Prolific, precocious, KATE BUSH’s journey from girl genius to multifaceted art-pop phenomenon involved unlikely stops on the shelf at a sceptical label and the outer reaches of London’s pub rock circuit. Meanwhile, between her early demos and Never For Ever, childhood enthusiasms morphed into adult insights over music bold and bewitching. Still, for Bush, turning her visions into records would never be straightforward: “It’s frustrating to see something that you have been keeping transient for years suddenly become solid.”
THE YOUNG CATHY BUSH PRESSED THE ‘PL AY’ AND ‘RECORD’ BUT TONS ON THE Akai reel-to-reel tape machine and her songs began to flow. Sat at the grand piano in her family home, East Wickham Farm in the suburb of Welling, south-east London, she began to capture the many, many compositions that she’d accumulated by the age of 14.
“I was writing a song, maybe two songs a day,” the grown-up Kate Bush later told MOJO. “I must have had a couple of hundred. I would put stuff onto tape, but I was the tape machine. I used to practise, practise, practise in order to remember the stuff.”
Having first begun songwriting at the age of nine, she’d developed fast. One of her earliest lyrics was themed around a typically childlike fascination with colours, but it went on and on for far too long. When she played it to her family, she noticed them growing bored.
“They could only take so much before they had to leave the room,” she noted in the foreword to the 2023 paperback of her How To Be Invisible lyric anthology. “An honest response can be a very useful thing, so I worked on trying to make the next songs a little shorter.”
From here, Bush’s early compositions were more carefully edited, while at the same time increasingly involving an entire universe of her own creation, filled with elaborate world building and vivid character creation. When these home-recorded tapes – much to her annoyance – were inevitably bootlegged in the ’80s and then leaked online in the ’90s, they offered a fascinating glimpse into the early flights of imagination of a unique talent.
Some of these works-in-progress, later abandoned, deserved to have been completed. Something Like A Song, demoed in 1973, matched a wordless “ooo-ooo-ooo, aaa-aaaooo” chor us to descending piano chords, punctuating verses in which it seemed a vision of the god Pan appeared to the young singer in her garden, piping a haunting melody that she attempted to voice. In another song, Atlantis, Bush imagined a drowned world (an early draft of the one that later appeared in A Coral Room on 2005’s Aerial) replete with shoals of her ring swimming through the sails of sunken ships, to the accompaniment of her or nate arpeggios.
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