S02E00 – Lionheart Album Introduction

Welcome to a special Album Introduction episode! Before we start Season 2 of the show, we’re going to start with an Introduction episode where we get to talk about the history of the album to come and general personal thoughts on it. We’ll also talk about where this album fits into Kate Bush’s canon and what to expect from the themes we’ll be discussing in each episode! Lionheart was released on November 12, 1978, not even nine months after Kate put out her debut album The Kick Inside. In the years since its release, Lionheart, Kate Bush’s second full-length album, has become a rather maligned album. Lionheart is not discussed much, if at all, and tends to rank low on fan lists of favorite Kate Bush albums. If Lionheart is ever discussed, it’s usually dismissed as “rushed” and/or “a pale copy of The Kick Inside.” Though she spoke well of it at the time, Kate Bush herself later said that: “Considering how quickly we made it it’s a bloody good album, but I’m not really happy with it”. In this episode, Cecilee gets to talk with a special guest: Zoey P, a fellow Kate Bush fanatic who has a lot to say about Lionheart. Lionheart is one of Zoey’s favorite Kate Bush albums, so she will be sharing her thoughts on the album as well as some of the recording history of Lionheart and how this album fits in Kate’s body of work. Zoey will also talk about the ways in which Kate slips into many different personas from one song to the next, from a gay man trying to make it in show business (Wow) to a World War II pilot plummeting to his death (Oh England My Lionheart) to a little boy trying to make sense of the world (In Search of Peter Pan). Cecilee, a fan who also likes Lionheart and thinks it’s rather unjustly maligned, will also talk about what this album means to her and her opinions of this album. She will also dig into the history of Lionheart and how it was recorded in the south of France (the only Kate album to be recorded outside the UK).