Del Palmer, the longtime bassist, collaborator, and partner of Kate Bush, has died. He was 71 years old.
News of Palmer’s passing came via a social media post shared by his niece, Debbii Louise Palmer, on behalf of his family. It has since been confirmed by outlets like the fan site Kate Bush News, which also reported that Palmer had “dealt with health issues” during his final years.
Born on November 3rd, 1952, in Southeast London, Palmer began performing at an early age, eventually crossing paths with an ascendant Bush during her late teenage years. In 1977, he joined her KT Bush Band, formally beginning a collaboration that would stretch on for four decades, with Palmer receiving credits on every Bush album released between 1978 and 2011.
When Bush was working on her first studio album, 1978’s The Kick Inside, she requested that Palmer and the KT Bush Band serve as the musicians, but her label, EMI, insisted that seasoned session musicians were used instead (though Palmer did contribute some visual artwork for the record’s back cover). By the time of Bush’s second album Lionheart, though, her desires won out, and Palmer appeared as the bassist on three tracks.
From there, the two’s collaboration — and personal relationship — only grew. Palmer went on to play bass on many of Bush’s tracks, and earned engineering credits on quite a few of her albums, including 1985’s Hounds of Love, 1989’s The Sensual World, 1993’s The Red Shoes, and more. The back of his head can even be seen on the album artwork for 1982’s The Dreaming.
Palmer and Bush also had a romantic relationship, which began in the late ‘70s and lasted until early ‘90s. The couple was fairly protective of their personal lives, and seemingly continued to hold great loyalty to each other, even after their romantic partnership came to an end. They continued working together, with Palmer contributing to all of Bush’s album’s through her most-recent work to date, 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. Likewise, Palmer was known to turn down requests for interviews discussing his relationship with Bush.
There were a few exceptions, though. In one old interview from a Bush-centered documentary, Palmer said: “I probably have more involvement than anybody else in what [Bush] does. I say that very modestly, because I don’t really feel like anybody has that much involvement in what she does — it all comes out of her own head, really. We just try to contribute a little bit here and there.”
For her part, in an interview recorded for the same documentary, Bush explained: “It’s very important to me to work with people who, ideally, I’ve worked with for a long time… [with] people like Del, the more we work, the more there’s this sense of you just know each other so well that you don’t really have to communicate with words. A lot of that’s all been done years ago, you’ve got all that out of the way… a lot of what I do is quite personal, and in some ways, I’m quite a shy performer, but I feel very comfortable working with Del, and there’s not many people I would feel that way with. So, it’s very important to me to have that kind of trust in such an intimate situation. Most of the time, it’s either just myself, or Del and myself, and the musicians are brought in at stages.”
Outside of his work with Bush, Palmer also played in a variety of club bands around the London area in the ‘70s, including Cobwebs and Strange (with future Bush guitarist, Brian Bath), Tame, and Company, the latter of which was signed to Cube Records.
In his later life, Palmer played with a few tribute projects, including on Billy Sherwood’s Pink Floyd tribute albums, Back Against the Wall and Return to the Dark Side of the Moon. In the late 2010s, he performed shows with the Bush tribute group, Cloudbusting, partaking in their concerts celebrating the 40th anniversary of The Kick Inside.
In the 2000s, Palmer also began a solo career of his own, releasing his first album, Leap of Faith, in 2007. He followed up with a live EP in 2008, titled Outtees & Alternatives. In 2010, he released his second album, Gift, and in 2015, his third album, Point of Safe Return, arrived.
This past November, Bush announced that she would reissue her back catalog and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.