phoenix - the history of the demos

The beginning

Kate: "My father has told me I used to dance to the music on the telly. I remember it vaguely. It was completely unselfconscious and I wasn't aware of people looking at me. One day some people came into the room, saw me and laughed and from that moment on I stopped doing it. I think maybe I've been trying to get back there ever since."

At about 1969, 11 year old Kate begins to play on the piano and starts writing poems. By 1971 she starts writing ballads and slow songs such as The man with the child in his eyes or Saxophone song.

Vermorel: She wrote stories for her own amusement and poems 'about being alone or wandering in the woods'. She had a phase of being obsessed about whales and tried several times to write 'a whale song'.

Kate: "I wasn't an easy, happy-go-lucky girl, because I used to think about everything so much, and I think I probably still do."

"I found it very frustrating being treated like a child when I wasn't thinking like a child. From the age of ten I felt old. I became very shy at school..."

"When I was very little, my brothers were into traditional folk music, and my father used to play and compose on the piano and I think that this was a very strong influence on me. I was very little and there was always music in the house, so it didn't seem unnatural to start playing the piano or playing around on the instruments that were in the house."

"I probably wrote the first song when I was about eleven, but I mean it was terrible (laughs), very overdone. And I think the more you write songs, you just get a knack for them, hopefully. (laughs)"

"Since I was a kid, I mean I've been interested in music since I was about five. But when I was about eleven I actually started writing songs."

"I was up in my little room screaming my head off and plonking away at the piano."

Paddy: "And when Kate began working on the piano, she'd go and lock herself away and wind up spending five or six hours, seven days a week, just playing the piano. At the age of thirteen or fourteen she was spending tons and tons of time writing, but starting in fact when she was about ten."

Kate: "I just started poking around at the piano and started making up little songs."

"When I was 14, I started taking it seriously, and began to treat the words to the songs as poetry."

Vermorel: 1972 saw Kate's first public appearance as a singer and dancer. The occasion was a school production of the musical play 'Amahl and the Night Visitors'. The school magazine records that "...'colourful relief' was introduced at the entrance of the shepherds and shepherdesses, members of the Senior and First and Second year Choirs, who tripped in all rosy-cheeked and healthy-looking, bringing gifts for the kings. Two of these, Catherine Bush and Sarah Brennan, later gave a short dance in honour of the kings, which was both pastorally graceful and imaginative."