002: my favourite kate bush demos

 those who know me personally will know that i am a HUGE kate bush fan and have been since i was 14, 
those who don't know me personally also know that i am a kate bush fan because it's all i talk about. 

( x minute read).

a peice by india southgate.

"why are you such a huge lover of kate bush?" you may ask. i could give many reasons. though for me, it's not the rumours of topless recording sessions, nor the hotboxing of set trailers before 8am on cloudbusting, nor the alleged box of tokes she used to have while performing with the KTbush band that had to be confiscated, nor the level of detail laced into her production which can be seen in blow away with the childs voice whispering in the latter parts, nor that she is her own producer. none of that is what drives me to like her work. it is not her mythic nature that gets me, it's how abstractly normal she seems to be beside her work. she seems to be the most normal woman in the world. she co-exists with the weirdness inside and chooses to befriend it rather than cower to it and be as disfunctional as those who do. she is well read, intellectually curious, privy to a wide catelogue of film and art. she is truly who i felt understood by.

i think the first time i really heard her work must have been when i was very young on absolute 80's radio as the second time i remember very well. i was in supervised study, a compulsary hour after school where i was supposed to do my homework but i was really more interested in what music my dad had put onto my phone, and i had found that i had all of her albums downloaded so i started to listen. i think i started with what i knew first; running up that hill, hounds of love, wuthering heights, and i found myself knowing all the words. from that point on i progressed through the discography each week, listening to my favourite albums over and over agiain until i felt sick of them and moved on to the next. i don't remember touching on aerial or the red shoes until much later but when i did i felt much regret that i had not opened my mind up sooner. having become totally sick of picking apart the meanings of each song on genius (most peoples interpretations are wrong), i seached for more. first i went to interviews, what had she said about each song? sometimes i'd find heaps, other times not much so i moved to what she had said about her life. i read an interview she gave about her school life in flexipop that has much been disputed to have been ghost edited or even ghost written as they get her birthday wrong. i read on the wikepedia page that she had 10/11 gces so i thought id get the same amount (i did, i think i have 11 and a half, to make her proud). then i believe i saw that she had written poetry so i went on the search for written copies of these. through college, no avail. though recently in uni i found an archived geocities (?) website with her early poems. i must say that 'call me' is my favourite, though it is hard to pick. i was looking around the website a bit more and i read her letter to a friend and a page of her diary and i wished that younger me had read it. she was so candid and felt so tangible that it was almost as if i had written it, or could have. i think that's the only writing of hers i could have written by myself.

it is strange to thing of the past as much as this. i remember, now that i am older, how i used to listen to her music and yearn for what she had felt. a young love, a young brilliance, it seemed to me at the time, i could never have. but i lived, and experienced many things, and i listen again and feel just as i had then but now it is coloured by experience. i too had been writing songs at that time. the first being written in one of those supervised study sessions called absynthium, a very dramatic song about my feelings at the time. then i wrote sun between school and college. in college when i wrote darkroom then i had a tune stuck in my head that eventually became a song i still play though the lyrics have changed. i had started writing when i was 11 on ukulele, then in the pandemic i picked up guitar and piano and ran on from there. i don't know what happened with the singing. i most likely started in the shower or the car but i remember i had a pretend band in primary school that a friend would humour mw with, then prior to that i'd imagine my own albums, then failing to write those imagined songs i'd get my dad ro rip cd's for me. though i seem to have gotten much better than i used to be. i haven't recorded my voice in forever but you can hear it's progression on my soundcloud. i started getting interested in soul, bulgarian choral, kulning, bel canto techniques and other such unique voices and have become quite happy with how i sound.

at last i arrive at kate's demos. i found that my evenings had and have always been punctuated by nothing. for a few hours after dinner every night i would be on youtube searching for new documentaries to watch or new music to listen to and love. i stumbled upon my holy grail, alone at my piano. i think you can even see my comment from when it was first posted. not the oldest comment, but one of the oldest atleast. on first listen, my hear was on fire. i was seen, i was known, it all made sense. each story wasn't really about the narrative, but about the feelings evoked. kate has always been a storyteller and also a woman. this sounds odd, and i risk being reductive here, but her femeninity and exploration of taboo imparts a sensuality onto her material that is rarely seen elsewhere. that is why i am a fan. i have her records, the kate book, the official chord book (i used to use russian chord sites that have all the chords to the demos on but they seem to get taken down within a few months of using each time), a miriad of other books, a fanclub magazine, and two 2014 tour tshirts i got on ebay. i also have favourite demo's, and here they are.

(listen to the demos playlist while you read!!)

my favourite kate bush demos!!!

1. frightened eyes (year)

reason

lyrics

0. hot in the ice (year)

reason

lyrics

0. cussi cussi (year)

reason

And I've notice in your eyes
A sadness I don't like.
To recognise
You are feeling a heavy side of your ecstacy.

0. blow away (year)

reason

lyrics

0. kidnapped at the building site (year)

reason

lyrics

0. sunsi (year)

reason

Oh where is the light, where I have seen the flame.
Oh where is the light, oh I have been the flame.
Oh river light, go out with a flame.

0. rinfy the gypsy (year)

reason

Oh, yes, I know, I'm always falling,
Gazing at hazy goldfish in your swimming eyes.
How could I not lie there with you?

0. violin (year)

reason

lyrics

0. oh to be in love (year)

reason

lyrics

0. davy (year)

reason

lyrics

0. so soft (year)

reason

lyrics

0. craft of love (year)

reason

lyrics

0. eddie the queen (year)

reason

lyrics

0. carmilla (year)

reason

lyrics

0. who is sylvia (year)

reason

lyrics

0. dali (year)

reason

lyrics

final thoughts...

(if you have any thoughts, please let me know on my guestbook!)

date started: 04 may 2025

date finished:

updates: none