her—it was Hounds of Love and I
purchased it the first day it was available in my town via import after getting
drunk on schnapps(so
classy!) with another misfit friend after school. I was fourteen years old that
day, draped in rhinestones and combat boots and a Nina Hagen souvenir concert
t-shirt (believe me, that's another story...) But time passed. Kate matured,
and so did I. By the time I heard "Never Be Mine" from The
Sensual World, we had both been screwed over by love, but the change was so
subtle that I didn't recognize it. You never notice yourself become jaded, it
merely manifests itself in new soundtracks. Somewhere along the way I stopped
listening to The
Kick Inside and
filed it in the midst of the rest of my personal vinyl archive.
The other day I pulled it out
and listened to The
Kick Inside for
the first time in years. Within seconds I was slack-jawed and on the verge of
tears. I was back in my youth, back in my moments of longing for something more,
something pure, and something innocent. Now I know too well that life and love
are not as I imagined them when I first heard The Kick Inside, nor are they as Kate
Bush wrote about them when she put her childish dreams to analog tape, either.
Listening to The
Kick Inside this
time 'round showed me that Kate Bush was as much an isolated girl struggling
for something more as I was. The songs that I thought were so worldly when I
heard them at age thirteen were, in fact, the feeble hopes of someone who had
yet to experience real love, someone who had just been dreaming as much as I
was about it. She was just better at recording those dreams, and I was there to
confirm them for her. Her art was the mirror for me and, I imagine, countless
other girls in the isolated world of suburban adolescence, a place to rest
until we could find a more worthy locale for our aspirations.
But listening to The
Kick Inside now
gives another kind of pleasure. To hear what innocence actually sounds like,
the thrill of the uncorrupted twinging heart, desires for literary lovers to
sweep you off your feet, the belief in fate and "Strange Phenomena,"
and, at the same time, the bittersweet disappointment in the incestuous
"Kick Inside"—all of this bound up in the sweetest and most
unsophisticated little girl warble imaginable—it is pure and simple magic. It
means nothing, what came after in the career of Kate Bush—the more complex
concept albums, the refusals to tour, the apparent lack of intentions to
release more material, the holing up in her infamous family farmhouse—none of
that is relevant to a new spin of The Kick Inside. In fact, I hope Kate
Bush never makes another record. I think I love her too much to hear it. I know
what it's like to be an adult, I don't need her latest contribution to that reality.
What I need is to reminded of what it means to be a girl. The
Kick Inside is
enough for me.
(Copyright Nancy L. Stockdale, 2001-2015, All Rights Reserved)
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