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"Breathing"
"The Empty Bullring"
[Here is Kate's article from the sixth issue, July 1980.]
Hello everyone. This is just to say I hope you're all well and having a good time. We've almost finished the album [ Never For Ever ] and I'm on holiday for a short while. The Club convention was great. I came along just at the end, when everyone had been there for hours, and it was a strange feeling going along to something where people that you know very well had been for hours watching you, although you weren't actually there. [Premonitions of Watching You Without Me? ] When I got onto the stage it was incredible. There were so many people, and they all looked so happy, and I felt really nervous--much more nervous than I do for gigs, because I didn't know what I was going to say. It was fantastic: it was like we all knew each other, and I thought the best thing we could do was to scream and try to take the roof off.
There was a lot of effort put into the convention, particularly by Terry Walker and Bill Clark, and that was so useful because it made it what it was. Without the effort it wouldn't have come across so professionally and people wouldn't have had such a good time.
I've been doing lots of crosswords! I got into that while we were doing the album. We'd do a crossword every day, and now I can't not do them. And I've come out in spots and I'm not sure if that's because I'm eating too much chocolate or because my system's spitting out the city. My skin feels full of the city--I can feel it oozing out, but here the air is so seablown and new, I feel it's helping to get me fit and awake.
But before the album's finished and released, there will be another single--sometime in June, probably. We're a bit sad about the delay, but there's such a lot of good music around--it's going to be a summer full of music!
-- Kate
I wanted to write a song, and I came up with some chords which sounded to me very dramatic. Then up popped the line, "Outside get inside," as I was trying to piece the song together, and I thought it would be good to write a song about a baby inside the womb. Then I came to a chorus piece, and decided that the obvious word to go there was "breathing", and I thought automatically that it had been done before. But asking around, I couldn't understand why it hadn't, because it's such a good word. Then "breathing" and the baby turned into the concept of life, and the last form of life that would be around--that would be a baby that was about to be born after the blast. It was a very personal song. I thought at the time that it was self-indulgent, and it was something I just did for myself, really. For me it's a statement that I hope won't happen.
This is a song that I first had ideas for quite a few years ago. It is really about someone who is in love with someone who is obsessed with something that is pretty futile. They can't get the person to accept the fact that it is a futile obsession. To put it into a sort of story form: he became a matador, and got gored so badly that he couldn't carry on. But at night he climbs out of the window and runs off to a bullring, when there is no-one there, and he fights a bull that doesn't exist.
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Andy Marvick