How We Made 'The Kick Inside', guest publication - Paul Becker and JOAN Publishing

Description

I began a kind of doodling whereby I was gathering together guitar leads, speaker cables and various inexplicable wires and repurposing them, sometimes winding them up into objects or, as I had with the string, stretching them out around the room into a kind of network. I would strip off conduit and rip out the copper wires from all the leads. I began to disembowel the mixing desk, pulling out its entrails: green, white, red, brown leads. I fixed all the wrong type of wiring to the wrong type of power and then I would turn the whole system on again to see what happened.

The book, ‘voiced’ by Kate Bush, is a fictional inhabiting (via the Guardian’s ‘How We Made…’ feature) of the production of her remarkable first album. A meditation on the idiosyncrasies of the creative process and what constitutes an artist’s sensibility, and then an unravelling towards a manifestation of that process and the strangeness, the rapture, that can follow.

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‘The first part of this short book is the most alive and profound, intensely specific and supernaturally communicative sequence of insights into the process of making art I have ever read. And then. I don’t actually have the words to describe what comes next. My mouth fell open. My mind fell open. I think you’ll just have to read it.’

– Kate Briggs

‘I used to think that Anthony Burgess had a rubber stamp with which he printed the words ‘His best book yet’ for every publication he was sent to review. I have never read anything by Paul before and don’t get asked for my opinion much, so I would rather not waste this opportunity with disingenuousness. This is a fascinating book with a brilliant conceit as its impetus. I never knew Kate Bush was so interesting and then again, maybe she still isn’t.’

– Stephen Sutcliffe

‘This is writing as dance, an extraordinary choreography of crystalline images and rare tableaux. It moves in (im)perfectly controlled ara- besques toward a crescendo as exciting as anything in contemporary writing. It’s a summa, a guide, a Fellini-esque sleight of hand, and it represents a powerful condensation of what Bush/Becker describe as ‘instinct, grounded, earned and achieved through knowledge.’ It’s art, in other words. Rare and beguiling art.’

– John Douglas Millar

'Becker has found a way to hide an hallucinatory description of the artistic process inside a Kate Bush documentary. (It may not even need the Kate Bush part—she can look after herself.) The result is a rapturous, peculiar fantasy, a confessional about the psychological experience of making things.'

– Dan Fox