How Utah Saints Became the Only Group Granted Permission To Sample Kate Bush

From their very beginnings in 1991, the Utah Saints duo of Tim Garbutt and Jez Willis stood out from other dance music artists in the UK and beyond. They pioneered the use of sampling songs and recontextualizing those sounds into a new tune. Whereas many other artists of the time manipulated a groove or melody and used that as the basis for a song, this twosome wanted to create something fresh.

The All-Important Follow-Up

After their debut single “What Can You Do for Me” rose to No. 10 in the UK in 1991, their label was pestering them to come up with another hit. The producer/DJ duo was busy doing raves and hadn’t really contemplated a follow-up. Nine months later, they worked on the 1992 track that became “Something Good.” Once the building blocks of the rhythm section were in place, Garbutt and Willis needed something to make it special. Their first hit included an Annie Lennox vocal sample from “There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)” by Eurythmics. It seemed only natural to try something with the other very popular female British singer of the time, Kate Bush. So they bought a couple of her albums and scoured them for something exciting and upbeat.

Utah Saints’ team approached Bush to clear the use of samples from her enigmatic track “Cloudbusting,” and she agreed. Even today, that fact places them in a unique position—they are the only group to have the revered singer/artist give them permission to sample her work. And whereas her original song was slower and more orchestrated, their track “Something Good” was hyperkinetic. They really did use her vocal line and string sounds to a different effect, and the result was their second Top-10 track in the UK, this one going to No. 8. The single release was also two minutes shorter than the album version.

The Early Days of Sampling

While many artists then and today use samples as a way to build a track, Utah Saints, as Garbutt notes to American Songwriter, “always started with the drums and added a bassline, and we had a track going before we had the sample. It was probably a wrong way around to doing it technically because it takes a lot longer. But then we tried to find samples to work with our track as an instrument. We also never tried to take someone else’s chorus and make it our chorus, which I like to think is why that’s the only sample Kate Bush has ever cleared. We didn’t take a chorus from one of her tracks and just put down beats behind it. We took a little line from the verse and flipped into a completely different context.”

Sampling is easier today. Whereas digital music software allows for the easy extraction of individual music elements, such was not the case in 1992. Utah Saints had to take the samples directly off of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love CD.

“We had the drums behind it and her strings, and we tried to pull out the vocal bit but we had our own stuff going on behind it,” Garbutt explains. “We’d have to really sit it in comfortably. The original ‘Cloudbusting’ was quite a lot slower. Whereas now it’s very easy digitally to put a track in time with whatever speed you want without changing the pitch, back then you either time-stretch it or we’d use pitch bend. We got the sample effect by using pitch bending to keep the sample running in time with our beats. So working with limited equipment, sometimes creativity and new ideas come to light, whereas now you’d probably just put that sample in and have it running in time.”

Approval From Up High

Utah Saints have no idea if Bush even heard the only other song they had released at the time, but given it involved a sample of Annie Lennox’s voice, perhaps she had. They also did not deal with her directly.

“We’ve always been scared of the enigma of Kate Bush, to be honest,” Willis confesses. “We’ve been around long enough now and we’ve worked with a lot of different people, but there are probably still a few artists that we are too much in awe of to actually have any kind of meaningful conversation with. I think we pull it together now, but at the time we were just very frightened of the whole enigma of Kate Bush and what an amazing creative artist [she was]. It felt like her music was art as well as being music.”

A Bit of Ceremony

An interesting conundrum developed from “Something Good.” “We hadn’t really thought about it properly from a DJ-ing point of view,” Willis muses. “It’s got almost a rock celebratory intro which meant that you can’t really mix it, so it meant that when people played it in a club they had to stop the track [they were on] and then start that one. There was accidentally a little bit of ceremony in there with that track being played. With Utah Saints we’ve always had goals, but we’ve never had a plan.”

“Our goal on any record is to always have an intro, probably at least three or four hooks in there, and not have a fade at the end or not beats going out,” Garbutt adds. We make our records like two and a half, three-minute pop records—an intro and an ending and quite bombastic.”

That musical philosophy is part of why Utah Saints’ self-titled 1992 debut album—recently reissued by London Records with an extra disc of bonus tracks—still stands out from the pack three decades later. Garbutt and Willis had a more cinematic vision and integrated samples from genres ranging from synth pop (Human League) to metal (Slayer). It wasn’t just about getting their groove on, it was about expanding their horizons. “Something Good” is still so beloved the 2008 single version sold 400,000 copies in the UK.

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