Kate Bush as producer: five years to produce her records alone

In 1980 a new word turns up in the credits of her records, next to her name. Not singer: producer.

The move is not a jump. It takes five years, and in the same stretch a machine enters her albums: the Fairlight CMI, one of the first samplers. The first two times, she is not the one playing it.

Five tracks to follow that route, from the shared credits of 1980 to a riff born inside the machine in 1985.

1980: a rifle used as percussion

“Never for Ever” came out in September 1980, and it is the first record she produced, alongside her engineer Jon Kelly.

MusicRadar quotes a line of hers about that moment, and it says nothing about sound.

The whole thing was so exciting for me, to actually have control of my baby for the first time.

On her own site she writes about that album: “I started working with the Fairlight on this album, an early form of a sampling machine”. And she adds a detail about one track only: “The sound of cocking a rifle is used as a percussion instrument in the song Army Dreamers”.

The Fairlight on that record, though, is played by Duncan Mackay, a session man. The machine is inside the track, in somebody else’s hands.

Same record, five and a half minutes

The last track on “Never for Ever” is “Breathing”, five minutes and thirty seconds, recorded like the rest of the album at Abbey Road.

When she talks about it on her site, she does not talk about herself. She talks about John Giblin’s fretless bass, and says he “created an oceanic creature that glided through the track”.

That is how someone who produces a record looks at it, rather than someone who sings on it: you describe it by what the other players put inside.

1981: somebody shows her the machine

Geoff Downes, keyboard player with the Buggles and Asia, told MusicRadar how he ended up on a Kate Bush track. He was recording at Townhouse Studios: “She saw me recording at Townhouse Studios, popped her head in, saw the Fairlight and said ‘What’s that? Can you come and play on my album?’”

It was a Sunday morning, early. She had a track called “Sat in Your Lap” and wanted some of the brass sounds he had shown her on the machine.

Downes ends the story like this: “A few months later, I’d heard she’d got one herself because she was so impressed by how it all worked.”

Second time the Fairlight turns up on one of her records, second time played by someone else. From here on it changes.

1982: nobody else’s hand on the desk

“The Dreaming” came out on 13 September 1982. Her site puts it in seven words: “I became sole producer for the first time.”

To Electronics & Music Maker, that October, she explained it without ceremony: “it’s the first one I have produced myself and anyway it’s the first time I’ve known enough to do that”.

About the machine, in the same interview, she says two things worth holding together. That “the Fairlight in a way is what I’ve been waiting for”. And that what draws her to it is “its ability to create very human, animal emotional sounds that don’t actually sound like a machine”.

That is not a throwaway line. In the magazine’s transcription of the album’s title track, published in the same issue, the list of sound sources includes sheep noises by Percy Edwards, a sampled orchestra chord, a whistle sample, a wood and metal tap.

She had bought a digital sampler in order to put animals and objects inside a record.

The point where the desk is hers

1985: the riff starts inside the machine

Five years on, the method has flipped. She told International Musician & Recording World that many songs on that album came from “just writing at the Fairlight, which was quite new for me”.

On one track she is precise: “Running Up That Hill all started off on the Fairlight. I just found this sound that I thought was a brilliant sound for the riff.”

A drum machine carries the weight, and she says so: “The Linn was actually taking a lot of the weight on the tracks.” The pattern is programmed by Del Palmer, who also plays bass and engineers on that record.

The place where this happens is not a studio rented by the hour. On her site she writes that she wrote the songs for that album “in a tiny room overlooking endless fields”.

The portrait

That studio was not built to make albums. In a 1993 interview Del Palmer says it had been set up to record demos for “Lionheart”, in 1978, in the barns next to the family home, and that he was the only one in the band interested in operating the tape machine.

In the same interview he describes how they worked ten years later. She would sing him a drum pattern and ask for it, he would program an eight-bar loop and never longer, and then she would program a sound in the Fairlight and get a tune going.

Palmer adds that there had been plenty of heated arguments, and how they ended: “Indulge me. Just do it.”

Moving behind the desk, the way the two of them tell it, was not about buying a machine. It was about reaching the point of knowing what to ask for.