COLLABORATIONS

“WITH A KISS I PASS THE KEY, AND FEEL YOUR TOUCH TEASING AND REVEALING…” FOR SOMEONE WHO’S SEEN AS AN ISOLATIONIST, CLASSIC POP ARGUES THAT SOME OF KATE BUSH’S MOST TREASURED WORK AND PERFORMANCES HAVE COME FROM COLLABORATIONS…

IAN PEEL

Let’s start at the top. Don’t Give Up with Peter Gabriel is Kate Bush’s biggest-selling, most-moving and career-defining collaboration. Inspired by a book of photographs of Depression-era America entitled In This Proud Land, Gabriel wrote the song for his 1986 magnum opus, So. Don’t Give Up barely charted in the US but it became a Top 10 hit in the UK and, perhaps more than any other song in either Kate or Peter’s canon, it has become a musical lifeline to many people. Not least Elton John, who once said it helped him out of a downward spiral into drugs.

“When I took drugs, in the worst period when I was perfectly aware of where I was slipping,” Elton said in 2001, “one song helped me resist: Don’t Give Up by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. I was listening to it and I was continuing to repeat aloud: “I will not let go, I will not throw in the sponge”. The problem was that I did not know how to abandon the hole into which I was hurled. Then I understood; I would have to ask for help: to say “I need help.” I will never forget that track from the album So. Every time that I allowed the situation to beat down, every time that I thought that this life was not worth anything, I put on Don’t Give Up and I convinced myself, yes, it is worth the pain. Still now I cry, when I feel it.”

Don’t Give Up wasn’t just a collaboration in song, the pair’s performance in Godley & Creme’s accompanying video was equally iconic. In fact, when Rolling Stone rounded up their 20 Best Dramatic Duets of All Time in 2014, it was the video rather than the song that they focused on. “If ever there was a video that perfectly captured the intent of a song, it’s the clip for Don’t Give Up,” it declared, “which simply features Gabriel and Bush in an embrace for dear life, a camera panning around their singing visages. There’s an insular, intimate feeling to this song of struggle and hope... Bush and Gabriel are so completely in sync their yearning gentility enveloping one another with hug-like strength.”

But this most famous collaboration, for both artists, wasn’t the first time they had appeared together on record. On Gabriel’s third self-titled album – aka Melt – from 1980 you can hear Kate take a tiny cameo on Games Without Frontiers. She’s also on backing vocals – much more noticeably – on Frontiers’ follow-up single, No Self Control.

It was at those studio sessions that Kate first met Melt’s engineer, Hugh Padgham. Padgham was on the cusp of a sonic breakthrough, developing the infamous – much aped – gated drum sound that’s all over the album’s opening track, Intruder, and which he went on to use to greatest effect on Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight. Between those two tracks he set to work with Kate, engineering three songs on The Dreaming.