Kate Bush recorded her own farts on a Fairlight sampler
The British singer, songwriter, record producer, and dancer Kate Bush collaborated with Irish musician Dónal Lunny. She is renowned for her unique and inventive art-rock approach and is regarded as one of the most successful and significant female performers in Britain in the late 20th century. She and he worked together on the song Night Of The Swallow, which was included on the The Dreaming album from 1980.
As reported here, he recently admitted, “She was a funny, mischievous woman. Somebody told me she sampled a fart on the Fairlight and she would happily play tunes on it!”
The Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) was the first commercially available digital audio workstation system. It was created in 1979 by Fairlight’s co-founders Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie and was based on the Qasar-M8 double microprocessor synthesizer starting at $25,000 and going up to $175,000. Since then, it has been replicated numerous times as a plugin and re-released as an iPhone app.
It’s encouraging to hear that a skilled artist like Bush may have been employing the technology for puerile purposes even in the early stages of sampling.
Peter Gabriel allegedly took delivery of the first Fairlight Series I in the UK and used it extensively on the 1985 albums The Dreaming and the all-conquering Hounds of Love, which introduced the celebrity to the instrument.
It appears that Bush continued to use the Fairlight years later. Speaking to International Musician in 1989, the celebrity reportedly confirmed, according to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia: “As we have a Fairlight, it tends to negate us getting in other sampling gear. We’re pretty well covered with the Fairlight and the DX7 for keyboard and the quality of the Fairlight is much better, though so difficult to use. Everyone says that. I used to program it myself but since the new software… I can’t keep up. They keep changing it as soon as I learn to program it”.
