Kite

Album: The Kick Inside (1978)
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Songfacts®:

  • The narrator in this reggae-styled Kate Bush tune learns a Wizard of Oz-like lesson: There's no place like home. Kate explained to Music Talk in 1978: "In the song, the character starts to feel that he is rooted to the ground, but there is a force pulling him up to the sky. A voice calls out, 'Come up and be a kite,' and he is drawn up to the sky and takes the form and texture of a kite. Suddenly he's flying 'like a feather on the wind,' and for a while he enjoys it, but the longing for home and the security of the ground overtake these feelings."
  • This was released as the B-side to Kate's debut single, "Wuthering Heights."
  • EMI originally wanted a sexy photograph for the album cover, but Kate had other ideas. Inspired by this tune, which has her singing, "There's a hole in the sky, with a big eyeball, calling me... come up and be a kite, and fly a diamond night," the cover art features the singer hanging from a colorful kite and gliding across a giant eyeball. Jay Myrdal, who photographed the session, recalled in a fan booklet: "Kate arrived at the studio with her father and a car full of bits of wood and painted paper from which he constructed the kite as it appears in the photograph. I rigged the rather fragile kite on the black painted wall of my studio with ropes and a metal bar which was strong enough for her to hang from."

    He continued: "In the meantime, Kate was in the back room with a makeup girl being covered in gold body paint. The image was entirely Kate's idea and Steve Ridgeway, the art director and I simply did more or less as we were told. The idea had come from the Disney animated film Pinocchio and the scene when Jiminy Cricket floats past the whale’s eye using his umbrella like a parachute."

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