Egypt (Patreon)

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Egypt live at Manchester Xmas special Egypt

While Kate Bush was staging her only tour, the 1980s were being born. The Labour government of James Callaghan collapsed, and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power, a major step towards the austerity policies and neoliberalism of the 1980s. The Camp David Accords were orchestrated by American President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin, and the Egypt-Israel Peace treaty, effectively terminating the Israeli occupation of Sinai while also seeing to it Egypt starting giving Israel some oil. Egypt steadily climbed the ranks of the world’s nations, becoming a force to be reckoned with in the political hegemony of the Eighties (we will return to this). By the time 1980 rolled around and Bush had released Never for Ever, the world was storming through a major sequence of globe-changing events. Jimmy Carter had lost a Presidential election to Ronald Reagan, the American half of neoliberalism’s early reign. CNN was established, arcade video games were becoming a viable commercial presence, and John Lennon was killed in New York. To be an artist is to be a cultural marker for a point in history. To be one in 1980 was to witness the world falling on its head.

The music of the time reflected this newfound turmoil. Just look at the UK’s Top 10 singles of 1980: it’s topped by Don McLean’s “Crying,” and the other songs are apprehensive titles like The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and, of all things, the MASH theme song. Even a catchy disco single like Odyssey’s “Use It Up and Wear It Out” sounds tense and minimalistic compared to something like “YMCA” or “Freak Out.” The obligatory ABBA song in the Top 10 is “Super Trouper,” which deals a bit with being pursued in addition to its militaristic title. 1980’s albums tend to abandon some of the Seventies’ utopianism as well: punk had given way to the abjection of post-punk groups like Public Image Ltd and Magazine, synthpop was rearing its head in the form of Ultravox and The Human League, and new wave was speeding up with Blondie, while Talking Heads honed their instincts for bizarre soundscapes with Remain in Light. Rock veterans like David Bowie were making the violent and weird Scary Monsters and its classic single “Ashes to Ashes,” a song possessed by the new-decade angst characteristic of every turn-of-the-decade Bowie album, and Bruce Springsteen went all-out with the completely undisciplined double-LP The River. Songwriters of Bush’s newer, younger generation were forging ahead: Elvis Costello released Get Happy!, one of his more sprawling albums, and Prince dropped his funk-cum-erotica LP Dirty Mind. There’s little that unites all the music of the period, but a single principle is clear: as the new decade stretches its limbs, the music scene is desperate to outrun it. 

Having just revolutionized touring, Kate Bush was entering her imperial phase. Having made two successful pop-rock albums, she proceeded to try out other things. She opted to not work with producer Andrew Powell again, instead taking control of her work by appointing herself co-producer with Jon Kelly, and finally using her own band. The result is a more idiosyncratic album, one with the mark of its creator in its every facet. Never for Ever is a weird step forward: for one thing, it’s much more in line with the synthesizer music that was beginning to surface in British pop. It’s the album where she discovers her long-term ally, the Fairlight, a classic synth which would direct much of her music. Never for Ever’s interest in soundscapes is greater than that of its predecessors, sometimes letting songwriting take a backseat to more spatial ideas of music and composition. The technology of music takes greater import in her work as she starts composing with synths. Never for Ever is the point where Bush’s songs start sounding like their concepts. Now in addition to her idiosyncratic vocals and unorthodox compositions, she has the technology to advance her songs too.

Never for Ever also signals a return to the conceptual clarity of The Kick Inside, which Lionheart lacked. Each of its ten songs has a clearly outlined idea and purpose, with refined hooks and clear-cut melodies. Yet there’s much of Lionheart’s darkness and trepidation as well: this time, the sense of doubt is in regards to more worldly causes than Lionheart’s adolescent stagefright. For all that Bush doesn’t discuss politics head-on, she’s writing heavy political songs. The world is a more dangerous place than it was in 1978: Never for Ever is a tense album full of familial trauma, violence, and nuclear fallout. It’s a veritable Pandora’s box of ideas and fears: take a look at the classic cover, which depicts a variety of fay creatures, sprites, and eldritch monsters pouring out from under her skirt. As Bush has said, “that’s where all [her] ideas come from.” And why not release your new album by giving birth to strange creatures? That may be the only way to release albums.

Speaking of “strange creatures,” let’s talk about “Egypt” (the song more than the country, although we’ll be talking about the latter soon). Its treatment of the country is anthropomorphization: it is seductress, serpent and sigil. “She’s got me with that feline guise/got me in those desert eyes,” the chorus says, “Oh, I’m in love with Egypt.” Bush’s Egypt is that of Ancient One of the Pharaohs, necropolises and the Sphinx, which Bush refers to in the best fucking lyric ever with “my pussy queen knows all my secrets.” The perception of Egypt is occidental: Bush is captivated by the myth of Egypt, the country that’s found in history books rather than the one that actually exists on the Sinai Peninsula. She’s dealing with iconography more than actual lived history once again. Falling into the pervasive Western trope of depicting Eastern landscapes minus the people, she sings about an unpopulated landscape, a playground for colonizers rather than a place where people live.

To Bush’s credit, she attempts to grapple with this tension. An early part of the discordant lyric — consisting of a mere two verses and two choruses, which almost entirely fail to rhyme — makes mention of how “the sands run red/in the land of the Pharaohs.” Bush’s gaze shifts from the bloodshed: the chorus begins with “I cannot stop to comfort them/I’m busy chasing up my demons.” At the very least, she tries to deal with the solipsism of Western colonialism. Fetishization of Egyptian objects becomes a sickness that distracts from the exploitation and cruelty of material history. 

The problem is that while Bush does take something of a critical hammer to colonialist attitudes, she engages in those very attitudes. Presenting Egypt as hypnotic is maybe not the critique Bush thinks it is. In fact it only buys into the orientalist trope of the East as inherently mysterious and esoteric: just look at the cover of Said’s Orientalism for another example. And for all that I tipped my hat to Bush for her acknowledgement of Egypt’s violent conflict, it’s a very minimal part of the song. The unpopulated landscape is still almost the entirety of “Egypt”: there are no people in it. It’s not that I want Bush to write a song about the Suez Crisis or Yom Kippur. I shudder at the thought of such a song from nearly any white artist. But “Egypt” is such a minimalistic piece of songwriting it’s hard to derive anything conclusive from what Bush has written. 

This is no surprise given that “Egypt” was the first new song written for Never for Ever (“Violin” was recycled from the Phoenix years). It’s oddly shaped and a bit hard to parse — it sounds outright unfinished, with its sparse lyric and chorus. More than likely it was written in between Lionheart and the Tour of Life, as it made its first appearance on that tour, where it was introduced as visual spectacle instead of an album track. As a result the song is more something to be seen than heard, as it was originally written for the stage. In concert, Bush strove up to the audience draped in full Cleopatra-meets-Captain-Marvel, draped in the red, blue, and gold livery, heralded by pipes and Preston Heyman’s powerful drumming. The subsequent performance is tense and distant — its frantic arrangement keeps it from getting dull, and it’s more driving and catchy than its record counterpart. The tour’s punchy and often acoustic arrangements give “Egypt” more weight than it would later have, and the song would be worse off without it.

Yet therein lies the problem of “Egypt”: in striving to dispel myths of Egypt, it imitates them. Musically it’s host to a number of caricatures found in Western imitations of “Oriental” music: the live versions of the song have this zig-zaggy four-note riff which is akin to plenty of Hollywood scores for epic movies set in Southern Asia or Northern Africa. It’s not just a crass idea of what European musicians think Egyptian music sounds like, but it’s a tacky-sounding riff as well. Paddy Bush’s strumento de porco, doesn’t help much with its ringing scrape of a sound either. Whatever Bush is trying to say about Egypt isn’t much helped by the song’s production.

Yet for all its problems, “Egypt” is a rather compelling track. Its failures are at least complex and interesting ones. Melodically it’s unusually restrained by Bush standards, another possible effect of its rushed composition. Perhaps in an attempt to write under time restraints, Bush has set Egypt almost entirely in a pentatonic scale (E minor, mostly the natural minor) rather than her preferred chromatic one. There’s the occasional break from pentatonic standards as Bush throws in a C or an F#, and the song shifts between 4/4 and 2/4 (not the “9/8 or 11/9” guitarist Brian Bath has said it was in), but it’s still a more controlled song than Bush tends to write. 

As “Egypt” was mixed early in the production of Never for Ever, its album version appeared on her classic 1979 Christmas special. While the acoustic instruments are largely dropped from this recording, a sense of rhythm is lost: “Egypt” meanders, Bush’s urgent “I cannot stop to comfort them!” serving as its anchor. The Prophet V synth of musician Mike Moran creates interesting spatial dimensions, but it’s far from the peak synth usage we’ll hear in Never for Ever. The song is not well served by Bush’s misjudged and goofy video for it, in which she wears a red silk veil and billowing robes, in addition to a black cloth wrapped around her face, which appears to be a simplified battoulah (a mask hailing from the Arab States rather than Egypt, which. Hmm. Oh dear). Miming shock at everything around as she’s superimposed over images of the Great Sphynx and stock footage of Egypt, Bush plunges the song into pure camp. Embarrassing doesn’t begin to cover it, but it’s also hilarious in all the wrong ways. 

And thus is “Egypt,” the first song prepared for Never for Ever, in all its miscalculated glory. It’s the embryo of an album that hasn’t figured itself out yet, which works both in its favor and prevents it from quite being good. Still, if this is the worst Bush can muster on this album, she’s in good shape. We’re preparing for a classic album here. As the adolescent optimism of The Kick Inside has broken down, she’s started asking more probing questions about the state of the world and traditions she’s relied upon. Next week we’ll see how she handles this through the lens of personal tragedy. When the world fails, Bush doesn’t stop seeking.

Performed live on the Tour of Life through April and May of 1979. Recorded late 1979 at Abbey Road Studios. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals. Preston Heyman — drums, percussion. Max Middleton — Fender Rhodes, Minimoog. Paddy Bush — backing vocals, strumento de porco. Mike Moran — Prophet V.