Scares Me Silly (But It Gets Me Going)
Throughout her career, Kate Bush has retained an unusual level of creative security. Outside of her demo era, there’s not a large number of Bush bootlegs in circulation. There’s not an empire of lost Bush songs like there are lost Bob Dylan or Beatles tracks. Fans are mostly left to speculate on the tidbits of information one gets about lost Bush songs, such as the Cathy demos’ “Go Now While You Can” and the title track of Never for Ever. Following the arc of Kate Bush’s career entails sticking almost entirely to her studio work.
The Kick Inside sessions seem to only have one outtake: “Scares Me Silly,” a bootleg rather than a bonus track from some official release. Listening to it in 2019, it’s not hard to understand why Bush never released the song. She sounds like she’s had one pint too many — “Scares Me Silly” is loopy, particularly in its calypso-esque It’s a ridiculous track, something Elton John might have cut on a drunk night at the Château d’Hérouville. Bush sounds like she’s had one pint too many — “Scares Me Silly” is loopy, beginning with its frantic up-tempo glam rocky intro, moving into a wordy calypso of a pre-chorus (“they try to put me on the tapes begin to spin/I feel a little sick and hope my notes are in”), and slowing down for a poppy chorus, repeatedly declaring “it scares me silly, but it gets me gooooiiiiin’!” There’s no sense Bush is disciplining herself, and the result is firmly outtakes material.
Curiously, the lyrics of “Scares Me Silly” are a pretty straightforward reflection of what kind of song it is. Bush describes a character working in a recording studio for the first time, feeling the anxiety that comes with pop music and how it separates the artist from themselves (“I lick my lips to start the first line/how can this girl be me?”). The prevailing mood is one of dizziness and giddy nausea, with Bush singing energetically of “vertigo, the need to lose.” Music is a force which carries her away — “I feel a little sick and I hope my notes are in” — to some other place. In “Scares Me Silly” the journey is the focus, and it’s more of a speed trip than an odyssey.
In the second verse Bush drifts to cinematic metaphors, as she often will in future, singing of “swimming amid the cans,” “goad[ing herself] into another take,” and even saying “it’s like a film — such balance.” Bush is almost as much a visual artist as a musical work, striving to write images as well as words. In short, she bluntly summarizes some of her own themes and visual preoccupations in a exclusively audio-bound piece of music. “Scares Me Silly” contains some of Bush’s recurring ideas in microcosm, and it’s not especially worth removing from a vault.