Not legally, no. Not all of them were recorded between the age of 16 and 18. Many, if not most, of them were recorded earlier, before she got her record contract, and were what led to her being discovered by family friend Ricky Hopper, who then got David Gilmour involved. She has never said anything publically about those early demos (called the “Cathy Demos” by fans) that got leaked. Her perfectionist self is probably not happy about her crude piano/vocal recordings (in some you hear the click as the tape recorder comes on, then the scrape of the piano bench as she sits back down), but they all show original talent, and some of them are sublime. Some of those songs are among my favorites of hers.
Legally? No. In the spirit of posterity though, I’m glad they exist, and I would dearly love to hear the songs we haven’t heard yet. Call me a pirate and slap me upside the head, I don’t care. I want to hear them.
Gaffaweb (the woefully out-of-date repository of all things Kate) is still down, but we had a local copy and I uploaded it to a temporary mirror. This page has some great info about those early recordings. It was put together by a fan (more obsessed than me!) culling from several different sources.
Dung Beetle’s choices are good, but I’d go along with scott evil. The Whole Story is the way to go. It’s the closest to a Best Of release that we’ll ever get, short of a fan putting together a copy (I’ll volunteer, though my song choices would be entirely different). It has just about all her styles represented. If, by the end of it, you’re dying to hear more, then delve into the album that contains the song you like the most. They’re all good, though very different from each other (except The Kick Inside and Lionheart, which were released in the same year).
My personal favorite album is The Dreaming but it’s bizarre, difficult and experimental so I don’t know if I’d recommend it to beginners. It’s my desert island disc, if I could only take one album. It’s so packed with thoughts and ideas, sound effects and vocal effects, layers and layers of music and meanings, that I hear something new everytime I listen to it, even after all these years. It takes several listens to get into, and several more to begin to try and understand. It rewards patience and perserverance though.
Hounds of Love is my second favorite, especially the “B side” which is a concept piece called The Ninth Wave, consisting of 7 inter-related songs that tell a story of a woman adrift at sea, treading water, hope of rescue fading. She begins to hallucinate, and we’re drawn into nightmare visions of purgatory, and poignant reflections on the life lived and the life not to be lived, it seems. Brilliant stuff. Called pretentious by some critics (those who prefer their music to be shallow and meaningless, I think), it’s an aural movie, and how often do you get to experience something like that?
