A year before "Wuthering Heights" made her an international phenom, and two years before the Tour of Life, a 17-year-old
Kate Bush, as a part of the hastily named KT Bush Band, toured London and its environs in Morris Minor panel van. She
performed classic songs like, of all things, "Honky Tonk Woman" and "Come
Together," alongside early renditions of "James and the Cold Gun" and "Kite." It
was there as well that she may have tried out obscure tunes like the haunting
and unreleased "Something Like a Song," which was recorded as early as
1973, but more likely 1975.
Kate, with the
help of David Gilmour signed to EMI in 1976, but the label execs felt
she wasn't yet accomplished enough to record single, let alone an LP.
Accustomed to performing only at the family home at Wickham Farm in Welling, she had never
performed in front of an audience. Brian Southall, EMI's head of talent
development said, "We'd heard demos in
the office, we knew she was a prolific songwriter, but we hadn't seen her perform.
So we suggested she gain some live experience." Sounds like The Beatles sent off to Hamburg. On a Tuesday night in March 1977, Bush played her first ever gig at
the Rose of Lee pub in Lewisham. She performed two 45-minute sets to roughly
20 in attendance. The band was paid £27.
"Her mum was there," Southall said. "She seemed to be doing the catering... The gig was slightly
odd, a rock-and-roll set with songs you really didn't expect her to be doing,
but I remember being very impressed by her. She already had an extraordinary voice
and she really could perform."
I'm trying to
picture the 17 year old Kate performing the dramatic "James and the Cold Gun" and the fledgling gunslinger routine (Kate shooting pubgoers with a cocked finger), which would become the highlight of the Tour of Life.
Strangely enough, upon first meeting David Gilmour in 1975,
Kate had never even heard Pink Floyd. She stated, "I was not really aware of much contemporary rock music
at that age. I had heard of them, but hadn't actually heard their music. It
wasn't until later that I got to hear stuff like Dark Side of the Moon. And I just
thought that was superb – I mean they really did do some pretty profound stuff." Gilmour would become the executive producer of The Kick Inside and sing on "Pull
Out the Pin" from The Dreaming and Pink
Floyd would become a startling influence on her subsequent music. Indeed, she
liked The Wall so much that she borrowed
the helicopter sequence to use on "Waking the Witch," and one can
certainly hear the influence in the track's opening, kind of staccato Morse
code, as Floydian as it gets. Of it Kate said, "That’s an effect that we managed to muck around with.
It was a very experimental idea, a sort of trick really, that took us a long
time to do. I wanted to give the impression of a very desperate attempt to
communicate." It's a funny statement from someone who has so easily communicated these past 40 years.
