Prolific, precocious, KATE BUSH’s journey from girl genius to multifaceted art-pop phenomenon involved unlikely stops on the shelf at a sceptical label and the outer reaches of London’s pub rock circuit. Meanwhile, between her early demos andNever For Ever, childhood enthusiasms morphed into adult insights over music bold and bewitching. Still, for Bush, turning her visions into records would never be straightforward: “It’s frustrating to see something that you have been keeping transient for years suddenly become solid.”

Words: TOM DOYLE

Passing through air: Kate Bush, Old Street Studios, London, 1979.

Portrait: BRIAN ARIS.

THE YOUNG CATHY BUSH PRESSED THE ‘PL AY’ AND ‘RECORD’ BUT TONS ON THE Akai reel-to-reel tape machine and her songs began to flow. Sat at the grand piano in her family home, East Wickham Farm in the suburb of Welling, south-east London, she began to capture the many, many compositions that she’d accumulated by the age of 14.

“I was writing a song, maybe two songs a day,” the grown-up Kate Bush later told MOJO. “I must have had a couple of hundred. I would put stuff onto tape, but I was the tape machine. I used to practise, practise, practise in order to remember the stuff.”

Having first begun songwriting at the age of nine, she’d developed fast. One of her earliest lyrics was themed around a typically childlike fascination with colours, but it went on and on for far too long. When she played it to her family, she noticed them growing bored.

“They could only take so much before they had to leave the room,” she noted in the foreword to the 2023 paperback of her How To Be Invisible lyric anthology. “An honest response can be a very useful thing, so I worked on trying to make the next songs a little shorter.”

From here, Bush’s early compositions were more carefully edited, while at the same time increasingly involving an entire universe of her own creation, filled with elaborate world building and vivid character creation. When these home-recorded tapes – much to her annoyance – were inevitably bootlegged in the ’80s and then leaked online in the ’90s, they offered a fascinating glimpse into the early flights of imagination of a unique talent.

Some of these works-in-progress, later abandoned, deserved to have been completed. Something Like A Song, demoed in 1973, matched a wordless “ooo-ooo-ooo, aaa-aaaooo” chor us to descending piano chords, punctuating verses in which it seemed a vision of the god Pan appeared to the young singer in her garden, piping a haunting melody that she attempted to voice. In another song, Atlantis, Bush imagined a drowned world (an early draft of the one that later appeared in A Coral Room on 2005’s Aerial) replete with shoals of her ring swimming through the sails of sunken ships, to the accompaniment of her or nate arpeggios.

Other pieces were sketchier. Cussi Cussi spoke of some secret knowledge shared with the titular individual. The vaguely religious Sunsi found her drawn to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. You Were The Star was a pretty paean to a fallen idol, with hints of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock. Queen Eddie detailed the emotional turbulence surrounding the breakup of a gay couple.

Having access to a reel-to-reel also allowed Bush to conduct her first playful experiments in sound: recording a vocal melody, then reversing the tape, phonetically learning it backwards before recording it again so that when played for wards it took on an eerie quality.

Cathy Bush was clearly a startling, precocious talent. But capturing her complex song worlds on record would prove an endless challenge, and it was years before she’d be remotely satisfied with the results.

ON MAY 26, 1972, BRIAN BATH, A 19-year-old guitarist friend of Bush’s elder, folk fan brother Paddy, drove to East Wickham Farm for the first time to have a jam with him. Surprising Bath on more than one level, Paddy’s 13-year-old sibling joined in.

“I went to Paddy’s, and he had his mandolin and my amp,” Bath recorded in his diary. “His little sister sang through a mike and amp and sounded really incredible.” Two weeks later, he was invited back. “Fit some guitar on Paddy’s sister ’s song,” he wrote. “Really feel honoured to do it.”

“She had loads of songs,” Bath said in 2018. “I remember a few of her family were in the room and she was on a grand piano. She was really sweet and pleasant. She had this great voice, and her songs were really kind of interesting and beautiful. They were a bit special.”

Kate’s eldest brother, John, brought her homemade tapes to the attention of his friend, Ricky Hopper, a record plugger. Hopper was to become the singer ’s earliest champion, touting these lo-fi recordings around labels and publishers, though to no avail.

Then, Hopper played a cassette to his old friend from Cambridge, David Gilmour.

“I listened to it with him,” Gilmour remembered, “and he said she was brilliant, and I said I agreed. I thought a bit more was needed to be brought out of it. She was a girl plonking away on a piano with a rather squeaky voice and I didn’t trust most of the A&R men that I’d come across to be able to spot what was in it.”

In 1973, the Pink Floyd guitarist travelled to the farm with his own recording equipment and taped upwards of 50 of Bush’s songs. Selecting a handful, in August, he organised a session at his home 8-track studio involving drummer Pete Perrier and bassist Pat Martin of Sur rey country rock band Unicorn, with himself on guitar and Bush moving between acoustic and electric pianos. One track, Maybe, had been originally titled Davy and appeared to have been born of the now-15-year-old’s love of David Bowie. Another, Passing Through Air, bore the stylistic imprint of her other hero, Elton John (and was the only officially released cut from the session, later appearing on the B- side of the Army Dreamers single in 1980).

“They didn’t really achieve what was required,” Gilmour r e c koned of the demos. Two years on, in the summer of 1975, massively upping the ante, he offered to fund a full-scale master session at George Martin’s AIR Studios, situated four storeys above Oxford Circus in central London.

Gilmour enlisted Andrew Powell, a producer and arranger whose recent credits included Leo Sayer and Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel, to oversee the recording. Three tracks were laid down: The Saxophone Song, Maybe and, astonishingly, what would prove to be the master version of The Man With The Child In His Eyes, recorded live by the 16-year-old Kate with the accompaniment of a 30-piece orchestra.