Practice Make Perfect

["Dan Riley" <dsr@lns598.TN.CORNELL.EDU>]

My apologies to Andrew and all other Love-Hounds for not giving a fuller
account of the "Piano Demos No. 1" CD earlier.  This is the first
bootleg I have ever bought, KaTe or otherwise, and it somehow didn't
occur to me that this might be a previously unreported item.

Anyway, as we will see, it is not complete, it is not entirely piano
demos, and does not appear to contain any new material.  It does contain 
most of the demo recordings generally available.

The front cover is a head and shoulders (and *lots* of hair) drawing of
KaTe, with the title "Kate Bush/Practice Makes Perfect/piano demos no. 1"
at the bottom.  The back is a small drawing of KaTe in dunce cap with
globe.  In the upper right is the word "Barklee", and below the drawing
is the title, track list, and "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED (C)  MADE IN FRANCE".

The track list is

 1. Kashka From Baghdad
 2. Coming Up
 3. Oh, To Be In Love
 4. Playing Canasta
 5. Snow
 6. Ferry Me Over
 7. Lionhearts
 8. Violin
 9. Craft of Love
10. Queen Eddie
11. In My Garden
12. Frightened Eyes
13. Never The Less
14. So Soft
15. I Don't See Why I Shouldn't
16. The Kick Inside
17. Hammer Horror
18. A Rose Growing Old
19. Keep Me Waiting
20. Davy
21. Disbelieving Angel
22. Don't Push Your Foot On The Heartbreak
23. Kite
24. L'Amour Looks Something Like You
25. Strange Phenomena
26. Really Gets Me Going

Total running time is a little over 72 minutes.

The first 21 are essentially the "Cathy Demos," complete with the 
identification of "Feeling Like a Waltz" as "A Rose Growing Old." 
"Coming Up" is the track identified as "Camilla" in _The_Garden_, 
"In My Garden" is "Something Like a Song," and "Really Gets Me Going" 
is presumably "Scares Me Silly."  "Who is Sylvia?" seems to be absent, 
as well as the later demo of "Moving" and the two "Babooshka" demos.

I've only heard "Passing Through Air" once, and we did not A/B the two 
CDs while I was at Greg's (footah!), so I can only give a subjective 
opinion that the quality seems comparable to, or perhaps slighter better, 
than the "Passing Through Air" CD.  The tracks are faded out fairly 
agressively in between tracks (irritatingly so in several cases), so most 
of the ambient noises are lost.  On one track I hear papers being shuffled
during the fade out, and on another it sounds like perhaps the microphone 
is being moved, but I don't hear anything that is obviously KaTe moving 
around at the piano bench.

In conclusion, I appreciate having most of the demos in one handy CD, but
there doesn't appear to be anything new on this CD, as far as I can tell.
I do hope that the "no. 1" at the end means that there are more disks to
come, since that would at least suggest more of these fascinating demos
yet to be released.  We can only hope...

-dan