James and the Cold Gun.
A rough draft. Will revise before the final posting, but here's what I have so far.
James and the Cold Gun
Hammersmith Odeon
A ragtag group of session musicians is enveloped in an infernal red backlight, which makes good on its promise to swallow the entire stage. A cowgirl from some dark dimension swaggers onstage, posing in a black and gold robe for the presumably dumbfounded audience. For close to nine minutes, the cowgirl sweeps across the stage, wailing over the cacophony of her band and illustrating her lyrics with suitably on-the-nose gestures. It culminates, as any Chekov-honoring song featuring “gun” in the title does, with a murder, as the cowgirl blasts the life out of an adversary, each gunshot met beat-for-beat by accompanying drums. Contorting her body in a freakish victory dance, the cowgirl ends the song lifting a rifle above her head in triumph, as her audience roars its approval.
“James and the Cold Gun” is The Kick Inside’s showstopping number, Bush’s rockiest song. This is probably why it was EMI’s original pick for Bush’s debut single until Bush stopped those plans dead in their tracks. It’s not difficult to understand why EMI found “James” promising: it’s closer to the rock that was in the charts, with its jaunty Americanness and its prominent guitar jams. The song was popular among the pub-frequenting audiences of the KT Bush Band. Formally, it’s closer to, say, chart-topping hard rock acts like Queen and the Sex Pistols than Bush’s courtship of more intricately formalist rock such as Genesis.
We may as well talk about Genesis, who were accustomed to giving the sort of performances Bush would put on for “James and the Cold Gun” in concert. Prog rock’s affinity for jams and playing a single track at great length would reach into astonishingly long improvs onstage. Peter Gabriel would don make-up and extravagant costumes and give a literary voice to the mirage of sound. It comes as no surprise this approach bears similarities to Bush’s stageshow. While not directly name-checked as an influence on Bush’s tour, Gabriel would come to play a part in her career soon enough.
“James” is a rollicking ballad, staying in B flat minor for its entirety. It’s one of the more playful Kick Inside tracks, and lacks a terrible amount of detail to unpack. Bush sings a Western pastiche, half-speaking/half-singing of “Genie, from the casino,” who’s “still a-waiting in her big brass bed.” The song is jokey in tone, with Bush urgently warning the hero James “you’re running away from humanity/you’re running out on reality!” She describes a Western that’s been abandoned by its hero. Her strategy of putting self-awareness into genre characters has been lightly subverted. In “James and the Cold Gun” she presents a genre that’s fallen apart in the absence of a protagonist. A post-apocalyptic Western: not Bush’s most intriguingly explored concept, but perfectly usable for a throwaway.