The Kick Inside

She may have been a teenager, but Kate Bush's amazing 1978 debut was years in the dreaming.

- Mark Blake

IN FEBRUARY 1978, the month Kate Bush released The Kick Inside, she appeared on Saturday Night At The Mill. Broadcast from the BBC’s Pebble Mill studio in Birmingham, the show had dinner-jacketed host Bob Langley chatting to old stagers such as Beryl Reid and Frankie Howerd, and music by house band Kenny Ball And His Jazzmen.

In retrospect, the siren-voiced, 19-year-old Kate Bush playing Them Heavy People, a rollicking hymn to spiritual enlightenment which name checks Russian mystic Gurdjieff, seems absurdly out of place. Afterwards, Bob Langley interviews “the lady, Kate Bush” in the manner of a well-meaning but slightly condescending schoolmaster. Sat behind her grand piano, Bush politely answers his questions, but looks like she might be silently telling him to piss off.

Back then, Bush said she wanted to challenge the clichéd image of the docile female singer-songwriter and make music that “intrudes” and “puts you against the wall”. Her first single Wuthering Heights, released a month before The Kick Inside, did just that. Bush’s soprano voiced interpretation of Emily Brontë’s gothic romance won some unlikely fans, including Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten. The future John Lydon was the tabloid press’ public enemy number one at the time, and later described Wuthering Heights’ “shrieks and warbles” as “beauty beyond belief.”

There’s a maddening, brilliant contradiction at the heart of Wuthering Heights and its parent album. At first, The Kick Inside’s dainty grand piano and lush strings seem to have one foot in the Pebble Mill studio. Then these songs about Gurdjieff, orgasms, incest, lust and suicide reveal themselves and, as threatened, you’re up against the wall.