Re: TAFKAP

[Robb McCaffree <nsrjm@nursepo.medctr.ucla.edu>]

Richard Bensam wrote:
> 
> Robb McCaffree wrote:
> 
> >After the disappointing sales of "The Dreaming," EMI tried to
> >force a new producer on Kate so that she wouldn't come up with
> >something quite as experimental. This is perhaps the thing that
> >prompted her to develop her own studio the most -- though she'll
> >cite creative freedom and rented studio costs if asked.
> 
> This I'd never heard before!  I knew there was much grumbling about The
> Dreaming, but this is considerably more extreme.  If true -- and I have no
> reason to believe it isn't, but I wonder where you've heard this -- it puts
> Kate's position with regard to EMI in a new light, and suggests that there
> was a lot to be read between the lines which I failed to see.  I may want
> to withdraw my earlier remarks, except for the parts about 
>Skippy. 

I've read harsher descriptions of this particular 
unpleasantness, but this exerpt from the Iron Maiden interview 
(with much thanks to the glorious gaffaweb!!!) will suffice:

But if the theory of self-determination was coming along fine, 
the practice was on the blink. Kate Bush may seem to have had a 
fairly stable career, always coming up with something fresh and 
surprising, always played on the radio and talked about, but the 
commercial reality was that her album sales had plotted a 
uniform downward curve in Britain, her main market-place given 
America's resolute lack of interest up to that point. The Kick 
Inside did triple platinum plus (more than a million), Lionheart 
platinum (over 300,000), Never For Ever gold (100,000), and The 
Dreaming was where she hit bottom with a mere silver (60,000). 
Reviewers were ecstatic, Radio Once wholly unreceptive, EMI 
utterly miserable. As a single the title track expired at 48 and 
the follow-up, There Goes A Tenner, was her first release not to 
show in the charts at all. Harsh things were said in the 
corridors of EMI, and some of them to the artist's face, which 
				   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^   !!!
had never happened before so fond and respectful was the 
company's attitude to her. "That was my 'She's gone mad' album," 
Kate says, "my 'She's not commercial any more' album." 

It was time to regroup and rebuild, in every sense, close to 
home. Kate's remaining dependency in EMI, more conspicuous after 
a commercial flop, was for advances to pay recording costs -- an 
Abbey Rosd studio then weighed in at 90 pounds an hour, for 
instance. The Bush response was to reduce the company's
leverage. 

Robb