| Bush, Kate - Alone At My Piano (Remastered And Expanded) |
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| Notes |
| The ultimate collection of early demos. Overall great SQ. From the info file: Kate Bush 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 1. The Kick Inside aka Brother 2. Hammer Horror 3. It Hurts Me aka Feeling Like a Waltz aka A Rose Growing Old 4. Stranded At The Moonbase aka The Air Is Getting Low aka Keep Me Waiting 5. Kashka from Baghdad 6. Surrender Into The Roses aka Coming Up aka Carmilla 7. Oh To Be In Love 8. Rinfy The Gypsy aka Playing Canasta In Cold Rooms 9. 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) I hope you'll all enjoy this set. If anyone has the one 1977 band demo missing from this set (of the song 'Moving'), or (better still) the 1976 demos (or older ones) in better sound quality, feel free to trump this seed! |