Kate Bush - Alone At My Piano (STU/FLAC)

(studio FLAC)

Alone At My Piano (Ukinel Records NY 1988)
modestly remastered & expanded

The 22 demos which Kate Bush recorded all by herself & her piano in November of 1976 can be found, as a whole or in part, on a number of bootleg CDs. The most common ones are "Cathy's Home Demos", "Practice Makes Perfect (Piano Demos No 1)", "If You Could See Me Fly", and "Passing Through Air". The order of the songs varies across those discs, the pauses between songs have been edited out and all of those bootlegs appear to be taken from a vinyl source. The sole exception that I know of is "Alone At My Piano", which presents an (almost completely) uninterrupted recording of all those demos, with inbetween-song pauses & noises intact, taken from a tape source (be it several generations removed from the master cassette).

What ALL those bootleg CDs have in common is that they play dreadfully slow, turning the singer into "a child with a woman in her voice" rather than the true musical prodigy Cathy was at the tender age of 18. That's why I have sped up the recording found on "Alone At My Piano" by about 5.4 %, which more or less restores the original tone & pitch of the cassette recording. What I didn't do is remove the hiss that is clearly present in the copy used for the bootleg (hence the "modest" remastering). We will never be able to get back into that room anyway, alone with Kate at her piano, so I thought it best to leave well alone. This is priceless stuff nonetheless... music in its purest form, methinks.

As for the "expanded" bit: I have added six tracks which can be found on the "Cathy's Home Demos" bootleg. They are two further solo demos from 1980 of "Babooshka" (the first with Kate alone on the piano & some vocal overdubs, the second with Kate at the piano & a rhythm box and vocal + musical overdubs) and five demos with band from 1977, the so-called "Kick Inside" demos. All those clearly derive from a vinyl source; I have removed the worst clicks & pops with the pen tool in SoundForge, but I did not remove the last bit of surface noise as, again, I didn't want to compromise the sound in any way by using a generic restoration tool.

Those wishing to read up on these wonderful piano demos from (November?) 1976 can have a field day on the following web pages:

http://gaffa.org/dreaming/demo_top.html
http://gaffa.org/phoenix/index.html
http://www.kate-bush.de/14333.html (in German, but well worth a visit)

re: the tracklist. The song titles of the 1976 demos are a moot point, as most of those songs have never been released officially. That's why these songs can be found with different titles on different bootlegs. What you find here are, first, what may well be the true original titles, followed by the various alternatives found for the songs in question on different bootlegs.

The 1976 demos
01. The Kick Inside aka Brother
02. Hammer Horror
03. It Hurts Me aka Feeling Like a Waltz aka A Rose Growing Old
04. Stranded At The Moonbase aka The Air Is Getting Low aka Keep Me Waiting
05. Kashka from Baghdad
06. Surrender Into The Roses aka Coming Up aka Carmilla
07. Oh To Be In Love
08. Rinfy The Gypsy aka Playing Canasta In Cold Rooms
09. On Fire Inside A Snowball aka Hot in the Ice
10. Dali aka Ferry Me Over
11. Where Are The Lionhearts aka On The Rocks
12. Violin
13. The Craft of Love aka Craft of Life
14. The Gay Farewell aka Eddie the Queen
15. Something Like A Song aka In My Garden
16. Frightened Eyes
17. The Disbelieving Angel
18. Nevertheless You'll Do
19. Come Closer To Me Babe aka Who Is Sylvia? aka Goodnight Baby
20. So Soft aka You're Soft
21. The Rare Flower aka Pick The Rare Flower aka I Don't See Why I Shouldn't
22. While Davy Dozed aka Davy aka Hold Me

The 1980 demos
23. Babooshka #1 (piano & vocal overdubs)
24. Babooshka #2 (rhythmbox & vocal + musical overdubs)

The 1977 "Kick Inside" band demos
25. Don't Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake
26. Kite
27. L'Amour Looks Something Like You
28. Strange Phenomena
29. Scares Me Silly (But It Gets Me Going) (unreleased song)