This is the full performance from the German Peter’s Pop Show (30 November 1985)🔥
It’s also the only time we can watch Kate dance to the notes of “The Big Sky”…
Kate: "The Big Sky.'' Someone sitting looking at the sky, watching the clouds change. I used to do this a lot as a child, just watching the clouds go into different shapes. I think we forget these pleasures as adults. We don't get as much time to enjoy those kinds of things, or think about them; we feel silly about what we used to do naturally. The song is also suggesting the coming of the next flood - how perhaps the ‘fools on the hills' will be the wise ones."
It was a song that changed a lot between the first version of it on the demo and the end product on the master tapes. As I mentioned in the earlier magazine, the demos are the masters, in that we now work straight in the 24-track studio when I'm writing the songs; but the structure of this song changed quite a lot. I wanted to steam along, and with the help of musicians such as Alan Murphy on guitar and Youth on bass, we accomplished quite a rock-and-roll feel for the track. Although this song did undergo two different drafts and the aforementioned players changed their arrangements dramatically, this is unusual in the case of most of the songs." (KB Club magazine, issue 18, 1985)
Del Palmer: "The Big Sky" changed about three times. Originally it was radically different from the way it's found on the album, the melody-line, the interpretation, everything. But kate scrapped it and then rewrote it, retaining only a few elements of the original song." (Musician, Fall 1985)
Kate: "The Big Sky'' was very difficult to write. I knew what I wanted to finish up with, but I didn't seem to be able to get there! We had three different versions and eventually it just kind of turned into what it did, thank goodness."
(Classic Album, BBC Radio 1, 25 January 1992)