Kate Bush: Lionheart [PARLOPHONE]

Why you'll love it

This remastered 180g pressing comes in a gatefold jacket with the artist and title embossed front and back. Lionheart went platinum in the UK and reached No. 6 there, and "Wow" was a top 15 hit.

This edition

• Remastered
• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Embossed sleeve
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Kate Bush was 19 when she made Lionheart, nine months after The Kick Inside had made her a star. Most of these songs had been written in her teens, then reworked for the sessions, while "Symphony In Blue," "Fullhouse" and "Coffee Homeground" were brand new.

She recorded it at Super Bear Studios on the French Riviera, the one album she made outside the UK, with Andrew Powell producing for the second time. "Wow" is the showstopper, a soaring song about showbusiness, "In Search Of Peter Pan" leans on J. M. Barrie's lost boys, "Oh England My Lionheart" is a tender, recorder-laced love letter to home, and "Hammer Horror" is a gothic, theatrical romp. "Kashka From Baghdad" and "In The Warm Room" show her storytelling at its most vivid, and "Coffee Homeground" is a giddy cabaret number about a guest convinced the host is poisoning him.

From here on she produced her own records, and the theatrical streak of her first tour is all over these songs. Writing a love letter to England while sitting on the French Riviera is, we'd suggest, the most English thing anyone has ever done.

Also at Kops: more Kate Bush on vinyl · browse Singer-Songwriter

Tracklist

Listen

On EMI / Parlophone / Fish People, a reissue of the 1978 album.