Album title: Never for Ever
Artiste: Kate Bush
Genre: Art Rock/Pop
Year: 1980
Label: EMI
Producer: Kate Bush, Jon Kelly
Chronological position: Third album
Notes:
Album chart position: 1 (UK)
Singles: “Babooshka”, “Army dreamers”, “Breathing”
(Note: I'm discontinuing the “Lineup” category from now, putting it in only on the first album or if there are major changes along the way. Some of the personnel lists are ridiculously huge)
Kate's first album to hit number one (only in the UK though: she was still pretty much unknown in the USA), this was also the first album she produced herself (although with help), something that would continue through all her albums to date as she took more control over her music. It features three hit singles, two of which cracked the top twenty (again, only in the UK) and one of which went to number five, her biggest success since “Wuthering Heights”.
Review begins
A dark piano opens up “Babooshka”, one of the hit singles, the one that went to number five, and it features a bewitching performance from Kate on vocals, with some pretty hard guitar and a great driving rhythm in a kind of folk style at time, fretless bass provided by John Giblin. The song is the tale of a woman trying to test her husband's fidelity by presenting herself in disguise to him as a rival for her affections, through letters. I suppose, to some degree, similar in theme to Rupert Holmes's “Escape”. The song features the sound of what sounds like glass breaking, perhaps meant to symbolise either the woman's breaking heart as she realises, as the husband falls for “the other woman”, that she has outmanoeuvred herself, or her hurling crockery and things in a temper. Oddly, Kate revealed that at the time she wrote the song she didn't realise that the word was a Russian term for a grandmother. A similar percussive line to “In the air tonight” gets “Delius” underway, with what I think is the first male vocal on a Kate Bush album – I don't know if it ended up being the last one. Certainly she did not use male voices much, if at all, in her music. The tune itself is a nice kind of soft rippling thing, again driven on bright piano but with the vocals at times almost snarled by the male voice, which belongs to none other than Ian Bairnson, the guitarist from the Alan Parsons Project who has at this point been on both of her albums. Here though he only provides the vocals on this track, guitar duties being taken by Brian Bath and Alan Murphy.
“Blow away” is a sort of prayer for one of her engineers who died in an accident, and has an almost gospel chorus with some lovely orchestral arrangements, quite sad but almost celebratory in its own way, while whistling flute and violin complement the piano on “All we ever look for” with a kind of
pizzicato rhythm, more male backing vocals, this time from Gary Hurst and Andrew Bryant, and the song ends on a rather odd effect of what sounds like Kate walking out of the room in which the music is playing (it fades down as she closes the door) and a whistle. Odd little song, can't say I like it all that much. “Egypt” then has a suitably eastern melody, though it sounds like there are uileann pipes in there, and rather oddly a piano run which sounds eerily similar to later Deacon Blue hit “Real gone kid”!
A much more uptempo and forceful affair, “The wedding list” has some fine violin and I think harmonica, with Kate almost channelling Lene Lovich at times (!) and the song sounds like it may be a tale of revenge (I'm pretty sure she mentioned it in the lyric, but I'm too lazy/busy to look it up), with again some really nice work from the Martyn Ford Orchestra. I had, I admit, expected “Violin” to be an atmospheric ballad on, well, violin, but it turns out to be Kate's attempt to move on from Lovich and on to Sioxsie Sioux! Totally madcap and full of energy, giving the guitarists a chance to rock out, even rack off a solo, but I'm not that fond of it. “The infant kiss” is another nice ballad with a sort of lullabye feel to it, some of the piano a little discordant, and violin coming in here too, very effective, while “Night scented stock” is barely a minute long, leading into “Army dreamers”, a waltz rhythm defining one of her other hit singles and again featuring male backing vocals. I always feel that Kate sounds totally Irish on this; maybe it's the accent she uses, I don't know. The final single, “Breathing”, displays Kate's amazing creativity and versatility in terms of subject matter, as she takes on the persona of an unborn foetus, worrying about the world it is going to be born into. The longest track on the album, it's accompanied by dramatic piano and mournful violin and has a dark, apocalyptic feel to it, perhaps an odd one to end the album on, an even odder choice for a single, but a great song and one that showed Kate was serious about her music.
Track listing and ratings
Babooshka
Delius
Blow away
All we ever look for
Egypt
The wedding list
Violin
The infant kiss
Night scented stock
Army dreamers
Breathing
Afterword:
I'd say a definite step forward for Kate, compared to her last two albums. Still not blowing me away, but some really powerful material here and a marker for how much of a force she was going to become in music, and what an icon she would represent for women trying to make it in what was still very much a man's world.
Rating: 