**** Kick Inside and Dreaming published reviews ****

[rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill)]

        These are two reviews I got from the Night Scented Stock BBS in 
Canada. 


             KATE BUSH: UNCAGED BIRD (THE KICK INSIDE REVIEW) 
 
                   by Peter Reilly/STEREO REVIEW/1978 
 
   A lot of people are not going to like what they hear Kate Bush 
saying in her new album THE KICK INSIDE, about being a woman in the 
Seventies. And perhaps even more are going to object to the way she 
says it, for in many of her songs she treads on a territory 
(sex-as-sex-as-sex) long held to be a male preserve. She does so with 
the same brisk authority and self-possession that has characterized at 
least some British women since the days of Emmeline Pankhurst, 
suffragist -extraordinaire-, and for this reason she will surely offend 
a great many men. 
   But probably as many women will be equally upset by Kate Bush's 
candor and honesty, though for a much different reason, the gallingly 
accurate one given by Germaine Greer in her book "The Female Eunuch". 
Greer says that as far as women's rights and equality are concerned, 
they are an accomplished fact, that indeed for the last fifty years the 
cage has been open, -but the bird has refused to fly out-. Bush's 
frankness and sense of what a female friend of calls "gut nooky" will 
hardly endear her to  those women who still cling to the perch while 
making complaining Tweetie-Pie denials of their own sexuality. 
   What is different, however, about Kate Bush -- and what makes her 
songs important -- is not agitprop but excellence. With such songs as 
"Room For The Life", "Feel It", or "L'Amour Looks Something Like You", 
listeners know that they are in the presence of a real person, a real 
woman who lives in the here-and-now dealing with life as it is being 
lived, not as it is -supposed- to be lived in the perfume ads. Bush's 
females are fully as hungry as males are -- not in the angry, doomed, 
and rather dreary way of the romantic-gone-wrong of LOOKING FOR MR. 
GOODBAR, but simply as healthy, alive human beings with sensual and 
sexual appetites to satisfy.  And they are as guiltless about 
expressing their hunger as most males have been for years. 
     Consider this from "Feel It": "Feel your warm hand walking 
around/I won't pull away, my passion always wins/So keep on a-moving 
in, keep on a-tuning in/Synchronize rhythmn now..." Or this from 
"L'Amour": "I'm dying for you just to touch me/And feel all the energy 
rushing right up-a-me/ L'Amour looks something like you." Bush performs 
these songs with a direct sincerity in an appealing, rather quavery, 
high-pitched voice that communicates not lubricity but the joy of 
satisfactory love-making. What we have here is not the eye-rolling 
lewdness of Xaviera Hollander (the greatest management consultant of 
modern times), the kinkiness of a Pauline Reage, or even the brittle 
comedy of sexual manners of an Erica Jong, but a human being telling 
about one aspect of her humanity. 
   There is a great deal more to Kate Bush and her album than matters 
sexual, however, and aside from two clinkers -- "Wuthering Heights", a 
weary rehash about "cruel Heathcliff", and "James And The Cold Gun", a 
song about 007 that seems as deliberately nonsensical as the plots of 
some of the Bond films -- all her songs have a lively sense of 
truth-telling about them. In the lovely "The Man With The Child In His 
Eyes", the protagonist confesses. "And here I am again my 
girl/Wondering what on earth I'm doing here/Maybe he doesn't love me/I 
just took a trip on my love for him." Probably the strongest song in 
the album is "Room For The Life", which in one way is a call to those 
still-caged Tweetie-Pies and in another is a simple statement of the 
perils of freedom, liberation, and independence in the life of any 
Seventies woman: "NIght after night in the quiet house/Plaiting her 
hair by the fire, woman/With no lover to free her desire/How long do 
you think she can stick it out/How long do you think before she'll go 
out, woman/Hey get up on your feet and go get it now/Like it or not we 
keep bouncing back/Because we're woman." 
   Nobody's said it better than that in quite a while -- not even
Katherine Hepburn, who was asked a few years ago if she missed having a 
home life because of the demands of her career and replied, "Well, we 
can't have it all, can we?" Kate Bush seems to know and to believe and, 
most important, to communicate that what women can have, if they are 
honest with themselves, is quite enough. You've come a long way, 
Emmeline baby! 
 
 
(SysOp note: "James And The Cold Gun" has nothing to do with James 
Bond) 
 
 
 
                       KATE BUSH - THE DREAMING 
 
            by Colin Irwin/MELODY MAKER/September 11th 1982 
 
   Under the premise that the Great British Public instinctively turns 
its nose up at anything that's a little unexpected, or which doesn't 
meet its carefully coiffured preconceptions, then this album will be an 
overwhelming flop. 
   The people'll be guided in their dismissive diagnosis, of course, by 
the all-wise radio producers who will flick quickly through it for the 
new "Man With The Child In His Eyes", fail to find it, assume Kate's 
gone off her trolley, and make a grab for the safety of Haircut One 
Hundred. 
   Reputedly two years in the making, the first album produced by Kate 
herself, no expense or musical craving spared...the result is mind- 
boggling. Even by the mannered, eccentric standards she's set herself, 
this is still an odd one; you may have thought "Babooshka" and "The 
Wedding List" on NEVER FOR EVER a little weird, then "Get Out Of My 
House" and "Houdini" here are positively manic. 
   Always an artist of extremes, Bush has allowed her highly theatrical 
imagination to run riot, indulging all her musical fantasies, following 
her rampant instincts, and layering this album with an astonishing 
array of shrieks and shudders. 
   Initially it is bewildering and not a little preposterous, but try 
to hang on through the twisted overkill and the historic fits and 
there's much reward, if only in the sense of danger she constantly 
courts. 
   Consider the options for a glamourous girl singer with an acute 
sense of melody; consider that she's taken the riskiest, most 
uncommercial route; and consider whether this album should be regarded 
with patience and admiration, even when it occasionally slips right 
over the top. 
   Two of it's ingredients, "Sat In Your Lap" and "The Dreaming", have 
already been issued as singles and sunk without a trace, which is not 
only significant but tragic. "The Dreaming" is the perfect example of 
the passion for percussive torrents that's overtaken her (and the 
influence of African music?) yet it's one of her more restrained vocal 
performances on the album where her dynamic singing is one of the prime 
features ("Get Out Of My House" has her roaring and ranting like a 
caged lion, "Leave It Open" has her yelling like a demented mynah 
bird.) Elsewhere, on "Houdini" and "All The Love", she'll break us in 
gently, even tenderly, before the fuse runs out and we reel in awe and 
amazement at the sheer power of her rage. 
   There's only one even vaguely conventional track, the lively 
"Suspended IN Gaffa", though there's something strangely disconcerting 
even about that and the only light track is "There Goes A Tenner", 
which is even mildly funny as Kate relates a tale of skullduggery with 
an exaggerated cockney swagger. 
   The lyrics, naturally, are another thing altogether. An analyst 
would surely come up with an interesting conclusion for her obsession 
with lurid drama, so vivid and colourful it could be traditional 
balladry. 
   "There Goes A Tenner" is about crime; "Pull Out The Pin" is a 
graphic account of terrorism and war; "All The Love" and "Houdini" 
blaze in one different aspect of death, the latter in a particularly 
complex but clever way. Personally I reckon the girl watches too many 
B-movies. 
   The epic track, though, the cornerstone of the album is "Night Of 
The Swallow", which shows both her growing maturity as a writer and her 
arrival as an outstanding producer. Another complicated song (surprise, 
surprise) it moves gracefully through many changing moods and patterns; 
it's a work of both beauty and anguish, poignancy and eeriness. These 
twists of mood are enhanced by the use of sublime Irish music (Liam 
O'Flynn and Donal Lunny of Planxty, Sean Keane of the Chieftans) 
interspected with the rugged main action. 
   Like most of the other tracks, I'm still not entirely sure what the 
hell's going on or what it's all about, but the puzzle's intriguing 
enough to entice you back until you unravel it. It's the sort of album 
that makes me want to kidnap the artist and demand the explanation and 
inspiration behind each track. 
   If you're out there, Kate, do me a favour and give me a bell, huh? 

 
 

---
rhill@netrun.cts.com (ronald hill)
NetRunner's Paradise BBS, San Diego CA