The Wild Reed: Ben Hewitt on the 40th Anniversary of Kate Bush’s Never for Ever

Monday, September 07, 2020

Ben Hewitt on the 40th Anniversary of Kate Bush’s Never for Ever

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Kate Bush’s third album, 1980’s Never for Ever, was the first album I ever bought. And I remember the day as if it were yesterday.

Back then, of course, it was a proper vinyl album that I purchased – from Gunnedah Sound Center, the little record store in my Australian hometown. I was fourteen . . . and it was a Saturday, as I remember walking around the corner to the main street and meeting up with some of my high school friends for lunch at the Monterey Cafe. I also remember keeping my purchase in its brown paper bag, as I didn’t want greasy finger prints all over the album’s strange and fantastical artwork!

Like everyone in Australia at that time who wasn’t living under a rock, I’d known of Kate Bush since her spectacular (and wildly original) emergence onto the music scene two years earlier with “Wuthering Heights.” It was my purchase of Never For Ever in 1980, however, that set me on course to being a lifelong admirer of Kate Bush. I soon added her two earlier albums (The Kick Inside and Lionheart) to my collection and from then on would purchase each new Kate Bush album upon its release – The Dreaming in 1982; Hounds of Love in 1985, my second year of college; The Sensual World in 1989, my second year of teaching; The Red Shoes in 1993, my last year teaching and living in Australia; Aerial in 2005, well into my new life in the U.S.; and 50 Words for Snow in 2011.

My most recent purchase has been Kate Bush Remastered – Part 1, a box set of her first seven albums, beautifully remastered and repackaged.

As I write, I have Never For Ever playing, and I must admit I find it hard to believe it’s been 40 years since its release. But there you have it. To my ears, the album remains strangely and compellingly contemporary. Or perhaps better still, timeless.

Ben Hewitt of Quietus has penned a wonderfully insightful appreciation of the album in which he writes that although it’s not Kate Bush’s most celebrated recording, “it might be her most pivotal – the start of her transition from artist to auteur.”

Following, with added images and links, is an excerpt from Ben Hewitt's Quietus piece on Never For Ever.

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Despite being overshadowed by what followed, [Never For Ever is] the start of [Kate Bush's] transformation into a one-of-a-kind auteur, the record that made her later, greater glories possible. Tired of EMI’s conveyor-belt approach to rushing out LPs, Bush assumed more ownership in the studio and changed the way she made music forever. “The whole thing was so satisfying,” she enthused in 1980. “To actually have control of my baby for the first time.” Forty years later, it’s no less significant: Never For Ever isn’t Bush’s best album, but it might well be the most important.

By late 1979, Bush was long used to battling EMI. If the label had gotten its way three years previously, her first release would have been the fun-yet-forgettable ‘James And The Cold Gun’; Bush pushed for ‘Wuthering Heights’ instead, and duly became the first woman to hit No 1 with a self-written single. Still, there were only so many fights a 19 year old could win in a sexist, stuffy industry. After the success of 1978’s The Kick Inside EMI demanded an instant follow-up, giving her only weeks to write new material and forcing her to mostly use years-old compositions. Worse, they then backed producer Andrew Powell’s decision to again replace her group, the KT Bush Band, with session musicians. The patchy Lionheart, released nine months after her debut, left her cold. “Though they were my songs and I was singing them, the finished product was not what I wanted,” she later told Keyboard.

Never For Ever would change all that. Draining as it was, Bush’s gruelling Tour Of Life gave her the chance to co-produce 1979’s On Stage EP with engineer Jon Kelly, convincing her they could handle a full album together. She ousted Powell and combined the session hands with her band members, swapping them in and out like rolling subs and making them record take after take. Bush biographer Rob Jovanovic, estimates she spent an unprecedented five months writing and demoing at Abbey Road, honing new and old ideas alike, while keyboardist Max Middleton [has said that] the sessions were so exacting because of her obsession with finding “something nebulous that was hard to pinpoint.” For Bush the autonomy was worth savouring, no matter how painstaking the process. “It was the first step I’d really taken in controlling the sounds,” she said, “and being pleased with what was coming back.”

Listen now and you can still hear that fundamental shift Bush spoke of, the birth of some new, peculiar magic. It starts with ‘Babooshka,’ in which a paranoid wife impersonates a younger woman to test her husband’s roving eye, and ends up destroying her marriage.

It’s a wonderfully wicked premise: Bush based it on the cross-dressing, happy-ever-after hijinks of the traditional English folk ditty ‘Sovay’, but her revamp is less a cheeky romp than a surreal, bitter farce, pitched somewhere between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tales of the Unexpected. Most startling, though, is the way it sounds, like unearthly Russian folk music: there’s something both archaic and futuristic about its echoey keys, eerie synths and the ethereal strings of her brother Paddy’s balalaika, as uncanny as a Cossack band playing on the Mir space station. Bush sings like two different people, flitting from coy trills to operatic shrieks, and eventually her world comes crashing down in a crescendo of squalling guitars and the Fairlight’s splintering glass.

Then, before the debris has cleared, she drifts into the wispy beauty of ‘Delius (Song Of Summer)’, which recounts how Frederic Delius’s amanuensis, Eric Fenby, took down his idol’s compositions from dictation after he was waylaid by syphilis. All the same, if “moody old man” Delius was difficult, there’s no rancour in its shimmering reverie of hazy sitar and bubbling percussion: it hums with the heady buzz of the olde British countryside, and Bush’s vocal has the crisp, bucolic freshness of dandelion and burdock. Both tracks size up the album’s big themes – the push-and-pull of thorny relationships, the constant churn of emotions – but one bursts into thunder, and the other floats on the breeze.

. . . Like ‘Wuthering Heights’, Never For Ever made history: the first No 1 album by a British female solo artist. Yet its significance transcends chart milestones. For the next decade Bush would build on its potential to become, as she joked to Q in 1989, the “shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet.” Whereas her first three albums were squeezed into two-and-a-half years, the subsequent three spanned nine. The next one, the bewildering, avant-garde masterpiece The Dreaming, was the first she produced entirely by herself; soon after, she built a studio-come-sanctuary near her family home and hunkered away to make the flawless Hounds Of Love. Each record introduced new inspirations, new instruments, new collaborators and new methods, all indebted to Never For Ever’s triumph of bloody-minded determination. It doesn’t belong in her imperial period, but that imperial period wouldn’t exist without it.