Breathing (Kate Bush song)

"Breathing"
Single by Kate Bush
from the album Never for Ever
B-side	"The Empty Bullring"
Released	14 April 1980
Format	7" single
Genre	Progressive rock
Length	4:52 (Single edit) 5:30 (Album version)
Label	EMI 5058
Writer(s)	Kate Bush
Producer(s)	Kate Bush, Jon Kelly
Kate Bush singles chronology
"Strange Phenomena" (1979) "Breathing" (1980) "Babooshka" (1980)
Music sample Breathing

"Breathing" is a single by Kate Bush, the first cut from her 1980 album Never for Ever, with backing vocals by Roy Harper.

The single was issued on 14 April 1980, four months before the album was released, and reached number 16 in the UK charts, remaining in the charts for seven weeks.^[1] It was the first single by Bush to feature a non-LP track on its B-side, "The Empty Bullring".

Content

"Breathing" is about a foetus, very much aware of what is going on outside the womb and frightened by nuclear fallout, which implies that the song is set either during a nuclear war scare or a post-apocalyptic birth. The lyrics also refer to the foetus absorbing nicotine from the mother's smoking. In an interview that year Bush described the song as her "little symphony", adding that she considered it her best work to date.^[2] Bush stated that the information within the song mostly came from a documentary she had seen about the effects of nuclear war, while the tone of the song was inspired by Pink Floyd's The Wall (side three in particular).^[3] The song was recorded over three days in early 1980.

The track includes spoken words describing the flash from a nuclear bomb.

The music video features Bush in a womb portraying a foetus.^[4]

Charts

See also

• List of anti-war songs

References